Doorway

“ In the country as I drive up to the house I notice curtains stirring, I hear voices, and before I have had time to get out and find the hitch-rope every person in the house is either at the gate or standing in the doorway. ”

“ How many doorways are there? are any now stopped up, and are their heads semicircular or pointed, whether of lancet or equilateral form, or struck from two or four centres, or of ogee form, or flat?
9. Are the doorway mouldings round or angular—plain or ornamented—and of what architectural style?
10. Has the chancel any low narrow doorway, and of what form is its head? Do any of the doors themselves appear ancient, and of what form is their iron-work? ”

“ On either side of the doorway is a round-headed window of two lights, plain without, but ornamented within with the same label as that which surrounds the outer arch of the doorway itself. An ancient painting can be made out on the north side of the northernmost of these windows ”

“ This is a fine modern doorway, of Norman design, in a machicolated central tower of three stories in height. Over the doorway is a large central window, on each side of which is a colossal figure of Hospitality and Liberty respectively. Over this again are the [164] arms of the Howards, sculptured, and these again are surmounted by the machicolations, parapet, &c. Immediately on entering this splendid ducal residence, the visitor reaches the Grand-staircase leading to its various apartments. ”

“ DOOR (corresponding to the Gr. θύρα, Lat. fores or valvae; the English word, with other forms common in allied languages, comes from the same Indo-European stem as the Gr. θύρα and Lat. fores) , in architecture, the slab, flap or leaf forming the enclosure of a doorway (q.v.) , either in wood, metal or stone. ”

“ The sitter sits sideways, between a cracked window on one side and a cracked doorway on the other; and as a draught is always going in at the ear next the window, and out at the ear next the door, it is about as cold and comfortless a vehicle for winter as may be well imagined. ”

“ In the slanting beams that streamed through the open doorway the dust danced and was golden. The heavy scent of the roses seemed to brood over everything. ”

“ On entering the massive doorway, which is always carefully closed at night, two small rooms are discovered, the one on the right, the other on the left; these rooms are perfectly empty of everything except dust and dirt. ”

“ It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.
When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. ”

“ The supreme effort of the builder seems to have centred in the doorways, which are often quite intricate in their ornament; yet they are never reckless in design, and are always pleasing in effect. Often, too, the decoration of the doorway was echoed in the ornament of the window-frames and the cornice under the eaves. ”

“ Whereby the unsuspecting stranger, entering what, in his innocence, he supposes to be the front doorway of a house, walks along the hall and is presently astonished to find himself walking out of another front door into another thoroughfare. ”

“ Green and blue doorways, through which one must stoop to enter, open in from the street, and you are constantly hearing them shut as you pass, as some of the women of the household recognize the presence of a foreigner. You are never quite sure as to what you will meet in the streets or what may be displayed at your elbow before the doors of the bazars. ”

“ The house is not large, as great houses go, and it sits, as I have said, upon the grass without even a flagging or a foot-path to conduct you from the point where the avenue stops to the beautiful sculptured doorway which admits you into the small, quaint inner court. ”

“ They were in a sort of corridor which paralleled the wall through which they had just come. On the opposite wall of this hallway were banks of dials and charts and switches, and in the center of this opposite wall was an open doorway. ”

“ Solid doorways with iron-clasped and iron-studded doors give an impression of security, and suggest comfort and to some extent home life, and sprays of orange trees, hanging over walls, and fronds of date palms give an aspect of pleasantness to the courtyards. ”

“ Here and there the fringe of the mass swelled up and swept against the steps of some building, forcing, or trying to force, an entry. Sometimes a narrow stream of men trickled into the half-open doorway ”

“ Astuʻgataʻga—A Cherokee lieutenant in the Confederate service killed in 1862. The name may be rendered, “Standing in the doorway,” but implies that the man himself is the door or shutter; it has no first person; gataʻga, “he is standing”; stuti, a door or shutter; stuhu, a closed door or passage; stugiʻsti, a key, i. e., something with which to open the door. [208]
asunʻtli, asuntlunʻyu—a footlog or bridge; literally, “log lying across,” from asiʻta, log. ”

“ Internally, the remaining thickness of the wall is arched in another order (either square or sloping) , which arch has to spring at a higher level to avoid the catching against it of the door while opening.
A doorway thus constructed may be clothed with what decorations you think good; and, if you are working in the Pointed style, the principle applies just as well as in Norman; indeed, we have here the principles of nearly all good doorways, whether Romanesque or Gothic (Fig. 234) .{78}
Fig. ”

“ In the most elaborate examples of this condition, each of these secondary doorways has an arch heading, a cross lintel, and a triangular filling or tympanum of its own, all subordinated to the main arch above. ”

“ How many possible men are there in that doorway? ”

“ In these features, which are always of a single light, the same simple forms are found, which characterize the doorways, namely, the inclined sides, and the horizontal and semi- circular heads; the horizontal head, however, so common in the doorways, is but of comparatively rare occurrence in the windows ”

“ They have built up the long lines of doors by which rooms opened one out of another, and made new doorways in convenient places; they have cut up rooms that were too large, and improved the arrangement ”

“ A tall young man sped swiftly up the wide stone steps leading to the doorway of a mansion in one of Chicago's most fashionable avenues. ”

“ Folks don't jump from second-story windows in broad daylight, and as to leaving by the doors, the front door closes with such a slam all the house can hear it from top to bottom, and as for the back-door, no one that goes out of that can get clear of the yard without going by the kitchen window, and no one can go by our kitchen window without the cook's a-seeing of them, that I can just swear to. ”

“ This is a street of black and battered doors, of damaged railings, and of broken windows. On the doorsteps here and there stand groups of slatternly, unkempt women. From the windows above a tousled head occasionally appears. Many of the houses here are common lodging-houses; but some of them are in the hands of the house-farmers, who let them out in furnished rooms at a shilling a day. We enter a room which is unoccupied and take stock of the furniture. ”

“ As a rule, you enter from the front door into a narrow passage-way, with perhaps an internal screen, with folding-doors which are rarely shut, and immediately opposite is the main staircase of the house, so that any one, on entering, not only commands the absolute thoroughfare of the house, but sees everybody who goes up or comes down, by which privacy is materially interfered with, and the whole house is made subject to sudden draughts of cold air, which arc driven up the-well-hole, as it is called, by the opening of the street-door. ”

“ The house was of white stone, wider and more imposing even than its neighbors, but like them with a low, broad entrance door sunk three steps below the level of the street, a smaller tradesmen's entrance some distance away and between them a row of wide, ornate windows. ”

“ Knock in the door—break open the door! the front door—that is the best, because it leads to all parts of the house, and we can secure any one who attempts to move from one to the other, as they come down. ”

“ A door! And why should a door be there except to lead to another room? There was a door, and that presupposed something on the other side. And what a door it was! More of a barricade than a partition. The iron hinges were built to support weight and give complete defense and support. There was a keyhole, and if the key corresponded with the size of the hole, it was the largest that I had ever heard of.
Naturally, I wanted to open the door. As master of the villa, I had a right to. Upstairs the old woman seemed unable to understand me and ended by telling me to see her husband. ”

“ Rows and rows of smug, well-built houses, each with a front garden, each with a front gate, and each front gate remains shut against the casual caller until you have rung a bell—and the occupants have had time to make up their minds about you from behind the window curtains—when some mechanism in the vestibule is set in motion, the gate opens, and you walk in. ”

“ She flew through the ante-room to the outer door and fearfully opened it, and gazed downwards to the electric light that, somehow equivocally, invited wayfarers to pass through the ever-open street door and climb the shadowy steps to the second storey and behold there strange matters. ”

