"Foreground" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if we are to control our own morals we wish to control them not by some one else's ideals but by our own. If a thing is really right to do there must be definite and legitimate reasons for the doing which can appeal to our intelligence and our emotions; these we should bring into the foreground of our thought and express as clearly ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... 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
... Perrault's hill towards the south. There stands, with a few shrubs and trees in the foreground, the Military Home—where infirm soldiers, their widows and children, could find a refuge. It has recently been purchased and converted into the "Female Orphan Asylum." It forms the eastern boundary of a large expanse of verdure and trees, reaching the summit of the lot originally intended ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... top of it, the town ended abruptly at the edge of the common. On one side was a high brick wall, hiding the grounds and gardens of the villas; on the other was the common, seen through the leaves of a line of thin trees. In her nervous agitation, she saw very distinctly—the foreground teeming with the animation of cricket, the more remote parts solitary, the windmill hovering in a corner out of the way of the sunset, and two horsemen and a horsewoman cantering along the edge of the long valley ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... forces were following in straggling disorder. The first battalions of the Bois-Brules, which had already rounded the marsh, were now in the settlement on Red River bank. It was to them that Grant referred. Commanding a halt and raising his spy-glass, he took an anxious survey of the foreground. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... and preserved for believers by him. Consequently, we are following not only the indications of the succeeding history, but also the requirement of the thing itself, when, in the presentation of the Gospel, we place in the foreground, not that which unites it with the contemporary disposition of Judaism, but that which raises it above it. Instead of the hope of inheriting the kingdom, Jesus had also spoken simply of preserving the soul, or the life. In this one substitution lies already a transformation of universal significance, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... liked her and she liked me: we were a kind of foreground and background: she threw me into relief and I was an ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... look at everything from a sailor's point of view," he said good-naturedly. "Now, there's nothing gives me more pleasure than to watch a sunset and sunrise anywhere in the tropics—particularly if there's land in the foreground or background—I never miss a sunrise in the South Seas if I ...
— Yorke The Adventurer - 1901 • Louis Becke
... these dismal questionings, came a steamer letter from Franklin Winslow Kane, announcing his immediate arrival. Althea had thought very little about Franklin in these last weeks; her mind had been filled with those foreground figures that now seemed to have become uncertain and vanishing. And it was not so much that Franklin came forward as that there was nothing else to look at; not so much that he counted, as that to count so much, in every way, for him might almost atone for ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... one lovely view in the afternoon of the island of Yoken San, with its snowy mountain at the back, and a pretty little village, with a few picturesque junks in the foreground. The yacht passed between Oki Sama and Le Sama, steering straight for the cone-shaped little island of Odutsi. Towards dusk we made the light of Nabae Sinaon Yo Sina, and, steering past it, had to take several sharp and awkward turns, to avoid two ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... roof of our open, airy dining-room, surrounded by the forest, and commanding a view of the lake and wooded hillside opposite, the little landing below, where were moored our barge with its white awning, the gay canoe, and two or three Indian montarias, making the foreground of the picture. After breakfast our party dispersed, some to rest in their hammocks, others to hunt or fish, while Mr. Agassiz was fully engaged in examining a large basket of fish,—Tucunares, Acaras, Curimatas, Surubims, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... and I loafed guiltily on the pavement, pointing out to one another objects of local interest with the fatuous officiousness of people in the foreground of hotel advertisements. Occasionally he paused to contemplate the contents of a shop window. We gazed industriously into the window next door. Our first window, I recollect, was an undertaker's, ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... have had a "long foreground" we find after studying the man. Sailing a ship is no sinecure, and for Conrad a ship is something with human attributes. Like a woman, it must be lived with to be understood, and it has its ways and whims and has to be petted or humoured, as in The Brute—that monstrous personification ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... nothing more, smiling back with a contented deference toward the mightier majesties, as those who might say: "We do our gentle best; it is not yours; yet we, too, are mountains, though but little ones." From underneath spread the foreground of green, brilliant intervale, with the river flashing down between margins of sand ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... view, the lost dryad was a prominent figure in the middle of the foreground; for life was strenuous for those in the grasp of the Hands, and it was only at night, when her body could lie quiet while her brain was still terribly active, that other figures assumed their due importance for Win in the great, bright picture ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... without fearing to be wrecked by the storm. Often he sat out looking seaward, thinking of the days when he had first met Beatrice, of those early days of pleasant companionship, of the marvelous avidity with which he had learned from her. Only when Elizabeth's face stole into the foreground did he spring from his place and turn back to ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the summit of the Tehachapi Mountains and Mahatmadom suddenly looked long, weary, and profitless, and by means of which the twins were transferred from the comfortable middle distance they had previously occupied to the immediate foreground of duty. The lens might slip, but while it was in place she saw as ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... have to cross the Pegnitz, whose banks are overhung by quaint old houses. Their projecting roofs and high gables, their varied chimneys and overhanging balconies from which trail rich masses of creepers, make an entrancing foreground to the towers and the arches of the Henkersteg. The wall was carried on arches over the southern arm of the Pegnitz to the point of the Saumarkt (or Troedelmarkt) island which here divides the river, and thence in like manner over the northern arm. The ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... sadness. The Saints Benedict, Bernard and Romuald follow, then St. Thomas Aquinas with a most beautiful head full of life and character (it must certainly be a portrait, so life-like is the expression), next St. Peter Martyr with his hands on his breast; and lastly in the foreground an unknown monk (Padre Marchese thinks it is St. John Gualbert) who weeps, with his left hand over ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... allowed to marry George Boult; she could not remain in the shop. How were she and Bessie to live? With the vanity of youth, which always sees itself in the foreground, Deleah thought she perceived that it was she who must get a living ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... shrivelled with a long steeping. The fields and copses, of course, are more forgiving. The railway line follows as well the charming Canal du Midi, which is as pretty as a river, barring the straightness, and here and there occupies the foreground, beneath a screen of dense, tall trees, while the Garonne takes a larger and more irregular course a little way beyond it. People who are fond of canals—and, speaking from the pictorial standpoint, I hold the taste to be most legitimate—will delight in this admirable specimen of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... would be as bad for Germany as war. He will argue naturally enough and reasonably enough that he may as well die fighting as starve. This is a far more vital issue to him than the Belgian issue or Poland or Alsace-Lorraine. Our statesmen waste their breath and slight our intelligence when these foreground questions are thrust in front of the really fundamental matters. But as the mass of sensible people in every country concerned, in Germany just as much as in France or Great Britain, know perfectly well, unimpeded trade is good for every ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... In the foreground of the dock was an individual who apparently didn't. He was a fashionable and frantic oldish-young man, who had burst through the barrier and now jigged upon the pier-head in a manner not countenanced by the Society for Standardizing Ballroom Dances. At intervals he made gestures toward the Tyro ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to be in the foreground, at some little distance, a grove of trees, not unlike that In which Mr Carker had made his chain of footsteps in the morning, and with a seat under one tree, greatly resembling, in the general character of its situation, the point where his chain ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... its spacious manufactories, its strange and picturesque buildings, and the numerous spires and towers of its churches, many of them in ruins, but not the less interesting on account of their decay, presents a foreground diversified with endless variety of form and color. The bridge of boats seems immediately at our feet; the middle distance is composed of a plain, chiefly consisting of the richest meadows, interspersed copiously with country ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... tropical verdure, with many flowering plants and creepers, all the colors of which are reflected in its clear waters. The old barracks were in sight as we slowly worked our way against the current. Located in a small clearing, with cocoanut-trees in the foreground, the white buildings made, with a backing of deep green, a very pretty picture. We approached cautiously, not knowing with what reception we should meet. As we neared the small wharf, we found waiting some twenty or thirty men, of all ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... but sea or sky filled the field of the glass as the ship rose and fell; but all at once there leaped into this field the hull of a ship, deep as her main-chains in the water, which came and went before my eye as the long seas lifted or dropped in the foreground. I managed to keep her sufficiently long in view to perceive that she was ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... forward from the shadow of the pine branches, to the edge of the inclined plane in the foreground. The slow tread of approaching steps is now distinctly heard advancing—it may be a deer. Two figures approach, and Louis moves a little, within the shadow again. A clear shrill whistle meets his ear. It is Hector's whistle, he knows that, and assured by its cheerful tone, he springs forward ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... all this limelight stuff is playing right into your mitt. I didn't spill who I was to them news hounds, and I don't have to. I let you take all the foreground. I was the mechanic—see? So it's you that will have to put this over; and put it over ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... Louisiana Purchase Exposition was a fine specimen of Georgian architecture, of the type so much used throughout the South in antebellum times. The adaptation of the colonial features to the purpose for which the building was used was most admirable. The location, with its foreground of grass and forest trees, produced an effect suggesting age and permanency that few buildings on the ground possessed. In fact, on coming upon the building unexpectedly, one would presume that it had occupied its site for ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... the Quarantana, is supposed to be the "high mountain" from which the Tempter showed Jesus the "kingdoms of the world." In the foreground of that view, sweeping from the snowy summits of Hermon in the north, past the Greek cities of Pella and Scythopolis, down the vast valley with its wealth of palms and balsams, must have stood the Roman city of Jericho, with its imperial farms and the palaces, baths and ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... extremely picturesque in the pale moonlight, with the grand sandstone bluff of the island of Balhalla standing out boldly in the foreground against the starlit sky; but the coast-line seemed still more beautiful in the bright morning sunshine. The brilliant light was relieved by some heavy thunder-clouds fringing the Bay of Sandakan and hanging in denser masses over ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... out was a wood-cut representing Darwin's reconstruction of the dingue from the fossil bones in the British Museum. It was a well-executed wood-cut, showing a dingue in the foreground and, to give scale, a mammoth ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... in the foreground always, and the parental grief so wild and loud—with that deeper, deadlier, infinitely more cruel private social wrong interwoven with all the political representation, and overpowering it everywhere, as if that inner social evil were, after all, foremost in the Poet's thought—as ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... could not see me at that distance, but I knew that he had detected the direction in which the danger lay. By slowly moving ahead, the distance was cut to about seventy yards, which was not too far away in an open country with a wounded rhino in the foreground. I resolved to shoot before he charged or before he ran away, and so I prepared to end the long ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... might be the endurance, if sustained only by a finite hope. But the black despairing darkness that revealed a tossing sea self-tormented and fighting with chaos, showing neither torch that glimmered in the foreground, nor star that kept alive a promise in the distance, violently refused to be comforted. It is beside an awful aggravation of such afflictions, that the lady herself might have co-operated in the later stages of the tragedy with the purposes ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... task 'in background' is to do it whenever {foreground} matters are not claiming your undivided attention, and 'to background' something means to relegate it to a lower priority. "For now, we'll just print a list of nodes and links; I'm working on the graph-printing ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... flutings between the tops of which are shells and seaweed. These are surrounded by a ring of marine cable. On the front, a scene represents the lifesavers at work. In perspective some distance out, where the sea rises in mountainous waves, there is a wrecked vessel, and in the foreground lifesavers are carrying the rescued to the beach. The ornamentation that covers the top of the body of the vase consists of a cable net in which are starfish, seaweed, and other marine flora and fauna. ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... ingenious—it needed too much co-operation from the observer's mind. Besides, I had never seen a boy with anything approaching the muscular development of the epileptic youth in the centre. The thing in the picture that I most approved of was the end of the log in the little pool, in the foreground; it looked ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... extraordinary beauty of the situation in which they are placed, with its huge cliffs and rugged hillsides, may be appreciated from the photograph which is taken from a steep path half-way up the cliff above the Great Temple. In it we see the Great Temple in the foreground with the modern roofs of two of its colonnades, devised in order to protect the sculptures beneath them, the great trilithon gate leading to the upper court, and the entrance to the cave-shrine of Amen-Ra, with the niches ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... slavery into the foreground. Without waiting for his inauguration, several Southern States, acting in accordance with their previous threats that they would secede if a Republican President were elected, withdrew from the Union. Others soon followed their example. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... his architectural aspirations. She had always dimly guessed him to be in touch with important people, involved in complicated relations—but she felt it all to be so far beyond her understanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on the farthest verge of her thoughts. In the foreground, hiding all else, there was the glow of his presence, the light and shadow of his face, the way his short-sighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepened as if to draw her down into them; and, above all, the flush of youth and tenderness ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... who from this time appears in the foreground of this history, came from the most humble ranks of society; the date and the circumstances of his entrance into the Order are unknown, and hence conjecture has come to see in him that friend of the grotto who had been Francis's confidant shortly before his decisive conversion. However this ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... the evident marks of their disrupture and avulsion from their beds by the most powerful agents of nature, corroborate the impression. But the distant finishing which nature has given to the picture, is of a very different character. It is a true contrast to the foreground. It is as placid and delightful, as that is wild and tremendous. For the mountain being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smoothe blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and tumult roaring ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... downstairs to Mr Poulter's private sitting-room. This was a homely apartment furnished with much-worn horsehair furniture, together with many framed and unframed flashlight photographs of various "Terpsichorean Festivals," in all of which, conspicuous in the foreground, was Mr Poulter, wearing a big white rosette on the ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... congratulations! SIR M. Sir, you are most obleeging! ALEX. Dr. Daly My dear old tutor, and my valued pastor, I thank you from the bottom of my heart! (Spoken through music) DR. D. May fortune bless you! may the middle distance Of your young life be pleasant as the foreground— The joyous foreground! and, when you have reached it, May that which now is the far-off horizon (But which will then become the middle distance), In fruitful promise be exceeded only By that which will have opened, in the meantime, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... features, arranged with a light, unconscious grace, neither too much nor too little—equally remote from the barren generalizations of a former age, and the dull, servile fidelity with which so many inferior writers of our time fill in both background and foreground, having no more notion of the perspective of genius than Chinese paper-stainers have of that of the atmosphere, and producing in fact ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... description, it was a forest scene. "Great trees rise on the right to the top of the canvas. On the left are also some smaller trees, whose upper branches reach across and make, with the trees on the right, a sort of arch through which is seen a wonderful stretch of sky. A rocky path leads away from the foreground beneath the overhanging trees, sloping upward until it reaches the crest of a hill beneath the sky. Just at this point the figures of two retreating horsemen are seen. These are the men who have been trying to kill St. Sebastian, and have left him, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... centre of the fishing section, and this was the background depicted by the artist who drew the wrapper for the first serial issue of "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club." Putney Church is seen in the distance, with its Henry VIII. Chapel, and in the foreground Mr. Pickwick is found dozing in his traditional punt,—that curious box, or coffin-like, affair, which, as a pleasure craft, is apparently ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... viewed the immediate foreground with misgiving. The beach looked more abrupt than he recalled it. "What beach is ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... had. Roy does not have to be posed; he poses himself, willingly and patiently, so long as he can pose himself very close to his master; and he always places his front legs, which he knows to be his strong point, in the immediate foreground. He tries very hard to look pleasant, as if he saw a chipmunk at the foot of a tree, or as if he thought Mr. Beckwith was squeezing little worms of white paint out of little tubes just for his amusement. And if he really does see a ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... we descended and made our way among Prussian troopers through the noisome alley to a small side door, where we were stopped by a sentry who stuck a bayonet in our general direction and said we could go no further. I was immediately thrust into the foreground as the brilliant German scholar; and, limbering up my heavy German artillery, I attacked him. The sentry blanched, but stood his ground. An officer came up as reinforcements, but was also limited to the German tongue; so I had to keep it up, with two full-grown ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... for himself when the boats and when the teams should be made to wait, and how long, while in addition to the regular pedestrians a group of idlers stood at gaze fascinated by the crowd of masts, the crush of wagons, and the picturesque tugs in the foreground below. Cowperwood, as he sat in his light runabout, annoyed by a delay, or dashed swiftly forward to get over before a bridge turned, had long since noted that the street-car service in the North and West Sides ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... he looks at it from another point of view - to reproduce a colour, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He can show his readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all this thrown ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they would care to go. They were, however, much interested when I made the proposal. We were rather late, and missed the Last Supper, arriving just before the curtain rose on the garden. It was a beautiful scene. Christ was kneeling at a rock in the background, the disciples were sleeping in the foreground and the wings were hidden by branches of real trees. An angel descended with a cup from which the principal figure drank. When the angel had departed there was a pause—the lights changed and through the silence we heard the tramp, tramp of approaching people; ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... there for the mere survey of a new gown, but after a moment of dwelling on her own reflection she found herself considering it only as an object in the foreground of a picture. That picture, seen through the open door, reflected in the glass, was all of a bright, hard glitter, all a high, harsh tone of newness. In its paneled oak, in its glare of cut-glass and silver, in the shining ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... this royal and ancient park. Nor were we allowed to forget that in this case, too, the stags were being taken by the servants of a queen. Everything was ready for the transport of the stags to Windsor, and in the foreground was a good strong wooden cart, painted red and blue, and inscribed in the largest capitals with the words, "Her ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... she raised her head she could see the big market, a confectionery store, a bell-hanger's shop, and, farther on, above the roofs, the glass skylights and water tanks of the big public baths. In the nearer foreground ran the street itself; the cable cars trundled up and down, thumping heavily over the joints of the rails; market carts by the score came and went, driven at a great rate by preoccupied young men in their shirt sleeves, with pencils behind their ears, or by reckless boys in blood-stained butcher's ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... occupied the central foreground of our match-maker's thoughts were her niece, Mabel Aylott, and her own departed husband's namesake, Frederic Chilton. She dilated to herself and to Mabel with especial gusto upon the "wonderful leading," the inward whisper ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... masses, however, who vote for the socialist here or abroad, the glory of moral righteousness is somewhat clouded by motives less inspiring in quality. The animosity against the men of wealth rushes into the mental foreground, and if it is claimed that the puritans disliked the bear baiting not because it gave pain to the bears, but because it gave pleasure to the onlookers, it sometimes seems as if the socialists, too, desire the change, not in order that the poor gain more comfort, but in order ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... never travelled. He was aware that his romance was earthly and had discomforts only to be evaded by the one potent talisman possessed by his patron. His Alp would hardly be grand to him without an obsequious landlord in the foreground: he must recline on Mammon's imperial cushions in order to moralize becomingly on the ancient world. The search for pleasure at the expense of discomfort, as frantic lovers woo their mistresses to partake the shelter of a but and batten on a crust, Adrian deemed the bitterness of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... but at Searle's summons had bounded back to the terrace and leaped upon the ledge, where he now stood licking his new friend's face. The scene had a beautiful old-time air: the peacock flaunting in the foreground like the genius of stately places; the broad terrace, which flattered an innate taste of mine for all deserted walks where people may have sat after heavy dinners to drink coffee in old Sevres and where the stiff brocade of women's dresses may have rustled ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... was clear 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 ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... the shadows creep through the trees in the Park, and the lights in half the windows up that white cliff wall begin to gleam in golden squares, the great building becomes curiously ethereal, the pine limb flung into the foreground of the design catches the eye, the reflection in the water is as real as the reality. The Plaza, monstrous tons of steel and stone, floats between two elements. Then darkness gathers, the reflected lights in the blackening water grow ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... expanse of country became more thickly studded with lights. They flashed in the foreground in regular constellations as the train whizzed with undiminished speed past tall block towers and tiny ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... without a sign of unfriendliness. Their chief interest seems to be centred in two large black mounds that are visible in the foreground of the camp; what they are I am unable to make out — there is not light enough for that — but I am probably not far wrong in guessing that they are seals. They are rather hard eating, anyhow, ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... being their leader he became their instrument. Fond of applause, ambitious of distinction, timid by nature, destitute of pluck, and of that rarer virtue moral courage, Ledru Rollin, to avoid the imputation of faint-heartedness, put himself in the foreground, but the measures of his followers being ill-taken, the plot in which he was mixed up egregiously failed, and he is now in consequence ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... though a sense of painful uneasiness grew momentarily. At first she imagined it was fear of what she must encounter upon her return home; then she felt sure it was her dread of meeting the people for whom she had risked so much. Finally Jerry-Jo loomed in the foreground of her thought and an entirely new terror was ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... seagirt sand, called Aybat and Saad el Din. These places supply Zayla, in the Kharif or hot season [20], with thousands of gulls' eggs,—a great luxury. At noon we sighted our destination. Zayla is the normal African port,—a strip of sulphur-yellow sand, with a deep blue dome above, and a foreground of the darkest indigo. The buildings, raised by refraction, rose high, and apparently from the bosom of the deep. After hearing the worst accounts of it, I was pleasantly disappointed by the spectacle of white-washed houses ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... grass—well in the foreground. For the background, perhaps a thousand miles away or more than half a decade removed in time, is the American Civil War. In the blue sky a meadow lark's love song, and in the grass the boom of the prairie chicken's wings are the only sounds that break the primeval silence, excepting the lisping ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... trees on one side, and out beyond a range of low hills, purple in the evening light. In the sky was a rosy sunset glow, melted above into saffron color, and this was reflected in the water, gilding and mellowing the foreground of sedge and water lilies. But what made the picture specially charming was that the artist had really caught the peculiar solemn stillness of evening; merely to look at that quiet, peaceful river brought a feeling of hush and calmness. It seemed a strange picture to find as the sole ornament ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... forest has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake amid hills which rise from the water's edge; for the water in which it is reflected not only makes the best foreground in such a case, but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary to it. There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there, as where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it. The trees have ample room to expand on the water ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... quality. Opening his eyes, he saw an assembly of beautifully clad, flower-bedecked Grecian youths and maidens drawn up across the back of the stage, chanting the chorus, and in their midst, in the foreground, one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. He drew himself up with a start and rubbed his eyes to assure himself that he was really awake. And then, considering the occasion and the time and the place, he witnessed a performance that ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... much which he could not stop or remedy. Thus passive and helpless, yet with the fiction of supremacy in his name, we see the boy only by glimpses through the tumultuous crowd about him with all their struggles for power, until suddenly he flashes forth into the foreground, the chief figure in a scene more violent and terrible still than any that had preceded it, taking up in his own person the perpetual and unending struggle, and striking for himself the decisive blow. There is no act so well ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... clothes. From that fact and from the half-bare branches of the bush that we see growing beside the rock in the foreground of the picture we should judge it to be ...
— Stories Pictures Tell - Book Four • Flora L. Carpenter
... writing for evening dress—which wanted, I remember, a button—and hastened to the Park. I did not tell my wife anything about it. I did not care to have her with me. In all such adventures I find her more useful as a sentimental figure in the background—I, of course, allow no sentiment in the foreground—than ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... river, and distant view of Sierras, snow-ravined. Schoolhouse of logs in right middle distance. Ledge of rocks in centre. On steps of schoolhouse two large bunches of flowers. Enter STARBOTTLE, slowly climbing rocks L., panting and exhausted. Seats himself on rock, foreground, and wipes his face ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... Ethel, 'I was really pleased and touched in spite of Mrs. Ledwich's devotion to her, till I found out a certain manoeuvring to put herself in the foreground, and not let her sorrow hinder her from ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... too light and slender to make much resistance, he was first to be pushed into the foreground, and found himself nearest the commander-in-chief. He made the best of a bad matter, and his frank young face flushed hotly as he doffed his battered cap ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... lived mostly at Venice, he belongs to the school of that city. He was an imitator of Titian, whom he did not equal; still he was a fine painter. His excellences were in his harmonious color, his good arrangement of his figures in the foreground, and his fine architectural backgrounds. He tried to make his works magnificent, and to do this he painted festive scenes, with many figures in splendid costumes. He is buried in the Church of St. Sebastian, where there ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... Cranes repair each year to the Colorado River Valley, flock succeeding flock along the course of the great stream from their arrival in September until their departure the following spring. Taller than the Wood Ibises or the largest Herons with which they are associated, the stately birds stand in the foreground of the scenery of the valley.... Such ponderous bodies moving with slowly-beating wings give a great idea of momentum from mere weight, a force of motion without swiftness; for they plod along heavily, seeming to need every inch of their ample ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... mountains were all smooth, as though polished by art; in the foreground I only noticed one which was covered with wonderful forms of dried lava. A deathlike silence weighed on the whole country round, on hill and on valley alike. Every thing seemed dead, all round was barren and desert, so that the effect was truly Icelandic. The greater ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... let us always put charity in the foreground. It is such a fine thing that its counterfeit even is an excellent card. I will give my butter to the people and they will give me their money. Is ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... could have observed at close range the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 without perceiving, always in the background and occasionally in the foreground, the colossal rival figures of Russia and Austria-Hungary. Attention was called to the phenomenon at various points in this volume and ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... in the valley, at the northwest, lies lie de Villenoy, like a toy town, where the big bridge spans the Marne to carry the railroad into Meaux. On the horizon line to the west the tall chimneys of Claye send lines of smoke into the air. In the foreground to the north, at the foot of the hill, are the roofs of two little hamlets,—Joncheroy and Voisins,—and beyond them the trees that ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... faint," he 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 ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... he could not seem to arouse an atom of real enthusiasm. He should be too excited to sleep, but he did sleep well. When he dreamed of Egypt and the tombs of the Ptolemies, there was always a Cape Cod cottage in the foreground. And the cottage never varied in design; it was always the "Phipps' place," and its mistress was always standing in the doorway. That was the great trouble, he knew it. He was going to be homesick for that cottage and its contents. If they ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... umbrella, and followed by the puppy-dog stew. They see their noble father, rudely awakened from his nap, also attempting a short flight, while their mother, the Crooked Road, and their aunt, the Mud Turtle, exhibit every sign of surprise on the foreground. ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of the old city is taken from the rocks on the Indian reserve, and in the foreground is a large building which occupied the site of the present marine hospital. When first I remember this building it was used as a lunatic asylum. It is the only prominent building shown on the reserve, ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... with details of all these preliminary things; on the contrary, it is necessary that he keep his memory clear for the far more important things that lie ahead of these, and entertain these in a summary way, as a kind of foreground to what is coming. Perhaps the following Fractions of Note, which put matters in something of Chronological or Synoptical form, will suffice him, or more than suffice. He is to understand that the grand tug of War, this Year, gradually turns out not to be hereabouts, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... passed out of sight, and even the vehicles looked like mere grains of sand; there remained naught but the gigantic carcass of the city, seemingly untenanted and abandoned, its life limited to the dull trepidation by which it was agitated. There, in the foreground to the left, some red roofs were shining, and the tall chimneys of the Army Bakehouse slowly poured out their smoke; while, on the other side of the river, between the Esplanade and the Champ-de-Mars, a grove of lofty ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... 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 ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... of soul-matehood is here signified in the two stars rising in the foreground; not only the soul-affinities of humanity, but the eternal father-mother forces manifested in the biune spirit of universal life and nature, the two great creative powers, Life and Light, whose harmony creates love, attraction and repulsion, and the straight ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... diversities and contrarieties in the spirit, from being excessive and dazzling, was all about. In the midst of the calm Minnie's little theories of the new-made wife made a diverting incident in the foreground. Mrs. Warrender looked at her across the writing-table, with a smile ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... aren't settled," said Ann Veronica. In addition, the Fadden Dance business, all out of proportion, occupied the whole foreground of her thoughts and threw a color of rebellion over everything. She kept thinking she was thinking about Mr. Manning's proposal of marriage and finding she ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... background, the Church and the world, as they shape themselves in the Cevennes, the priest and the peasant, occupy about an equal share of interest. Sometimes, as in the charming little book we wish now to introduce, unclerical human nature occupies the foreground almost exclusively; though priestly faces will still be found gazing upon ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... up a stony watercourse, now dry, and then through old Austrian trenches, elaborately blasted in the Carso rock and captured a year ago. The Nad Logem is part of the northern edge of the Carso, and from our O.P. a great panorama spread out north, east and west, with the sinuous Vippacco in the foreground, fringed with trees. From here I had pointed out to me the various features of the country. The play of light and shade in the distance was very wonderful. Our target that afternoon was a point in the Austrian ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... his "Thoughts on Gardening," several artifices that he put in practice for increasing the apparent distance of objects, or for lengthening the perspective of an avenue by widening it in the foreground and planting it there with dark-foliaged trees, like yews and firs, "then with trees more and more fady, till they end in the almond-willow or silver osier." To have Lord Lyttelton bring in a party at the small, or willow end of such a walk, and thereby spoil the whole trick, must indeed ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... beyond. It was pleasant in the park, but it was still nicer in the fields. On the right some women who were digging potatoes formed a mass of bright red and white colour; on the left were wheat fields, meadows, and grazing cattle; and in the foreground, slightly to the right, were the dark, dark oaks of Littleports. Volgin took a deep breath, and felt glad that he was alive, especially here in his cousin's home, where he was so thoroughly enjoying the rest from ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... beautiful hill country, and with the clearest and purist air we have met with in Italy, Siena is perfectly charming. The window is wide open and I look out upon a vast panorama, something like that of the Surrey hills, only on a larger scale—"Raw Siena," "Burnt Siena," in the foreground, where the colour of the soil is not hidden by the sage green olive foliage, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... imprimis, that ghostly lithograph by Calame. It was a mere black spot on the white wall, but my inner vision scrutinized every detail of the picture. A wild, desolate, midnight heath, with a spectral oak-tree in the centre of the foreground. The wind blows fiercely, and the jagged branches, clothed scantily with ill-grown leaves, are swept to the left continually by ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... time the distant view from the chapel terrace was exceedingly beautiful, whilst the immediate foreground was uncompromisingly ugly. A vegetable garden then covered the space where now the steps of the "Slopes" run down through lawns and shrubberies, and rows of utilitarian cabbages and potatoes extended right up to the terrace wall. But beyond this prosaic display of kitchen-stuff, ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... incomparably more beautiful when viewed by the full light of day and in all the glory of brilliant sunshine. A thousand gorgeous colours on leaf and blossom, on gaily-plumaged bird and bright-winged insect, charmed their eyes and enriched the foreground of the picture; while the dense masses of foliage, with their subtle gradations of colour, light, and shade, as they gradually receded into the background, and finally melted into the rich purply grey of the extreme distance, balanced and harmonised the whole, completing ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... scamper away to Rainette's