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Porphyry   Listen
noun
Porphyry  n.  (pl. porphyries)  (Geol.) A term used somewhat loosely to designate a rock consisting of a fine-grained base (usually feldspathic) through which crystals, as of feldspar or quartz, are disseminated. There are red, purple, and green varieties, which are highly esteemed as marbles.
Porphyry shell (Zool.), a handsome marine gastropod shell (Oliva porphyria), having a dark red or brown polished surface, marked with light spots, like porphyry.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Porphyry" Quotes from Famous Books



... seen the same kinds of hills in latitude 29 degrees, longitude 120 degrees. Bare granite rocks sometimes in the vicinity, though not attached. (May 4th.) : Two small specimens of Micaceous Iron-ore with brown Haematite. Impossible to state the age. Similar ore occurs in Victoria, in Elvans in Porphyry, but it also occurs ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest

... on the above-mentioned Feast of the Assumption, small beer having been served to the novices in the proportion of one quart to each four, the said brother John did drain the pot at one draught to the detriment of brother Paul, brother Porphyry and brother Ambrose, who could scarce eat their none-meat of salted stock-fish on account of ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... church or another. I believe In one Priest, and one temple with its floors Of shining jasper gloom'd at morn and eve By countless knees of earnest auditors, And crystal walls too lucid to perceive, That none may take the measure of the place And say "So far the porphyry, then, the flint— To this mark mercy goes, and there ends grace," Though still the permeable crystals hint At some white starry distance, bathed in space. I feel how nature's ice-crusts keep the dint Of undersprings of silent Deity. I hold the articulated gospels ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... not harder than Porphyry or Agate, the Chisel of my love, drove by the Mallet of my fidelity, would have made some impression on thee. I, that have shaped as I pleased the most untoward of substances, hoped by the Compass of reason, the Plummet of discretion, the Saw of constancy, the soft File of ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... strictly ethical views of PLOTINUS, the chief representative of the school, are found mainly in the first of the six Enneads into which Porphyry collected his master's essays. But as they presuppose the cosmological and psychological doctrines, their place in the works, as now arranged, is to be regarded as arbitrary. The soul having fallen from ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... heavy eyebrows ended at the wide nostrils; the mouth was a crescent, but bowed downwards; the heavy shoulders were rounded. Indeed, the only straight line to be discerned about him was that of his hair, black as bitumen, banged across his forehead; even his polished porphyry eyes were constructed on some curvilinear principle, and never seemed to focus. It might be said of Mr. Gorse that he had an overwhelming impersonality. One could never be quite sure that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... Mesozoic series, from the Lias to the Upper Cretaceous, appears to be represented without a break of more than local importance. The deposits are marine, consisting mainly of sandstone and limestone, together with tuffs and conglomerates of porphyry and porphyrite. These porphyritic rocks form a characteristic feature of the southern Andes, and were at one time supposed to be metamorphic; but they are certainly volcanic, and as they contain marine fossils they ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... higher ranges, are without exception limestone of the early cretaceous period, the valleys and gorges are filled with formations of every possible variety, sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous. Down many of them run long streams of trap or basalt; occasionally there are dykes of porphyry and greenstone, and then patches of sandstone, before the limestone and flint recur."[133] Some slopes are composed entirely of soft sandstone; many patches are of a hard metallic-sounding trap or porphyry; but ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... baby would be in the hall to greet him; but on this occasion he was disappointed. To be sure the appetizing odour of gedampftes kalbfleisch wafted itself down the elevator shaft as he entered the gilt and plaster-porphyry entrance from the street, but when he crossed the threshold of his own apartment the robust wail of his son and heir mingled with the tones of Lina, the Slavic maid. Of Mrs. Perlmutter, however, there ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass

... time-worn stone and these wildflowers are but poor memorials {3} of one so great as Keats; most of all, too, in this city of Rome, which pays such honour to her dead; where popes, and emperors, and saints, and cardinals lie hidden in 'porphyry wombs,' or couched in baths of jasper and chalcedony and malachite, ablaze with precious stones and metals, and tended with continual service. For very noble is the site, and worthy of a noble monument; behind looms the grey pyramid, symbol of ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... amongst them, of which mode, indeed, Mesmer seems to have been the original discoverer. The ancients, too, were aware (as we are) that the magnetic and divining state can be produced only in young and somewhat simple (simpliciores) persons. Porphyry confirms this in his remarkable letter to the Egyptian priest of Anubis (to which I earnestly direct the physiologists), in which he asks, "Wherefore it happens that only simple (aplontxronz kai nxonz) ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... Mr. Monville's, a house divided into small apartments, furnished with effeminate and minute elegance.—Porphyry. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... poured into Germany, and which, at a later date, were made use of by the hordes of barbarians when rushing into the ancient Roman world; at another, on its surface it floated peaceably the fir-trees of Murg and of Saint Gall, the porphyry and the marble of Bale, the salt of Karlshall, the leather of Stromberg, the quicksilver of Lansberg, the wine of Johannisberg, the slates of Coab, the cloth and earthenware of Wallendar, the silks and linens of Cologne. It majestically ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... life, supporting the springers of the arches, mixed groups of loins and chests with swelling muscles, under the electric lights, and, in the lobbies, a lavish display of African onyx, Scotch granite and Russian porphyry. The crowd would pass in between Venus and Apollo, holding flowers and lights; and there would be music everywhere; gaiety, noise, red and gold everywhere; all cares would be laid aside and forgotten on entering; ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne

... serpent, lizard, antelope, nor ostrich—the usual inhabitants of the most dreary deserts. There is no sort of water—even the birds seem to avoid the place as pestilential—the sun was burning hot." In a few days the scene changed, and Bruce is noting that in four days he passes more granite, porphyry, marble, and jasper than would build Rome, Athens, Corinth, Memphis, Alexandria, and half a dozen more. At last after a week's travel they reached Cossier, the little mud-walled village on the shores of the Red Sea. Here Bruce embarked in a small boat, the planks of which ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... in Paris to young Foch, in all the depression he found there, was undoubtedly the great Dome des Invalides, where, bathed in an unearthly radiance and surrounded by faded battle flags, lies the great porphyry sarcophagus of ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin

... steps up at the third pier past the tower, and three at the fourth or point of the junction of the apse. In Dean Goulburn's time, the sanctuary space was enlarged by being brought forward one bay. The present floor, designed by Sir A.W. Blomfield in glass mosaic and porphyry, was executed by Powell Brothers. Then also was added the somewhat elaborate communicants' rail, executed in bronze and spars. In enlarging the sanctuary, Dean Goulburn moved the three steps from the fourth pier past the tower to the third, and at the same time ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell

... the Swiss village, of which Louis XVI. had been the miller, the Count of Provence the schoolmaster, the Count of Artois the gamekeeper, the village with its merry mill, the dairy where the cream filled porphyry vessels on marble tables, the laundry where the clothes were beaten with ebony sticks, the granary to which led mahogany ladders, the sheep-house where the sheep were shorn with golden shears. They saw once more the grass sprinkled ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... Byzantium heard of me he left his porphyry chamber and set sail in his galleys. His slaves bare no torches that none might know of his coming. When the King of Cyprus heard of me he sent me ambassadors. The two Kings of Libya who are brothers brought me gifts ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde

... which was prodigious, besides various other sacred edifices, and four lofty pyramids at the angles of the walls. The entrance was by vast halls, followed by saloons, which conducted to grand porticos, the ascent to which was by a flight of ninety steps. The interior was decorated with columns of porphyry and colossal statues of Egyptian gods. The whole was surrounded by a wall, but the passages were so intricate that no stranger could find the way without a guide. The substructions of this famous labyrinth ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner

... porphyry blocks with quaint grecques and much hieroglyphic painting. Already unpacked were half a dozen copper axes, some of the first of that particular style that had ever been brought to the United States. Besides the sculptured stones and the mosaics were ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve

... seasons change, And order, truth, and beauty range, Adjust, attract, and fill: The grass the polyanthus checks; And polished porphyry ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... named in honor of Queen Caroline, who furnished the books for the altar and pulpit, the plate, and two solid mahogany chairs, which are still in use in St. John's. Within the chancel rail is a curious font of porphyry, taken by Colonel John Tufton Mason at the capture of Senegal from the French in 1758, and presented to the Episcopal Society on 1761. The peculiarly sweet-toned bell which calls the parishioners of St. John's together every Sabbath is, I believe, the same that formerly ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... St. Peter's shrine look dim and yellow in the fulness of its radiance; and of colour combined of friezes of burnished gold, and brilliant frescoes, and rich altar pieces, and bronze statues, and slabs of oriental alabaster, and blocks of red porphyry and lapis lazuli, and guilded vaulted ceiling, and walls ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... me a palace fit to receive the Princess Buddir al Buddoor. Let its materials be made of nothing less than porphyry, jasper, agate, lapis-lazuli, and the finest marble. Let its walls be massive gold and silver bricks laid alternately. Let each front contain six windows, and let the lattices of these (except one, which must be left unfinished) be enriched ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten

... of statues and flowers and fountains, Vases of onyx and jasper from Indian emperors sent; Pictures out of the heart of tropical sunlit mountains, Of rocks of porphyry piled at the gates ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean

... of Alus, and then went forward again between bare walls of greyish-green and red porphyry. These cliffs rose higher and higher, but from time to time, above the lower range, they could see the rugged summit of some giant of the range, though, bowed under their heavy loads, they ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... hang for that very purpose right above the gorge. When we raised our eyes toward the crests we stood dazzled and stupefied by what we saw. They looked red and notched like festoons of coral, for all the summits are made of porphyry; and the sky overhead seemed violet, lilac, discolored by the vicinity of these strange mountains. Lower down the granite was of scintillating gray, and under our feet it seemed rasped, pounded; we were walking over shining powder. ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant

... masterpiece after masterpiece till art itself became hateful at last and enthusiasm died. He came upon a Madonna by Raphael, but he was tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio never received the glance it demanded of him. A priceless vase of antique porphyry carved round about with pictures of the most grotesquely wanton of Roman divinities, the pride of some Corinna, scarcely drew a ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... of the theory of general language is the subject of what is termed the doctrine of the Predicables; a set of distinctions handed down from Aristotle, and his follower Porphyry, many of which have taken a firm root in scientific, and some of them even in popular, phraseology. The predicables are a fivefold division of General Names, not grounded as usual on a difference in their meaning, that is, in the attribute which they connote, but on a difference in the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... the caps and sills, cannot well be made of these rough hard heads and cobbles that are scattered over the fields, or from quarry chips. And here will arise the question of cost. It would seem decidedly grand to use for the corners substantial blocks of hewn stone,—sandstone, granite, marble, or porphyry,—channelled and chamfered, rock-faced, tooled, rubbed, or decorated; key-stones and voussoirs embellished with your monogram or enriched by any other charming device you choose to invent; bands of encaustic tile, brilliant in color and pattern, belts ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner

... of Magi enumerated by Porphyry, abstained from wine and women, and the first of these ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... foolish enough to argue with him. I had talked with others about the mine of Injun Jim, and one man (who owned cattle and called mines a gamble) told me that he doubted the whole story. A prospectors' bubble, he called it. Free gold, he insisted, did not belong in this particular formation; it ran in porphyry, he said,—and then he ran into mineralogy too technical for me now. I repeated his statement, however, ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... in hussar uniform, and holding his horse, by Allan of Edinburgh, a noble portrait, over the fireplace; and the only bust is that of Shakspeare, from the Avon monument, in a small niche in the centre of the east side. On a rich stand of porphyry, in one corner, reposes a tall silver urn, filled with bones from the Piraeus, and bearing the inscription, "Given by George Gordon, Lord Byron, to Sir Walter Scott, Bart." It contained the letter which accompanied the gift till lately: it has disappeared; no one ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various

... dimensions in the transparent atmosphere of Arizona. Siva's Temple, for example, stands upon a platform four or five miles square, from which rise domes and pinnacles a thousand feet in height. Some of their summits call to mind immense sarcophagi of jasper or of porphyry, as if they were the burial-places of dead deities, and the Grand Canon a Necropolis for pagan gods. Yet, though the greater part of the population of the world could be assembled here, one sees no worshipers, save an occasional devotee of Nature, ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard

... XII (who himself belonged to the Corsini family and who was an uncle of Cardinal Corsini) is in a niche between two columns of porphyry, and there is a bronze statue of the Pope. On the opposite side is a statue of Cardinal Corsini, and in the crypt below are tombs of the Corsini family. On the altar—always lighted—is a "Pieta" by Bernini, of which the face of the Christ is ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... ether, broke in two, and the ravished Sun, like the eye of a Venus floating through her ancient heavens—for she once stood even here—looked mildly in from the upper deep; then a holy radiance filled the temple, and burned on the porphyry of the pavement, and Albano looked around him in an ecstasy of wonder and delight, and said with low voice: "How transfigured at this moment is everything in this sacred place! Raphael's spirit comes forth from his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... Landor. Dear Abbe, porphyry is heavy, gold is heavier; Ossa and Olympus are rough and unequal; the steppes of Tartary, though high, are of uniform elevation: there is not a rock, nor a birch, nor a cytisus, nor an arbutus upon them great enough to shelter a new-dropped lamb. Level the Alps one with another, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... themselves to the view. This task was reserved for men who were born indeed in a baser age, but, who being allotted a nature similar to their leader, were the true interpreters of his mystic speculations. The most conspicuous of these are the great Plotinus, the most learned Porphyry, the divine Jamblichus, the most acute Syrianus, Proclus the consummation of philosophic excellence, the magnificent Hierocles, the concisely elegant Sallust, and the most inquisitive Damascius. By these men, who were truly links of the golden chain ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... amid the ruins of an Eastern city, men find a slab of porphyry or malachite so gorgeously grained, that not many whole and perfect works of art can stand undimmed and undiminished beside it. Such is ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... older and harder than the rocks of the plains; and as you travel from the south to the north, the older and harder they become. The highest mountains of Wales, and some of its hills, have crests of the very oldest and hardest rock—granite, porphyry, and basalt; and these rocks are given their form by fire. But the greater part of the country is made of rocks formed by water—still the oldest of their kind. In the north-west, centre, and west—about two-thirds of the whole country,—the rocks are chiefly ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards

... the University of Paris at first forbade the study of the new Aristotle, but it soon became universal in the medieval universities. In addition to the works of Aristotle, as they were known in the Middle Ages, medieval students read such books as Porphyry's Isagoge, or Introduction to Aristotle; the criticism of Aristotle's Categories, by Gilbert de la Porree, known as the Sex Principia; the Summulae Logicales, a semi-grammatical, semi-logical treatise by Petrus Hispanus (Pope John XXI.); the Parva Logicalia of Marsilius ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait

... Assyrian Queen to the British Mercantile Company, have overrun and plundered India, but have left it the same unintelligible, unchangeable, and marvellous country as before. It is the same land now which the soldiers of Alexander described,—the land of grotto temples dug out of solid porphyry; of one of the most ancient Pagan religions of the world; of social distinctions fixed and permanent as the earth itself; of the sacred Ganges; of the idols of Juggernaut, with its bloody worship; the land of elephants and tigers; of fields of rice and groves of palm; of treasuries ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... of snowy gleam, with marble domes and jeweled arabesques, and the hush of prayer under columned aisles. "Here are sold wine, liquor and tobacco," was written where once verses of the Koran had been blazoned by reverent hands along porphyry cornices and capitals of jasper. A Cafe Chantant reared its impudent little roof where once, far back in the dead cycles, Phoenician warriors had watched the galleys of the gold-haired favorite of the gods bear down to smite her against whom ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... Gothic, and Egyptian versions, as well as by [Symbol: Aleph]BDL[Symbol: Delta], and (according to Tischendorf) by nearly twenty-five cursives; besides the following ancient writers: Irenaeus, Origen, Porphyry, Titus, Basil, Serapion, Epiphanius, Severianus, Victor, Eusebius, Victorinus, Jerome, Augustine. I proceed to shew that this imposing array of authorities for reading [Greek: en to Esaia to prophete] instead of [Greek: en tois prophetais] in St. Mark i. 2, which has certainly imposed upon every ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... moraine about two hundred yards in length and fifty feet wide. It rests on sandstone about fifteen feet above the present sea-level and the boulders consist of polished and sub-angular blocks of sandstone and porphyry of various sizes. It evidently belongs to the valley or to a later stage of glaciation. The rocks along the coast are all a volcanic series, and basic dykes are ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... should have said, we learn from Porphyry, the Tyrian, who was a kind of Boswell to Plotinus. The philosopher himself often reminds me of Dr. Johnson, especially as Dr. Johnson is described by Mr. Carlyle. Just as the good doctor was a sound Churchman ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang

... work, were the richly-mounted tables, having slabs of Egyptian porphyry, or Florentine marble mosaic; and marqueterie cabinets, with beautiful mountings of ormolu, or gilt bronze. Commodes and screens were ornamented with Chinese lacquer, which had been imported by the Dutch and taken to Paris, after the ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield

... Vallambrosa. It was first used to counterfeit marbles; and the altar of St. Antonio, in the church of St. Nicolo, at Carpi, is still preserved as a monument of extraordinary skill and beauty. It consists of two columns, representing porphyry, and adorned with a pallium, embroidered as it were with lace; while it is ornamented in the margin with medals bearing ...
— The Lady's Album of Fancy Work for 1850 • Unknown

... shone With richest tracery, the beams were bound In golden coverings; no scant veneer Lay on its walls, but built in solid blocks Of marble, gleamed the palace. Agate stood In sturdy columns, bearing up the roof; Onyx and porphyry on the spacious floor Were trodden 'neath the foot; the mighty gates Of Maroe's throughout were formed, He mere adornment; ivory clothed the hall, And fixed upon the doors with labour rare Shells of the tortoise gleamed, from Indian seas, With frequent emeralds studded. Gems of ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... strikingly the case with the Scarabaeus which, under the hands of the Etruscan cutter, lost at once all specific character. He might be Scarabaeus anything: he is not pilularius; and, instead of being made of basalt, porphyry, smalt, and very rarely of pietra dura, as in Egypt, he is engraved in carnelian, onyx, sardonyx, and all the rare and lovely varieties of pietra dura,—which, being essentially the same, change their names with their colors,—but mainly in an opaque carnelian, admirably calculated to show ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... still surrounded its own neighbourhood with poisonous fumes; and that I was approaching it. I must have somehow crawled, or dragged myself forward. There is an impression on my mind that it was a purple land of pure porphyry; there is some faint memory, or dream, of hearing a long-drawn booming of waves upon its crags: I do not know whence I have them. I think that I remember retching with desperate jerks of the travailing intestines; also that I ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... enriched with silver daisies, which Michelangelo had designed for Margaret of Navarre. The jewelled crucifix was gone, together with the old chain bible and ebony lectern from the Cistercian Monastery at La Trappe. The curious chalice, too, of porphyry starred with beryl, taken at the sack of Panama, and recovered a century later from an inn at Saragossa, had disappeared from its place; and where illuminated missals and monkish books had formerly lain upon the long window seat were works dealing with the war, associated ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer

... anciently made of plates of copper and lead, the bark of trees, bricks, Stones, and wood. Josephus speaks of two columns, the one of stone, the other of brick, on which the children of Seth wrote their inventions and astronomical discoveries. Porphyry mentions some pillars, preserved in Crete, on which the ceremonies observed by the Corybantes in their sacrifices were recorded. The leaves of the palm-tree were used, and the finest and thinnest part of the bark of such trees as the lime, the ash, the maple, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various

... the Eastern nations before it was introduced into Europe. The Hindoos were especially skilled in the art of making steel, as indeed they are to this day; and it is supposed that the tools with which the Egyptians covered their obelisks and temples of porphyry and syenite with hieroglyphics were made of Indian steel, as probably no other metal was capable of executing such work. The art seems to have been well known in Germany in the Middle Ages, and the process is on the whole very faithfully described by Agricola in ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... In Melcatis and Pi- Hebit also earth-tillers wrecked the houses of Phoenician tenants. At Kasa they refused to repair the canal, declaring that pay from the treasury was clue them for that labor. Finally in the porphyry quarries the convicts killed their overseers and tried to escape in a body ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... attributed to Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raffaelle, Correggio, Titian and other old masters. Statues by Canova, Thorwaldsen, Chantrey and R.J. Wyatt are included among the sculptures. In the state apartments the walls and window-panes are in some cases inlaid with marble or porphyry; the woodcarving, marvellous for its intricacy, grace and lightness of effect, is largely the work of Samuel Watson of Heanor (d. 1715). Chatsworth Park is upwards of 11 m. in circuit, and contains many noble forest-trees, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... went home. Opening my classical dictionary at Iamblicus, I read what I certainly had not seen or thought of for more than thirty years, that he was an author on "the mysteries of the Egyptians," and was bracketed with Porphyry as a professor of the black art. Was then this unpleasant visitor to Fitzroy Square no other than that magician redivivus? ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... fires, all the families and associations of men, and makes society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been "blasted with excess of light." The trances of Socrates, the "union" of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in innumerable instances in common life, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... waves swept in close succession, about thirty seconds apart, they snapped, hummed, and buzzed in such a manner that their advance and retreat could be plainly heard. In passing by me, the noise was more of a crackling and humming nature, while a million faint sparks flashed from the stones (porphyry and rhyolite) as the wave passed over. But the effect on me became constant. Every muscle was almost immovable. I could climb only a few steps without weakening to the stopping-point. I breathed only by gasps, and my heart became violent and feeble by turns. I felt as if cinched in a steel ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... (sun) are somewhat cooled off, yet is the heat of the same still so great (some reckoning it at two or six thousand degrees while others hold it incomputable) that absolutely no life can exist within such balls of fire. But after the more solid parts are formed (granite, porphyry, etc.,) gradually by cooling off and contracting, and these are fused together into larger masses, then begin the ribs of the earth-structure, the rocky foundations of the super-structure, and as soon as the development of the earth is ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various

... between octangular towers loopholed and finished battlement style was a covered passage suggestive of Egypt. Two Victories in high relief blew trumpets at each other across the entrance front. Ponderous benches of porphyry, polished smooth by ages of usage, sat one on each side for the guards; fellows in helmets of shining brass, cuirasses of the same material inlaid with silver, greaves, and shoes stoutly buckled. Those of them sitting sprawled their bulky limbs broadly over ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... incomparable slave, who has done me the honor to call here in your service. But now have you given of it the last and highest proof. Never has the wit of man before compounded an essence like that which lies buried in this porphyry vase.' ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... strewed along the shores of the Cromarty Firth. With a big hammer which had belonged to his great-grandfather, an old buccaneer, the boy went about chipping the stones, and accumulating specimens of mica, porphyry, garnet, and such like. Sometimes he had a day in the woods, and there, too, the boy's attention was excited by the peculiar geological curiosities which came in his way. While searching among the rocks on the beach, he was sometimes asked, in irony, by the farm-servants ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon

... polishing of our newly picked up mementos from the ruins went on, which was as subtle as that of flowers. A man or two, hoary with marble-dust and ennobled by the "bloom" of it, stood tall and sad about the wheel, and we handed to these refined creatures our treasures of giallo-antico and porphyry and other marbles picked up "for remembrance" (and no doubt once pressed by a Caesar's foot or met by a Caesar's glance), in order to observe the fresh color leap to the ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... various colours is to be found, and also enormous quantities of mica and amianth; porphyry and porphyroid granite, carbonated and hydroxided iron, ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... their turn, however much they may protest against the heap of fabulous gods and, like Plato and Porphyry, declare that there exists but one God, soul of the universe, yet they no less accepted the minor gods, and intermediaries or messengers betwixt gods and men, whom they called demons. These hybrid beings, who pertained to humanity by their passions, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... remote future than others. The Ateucus sacer intends to consume the provisions he prepares almost immediately. Yet he acts in so careful a manner that I cannot pass him in silence. This beetle is the sacred Scarabaeus so venerated by the Egyptians, who have everywhere reproduced his image in porphyry and granite. He is a most singular insect. The celebrated Fabre has given a complete and very picturesque history of his customs.[54] I have myself had an opportunity of seeing him at work. It was in Persia, in the plain of Susiana, on a hot morning in March. We had ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... stone carving as decorates the outside. There are beautiful "Rose" windows close to the ground, and the Lilies of France, of course, are everywhere. The chief drawing-room is a charming room, hung with pale yellow satin damask, and with beautiful Louis Quinze furniture. The porphyry hall is considered one of the sights, the roof, walls, and floor are all ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden

... ornamental Swiss roof has been built, is in a valley close to a clear, rushing river, which emerges a little higher up from an inaccessible chasm of great sublimity. One side of the valley is formed by cliffs and terraces of porphyry as red as the reddest new brick, and at sunset blazing into vermilion. Through rifts in the nearer ranges there are glimpses of pine-clothed peaks, which, towards twilight, pass through every shade of purple and violet. The sky and the earth ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird

... fruit. If there is any great and good thing in store for you, it will not come at the first or the second call, nor in the shape of fashion, ease, and city drawing-rooms. Popularity is for dolls. "Steep and craggy," said Porphyry, "is the path of the gods." Open your Marcus Antoninus. In the opinion of the ancients, he was the great man who scorned to shine, and who contested the frowns of Fortune. They preferred the noble vessel too late for the tide, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... on and on of porphyry walls and contact veins, gray copper and ruby silver, and sulphurets and pyrites of iron, but when my eye kindled with the majestic beauty of these eternal battlements and my voice trembled a little with awe and wonder; while my heart throbbed and thrilled in the midst of nature's eloquent, ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... the princess retired into a large room of marble and porphyry, where several bubbling fountains, refreshed the air with an agreeable coolness. As soon as she entered the music began, a sumptuous supper was served up, and the birds from several aviaries on each side of the room, of which Abricotina had the chief care, opened ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik

... order. With these pauper princes his children intermarried, and he fed them with his crumbs and clothed them with scraps of his purple. The visitor can see today, in every one of their dwarf palaces, some of his malachite vases or porcelain bowls or porphyry columns. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... PLOTINUS.—Plotinus had as pupils and successors, amongst others, Porphyry and Iamblichus. Porphyry achieves little except the exposition of the doctrine of his master, and shows originality only as a logician. Iamblichus and his school made a most interesting effort to revive exhausted and expiring paganism and to constitute a philosophic paganism. The philosophers ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... of a mountain formed of marine deposits, and which has been raised by subterraneous fire, and those large and singular veins which you see at the base and rising through the substance of the strata are composed of volcanic porphyry, and offer a most striking and beautiful example of the generation and structure of ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... Celsus was in the second century, Porphyry became in the third. His work, which was a large and formal treatise against the Christian religion, is not extant. We must be content, therefore, to gather his objections from Christian writers, who have noticed in order to answer them; ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... works have therefore been able to resist the damp and to preserve their colour very well without suffering any change. With the same mixture he worked on peperino-stone, white and variegated marble, porphyry, and slabs of other very hard kinds of stone, materials on which paintings can last a very long time; not to mention that this has shown how one may paint on silver, copper, tin, and ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari

... must be the thing itself, and not merely talk about it or look at it. We must be in love if we are to know what love is; we must be musicians if we are to know what music is; we must be godlike if we are to know what God is. For, in Porphyry's words: "Like is known only by like, and the condition of all knowledge is that the subject should become like to the object." So that to the mystic, whether he be philosopher, poet, artist, or priest, the ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon

... Zoroaster Pythagoras Zeno Buddha Isaiah Daniel Empedocles Socrates Plato Aristotle Porphyry John Wesley Franklin Goldsmith Ray Paley Isaac Newton Jean Paul Richter Schopenhauer Byron Gleizes Hartley Rousseau Iamblichus Hypatia Diogenes Quintus Sextus Ovid Plutarch Seneca Apollonius The Apostles Matthew James James the Less Peter The Christian Fathers Clement Tertullian Origen Chrysostom ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon

... three hundred and sixty-five Churches of Rome, I have as yet visited but four, and may find time to see as many more of the most noteworthy. They seem richer in Sculpture, Porphyry, Mosaic, Carving, Tapestry, &c. than anything elsewhere well can be; but not equal in Architecture to the finest Churches in Genoa, the Cathedral at Pisa, and I think not externally to Notre Dame at Paris. Indeed, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... reach, beneath as clear And blue a heaven as ever blest this sphere, Gardens and pillared streets and porphyry domes And high-built temples, fit to be the homes Of mighty gods, and pyramids whose hour Outlasts all time, above the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... laughter had the lilt Of chiming waters that are spilt In sprays of spurted melody From founts of carven porphyry, And in the billowy turbulence Of her dusk hair drowned soul and sense— Dark ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis

... great Element, which is to space What Ocean is to Earth, spreads its blue depths, Softened with the first breathings of the spring; The high Moon sails upon her beauteous way, Serenely smoothing o'er the lofty walls Of those tall piles and sea-girt palaces,[ef] Whose porphyry pillars, and whose costly fronts, Fraught with the Orient spoil of many marbles, Like altars ranged along the broad canal, Seem each a trophy of some mighty deed 80 Reared up from out the waters, scarce less strangely Than those more massy and mysterious giants Of architecture, those Titanian ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... mountain scenery afforded. Around us on every side rose up lofty peaks and rugged heights, prominent among which appeared the snow-capped, truncated peak of Cotopaxi, looking like a vast sugar-loaf. The rocks, too—huge masses of porphyry—were broken into all sorts of shapes, and were of every variety of colour, from dark brown to the brightest lilac, green, purple, and red, and others of a clear white, producing a very curious and beautiful effect, and at the same ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... be found only in limestone; but now that he has sent to the Academie specimens of gneiss and mica schist, containing pholades, on which the acid has no effect, he conceives that they must have entered by boring. They have also been found in porphyry—a fact of which Brongniart said, many years ago, that nature had concealed the explanation, and we must wait for a solution. Whether M. Cailliaud's solution be the true one or not, is a point that will soon be verified or disproved by geologists and naturalists, who ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various

... Genoese estates in Acre,[2] and this flame was blown by other unlucky occurrences. Acre suffered grievously.[3] Venice at this time generally kept the upper hand, beating Genoa by land and sea, and driving her from Acre altogether. Four ancient porphyry figures from St. Sabba's were sent in triumph to Venice, and with their strange devices still stand at the exterior corner of St. Mark's, towards ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... tells his translator[82] that the only books worth studying are those of Aristotle and his true commentators, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Averroes. Alfarabi and Avicenna are also important, but other writings, such as those of Empedocles, Pythagoras, Hermes, Porphyry, represent a pre-Aristotelian philosophy which is obsolete, and are a waste of time. The books of Isaac Israeli on the "Elements" and on "Definitions," are no better, seeing that Israeli was only a physician and no philosopher. He is not familiar with the "Microcosmus" ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik

... upon thy shores! Over thy broad savannahs I spur my noble steed, whose joyous neigh tells that he too is inspired by the scene. I rest under the shade of the corozo palm, and quaff the wine of the acrocomia. I climb thy mountains of amygdaloid and porphyry— thy crags of quartz, that yield the white silver and the yellow gold. I cross thy fields of lava, rugged in outline, and yet more rugged with their coverture of strange vegetable forms—acacias and cactus, yuccas and zamias. I traverse thy table-plains through bristling ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... new and more magnificent one, which we shall examine more {58} closely presently, was prepared by the same Italian workmen who were employed on the pavement, and afterwards to decorate the tombs of Henry III. and Queen Eleanor of Castile. The materials—the mosaic, the coloured marbles, and the porphyry—used for this beautiful pavement, which was put down in 1268, as well as for the royal tombs, were, like the designers and craftsmen themselves, brought from Rome by Abbot Ware, who, with his successor, Abbot Wenlock, lies beneath the mosaic work which ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... streets of Nehardea." He arranged the Jewish Calendar, his work in this direction being perfected by Hillel II in the fourth century. Like Simlai, Rab and Samuel had heathen and Christian friends. Origen and Jerome read the Scriptures under the guidance of Jews. The heathen philosopher Porphyry wrote a commentary on the Book of Daniel. So, too, Abbahu, who lived in Palestine a little later on, frequented the society of cultivated Romans, and had his family taught Greek. Abbahu was a manufacturer of veils for women's wear, for, like many Amoraim, ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams

... Egyptians, with explanatory passages from the ritual of the dead. Rudely-sculptured bas-reliefs and intaglios, torn from ancient mastabas, were set over windows and doors, and stone colossi of kings and gods leered and threatened from dusky corners. Sarcophagi of black basalt, red porphyry and pink-veined alabaster, cunningly carved, were disposed as they had been found in the pits of the dead, with the sepulchral vases and the hideous wooden ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer

... walls of massive masonry which increase in height as the hill rises. This passage leads to a vertical facade 46 feet high, pierced by a door between 17 and 18 feet in height, which was bordered by columns carrying a cornice, above which was a triangular relieving space, masked by slabs of red porphyry adorned with spiral decorations, while the whole facade appears to have been enriched with bronze ornaments and coloured marbles. The massive lintel of the door is 29 feet 6 inches long, 16 feet 6 inches deep, and 3 feet 4 inches high, ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... his cheek had rained the morning light, Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night, Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth, Or stretched ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... was the custom of the Regents to dictate, to the students their observations on such parts of the writings of Aristotle, Porphyry, and others, as were read in their classes. This was done in Latin which was the only language allowed to be used by the students even in their common conversation. At a meeting of commissioners ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... was, for work of that kind. In oil painting, its unctuous quality is to be delighted in; in fresco, its chalky quality; in glass, its transparency; in wood, its grain; in marble, its softness; in porphyry, its hardness; in iron, its toughness. In a flint country, one should feel the delightfulness of having flints to pick up, and fasten together into rugged walls. In a marble country, one should be always more and more astonished at ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... which is often a great resource in like cases, ascribing to him an intrinsic devoutness, a hidden substantial sanctity compatible with the utmost latitudes of heterodoxy; a bedrock of devout gneiss or porphyry hidden under a mere alluvium of modern freethinking; a reality—if the truth were known—of St. Francis of Assisi behind a mask of Voltaire. Her hearer only half followed her reasoning, but that mattered little, as she was brimming with assent to anything Gwen advanced, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... I saw the well-proportioned pillars,[44] with their good capitals of green and red porphyry (Gassenstein) which Charles the Great had brought from Rome thither and there set up. They are correctly made according ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... has portions, which may be said to verify what we have read, in boyish days, of the wonder-working powers of the lamp of Aladdin. Here are porphyry and granite, and rosewood, and satin-wood, porcelaine, and or-molu ornaments, in all their varieties of unsullied splendor. A magnificent vestibule, and marble staircase; a concert room; an assembly-room; ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... porphyry, gneiss and basalt, deposits which are still found upon the earth in immense quantities, and in the same condition as thousands of ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... all, a vegetable dietary is not popular. Doubtless a less frequent use of fleshly food would be greatly to our advantage as a people. But utter abstinence is out of the question. A vegetable diet, however, has great authorities in its favor, both ancient and modern. Plautus, Plutarch, Porphyry of Tyre, Lord Bacon, Sir William Temple, Cicero, Cyrus the Great, Pope, Newton, and Shelley have all left their testimony in favor of it and of simplicity of living. Poor Shelley, who in his abstract moods forgot ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... The Romans introduced many innovations in the general use and treatment of the orders. Monolithic shafts were preferred to those built up of superposed drums. The fluting was omitted on these, and when hard and semi-precious stone like porphyry or verd-antique was the material, it was highly polished to bring out its color. These polished monoliths were often of great size, and they were used in almost ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... fended the canoes off the sides, and assisted our progress by pushing against the rock with bamboos. These precipitous rocks were all primitive, frequently of granite and gneiss, and mixed in many places with red porphyry. In the clefts were beautiful ever-greens of every tint, including giant euphorbias; and wherever a rivulet or spring glittered through the dark foliage of a ravine, it was shaded by the graceful and ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... how does all this apply here. For surely never was there plainer writing; there are a thousand charms of sun and moonbeam, ripple, and wave, and stormy billow, but all on the surface. Had Chapman read Proclus and Porphyry?—and did he really believe them,—or even that they believed themselves? They felt the immense power of a Bible, a Shaster, a Koran. There was none in Greece or Rome, and they tried therefore by subtle allegorical accommodations to conjure the poem of Homer into the [Greek (transliterated): ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... alabaster jars, Fragments of porphyry and Persian tiles, Lie heaped in ruin, and at our dismay The old Turk shrugs ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West

... Norman work in them. They are, every atom, done by Greeks, and are as pure Greek as the temple of AEgina; but more rich and refined. I drew with accurate care, and with measured profile of every moulding, the tomb built for Roger II. (afterwards Frederick II. was laid in its dark porphyry). And it is a perfect type of the Greek-Christian form of tomb—temple over sarcophagus, in which the pediments rise gradually, as time goes on, into acute angles—get pierced in the gable with foils, and their sculptures thrown outside on their flanks, ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin

... centre of a circular chamber of vast dimensions, is an enormous circular basin of porphyry, of forty-one feet in diameter. A superb mosaic adorns the floor of the centre of this chamber, and is inclosed. Appropriate ornaments to this immense chamber are the colossal statues of the Dii majorum Gentium. Here are ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye

... Porphyry says: "By images addressed to sense, the ancients represented God and his powers—by the visible they typified the invisible for those who had learned to read in these types, as in a book, a treatise on the Gods. We need ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... of crimson, or else of puniceus, or blood-red. Gibbon was never more mistaken than when he argued that all the endless disputing about the purpureus of the ancients might have been evaded by attending to its Greek designation, namely, porphyry-colored: since, said he, porphyry is always of the same color. Not at all. Porphyry, I have heard, runs through as large a gamut of hues as marble; but, if this should be an exaggeration, at all events porphyry is far from being so monochromatic as Gibbon's argument would presume. The truth is, colors were as loosely and latitudinarially ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... carried the seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople he set up in the marketplace of the new capital a porphyry pillar which had come from Egypt, and of which a strange tale is told. In a vault beneath he secretly buried the seven sacred emblems of the Roman State, which were guarded by the virgins in the temple of Vesta, with the fire that might never be quenched. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... white. In the centre of all are other black leaves and scrolls in red, damaged by a mediaeval tomb. Three steps led down to the choir, for the singers, sub-deacons, and deacons. It has a plaster floor of a porphyry purple colour, and reaches as far as the third column of the present nave, counting from the east. It was afterwards extended on a lower level, reached by steps on each side, one of which is still in place. The mosaic pavement of this lower nave continues ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson

... needed for the bodies of those who professed to have revolted from heathenism. The marble pillars of the Mausoleum of Constantia were taken from more ancient and nobler buildings, its walls were lined with mosaics, and her body was laid in a splendid sarcophagus of porphyry. In the thirteenth century, after Constantia had been received into the liberal community of Roman saints, her mausoleum was consecrated as a church and dedicated to her honor. A narrow, unworn path leads ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various

... the ore bin underneath the crusher. "Here's where it is," said he to himself. "With the jaw screwed that tight, how cud ye hope to handle this stuff—especially since the intilligent and discriminatin' mine-boss was sendin' down quartz that's more'n half porphyry! Yer little donkey injin, and yer little sugar mashers, and yer little lemon squeezer of a crusher—yah! It's a grocery store ye've got, and not a stamp mill. Loose off yer nut on the lower ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough

... at their tips; manners of one who had ranged all ranks of society from highest to lowest, and duped the most wary in each of them. Did she please it, a crown prince might have thought her youth must have passed in the chambers of porphyry! Did she please it, an old soldier would have sworn the creature had been a vivandiere,—in age, perhaps, bordering on forty. She looked younger, but had she been a hundred and twenty, she could not have been more ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of his report Mr. Foote mentions the fact that "a great dyke of beautiful porphyry traverses the hills east of the Karigatta temple overlooking Seringapatam. The porphyry, which is of warm brown or chocolate colour, includes many crystals of lighter coloured felspar, and dark crystals of hornblende. The ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot

... quarried there, for use in buildings where durability was necessary—the lighthouse and beacon on Plymouth Breakwater having both been built with granite obtained from these quarries. There was also a very hard variety of granite much used by sculptors called porphyry, a very hard and variegated rock of a mixed purple-and-white colour. When the Duke of Wellington died, the Continent was searched for the most durable stone for his sepulchre, sufficiently grand and durable to cover his remains, but none could ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... in the west, the most prominent place for learning. He was the scholar of Zoroaster at Babylon, and learned of him most of that knowledge which afterward rendered him so famous. So saith Apulcius (Floridorum secundo), and so say Jamblichus (in vita Pythag. c. 4), Porphyry (Ibid. p. 185. edit. Cant.), and Clemens Alexandrinus (Stromata i. p. 223) for the Zabratus or Zaratus of Porphyry, and the Na-Zaratus of Clemens, were none other than this Zoroaster; and they relate the ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield

... of immersing the remains of the deceased in a jar of methylated spirit was obviously impracticable. However, I bethought me that we had in our collection a porphyry sarcophagus, the cavity of which had been shaped to receive a small mummy in its case. I tried the deceased in the sarcophagus and found that he just fitted the cavity loosely. I obtained a few gallons of methylated spirit which I poured ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... an excellent master by means of these works, above all through many works in metal, in which he took much delight, he made a tomb of bronze in S. Lorenzo, wholly in the round, for Giovanni and Pietro di Cosimo de' Medici, with a sarcophagus of porphyry supported by four corner-pieces of bronze, with twisted foliage very well wrought and finished with the greatest diligence. This tomb stands between the Chapel of the Sacrament and the Sacristy, and no work could be better done, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari

... gilding. The corporation trod tremblingly over the gorgeous carpet of Axminster, which displayed, in vivid colours and colossal proportions, the shield and supporters of Bellamont, and threw a hasty glance at the vases of porphyry and malachite, and mosaic tables covered with precious toys, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... Its porphyry stairs and fountained base Shone, houried with voluptuous forms, Where Andalusia vied in grace With old Castile, ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein

... dusty artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gew-gaws, hanging at the saintly shrines. The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the precious marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and rounds of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred directions, showing how roughly the troublesome ages have trampled here; the gray dome above, with its opening to the sky, as if heaven were looking down into the interior of this place of worship, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... much dimmed by the leaves through which it passed, took a hue of singular mildness as it mingled with the azure lustre of the perfumed lamps, and the crimson brightness of the fire in the tall chimney of oriental porphyry. In the obscurity of this apartment, impregnated with sweet odors and the aromatic vapor of Persian tobacco, a man with brown, hanging locks, dressed in a long robe of dark green, fastened round the waist by a parti-colored sash, was kneeling ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... and came by way of the Corso degli Ademari, the which was oftentimes his road, to San Giovanni, round about which there were at that present divers great marble tombs (which are nowadays at Santa Reparata) and many others. As he was between the columns of porphyry there and the tombs in question and the door of the church, which was shut, Messer Betto and his company, coming a-horseback along the Piazza di Santa Reparata, espied him among the tombs and said, 'Let us go plague him.' Accordingly, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... Schools. 2. A concise and simple, yet full statement of the Aristotelian Logic, with reference annexed to the authors, and the name and page of the work to which each part may be traced, so that it may be at once seen what is Aristotle's, what Porphyry's, what the addition of the Greek Commentators, and what of the Schoolmen. 3. An outline of the History of Logic in general, 1st Chapter. The Origin of Philosophy in general, and of Logic 'speciatim'. 2d ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... through. Passing into it, they entered a long underground passage, which led out on to a wide field, above which spread a blue sky. In the middle of the field stood a magnificent castle, built out of porphyry, with a roof of gold and with glittering battlements. And his beautiful guide told him that this was the palace in which her father lived and reigned over his kingdom in ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang

... is in general basaltic, but white, black, and green marble, red porphyry, jaspar, red and grey granite, abound east of the Buonaventura. Quartz, upon some of the mountains near the sea-shore, is found in immense blocks, and principally in that mountain range which is designated in the map as the "Montagne du Monstre," ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat

... intermarried, and he fed them with his crumbs, and clothed them with scraps of his purple. The visitor can see to-day, in every one of their dwarf palaces, some of his malachite vases, or porcelain bowls, or porphyry columns. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... temples; if he listened to the clergy, he also consulted the haruspices; if he summoned the Council of Nicea, he also honored the statue of Fortune; if he accepted the rite of baptism, he also struck a medal bearing his title of "God." His statue, on the top of the great porphyry pillar at Constantinople, consisted of an ancient image of Apollo, whose features were replaced by those of the emperor, and its head surrounded by the nails feigned to have been used at the crucifixion of Christ, arranged so as to form ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... who followed Plato, and who adapted his teachings to their many conflicting ideas, held firmly to the doctrine of Reincarnation. The writings of Plotinus, Porphyry, and the other Mystics, had much to say on this subject, and the teaching was much refined under their influence. The Jewish philosophers were affected by the influence of the Platonic thought, and the school of the Essenes, which held ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson

... were upon the point of being closed. So, hurrying down the steps, I left half my vows unpaid and a million of delicate sculptures unexplored; for every pilaster, every frieze, every entablature, is incrusted with porphyry, verde antique, or some other curious marble, carved into as many grotesque wreaths and mouldings as we admire in the loggios of Raffaello. The various portals, the strange projections, the length of cloisters; in ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... was there nearly finished, of rotunda shape, of a grandeur and size which surprised me. Gold, painting, sculpture, the richest ornaments of all kinds, are distributed everywhere with prodigality but taste. The architecture is correct and admirable, the marble is most exquisite; jasper, porphyry, lapis, polished, wreathed, and fluted columns, with their capitals and their ornaments of gilded bronze, a row of balconies between each altar with little steps of marble to ascend them, and the cage encrusted; the altars and that which accompanied them admirable. In a word, the church ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... imagine to ourselves the goodman of the house proudly leading his guests after a sumptuous meal in the adjacent dining-room into the cool corridors of his peristyle, in order to point out to them his statues and vases of bronze or porphyry, and to expatiate upon their value or elegance of form? On such a festive occasion these great shallow basins of pure white marble before us would be heaped high with fragrant pyramids of red and white roses, roses that were perhaps plucked all dewy in the famous gardens ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... of polished porphyry. 35 They seemed to wear a beauty from the eye That looked on them—a fragrance from the touch Whose warmth ... checked their life; a light such As sleepers wear, lulled by the voice they love, which did reprove 40 The childish pity that she felt for them, And a ... remorse ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... Anathon, Anopus, Anorus. Some of these were so called from their situation; others from the worship there established. The Egyptians had many subordinate Deities, which they esteemed so many emanations, [Greek: aporrhoiai] from their chief God; as we learn from Iamblichus, Psellus, and Porphyry. These derivatives they called [198]fountains, and supposed them to be derived from the Sun; whom they looked upon as the source of all things. Hence they formed Ath-El and Ath-Ain, the [199]Athela and Athena of the Greeks. These were two titles appropriated to the same personage, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant

... Pope papo. Poplar poplo—arbo. Poppy papavo. Poppy-coloured punca. Populace popolo—amaso. Popular populara. Population logxantaro. Populous popola. Porcelain porcelano. Porch vestiblo. Porcupine histriko. Pore trueto. Pork porkajxo. Porous trueta. Porphyry porfiro. Porpoise fokseno. Port (harbour) haveno. Portable portebla. Portend antauxsciigi. Porter (doorkeeper) pordisto. Porter portisto. Portfolio paperujo. Portion (allot) dividi. Portion porcio, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... been partly burnt up, and had become unfit for respiration. At every hundred paces they were obliged to stop to take breath. It was therefore past ten o'clock when the engineer and his companion reached the crest of the enormous mass of rocks of basalt and porphyry which composed the north-west coast ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)

... being formed of a gallery with columns inclosing the sanctuary. The north and south sides are inclosed by piazzas with many noble columns. There are two hundred and fifty of these, formed of single stones of granite and porphyry, which are known to have come from Memphis and Heliopolis. The whole deserted temple constitutes the most important monument of Arabian architecture in Cairo. Seen as it was in the dull gray of early morning, before ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... wilderness lay before us like the dry bed of a vast ocean, whose waters by some subterranean convulsion had been sucked into the bowels of the earth, leaving in its whirling eddies the debris of submarine mountains heaped up in rugged confusion or scattered over its sandy bottom. Porphyry and black granite bowlders, in every conceivable form and size, lay strewn over the plain. Sometimes so fantastic did their shapes become that the least imaginative of our party could picture the gigantic ruins of some ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various

... traveller, who was surveying the ruins of Rome, expressed a desire to possess some relic of its antient grandeur, Poussin, who attended him, stooped down, and, gathering up a handful of earth shining with small grains of porphyry, "Take this home," said he, "for your cabinet; and say boldly, ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers

... where the wall of a temple, the arch of an aqueduct, rose crowned with wall-flower and weeds out of the rank grass, the briars and nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and plaster, among which shone beneath the darting lizards, scraps of vermilion wall-fresco, the chips of purple porphyry or dark-green serpentine; long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by arum-fringed walls, or by ditches where the withered reeds creaked beneath the festoons of clematis and wild vine; solemn and solitary ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... was getting too full of those little jewelled thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I have no need to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power of the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the knowledge and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see your friends in the cottages, and to talk to old ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... between the elder palaces and those built "within this last hundred years; which all have their fronts of white marble brought from Istria, a hundred miles away, and besides, many a large piece of porphyry and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... in a building not far from the imperial palace. The pavement was of polished marble, and columns of porphyry supported a paneled dome. An altar with a statue of a heathen deity was at one end of the apartment. Magistrates in their robes occupied raised seats on the opposite end. In front of them were some soldiers guarding ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous

... It would seem that some demons are naturally wicked. For Porphyry says, as quoted by Augustine (De Civ. Dei x, 11): "There is a class of demons of crafty nature, pretending that they are gods and the souls of the dead." But to be deceitful is to be evil. Therefore some ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... geologists—has been slowly upheaved in mass in the same gradual manner as the coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific have arisen within the recent period. The other striking features of the Cordilleras were the bright colours, chiefly red and purple, of the utterly bare and precipitous hills of porphyry; the grand and continuous wall-like dikes; the plainly divided strata, which, where nearly vertical, formed the picturesque and wild central pinnacles, but where less inclined composed the great massive mountains on the outskirts of the range; and lastly, the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... of Uranus by the Maori tale of Tutenganahau. The child-swallowing he connects with Punic and Phoenician influence, and Semitic sacrifices of men and children. Porphyry {61b} speaks of human sacrifices to Cronus in Rhodes, and the Greeks recognised Cronus in the Carthaginian god to ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... design. The gilded bar-rooms, flashing with mirrors and cut glass; the saloons, with their desert expanse of Turkey carpet and oasis of clustered divans and gilded tables; the great dining-room, with porphyry columns, and walls and ceilings shining with allegory—all these things which had attracted his youthful wonder without distracting his correct simplicity of taste he now began to comprehend. It was the bank's money "at work." In the clatter of dishes in the dining-room he even seemed ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte

... centuries ago, and how even more beautiful in the foretime. Of the great mosque writers of travel can scarcely say enough. Mr. Lane-Poole says: "Travellers stand amazed among the forest of columns which open out apparently endless vistas on all sides. The porphyry, jasper, and marbles are still in their places; the splendid glass mosaics, which artists from Byzantium came to make, still sparkle like jewels in the walls; the daring architecture of the sanctuary, with its fantastic crossed arches, is still as imposing as ever; the courtyard ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... of the avenue are the tombs, with groups of trees about them. Each tomb is really a temple in which white and pink marble, porphyry and carved teak-wood are combined, not indeed with harmony or taste, but, what is rare in China, with lines of great purity and severity. One of the halls of these tombs is about a hundred feet long ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... by reciting a lot of words jumbled together without skill, which are no more than a vain murmur? Have you forgotten that I am a bit of a philosopher myself? And do you think to satisfy me with some rags, torn by ignorant men from the purple garment of AEmilius, when AEmilius, Porphyry, and Plato, in all their glory, did not satisfy me! The systems devised by the sages are but tales imagined to amuse the eternal childishness of men. We divert ourselves with them, as we do with the stories of The Ass, The Tub, and ...
— Thais • Anatole France

... gilt, although he is often short of gold—and throw them at the feet of his snow-clad mountains, piles of rocks, and other cloud-capped philosophers, long and terrible works, marble columns, real thoughts carved in porphyry. ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac

... too overladen, too rich; and yet it is imposing. The first gold brought from South America gilds the profusely decorated roof, the dark red polished porphyry pillars of the high altar gleam in the warm haze of light, the endless marble columns rise in shining ranks, all ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... through many marble halls, he came to a huge staircase made of porphyry, leading down ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang

... confounded the Grecian schools in the fair conflict of reason with reason. The bravest and wisest of the Caesars found their arms and their policy unavailing, when opposed to the weapons that were not carnal and the kingdom that was not of this world. The victory which Porphyry and Diocletian failed to gain is not, to all appearance, reserved for any of those who have in this age, directed their attacks against the last restraint of the powerful and the last hope of the wretched. The whole history of Christianity shows, that ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... forum. Here was a bit of wall, with a touch of gay painting mouldering on an inner surface,—Venus, in robe of red, rising from a daintily suggested sea in lines of green. They gathered fragments of old mosaic floor in their hands, blue lapis lazuli, yellow bits of giallo antico, red porphyry, trodden by gay feet and sad, unnumbered years ago. They found broken pieces of iridescent glass that had fallen, perhaps, from shattered wine cups of the emperors, and all these treasures Bertuccio stored away in his wide pockets. Again, they climbed gracious heights and looked down ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood

... because the copper had DIED OUT when they reached this underlying non-metalliferous member of the series. This red under-lyer is, in fact, a great deposit of red sandstone, breccia, and conglomerate with associated porphyry, basalt, ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... steps." We straightway thither came. The lowest stair was marble white so smooth And polish'd, that therein my mirror'd form Distinct I saw. The next of hue more dark Than sablest grain, a rough and singed block, Crack'd lengthwise and across. The third, that lay Massy above, seem'd porphyry, that flam'd Red as the life-blood spouting from a vein. On this God's angel either foot sustain'd, Upon the threshold seated, which appear'd A rock of diamond. Up the trinal steps My leader cheerily drew me. "Ask," said he, "With humble heart, that he unbar ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... to help the ailing eye. Best wait: I reach Jerusalem at morn, There set in order my experiences, Gather what most deserves, and give thee all— Or I might add, Judaea's gum-tragacanth Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained, Cracks 'twixt the pestle and the porphyry, In fine exceeds our produce. Scalp-disease Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy— Thou hadst admired one sort I gained at Zoar— 60 But zeal outruns ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning

... the Pampas, and covers the granitic rocks of Banda Oriental. From the Strait of Magellan to the Colorado, a distance of about eight hundred miles, the face of the country is everywhere composed of shingle: the pebbles are chiefly of porphyry, and probably owe their origin to the rocks of the Cordillera. North of the Colorado this bed thins out, and the pebbles become exceedingly small, and here the characteristic vegetation of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... Konyam Bay consists of crystalline rocks, granite poor in mica, and mica-schist lowermost, and then grey non-fossiliferous carbonate of lime, and last of all magnesian schists, porphyry, and quartzites. On the summits of the hills the granite has a rough trachytic appearance, but does not pass into true trachyte. Here however we are already in the neighbourhood of the volcanic hearths of Kamchatka, which for instance ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... Cousin an eclecticist. His Philosophy is a positive one compared with that of Emerson. Here are scraps of Plato and Hegel, of Porphyry and Swedenborg, of AEschylus and De Stael. Like the Lehrer zu Sais, 'he looks on the stars, and imitates their courses and positions in the sand.' In the obscurity that proves him great, for 'To be great is to ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various



Words linked to "Porphyry" :   groundmass, igneous rock, porphyritic, porphyritic rock



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