“ But she examined the window shutters at the back, and the fastenings of the street door, with a good deal of care, and then went back to the kitchen, put on her shoes again, and looked over the locks and bolts of the back door. ”

“ I take the stone steps in three jumps and knock at the door. Children's voices die abruptly to silence, a step sounds over the floor, the latch clicks, and the door opening wraps us in a gust of warm air. ”

“ He crossed the courtyard, and, reaching the line of door-stepless, poverty-stricken hovels—they appeared to be little more than that—crept stealthily along to the end house at the left, halted an instant to press his face against a black window pane, then tried the door cautiously. ”

“ I should say that there will be one sentry outside the door, and perhaps two inside. If there is a door or a window at the back of the house, we need not bother about the man in front. I must do for the two men inside. You bring the two horses round within a hundred yards of the back of the house, and we will drop out of the window, if there is one, or walk out of the door. ”

“ When the cellar-door is opened, and the boy begins to descend into the thick darkness, it is always with a heart-beat as of one started upon some adventure. Who can forget the smell that comes through the opened door;—a mingling of fresh earth, fruit exhaling delicious aroma, kitchen vegetables, the mouldy odor of barrels, a sort of ancestral air,—as if a door had been opened into an old romance. ”

“ The door-way is in the middle of one side, formed like a porch, and so low and narrow as just to admit a man to enter upon all fours. The largest house I saw was about sixty feet long, eight or nine feet high in the middle, and three or four at each end ”

“ And yonder door, made of solid oak, thick as a hand's palm, and covered with sheets of iron and enormous nails—that door is the door of the chamber in which the treasures of the noble seigneur are kept. Only he keeps the key. ”

“ Each ring of the doorbell brought chattering groups to hang over the banisters, each sound of wheels on the driveway was the signal for excited faces to be pressed against the window-pane and for round eyes to try in vain to bore through the paper wrappings of mysterious bundles whisked out of sight all too soon. ”

“ I was more anxious about this door. It is, palpably, of a more modern make than the others, and, though a stout piece of work, it has little of their ponderous strength.
I must explain here, that there is a small, raised lawn on this side of the house, upon which this door opens—the windows of the study being barred on this account. All the other entrances—excepting the great gateway which is never opened—are in the lower storey. ”

“ He heard the familiar sound of water gushing from the sink in to the grate, the dropping of a pail outside the door, the clink of a coal shovel, the banging of a door, the sound of voices. So many houses cheek by jowl, so many squirming lives, so many back yards, back doors giving on to the night. ”

“ I tiptoed to the front door and turned the knob. The door did not yield. Then for the first time I recalled the window which our housebreakers had forced the night before; unless the latch had been repaired during the day, it would be an easy matter to gain access to the dining-room, which was located in the western wing.
Now it was the eastern wing or gable which sheltered the library, the conservatory, and Mr. Page's bedroom, and it was thither the second man's foot-prints led. I followed them round the corner of the house. ”

“ There are trapdoors, sliding doors, double doors, stage doors, prison doors, glass doors. But the symbol and mystery of a door resides in its quality of concealment. A glass door is not a door at all, but a window. The meaning of a door is to hide what lies inside ”

“ A door in front of her, a sliding door it seemed to be, opened noiselessly, and she could see a faintly lighted, narrow, and very short passage ahead of her. It appeared to make a right-angled turn just a few yards in, and what light there was seemed to filter in from around the corner. And on each side of the passage, before it made the turn, there was a door, and from the one on the right, through a cracked panel, a tiny thread of light seeped out. ”

“ A door is made of wood. What beautiful wood is in these church doors! The doors of life are made of our will. By the exercise of our will we open and close whatsoever doors of life we choose.
The doors of our houses swing on hinges. Heavy doors seem as light as a feather because they are so delicately hung upon hinges. The [95] hinges of the doors of life are made not of brass or iron, but of love.
When, in a little while, you leave this church you will take hold of a knob and pull open the door. The doors of life have knobs. ”