Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Don't tell me you thought it up all by yourself, you word-painter! Miss Chubbsy Chubbins! Where's she work?" Bean saw release. "Little manicure party," he confessed; "certain shop not far from here. Think I'm going to put you wise?" Bulger was pleased at the implication. "Ain't got a friend, has she?" "No," said Bean. "Never did have one.
He was pre-eminently a profound thinker, a severe critic, a great word-painter, a man of uncommon original gifts, who aroused and instructed his generation.
No professional word-painter has ever put a dramatic scene, a contention, a battle, such as those which were everyday occurrences in Scotland at that time, upon paper with more pictorial force, or with half the fervour of life and reality. The writer goes through all the gamut of popular passion.
In fact, an artist's picture of a mirage would be his picture of a level-brimmed, unruffled lake; also, the most skilful word-painter, in attempting to contrast the appearance of water with that of its fac-simile, would become as confused and hazy as any clergyman taxed to differentiate his creed from that of the mollah running the opposition.
Villemain declared their author to be "the most original of geniuses in French literature, the foremost of prose satirists; inexhaustible in details of manners and customs, a word-painter like Tacitus; the author of a language of his own, lacking in accuracy, system, and art, yet an admirable writer."
They stand alone in English, and there is not their like in any other language. Yet Hawthorne is not a word-painter like Browning and Carlyle, but obtains his pictorial effect by simple accuracy of description, a more difficult process than the other, but also more satisfactory. His eyes penetrate the masks and wrappings which cover human nature, as the Rontgen rays penetrate the human body.
According to the same authority, he "was not a deep thinker, but he was a great word-painter ... he has the inspiration as well as the contortions of the Sibyl, the strength as well as the nodosities of the oak. ... In the French Revolution he rarely condescends to plain narrative ... it resembles a drama at the Porte St.
Men who had made their reputations as special descriptive writers were mobilised from distant corners of Europe and the further side of the Atlantic in order to enrich with their pens the daily printed records of the case; one word-painter, who specialised in descriptions of how witnesses turn pale under cross-examination, was summoned hurriedly back from a famous and prolonged murder trial in Sicily, where indeed his talents were being decidedly wasted.
He was a word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its surfaces. Cradled "in a covered wagon pointing West," mingling with wild frontier life from Alaska to Nicaragua, miner, Indian fighter, hermit, poseur in London and Washington, then hermit again in California, the author of "Songs of the Sierras" at least knew his material.
What gave his rare qualities their most advantageous field, not merely for the display of their peculiar superiorities, but for keeping their fruit sound and sweet, was that he is the historian of hell, purgatory, and heaven of the world to come such as it was pictured in his day, and as it has been pictured more or less ever since the word-painter of that visionary, awful hereafter, the thought of which has ever been a spell.
Word Of The Day