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Gothic   /gˈɑθɪk/   Listen
Gothic

noun
1.
Extinct East Germanic language of the ancient Goths; the only surviving record being fragments of a 4th-century translation of the Bible by Bishop Ulfilas.
2.
A heavy typeface in use from 15th to 18th centuries.  Synonym: black letter.
3.
A style of architecture developed in northern France that spread throughout Europe between the 12th and 16th centuries; characterized by slender vertical piers and counterbalancing buttresses and by vaulting and pointed arches.  Synonym: Gothic architecture.



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"Gothic" Quotes from Famous Books



... Cathedral is a history, written in solid stone, of architectural progress, illustrating in itself almost all the various kinds of the style commonly called Pointed. Of these the earliest form of Gothic and Perpendicular chiefly predominate. The shape and arrangement of the building was doubtless largely influenced by the extraordinary number of precious relics which it contained, and which had to be properly displayed and fittingly enshrined. Augustine's church had ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers

... the adverb there precedes the participle, and we evidently have nothing by which to determine the case that follows; as, "These judges were twelve in number. Was this owing to there being twelve primary deities among the Gothic nations?"—Webster's Essays, p. 263. Say rather: "Was this because there were twelve primary deities among the Gothic nations?" "How many are injured by Adam's fall, that know nothing of there ever being such a man in the world!"—Barclay's Apology, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... the highest order had lent itself wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the most important on our list. "Towards him all the lines of the romantic revival converge." [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic romance, the Ossianic poetry, the new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries, these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. It is true that his delineation of feudal society is not ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... of boreal isles, Roar from the hidden, jagged steeps, Where the destroyer never sleeps; Ring through the iceberg's Gothic piles! ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard

... an old historic and important manufacturing town in Wuertemberg, on the Neckar, 9 m. SE. of Stuttgart; has a citadel and the Liebfrauen Church, which is a fine Gothic structure with a spire 246 ft.; is a noted hardware centre, and celebrated for its machinery; a good trade is done in textiles, fruit, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... men have their classification too, for in human effort like causes produce like effects. Most people know what schools of poetry, painting, and music are. In architecture, we know, too, that there are great divisions—such as classic and Gothic. But many have yet to learn how far classification may go; and it is a new feature to have the peculiar national architecture of Scotland separated from that of England, and its peculiarities traced to interesting national events and habits. The ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various

... into a square of which one side was formed by an old Gothic church, they had engaged in a dark and narrow street the further end of which was bastioned by one of the flying buttresses of the church ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... betook himself, accompanied, of course, by his faithful follower, Andrew Fairservice. They found the Laigh Kirk to be a gloomy underground crypt into which light was but sparingly admitted by a few Gothic windows. In the centre the pews were already full to overflowing with worshippers, and Andrew and Frank had to take their places in the ring of those who stood in the outer dark among the gloomy ranges of pillars which stretched away ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... symphonic composition is not very closely allied to the melodic. This means that fundamentally there is a composition founded on rest and balance. The mind thinks at once of choral compositions, of Mozart and Beethoven. All these works have the solemn and regular architecture of a Gothic cathedral; they belong ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky

... its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand shrubberies, and thrill anew with undefinable delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-bell, breaking, each, hour, with sullen and sudden roar, upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay embedded and asleep. It gives me, perhaps, as much of pleasure, as I can now in any manner experience to dwell upon minute recollections of the school and its concerns. Steeped in misery as I am—misery, alas! only too real—I shall be pardoned for seeking relief, however slight and temporary, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... such an amount of vegetation by their peculiar structure. Their surfaces are very irregular, broken into holes and fissures, with ledges overhanging the mouths of gloomy caverns; but from each projecting part have descended stalactites, often forming a wild gothic tracery over the caves and receding hollows, and affording an admirable support to the roots of the shrubs, trees, and creepers, which luxuriate in the warm pure atmosphere and the gentle moisture which constantly exudes from the rocks. In places ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... Germans occupied Rheims, but were driven out after von Kluck's retreat. On September 20, 1914, they were reported as first shelling the Cathedral of Rheims and the civilized world stood aghast, for the edifice, begun in 1212, is one of the chief glories of Gothic ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... which the sailor is, above all other men, perhaps, ever liable. One of our boys, William Edwards, whilst at work on the main crosstrees, fell to the deck, sustaining such fearful injuries that he died a few moments afterwards. We buried him in the little cemetery on shore, where an unpretending gothic cross now records the simple fact that ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... have neither the Prologue in the Theatre nor the Prologue in Heaven, but, with the exception of some verbal changes, the opening scene which introduces us to Faust is identical with that of the poem in its final form. Seated at his desk in a dusty Gothic chamber, furnished with all the apparatus for scientific experiment, Faust reviews his past life, and finds that he has been mocked from the beginning. In every department of boasted knowledge he has made himself a master, but it has brought satisfaction ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... stop, to look at the enchanted rain of tiny lights. We stood in a billowy meadow, with the pale gray-green of the stacked oats dimly silvered by the baby moon, that was hurrying down the west after the sun. The bundles of grain made pointed, gothic arches, and through these, back and forth, in and out, threaded the fireflies, like fairies with lanterns searching for lost ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... considerable extent, with remains of Gothic arches, and carvings about the doors—all open to the sky except a few places on the ground-level which were vaulted. These being still perfectly solid, were used by the family as outhouses to store wood and peats, to keep the garden tools in, ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald

... As yet other palms, which were plumed at the summit like an ostrich wing; or as the smaller ones at their base, spreading out into fans of emerald green. Again, as the forest giants which far overhead were the arches of a watercourse, like the nave of a Gothic cathedral. And even the parasite vines were of the same Titan designing, for they bound the girders of the vault in a dense mat of leaves and woven twigs, while underfoot the carpet was soft inches ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... are still covered with a quaint mediaeval roof, like that at Tournay. An old chateau is to be seen there, the first stone of which was laid so long ago as 1197, by Count Baldwin, afterwards Emperor of Constantinople; and there is a Town Hall, with Gothic windows, crowned by a chaplet of battlements, and surrounded by a turreted belfry, which rises three hundred and fifty-seven feet above the soil. Every hour you may hear there a chime of five octaves, a veritable aerial piano, the renown of which surpasses that of the famous chimes ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... yet with satisfaction, when the professorship was offered. It was all so different from what was in his mind for the future. As he looked out of the oriel window in the sweet gothic building, to the green grass and the maples and elms which made the college grounds like an old-world park, he had a vision of himself permanently in these surroundings of refinement growing venerable with years, seeing pass under his influence thousands of young ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... the apartments appropriated to the earl in the royal palace, within the embrasure of a vast Gothic casement, sat Anne of Warwick; the small wicket in the window was open, and gave a view of a wide and fair garden, interspersed with thick bosquets and regular alleys, over which the rich skies of the summer evening, a little before sunset, cast alternate light and shadow. Towards ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... quarries, its solid square mass relieved by its quaint dormer windows was softened from its primal ugliness by the Boston ivy that had clambered to the eaves and lay draped about the windows like a soft green mantle. Built in the early days, it stood with the little church, a gem of Gothic architecture, within spacious grounds bought when land was cheap. Behind the house stood the stable, built also of grey limestone, and at one side a cherry and apple orchard formed a charming background to the grey buildings with their crowding shrubbery ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor

... curtain; a stove of somewhat eccentric habits, and consisting simply of an iron cylinder with a pipe that passed through the window, had been manufactured for them at Palma; a charming clay vase surrounded with a garland of ivy displayed its beauty on the top of the stove; a beautiful large Gothic carved oak chair with a small chest convenient as a book-case had, with the consent of the sacristan, been brought from the monks' chapel; and last, but not least, there was, as we have already read in the letters, a piano, in the first weeks only a ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... two signs of human handiwork were visible. Close clinging to the sides of a rugged mountain a narrow track of shining steel wound its way upward, marking the pathway of civilization in its march from sea to sea, while near the summit of a neighboring peak a quaint cabin of unhewn logs arranged in Gothic fashion was built into the ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour

... up to the top, a feat which Ferdinand the Seventh is said to have accomplished. The view from the summit is very extensive, and on a fine clear day the mountain ridge, called the Sierra de Ronda, may be discovered, though upwards of twenty leagues distant. The cathedral itself is a noble Gothic structure, reputed the finest of the kind in Spain. In the chapels allotted to the various saints are some of the most magnificent paintings which Spanish art has produced; indeed the Cathedral of Seville is at the present time far more rich in splendid paintings than at any former period; possessing ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... edifices, a large red-brick building, with level gray roofs, and rows of short barred windows bespeaking captivity, the whole contrasting greatly by its formalism with the quaint irregularities of the Gothic erections. It was somewhat disguised from the road in passing it by yews and evergreen oaks, but it was visible enough up here. The wicket from which the pair had lately emerged was in the wall of this structure. From the middle of the building an ugly flat-topped octagonal tower ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... like a gold ornament of Byzantine workmanship: there is in his style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the Gothic, of the window. Ah! in this hour of weariness for one of Mallarmé's prose poems! Stay, I remember I have some numbers of La Vogue, One of the numbers contains, I know, "Forgotten Pages;" I will ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... had been a banker's Gothic home. When Rincon Hill was spoiled by bloodless speculators, he abandoned it and took up his abode in another city. A tenant was left to mourn there. Every summer the wild winds shook that forlorn ruin ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... clustered pillars, and the pointed arches—appears to be in consummate repair. At all points where decay has laid its finger, the structure is clamped with iron, or otherwise carefully protected; and being thus watched over,—whether as a place of ancient sanctity, a noble specimen of Gothic art, or an object of national interest and pride,—it may reasonably be expected to survive for as many ages as have passed over it already. It was sweet to feel its venerable quietude, its long-enduring peace, and yet to observe how kindly and even cheerfully it received the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... face; therefore the queen, with that instinctive impulse of coquetry which urges women, in whatever situation they find themselves, to desire to be beautiful, above all for women, made a sign to Mary Seyton, and, going to a little mirror fastened to the wall in a heavy Gothic frame, she arranged her curls, and readjusted the lace of her collar; then; having seated herself in the pose most favourable to her, in a great arm-chair, the only one in her sitting-room, she said smilingly to Mary ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... letters of army officers and men in authority were published, an indescribable gold fever took possession of the nation east of the Alleghanies. All the energetic and daring, all the physically sound of all ages, seemed bent on reaching the new El Dorado. "The old Gothic instinct of invasion seemed to survive and thrill in the fiber of our people," and the camps and gulches and mines of California witnessed a social and political phenomenon unique in the history of the world—the spirit ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis

... to Charlemagne and his paladins. As Siegfried was the greatest of the heroes of the North, so too was Roland the most famous among the Knights of the Middle-Ages. While The Story of Siegfried exemplifies the sublime old-world spirit of the Gothic nature myths, its counterpart, The Story of Roland, is less remote, and the incidents, though equally wonderful, are of a more human character and appeal with ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston

... better service to the study of Gothic architecture in this country than Mr. J.H. Parker, of Oxford. The value of his admirable Glossary of Terms used in Architecture, is attested by the fact, that it has already reached a fourth edition, and that another will soon be called for. But we doubt whether ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.19 • Various

... I shall go nigh to see you clapt into the State's prison, or at least into that Gothic cottage ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... chair and recalled how handsome the lover of her dream was, and how truly she already loved him. Then she decided to go to bed, and while she was folding her few things, putting her apron away, combing out her long and beautiful hair, she sang an old Gothic song, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon

... indulged an inclination to study in the midst of ferments, occasioned by the wars and pretensions of opposite factions. It was revived in modern Europe among the turbulent states of Italy, and spread to the north, together with the spirit which shook the fabric of the Gothic policy: it rose while men were divided into parties, under civil or religious denominations, and when they were at variance on subjects held the most ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... exact words of one of the ablest supporters of the Germanic origin of the south-eastern Britons, Mr. E. Adams, in a paper entitled, "Remarks on the probability of Gothic Settlements in Britain Previously to A.D. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... character to the writing of the time. Dr. Johnson was fond of old romances. When he was in Skye he amused himself by thinking of his Scottish tour as the journey of a knight-errant. "These fictions of the Gothic romances," he said, "are not so remote from credibility as is commonly supposed." It is a mistake to suppose that the passion for mediaevalism began with either Coleridge or Scott. Horace Walpole was as enthusiastic as either of them; good eighteenth ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... of common birth, was so confident of his valour, that he was moved to aspire to a splendid marriage. He was a suitor for Sigrid, the daughter of Yngwin, King of the Goths, and moreover demanded half the Gothic kingdom for her dowry. Halfdan was consulted whether the match should be entertained, and advised that a feigned consent should be given, promising that he would baulk the marriage. He also gave instructions that a seat should be allotted to himself among the places ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... returned. As again we pass the cathedral cliff on the north, and join the western side with this in one view, we are somewhat prepared by familiarity to mingle its majesty and beauty, and take from them a single impression. The long Cyclopean wall and vast Gothic roof of the side, including many an arched, rounded, and waving line, emphasized by straight lines of blue seam, are set off against the strange shining traceries of the facade; while the union of flower-like softness and eternal strength, the fretted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... earlier yet, Ad. Mueller had looked upon taxes not in the light of an insurance premium, but as "the interest of the invisible and yet absolutely necessary intellectual capital of the nation." (Elemente, III, 75.) Of course, the State is much more than a species of capital; just as a Gothic cathedral is something more than a piece of masonry, but does not on that account cease to be ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... also on the Tame. In coming over the hill from Ashton, the traveller has, at the top, both right and left, fine large gardens with superb villa-like houses in their midst, built usually in the Elizabethan style, which is to the Gothic precisely what the Anglican Church is to the Apostolic Roman Catholic. A hundred paces farther and Stalybridge shows itself in the valley, in sharp contrast with the beautiful country seats, in sharp contrast even with the modest cottages of Ashton! Stalybridge lies in a narrow, crooked ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... with her little teeth, which served For pickaxe and for spade, She gnawed right through the gothic door, And thus an ...
— The Mouse and the Christmas Cake • Anonymous

