"Parterre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unrolled before me; red, yellow, violet, blue, every colour, every tint was there; millions of the most magnificent prairie roses, tuberoses, asters, dahlias, and fifty other kinds of flowers. The finest artificial garden in the world would sink into insignificance when compared with this parterre of nature's own planting. My horse could hardly make his way through the wilderness of flowers, and I for a time remained lost in admiration of this scene of extraordinary beauty. The prairie in the distance looked as if clothed with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... repress a grin of happiness, Pinchas stumbled through the dim parterre, barking his shins at almost every step. Arrived at the orchestra, he found himself confronted by a chasm. He wheeled to the left, to where the stage-box, shrouded ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... neither dramatist ever equalled its delicate descriptions of passive Nature.[56] The preponderance of mythology, however, the dearth of real human beings, the unnaturalness permitted to invade nature—so that even the flowers are grouped, as in an absurd parterre, to represent the forms of goddesses—make Peele's pastoralism, despite the undeniable charm of many passages, inferior to Greene's representation of ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... drew up at the entrance of the great parterre, she stepped out to select them. Having quickly combined their fragrant beauties, she put the nosegay into the hand of one of the servants to place on the seat. Being nigh the church porch, she suddenly expressed a wish to her husband, on whose arm she leaned, to walk through the church-yard, ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the beauties of Flora's court Smile on the gay parterre, What glorious color, what exquisite form, And dainty scents are there! They bask in the beam, and bend by the stream, Like beautiful nymphs at play, Holding dew-pearls up in each nectar cup To the glorious God of Day. Oh, their lives are ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... garden of white and vari-colored flowers of stone, of fans and vases and grotesque shapes, huge sponges and waving bushes and stunted trees. Fish of a score of shapes and of all colors of the spectrum wove in and out the branches and caverns of this wondrous parterre. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... you own You like your Iliad in the Prose of Bohn,— Tho' if you'd learn in Prose how Homer sang, 'Twere best to learn of Butcher and of Lang,— Suppose you say your Worst of POPE, declare His Jewels Paste, his Nature a Parterre, His Art but Artifice—I ask once more Where have you seen such Artifice before? Where have you seen a Parterre better grac'd, Or gems that glitter like his Gems of Paste? Where can you show, among your Names of Note, So much to copy and so much to quote? And where, ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... and with owners whose hospitality always prompts them to try its capabilities to the utmost. A creek runs near the house, and on its banks, sloping to the sun, lies a lovely garden, as trim as any English parterre, and a mass of fruit and flowers. Nothing can be more picturesque than the mixture of both. For instance, on the wall of the house is a peach-tree laden every autumn with rosy, velvet-cheeked fruit; and jasmine and passion-flowers growing ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... present case. In fact, the gentlemen do but very rarely flutter from flower to flower within the sacred confines of the paddock, but are much more apt to betake themselves in crowds to the less showy parterre of the betting-ground, where, under the shadow of the famous chestnut tree, such enormous wagers are laid, and especially do they congregate in the neighborhood of the tall narrow slates set up by such well-known bookmakers as Wright, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... was rushing over Little Holland. We did not get indoors without wetting our feet. After drinking a parting glass I shook his hand heartily, bade him cheer up, and said that study would soon put him in the parterre of pianists. He looked gloomy, and nodded good-night. I went to my room. As the water was likely to invade the cellar and even the ground floor, the bedrooms were all on the second floor. I soon ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... the palace, the perspective produces a most striking effect: the eye first wanders for a moment over the extensive parterre, which is divided into compartments, planted with shrubs and flowers, and decorated with basins, jets-d'eau, vases, and statues in marble and bronze; it then penetrates through a venerable grove which forms a beautiful vista; and, following the same ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... the crowded assembly and the fluttering parterre, I sought relief in solitude. Never was solitude so grateful to me. I indulged in a thousand reveries. Gay hope exhibited all her airy visions to my fancy. I formed innumerable prospects of felicity, and each more ravishing than the last. The joys painted ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... at the Theatre-Francais since February 25. The receipts for each performance have been five thousand francs. The public every night hisses all the verses. It is a rare uproar. The parterre hoots, the boxes burst with laughter. The actors are abashed and hostile; most of them ridicule what they have to say. The press has been practically unanimous every morning in making fun of the piece and the author. ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... brother, and master, and lord, and king, Though vice's roses and raptures did not spring In thy poetic garden's trim parterre; Though thou wert fond of sunshine and sweet air, More than of kisses, that burn, and bite, and sting; Some living love our ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... Diamonds, diamonds must win hearts. I have watched you in a deeper, darker, madder whirl, while I have seen fair, blooming flowers wither in the hot hands of drunken licentiousness. Oh, Becky Sharp! Oh, Dame aux Camellias! you are but single dandelions in a parterre of heliotropes! ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... appropriateness, but with rhetorical force—with amplitude of thought and spontaneity of image. By the side of such a wonderful flower-show (as one of our poets said of a selection from a brother poet's lyrics), Lyttelton's trim parterre shows, no doubt, but dimly; nevertheless, to that accomplished nobleman there is due something more than the small credit of having been Landor's predecessor in this form of English composition. Of that form Lyttelton says, in the preface to his ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... Paris; the officer on duty told it at his relief to some of the guards, they to those whom they met, and it spread like wildfire. It was therefore very natural that, long before the curtain was raised, the great opera-house was completely filled, parquette, boxes, and parterre, with a passionately-excited throng. The friends of the queen went in order to give her a long- looked-for triumph; her enemies—and these the poor queen had in overwhelming numbers—to fling their hate, their malice, their scorn, into ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... utterance, they wandered back again to the enchanted garden where the band had played for them. The garden was silent, too. The bandstand was empty, black, unearthly as if haunted by some thin ghost of passionate sound; and empty, row after row of seats in the great parterre, except for a few couples who sat leaning to each other, hand in hand, finding a happy solitude in ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... came to the door of the Mills, a damsel, with a wide basket on her arm, the covering of which being removed, a goodly show of laces, caps, fans, wash-balls, buckles, and other attractions, came out like a parterre of flowers, with such a glow as dazzled the eyes of ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... spread about through the busy parterre: Miss Columbine turn'd up her nose, And the prude Lady Lavender said, with a stare, That her friend, Mary-gold, had been heard to declare, The creature had toy'd with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Meadowsweet, walking slowly down the long avenue which led to the Manor. This avenue was kept in no order; its edges were not neatly cut, and weeds appeared here and there through its scantily gravelled roadway. The grass parterre round the house, however, was smooth as velvet, and interspersed with gay flower-beds. It looked like a little agreeable oasis in the middle of a woodland, for the avenue was shaded by forest trees, and the house itself had ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... bath and laid out his robes, the Bishop mounted to the ramparts and watched the gold fade in the west. He glanced at the river below, threading its way through the pasture land; at the billowy masses of trees; at the gay parterre, bright with summer flowers. Then he looked long in the direction of the city from which ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... windows! And my father was even now up there in his grim garret, his heart stirring calm and kindly within him, in spite of all the atmosphere of blood in which his life had moved, as untouched as though he had been a gardener working among the flowers of the parterre. Also the block was there, and against it the Red ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... some deep tidal pool, thickly studded with the long and slender stems of Tubularia, surmounted by the bright rose-coloured heads, is like the gay parterre of a garden. Equally beautiful is the dense growth of Campanularia, covering (as I have seen it in Plymouth Sound) large tracts of the rock, its delicate shoots swaying to and fro with each movement of the ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... themselves, they were unwilling to let their prey go until they had also ravished from him some specimens of the airy mintage whence they had issued. Accordingly the Catholic vagabonds seated themselves on the ground, a fuliginous parterre to look upon, and called upon G—— for a song. A rock which projected itself from the side of the hill served for a stage as well as the "green plat" in the wood near Athens did for the company of Manager Quince, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... that lent Its sweets to earth a day; From Heaven's parterre 'twas kindly sent, But ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various |