window! He was grateful for his little friend's infirmity: with her he could give himself airs of superiority and even be a little patronizing. With a little swagger he would tell her about the things that happened in the street and always put himself in the foreground. Sometimes in gallant mood he would bring Rainette a little present, roast chestnuts in winter, a handful of cherries in summer. And she used to give him some of the multi-colored sweets that filled the ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... with every cove he met, and keep the poor man standing for public gaze, like chained innocence awaiting the nod of a villain. The picture would have been complete, if a monster in human form were placed in the foreground applying the lash, according to the ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... to remember what other people have done for you; to ignore what the world owes you, and to think what you owe the world; to put your rights in the background, and your duties in the middle distance, and your chances to do a little more than your duty in the foreground; to see that your fellow-men are just as real as you are, and try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy; to own that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... wanted, and least done by Mr. Spencer. Even in the passages given above—passages collected by Mr. Spencer himself—this point is altogether ignored; make it clear as Professor Hering made it—put continued personality and memory in the foreground as Professor Hering did, instead of leaving them to be discovered "by implications," and then such expressions as "accumulated experiences" and "experience of the race" become luminous; till this had been done they were ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... 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 intelligence growing ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... volume, although poorly printed on a cheap grade of book-paper, are noted for their accuracy, and are interesting as showing the methods etc. of the miners while Shirley was writing her Letters. The tail-race, in the foreground, is where James Wilson Marshall and Peter L. Wimmer first saw the nuggets, but Marshall was the first to pick up a specimen. Much has been written of Marshall; the Wimmers were of the Western ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... virtue is the best preparation for the grace of God. Many pages of The Aspirations of Nature, from which the following brief quotations are made, are devoted to the dignity of humanity and the need of placing the excellence of human nature in the foreground when considering how man may attain ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... make some speeches—I had always kept the public side of my career in the foreground, and in this campaign my enforced prominence as director of the machine was causing the public to dwell too much on the real nature of my political activity. But I could not bring myself to it. Instead, ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... essential quality of Dostoevsky's creative art is the psychical analysis, which occupies the foreground in the majority of his romances, and constitutes their chief power and value. A well-known alienist doctor, who has examined these romances from a scientific point of view, declares himself amazed ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... The sun was sinking and they faced it, the young man's indicating finger moving back and forth across the vagaries of the route. The prairie was cut by long undulations, naked of verdure, save a spot in the foreground where, beside a round greenish pool, a single tree lifted thinly clad boughs. Something of bleakness had crept into the prospect, its gay greenness was giving place to an austere pallor of tint, a dry economy of vegetation. The summits of ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... penitential mood, and in the absence of a prepared background, it was the processes of her pregnancy rather than the issue of it, that got into the foreground of her mind. She was in for an experience now that no one could call trivial. She had months of misery ahead of her, she assumed, reasoning from the one she had just gone through with, surmounted by hours of agony and peril that even Portia wouldn't ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... 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 ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... a time of religious struggles. In the following century political and economic interests pressed into the foreground of historical movement. The democratic institutions of the colonies were repeatedly in opposition to those of the mother-country, and the ties that bound them to her lost more and more of their significance. The great antagonism of their economic interests began ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... which he had commenced, and in the execution of which he was interrupted by those ambitious enterprises to which his subsequent downfall was owing. To a painter's eye, the effect of the whole scene is increased by the rich and varied foreground which everywhere presents itself, composed of the shrubs with which the skirts of the square are adorned, and the lofty poplars which rise amidst the splendour of architectural beauty; while recent events give a greater ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... day in the Shadengo Valley. A mist had settled down upon the old inn; lost to view was the landscape with its varied foliage. Only the immediate foreground was visible to a teamster who came down the road—the trees with dripping branches, and the inn from the eaves of which water fell to the ground with depressing monotony; the well with its pail for watering the horses and the log trough in whose limpid waters a number ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... was from the back of the vicarage, and there was nothing to interrupt the eye between the house and the glorious gray pile of the cathedral. The intermediate ground, however, was beautifully studded with timber. In the immediate foreground ran the little river which afterwards skirted the city; and, just to the right of the cathedral the pointed gables and chimneys of Hiram's Hospital peeped out of the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... side, sought its shelter ere the close of day. As she then lifted her eyes to these many-coloured fires lighted by His hand who setteth His glory in the heavens, they had seemed to burn in wrath; while the great moors, dark in the foreground, raised themselves like barriers—uplands of desolation, across which no path of hope stretched its ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... thus made to reveal the inner thought and a life beyond that passing at the moment. The first and most notable is in the "Charles the Second fleeing from the Battle of Worcester." The king and two nobles are in the immediate foreground, in flight, while far away the sun is going down in a red glare behind the smoke of battle, the lurid flames of the burning town, and the royal standard just fluttering down from the battlements of a ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... that