United States or Faroe Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


In short, nothing could be more delightful and satisfactory than were all the arrangements in Abra; and, up to the time he was seven years old, Calladon had never wished for anything that it could not give him. Sometimes he would amuse himself with looking through the alabaster walls into the outer rooms, Cada and Bra.

Sometimes the Virgin stands on one side of the altar, the angel on the other, carved in marble or alabaster, or of wood richly painted and gilt; or even, as I have seen in some instances, of solid silver. Not seldom, we find the two figures placed in niches against the pillars, or on pedestals at the entrance of the choir.

According to their traditional custom all the Toledans gathered to admire the steps covered with rows of burning lights, the Roman legionaries in alabaster leaning on their lances, and the rich curtain with its innumerable folds that hung from the vaulting down to the platform of the monument.

And when he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at table, a woman came, having an alabaster vase of ointment, of genuine spikenard, of vast value: and breaking the vase, she let it flow down upon his head. And there were some who felt indignation within themselves, saying, Wherefore is this waste of the ointment made?

The colouring was in keeping with the alabaster retables, the black marble tombs, the pinnacled tabernacles with their crockets of curled and dentate foliage. We can then quite easily imagine the columns and walls painted, the ribs and bosses washed with gold, and making a harmonious whole of this bonbonnière, which indeed is a piece of jewelry rather than of architecture.

Her hair, of velvet blackness, fell in curls half-way down her shoulders; her brow, white as alabaster and polished as a mirror, reflected the rays of the sun; her beautiful and finely arched black eye-brows melted into the opal of her temples; her eyelids were fast down, and the curled black fringe of lashes veiled a glowing and liquid glance of divine emotion; the nose, straight, slender, and cut by two easy nostrils, gave to her profile that character of antique beauty which is vanishing day by day from the earth.

For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she doeth it for my burial. Aye, Lazarus, aye, Martha, that I might forget thy sister's face as these words did pass his lips. It turned white as the alabaster in her hand. Stillness fell on the company about the table like that of the tomb. And then the sob! Lazarus, that sob did wound my heart.

"Princess Irene," he said one day, "I have studied the book you gave me; and knowing now who Christ is, I am ready to accept your Creed. Tell me how I may know myself a believer?" A lamp in the hollow of an alabaster vase glows through the transparency; so her countenance responded to the joy behind it.

Scores of beautiful vases of alabaster, breccia, marble, and soapstone, wrought in some cases to the thinness of a modern china cup, suggest at once the protodynastic Egyptian bowls of diorite and syenite, and show that if the Cretan took the idea from Egyptian models, he was not behind his master in the skill with which he carried it out.

One fine month of August, not a breath of wind had been blowing for a week or two, so that the mill-sails had not made a single turn; not a load of gypsum had been brought during the time, and Oliver was quite out of alabaster; though, as it happened, he much wanted a good supply, for a particular reason.