... ransacked to increase his collections, and from these sources he gleaned many rude but pleasing volumes, perhaps full of old popular poetry! or the wild Romances of Chivalry which enlivened the halls and cots of our forefathers in Gothic days. ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... nobly of the soul, and in no way approved his opinion; but I remember that Harriet Rohan, in her school-days, accepted this, her destiny, with glee. "When I saw the Oriole," she wrote to me, "from his nest among the plum-trees in the garden, sail over the air and high above the Gothic arches of the elm, a stream of flashing light, or watched him swinging silently on pendent twigs, I did not dream how near akin we were. Or when a Humming-Bird, a winged drop of gorgeous sheen and gloss, a living gem, poising ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... forced to pay toll. Inside the walls were clustered houses of every description. Rising from the midst of tumble-down dwellings might stand a magnificent cathedral, town-hall, or gild building. Here and there a prosperous merchant would have his luxurious home, built in what we now call the Gothic style, with pointed windows and gables, and, to save space in a walled town, with the second story projecting out over ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... and in the twilight I saw before me a biggish house like an overgrown Swiss chalet. There was a kind of archway, with a sham portcullis, and a terrace with battlements which looked as if they were made of stucco. We drew up at a Gothic front door, where a thin middle-aged man ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan

... which was inspired by German Romanticism. Of this so-called "phosphoristic" school Atterbom was the leader. Stagnelius, the young poet, who died early, belonged to the same group. The New School was in turn opposed by the Gothic Society or Scandinavian School, among whom were Ling and Geijer. Franzen and Wallin devoted themselves to religious poetry. The most famous of all modern Swedish poets was Esaias Tegner, whose "Frithiof's Saga" achieved an international reputation. ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... answer may be, I walked over the old Gothic bridge with a heart strong enough to meet Mrs Oldcastle without flinching. I might have to quarrel with her—I could not tell: she certainly was neither safe nor wholesome. But this I was sure of, that I would not quarrel with her without being quite certain ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... Honorius was holding the imperial power in the West, barbarians took possession of his land; and I shall tell who they were and in what manner they did so. [395-423 A.D.] There were many Gothic nations in earlier times, just as also at the present, but the greatest and most important of all are the Goths, Vandals, Visigoths, and Gepaedes. In ancient times, however, they were named Sauromatae and Melanchlaeni;[14] and there were some too ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius

... future, few, while ignorantly admiring the monument, would give a thought to the artist. Books were eternally signed, and pictures, and sculpture. But the architect was forgotten. What did it matter? If the creators of Gothic cathedrals had to accept oblivion, he might. The tower should be his signature. And no artist could imprint his influence so powerfully and so mysteriously upon the unconscious city as he was doing. And the planet was whirling the whole city round like an atom in the icy spaces ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... a ruin old, That stood so low, in lonely glen. The gothic windows high and dark Were hung ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... its work?... And what man shall teach it to our musicians? Music has not yet had its Raphael. Mozart is only a child, a little German bourgeois, with feverish hands and sentimental soul, who uses too many words, too many gestures, and chatters and weeps and laughs over nothing. And neither the Gothic Bach nor the Prometheus of Bonn, struggling with the vulture, nor his offspring of Titans piling Pelion on Ossa, and hurling imprecations at the Heavens, hare ever seen ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... The Gothic stile of building could produce nothing nobler than Mr Allworthy's house. There was an air of grandeur in it that struck you with awe, and rivalled the beauties of the best Grecian architecture; and it was as commodious ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... declared that they would "disgrace Gothic barbarism." Jefferson's soul was stirred with the profoundest indignation. Under his inspiration, the Virginia assembly adopted resolutions calling on the state to nullify within its limits the enforcement of the Sedition act. The Alien and Sedition ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.

... sudden triumph, and, under all, a new, vague dread, unknown before, smothered down, kept under, but still there? It left him but once during the night, when, for the second time in his life, he entered a church. It was a sombre Gothic pile, where the stained light lost itself in far-retreating arches; built to meet the requirements and sympathies of a far other class than Wolfe's. Yet it touched, moved him uncontrollably. The ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis

... the Gothic nobles took refuge on the seaward slopes of the Cantabrian mountains in the Asturias and there made a successful stand, electing ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson

... ancient metropolis, affectionately called "Mother Moscow," and hardly less sacred in his eyes than Jerusalem. The soldiery beheld with joy and exultation the magnificent extent of the place; its mixture of Gothic steeples and Oriental domes; the vast and splendid mansions of the haughty boyards, embosomed in trees; and, high over all the rest, the huge towers of the Kremlin, at once the palace and the citadel of the old ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... later. His forbearance was all the more remarkable because his church and his rectory were just across the street from the Conwell place, at the corner of another street, where we could see their wooden gothic in the cold shadow of the maples with which the green in ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells

... turned up nothing valuable, and stimulated esthetic and emotional ardor. In a dim way he felt God near, but he did not learn to fling the arms of the soul in faith around the cross of Christ. Later the revelation he found in Plato removed him farther from boyhood. He fell in love with gray Gothic churches, painted glass, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... threaded swiftly, in shifting arabesque, in Gothic traceries, in lace-like fantasies; utterly ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... enough to carry out in a very sumptuous manner the last wishes of its benefactor, who desired to be commemorated by a monument in the style of the later Scaliger tomb at Verona, and from the designs of Frauel was erected the hexagonal Gothic pavilion, surmounted by an equestrian statue of the Duke, which is so well known to architects. The Veronese prototype of the monument is a tolerably insecure affair, but the modern imitation is still larger and heavier, ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various

... a beautiful old church, and it was a rich church also. It was built in the older Gothic style, and its heavy, broad-arched walls, its massive columns would have made it look cold and bare had not handsome tapestries, the gift of the lady of the manor, covered the walls. Fine old pictures hung here and there above the altars, ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner

... provided that his plans should be adhered to. The result has been a singularly happy one. It was not merely that the Archbishop has left us one of the noblest examples of that strange yet successful revival of Gothic feeling of which the staircase of Christ Church Hall, erected at much about the same time, furnishes so exquisite a specimen. It is that in his tenacity to the past he has preserved the historic interest of his hall. Beneath the picturesque woodwork of the roof, in ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... acanthus being used), the columns higher, and the entablature more richly decorated. This order was copied by the Romans more than the other two as it suited their more florid taste. All the orders have the horizontal feeling in common (as Gothic architecture has the vertical), and the simple plan with its perfect harmony of proportion leaves no ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop

... East— not the East of barbarous Pontine countries peopled by men of our own race, where the legend of St. George is allowed to have sprung up, but of the civilised, metaphysical, dark-haired races of Egypt, Syria, and Hindostan. The "objectivity" of the Gothic mind has never had any sympathy with it. The Teutonic races, like the earlier Greeks, before they were tinctured with Eastern thought, had always wanted historic facts, dates, names, and places. They even found it necessary to import ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... opened by a long, low, latticed window on to the ancient lichen-tinted court of the old college. A Gothic arched door led to a worn stone staircase. On the ground floor was the tutor's room. Above were three students, one on each story. It was already twilight when we reached the scene of our problem. Holmes halted and looked earnestly at the window. Then he approached it, and, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... in this latter time preserved the spirit and the numbers of the ancient Gothic people, had seated themselves in England, in the Low Countries, and in Normandy. They passed from thence to the southern part of Europe, and in this romantic age gave rise in Sicily and Naples to a new kingdom and a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... There are some few maps, and a print or two interspersed here and there, in the British Museum; but is there any regular series of plates? We know that Inigo Jones built a Grecian portico on to the east end of the Gothic cathedral of old St. Paul's, surmounted with statues of Charles I., &c.; that the Puritans destroyed a beautiful conduit at the top of Cheapside; that Sir Thomas Gresham's Exchange was standing. But among the many city halls burnt down, were there any fine specimens of architecture, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various

... fount (i.e.,?). This will be the more readily comprehended when we remember that Father Persons' books, which Brinkley had printed before, were in English, and that English prose was then still generally printed in Gothic character[9]. ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion

... I wandered a little about Bordeaux. Fine church, partly Roman. Pretty Gothic flowered tower. Superb Roman ruin (Rue du Colysee) which ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... Earl of Moray, superior of the village, offered to restore the church to its original state, and, when examined by competent authorities, the supposed Chapter House was found to be a beautiful little Gothic chapel with groined roof supported {144} by a central pillar, similar to the building which once covered St. Margaret's well at Restalrig. Further explorations proved that the little octagonal building had evidently been raised over ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett

... graceful Gothic structure near the sea at Palma, had been for centuries a feudal possession of his forefathers. Everything was for the Febrers which was flung upon the mole from the high-forecastled galleons, from Oriental cocas with their massive hulls, ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... their long lashes, are fixed with an expression of watchful interest upon a pale and sickly youth, who, lounging upon a sofa opposite, is carelessly turning over the leaves of a new journal, or gazing steadfastly on the fretted gothic of the ceiling, while his thoughts are travelling many a mile away. The lady being the Senhora Inez; the nonchalant invalid, your unworthy ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... from the lake is a peak of lava which is called the "Gothic Cathedral" from its shape. Some of the party passed by a block looking like a lion. There were huge fields of "a-a" where the lava was thrown up into rough heaps, as if some one had tried to knead up blocks a foot square, and given it up as a bad job. We walked nearly six miles in the crater, going ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson

... they were pages thrown away; but this is not so: we forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see the different layers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has been accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the "Gothic profile" of the city, of the "surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and belfries," and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. And throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... he wrote in 1803, "I had a passion for taking in all the antiques that I met with: moth-eaten furniture, tapestries, family portraits, Gothic manuscripts (that I had learned how to decipher), had for me an indefinable charm. A little later on, I loved to walk in the solitude of cemeteries; to examine the tombs and to trace out their mossy epitaphs. I knew most of the churches of the canton, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... the square in front of the church of Saint-Etienne du Mont, beside the Pantheon, but it failed to disperse the faithful, who were taking part in the outdoor service of homage to Sainte-Genevive, the protectress of Paris, whose remains are buried in this small church of the Gothic-Renaissance period (1517-1620), one of the most beautiful of all the sacred edifices ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard

... with cathedral, "pracas," fountains, and statues, dumped down in the Far East. The place, too, is as picturesque as a scene from an opera, and China is the last spot where one would expect to find lingering traces of Gothic influence in carved doorways and other architectural details. As far as externals went Camoens, the great Portuguese poet, can scarcely have realised his exile during the two years, 1556-1558, of his banishment to Macao. He most creditably utilised ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... the last of the Latin poets, forming the transitional link between the Classic and the Gothic mode ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... Greifensteins had dwelt in security through many generations, in the stormy days of the robber barons. So sure were they of their safety, that they had built their dwelling-place on the other side of the bulwark in a manner that offered no suggestion of war or danger. The house was Gothic in style, full of windows and ornamented with spacious balconies and much fine stonework. The three-cornered platform was converted into a flower-garden, surrounded by a parapet. Protected on the north side by the huge wall, and fully exposed to the southern sun, the plants throve in an almost ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... chimney-tops were still distinct in the last clear light of the dropping day. It was light enough, however, for one to read, easily, from the opposite sidewalk, "Dr. C. Renton," in black letters, on the silver plate of a door, not far from the gothic portal of the Swedenborgian church. Near this door stood a misty figure, whose sad, spectral eyes floated on vacancy, and whose long, shadowy white hair, lifted like an airy weft in the streaming wind. That was ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor

... explained how the principle of Gothic architecture, "the substitution of a balance of active forces for the principle of inert resistance," was gradually evolved. This principle once found, Gothic architecture reached its most splendid period in a wonderfully short space ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... existed save in name. Foreigners, come from all the countries of the Mediterranean, plundered the provinces under its authority. The army was almost altogether in the hands of the Barbarians. They were Gothic tribunes who kept order outside the basilica where Ambrose had closed himself in with his people to withstand the order of the Empress Justina, who wished to hand over this church to the Arians. Levantine eunuchs domineered over the exchequer-clerks in the palace, and officials of all ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... super), from uper. This change took place before the Goidelic Celts broke away and invaded Britain in the tenth century B.C., but while Celts and Teutons were still in contact, since Teutons borrowed words with initial p, e.g. Gothic fairguni, "mountain," from Celtic percunion, later Ercunio, the Hercynian forest. The loss must have occurred before 1000 B.C. But after the separation of the Goidelic group a further change took place. Goidels preserved the sound represented by qu, or more simply by c or ch, but this ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch

... curious to note what Pope omits as what he mentions. He is much taken with a commonplace square, and with the mingling of ships and houses (which is truly effective), but the modern traveller would find the chief beauty of the city in its Gothic architecture, to which Pope gives one line—"a cathedral, very neat, and nineteen parish churches." Let the visitor ascend any one of the hills which overhang Bristol, and a beautiful scene at once bursts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... young, and breathing into that pleasure her own refining, exalting note; a stately ceremony—the Encaenia—going back to the infancy of English learning; and the dancing of young men and maidens in Gothic or classical halls built long ago by the "fathers who begat us." My own recollection of the Oxford summer, the Oxford river and hay-fields, the dawn on Oxford streets, as one came out from a Commemoration ball, or the evening under Nuneham woods where the swans on that ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... reverence, as he gazes on the clustered pillars, the mullioned windows, the panelled walls, the groined ceilings, decorated with ribs, tracery, and bosses, all evincing the skill of its architects and the wonderful capabilities of the Gothic style. ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various

... pleased. This was much older still than Queen Mary's rooms. Ellen admired the wild melancholy look of the Gothic pillars and arches springing from the green turf, the large carved window, empty of glass, the broken walls; and, looking up to the blue sky, she tried to imagine the time when the Gothic roof closed overhead, ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... hills, altogether formed one of the finest scenes imaginable. It seemed as if a great chieftain in olden feudal times was receiving his sovereign. It was princely and romantic. Lord and Lady Breadalbane took us up-stairs, the hall and stairs being lined with Highlanders. The Gothic staircase is of stone, and very fine; the whole of the house is newly and exquisitely furnished. The drawing-room, especially, is splendid. Thence you go into a passage and a library, which adjoins our private ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous

... excellent pavement. The principal street, containing the houses of the ancient Knights of St. John, is very broad, with buildings so massively constructed of stone as almost to resemble fortresses. Heraldic bearings, with dates carved in stone, grace many of the Gothic gateways. The French shield, with the three lilies and the date 1402, occurs most frequently. On the highest point in the city are built the church of St. John and the house ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer

... to achieve, that is to say, German power, distinguishes the host of warriors now embattled on the five huge fields of blood from the race of the poets and thinkers. Their brains, too, yearn back, throbbing for the realm of the muses. Before the remains of the Netherland Gothic, before the wonders of Flemish painting, their eyes light up in pious adoration. From the lips of the troops that marched from three streets into the parade plaza in Brussels there burst, when the last man stood in the ranks—and ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... his memory about the time of Constantine the Great. This edifice, being destroyed in the Saxon wars, was rebuilt by Offa, king of Mercia, and a monastery erected adjoining to it, some remains of which are still visible, and the church is a noble Gothic structure. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... each stem in his beak, holding it very firmly and then with a strong sidewise and downward thrust slicking it upright in the sand, to stand and to point "just exactly so." The finished bower was a Gothic tunnel with walls of grass stems, about eighteen inches long and a foot high. In making it the male bird wrought as busily as a child building a playhouse of blocks. Our bird would pick up pieces of blue yarn that had been placed in his cage to test his color sense, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... of Gothic style surrounded all these portraits. At the right, on the bottom of each picture was painted a little escutcheon having for its crest a baronial coronet and for supports two wild men armed with clubs. The field was red; with its three bulls' ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard

... fit ally: "There is, as far as I know, only one Gothic building in Europe, the Duomo of Florence, in which the ornament is so exquisitely finished as to enable us to imagine what might have been the effect of the perfect workmanship of the Renaissance, coming out of the hands of men like Verocchio ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... Brussels, as might be supposed from the historical importance of the city in the past, are numerous and celebrated, at least they are characteristically Flemish in much of their belongings, though the great cathedral of Ste. Gudule itself is Gothic ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... across the bay, on a Detroit-built submarine-chaser, to a Franciscan monastery dating from the fifteenth century. We were met by the abbot at the water-stairs, and, after being shown the beautiful Venetian Gothic cloisters, with alabaster columns whose carving was almost lacelike in its delicate tracery, we were led along a wooded path beside the sea, over a carpet of pine-needles, to a cloistered rose-garden, in which ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell

... to this lawless association is a similarity of laws. The followers of Cortez, it will be remembered, were welcomed in Mexico as the long-expected "Fair Gods" because of their blond complexions derived from a Gothic ancestry. Far back in history their forbears had been neighbors of the Anglo-Saxons in the forests of Germany, so that the customs of Anglo-Saxon England and of the Gothic kingdom of Castile had much in common. The "Laws of ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig

... such reasoning the obtuseness of its black-walnut chamferings; and something in its attitude suggested that its owners would be as uncompromising. The room showed none of the modern attempts at palliation, no apologetic draping of facts; and Mrs. Quentin, provisionally perched on a green-reps Gothic sofa with which it was clearly impossible to establish any closer relations, concluded that, had Mrs. Fenno needed another seat of the same size, she would have set out placidly to match the one on which her ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... there existed a great Gothic kingdom in the north, extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, under the rule of an able monarch named Hermanric, who had conquered and combined numerous tribes into a single nation. On this nation, just as ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... Loherain. Mark Twain in the person of Huckleberry Finn is committed to the ideas of chivalry neither more nor less than Walter Scott in Ivanhoe or The Talisman. I am told further—though this is perhaps unimportant—that Gothic ornament in America is not peculiarly the taste of the South, that even at Chicago there are imitations of ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker

... eloquence than convinced by his argument. He is picturesque, rich; but it is the picturesqueness and richness of the truly bewildering Roman architecture of the Renaissance—half Byzantine, three-eighths Gothic, and the remainder Greek. But Motley, with all his varied learning and association, is still perfectly and nobly Anglo-Saxon. His short, epigrammatic sentences ring like the click of musketry before the charge, and swell into length and grandeur with the ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... had sat in her babyhood at Antoine's feet, she would sit so long as she sold flowers in Brussels,—here, underneath the shadow of the Gothic towers that saw ...
— Bebee • Ouida

... large bouquet of roses; bouquets of moss roses and pansies.; bouquets of small camellias; bouquets of wall-flowers and poppies; bouquets of orange-blossom, medallions, various subjects; birds'-nests; Gothic initials and ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... couplets from Hall's Satires; a passage from Albania; notes on the Second Sight, with extracts from Aubrey and Glanville; a "List of Ballads to be discovered or recovered;" extracts from Guerin de Montglave; and after many more similar entries, a table of the Maeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon and Runic alphabets—with a fourth section, headed German, but left blank. But ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... the enclosure. Immediately in front of it stood an old oaktree, of whose trunk one might say, that it agonized in despair because of the lack of harmony between its fresh yellowish foliage and its black and gnarled branches; they resembled most of all grossly misdrawn old gothic arabesques. Behind the oak was a luxuriant thicket of hazel with dark sheenless leaves, which were so dense, that neither trunk nor branches could be seen. Above the hazel rose two straight, joyous maple-trees with gayly indented leaves, red stems and long dangling clusters of green fruit. Behind ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen

... so great an authority as that of Mr. Dryden, I should not venture to observe that the taste of most of our English poets, as well as readers, is extremely Gothic. He quotes Monsieur Segrais for a threefold distinction of the readers of poetry; in the first of which he comprehends the rabble of readers, whom he does not treat as such with regard to their quality, ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison

... Britain that he loved and the France where he lay buried than of its flashy appearance and the fine finish it gave to my uniform. I was a strange mixture, for, when the preacher, looking down the old Gothic arches, said: "This historic church has often before filled with armed men," I shivered with the poetry of it; and yet, no sooner had I come out into the modern sunlight and seen the congregation waiting for the soldiers ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond

... English, or the feuds and discords that raged with perpetual violence within our own distracted kingdom, you would now behold cultivated and smiling with plenty. Instead of the castles, which every baron was compelled to erect for the defence of his family, and where he lived in the barbarism of Gothic pride, among miserable vassals oppressed by the abuse of his feudal powers, your eyes would be charmed with elegant country houses, adorned with fine plantations and beautiful gardens, while happy villages or gay towns are rising about them and enlivening the prospect with every image of rural ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton

... extremity to the other. In feeling, in taste, in judgment, in the grandest matters and the least, the pendulum swings. From Popery to Puritanism; from Puritanism back towards Popery; from Imperialism to Republicanism, and back towards Imperialism again; from Gothic architecture to Palladian, and from Palladian back to Gothic; from hooped petticoats to drapery of the scantiest, and from that backwards to the multitudinous crinoline; from crying up the science of arms to crying it down, and ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... while not amounting to definite ill-health, refused interest and exertion. She could not shake it off. To her all things were empty, blank, immensely purposeless. Religion failed to touch her state—religion, that is, in the only form accessible. The interior of some frowning Gothic church of old Castile, or, from another angle, of some mellow Latin basilica, might have found the required mystic word to say to her. But Protestantism, even in its mild Anglican form, shuts the door on its dead children with a heavy ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... had the very same Christian religion, agreeing in the fundamental parts, varying a little in the ceremonies and in the subordinate doctrines. The whole of the polity and economy of every country in Europe has been derived from the same sources. It was drawn from the old Germanic or Gothic Custumary,—from the feudal institutions, which must be considered as an emanation from that Custumary; and the whole has been improved and digested into system and discipline by the Roman law. From hence arose the several orders, with or without a monarch, (which ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... command of language was immense. With him died the secret of the old poetical diction of England,—the art of producing rich effects by familiar words. In the following century it was as completely lost as the Gothic method of painting glass, and was but poorly supplied by the laborious and tesselated imitations of Mason and Gray. On the other hand, he was the first writer under whose skilful management the scientific vocabulary fell into ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay



Words linked to "Gothic" :   face, Gothic romance, literature, typeface, Gothic arch, type of architecture, architectural style, unusual, case, Gothic architecture, fount, medieval, East Germanic, English-Gothic architecture, perpendicular, Gothic romancer, Goth, font, style of architecture, strange, perpendicular style, East Germanic language, nonmodern



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