high "Falootin" style so popular over the Atlantic, of those grand-sounding periods about freedom and love of country, was not to be lost by a set of people who, in all their enthusiasm for Garibaldi, are intently bent on making themselves foreground figures in the tableau that should have been filled ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... undercurrent of consciousness, or we might call it a background. The foreground consists of what you are taking notice of or thinking about, or of what you are intending to do; that is to say, the foreground is cognitive or impulsive, or it may be both at once, as when we are intent on throwing this stone and hitting that tree. In ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions to the foreground of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over the respect of the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from office. One by one, the younger men of talent, Carteret, Pulteney, Chesterfield, Pitt, were driven into hostility. He maintained himself in office by a corruption ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... Florence, pinnacled and roof-crowded, across the gentle valley. Not far away rose Galileo's rival tower, and the habitations of one or two friends. On another side of the keep the valley clipped more decidedly; and in the foreground clustered a collection of trees upon a grassy slope, divided from the villa lawn by a low wall, over which my father and mother sometimes bought grapes, figs, pomegranates, and peaches grown upon the place, which were smilingly offered by the count's contadini. These from their numbers ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... In the 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 ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... foreground of the Pier generally presents a most animated picture,—crowded with promenading fashionables; and surrounded by numerous wherries, steam-packets, and other craft, at anchor or gaily sailing about; a busy scene which forms a striking contrast ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... him and Jarvo; he took it for granted that Jarvo had grasped that Olivia must be taken back to her aunt and her friends at the palace; and afterward he knew only, for an indeterminate space, that the car was moving across some dim, heavenly foreground to some dim, ultimate destination in which he found himself believing with ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... to understand, sir, that this is a rolling prairie in the foreground?" asked a deep voice, which Tiffles at once recognized as emanating ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... shows the need men have of distinction and the advantage they find even in conceiving it. For it is the presence of variety and a nearer approach somewhere to just and ideal achievement that gives men perspective in their judgments and opens vistas from the dull foreground of their lives to sea, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... ambitions which were presently to result in the foundation of New France and the colonial empire of the Bourbon monarchy. Francis I, the French king, was a vigorous and ambitious prince. His exploits and rivalries occupy the foreground of European history in the earlier part of the sixteenth century. It was the object of Francis to continue the work of Louis XI by consolidating his people into a single powerful state. His marriage with the heiress of Brittany joined that independent ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... of the picture which the rapt listener made. His study-desk near by, strewn with papers and 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
... greater things, his few landscapes would alone have won him fame enough. He has in this room a large number of royal portraits,—one especially worth attention, of Philip III. The scene is by the shore,—a cool foreground of sandy beach,—a blue-gray stretch of rippled water, and beyond, a low promontory between the curling waves and the cirrus clouds. The king mounts a magnificent gray horse, with a mane and tail like the broken ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... the line of hills close in the foreground where, an instant before, had been only empty ground. There was a sharp crackle, a strident hum and then the muffled plop of bullets burying themselves in the earth six hundred feet in the rear. The Nig grew taut in every muscle; then she edged slowly towards the huge khaki-colored ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... Well in the foreground of the picture would be Jack, to be sure; Jack riding far afield upon Surry, whom he had found the best horse for his purpose upon the whole ranch; lassoing cattle to get his hand in, practising certain little twists of his own invention, and teaching Surry to know without fail just ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... Lesbia, as she stood on the grassy crag looking down on the shining water, broken in the foreground by fringes of rushes, and the rich luxuriance of water-lilies. 'Is it not pitiable to think of the years he spent in this monotonous place, without any society worth speaking of, with only the shabbiest collection of books, with hardly any interest ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... liquid sheet drawn and fitted smoothly to place. Nothing but water, north, west, and south; a vast plain reflecting stars, and here and there showing spots like burnished shields. The grotesque halves of buildings in its foreground became as insignificant as flecks of shadow. The sky was a clear blue dome, the vaporous folds of the Milky Way seeming to drift across ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... 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 ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... France in 1806, all of which are repudiated"—dead. It is useless to go further into details. Science has been as much abused as religion. What benefit would accrue to the human family from an effort upon our part to bring to the foreground all the blunders made in scientific researches which are to-day numbered with the old effete errors in religion? And where is the propriety of infidels making a set of asses of themselves by playing upon the little irregularities of language and character in religion, as they ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... draw up plans for promoting the objects of the mission, founding and managing schools, raising subscriptions, and other things of a like nature; so that he has taken a more active part than Brother Ward or myself in these public acts of the mission. These things placed him in the foreground, and it has been no uncommon thing for him to bear the blame of those acts which equally belong to Brother Ward and myself, merely because he was the instrument ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... arrangement he is brought into the immediate foreground and sits there, already isolated, already damned, in such a torment of body and soul as haunts the spectator who has had the courage to reconsider the dictum of authorities who call him "a Jew of frightful vulgarity." Frightful he may be; but ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue |
