Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
The company rearranged itself with some changes after leaving the tea-table. Dudley Veneer was very polite to the Widow; but that lady having been called off for a few moments for some domestic arrangement, he slid back to the side of Helen Darley, his daughter's faithful teacher. Elsie had got away by herself, and was taken up in studying the stereoscopic Laocoon.
"They are not at all like idols, mother; they are the most noble conceptions of the human form." How could they look human? He himself had told her they were made out of marble; just such marble, she supposed, as was used for tomb-stones. "I only wish you could see some of the statues in Italy; the Laocoon, Niobe, and others I have seen.
That Aristides, that Genius of Death, that fragment of the unrivalled Psyche, are worth a thousand Scaligers! "Do you ever look at the Latin translation when you read Aeschylus?" said a schoolboy once to Cleveland. "That is my Latin translation," said Cleveland, pointing to the Laocoon.
The pride of the world in sculptures seem to be the Laocoon and the Dying Gladiator, in Rome. They are as old as Pompeii, were dug from the earth like Pompeii; but their exact age or who made them can only be conjectured. But worn, and cracked, without a history, and with the blemishing stains of numberless centuries upon them, they still mutely mock at all efforts to rival their perfections.
The stadium furnished its fleet runners, nimble as the wing-footed Mercury, fit types for his light and airy conceptions; while the arena of the athletes offered marvellous opportunities for the study of muscle and posture, to show its results in the burly limbs of Hercules or the starting sinews of Laocoön.
The Egyptians excelled much more in the art of imitating animals than in representing men: the dominion of the soul seems to have been inaccessible to them. After these come the porticos of the museum, where at each step is seen a new masterpiece. Vases, altars, ornaments of every kind, encircle the Apollo, the Laocoon, and the Muses.
Morse, with his first message, brought by his servant, the lightning; Fulton, in that long-drawn century of suspense, when he placed his hand upon the throttle-valve and lo, the steamboat moved; Jenner, when his patient with the cow's virus in his blood, walked through the smallpox hospitals unscathed; Howe, when the idea shot through his brain that for a hundred and twenty generations the eye had been bored through the wrong end of the needle; the nameless lord of art who laid down his chisel in some old age that is forgotten, now, and gloated upon the finished Laocoon; Daguerre, when he commanded the sun, riding in the zenith, to print the landscape upon his insignificant silvered plate, and he obeyed; Columbus, in the Pinta's shrouds, when he swung his hat above a fabled sea and gazed abroad upon an unknown world!
What an enthusiasm he displayed for classical beauty! what a worship of the form! what a fervor of paganism is found in its eloquent pages when he also comments on the admirable group of the Laocoon, or the still purer masterpiece of the Apollo of Belvedere. These men were the vanguard of the great Germanic army; Schiller and Goethe alone formed its main column.
The advantages of an open and those of an anonymous attack would be combined; and the authority of avowal would be united to the security of concealment. The serpents in Virgil, after they had destroyed Laocoon, found an asylum from the vengeance of the enraged people behind the shield of the statue of Minerva.
We only can judge of his great merits from his transcendent reputation and the criticism of classic writers, and also from the works that have come down to us which are supposed to be imitations of his masterpieces. It was his scholars who sculptured the Colossus of Rhodes, the Laocoön, and the Dying Gladiator.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking