United States or Solomon Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The arabesques were pretty and graceful; the counterpane was of immaculate whiteness; there was just enough of effort in tracing out the intricacies of the interlacements to give a gentle sensation of pleasure; and there was the latent consciousness, behind this voluntary trifling, that it could be exchanged at any moment for the most terribly real and absorbing excitement.
This salon contains a chest or cabinet worth in these days seven or eight thousand francs, a carved ebony table, a secretary with many drawers, inlaid with arabesques of ivory and bought in Venice, with other noble Gothic furniture. Here too are pictures and articles of choice workmanship bought in 1818, at a time when no one suspected the ultimate value of such treasures.
Ovid and Pliny describe it; Virgil alludes to it as a most beautiful ornament; and Horace mentions a pine agreeing in character with the Stone pine; while in Pompeii and Herculaneum we find figures of pine cones in drawings and on the arabesques; and even kernels of charred pines have been discovered.
While M. Zola thus expressed himself, we sat face to face, he in his favourite arm chair on one side of the fireplace, and I on the other, in the familiar room, with its three windows overlooking the lively road, while all around curvetted the scrolls and arabesques of the light fawn-tinted wall paper. And after chatting about Du Paty and Esterhazy we gradually lapsed into silence.
There were all sorts of faces among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders that ran round the pages. They had mostly the outline of childish or womanly or manly beauty, without very distinct individuality. But at last it seemed to me that some of them were taking on a look not wholly unfamiliar to me; there were features that did not seem new. Can it be so?
At the end of the Gothic period architecture had thus come to be conceived as the art of covering shapeless structures with a wealth of arabesques in marble, fresco, bronze, mosaic. The revival of learning and a renewed interest in the antique withdrew the Italians for a short period from this false position.
The fore-court of the mosque is also one of the largest existing; its length is 436 feet, its breadth 408; it is surrounded by fine arabesques and small cells. This court is considered almost as sacred as the mosque itself, in consequence of the Sultan Akbar, "the just," having been accustomed to pay his devotions there.
The houses were often ancient, and most picturesquely time-stained, the plaster dropping in spots from the old brickwork; others were tinted of pleasant and cheerful lines; some were frescoed with designs in arabesques, or with imaginary windows; some had escutcheons of arms painted on the front.
Bouret furnished the house with all the elegancies of Parisian homes for an Opera celebrity; and to him Les Aigues owes the restoration of its ground floor in the style Louis XV. I have often stood rapt in admiration at the beauty of the dining-room. The eye is first attracted to the ceiling, painted in fresco in the Italian manner, where lightsome arabesques are frolicking.
Whitman's elegant tea-leaf border for the cover of Dr. O. W. Holmes's "Over the Tea-cups," and Miss Alice Morse's arabesques and medallions for Lafcadio Hearn's "Two Years in the French West Indies." Miss May Morris designed many tasteful letters for the fine bindings executed by Mr.
Word Of The Day