Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 26, 2025
Know that in my childhood I had a dear friend, a maiden a few years older than myself, and she had the divine gift of trance which comes from Apollo. Often, gazing into space, her eyes became fixed, and her frame still as a statue's; then a shiver seized her limbs, and prophecy broke from her lips.
Finding in herself, also, no such sweet ashamed emotions as had before now crossed her heart on account of lesser men, she grew grave and troubled; and she said to the king: "Brother, is this love? For I had as lief he were away as here; and when he is here he kisses my hand as though it were a statue's hand; and and I feel as though it were. They say you know what love is. Is this love?"
Several times before the afternoon had waned she snatched a moment to fling herself down at the statue's feet and pray her foolish little prayer over again. We think we are quite sure that it is a foolish little prayer, when people pray to have torn lace made whole. But it would be hard to show the odds between asking that, and asking that it may rain, or that the sick may get well.
"You say you can strike me dead," she said: "I'm sure I hope you can! And the sooner the better for I will not leave this room!" The dreamy smile still curved the statue's lips, in terrible contrast to the inflexible purpose of her next words. "You have called down your own destruction," she said, "and death shall be yours!" "Stop a bit," cried Leander, "mind what you're doing!
Surely, we must succeed for the Little Statue's prayers were following me and I bounded on with a faith as buoyant as the priest's blind trust. Thus we ran through the moon-shafted woods pursuing the flitting, lithe figures of trapper and Indian, who scarce disturbed a fern leaf, while Father Holland and I floundered through the underbrush like ramping elephants.
Angelica slowly unclasped her hands from behind her head, let her chin sink on her chest, and looked up from under her eyebrows at her aunt. Her eyes were bright, but otherwise her face was as still as a statue's, and what she thought or felt it was impossible to say. "It is idle to talk of choice," she answered coldly. "I had chosen honestly, I told you; you see what has come of it!"
A wise old philosopher was walking through the park with a young man and his true love when they came upon a beautiful statue of a Nereid. "Come here," he said to the youth, "and touch this statue." The young man put his hand on the statue's arm and felt of it closely, though he did not seem surprised at what he found.
Indeed, at first sight, one might almost conjecture that the original chalk study was a genuine work of Raffaello, aiming at rivalry with Michelangelo's manner. The calm beauty of the statue's classic profile, the refinement of all the faces, the exquisite delicacy of the adolescent forms, and the dominant veiling of strength with grace, are not precisely Michelangelesque.
That was a glory of the past. He had no successor. The thought was chilling; the solitariness of childlessness to an aged man, chief of a most ancient and martial House, and proud of his blood, gave him the statue's outlook on a desert, and made him feel that he was no more than a whirl of the dust, settling to the dust. He listened to the parson curiously and consentingly. We are ashes.
Among the Colleoni statue's great admirers was Robert Browning, who never tired of telling the story of the hero to those unacquainted with it. The vast church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo does for the Dominicans what the Frari does for the Franciscans; the two churches being the Venetian equivalents of Florence's S. Maria Novella and Santa Croce.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking