Turrets, Towers, and Temples: The Great Buildings of the World, as Seen and Described by Famous Writers

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Esther Singleton
Dodd, Mead, 1898 - Architecture - 317 pages

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Page 4 - ... them, — a crowd which, if it had its will, would stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards ; and unregarded children, — every heavy glance of their young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing, — gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour after hour, clashing their bruised centesimi upon the marble...
Page 61 - THEN Solomon began to build the house of the Lord at Jerusalem in mount Moriah, where the Lord appeared unto David his father, in the place that David had prepared in the threshingfloor of Oman the Jebusite.
Page 5 - Under foot and over head, a continual succession of crowded imagery, one picture passing into another, as in a dream; forms beautiful and terrible mixed together; dragons and serpents, and ravening beasts of prey, and graceful birds that in the midst of them drink from running fountains and feed from vases of crystal; the passions and the pleasures of human life symbolised together...
Page 1 - A yard or two farther, we pass the hostelry of the Black Eagle, and, glancing as we pass through the square door of marble, deeply moulded, in the outer wall, we see the shadows of its pergola of vines resting on an ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its side; and so presently emerge on the bridge and Campo San Mois£, whence to the entrance into St.
Page 3 - Lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst. Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval ! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them ; for, instead of the...
Page 144 - I well remember how, when a boy, I used to despise that Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from my windows by sunlight and...
Page 233 - As in its origin it bore the traces of the fantastic childish character of the King and of the age, in its architecture it bore the stamp of the peculiar position which Edward occupied in English history between Saxon and Norman. By birth he was a Saxon, but in all else he was a foreigner Accordingly, the Church at Westminster was a wide sweeping innovation on all that had been seen before. " Destroying the old building," he says in his Charter, " I have built up a new one from the very foundation.
Page 236 - It was to be his chantry as well as his tomb, for he was determined not to be behind the Lancastrian princes in devotion ; and this unusual anxiety for the sake of a soul not too heavenward in its affections expended itself in the immense apparatus of services which he provided. Almost a second abbey was needed to contain the new establishment^ monks, who were to sing in their stalls " as long as the world shall endure.
Page 144 - Nature often attains it by the simplest means, through the exquisite perfection of a flower or a stretch of summer sky. Just as we have looked at a sunset we look at Giotto's tower, poised far above in the blue air, in all the wonderful dawns and moonlights of Italy, swift darkness shadowing its white glory at the tinkle of the Ave Mary, and a golden glow of sunbeams accompanying the midday Angelus. Between the solemn antiquity of the old Baptistery and the historical gloom of the great Cathedral,...
Page 2 - ... a multitude of pillars and white domes clustered into a long low pyramid of colored light; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory — sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm leaves...

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