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Attic   Listen
adjective
Attic  adj.  Of or pertaining to Attica, in Greece, or to Athens, its principal city; marked by such qualities as were characteristic of the Athenians; classical; refined.
Attic base (Arch.), a peculiar form of molded base for a column or pilaster, described by Vitruvius, applied under the Roman Empire to the Ionic and Corinthian and "Roman Doric" orders, and imitated by the architects of the Renaissance.
Attic faith, inviolable faith.
Attic purity, special purity of language.
Attic salt, Attic wit, a poignant, delicate wit, peculiar to the Athenians.
Attic story. See Attic, n.
Attic style, a style pure and elegant.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Attic" Quotes from Famous Books



... for miles around. The second home, Otsego Hall, built in 1798, was of bricks which were made at the outlet of the lake. It had seventy feet of frontage by fifty-six of depth, and had two stories with attic and basement. The main hall measured twenty-four by forty-eight feet and the rooms on either side were twenty feet wide. Otsego Hall is said to have been of the exact, generous proportions of the Van Rensselaer Manor House at Albany, New ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips

... ever more alive, more rich in individuality, than M. Paul. He is alive and he is adorable, in his paletot and bonnet grec, from the moment when he drags Lucy up three pairs of stairs to the solitary and lofty attic and locks her in, to that other moment when he brings her to the little house that he has prepared for her. Whenever he appears there is pure radiant comedy, and pathos as pure. It is in this utter purity, this transparent simplicity, that ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... to surfeiting With lyric draughts o'ersweet, from rills that rise On Hybla not Parnassus mountain: come With beakers rinsed of the dulcifluous wave Hither, and see a magic miracle Of happiest science, the bland Attic skies True-mirrored by an English well;—no stream Whose heaven-belying surface makes the stars Reel, with its restless idiosyncrasy; But well unstirred, save when at times it takes Tribute of lover's eyelids, and at times Bubbles with laughter ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson

... upset old Mary, so that she fell and broke her arm. That finished old Mary's scrubbing, for the break never healed. Ever since this, bloodthirsty Rudie had been stealing down Mulberry Street to the old woman's attic on pay-day and sharing his meagre wages with her, paying, beside, the insurance premium that assured her of a decent burial; though he denied it hotly if charged with it. So when Rudie announced that he would like to pull the pedler's whiskers, it was taken as a motion that he be ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... Fire the whole situation assumed an aspect of Ghosts. In spite of her courage she was very glad the chief was at her heels, and when she finally reached the last narrow step and stood under the rafters, Jane Allen sent a sweeping eye over that dark attic. ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft

... to St. Petersburg, where he was now in prison. Prince Charles of Courland arrived about this time, and I hastened to call upon him as soon as he advised me of his coming. He was lodging in a house belonging to Count Dimidoff, who owned large iron mines, and had made the whole house of iron, from attic to basement. The prince had brought his mistress with him, but she was still in an ill-humour, and he was beginning to get heartily sick of her. The man was to be pitied, for he could not get rid of her without finding her a husband, and this husband became more ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... of something better to do I have cleaned the old house from attic to cellar, and have been glad to creep to bed lame and sore from work, because then I could sleep. Father won't let me read at night—watches for signs of the light under my door and calls out to me if it shows. It is golden weather without, dear friend, and within is order and system. ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... It was so light, so peaceful, so high, that little room which caught the last gleam of daylight on its windows, which was all aflame with the last rays of the sun already sinking below the horizon, and which seemed, like all attic rooms, carved out of a piece of sky, with its bare walls, decorated only by a large portrait, her own; nothing but her own portrait smiling in the place of honor and another in a gilt frame on the table. Yes, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... double purposes of windows and loop-holes. Though the apartments were so evidently arranged for defence, the plain domestic, furniture they contained was suited to the wants of the family, should they be driven to the building for refuge. There was also an apartment in the roof, or attic, as already mentioned; but it scarcely entered into the more important uses of the block-house. Still the advantage which it received from its elevation was not overlooked. A small cannon, of a kind once known and much used under the name ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper

... occupied by an hexastyle portico of the Ionic order, with fluted columns. The floor is approached by a bold flight of steps, and in the wall, at the back are three entrances to the church. The columns are surmounted by their entablature and a pediment, behind which a low attic rises from the roof of the church to the height of the apex of the pediment; it is crowned with a cornice and blocking-course, and surmounted by an acroterium of nearly its own height, but in breadth only equalling two-thirds ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various

... upwards of three centuries, was destroyed by a churchwarden. The spirit of veneration was strong in the boy, and he sent to the local journal on the 7th of January 1764 a clever satire on the parish Vandal. But his delight was to lock himself in a little attic which he had appropriated as his study; and there, with books, cherished parchments, saved from the loot of the muniment room of St Mary Redcliffe, and drawing materials, the child lived in thought ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... and was out of the room. Up to the attic flew the child, and after her dashed Bessie. The bag was found in the corner of the linen-cupboard. Bessie aimed a frenzied blow at Judy, who once again dodged her, then the schoolgirl ran downstairs and was ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade

... difficulty in estimating the weight of a talent. Dr. Gill considers it about sixty pounds; this was the lesser Roman talent. Michaelis estimates the Jewish talent at thirty-two pounds and a half. The attic talent of gold used in Greece in the time of Homer is estimated at less than an ounce. The safest conclusion as to the weight of the hail-stones is, that they were enormous, and fell with a velocity to crush ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... only a story and a half high, but there was a commodious and cheerful room down stairs, with four windows, and from the narrow hallway a quaint little winding stair led to an attic which though its roof was low and sloping contained a room large enough to serve the double purpose of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... perhaps lost the point of the joke. While these three, Theocritus, Callimachus, and Philastas, were writing in Alexandria, the museum was certainly the chief seat of the muses. Athens itself could boast of no such poet but Menander, with whom Attic literature ended; and him Philadelphus earnestly invited to his court. He sent a ship to Greece on purpose to fetch him; but neither this honour nor the promised salary could make him quit his mother country ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... an' then she looked me straight in the face, and sez "I found it in the attic. I wanted a new box to put my cigarettes in, an' one day Daddy left the attic door open an' I went in. The' was just a dandy chest there an' he had left the key in it. I opened it an' this letter was on top. He goes to the attic alone every now an' ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason

... 8.—I wish I could give a description of our house, for it really has a character of its own, which is more than can be said of most edifices in these days. It is two stories high, with a third story of attic chambers in the gable roof. When I first visited it, early in June, it looked pretty much as it did during the old clergyman's lifetime, showing all the dust and disarray that might be supposed to have gathered about him in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... the garden and pointing out our own pet plants and bulbs. Even the servants can keep smiling through three days of extra work. But the second night begins to see us becoming exhausted. We have said everything we wanted to say. We have taken him up to the attic and to the farthest ends of the pig sty, we have laid down the law concerning our own pet enthusiasms and tolerated him while he told us about his own. But a sense of boredom begins to creep into our hearts at the end of ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... sullen day, what may be won From the hard season gaining? Time will run On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun. What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air? He who of those delights can judge, and spare To interpose them ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... pleasure in stepping into the same little front porch which Townsend Bishop had built so many years ago. And upon ascending the stairs I found myself lingering a while by the old original balusters, the building of which Roger Williams had perhaps viewed with interest. Upon reaching the attic it was a pleasure, indeed, to see in this new world the frame-work of a house which for two hundred and fifty years had stood so well the test of nature in all her moods. No saw was used in shaping those oaken timbers. They knew only the broad-axe. From this attic I ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various

... old man with a violin tucked under his arm shuffled down the attic steps and the many flights of stairs until finally he ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle

... justly, waiteth until the blood is cool. If the Sheik will honor me with a copy of his lines, I will scan and measure them by the rules descended to us from Homer, and his Attic successors." ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... is the custom to store grain in garrets, and there the cats are treated very kindly. There is a small door in each attic for their use; food and drink are given to them; and they may walk where they like over the roofs of the city. Many of them never care to ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy

... disgrace, Procopius [12] successively composed the history, the panegyric, and the satire of his own times. The eight books of the Persian, Vandalic, and Gothic wars, [13] which are continued in the five books of Agathias, deserve our esteem as a laborious and successful imitation of the Attic, or at least of the Asiatic, writers of ancient Greece. His facts are collected from the personal experience and free conversation of a soldier, a statesman, and a traveller; his style continually aspires, and often attains, to ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... below, and her father next to her along a narrow gangway. From my attic I got down to this gangway by means of a staircase hardly to be told from a ladder. The gangway, just past the Colonel's door, became a little landing whence three or four steps led down to a larger landing, from which one could mount up to the other and corresponding half of the house or descend ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough

... enough in Athens to acquire a mastery of Attic Greek, and his public discourses could not have been without full seasoning of Attic salt. In Italy and Gaul his success brought him money beyond his present needs, and he went back to Samosata, when about forty years old, able to choose ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian

... there, and sure enough we found, after rummaging about in the large attic, a quantity of old tapestries: three complete subjects (biblical and pastoral), all of them more or less spoiled by rats and ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone

... who lived in an attic, being asked what part of the house he occupied, answered, "If the house were turned topsy-turvy, I'd be livin' ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon

... was found to fall short of his merits. He has consummate oratorical power, fluency and choice of expression, and though he always speaks extempore his speeches might have been carefully written out long beforehand. He speaks in Greek, and that the purest Attic; his prefatory remarks are polished, neat and agreeable, and occasionally stately and sparkling. He asks to be supplied with a number of subjects for discussion, and allows his audience to choose which they will have and often which side they would like him to take. Then ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger

... Marshall's andirons up in the attic!" said Mother Marshall, looking up suddenly over the top of the Sunday ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... second story, followed by his pursuers; on he went, until he reached the attic, from which a ladder led to the roof. Ascending this, he drew it up after him, and found himself on the roof of a house that was ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb

... poor people, so poor they were starving When I found them a few months ago, were now halving Their food and their home with this waif and with Benny— For he was an orphan child left by his granny, Who died in an attic just over their room, In the tumble-down house they before-time called home; Though they've four of their own, and the eldest is Jenny, The little street-sweep who would not take the penny, Yet they say, "Benny seems quite ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller

... lonely," he repeated, "and I am afraid of you here in all this luxury. I am so far away. I come from my attic to this, and I am afraid. Do you ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... back to Johnny's grave; he took a side road down through the edge of the grove, and so went home; and when he reached home, he went up to his attic room, and knelt down and prayed for Kitty as only those can pray who have been working as well as ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)

... quite safe, however, and managed to convey it unseen to her little attic-room. But Nelly felt far more unhappy than she had ever been when her harsh mother had beaten her most severely. She could not understand how it was that she should feel so miserable. She was glad that she could not go for her lesson ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar

... will give you a delicacy of perception, an ingenuity, a persuasiveness, which no heart shall be able to resist. Love will reconcile the accomplished scholar to a life among savages, and will carry the refined and cultured lady up to the sultry attic, or down to the damp and airless cellar. Love will bear all, believe all, hope all, endure all, if only it may win wild wandering ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... BYRON; but it may be the author of the Essay on the Formation of Opinions, and of the Principle of Representation. Mr. BAILEY, of Sheffield, though little known, possesses the fine reasoning powers, intellectual grasp, independence of research, abstract analysis, and attic style, that would qualify him to produce the Vestiges of Creation, though we never heard that he is a great natural philosopher. But, as just hinted, deep science is not evinced by the Vestiges, only an able, systematic, and ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous

... been three years of bitter, almost half-sullen, struggle, lightened by one sweet friendship with a girl whose face she had since drawn in a hundred different poses on stray pieces of paper, on the walls of the big, well-lighted attic to which she retreated for hours every day, when she was not abroad on the prairies, riding the Indian pony that her uncle the Piegan Chief, Ice Breaker, had given her years before. Three years of struggle, and then ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... high school, of course they were supposed to put away dolls, together with other childish things. But Nan Sherwood never could neglect her doll-babies and had often spent whole rainy days playing with them in secret in the attic of the little house on ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr

... called in vain for her young son. Then she searched the ground floor, the first story, the second, and the attic—all in vain. Finally, she climbed to the trap door in the roof, pushed it open, ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous

... brain that he at once concluded something must be wrong with him, and rushing upstairs two at a time, and making sure that he was not followed, he continued the rest of his way in the darkness as silently as he could, pausing to listen at the top of the attic stairs, and then cautiously creeping to and trying the door of ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn

... two stories in a gentleman's country residence, and a dormer or mansard story if we may so term it, in the roof;—we will not be so vulgar as to call it a garret,—nor yet so classical as to resort to the appellation of an attic. If, therefore, you require a large house, take plenty of ground, and lay out all your rooms en suite. Let all the offices, whence any noise or smell can arise, be perfectly detached from the dwelling part of the mansion:—such as the kitchens, sculleries, laundries, &c. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... they could not afford an ox or a sheep, might bring a little milk or cheese, a few dates, or a handful of wild fruit. On the other hand, the king was bound, whenever he visited Pasargadae, to present to each Persian woman who appeared before him a sum equal to twenty Attic drachmas, or about sixteen shillings of our money. This custom commemorated the service rendered by the sex in the battle wherein Cyrus first repulsed the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson

... and of trophies hung, Of forests and enchantments drear, Where more is meant than meets the ear. Thus Night, oft see me in thy pale career, Till civil-suited Morn appear. Not tricked and frounced as she was wont With the Attic Boy to hunt, But kerchiefed in a comely cloud While rocking winds are piping loud, Or ushered with a shower still, When the gust hath blown his fill, Ending on the rustling leaves, With minute drops from off the eaves. ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... period, for it existed in its essential perfection in the time of Homer. It was, also, early divided into dialects, as spoken by the various Hellenic tribes that inhabited different parts of the country. The principal of these found in written composition are the Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, and Attic, of which the Aeolic, the most ancient, was spoken north of the Isthmus, in the Aeolic colonies of Asia Minor, and in the northern islands of the Aegean Sea. It was chiefly cultivated by the lyric poets. The Doric, a variety of the Aeolic, characterized by its strength, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... milk-jugs and bells, and with a leathern wallet, yokes and shackles, the sheepskin coats of the shepherds, bristling masks for their dogs (as a defence against wolves), loaves of bread, onions and garlic. Thus in town and village, palace and attic, house and street, on road and mountain and sea the Portugal of the early sixteenth century is clearly and charmingly conveyed to us, and we can realize better the conditions of Gil Vicente's life at Court ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente

... that long gallery, where the Caryatid thrusts her bosom that her neck may be the prouder to the weight, she saw the objects of her present pilgrimage— beaten, blind, and dumb, immovable as the eternal hills, the Attic Fates; and before them at gaze, his arms folded over his narrow chest, Morosine ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... He thought meanly of human nature for in his profess he must cringe or snarl, always the undermost dog. Yet he had some liking for the priests, who had been kind to him, and there was always a glow in his heart for the pale wife who dwelt with his child in the attic in Billingsgate. Under happier circumstances Mr. Nicholas Lovel might have shone ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... however, kept up my scrutiny of the attic window—observed closely every female foot that glanced about the neighboring courts, and remitted sadly my attention to the Grammaire des Grammaires, in the quiet room of my ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... quiet place for reading—an attic lumbered with rubbish, a bedroom cold and empty, even a corner on the stairs—he makes of that place a theatre, in which he is the sole audience. Before his eyes—to him alone—the drama is played, with scenery complete and costume correct, by such actors as ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... with hermit heart Disdain'st the wealth of art, And gauds, and pageant weeds, and trailing pall: But com'st a decent maid, In Attic robe array'd, O chaste, unboastful ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... must attend to it immediately. The woolens ought to be put up if moths had already appeared. John's clothes and the boys' winter coats were in great danger of being ruined. By lunch time the necessary brushing and doing up were ended. But in stowing away the winter garments in the attic, our heroine was appalled at the confusion among the trunks. The garret needed attention, and received it as soon as the noonday meal was dispatched. At four o'clock, with the waitress' assistance, the task was completed. ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... who, not mistook, Hath read in Nature's mystic book! And see how chance's better wit Could with a mask my studies hit! The oak-leaves me embroider all, Between which caterpillars crawl; And ivy, with familiar trails, Me licks and clasps, and curls and hales. Under this Attic cope I move, Like some great prelate of the grove; Then, languishing with ease, I toss On pallets swoln of velvet moss, While the wind, cooling through the boughs, Flatters with air my panting brows. ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell

... made bigger. It is a moral crime, a literary abortion. The style is faulty and the narrative marred—if a bad egg can be spoiled—by slang lugged in from the slums of two continents with evident labor. Employed naturally, slang may serve—in a pinch—for Attic salt; but slang for its own sake is smut on the nose instead of a "beauty-spot" on the cheek of Venus—sure evidence of a paucity of ideas. A trite proverb, a non-translatable phrase from a foreign tongue may be permissible; but the writer who jumbles two languages together indiscriminately ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... to know where Ted keeps her keys? I want to get something out of that box of old trumpery of mine in the attic, and the thing ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray

... they all had! If some of the potatoes were slightly burned and others a little raw, the occasion added a flavor better than Attic salt. A flock of chickadees approached near enough to gather the crumbs that were thrown ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... and Mrs. Winlow, blue room and dress; maid, small drab. Mr. George, white room. Mrs. Jaspar Bellew, gold. The Captain, red. General Pendyce, pink room; valet, back attic. That's the lot." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... ventilated by a force or blower fan in the basement, and by an exhaust fan in the attic with sufficient capacity to insure complete renewal of air in each laboratory once in ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson

... by its setting than that of Chelsea, if the Manresa Road was to be taken as a criterion. Along the uninviting uniformity of this street no trace of unorthodoxy was to be seen. There came no merry, roystering laughter from attic windows. No talented figures of idle geniuses fetched pints of beer from the public-house at the corner. No one dressed in an ancient ulster and a battered straw hat and puffing enormous clouds of blue smoke from ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... indifferently barbered, and with a quite unnecessary pair of glasses on his fairly prominent nose—he wore these to make himself look older, that discipline might be maintained. At the particular moment when this story begins he was in his bedroom. An attic it was, with lead-framed dormer windows, a slanting ceiling and a bulging wall, covered, as a number of torn places witnessed, with innumerable strata of ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... the doctor, with a touch of sympathy in his tone. "You must have been rather lonely in that attic of yours. And yet do you know, I sometimes sigh for the quiet of such an attic! Perhaps when you've been some months under the same roof with these miniature thunderstorms, Jack, Harry, Job, Jenny, and Dolly, you'll long to go ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne

... his feet, the author spent an appreciable part of his time in visiting the second-hand bookshops and buying copies of his book absurdly cheap. He carried these waifs home and stored them in an attic secretly, for he would have found it hard to explain his motives to the intellectually childless. In the first flush of authorship he had sent a number of presentation copies of his book to writers ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton

... other; they were at once in good accord; I saw them off and went homeward. A day or two after I learned that when they reached the New York shore, Verplanck volunteered to stroll down to the Courier office with the editor, accepted his invitation to walk in, ascending with him to his room in the attic, and, to the editor's great delight and edification, remained with him, conversing, reading and ruminating until broad daylight. There was a charm in Mr. Verplanck's conversation that was distinctive and peculiar. It was 'green pastures ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant

... with the two younger children; the other two had a little bed in the front room, which during the daytime served as a parlour. On occasions of ceremony—when the parlour was needed in the evening—the children slept in a bare attic next to that occupied by Moggie; and this they looked upon as a treat, for it removed them from their mother's observation, and gave opportunities for all sorts ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing

... highway the silent dusk was stealing, Quite alone I stood and stared about me in the gloom; And the voice of me was still, and my heart was kneeling Like a weary pilgrim soul in an attic room. And I stretched my empty hands to where the ghostly lighting, Showed a crumpled mist of blue, a heap of white and red— There along the broad highway like armies after fighting, All the gallant little dreams ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster

... manly side, better known, and to enable my readers to judge his memory from the point of view of those old shrimpers by the new basin as a "good gennleman," as a noble-hearted, courageous man, as well as the more artificial scholar who quotes Attic scholiasts in a playful way as though they were school classics. Every new discovery of FitzGerald's life seems to create new wonder, new admiration for him; and there are, I hope, few who will read without some emotion not far from ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth

... these catastrophes—cheap, mustard-coloured, half attic, half studio, curiously ornamented with silver paper stars, Welshwomen's hats, and rosaries pendent from the gas brackets. As for Florinda's story, her name had been bestowed upon her by a painter who had wished it to signify ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... nationality. As it had been said of old that "Captive Greece subdued her conquerors", so now was it with subject Italy and its Gothic mistress. A diligent student of Greek as well as of Latin literature, able to discourse with the ambassadors of Constantinople in well-turned Attic sentences, or to deliver a stately Latin oration to the messengers of the Senate, she could also, when the occasion required brevity, wrap herself in the robe of taciturnity which she inherited from her Teutonic ancestors, and with few, diplomatically chosen words, ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... was she so quiet? She opened the door noiselessly, and listened. She fancied that she heard, above the multitudinous small noises and creakings and warpings of the vacant house, a smaller voice singing on the floor above. This, as she remembered, was only an open attic that had been used as a storeroom. With a half-guilty consciousness, she crept softly upstairs and, pushing the door partly open, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... they all rolled. Another part of it was dry, loose, newly-ploughed ground. Still another part of it was a long stretch of low grape-vines, which were tanglesome and troublesome, and which we took to be brambles. The Attic Plain, barring the grape-vines, was a barren, desolate, unpoetical waste—I wonder what it was in Greece's Age of Glory, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... faint," he said weakly, "but I felt as if I was. It was a bad fit, and I had to try and hold him. I was all by myself. The people in the other attic thought he was only drunk, and they wouldn't come in. He's lying ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... gathering in the gloomy hall of the old tenement house, when Beryl opened the door of the comfortless attic room, where for many months she had struggled bravely to shield her mother from the wolf, that more than once ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... the keys. I want my child to live roundly—in all her mental rooms. What is the use closing off any part of a house that was meant for light and sunshine? I want her to know the world she lives in from attic to cellar. The good from the bad, so that, knowing the bad, she can love more the good. The ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... a sudden flush mantled his cheeks, when he heard the pure Attic dialect, "with its ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child

... know about that yet. I merely meant to say, that I shall not willingly leave this house until I have seen everything again. Come, Damie, you are my brother—come up into the attic. Do you remember where we used to play hide-and-seek, behind the chimney? And then we'll look out of the window, where we dried the truffles. Don't you remember the bright florin father got ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... left of the front door; on the right of it a big bedroom—I've always pined for a downstairs bedroom—I don't know why, but I never had one till I came to your house—with a bathroom and dressing-room behind it; the dining-room and kitchen will be in the ell. I'm sure I can make that unfinished attic into three more bedrooms, and another bathroom, but I want to see what you think. I'm going to have a great deep piazza all around ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes

... from his attic window, and an officer tried to beat the men back. Seeing us convulsed with laughter, they turned sheepishly; but the little boats wagged on, people jumping into the water as ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon

... student came to the farm for the harvest. He was a peasant lad, a penniless bursary student at Edinburgh University. In the Long Vacation, he worked at his native farming, reading voraciously all the time and feeding sparingly, saving his wages against the coming bleak winter in his fireless attic in an Edinburgh wynd. He talked to Marcella, dogmatically, prodigiously, unanswerably. On her legends and fairy-tales and poetry he poured contempt. He read the "Riddle of the Universe" and the "Kritic of Pure Reason," orating them to Marcella as they worked together ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... the shriveled canvas of an old (Puritan) clergyman in wig and gown—the parish priest of a century ago—a friend of Whitefield." He is likely to come under the spell of this reverend Ghost who haunts the "Manse" and as it rains and darkens and the sky glooms through the dusty attic windows, he is likely "to muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands" ... "that thought grows moldy," and as the garret ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... capital, where a modest country-house had been bought. Honore, by dint of insistence, obtained permission to remain in Paris, where he would be freer to work and could more easily get into relations with publishers; and a meagrely furnished attic-study was rented for him at No. 9 Rue Lesdiguieres, a street near the Arsenal, still bearing the same name. A small monthly allowance was made him, just enough to keep him from starving; and an old ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... from any one point of view. As he passed from room to room he should inform his reader of his change of position. Then the description, though a unit, is a combination of several descriptions; just as the house is one, though made of dining-room, sitting-rooms, bedrooms, and attic. This kind of description is very common in books of travel, in which the author tells what he sees in passing. The thing to be remembered in writing this kind of description is to inform the reader where the author is when he writes the different parts of the description,—to ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... a moment when he was almost ready to consign the Duke and all that appertained to the devil or the deep sea, and to take his fate as it came. But one of the other selves of him calling down from the little attic where dark things brood, told him that to throw up his present chances would bring him no nearer and no sooner to Guida, and must return him to the prison ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... with the Carlists and received titles and orders of distinction from Don Carlos. After the downfall of the cause for which he had fought he had come to Paris like so many of his compatriots and Pilar had rescued him from terrible want. He did not live in the house, but had an attic somewhere in the town. Every morning he appeared at the Boulevard Pereire to receive Pilar's orders, was occupied during the whole day in going on errands and doing shopping of every description, and his work ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... one person in the room—a woman, who was moving about fully dressed, late as it was. The room was a mere attic, the counterpart of that we had left. A box-bed with a canopy roughly nailed over it stood in a corner. A couple of chairs were by the hearth, and all seemed to speak of poverty and bareness. Yet the woman whom we saw was richly dressed, though her silks and velvets were ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman

... present I could only see—see what? At one moment a squalid attic, the starlight shining through patched window-panes upon a lonely mattress, on which a starving girl was lying; at another moment a cellar damp and dark, in one corner of which a youthful figure was crouching; ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... new (or as he appeared the old) king had not been many days on the throne when he remembered the immense treasure of which his parent had been possessed. Sending every one away on one pretext and another, he searched the palace from attic to basement, peeped into all the drawers his father had used, turned over every document, sounded every wall, bored holes in the wainscot, ripped up the bark, and covered himself with dust in his furious endeavours to find it. But though ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies

... philosophy. [111] The vulgar dialect of the city was gross and barbarous: a more correct and elaborate style distinguished the discourse, or at least the compositions, of the church and palace, which sometimes affected to copy the purity of the Attic models. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... Chalcidians, called Hippobotae, horse-feeders, the chief persons for wealth and reputation among them; and removing all the Histiaeans out of the country, brought in a plantation of Athenians in their room; making them his one example of severity, because they had captured an Attic ship and killed all ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... in the humble little attic room where he had first chanced upon a set of old law books and imbibed a taste for the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... on the stair without. It was late, for my uncle had been out, and I had sat up reading, and had forgotten how time was passing. As I continued to listen I heard a strange moaning proceeding, I felt sure, from 'Brownie's' attic, which was situate a foot or two above my chamber on the top turn of the newel stairway. I had recognised, I thought, the tread on the stairs, for my uncle's footstep was peculiar, since he had a slight limp; it was this that had aroused ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... Thatcher Barclay came into this world, and what with her Grandmother Barclay uncovering her to look at the Thatcher nose, and her Grandmother Mason taking her to the attic so that she could go upstairs before she went down, that she might never come down in the world, and what with her Grandfather Mason rubbing her almost raw with his fuzzy beard before the women could scream at him, and what with her father trying ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... assistants, and his dietary and private life were characterised by a philosophical simplicity. He was a water-drinker, a vegetarian, and all those logical disciplinary things. But the sight of his equipment settled many doubts. It looked like business from cellar to attic—an amazing little place to find in an out-of-the-way village. The ground-floor rooms contained benches and apparatus, the bakehouse and scullery boiler had developed into respectable furnaces, dynamos occupied the cellar, and there was a ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... step up three flights of stairs into the attic. She pushed aside an old-fashioned wardrobe and opened a small door of plain pine boards about four feet in height which led to the ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... that. You can extend it horizontally for about fifty feet, say, for instance, from the side or back of your house to the barn or the garage, and then have it go up as high as it can go. The upper end doesn't have to be in the outer air, for the sound will come along it if it's in the attic. Still it's better to have it outside if possible. The lower end of the wire has to be connected with the ground in some way, and you can fix that by attaching it to a water pipe or any other pipe that runs into the ground. A good way ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman

... first couple, the singer, who never took his eyes from the attic curtain, saw no signs of life. While he sang the second, the curtain stirred. When the words "Receive these flowers" were sung, a youthful face appeared; a white hand cautiously opened the casement, and a girl made a sign with her head to the singer as ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... dogs at each wheel; the cable-cars coming up hill begin to drop the men each at his own door—the door of the house that he builded for himself (though the architect incited him to that vile little attic tower and useless loggia), and, naturally enough, twilight brings the lovers walking two by two along the very quiet ways. You can tell from the houses almost the exact period at which they were built, whether in the jig-saw days, when if behoved respectability to ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... on the walls; So stony still the house From cellar to attic rings the shrill Squeak of ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare

... noise," cautioned the uncle, "and we can go up in the cupola and slide down a post so quietly the bird will not hear us," and as he said this, he, in his bath robe, went cautiously up the attic stairs, out of a small window, and slid down the post before Bert had time to draw his ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope

... his attention. Of these, however, the tin soldiers most took his fancy; and the war game was constantly improved and elaborated, until from a few hours a "war" took weeks to play, and the critical operations in the attic monopolised half our thoughts. This attic was a most chilly and dismal spot, reached by a crazy ladder, and unlit save for a single frosted window; so low at the eaves and so dark that we could seldom stand upright, nor see without a candle. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... world-wide term as Socratic love can hardly be explained by the lucus-a-non-lucendo theory. We are overapt to apply our nineteenth century prejudices and prepossessions to the morality of the ancient Greeks who would have specimen'd such squeamishness in Attic salt. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... critters would call plain swell head. That there disease is listed an' catalogued in the text books of the New York Medical Institoot as bearin' a close relationship to the geni Loco; which is a scientific way of sayin' that you've got buzzers in your attic." ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various

... a kitchen and attic. Coal-hole and pig-stye in the back yard. Also a pump. But they're not for sale, so ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim

... this letter is finished I am going to settle down to a book which I found in the attic. It's entitled, On the Trail, and sprawled across the front page in a ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster

... out on her own and taken a room for herself in a house standing in a quiet, withdrawn square in the neighbourhood of King's Road, Chelsea. To call it a room was to dignify it by a title to which it could lay no real claim. It was an attic, up the last rickety flight of stairs, with roofs that sloped down within two feet of the ground, and a diminutive window from which one could get but the barest glimpse of the skies. Still it had possibilities, its aspect was not so terribly common-place as ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson

... kitchen, the storehouse, the pantry, the laundry, the dining-room, the living or sitting-room, the lavatory, the parlor, the hall, the library, the nursery, the sewing-room, the bedrooms, including guest chamber, the attic, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller

... you see," replied the youth, who spoke with an effort, "That is our house down to which I now am about to conduct you, And that window yonder belongs to my room in the attic, Which will probably soon be yours, as we're making great changes. All these fields are ours, and ripe for the harvest to-morrow; Here in the shade we are wont to rest, enjoying our meal-time. But let us now descend across the vineyard and garden, For observe how the threatening ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe

... Rivarol had hung about the skirts of the University for several years; supplying his few wants by writing for scientific journals, or by giving assistance to students who, like myself, were characterized by a plethora of purse and a paucity of ideas; cooking, studying and sleeping in his attic lodgings; and prosecuting queer experiments all ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various

... immoral. But for that matter, Gray could endure no blank verse outside of Milton. This is curious, that rhyme, a mediaeval invention, should have been associated in the last century with the classical school of poetry; while blank verse, the nearest English equivalent of the language of Attic tragedy, was a shibboleth of romanticizing poets, like Thomson and Akenside. The reason was twofold: rhyme came stamped with the authority of the French tragic alexandrine; and, secondly, it meant constraint ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... Miss Renie, you should be just like me again!" She smiled in the dark. "When I was a boy always next to the attic window I liked to sleep. When I built my house, Miss Renie, the first thing after I designed my rose-garden I drew up for myself a sleeping-garden on my roof. The architects fussed enough about spoiling the roof-line, ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... her discourse was the Evil One, who lived, so she told us, in our attic, with his wife and brood. A pet amusement of our invisible tenant was the translating of human babies into his lair, leaving one of his own brats in the cradle; the moral of which was that if nurse wanted to loaf ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... London house, with five floors from basement to attic, and a couple of rooms upon each, like most little houses in London; but this one had latterly been the scene of an equally undistinguished drama of real life, upon which the curtain was even now descending. Although a third was whispered by the ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung

... 'Ah, ha! it may be that he has heard of our silver service an' has come to steal it.' I would have begun to regard my servants an' many other people with dread an' suspicion. Why, once I knew a man who had a silver service, an' they carried it up three nights to the attic every night for fifty years. They figured that they'd walked eleven hundred miles up an' down stairs with the silver service in their hands. The thought that they couldn't take it with 'em hastened an' embittered ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller

... miserable attic over the kitchen in the public-house already described, there was a sound of deep, half-suppressed, passionate weeping—a young mother weeping for her first-born, who would not be pacified. The deepest fountain of love in the human heart had been stirred; its hallowed sources ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie

... attic of uncle Nathan's house; at least it was there three years ago, when I went to ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic

... a pleasure that's emphatic We retire to our attic With the satisfying feeling that our duty has ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse

... well as circumstances would permit; the first story was also made a fortress by loading the landing place with armoires and chests of drawers. The upper story, or attic, if it might be so called, was defended in the same way, that they might retreat from one to the other if the ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat

... for a few of the smaller specimens mounted whole but in the average home they are the bugbear of the housekeeper, early exiled to the attic. A friend of mine has his collection of small game birds, occupying the plate rail of his dining room, well out of the way and admired by many. Well mounted heads and antlers are suitable almost anywhere that they do not seem crowded. The famous East Room of the White House has some ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham

... invasion of the Peloponnesians was prolonged for forty days, and the whole Attic territory was laid waste. Pericles again refused to venture a pitched battle against them, knowing well that the Athenian army was no match for them in the open field. But a powerful fleet was sent to cruise round Peloponnesus, which inflicted much damage on the coast districts. It was ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell

... true, on the evening he (Colonel Barry) mentioned to you, when Mrs. Piozzi honoured this roof, his conversation greatly contributed to its Attic spirit. Till that day I had never conversed with her. There has been no exaggeration, there could be none, in the description given you of Mrs. Piozzi's talents for conversation; at least in the powers of classic ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi

... book—sent FREE to every boy—reveals the rousing sport thousands of boys are enjoying right at home. How their parents praise billiards and pay to play till the table is paid for. How any room, attic, basement or loft gives plenty of space for a real Brunswick Carom or Pocket Table—now made in sizes from 2-1/2x5 feet to ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson

... in the little attic, and at first she did not come near Jude at all. She went to and fro about her own business, which, when they met for a moment on the stairs or in the passage, she informed him was that of obtaining another place in the occupation ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy

... Edinburgh, as I lately saw,—if she boasts of no Venetian perfectness of art in the portraiture of her Bruce or James, her Douglas or Knox, at Holyrood, has at least a charming portrait of a Scottish beauty in the Attic Institution, whose majesty, together with that of the more extensive glass roofs of the railway station, and the tall chimney of the gasworks, inflates the Caledonian mind, contemplative around the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... classes of the community.] By this time Kate had a hearty supper ready for the wanderers, to which they did ample justice before returning with grateful hearts to their old lodgings in the capacious attic. By such privations and sufferings on the part of her faithful yeomanry, were the liberties of Canada maintained in those stormy days ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow

... Greek pigs and bulls and all their odd rites, as connected with the beast in which the corn-spirit is incarnate, holds its ground better than my totemistic suggestion. But I am not sure that the corn-spirit accounts for the Sminthian mouse in all his aspects, nor for the Arcadian and Attic bear-rites and myths of Artemis. Mouse and bear do appear in Mr. Frazer's catalogue of forms of the corn-spirits, taken from Mannhardt. {87} But the Arcadians, as we shall see, claimed descent from a bear, and the mouse place-names ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... I had come home to dinner particularly tired after a long day. I had sat in an attic the greater part of the afternoon (a case of top story valvular trouble) and had had to sit in a cramped position which practically forbade sleep. I was feeling, therefore, none too well pleased, when ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... Study of these buildings, so sublime in their massiveness, so noble in the parsimony of their decoration, so dignified in their employment of the simplest means for the attainment of an indestructible effect of harmony, heightens our admiration for the Attic genius which found in this grand manner of the elder Doric architects resources as yet undeveloped; creating, by slight and subtle alterations of outline, proportion, and rhythm of parts, what may fairly be classed as a style ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... stagnant mentality of the period. That the men who brought them were brusque and exclusive, was of small account. When Stohlmann, who had recently been called to St. Matthew's Church, visited Pastor Oertel in his attic room, his Lutheranism, with a sly allusion perhaps to the stairs, was promptly challenged by the remark: "You ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner

... monuments. The blockings of the friezes were sculptured; large guideron shields were blazoned with the arms of the principal City companies. The old mediaeval open timber-work roof had been swallowed up by the Great Fire, and in lieu of it there was a poor attic storey, and a flat panelled ceiling, by some attributed to Wren. At each end of the hall was a large pointed window; the east one blazoned with the royal arms, and the stars and jewels of the English orders ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... reflected there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... The constable was around last evening. He locked me in the attic for safe keeping, but I got free, and here I am, on my way to—to—on my way to ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness



Words linked to "Attic" :   Ionic dialect, noodle, Classical Greek, attic fan, mow, level, bean, architecture, cockloft, wall, entablature, dome, ionic, house, garret, human head, story, noggin, floor



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