"Middle distance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mostly reddish, ornamented with eccentrically shaped chimney pots, pent-houses, skylights and water tanks, in addition to various curious whistle-like protuberances from which white wraiths of steam whirled and danced in the gay breeze. Beyond, in the middle distance, a great highway of sparkling jewels led across the waves to the distant faintly green hills of Staten Island. Three tiny aeroplanes wove invisible threads against the blue woof of the sky above the New Jersey shore. It was not a day to practise law at all. ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... searching for the exact balance between generous praise and critical discrimination, expressing their opinions in the mild technicalities of the Art Books and painting classes. They spoke of atmospheric effects, of middle distance, of "chiaro-oscuro," of fore-shortening, of the decomposition of light, of the subordination of ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... group was gathered in the cellar of Pervyse. An occasional shell was heard in the middle distance, as artillery beyond the Yser threw a lazy feeler over to the railway station. The three women were entertaining a distinguished guest at the evening meal of tinned rabbit and dates. Their visitor was none other than F. Ainslie-Barkleigh, the famous ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... 2 give, I think, a fair illustration of what I mean, the steep contours and thickly wooded character of the foreground and nearer middle distance shown by Plate 1 being typical Kuni scenery, and the more open nature of the country displayed by Plate 2 and the comparative freedom from forest of its foreground being typical of the higher ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... every conscious volition—every act that is so characterized—the larger part of it is quite unconscious. It is equally certain that in every perception there are unconscious processes of reproduction and inference. There is a middle distance of sub-consciousness, and a background ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... old Vesuvius, like a wicked, fallen angel, wearing his plumy, fumy halo of sulphurous hell-smoke; in the middle distance the Bay of Naples, each larcenous wave-crest in it triple-plated with silvern glory pilfered from a splendid moon; on the left the riding lights of a visiting squadron of American warships; on the right the myriad slanted sails of the coral-fishers' boats, beating out ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... vision of those further slopes, distance beyond distance, with Bogota, a place of multitudinous stirring beauty, a glory by day, a luminous mystery by night, a place of palaces and fountains and statues and white houses, lying beautifully in the middle distance. He thought how for a day or so one might come down through passes drawing ever nearer and nearer to its busy streets and ways. He thought of the river journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the still vaster world beyond, through ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... more complicated structure. The historical part of "Paracelsus" is all contained in the one life. In "Sordello" it forms a large and moving background, which often disputes our attention with the central figure, and sometimes even absorbs it: projecting itself as it were in an artistic middle distance, in which fact and fancy are blended; while the mental world through which the hero moves, is in its way, as restless and as crowded as the material. It may save time and trouble to readers of the poem to know something of its historical ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... sky. As the eye follows this roadway to its distant part the sun lights up the sky, tingeing with a mellow light the group of small trees and willows, contrasting beautifully with the almost sombre tones of the dense forest in the middle distance." ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... hotly—whether Albert possessed a soul. The most one could say for certain is that he looked as if he possessed one. To one who saw his deep blue eyes and their sweet, pensive expression as they searched the middle distance he seemed like a young angel. How was the watcher to know that the thought behind that far-off gaze was simply a speculation as to whether the bird on the cedar tree was or was not within range of his catapult? Certainly Maud had no such suspicion. She worked hopefully day ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... not ill-natured. Least of all was it scandalous, for the girls were always there, Cousin Maria not having thought it in the least necessary, in order to put herself in accord with French traditions, to relegate her daughters to the middle distance. They occupied a considerable part of the foreground, in the prettiest, most modest, ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... in the foreground should be greener, to throw back the middle distance. That is the peak of South Moor exactly, ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... beneath us, extending away and away until it ended in dim blue mists upon the farthest sky-line. In the foreground was the long slope, strewn with rocks and dotted with tree-ferns; farther off in the middle distance, looking over the saddle-back hill, I could just see the yellow and green mass of bamboos through which we had passed; and then, gradually, the vegetation increased until it formed the huge forest which extended ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the terrace BONAPARTE surveys and dictates operations against the entrenched heights of the Michaelsberg that rise in the middle distance on the right above the city. Through the gauze of descending waters the French soldiery can be discerned climbing to the attack ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... in—or rather sitting in front of—the stable; Saint Joseph leaning on his staff and gazing at the Divine Infant; a knot of shepherds in adoration, some bringing gifts and others playing on bagpipes, exactly similar to the instruments still used in the Neapolitan Apennines; other figures in the middle distance; beyond these a delicious bit of mountain-landscape; "a glory" above; and in the arch of the window a half-figure representation of God the Father. The composition, drawing and disposition of this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... red building and wrapped it in a velvet cloak of warm security. Tulips in long beds—brilliant mosaics in a floor of green marble—were let into the lawn that stretched down the drive. Away on the horizon, the rising ground about Wycombe showed blue through the soft spring atmosphere, and in the middle distance, the ploughed fields—freshly turned—glowed with the rich, red blood of the earth's fulness. So it presented itself to the eyes of Mrs. Durlacher, when, one morning late in April, she drove up in her motor to the old iron-barred oak-door which opened into ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... sturdy evening breeze, tinged with cold, that seemed to bring the night with it, so silently and coolly did it settle down. The immense plain and farther mountains remained almost visible in the starlight, in the middle distance the lamps of Silao, and near the center of the half-seen picture those of Irapuato, while far away a faint glow in the sky marked the location of the ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... most of the men remained standing: their sable rank, lining the background, looked like a dark foil to the splendour displayed in front. Nor was this splendour without varying light and shade and gradation: the middle distance was filled with matrons in velvets and satins, in plumes and gems; the benches in the foreground, to the Queen's right hand, seemed devoted exclusively to young girls, the flower—perhaps, I should rather say, the bud—of Villette aristocracy. Here were no jewels, no head-dresses, no ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... quantities of men of this stamp in large cities. No writer has felt and expressed this complex temperament with more justice than De Maupassant, and, as he was an infinitely careful observer of milieu and landscape and all that constitutes a precise middle distance, his novels can be considered an irrefutable record of the social classes which he studied at a certain time and along certain lines. The Norman peasant and the Provencal peasant, for example; also the small officeholder, the gentleman of the ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... of the "Dean" the distances are dreamy and wide, with high horizon-lines touching wooded hills and shutting the Thames into a middle distance toward which a hundred little hills either descend abruptly or decline gently upon broad green meadows. Nature here smiles, not with pure pagan blitheness, but with a tenderer grace, as of a soul grown ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... the middle distance, a couple of flags draped over his person. I am going to send him a message. I signal to him that I am about to begin; he waves back that he is ready. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... stretched away before us. The veldt was not all yellow, but in low-lying places, after the recent rain, was beginning to be streaked with vivid green. Opposite us, across the flat or gently undulating veldt in the middle distance, were hills and kopjes, while beyond, purple under clouds or light blue in sunshine, rose to the far horizon mountains, pointed, or of that quite flat-topped shape so ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... satisfied this household critic, then is the time to show some handy brother-craftsman your amended work, and listen gratefully when he suggests that you should put a tone on this wall, and a tree, or something, in the left middle distance to balance the composition, and raise or depress the horizon-line to get ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... half-way in this respect between the two groups, and acts the thankless part of a family mediator; for it has most of its long tail-hairs collected in a final flourish, like the donkey, but several of them spring from the middle distance, as in the genuine Arab, though never from the very top, thus showing an approach to the true horsey habit without actually attaining that final pinnacle of equine glory. So far as one can make out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my prehistoric Phidias the horse of the quaternary ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... endeavoured to convey the idea of a sunny morning. I had ventured to give more of the bright verdure of spring or early summer to the grass and foliage than is commonly attempted in painting. The scene represented was an open glade in a wood. A group of dark Scotch firs was introduced in the middle distance to relieve the prevailing freshness of the rest; but in the foreground was part of the gnarled trunk and of the spreading boughs of a large forest-tree, whose foliage was of a brilliant golden green—not golden from autumnal mellowness, but from the sunshine and the very immaturity of the ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... nourished a rancorous hatred for the society which had seemed to accept her under protest, for Francesca's sake, and she was ready enough to turn her back on it before it should finally make up its polite mind to relegate her to the middle distance of ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... closed eye. He was so absorbed in his task that he was blithely unconscious of the approach of a girl from the house, and his first glimpse of her was forthcoming when she crossed the last spread of velvet sward which separated a cluster of rhododendrons in the middle distance from the farther edge ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... PONSCH enters, bearing a stout staff, which he nurses gloomily, like an infant; a hurricane is heard in the middle distance; the waterpipe sobs strangely and then expires; a blackbeetle comes out of a cupboard and runs uneasily about, until a flash of lightning enters down the chimney and kills it. PONSCH stands glaring ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... almost every other house bore a name which read like a page of French history; and farther still the merry, wicked Latin quarter and the grave Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Garden of Plants; on the hither side, in the middle distance, the Louvre, where the kings of France had dwelt for centuries; the Tuileries, where "the King of the French" dwelt then, and just for a ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... baskets, selling water and syrups, cakes and confectionery, melon seeds and peanuts—others going about with halfpenny buttonholes of gelsomina, each neatly folded up in a vine-leaf to keep the scent in—three independent piano-organs and a brass band in the middle distance—an enthusiastic blind singer, a survival of Demodocus in the Odyssey, with a falsetto voice and no bridge to his nose keeping a group of listeners spellbound in the foreground with their favourite ballad, ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... mud-flats of the Haven, the tide being low. Upon the sandy skirts of the Bar, across the river just opposite, three cormorants—glossy black against the yellow—postured in extravagant angular attitudes drying their wings. Above the rim of the silver-blue sea—patched with purple stains in the middle distance—webs of steamer smoke lay along the southern sky. Occasionally a sound of voices, the creak of a wooden windlass and grind of a boat's keel upon the pebbles as it was wound slowly up the foreshore, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... their being drowned. They are all, too, engaged in noble works; charity, energy, and inventiveness are amongst the virtues they exhibit; there is no panic, or struggling one with another; no anger or selfishness, excepting only in the boat in the middle distance; a woman helps her children, a man his wife, an old man bears a young man in his arms, Priam carrying AEneas, an even more pathetic imagination than Homer's; others attempt to save their household goods; ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... the Father, and St. Michael. Christ of course at the right hand of the Father, as Stephen saw him standing; but there is little dignity in this part of the conception. In the middle of the picture, which is also the middle distance, are three or four men throwing stones, with Tintoret's usual vigor of gesture, and behind them an immense and confused crowd; so that, at first, we wonder where St. Paul is; but presently we observe ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... a view from the actual top difficult to obtain. The whole of the Weald is in sight and also the far-off line of the North Downs broken by the summits of Holmbury and Leith Hill with Blackdown to the left. In the middle distance is St. Leonard's Forest, and away to the right Ashdown Forest with the unmistakable weird clump of firs at Wych Cross. But it is the immediate foreground of the view which will be most appreciated. The prehistoric entrenchment ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... in sight. We wandered along at our sweet will, dawdling as slowly as we pleased. The guide had apparently quite disappeared. Look where we would we could in no manner discover him. At the next corner we would pause, undecided as to what to do; there, in the middle distance, would stand our friend, smiling. When he was sure we had seen him, and were about to take the turn properly, he would disappear again. Convoyed in this pleasant fashion we wound and twisted up and down and round and about through the most appalling maze. We saw the native markets with their ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... were looking at a picture of the deluge; the ark was seen in the middle distance, while in the fore-sea an elephant was struggling with his fate. "I wonder," said the gentleman, "that the elephant did not secure an inside place!"—"He was too late, my friend," replied Canning; "he was detained packing up ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... door with one hand, and the frame with the other, swinging back and forth on the threshold, with abnormally large iron shoes flying up and down in the wet green foreground, and the whole North Sea towering over me in the middle distance—oh, but a ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... no need. Looming ponderously in the middle distance of the pier's vista, a lorgnette held to her eyes, and a frozen look of horror on her ample features, was Aunt ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... towers, purple cliffs, wide-spread apart, hints of color and splendor; on the right distance, mansions, gold and white and carmine (so the light made them), architectural habitations in the sky it must be, and suggestions of others far off in the middle distance—a substantial aerial city, or the ruins of one, such as the prophet saw in a vision. It was only a glimpse. Our hearts were in our mouths. We had a vague impression of something wonderful, fearful—some incomparable splendor that was not earthly. Were we drawing near ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... meeting. Therefore, instead of turning at Faber Street, she crossed it. But at the corner of the Common she halted, her glance drawn by a dark mass of people filling the end of Hawthorne Street, where it was blocked by the brick-coloured facade of the Clarendon Mill. In the middle distance men and boys were running to join this crowd. A girl, evidently an Irish-American mill hand of the higher paid sort, hurried toward her from the direction of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... prophetic of winter's bite, and the Isar swept below them, carrying its hurry of tumult away, away, far into the west, towards a wealth of rose and golden sky. Between the glory and the water, in the middle distance, lay a line of roofs stretching irregularly into the blackness of their own shadows, and beyond them was the forest, to the fringing haze of whose bare branches the distance lent a softness not their own. The banks of the Promenade were still green, but the masses of vine that trailed ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... apartments were in the third story. From the window of his sitting-room he could look out over the houses on to Cullerne Flat, the great tract of salt-meadows that separated the town from the sea. In the foreground was a broad expanse of red-tiled roofs; in the middle distance Saint Sepulchre's Church, with its tower and soaring ridges, stood out so enormous that it seemed as if every house in the place could have been packed within its walls; in the background was ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... was to be his first masterpiece, his salon picture when he should get to Paris. A British cavalryman and his horse, both dying of thirst and wounds, were to be lost on a Soudanese desert, and in the middle distance on a ridge of sand a lion should be drawing in upon them, crouched on his belly, his tail stiff, his lower jaw hanging. The melodrama of the old English "Home Book of Art" still influenced Vandover. He was in love with this idea for a ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... he concluded. "I don't want any of your leading questions. 'I quite expect we were expected yesterday, weren't we?' All sweet and slimy, with a five-franc note in the middle distance." ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... interviewed the hermit and enjoyed the prospect; and finally settled themselves for as pleasant a rest as possible among the myrtles on the solitary point of the coast. From here their eyes had a constant regale. The blue Mediterranean spread out before them, Capri in the middle distance, and the beauties of the shore nearer by, were an endless entertainment for Dolly. Christina declared she had seen it all before; Mr. Thayer found nothing worthy of much attention unless it had antiquities to be examined; and the fourth member of the party was ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... to the west are ascended the view broadens, until, from the extreme top of some of the higher points, there is, to the east, the valley stretching away to the Cascade Mountains, with its rivers, the Columbia and Willamette; in the foreground Portland, in the middle distance Vancouver, and, bounding the horizon, the Cascade Mountains, with their snow-clad peaks, and the gorge of the Columbia in plain sight, whilst away to the north the course of the Columbia may be followed for miles. To the west, from the foot of the hills, the valley of the ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... made use of the most formal and Squarcionesque contours in his surroundings. The rocks are of an unnatural, geological structure. The towers of Jerusalem are defined in elaborate perspective, and a band of classic figures fills the middle distance. The sleeping forms of the disciples are laid about like so many draped statues taken from their pedestals. The choir of child angels is solid and leaves nothing to the imagination, and if it were not for the beautifully conceived Christ, the whole composition would ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... seven-and-sixpenny matter, or a trifle beyond. It does well enough what it pretends to do; but this is a subject I never ought to have touched. I know my limits. You'll see, sir," he went on, in a more business-like tone, "I've indicated your ship here in the middle distance. I thought it would give the portrait just that touch ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Norman castle, and another of a cottage charmingly painted, and of which I have a sketch. But the act scene, which was a view on the Clyde looking towards the Highland mountains with Dumbarton Castle in the middle distance, was such a combination of magnificent scenery, so wonderfully painted, that it excited universal admiration. These productions I studied incessantly; and on them my style, if I have any, was originally ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... did not meet a soul; only in the middle distance of one of the lower side streets he espied a policeman. Trafalgar Road was a solitude of bright and forlorn gas lamps and dark, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... some long strokes with a vigorous touch. He always drew the same landscape—large dishevelled trees in the foreground, in the middle distance a plain, and on the horizon an indented chain of hills. Liza looked over his ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... I am not sure of their meaning. Hiller, to whom I applied for an explanation, was unable to help me. Perhaps Chopin uses here the word plan in the pictorial sense (premier plan, foreground; second plan, middle distance).] ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... excuse to make for his defeat. Taylor's performance undoubtedly stamps him as the premier 'cycle sprinter of the world, and, judging from the staying qualities he exhibited in his six days' ride in the Madison Square Garden, the middle distance championship may be his before the end of ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... patent leather. He was one size smaller than his father and had one-tenth of his brains. With regard to every other measurement, however, there was not the slightest doubt but that in a few years he would equal his distinguished father's outlines, a fact already discernible in his middle distance. In looking around for the missing nine-tenths of gray matter his father had found it under Philip Colton's hat, and the formation of the firm, with himself as special and his son as ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... A drop-scene fell; the stage was transformed, for, in the middle distance, swelling green hills rose against a soft blue sky seen between trees in the foreground. Sunshine lay on the landscape, enhancing the haze in the distance and throwing up the hills more prominently against it. The cries and ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... a path crimson with the fallen blossom, till we got to the top, when a glorious view opened out before our delighted eyes. The wooded hills of Jakho and Elysium in the foreground, Mahasu and the beautiful Shalli peaks in the middle distance, and beyond, towering above all, the everlasting snows glistening in the morning sun, formed a picture the beauty of which quite entranced us both. I could hardly persuade my wife to leave it and come into the house. Hunger and fatigue, however, at length triumphed. ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the air, and the curious one-sided appearance of the wind-swept trees, made her aware of the nearness of the sea—then presently she saw it—just a line of deeper blue against the azure of the sky, with the square tower of Renwick Church girdled with clustering red roofs clearly visible in the middle distance. ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... Breda," by Velazquez, page 161 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXVI].—First spear in upright row on the right top of picture, exactly Phi proportion with sides of canvas. Height of gun carried horizontally by man in middle distance above central group, exactly Phi proportion with top and bottom of picture. This line gives height of group of figures on left, and is the most important horizontal ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... accompanied by all the scenery in which he so peculiarly delighted. In the foreground is the ruins of an old temple, with its lofty pillars finely displayed in shadow above the summits of the horizon;—in the middle distance the battle is dimly discerned through the driving rain, which obscures the view; while the back ground is closed by a vast ridge of gloomy rocks, rising into a dark and tempestuous sky. The character of the whole is that of sullen ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison |
