"Foreground" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... few minutes later was in a ramshackle cab clattering stationwards. She left a note for Theo, but she was sincerely glad that time was too short for her to make any attempt to see either him or Joyselle. They had faded into the background of her mind, and in the foreground stood, piteous and appealing, poor ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... king and she had determined to take his declaration of the 23d of June[12] as the basis of the Constitution, with such modifications as subsequent circumstances might have suggested. Religion would be one of the matters placed in the foreground. ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... same observations as their own. They find, finally, in Delacroix the frequent and very apparent application of their ideas. Notably in the famous Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, the fair woman kneeling in the foreground is painted in accordance with the principles of the division of tones: the nude back is furrowed with blue, green and yellow touches, the juxtaposition of which produces, at a certain distance, an ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... the carriage. She was dimly aware of Clara's presence beside her, but for the moment Clara had ceased to be a factor. The shape that filled all the foreground of her thought was Harry. He loomed alarming to her imagination—all the more so since, for the moment, he had seemed to lose his grip. That was another thing she could not quite understand. That burst of violent irritation following, ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... grossly and crudely real the thing fades and changes into an unreal image of the senses. The gaudy flies and beetles that hum round one, whose noise is so much louder and nearer than the crash of shells, they fill the foreground of reality; it is not conceivable that the man with the pleasant face and kindly eye who is directing a battery should be attempting the lives of his fellows on so large a scale. Yet it is the scale that makes the difference: a man who would abhor to kill another ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... the entrance hall and vestibule without challenge. The general atmosphere of the scene suggested a blend of the railway station at Cologne, the Hotel Bristol in any European capital, and the second act in most musical comedies. A score of brilliant and brilliantined pages decorated the foreground, while Hebraic-looking gentlemen, wearing tartan waistcoats of the clans of their adoption, flitted restlessly between the tape machines and telephone boxes. The army of occupation had obviously established a firm footing in the hospitable ...
— When William Came • Saki
... farms of astounding prosperity. The window was filled with pumpkins, apples, oranges, sheaves of wheat, bottles full of soft fruits preserved in alcohol, and the like. As background was an oil painting in which the Lucky Lands occupied a spacious pervading foreground, while in clever perspectives the Coast Range, the foothills, and the other cities of the San Fernando Valley supplied a modest ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... turned its course up the stately river. The rippling waters sparkled in the sunshine, and all the vine-clad hills were dressed in summer beauty. On the right, dropping behind us, was Bingen, famous in legend and in song, and on the left, in the foreground, appeared the curious spires and roofs of Ruedesheim. The scene was an ideal tableau, such ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... In the foreground, the plain, its ruddy soil pierced on all sides by rocks, like a Titan graveyard with its bones protruding through the earth. Then, sharply outlined in the setting sun, was Avignon with its girdle of walls and its vast palace, like a crouching lion, seeming to hold the panting city ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... a view could be had for miles in every direction. Toward the south stretched the rugged, ice-clad waste to the edge of the mighty barrier. Toward the east and west, and dimly toward the north I descried other Okarian cities, while in the immediate foreground, just beyond the walls of Kadabra, the grim guardian shaft ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... basin of Chateau-Thierry. It is a beautiful spot, and at the same time, of great military value. The little town long ago forgot its role of fortress, but has been brutally reminded of it by the violence of the battles that have been fought in its neighborhood. In the foreground is the wide expanse of fields in the valley bottom; then a suburb of the town enclosed between two arms of the Marne. Across the river, scaling the slopes of a hill crowned by the ruins of a castle, the town rises, terrace-like, at the mouth of a narrow valley. ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... on a green hillock, raised a little above the valley, whence on one side a wide view over the blue sparkling sea could be obtained, with some shrubs of semi-tropical luxuriance, and the bright yellow sands forming the foreground, while behind arose the dark frowning cliffs and hills I have described. On the top of the hillock were four mounds, side by side, and at one end of each was seen a rough, flat piece of wood, a rude substitute for ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... lives. As we advanced they became more numerous, until we reached a point where, as far as we could see, in every direction, floated the little tricolore flags, like fine flowers in the landscape. They made tiny spots against the far-off horizon line, and groups like beds of flowers in the foreground, and we knew that, behind the skyline, ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... there is no difference of foreground and distance, and events are sometimes hurried on, sometimes left to linger indefinitely. Art, on the contrary, consists in the employment of foresight, and elaboration in arranging skillful and ingenious transitions, in setting essential events in a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... of yours is screaming: it's not in the evening light. The foreground is somehow chewed up, and there is something, you know, not the thing.... And your cottage is weighed down and whines pitifully. That corner ought to have been taken more in shadow, but on the whole it is not bad; ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... hold my hand—in a bow under your chin, you don't consult the mirror. But you shall sit with it in your left hand, your elbow resting on an Eastern table of black ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl. You will turn it from you, so that it reflects something exactly in front of you in the imaginary foreground. You will be looking at this unseen object with an expression of sublime affection. And in the mirror I will paint a vivid, brilliant, complete reflection, minute, but perfect in every detail, of your scarlet macaw on his perch. We will call it 'Reflections,' because ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... such a mind the creature would have seemed at first no more than one of several varieties of clambering frugivorous mammals, a little distinguished by a disposition to help his clumsy walking with a stake and reinforce his fist with a stone. The foreground of the picture would have been filled by the rhinoceros and mammoth, the great herds of ruminants, the sabre-toothed lion and the big bears. Then presently the observer would have noted a peculiar increasing handiness about the obscurer type, an unwonted ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... giving passage to the river and the road. The river is a torrent, and the valley is ascended at a sharp angle. At Ponte à la Leccia, we recrossed to the left bank of the river; the valley expanded, and there was much cultivated land, though the soil was poor. Rounded hills in the foreground were backed by a serrated range of mountains, Monte ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... God and Father,' indicate that the first thought is of the spotlessness and faultlessness in the presence of a Holy God, which is held out to us as His purpose and our privilege. In others (such as Phil. ii. 15; 1 Thess. ii. 10), the blamelessness in the sight of men stands in the foreground. In each case the word may be considered to include both aspects: without blemish and without blame must stand the double test of the judgment of God ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... vigorous life and preparing to put forth its might, majesty and strength, in Trade, Commerce, and Enterprise. The man of 1801 can scarcely believe his eyes in 1862. The distant view is still there, from the top of Everton church tower, but how wonderfully is all the foreground changed. ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... panelling the gently-rounded hills, and all the soft slopes down to the foot of the valley; the silvery, ripe barley against the dark-green beans; the rich gold of the wheat against the smooth, blue-dashed leaves of the mangel wurzel or rutabaga; the ripening oats overlooking a foreground of vividly green turnips, with alternations of pasture and meadow land, hedges running in every direction, plantations, groves, copses sprinkled over the whole vista, as if the whole little world, clear up ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... unmeasured expanse of the ice-whitened sea. Beyond, on the other side, lay the equally unmeasured expanse of snow-whitened land. Far in the distance stretched the endless chain of mountains, which to-day seemed to smoke with the snow blown a quarter mile above their summits. In the foreground, not a hundred yards away, was a group of perhaps fifty people. These were Chukches, natives, very like the Eskimos of Alaska. They had come to witness from afar the strange scene of ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... dressing in the corner farthest from the looking-glass, in a dismal room you would scarcely use for your housemaid's brooms and dusters at home, you may stand for a few moments in the background of some scene, and watch the leading lady making the hit in the foreground. Will these few, well-dressed, well-lighted, music-thrilled moments repay you for the loss of home love, home ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... used in its ancient meaning. Any question of general interest might easily be regarded as a national issue to be treated on a political basis. Thus it happened that when the question of language was brought to the foreground by Pallis' vernacular translation of the New Testament, the students took up arms rather ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... foreground of his dream (rich parqueterie) three figures went to and fro, one adorable in plum color and point lace; one, the one with the red hair, still beautiful in green; and one, not beautiful, but—well—elegant in pink. Now he saw a dining-room sumptuously furnished, a table white with silver and fine ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... drove Miss Schuyler, who was going back to New York, the first stage of her journey to the depot. A month had passed when one evening Torrance rode that way. The prairie, lying still and silent with a flush of saffron upon its western rim, was tinged with softest green, but broad across the foreground stretched the broken, chocolate-tinted clods of the ploughing, and the man's face grew grimmer as he glanced at them. He turned and watched the long lines of crawling cattle that stretched half-way across the vast sweep ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... hill, the view of which I described the 27th, and went to Colonel Huffy's monument, from whence the scene is different from the rest; the foreground is a gentle hill, intersected by hedges, forming several small lawns. There are some scattered trees and houses, with Mucruss Abbey half obscured by wood, the whole cheerful and backed by Turk. The lake is of a triangular form, Ross Island ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... St. Anthony's Gate, quite near Rembrandt's house, at the end of the street where he lived, taken from the north outside the bulwark (plate 6). On the opposite side of the town Rembrandt did that delightful sketch with the many mills in the foreground (plate 7). In the city he again sketched a former fortification-tower, called Montelbaenstoren (plate 9), showing to its right a perspective of the harbour. We miss in this drawing the steeple, with which it had been ornamented since 1606; the municipality had the good sense, when new extensions ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... pine forest. It looked very bonny in the bright sunlight, while the view from the Col d'Aspin was singularly felicitous. Not a cloud anywhere. The mighty Posets, the Pic d'Arbizon, and the other snow-crowned heights, softened by distance and beautified by the tints in the foreground, stood out against the azure sky in all ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... "joking apart, they are very picturesque, ain't they, how well they look in a sketch, eh! nice feature in the foreground." ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Netherlands showed plainly enough that religious persecution had driven them at last to extremity. At the same time, they were willing—for the sake of conciliating all classes of their countrymen—to bring the political causes of discontent into the foreground, and to use discreet language upon ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... going smoothly. The first rough outlines had been laid in, with bold effectiveness, a rosy cloud floated over the grim distance of the war; and in the foreground—only brilliant and ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... pours upon them the balm of her tender silence. There is none of the recognized and allowed selfishness of a betrothed pair about Barbara. Sometimes I almost forget that she is engaged, so little does she ever bring herself into the foreground; and yet, if it were not for us, I think that to-day she could well find in her ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... the net-work of ingratiating wrinkles, looked aside, from self-consciousness, out of the coach window at a velvet lawn with a cherry-tree and a dark fir side by side, and a Japanese quince in the foreground. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... perception, a vision capable of detecting, absorbing beauty wherever it be—the beauty of evening, of cities, of forests and seas, no less than of face, of a word or a smile, of an action or movement of soul? The foreground of the magical mirror at present reflects beautiful women, undraped; when shall we see, in their stead, the deep, great love of two beings to whom the knowledge has come that it is only when their thoughts ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... parchment and the special commendation of the Senatus and of his own professor for his excellent work lived with him like that day in the Glen. Every detail of the picture he could recall and ever in the foreground the maiden. With deliberate purpose he settled himself in his chair and set himself to fill in those fine and delicate touches that were necessary to make perfect the foreground of his picture, the pale olive face with its bewildering frame of golden waves and curls, the ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... member of the Water-Color Society in 1875. To the Philadelphia Exposition, 1876, she sent a "Kingfisher and Catkins," a "Flock of Snow Birds," and the "Corner of a Rye-Field." Of the last a writer in the Art Journal said: "Miss Bridges' 'Edge of a Rye-Field,' with a foreground of roses and weeds, is a close study, and shows that she is as happy in the handling of oil colors as in those ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... books, the white bed and bookcase farther off, pictures and mottoes of his own selection on the white walls, a little altar in the depths of the dormer-window; and the lord of the little domain in the foreground, hands on knees, lips parted, cheeks flushed, eyes fixed and dreamy, seeing the rich colors and varied action as soon as words conveyed the story to the ear; a perfect picture of the listening boy, to whom experience like a wandering minstrel sings the glory ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... pathetic impression. But it is, in truth, nearly as conspicuous in the greater part of her productions; where we scarcely meet with any striking sentiment that is not ushered in by some such symphony of external nature—and scarcely a lovely picture that does not serve as an appropriate foreground to some deep or lofty emotion. We may illustrate this proposition, we think, by the following exquisite lines, on a palm-tree in an ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... first shock of the attack; entire regiments had thrown down their arms, which were lying in regular lines on the ground, as if for inspection; suppers just prepared had been abandoned; tents, baggage, wagons, cannons, half-slaughtered oxen, covered the foreground in chaotic confusion, while in the background a host of many thousand Yankees were discerned scampering for their lives as fast as their limbs could carry them, closely followed by our men, who were taking prisoners by the hundreds, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and bitterly cold when Hawtrey and Sally Creighton drove away from Stukely's barn. Winter had lingered unusually long that year, and the prairie gleamed dimly white, with the sledge trail cutting athwart it, a smear of blue-grey, in the foreground. It was—for Lander's lay behind them with the snow among the stubble belts that engirdled it—an empty wilderness the mettlesome team swung across, and during the first few minutes the cold struck through them with a sting like the thrust of steel. A half-moon hung ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... appearance of grass, and when the glistening white buildings are set down on the grass among the trees with Old Glory floating overhead, and gaily dressed dolls in the foreground, the children will be delighted with the scene; nor will the appreciation be confined to the children, for older people will ...
— Little Folks' Handy Book • Lina Beard
... that may be, it must be admitted that the decision of the Court had behind it a great body of what may be called expert opinion. The question of the authority due to the Vulgate was skilfully kept in the foreground; and the report of even so liberal-minded a man as the Dominican Hernando del Castillo was not wholly favourable. Castillo, indeed, came to the conclusion that Luis de Leon had uttered nothing against faith; but while he acquitted the prisoner of teaching 'erroneous, temerarious or scandalous doctrine', ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... calm pluck of Hayward touched even his murderers, callous as they are to bloodshed It makes a sensational picture: a solitary figure in the foreground standing alone on the edge of a pine wood high up in the lonely grandeur of the everlasting hills, the first flush of dawn reddening the snow on peak after peak, changing the pure white to pink, the cold blue to purple, the tumbled sea of mountain summits gradually growing in distinctness, ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... after Rantoul's marriage to little Tina Glover, Herkimer returned to America. The last years had placed him in the foreground of the sculptors of the world. He had that strangely excited consciousness that he was a figure in the public eye. Reporters rushed to meet him on his arrival, societies organized dinners to him, magazines sought ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... year (1823) they quitted the town for a suburban home. The spot they chose was in rural Dulwich, on Herne Hill, a long offshoot of the Surrey downs; low, and yet commanding green fields and scattered houses in the foreground, with rich undulating country to the south, and looking across London toward Windsor and Harrow. It is all built up now; but their house (later No. 28) must have been as secluded as any in a country village. There were ample gardens front and rear, ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... jagged in this manner, but consists of mossy, or blooming, or otherwise organic texture, which cannot be represented by these coarse lines; their general consequence has therefore been to withdraw the mind of the observer from all beautiful and tender characters in foreground, and eventually to destroy the very school of landscape engraving which ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... city was proud of its scenery, and justly so: circled with bluffs, with Holliday's Hill on the north, Lover's Leap on the south, the shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... land, could discern within the spring-day horizon, the course of the Blackwater and the Boyne before they blend into one; the hills of Cavan to the far north; with the royal hill of Tailtean in the foreground; the wooded heights of Slane and Skreen, and the four ancient roads, which led away towards the four subject Provinces, like the reins of empire laid loosely on their necks. Since the first Apostle of the Gentiles had confronted the subtle Paganism of Athens, on the hill of Mars, none ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... return from the captivity a second judgment would be inflicted, by which the national independence should be destroyed. This judgment is described with remarkable clearness and distinctness by the post-exilic prophets, inasmuch as, to them, it appeared already more in the foreground; compare the remarks on Zech. v. and xi.; Dan. ix. The only plausible argument against this reference is this,—that the capture of the city by the Romans was subsequent to the appearance of the Messiah, and that it is, after all, the latter which forms ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... small sick-rooms, used oftener as overflow nurseries. These little rooms have names meaning "peace" and "tranquillity"; and those of us who have lived in them with our babies, sick or well, find the names appropriate. In the foreground there is a garden, in the background the mountain; and to give purpose to it all, the foreground is full of life. A new nursery now being built is a welcome gift from Australia; and a new field with a noble tree, in whose shade a hundred children could ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... to need each other we follow the long trail together. Manage to hit it off first-rate. He's still mooning over the girl; tough that he can't have the only thing in the world he wants! Obstreperous parent adumbrated in the foreground, shotgun in hand. I don't allow Cassowary to carry any money—would rather risk contamination myself than expose him to it. If he stays with me for a few years, his accumulated income will roll up so that he can endow orchestras and art museums all through the prairie ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... exclaimed a passer-by. "A pleasanter picture cannot be imagined. I must have that." And the man took out of his portfolio a little book with white leaves: he was a painter, and with his pencil he drew the smoking house, the charred beams and the overhanging chimney, which bent more and more; in the foreground he put the large, blooming rose-bush, which presented a charming view. For its sake alone the whole picture ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the little fireplace it enlarged, and there was an enormous grate, level with the floor, glowing with seacoal; and a magnificent mantel carved in oak, old and brown; and over it hung a landscape, wide, deep, summer in the foreground with all the gorgeous coloring of the tropics, and beyond hills of blue and far mountains lying in rosy light. I held my breath as I looked down the marvelous perspective. Looking round for a second, I caught a glimpse of a Hindoo at each window, who vanished as if they had ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... belong to him, which does not fit him and which will not stay on his head in a high wind. The consequence was that his talk lacked interest, and that he often did not talk at all. Nevertheless, he managed to show enough assiduity to keep himself continually in the foreground of Beatrice's thoughts. Being almost constantly present she could not easily forget him, and he held his ground with a determination which kept other men away. When a man can make a woman think of him half-a-dozen ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... another five hundred and eighty-five. Taos is another of the large pueblos, and is especially interesting because it is still inhabited. This great building has from three to six stories with several hundred rooms. In the foreground of the photograph (Fig. 76) appears one of the ovens in which the baking is done. In some of these pueblos the women still grind their corn by hand in stone matates, just as their ancestors did for many hundreds and perhaps thousands ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... and the historian and poet offered to the gods the products of human genius. In the religion of the Greeks, however, the moral element, although not passed over and in the Greek epic and tragedy not seldom expressed in grand characters, stood nevertheless too little in the foreground, so that the worship of the divine, as in the older nature-worship, especially in the feasts in honor of Dionysus and Aphrodite, was marked by immoral practices. The conception of a future life, which taken in connection with a future retribution has a moral tendency, had but little attraction ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... and the nail that pierced the right hand of J. C. on the Cross. In the chancel is a "Coronation" of Mary painted on wood, 15th cent., and behind the altar another "Coronation" by P. Veronese. In the foreground are Saints Laurence and Siffrein. Adjoining is the Palais de Justice, 1640, with frescoes and a crucifix in the "salle des assises." Within the court, right hand, is a Triumphal arch, erected by Diocletian between 284 and 305, 30 ft. high (but originally higher), 25 ft. wide, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... men," said Lelia, "and would like to be the least among them. But what will those shepherds bearing a star on their brows be able to do before the huge monster of the Apocalypse—before that immense and terrible figure outlined in the foreground of all the prophets' pictures? That woman, as pale and beautiful as vice—that great harlot of nations, decked with the wealth of the East, and bestriding a hydra belching forth rivers of poison on ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... In the foreground, illuminated by a marvelous sunset, stood the freedman's home. It was a picturesque cottage with gables, dormer windows and wide verandas. French windows reached down to the floor, and through the open casements appeared a seductive scene in the family sitting ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... had caused so much discussion was a very large one, covering some five feet of canvas. In the foreground was a long sandy road, on which was a procession of all manner of vehicles of different kinds. Hay-carts, calashes, buck-boards, and rude specimens of cabs were being driven by French-Canadian habitants along the road. In the middle distance was a churchyard ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... spaces in which wander aimlessly or deliriously the wraiths of damned men, not a whit less wretched nor awful than Dante's immemorial mob. Piranesi shows us cavernous abodes where appalling engines of torture fill the foreground, while above, at vertiginous heights, we barely discern perilous passageways, haunted windows peering out upon the high heavens, stone-fretted ceilings that are lost in a magic mist. By a sort of diabolic modulation the artist conducts our eye from these dizzy angles and granitic convolutions ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... silver issuing from domes of the same material. The limits of the view, in the west, were marked by an undulating outline of bright light, as if, reversing the order of nature, numberless suns might momentarily he expected to heave above the horizon. In the foreground of the picture, along the shores of the lake, and near to the village, each tree seemed studded with diamonds. Even the sides of the mountains where the rays of the sun could not yet fall, were decorated with a glassy coat, that presented ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... proved better than any other for pastoral purposes, this country delighted me; but I must say it would please me more if there were a few high hills in the distance. I was however charmed with the landscape around the camp this morning. In the foreground I saw fine box, excoecaria, and other trees festooned with beautiful cumbering creepers, and beyond them the horses feeding on a fine grassy plain extending to the north and eastward to apparently distant blue mountains. As the day advanced this picture ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... recorded the official account of the Battle of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson. At Covent Garden, where both the Kembles were then playing together with Mrs. Siddons, a "hasty but elegant compliment to the memory of Lord Nelson" was presented. It "consisted of columns in the foreground decorated with medallions of the naval heroes of Britain. In the distance a number of ships were seen, and the front of the picture was filled by Mr. Taylor and the principal singers of the theatre. They were grouped in an interesting manner with their eyes turned toward the clouds, ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... they give a singular and most picturesque character to the scenery of the islands they surround. In the accompanying sketch, taken from the "Voyage of the 'Coquille'," the reef is seen from within, from one of the high peaks of the island of Bolabola. (I have taken the liberty of simplifying the foreground, and leaving out a mountainous island in the far distance.) Here, as in Whitsunday Island, the whole of that part of the reef which is visible is converted into land. This is a circumstance of rare occurrence; more usually a snow-white line of great breakers, with here and there an islet crowned ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... fellows have no more idea of genius than a Dutch skipper has of dancing a cotillion. The dog has spoiled a fine piece of canvas; he is worse than a Harp Alley signpost dauber. There's no keeping, no perspective, no foreground. Why, there now, the fellow has actually attempted to paint a fly upon that rosebud. Why, it is no more like a fly than I am like—;" but, as he approached his finger to the picture, the fly ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... who was actually relaxing into amiability. "Is this yer a d—d picnic?" said Uncle Billy, with inward scorn, as he surveyed the sylvan group, the glancing fire-light, and the tethered animals in the foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular nature, for he felt impelled to slap his leg again and cram his ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... foreground where he had swung the hammock under the alamo it checked and was held, absorbed. A blanketed figure lay motionless in the curve of the meshwork. One arm was thrown across the eyes, warding a strong beam which had forced its way through the lower ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and the appearance in the group of many small subsidiary figures, which in a painting might have been given their proper value, being in the marble of the same relief and distinction as the major characters, give a somewhat absurd effect. The little goddess who sits in the foreground, for instance, is smaller than the dog. Again, there is less of the motive shown than in the Laocoon. The group is seized at the moment preceding the frightful catastrophe, but that moment is as full of agony as the succeeding ones, and in addition there is the feeling of suspense and oppression ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... Poughkeepsie was suggested as a proper place to obtain information; and, once there, our travellers soon found themselves in the hands of an intelligent contraband, who promised to place them safely on the desired ferry boat. As they neared the dock, a great rock, with an upset wagon for foreground, furnished an encouraging picture for two lone lady tourists. The boat proved neat and comfortable, and here again inquiries were made. The very polite captain had heard of a lake on the Shawangunk mountain, but knew neither its name nor exact location. He advised them to have ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... the drooping eyes, the exquisitely rounded face that always charm us, and the boys are real live children ready for a frolic. Another, called "The Madonna of the Meadow," represents the Virgin in the foreground of a gently broken landscape with the two children playing beside her. We must not forget, either, as belonging to this time, the very beautiful "La Belle Jardiniere," or the "Madonna of the Garden" which now hangs in the Louvre, the art gallery ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... understand, sir, that this is a rolling prairie in the foreground?" asked a deep voice, which Tiffles at once recognized as emanating from C. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... arbitrary creations of His will, hardly one in a million could escape temporary misery or eternal damnation, was not the best possible background for a Church, as the Virgin and the Saviour frankly admitted by taking the foreground; but the Church was not responsible for it. Mankind could not admit an anarchical—a dual or a multiple—universe. The world was there, staring them in the face, with all its chaotic conditions, and society insisted ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... interrupted at intervals by inexplicable interludes of repentance, Bible-reading, psalm-singing, and visions. To delineate Cellini will be the business of a distant chapter. The form of the greatest of Italian preachers must occupy the foreground ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... narrower term algolagnia which emphasizes the pleasure in pain and cruelty, whereas the terms selected by v. Krafft-Ebing place the pleasure secured in all kinds of humility and submission in the foreground. ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... Owens was called "Julius Caesar," and the men never knew whether he was explaining the Roman general's operations in Spain, or Joffre's at the Marne, he jumped so from one to the other. Everything was in the foreground with him; centuries made no difference. Nothing existed until Barclay Owens found out about it. The men liked to hear him talk. Tonight he was walking up and down, his yellow eyes rolling, a big black cigar in his hand, lecturing the young officers upon French characteristics, coaching ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... high above the black corrugated peaks. The gray, the gloom, the shadow whitened. The clearing of the dark foreground appeared to lift a distant veil and show endless aisles of desert reaching down ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... muslins of different hues, as the eye traversed the multitude; in the swaying and bobbing of hundreds of umbrellas and parasols of various colors; in the vibration of thousands of fans in playful mediation, while the death-struggle of a man upon the gallows was eagerly awaited. In the foreground, on the bank of the Susquehanna, the gibbet, with the solemn group about it, relieved only by flashes of color in the military uniforms, and by the gleam of swords ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... the spires and towers so well, and the river in the foreground. Look at that shadow of a cloud skimming over Christchurch Meadow. It's a ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... in the trench shown in the foreground, and the Germans were also entrenched in the space seen in the distance between the ruins. When we first took up our position the hotel was intact except that the roof had been destroyed. The wall towards our ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... announced, and did. When he returned to his love-story Johnnie's head was in Kitty's lap and a mounted policeman was in the foreground of the scene. His face was wet from the mist ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... the difficulties which loomed in the foreground, Partridge obtained permission from his Territorial associates to tell the central Manitoba Grain Growers' Association the result of his investigations at Winnipeg. The Manitoba convention was about to be held at Brandon and on his way back home he remained over to address the delegates. ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... There was a reasonable satisfaction in the doing, even of the disagreeable, dirty tasks necessary, in beating the risks he sometimes had to run. There was a secret triumph in overcoming difficulties as they arose. And he had an object, which, if it did not always lie in the foreground of his mind, he was nevertheless ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... alone among strange trees whose very names and aspects were then unfamiliar to me, but which I nowadays know to be Australian eucalyptuses. On the steps of the verandah sat a lady in deep mourning. A child played by her side, and a collie dog lay curled up still and sleepy in the foreground. The child, indeed, stirred no chord of any sort in my troubled brain; but my heart came up into my mouth so at sight of the lady, that I said to myself all at once in my awe, "That ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... dawn, I could compare it with nothing but the painting displayed in a theatre, and the quiet that reigned in that still hour, added greatly to the effect. The background of mountains piercing the clouds; the foreground being formed by the town itself with its houses of various hues, and picturesque styles of architecture, ascending the mountain's side, and villas, and country seats aiding the perspective, whilst the island of Cobras served as a ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... upon no one. It seems absurd to compare a tugboat skipper to a centaur: but he reminded me somehow of an engraving in a little book I had as a boy, which represented centaurs at a stream, and there was one, especially in the foreground, prancing bow and arrows in hand, with regular severe features and an immense curled wavy beard, flowing down his breast. Falk's face reminded me of that centaur. Besides, he was a composite creature. Not a man-horse, it is true, but a man-boat. He lived on board his tug, which was always ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... the waltz succeeds the schottish, the scene presents one bewildering maze of flaunting gossamers and girating bodies, now floating sylph-like into the foreground, then whirling seductively into the shadowy vista, where the joyous laugh dies out in the din of voices. The excitement has seized upon the head and heart of the young,—the child who stood trembling between the first and second downward step finds her reeling brain a captive ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... been invaded, and the invasion of those rights has been attended by many deplorable circumstances which ought sometime, in the proper way, to be accounted for. But back of it all is the struggle of a people to come into its own, and while we look upon the incidents in the foreground let us not forget the great tragic reality in the background which towers above the ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... between general and technical training. They went beyond the general training of the elementary schools and furnished the girl with the background of her future vocation. But she often needed a little more of the foreground, a little more ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... groups of trees in the park, the towns of Greenwich and Deptford, and the shipping in the Pool; due regard being had to size and colour, so that the laws of perspective in distance and atmosphere might not be outraged; the immediate foreground being constructed of cork broken into rugged and picturesque forms, and covered with minute mosses and lichens, 'producing,' says a critic of the period, 'a captivating effect ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... quickly forgotten, and though the Cassiar engines soon began to wheeze and sigh with doleful solemnity, suggesting coming trouble, we were too happy to mind them. Every face glowed with natural love of wild beauty. The islands were seen in long perspective, their forests dark green in the foreground, with varying tones of blue growing more and more tender in the distance; bays full of hazy shadows, graduating into open, silvery fields of light, and lofty headlands with fine arching insteps dipping their feet in the shining water. But every eye was turned ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... their offspring. Miss Dearborn heard many admiring remarks passed upon her ability, and wondered whether they belonged to her or partly, at least, to Rebecca. The child had no more to do than several others, but she was somehow in the foreground. It transpired afterwards at various village entertainments that Rebecca couldn't be kept in the background; it positively refused to hold her. Her worst enemy could not have called her pushing. She was ready and willing and never ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... minds of the shape and size of Table Mountain, but it was quite a surprise and the least little bit in the world of a disappointment to me to find that it cuts the sky (and what a beautiful sky it is!) with a perfectly straight and level line. A gentle, undulating foreground broken into ravines, where patches of green velts or fields, clumps of trees and early settlers' houses nestle cosily down, guides the eye half-way up the mountain. There the rounder forms abruptly cease, and great granite cliffs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... young lady, in a rough blue traveling-dress and a hat and feather, who was engaged in picking up wild-flowers from the warm heath. There was a gentleman from the office of the Board of Trade, who was sitting on the grass, nursing his knees and whistling. From time to time the chief figure in the foreground was an elderly gentleman, who evidently expected that he was going to be put into the picture, and who was occasionally dropping a cautious hint that he did not always wear this rough-and-ready sailor's costume. Mackenzie was also most anxious to point ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... the Alps, with a railroad in the foreground; then the ship of the Invincible Armada, in the Madrid exhibit, seemed to take up his mind; and all of the guns, from the fifteenth century on to our day; and the Spanish collection of models of block-houses, forts, ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... with an exclamation of shocked surprise, to which Heliet's look of horror formed a fitting corollary. Clarice was conscious only of a confused medley of feelings, from which none but a sense of amazement stood out in the foreground. Then the Earl quietly told her that, in leaping a wide ditch, Vivian had been thrown from his horse, and had ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... brother and sister, out of the hands of the Devil. Let us now admire and adore that fountain, the Lord Jesus Christ, from whence those streams come. The Lord himself will requite his labor of love." In 1690, Mather was willing to have Goodwin place him in the foreground of the picture, representing him as pulling the children out of the hand of the Devil. In 1700, it was expedient to withdraw him into the background: and Goodwin, accordingly, provided the Committee, of which he was a member, with a Certificate ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... faithfully certain phenomena of efflorescence peculiar to the plum-trees and the cherry-trees of the country. But these chromatic extravaganzas can be witnessed only during very brief periods of particular seasons: throughout the greater part of the year the foreground of an inland landscape is apt to be dull enough in the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... The foreground of the castle is formed of green and level meadows washed by the river Eden; and, in modern days, two fine stone bridges add to the beauty of the scene. The hanging banks are crowned with the village and church of Stanwix, and the mountains of Bewcastle form ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... at the head of civilization, were naturally thrown upon each other's assistance. Any inclination to express before me such grievance as might arise from our refusal to join the Western Powers was kept out of the foreground. I had the feeling that the pressure which England and Austria exercised in Berlin and Frankfort to compel us to render assistance in the western camp was much stronger, one might say more passionate and rude, than the desires and promises expressed to me in an amicable form, with which the Emperor ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... condition: two days of worry and nervousness, of sleepless nights, of untouched meals, culminating in the emotional crisis and Rosalind's abrupt decision—the strain of it had drugged the foreground of his mind into a merciful coma. As he fumbled clumsily with the olives at the free-lunch table, a man approached and spoke to him, and the olives dropped from ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... in a criminal. "See," he would muse, "how cunningly the creature works, now back to his earth, anon stealing an unsuspected run across country, the clever rascal;" and his ethical disapproval ever, as usual, with English critics of life, in the foreground, clearly enhanced a primitive predatory instinct not obscurely akin, a cynic might say, to those dark impulses he holds up to our reprobation. This self-realization in his fiction is one of Trollope's principal ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... in the Battle of Shiloh, Dick gets into three big fights. Antietam is the big battle described, with McClellan always in the foreground. ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... nothing haphazard about their arrangement. The colors were put together so as to represent a landscape. A large round sun, of pumpkin-colored silk, with rays of red satin flying from it, arose from behind a mountain of green velvet. The sky was of blue silk, with white plush clouds, and in the foreground bloomed a flower garden of such various colors that the ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... subordination among the troops may bring ruin and disgrace upon the best-concerted plans." But we cannot describe the character and conduct of this renowned commander in more forcible language than that of Fray Antonio Agapida, excepting that the pious father places in the foreground of his virtues his hatred of the Moors. "The count de Tendilla," says he, "was a mirror of Christian knighthood—watchful, abstemious, chaste, devout, and thoroughly filled with the spirit of the cause. He labored incessantly and strenuously for the glory of the faith and the prosperity ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving |
