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More "Fable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 2. The well-known fable for the most part refutes itself. To a considerable extent it has been concocted for the explanation of surnames (-Brutus-, -Poplicola-, -Scaevola-). But even its apparently historical ingredients are found on closer examination to have ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... mail-clad horses. The Greeks, who were wont to represent the forces of nature and the accomplishments of man by skilfully constructed myths, have left a record showing their appreciation of the strength derived from the union of horse and man, in their fable of the Centaur, which possibly grew up in a time before their people had won the use of the animal, and when they only knew the creature by chance encounters with enemies who were mounted upon them. Although the naturalist of to-day perceives the impossibility of there ever having been on ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... must have been at this moment that I began, for the first time, to take a really serious view of my plan "to see the world." It became evident with startling abruptness, that a man might be both hungry and cold in the midst of abundance. I recalled the fable of the grasshopper who, having wasted the summer hours in singing, was mendicant to the ant. My weeks of careless gayety were over. The money I had spent in travel looked like a noble fortune to me ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... the major heard him mutter. "It can't be true—the thing I've heard. Only a fable, surely! ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the gods, while others declared that he was murdered by persons, each of whom carried home a fragment of his body that it might never be found. It matters less which way we tell it, since the story of Romulus was quite as much a fable as that of AEneas; only it must be remembered as the Romans themselves believed it. They worshipped Romulus under the name of Quirinus, and called their chief families Quirites, both words coming from ger (a spear); and the she-wolf and twins were the favorite badge of ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators... Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... professor. "The toad is absolutely harmless. It has about it a liquid that might cause pain to a cut finger or a sensitive tissue like that of the mouth or eye, but the old story that a toad is poisonous is a silly fable." ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... stories.[9] The story of "The Hunchback" is found in Pitre and Straparola, and as it is also the subject of an Old-French fabliau, it may have been borrowed from the French, or, what is more likely, both French and Italians took it from a common source.[10] The fable of "The Ass, the Ox, and the Peasant," which the Vizier relates to prevent his daughter becoming the Sultan's wife, is found in Pitre (No. 282) under the title of "The Curious Wife," and is also in Straparola.[11] ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... close by told that Hank and his cronies were engaged in their favorite practice of having "fun." This generally partook of the nature of the old fable concerning boys who were stoning frogs, which was "great fun for the boys, but death to ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... to the village the old men and the women began to meet them, and now a scene ensued that proved the fallacy of the old fable of Indian apathy and stoicism. Parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters met with the most rapturous expressions of joy; while wailings and lamentations were heard from the relatives of the killed and wounded. The procession, however, continued on with ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... such rapidity that the Assyrian heroes and their prowess might well have been forgotten. The feeble recollections they left in men's minds became tinged with the colours of romance. The Greeks took pleasure in the fable of Sardanapalus: they developed it into a moral tale with elaborate conceits and telling contrasts, but they did not invent it from the foundation. The first hint of it must have been given by legends of the fall and destruction of Nineveh current in ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... sacrifice victims on the altar of superstition, to pursue the goat and the deer, and, by the pernicious invention of fire, to pervert their flesh into food, luxury, disease, and premature death, were let loose upon the world. Such is clearly the correct interpretation of the fable of Prometheus, which is the symbolical portraiture of that disastrous epoch, when man first applied fire to culinary purposes, and thereby surrendered his liver to the vulture of disease. From that period the stature of mankind has been in a state of gradual diminution, and I have not ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... indestructible when confided to the archives of his memory. To the child we owe the celebrity of the Cigale, of whose misfortunes he has babbled during his first lessons in recitation. It is he who will preserve for future generations the absurd nonsense of which the body of the fable is constructed; the Cigale will always be hungry when the cold comes, although there were never Cigales in winter; she will always beg alms in the shape of a few grains of wheat, a diet absolutely incompatible ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... very approach of such a relief predisposed him to receive whatever teaching might follow from the same source; and soon he believed himself satisfied that the notion of religion—of duty toward an unseen maker—was but an old-wives'-fable; and that, as to the hereafter, a mere cessation of consciousness was the only reasonable expectation. The testimony of his senses, although negative, he accepted as stronger on that side than any amount ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... not reach you, if I would, Nor sit among your cloudy shapes; And (spare the fable of the Grapes And Fox) I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... dispersion than the land forces, were not yet scattered. Thus provided against immediate alarms, and with the laurels of the War of Secession still fresh, the country in military matters lay down and went to sleep, like the hare in the fable, regardless of the incessant progress on every side, which, indeed, was scarcely that of the tortoise. Our ships underwent no ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... lives and their minds on journeys after imaginary gold?—and Margaret's influence, Margaret, who had been given a message for him—of that he felt convinced. She, at least, could be trusted, with her sane, practical Lampton brain. She had made up no fable. Her vision had not been the result of her imagination. And ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... the soul back once more under the dead ribs of nature, and makes the meanest bush burn again, as it did to Moses, with the visible presence of God. And it works the same miracle for language. The word it has touched retains the warmth of life forever. We talk about the age of superstition and fable as if they were passed away, as if no ghost could walk in the pure white light of science, yet the microscope that can distinguish between the disks that float in the blood of man and ox is helpless, a mere dead eyeball, before this mystery of Being, this ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... castle whose heir is initiated (as folk tell) on his twenty-first birthday to the knowledge of a secret so terrible as to overshadow his subsequent life. It struck us, discussing idly the various mysteries and terrors that may lie behind this fact or this fable, that no doom or horror conceivable and to be defined in words could ever adequately solve this riddle; that no reality of dreadfulness could seem caught but paltry, bearable, and easy to face in comparison with this vague we ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... world; discovers many serious objections to the doctrine of Providence; insinuates that the gods are only poetical creations; is uncertain whether the soul be immortal, but is clear that popular doctrine of punishment in the world to come is only an idle fable. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... FABLE BY LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE.—Once some gray old rats built a ship of State to save themselves from drowning. It carried them safely for awhile until they grew eager for more passengers, and so took on board all manner of rats that had run away from all sorts of places—Irish ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... starry fable of the milky way Has not thy story's purity; it is A constellation of a sweeter ray, And sacred Nature triumphs more in this Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss Where sparkle distant worlds: —Oh, holiest ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... the world was the salvation of man from everlasting damnation. Not only Tertullian, but several Fathers of the Church, regarded physical research as superfluous and absurd, and even as godless. "What happiness shall be mine if I know where the Nile has its source, or what the physicists fable of heaven?" asked Lactantius. And, "Should we not be regarded as insane if we pretended to have knowledge of matters of which we can know nothing? How much more, then, are they to be regarded as raving madmen who imagine that they know the secrets ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... represented in the English Parliament. What Edward had really done was to break the Welsh resistance. The policy with which he followed up his victory (for the "massacre of the bards" is a mere fable) accomplished its end, and though two later rebellions and a ceaseless strife of the natives with the English towns in their midst showed that the country was still far from being reconciled to its conquest, it ceased to be any serious danger to England ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... rock-selaginella on the great boulders of the river woods. As these are to be split up for masonry, the experiment of transferring the polypody is no sin, though it savours somewhat of the process of skin-grafting. Evan and I have tried the experiment successfully, so that it is no fable. We had a bit of shady bank at home that proved by the mosses that grew on it that it was moistened from beneath the year through. The protecting shade was of tall hickories, and a rock ledge some twenty ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... the common people—not of educated Copts. The best fun was to hear the Greeks (one of whom spoke English) abusing the Copts—rogues, heretics, schismatics from the Greek Church, ignorant, rapacious, cunning, impudent, etc., etc. In short, they narrated the whole fable about their own sweet selves. I am quite surprised to see how well these men manage their work. The boat is quite as clean as an English boat as crowded could be kept, and the engine in beautiful order. The head-engineer, ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... have been thrown in ex proposito to mislead the bystander; and hence the most ingenious discoverers become so pertinaciously deluded as to lose eye and ear for those less obvious indications of general tone of style, color of incident, and form of fable, on which more phlegmatic persons base measurement and comparison. Whatever of truth there may or may not be generally in the above remarks,—certain it is, that in the novels now in question instinct or divination directed us aright. In ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... he in a gull old ends reciting, To stop gaps in his loose writing; With such a deal of monstrous and forced action, As might make Bethlem a faction: Nor made he his play for jests stolen from each table, But makes jests to fit his fable.... The laws of time, place, persons he observeth, From no ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... Morning the Gentlemenn went a Fox hunting, but their Sport was marred by the Pertinacity of some Motion Picture menn who persewd them to take Fillums and catchd the General falling off his Horse at a Ditch. In the Evening some of the Companye tooke Occasion to rally the General upon the old Fable of the Cherrye Tree, w'ch hath ever been imputed an Evidence of hys exceeding Veracity, though to saye sooth I never did believe the legend my self. "Well," sayes the General with a Twinkle, "it wolde ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... fondee par Adrien que Trajanopoly par Trajan. Un tremblement de terre l'avoit ruinee; il la fit rebatir et lui donna son nom. On doit excuser ces erreurs dans un auteur du quinzieme siecle. Quant a l'oreille de mouton, il en parle comme d'une fable de Sarrasins.] ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... we play, in case we find our village?" asked Scapin. "Our repertoire is sadly reduced, you know. Tragedies, and even the better class of comedies, would be all Greek to the stupid rustics, utterly ignorant as they are of history or fable, and scarcely even understanding the French language. The only thing to give them would be a roaring farce, with plenty of funny by-play, resounding blows, kicks and cuffs, ridiculous tumbles, and absurdities ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... to fall into danger during his rambles about the camp. We might as well state here, however, that this precaution proved fruitless, for he blew it at all times and seasons; and everybody became so hardened to its melodious shriek that they paid no attention to it whatever,—history, or fable, thus again repeating itself. ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... I had elaborated the fable I had begun to tell in the corridor without. I had it ready now: it was thin, ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... Bajazet was imprisoned by Timur, so long and so often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected as a fable by the modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity. They appeal with confidence to the Persian history of Sherefeddin Ali, according to which has been given to our curiosity in a French version, and from which I shall collect and abridge, a more specious ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... with a fable, ascribed to Demosthenes. He had served the people of Athens with great fidelity in the station of an orator, when upon a certain occasion, apprehending to be delivered over to his enemies, he told the Athenians, his countrymen, the following ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... would push the tug along; and the heavy gunboat, withdrawing a short distance to gain headway, hurled herself forward, and dashed into the willows with a force that would have carried her through any bridge ever built. But the old fable of the lion bound down by the silken net was here re-enacted. The gunboat did not even reach the tug. The slender willow-shoots trailed along the sides, caught in the rough ends of the iron overhang, and held ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... believe that children are more moral in the country, or that they here remain longer uncorrupted than in towns, whether large or small. Nor is it proved that in former times the country possessed any advantage in these respects, as compared with our own days and with the modern town. The entire fable of rural innocence appears to rest, not upon an actual comparison between town and country, but rather upon the more lively interest felt in town life, and especially in the life of the great towns: in towns, immorality has been more carefully studied and more often described; ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... for many a year." He speaks of a time {222b} "when the inventive head and the sustaining heart of trade were held in bondage by the unruly lower members." A pity that the English working-men will not let themselves be pacified so easily with thy fable as the Roman Plebs, thou modern Menenius Agrippa! Finally, he relates the following: At one time the coarse mule-spinners had misused their power beyond all endurance. High wages, instead of awakening thankfulness towards the manufacturers and leading ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... There is some doubt whether Homer considered Briareus as the son of Neptune or of Uranus and Terra.—See Arnold. The fable is ridiculed by ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... physical phenomena—the poetic embodiment of the natural philosophy of the primitive races of men;[156] whilst others have looked upon them as historical legends, having a substratum of fact, and, when stripped of the supernatural and miraculous drapery which accompanies fable, as containing the history of primitive times.[157] Some of the latter class have imagined they could recognize in Grecian mythology traces of sacred personages, as well as profane; in fact, a dimmed image of the patriarchal traditions which are preserved ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... is all a fable. Mephistopheles—the real, vital, moving Mephistopheles—has outlived Goethe, and will outlast the very memory of the unhappy heroine of his noble poem. He walks the streets to-day as fresh and persuasive as when, in ophidian ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... certain definite forms at the time when the record of those termed comic poets begins. Who it was who supplied it with masks, or prologues, or a plurality of actors and the like, has remained unknown. The invented Fable, or Plot, however, originated in Sicily, with Epicharmus and Phormis; of Athenian poets Crates was the first to drop the Comedy of invective and frame stories of a general and non-personal nature, in other words, Fables ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... air of all but fabulous antiquity pervades them, greater perhaps than pervades the legends of any other north European people. We seem transplanted to a world of the most primitive type conceivable; a world of myth and of fable, of direct Nature interpretations, of mythology, in short, pure and simple. Even those stories which are known to be of later origin exhibit to a greater or less degree the same character; one which has come down to them doubtless from earlier half-forgotten tales, of which they are merely ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... the word other is left out. Thus, 'Greece was the most polished nation of antiquity'"—Bullions, E. Gram. see Lennie's Gram. "Burke, in his speech on the Carnatic war, makes the following allusion to the well known fable of Cadmus's sowing dragon's teeth;—'Every day you are fatigued and disgusted with this cant, the Carnatic is a country that will soon recover, and become instantly as prosperous as ever. They think they are talking to innocents, who believe that by the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... little unruly; brave, and such excellent horsemen, as almost to realize the fable of the Centaurs, charging an enemy with the impetuosity of lightning and disappearing with the quickness of thought, they requested me every moment to engage; but I knew too well the value of regular infantry, and how ineffectual would be the efforts of light cavalry ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... superstitions of Keltic races, in the Mediterranean basin. The dragon of Wantley lived in a well; the Lambton Worm began life in fresh water, and only took to dry land later on. I have elsewhere spoken of the Manfredonia legend of Saint Lorenzo and the dragon, an indigenous fable connected, I suspect, with the fountain near the harbour of that town, and quite independent of the newly-imported legend of Saint Michael. Various springs in Greece and Italy are called Dragoneria; there is a cave-fountain Dragonara on Malta, and another of the same name near ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... went on, "puts me in mind of the farmer and his corn in the fable—get out, cats!—he waited till he found that the proper thing to do was to get his sons to work and cut ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... improvisation and competitive versifying. They have also the epic or sjair, generally a pure romance, with much naive simplicity and natural feeling. And finally, they have the popular song, enigma, and fable. ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... fruits, and free room for cramped and scurvy-weakened limbs. And there, too, might be gold, and gems, and all the wealth of Ind. Who knew? Why not? The old world of fact and prose lay thousands of miles behind them, and before them and around them was the realm of wonder and fable, of boundless hope and possibility. Sick men crawled up out of their stifling hammocks; strong men fell on their knees and gave God thanks; and all eyes and hands were stretched eagerly toward the far blue cloud, fading as the sun sank down, yet rising higher and broader ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the sun and the wind that in the fable strove for the mastery; and the strife was for the traveller's cloak. The quiet moon had nought to do with such fierce rivalry of the burning or the blast; but as in her tranquil orbit she journeys round the world, ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... bull &c. (absurdity) 497; haplography[obs3]. illusion, delusion; snare; false impression, false idea; bubble; self- decit, self-deception; mists of error. heresy &c. (heterodoxy) 984; hallucination &c. (insanity) 503; false light &c. (fallacy of vision) 443; dream &c. (fancy) 515; fable &c. (untruth) 546; bias &c. (misjudgment) 481; misleading &c. v. V. be erroneous &c. adj. cause error; mislead, misguide; lead astray, lead into error; beguile, misinform &c. (misteach) 538[obs3]; delude; give a false impression, give a false idea; falsify, misstate; deceive ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... heathen nations. The old Greek was large in brain, but not in heart. He had created his gods in his own image, and they were—what they were. There was no goodness in his religion, and we can tolerate it only as it is developed in the Homeric rhapsodies, in the far-off fable-time of the old world, and amongst men who were but partially self-conscious. In that remote Homeric epoch it is tolerable, when cattle-stealing and war were the chief employments of the ruling caste,—and we may add, woman-stealing, into the bargain. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... don't say!" mocked the other. "Now, how d'ye suppose I c'n reach down seven feet or more, and give you the friendly hand? Think my arms stretch that far? Perhaps, now, you imagine I'll just drop in like the poor old goat did in the fable, to let the smart fox jump up on his back, and then out? If you do you've got another ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... the house. A large building, square and new, very high, seemed, as in the fable of the mountain and the mouse, to have given birth to a tiny little white house, which nestled near it. This little house was the original dwelling, and had been built by the former owner. The tower ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the fable that Lamech, when he had grown old and was blind, was led by a youth into the woods to hunt wild beasts, not for the sake of their flesh but for their skins; circumstances which are altogether absurd, and at once prove the whole ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... effect was quite different from the old Gothic ruins I had seen. This spoke of courts, of princes; and the pride and grandeur of the past, contrasted with the silence and desertion, reminded me of the fable of the city of enchantment, where king and court were smitten to stone as they stood. A mournful lion's head attracted my attention, it had such a strange, sad look; and there was a fountain broken ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... this district are Naragarhi, a small fort on the plain, where the Subah usually resides; Bhemagarhi, another similar place, where he occasionally resides; and Janakpur, a place of pilgrimage noted in Hindu fable, and already mentioned as the seat of a very ancient dynasty. I am told that there are no remains of former ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... orderly ways suits me better than the more demonstrative performances of my friends at home. Slow coaches as we call them, I should not be surprised if they got the suffrage before we did, as the tortoise won in the fable,' was Lavinia's secret thought as they drove away, after a ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... Mrs. Wesselhoeft's "Fable Stories" are proving themselves more and more acceptable to the children. "Old Rough" is a decided acquisition ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... deformed, to which one may lawfully joyne those rocks, those incumbrances, and those hideous monsters. If so it happen, that his Disciple prove of so different a condition, that he rather love to give eare to an idle fable than to the report of some noble voiage, or other notable and wise discourse, when he shall heare it; that at the sound of a Drum or clang of a Trumpet, which are wont to rowse and arme the youthly heat of his companions, turneth to another ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... He spake no word whatever about dominion; all he dared conjecture for his city was safety. Even that is put in a highly hypothetical mood. The augury begins with an "if," regarding the apocryphal story of Romulus and the twelve vultures. But whether the fable of the vultures be true or not, the augury of twelve centuries of safety deduced from it is undeniably false, whether it refers to the material city, or to the political constitution then established. The city then built was burnt ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the bread of independence is an old and deeply rooted feeling. There is an ancient fable of AEsop about the Dog and the Wolf which portrays this sentiment in a very quaint and delightful ...
— Wanted, a Young Woman to Do Housework • C. Helene Barker
... Commons, with loving hearts and true, Who stand by the bold Tribunes that still have stood by you, Come, make a circle round me, and mark my tale with care, A tale of what Rome once hath borne, of what Rome yet may bear. This is no Grecian fable, of fountains running wine, Of maids with snaky tresses, or sailors turned to swine. Here, in this very Forum, under the noonday sun, In sight of all the people, the bloody deed was done. Old men still creep among us who saw that fearful day, Just seventy years and seven ago, when ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... pass from the region of romance and fable to its very antipodes in realism; to the examination of a strip of fine linen cloth of the colour of brown holland, which is exhibited in ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... believe a word of his story," repeated Mr. Grey. "Your father's intelligence is so high, and his principles so low, that there is no scheme which he does not think that he cannot carry out against the established laws of his country. His present tale is a made-up fable." ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... the Fable are all common and popular modes of conveying instruction. Each is distinguished by its own special characteristics. The Tale consists simply in the narration of a story either founded on facts, or created solely ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... after the giants were overthrown by the gods, the earth in revenge produced her last offspring, which was Fame.[4] And the fable is thus interpreted; that when tumults and seditions are quieted, rumours and false reports are plentifully spread through a nation. So that by this account, lying is the last relief of a routed, earth-born, rebellious party in a ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... now grown so familiar to teachers that it will serve for illustration without repetition here. It is the type of story which specifically teaches a certain ethical or conduct lesson, in the form of a fable or an allegory,—it passes on to the child the conclusions as to conduct and character, to which the race has, in general, attained through centuries of experience and moralising. The story becomes an inescapable part of the outfit of received ideas ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... to human proofs of the dignity of learning, we find that among the heathen the inventors of new arts, such as Ceres, Bacchus, and Apollo, were consecrated among the gods themselves by apotheosis. The fable of Orpheus, wherein quarrelsome beasts stood sociably listening to the harp, aptly described the nature of men among whom peace is maintained so long as they give ear to precepts, laws, and religion. It has been said that people would then be happy, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... flattery, Your sex's much-lov'd enemy; For other foes we are prepar'd, And Nature puts us on our guard: In that alone such charms are found, We court the dart, we nurse the hand; And this, my child, an Aesop's Fable Will prove much ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... "You will perhaps say, that it is easy for me to preach against riches; but like the Fox in the fable, the grapes are sour. I speak, however, with indifference of the good that Providence has placed beyond my reach. Geoffrey, I was once the envied possessor of wealth, which in my case was productive ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... that high air Quickens imagination's flight, What monstrous bird and very rare Would in these parts some day alight; How, like a roc of Arab fable, A Zepp en route from London town, Trying to find its German stable, Would here ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... Choisy, Montargis, Marne, Meulan, and Orleanais. Amongst the latter there was one which was much appreciated by Henry I., and of which he kept a store, to stimulate his courage when he joined his army. The little fable of the Battle of Wines, composed in the thirteenth century by Henri d'Andelys, mentions a number of wines which have to this day maintained their reputation: for instance, the Beaune, in Burgundy; the Saint-Emilion, in Gruyenne; the Chablis, Epernay, Sezanne, ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... front of them a frightful monster ran across their path, which seemed so hideous to Martin, that his mind instantly reverted to the fable of Saint George and the Dragon, and he almost expected to see fire issuing from its mouth. It was a huge lizard, with a body about three feet long, covered with bright scales. It had a long, thick tail. Its head was clumsy ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... presented, extending over a vast space." He was fortunate, moreover, in making his visit to the gardens on the evening of a balloon ascent, "and thus I witnessed the most wonderful sight I ever saw—a sight which a hundred millions of people in India consider to be a Feringhi fiction, an incredible fable; for though a Frenchman made an ascent at Lucknow some years ago, nobody believes it who did not see it, and many even who were present, believed that their senses had been beguiled by magic.... A car in the shape of a howdah was swung by ropes beneath ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... is no cause why profite maye not folowe pleasure, and honestie ioyned to delectacion. [Sidenote: Wherfore lernyng is called humanitie] For what letteth that they shulde not lerne eyther a proper fable, arte of poets, or a sentence, or a notable prety hystorie, or a learned tale, as well as they lerne and can wythout boke a piuyshe songe, and oft[en]times a baudy one to, & folishe old wiues tatlynges, ...
— The Education of Children • Desiderius Erasmus
... took strange shapes, now of monstrous heads, now of fantastic towers. As his sure-footed nag forded the brown bog-stream, long-shanked birds rose silently from the pools, and he marked with emotion the spots his boyhood had known: the shallow where the dog-wolf—so big that it had become a fable—died biting, and the cliff whence the sea-eagle's nest had long bidden ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... Grecian history and even of Grecian fable. We are inspired by ancient poetry and eloquence, as well as by the bards and orators of modern times. Painting and sculpture are the equal admiration of every refined age. The virtue of patriotism has been illustrated by savage as well as civilized life. Thus every ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... of the learned have regarded this account of Fredegaire as a romantic fable, and have declined to give it a place in history. M. Fauriel, one of the most learned associates of the Academy of Inscriptions, has given much the same opinion, but he nevertheless adds: "Whatever may be their authorship, the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... that that old friendship between them was no fable. To-night it would bear fruit. False, she believed her—well, ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... a great part in the dawn of historical and geographical research. Because there was a Persian empire which was the natural enemy of the Greek, there must also have been an Assyrian empire, which had a similar hostility; and not only the fable of the island of Atlantis, but the Trojan war, in Plato's mind derived some features from the Persian struggle. So Herodotus makes the Nile answer to the Ister, and the valley of the Nile to the Red Sea. In the Republic, Plato is flying in the ...
— Laws • Plato
... said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and oeconomical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... last thirty or forty years; and we English are, as good King Alfred found us to his sorrow a thousand years ago, very slow to move, even when we see a thing ought to be done. Let us hope that in this matter—we have been so in most matters as yet—we shall be like the tortoise in the fable, and not the hare; and by moving slowly, but surely, win the race at last. But now think for yourself: and see what you would do to save these people from being poisoned by bad water. Remember that the plain ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... century, who has left us a history of the world to the year 1057. It contains many popular stories, but often transcribes or abridges official documents as well as ancient historians. In this work we might expect to find any fable, generally accredited, concerning Belisarius; but the account of his latter days is in exact conformity with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... is so much of fable mingled with the traditionary biography of this "Devonshire worthy," that most persons probably will dismiss the claim altogether. He became weary of his life, and, being determined to rid himself from the direful apprehensions of dangerous approaching evils, he adopted this strange mode ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... fire was called Aurva, from the following fable. The Rishi Aurva, who had gained great power by his austerities, was pressed by the gods and others to perpetuate his race. He consented, but warned them that his offspring would consume the world. Accordingly, he created from his thigh ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... her fury, until she recovered the love-letter she had written to me. As soon as she had secured it, she hired some persons to testify by oath, that, in the absence of his Excellency, I had attempted to violate her. This fable was represented with so much art and speciousness, that the president did not doubt its truth, and I was ordered to be put in prison. In this, my despairing condition, I saw no other means of deliverance than to confess the crime, with which I had been charged, and supplicate ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... described, the illustrations add much to the meaning and purpose of the text. Here the artist shows not only the physical attributes of the real animal, but in a subtle way goes a step further and through the features or the attitude suggests the characteristics attributed in the fable. Thus unconsciously the little reader gets from the picture an increased conception of the sly, clever, crafty ways of the fox or the slow, plodding, steadfast patience ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... in so prodigious a fashion, and in several countries, all very remote from each other. The gipsies themselves have preserved no tradition whatsoever as to their origin, and though most of them do speak of Egypt as their original fatherland, that is only because they have adopted a very ancient fable respecting their race. ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... eloquence, and of all good and prudent action. The right instruction of youth does not consist in cramming them with a mass of words, phrases, sentences, and opinions collected from authors. In this way the youth are taught, like Aesop's crow in the fable, to adorn themselves with strange feathers. Why should we not, instead of dead books, open the living book of nature? Not the shadows of things, but the things themselves, which make an impression upon the senses and imagination, are to be brought ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... proceed to a regular examination of the tragedy before us, in which I shall treat separately of the Fable, the Moral, the Characters, the Sentiments, and the Diction. And first ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... in which a very little history is mingled with a great deal of fable: the scribes as well as the people were acquainted with the fact that Egypt had been in danger of dissolution at the time when the Hebrews left the banks of the Nile, but they were ignorant of the details, of the precise date and of the name of the reigning Pharaoh. A certain similarity in ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... word the controversies which had agitated the profoundest reasons, and to settle with a sneer, the mysteries before which the mightiest thinkers had veiled their eyes in reverence and awe; that he should profess to set aside Christianity as a childish fable not worthy a wise man's acceptance, and triumph over it as a defeated and deserted cause; this indeed filled De Vayne's mind with sorrow and disgust. So far from being impressed or dazzled by Bruce's would-be cleverness, he sincerely grieved ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... trustingly in his face and thrusts forth its paw to tear him? Who blames the gorilla? Torn from its dam, caged or chained, it owes its captor a grudge. To the serpent? The story of the warming of the serpent in the man's bosom, is a mere fable. No man was ever fool enough to warm a serpent in his bosom. And the serpent never crosses the path of man if he can help it. The most deadly is that which is too sluggish to get out of his way—therefore bites in self-defense. And the serpent generally gives ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... the life of Abraham Lincoln savors more of romance than reality. It is more like a fable of the ancient days than a story of a plain American of the nineteenth century. The singular vicissitudes in the life of our martyred President surround him with an interest which attaches to few men in history. He sprang from that class which he always alluded to as the "plain people," ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... is told simply and strongly, preserving the fire and force of the original, and not losing the subtle charm of the old fable with ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... saying in the services, and elsewhere, that greater privileges grow out of larger responsibilities, and that the latter justifies the former. This is part truth and part fable. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... also that of his country with the vastest and noblest enterprise inscribed in the annals of history. And each one moved over his own favorite route toward his own goal. It was an apt illustration of the Russian fable of the swan, the crab, and the pike being harnessed together in order to remove a load. The swan flew upward, the crab crawled backward, the pike made with all haste for the water, and the load ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... mention (as the very extreme anachronism which the case admits of) that Mr. Archdeacon W. has absolutely introduced the idea of sin into the "Iliad;" and, in a regular octavo volume, has represented it as the key to the whole movement of the fable. It was once made a reproach to Southey that his Don Roderick spoke, in his penitential moods, a language too much resembling that of Methodism; yet, after all, that prince was a Christian, and a Christian amongst Mussulmans. But what are we to think of Achilles and ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... in which the poet has under his language a different meaning from what it expresses,—a meaning which there should be nothing in that language to indicate. Such a piece may be compared to the sopic fable; but, while it is the object of the fable to inculcate the virtues of morality and prudence, an historical interpretation has to be sought for the metaphorical pieces of the Shih. Generally, moreover, the moral of the fable is subjoined to it, which is never done. ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... breakfast, the Emperor was playing with the new King's oldest son, the little Napoleon, who was only three years and a half old, but was very bright for his age, and already knew by heart La Fontaine's fables. The Emperor made him recite the fable about the frogs who wanted a king, and listened to it, laughing loudly. He pinched the Queen's ear, and asked her, "What do you say to that, Hortense?" The allusions to the poor king and to his poor people were only too clear. The melancholy monarch, or rather, the crowned ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... as soon as the Lydians had been subdued by the Persians, sent messengers to Cyrus at Sardis, desiring to be his subjects on the same terms as they had been subjects of Croesus. And when he heard that which they proposed to him, he spoke to them a fable, saying that a certain player on the pipe saw fishes in the sea and played on his pipe, supposing that they would come out to land; but being deceived in his expectation, he took a casting-net and enclosed ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... Yet—such is the contradiction inherent in our poor fallen nature—these people were more annoyed by my proficiency in the common labours of the household, than they would have been by any displays of my unfortunate authorship. Never was the fable of the old man and his ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Superstitious they were, or sailors they never would have been; and here was the very stuff to set them all ears, like children about a bogey. Nor will I deny that Dolly Venn's tale was marvellous enough to make a fable. Had it been told to me under any other circumstances, my reply would have been: "Dolly, my lad, since when have you taken to sleep-walking?" But I said nothing of the kind, for I had that in my pocket which told me it was true; and what I knew I deemed it ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... exuberance and of the spirit of revelry. But shy reticence finds compensation in good-natured humor. Unenthusiastic but substantial realism, speculative meditation, and a certain didactic tone make the Low German country the home of the fable and the great epic. That such a great dramatist as Hebbel was also a scion of this stock seems almost exceptional. The stubborn peasant family-stocks, the urban culture of the Hanseatic cities, and the scattered seats of the nobility, even ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... bargain, the people would have cast him out; they were willing to tolerate him for a few years, more or less, but as a fixture—No! "Tolerate" is too harsh a word; but another might be too weak. The truth is, men do not care half so much what they get, as how they get it. The wolf in Aesop's fable keenly wanted a share of the bones which made his friend the mastiff so sleek; but the hint that the bones and the collar went together drove him hungry but free back to his desert. It is of no avail to give a man all he asks for; he resents having to ask you for it, and wants to know ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... enough to lift up the stone, and ascertain its weight, after which he declared it was of the exact size he expected; and that nothing was left him but to die, which he did accordingly,[7] after very properly making his will. It is needless to remark that this fable is confuted by the return of Michael to his native country; but it appears to have been the origin of a tradition still current amongst the peasantry of Scotland, and which ascribes a miraculous power to the bonnet of the Wizard. It is curious to find the tale of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... which there was immediately a most profound silence. After he had said much more in praise of Rockingham, he sub-joined, that with regard to General Conway's remaining in the ministry, it reminded him of a fable he had heard in his youth, of a wolf, who, on having clothed himself as a sheep, was let into the fold by a lamb, who indeed did say to him, "Where did you get those long nails, and those sharp teeth, mamma?" But nevertheless ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... insist here that it is exactly what is called the unpractical part of the thing that is really the practical. The chief difference between men and the animals is that all men are artists; though the overwhelming majority of us are bad artists. As the old fable truly says, lions do not make statues; even the cunning of the fox can go no further than the accomplishment of leaving an exact model of the vulpine paw: and even that is an accomplishment which he wishes he hadn't got. There are Chryselephantine statues, ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... each Book, and grouped after their Fables. The name is spelled "Aesop" in Riley, "Esop" in Smart and in the Contents. Inconsistencies in fable numbering are described at the beginning of the Table ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... and local disturbances of the laws of nature for a high object, the case, they candidly avowed, would have been wholly different; but such wholesale infractions of the fixed laws of the universe were at once to be summarily rejected. They were unquestionably the offspring of an age of fable ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... day have the dead of this fabled land been carried to the Carrion Caves, that in death and decay they might serve their country and warn away invading enemies. Here, too, is brought, so the fable runs, all the waste stuff of the nation—everything that is subject to rot, and that can add to the foul ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and stuffed into royalty! The receipt is, to take any ordinary female bee in its infancy, put it into a royal cradle or cell, and feed it with a certain kind of jelly; upon which its shape alters into that of sovereignty, and her Majesty issues forth, royal by the grace of stomach. This is no fable, as the reader may see on consulting any good history of bees. In general, several Queen-bees are made at a time, in case of accidents; but each, on emerging from her apartment, seeks to destroy the other, and one only remains living in one hive. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... organs of moderate capacity feels some apprehension at the mountains of rice and food which are placed before one, and is expected to devour. A European who wants to be on his best behaviour finds the last stages of a Persian dinner a positive trial, and is reminded very forcibly of the terrible fable of the frog that tried to emulate the cow. To show the reader to what test of expansion one's capacity is put, no better evidence can be given than a faithful enumeration of the viands spread before us at the dinner here described, all of which we were ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... which have clustered about the observations of the stars by the Chinese there are subjects for pictorial illustration without number. One of these stories is the fable of Aquila and Vega, known in Chinese mythology as the Herdsman and the Weaver-girl. The latter, the daughter of the Sun-god, was so constantly busied with her loom that her father became worried at her close habits and thought that by marrying her to a neighbour, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... change of plan, he hastily and somewhat clumsily divided what he had written into chapters on the model of "Amadis," invented the fable of a mysterious Arabic manuscript, and set up Cide Hamete Benengeli in imitation of the almost invariable practice of the chivalry-romance authors, who were fond of tracing their books to some recondite source. In working out the new ideas, he soon found the value of Sancho ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... not do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... this time that Vignau appeared in Paris with a tale which could not but kindle excitement in the heart of an explorer. The basis of fact was that Vignau had undoubtedly passed the preceding winter with the Algonquins on the Ottawa. The fable which was built upon this fact can best be told in ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... yellow, red, russet, all bright colors, brightened by the mild brilliancy of the descending sun; it was strange to recognize the sober old friends of spring and summer in this new dress. By the by, a pretty riddle or fable might be made out of the changes in apparel of the familiar trees round a house, adapted for children. But in the lake, beneath the aforesaid border of trees,—the water being, not rippled, but its glassy ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... this doubtful charge against the entire Russian race. For nothing is better calculated to sanctify a martyrdom and make a race abhorred than a belief in its injustice. Nothing is more potent to dissolve a race and scatter its suspected members from the altar of their fathers than the fable of their unrepentant hostility to the cry of Mercy from the sacrificial Ikon. Nothing so quickly exposes their abandoned fields to the tramp of hostile feet and the subjugation of their soil. Ambitious rivalry has no better ally ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... wittily and very justly, "If you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales." No man surely ever had so little talent for personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... the origin of the christian scriptures is involved in fable and mystery, should have been accompanied with a clear refutation of the arguments used by Lardner, Paley, and others, who have with much learning and labour traced the stream to ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... movement intended to root out this impediment to the Baltic trade, and raised no opposition when Gustavus offered, in the winter of 1524, to attack the island in the coming spring. The attitude of Fredrik to Gustavus recalls the fable of the monkey and the cat. The Danish king hoped ultimately to secure the chestnuts for himself, but in the mean time was not sorry to see an army gathering in Sweden to bear the brunt of the assault. Which party first proposed an expedition against Gotland is not clear.[89] At the general diet ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... Literature of the Indo-Chinese Nations, recently published in Volume 10 of the Asiatic Researches. The substance of the information conveyed by them is as follows; and I trust it will not be thought that the mixture of a portion of mythological fable in accounts of this nature invalidates what might otherwise have credit as historical fact. The utmost indeed we can pretend to ascertain is what the natives themselves believe to have been their ancient history; and it is proper to remark that in the present question there can be no suspicion ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... their bases melting in gold and the blue sea lying below them smiling at early stars: these windows were more mysterious than that; it was a more triumphant blue; it was like the Mediterranean seen with the eyes of Shelley, on a happy day in his youth, or like the sea round Western islands of fable seen by the fancy of Keats. They were no windows for any need of ours, unless our dreams be needs, unless our cries for the moon be urged by the same Necessity as makes us cry for bread. They were clearly concerned ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... more elegant or digestible. For the credit of Greek farmers, I am sorry that Eumaeus has nothing better to offer his landlord,—the most abominable dish, Charles Lamb and his pleasant fable to the contrary notwithstanding, that was ever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... is buried in impenetrable mists of fable. No one can assign a date to the foundation of these high-hill cities. The eminence on which it stands belongs to the volcanic system of Monte Amiata, and must at some time have formed a portion of the crater which threw that ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature. Books indeed continue to be read, for the interest of the fact or fable, in which this quality is poorly represented, but still it will be there. And, on the other hand, how many do we continue to peruse and reperuse with pleasure whose only merit is the elegance of texture? I am tempted to mention ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the adjutant and the paymaster, and so might they have continued, had not prosperity, that in its blighting influence upon the heart, spares neither priests nor laymen, and is equally severe upon mice (see Aesop's fable) and moral philosophers, actually deprived them, for the "nonce" of reason, and tempted them to their ruin. You naturally ask, what did they do? Did they venture upon allusions to the retreat upon ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... he pressed A trembling hand against his throbbing breast, His aimless fingers touched a treasured part Of the green holly-branch of Elfinhart, Laid in his breast when he put off his arms. What perils now are left in fairy charms? For poets fable when they call love blind; Love's habitation is the purer mind, Whence with his keen eyes he may penetrate All mists and fogs that baser spells create. Love? What is love? Not the wild feverish thrill, When heart to ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... written of those lands,[271-1] it was all by conjecture, without confirmation from eyesight, amounting only to this much that the hearers for the most part listened and judged that there was more fable in it than anything actual, however trifling. Since thus our Redeemer has given to our most illustrious King and Queen, and to their famous kingdoms, this victory in so high a matter, Christendom should have rejoicing therein and make great festivals, and give solemn thanks to the Holy ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... Apostle, 'so run not as uncertainly.' If the runner is now heading that way and now this, making all manner of loops upon his path, of course he will be left hopelessly in the rear. It is the old fable of the Grecian mythology transplanted into Christian soil. The runner who turned aside to pick up the golden apple was disappointed of his hopes of the radiant fair. The ship, at the helm of which is a steersman ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... Protestantism, awoke the nation to the true faculty of defence; and from that period alone could the burden of the fine national song be realized, and Britain was to "rule the main." The expeditions against the Spanish West Indies, and the new ardour of discovery in regions where brilliant fable lent its aid to rational curiosity, carried on the process of naval power. The war against Holland, under Charles II., though disastrous and impolitic, showed at least that the fleet of England was the true arm of its strength; and the humiliation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... made up with a heroic determination not to mind it. Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do not count a man's years, until he has nothing else to count. The vast inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus. In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we shall all be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... And on Andromache[186] his helmet laces. Great Agamemnon was, men say, amazed, On Priam's loose-trest daughter when he gazed. Mars in the deed the blacksmith's net did stable; In heaven was never more notorious fable. 40 Myself was dull and faint, to sloth inclined; Pleasure and ease had mollified my mind. A fair maid's care expelled this sluggishness, And to her tents willed me myself address. Since may'st thou see me watch and night-wars move: He that will not ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... "Fable tells us that upon entering into life Hercules saw the two paths open before him: of pleasure and ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... whole gold-fable was vastly exaggerated. To be sure there was gold, no one could deny that, but it occurred very rarely, and in terrible places to get at. One had to put in ten dollars' worth of work, to get out one dollars' worth of dust. And provisions were so high that the cost of living ate ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... world. All frontiers crossed, all barriers behind, he stood within the paradise of his heart's desire. The Consciousness of the Earth included him. These were early forms of life she had projected—some of the living prototypes of legend, myth, and fable—embodiments of her first manifestations of consciousness, and eternal, accessible to every heart that holds a true and passionate worship. All his life this love of Nature, which was worship, had been his. It now fulfilled ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century, to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The Republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the Republic of Venice was modern when compared to the Papacy; and the Republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigor. ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... monstrous one; but in its very monstrosity there lay this germ of encouragement—that it could not be suspected. The very hopelessness of the scheme grounded his hope; and he resolved to 20 execute a vengeance which should involve as it were, in the unity of a well-laid tragic fable, all whom he judged to be his enemies. That vengeance lay in detaching from the Russian empire the whole Kalmuck nation and breaking up that system of intercourse which had thus far been 25 beneficial to both. This last was a consideration which moved him but little. True ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... fairy-stories of our children. There is a special value in these old-world stories, that date back to a time long before written history. They belong to all countries in slightly different forms. We have regarded them as fables, but there was never a fable that did not arise out of truth—not, of course, the outside truth of facts, but from that inward truth of the life and thought of a people, which is what really matters. I cannot, then, do better than conclude the evidence for the mother-age by referring to some ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... that that story of "The Dog and the Water-lily" was "no fable," and that Beau really understood his master's wish when he fetched him a water-lily out of "Ouse's silent tide." How graceful are the last two stanzas of that ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... stated (Devay, 'Du Danger des Mariages,' &c., 1862, p. 141) that the marriages of cousins have been prohibited by the legislature of Ohio; but I have been assured, in answer to inquiries made in the United States, that this statement is a mere fable. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... "A fable, I think. Someone was telling me about her the other day. She is only a camp-follower and protegee; and a compatriot of mine. She is an orphan and Madame ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... my sweat—was an imp of darkness. My fool's paradise I had planted with all manner of fair flowers and lordly trees, and in my folly believed that those who had been my friends were forever after assured of pleasant places, lovely perfumes, and grateful shade; but like the Grecian in the ancient fable, I found I had sown dragon's teeth, and the crop I reaped was of hatred and envy, passion ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... "that we all know, and you know that we all know, is but a fable. Doth not Madam Cavendish treat you as a son, and are you not a convict in name only, so far as she is concerned? I say, Harry, you can ride my horse to the winning on Royal Oak Day, at the races. What think ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... 'winning wave in the tempestuous petticoat' which has rippled to such good purpose through so many graceful speeches since. So that though Julia and Dianeme and Anthea have passed away, though Corinna herself is merely 'a fable, song, a fleeting shade,' he has saved enough of them from the ravin of Time for us to love and be grateful for eternally. Their gracious ghosts abide in a peculiar nook of the Elysium of Poesy. There 'in their habit as they lived' ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... work for the day, twelve sums, four pages of penmanship, and the fable of "The Dog and the Rabbit" to learn by heart. He began with the fable, reciting it in a loud voice, like the hero in the play: "'A dog was roaming about the fields, when from behind a little hill jumped a rabbit, which had been nibbling ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... itself); and, except for Nicolai's good industry (in his ANEKDOTEN-Book), we should have difficulty even in guessing, not to say understanding, as is now partly possible. The few real particulars—and those do verify themselves, and hang perfectly together, when the big globe of fable is burnt off from them—are to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a thousand kisses, And fight e'er since for pay, like Swisses. Gay's 'Aye and No, a Fable'. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... presence of this great beast, which was made into the fanciful proportions most adapted to excite awe and wonder." To his friend Hogg, in after-years, Shelley often spoke about another reptile, no mere creature of myth or fable, the "Old Snake," who had inhabited the gardens of Field Place for several generations. This venerable serpent was accidentally killed by the gardener's scythe; but he lived long in the poet's memory, and it may reasonably ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Ha! why? Do you think I fable with you? I assure you, He that has once the flower of the sun, The perfect ruby, which we call elixir, Not only can do that, but, by its virtue, Can confer honour, love, respect, long life; Give safety, valour, ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... erected it. He did not calculate upon the avaricious frenzy of a whole nation; he did not see that confidence, like mistrust, could be increased almost ad infinitum, and that hope was as extravagant as fear. How was he to foretell that the French people, like the man in the fable, would kill, in their frantic eagerness, the fine goose he had brought to lay them so many golden eggs? His fate was like that which may be supposed to have overtaken the first adventurous boatman who rowed from Erie to Ontario. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... that necessary before one can believe in his teachings? The truth is always divine. What difference does it make whether the one who utters it be human or divine, bond or slave, AEsop or Marcus Aurelius? the truth remains the same. A fable is only another name of a parable. We have the story of the lost sheep; that's a parable; and that of the lamb that muddied the stream, and that's a fable. One is sacred, the other profane, but both ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... and geographical research. Because there was a Persian empire which was the natural enemy of the Greek, there must also have been an Assyrian empire, which had a similar hostility; and not only the fable of the island of Atlantis, but the Trojan war, in Plato's mind derived some features from the Persian struggle. So Herodotus makes the Nile answer to the Ister, and the valley of the Nile to the Red Sea. In the Republic, Plato is flying in the air regardless ...
— Laws • Plato
... scorn as well as defiance in her voice—scorn because he stood before her so silently; scorn because the fierce torrent of her anger had flowed unchecked. She had only to stand up to him, it seemed, and like the giant of the fable he dwindled to a pigmy. She was no longer hurt by his passivity. She despised him ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... their carriages, as one sometimes does in the Park, though not given to such nonsense, he could not help uttering a secret exclamation against the inequalities of fortune, and thinking the blindness of the goddess of the wheel no fable. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... of Piedmont was not quite seven years old, when his preceptor, Cardinal (then Father) Glendel, explained to him the fable of Pandora's Box. He told him that all evils which afflict the human race were shut up in that fatal box; which Pandora, tempted by Curiosity, opened, when they immediately flew out, and spread themselves over the surface ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... of himself in this fable, Mr Tapley took it upon him to issue divers general directions to the waiters from the hotel, relative to the disposal of the dishes and so forth; and as they were usually in direct opposition to all precedent, and were always issued in his most ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... voice faltered, and with a sudden impulse Mrs. Snowdon bent her head and kissed the fair forehead which had bent lower and lower as she went on. Each listener understood the truth, lightly veiled in that hasty fable, and each found in it a different meaning. Sir Jasper frowned and bit his lips, Annon glanced anxiously from face to face, Octavia hid hers, and Treherne's flashed with sudden intelligence, while Rose laughed low to herself, enjoying the ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... When the night is cold, windy, or rainy, he usually covers his body with a heap of 'Pandanus', 'Nipa', or Fern leaves, like those of which his bed is made, and he is especially careful to wrap up his head in them. It is this habit of covering himself up which has probably led to the fable that the Orang ...
— Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... sex's much-lov'd enemy; For other foes we are prepar'd, And Nature puts us on our guard: In that alone such charms are found, We court the dart, we nurse the hand; And this, my child, an Aesop's Fable Will prove much better than ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... in which verbena and maiden-hair have been steeped, as good raise mirth and jollity in the guests (in imitation of Homer's Helen, who with some medicament diluted the pure wine she had prepared), do not understand that that fable, coming from round Egypt, after a long way ends at last in easy and fit discourse. For whilst they were drinking Helen ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Europe, and beaten in one or two. If but once I had been shoved into the gutter by a heedless throng going furiously upon its financial ways, I should have been content.... The legendary "American rush" is to me a fable. Whether it ever existed I know not; but I certainly saw no trace of it, either in New York or Chicago. I dare say I ought to have gone to Seattle for it. My first sight of a stock-market roped off in the street was an acute disillusionment. In agitation ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... correspondence with the Orleans Princes, was thinking of starting a racing stable, and finished up by believing that he really was a fashionable man, and strutted about, and was puffed out with conceit, as he had probably never read La Fontaine's fable, in which he tells the story of the ass that is laden with relics which people salute, and so ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... in armour, on an enchanted steed, guarding hidden treasure, or waiting for the magic word which will set him free to fight for his banished rulers. And yet, here was I entering this ancient citadel mighty in history and fable, in an ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... that the Goddess is made to command nature—the breeze, the sleep of the Suitors. It is the method of fable thus to portray intelligence, whose function is to take control of nature and make her subserve its purpose. The breeze blows and drives the ship; it is the divine instrument for bringing Telemachus to Pylos, a part of the world-order, especially upon the present ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... "In realising the fable of the boys and the frogs with the poor old Dominie, forgetting that what may be sport to ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... vigorous Christianity. A Christianity without a dying Christ is a dying Christianity. And history shows us that the expansiveness and elevating power of the Gospel depend on the prominence given to the sacrifice on the Cross. An old fable says that the only thing that melts adamant is the blood of a lamb. The Gospel reveals the precious blood of Jesus Christ, His death for us as a ransom, as the one power which subdues hostility and binds hearts to Him. The Christ of the Gospels is the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... American girl is neither an affectation, nor a prejudiced fable, nor a piece of stupidity. The German woman, quoted by Mr. Bryce, found her American compeer furchtbar frei, but she had at once to add und furchtbar fromm. "The innocence of the American girl passes abysses of obscenity ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Very shortly he began to refuse to talk about the thing at all. The act was completed. Like the creature of fable, it had consumed itself. Out of that old man's consciousness it had departed. Amazingly. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... I advise you to give up trying to father the crime onto a band of gipsies. The witness Bridet, who has business relations with you, has endeavored, no doubt at your instigation, to induce us to accept this fable. I warn you he has ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... caterpillar and the horseman was conceived in arrogance, but it was pretty and effective. Every tory intellect on earth is pleased to discourse in that way of the labors of the only men who greatly help their species,—the patient elaborators of truth. A caterpillar, as we learn from this fable, had crawled slowly over a fence, which a gallant horseman took at a single leap. "Stop," ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... says the fable, "in the room of those pictures which exhibit men vanquishing lions, we should see lions feeding upon men." If the stone-cutter could have written like Bruyere, what would he ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... the collection was that of three portraits belonging to the pre-historical age, and, according to mythical tradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher, whose origin and attributes were as much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of an Indian Budh ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and as easily stampeded. When the Atlin boom struck the camp, Foy lost five hundred men in as many minutes. Scores of graders dropped their tools and started off on a trot. The prospector who had told the fable had thrown his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the general direction. Nobody had thought to ask how far. Many forgot to let go; and Heney's picks and shovels, worth over a dollar apiece, went away with the stampeders. As the wild mob swept on, the tethered blasters cut the cables that guyed ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... "Why do you always wear those eye-hiding glasses straddled across your nose? Are they supposed to make a man look handsomer or wiser than his fellows, or do you, a sensible person, really believe that you can see better than another man because of them? If so, then all I can say is that it is a fable, a delusion; no man can believe such ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... establish his credit as a staunch upholder of the Bourbons, and has tried already to gain admittance into my set. When his wife took Mme. de Langeais' box, she thought that she could take her charm, her wit, and her success as well. It is the old fable of the jay in the ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... constructed may be an actual occurrence or fiction; but, if fictitious, the story must be consistent and probable, with no admixture of the unusual or miraculous. In this respect the parable differs from the fable, the latter being imaginative, exaggerated and improbable as to fact; moreover, the intent is unlike in the two, since the parable is designed to convey some great spiritual truth, while the so-called moral of the fable is at best suggestive only ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... followed by comic groups, six of which illustrated Goethe's fable of "Reinecke the Fox," and were skilfully managed as well ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... devote themselves to his worship; they cast lots, and one of them offers her own tender infant to be torn by the three, like a roe; then the other women pursue them, and they are turned into bats, or moths, or other creatures of the night. And fable is endorsed by history; Plutarch telling us how, before the battle of Salamis, with the assent of Themistocles, three Persian captive youths were offered to ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... were moved with extraordinary indignation; who were once in the highest pitch of either honour, or calamity; or mutual hatred and enmity; or of any other fortune or condition whatsoever. Then consider what's now become of all those things. All is turned to smoke; all to ashes, and a mere fable; and perchance not so much as a fable. As also whatsoever is of this nature, as Fabius Catulinus in the field; Lucius Lupus, and Stertinius, at Baiae Tiberius at Caprem: and Velius Rufus, and all such examples of vehement prosecution in worldly matters; let these also run in thy mind ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... Pleasant Adventures at Brussels; a Comedy; with a familiar Preface upon a late Reformer of the Stage, ending with a Satirical Fable of the Dog, and the Otter, 1698. This play is dedicated to Thomas Lord Wharton, and part of it is borrowed from a Novel called Female Falsehood. Scene Brussels. 24. Massanello, or a Fisherman Prince, in two Parts; acted at the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... also returned. During my work I frequently felt quite well; the thunder-clouds seemed to have cleared away. I often felt beautifully elevated, gently supported; generally I was silent, but it was from inner joy; even hope wound itself softly round my heart; the children of fable came to the weeping elf, saying, "Weep not; thou too mayst still be happy." But the word resounded from farther and farther distance, till at last I could hear it no longer. Silence! now the old night holds me again; let it ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Salmali felt great shame. Remembering also the words that Narada had said, he began to repent greatly for his folly. Even in this way, O tiger among kings, a weak and foolish person, by provoking the enmity of a powerful one, is at last obliged to repent like the Salmali in fable. Even when possessed of equal might, people do not suddenly wage hostilities with those that have injured them. On the other hand, they display their might gradually, O king! A person of foolish understanding should never provoke the hostility of one that is possessed of intelligence. In such cases ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... what a fable is? You have heard fables?" Whatever the answer, proceed to explain a fable as follows: "A fable, you know, is a little story, and is meant to teach us a lesson. Now, I am going to read a fable to ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... sleep at ease in some pleasant wayside inn, without once meeting the eyes that stood as it were like a window between himself and a shrewd incredulous scoffing world that would turn him into a monstrosity and his story into a fable. And in a little while, perhaps in three days, he would awaken out of this engrossing nightmare, and know he was free, this black dog gone from his back, and (as the old saying expressed it without any ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... of curiosity has a hold of you, Molly; remember the fable they made us repeat: De loin c'est quelque chose, et de pres ce n'est rien. Now you shall go straight into your bed, and ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... and these great dark holes remained always mysterious to those that looked for mystery in the family that whiled away the ages in that castle. And by every fireplace two queer carved creatures stood upholding the mantlepiece, with mystery in their faces and curious limbs, uniting the hearth with fable and with tales told in the wood. Years after the men that carved them were all dust the shadows of these creatures would come out and dance in the room, on wintry nights when all the lamps were gone and flames stole out and flickered ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... (so chance I to please Caecilius owning me now-a-days!) Is it my own default, how so they say it be mine; 10 Nor can any declare aught sin by me was committed. Yet it is so declared (Quintus!) by fable of folk; Who, whenever they find things done no better than should be, Come to me outcrying all:—"Door, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... everything must give way to the considerations of war. It is taking the argument in the fable of the wolf and the lamb as serious philosophy and accepting the position of the wolf. They fail entirely to see the humor of the fable, and hence the fallacy of the ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... railed at by all who come from Ireland that I can defend him no longer. Lord Anglesea assured me that the story of applying Piso out of Tacitus(22) to Lord Treasurer's being wounded is true. I believe the Duke of Beaufort will be admitted to our Society next meeting. To-day I published the Fable of Midas,(23) a poem, printed in a loose half-sheet of paper. I know not how it will sell; but it passed wonderfully at our Society to-night; and Mr. Secretary read it before me the other night to Lord Treasurer, at Lord ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... friendship never parted, But among the evil-hearted; Time's sure step drag, soon or later, To his judgment, such a Traitor; Lady Lukshmi, of her grace, Grant good fortune to this place; And you, Royal boys! and boys of times to be In this fair fable-garden wander free.' ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... entered the war, and President Wilson was burning to associate his name and also that of his country with the vastest and noblest enterprise inscribed in the annals of history. And each one moved over his own favorite route toward his own goal. It was an apt illustration of the Russian fable of the swan, the crab, and the pike being harnessed together in order to remove a load. The swan flew upward, the crab crawled backward, the pike made with all haste for the water, and the load remained ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... cantos were added, which, following the fortunes of the hero, record at length that he was killed by a dragon. A digest and running commentary of the poem may be found in Turner's Anglo-Saxons; and no one can read it without discerning the history shining clearly out of the mists of fable. The primitive manners, modes of life, forms of expression, are all historically delineated. In it the intimate relations between the king and his people are portrayed. The Saxon cyning is compounded of cyn, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... inconveniences, she is heaping upon his head future accidents and perils; nor how cruel is the caution which prolongs the weakness of childhood in one who must bear the fatigues of a grown-up man. The fable says that, to render her son invulnerable, Thetis plunged him into the Styx. This allegory is beautiful and clear. The cruel mothers of whom I am speaking do far otherwise; by plunging their children into effeminacy they open their pores to ills of every kind, to ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... and broke his palette, determined never to paint again, but probably this is a good deal of a fairy tale and one that is not needed to impress us with the artist's greatness, since there is so much to prove it without adding fable to fact. ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... development of the world there came a time when there was danger of truth being corrupted and mingled with fable among those who did not follow the guidance of God, as did Abraham and the patriarchs; then the great lawgiver, Moses, was given the divine commission to make a written record of the creation of the world ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... corner of his cab with fully half his cry to finish out; and, curiously, all the time a sad little story from an old holiday in the country kept haunting him. It was at once a fact and a fable concerning a happy little family of swallows, whose sudden tragedy he had seen with his own ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... seems to me," he said, "that if AEsop had observed this he would have made a fable from it, how the Deity, wishing to reconcile these warring principles, when he could not do so, united their heads together, and from hence whomsoever the one visits the other attends immediately after; as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... change was coming over the boy. He began to weary of fable and cry out for fact. He had just entered his fourteenth year. He was growing fast; and, but for that dwarfing deformity, would have been unusually tall, graceful and well-proportioned. But along with this increase of stature had come a listlessness and languor which troubled Lady Calmady. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Scotlande: of the beginning (origin) of which name haue been sundrie opinios (opinions): One late feigned by him, which first prynted the Englishe Chronicle,[1] wherein is neither similitude of trouth, reasone, nor honestie: I mean the fable of the fiftie doughters of Dioclesian, kyng of Syria, where neuer any other historic maketh mencion of a kyng of Syria, so named: Also that name is Greke, and no part of the language of Syria. Moreouer the coming of theim from Syria in a shippe or boate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... builders. But she could offer her victory over herself, and ask her country to take back and use a character hewn and shaped in accordance with its traditions. Her husband's citizenship had become a legal fable. She would take it and weld it with her own, and, content never to know the outcome, lay them both together upon the ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... and the fable of the Sphynx! What lessons do they teach, What sermons do they preach Of the riddle and ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... point the fable teaches that money will not buy everything in European travel, though some Americans imagine it will. It will not, for instance, buy comfort or decency, though it will secure privacy in a French sleeper ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... There is so much of fable mingled with the traditionary biography of this "Devonshire worthy," that most persons probably will dismiss the claim altogether. He became weary of his life, and, being determined to rid himself from the direful apprehensions of dangerous approaching ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... haste to supplant a habit, so fearful and pernicious, though every thing else be laid aside. Let him show the great inconvenience a man must experience in whose word no confidence can be reposed. The fable of the shepherd-boy who gave false alarms to the distant workmen of the approach of wolves, so that when the wolves really came his cries were in vain, will show that lying is unprofitable in the end. But his chief object should be to exhibit the moral turpitude ...
— Reflections on the Operation of the Present System of Education, 1853 • Christopher C. Andrews
... The philosopher's stone is no fable, if words of yours could extract gold from a heart of flint. Brave Anthony! you have wrought a miracle. But let me look at the order. Seeing's believing; and I cannot believe such an improbable thing without I witness it ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son, Begirt with British and Armoric knights; And all who since, baptized or infidel, Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore When Charlemain with ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... person whom by reason of his purity of character they are unable to influence they react with terrible force upon their creator; so that the mediaeval story of the magician being torn to pieces by the fiends he himself had raised is no mere fable, but may well have ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... pantomimi was then revived, to add to the attractions of court-dances. Under the Roman empire the pantomimi had represented either a mythological story, or perhaps a scene from a Greek tragedy, by mute gestures, while a chorus, placed in the background, sang cantica to narrate the fable, or to describe the action of the scene. The question is whether mute pantomimic action, which is the essence of modern ballet, was carried through those court entertainments, in which kings, queens, princes and princesses, took parts with the courtiers; or whether it is of later growth, and derived ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... a fable, but history records This defeat of the "Fowl of Great Boasting Words." How the "Prussian Black Eagle" that thought he could scratch, Found in "Old Baldy" far more than ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... was the salvation of man from everlasting damnation. Not only Tertullian, but several Fathers of the Church, regarded physical research as superfluous and absurd, and even as godless. "What happiness shall be mine if I know where the Nile has its source, or what the physicists fable of heaven?" asked Lactantius. And, "Should we not be regarded as insane if we pretended to have knowledge of matters of which we can know nothing? How much more, then, are they to be regarded as raving madmen who imagine that they know the secrets of nature, which will ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... every man Some gift serviceable; Write I never could nor can Hungry at the table; Fasting, any stripling to Vanquish me is able; Hunger, thirst, I liken to Death that ends the fable. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... the world was but dimly known, the man who had reached India, China, or the Islands of the Sea, and returned to describe his adventures, made his narrative a matter of conscience, and justly considered that he had added something to the stock of human knowledge. The world of fable had not then contracted into as narrow limits as at present; foreign countries were full of marvels, and science had not made clear the phenomena of nature. The old travelers had all the wonder and the credulity of children. All was fish that came to their nets, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... the terrible doubt of appearances, Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only, May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters, The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known, (How ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... country into which it came. Infidelity was triumphant and religion was on the point of expiring. Something extraordinary seemed necessary to arrest the attention of a giddy people who were ready to conclude that Christianity was a fable and futurity a delusion. This revival has done it. It has confounded infidelity and brought numbers beyond ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... surmise. Ah me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurl'd Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides. Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, 160 Where the great vision of the guarded Mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold; Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth. And, O ye Dolphins, waft the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... antiquities. He has been occupied all the day in the attempt to convince me that the ancient Amriccans governed themselves!—did ever anybody hear of such an absurdity?—that they existed in a sort of every-man-for-himself confederacy, after the fashion of the "prairie dogs" that we read of in fable. He says that they started with the queerest idea conceivable, viz: that all men are born free and equal—this in the very teeth of the laws of gradation so visibly impressed upon all things both in the moral and physical universe. Every man "voted," as they called it—that is to say meddled ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... as many reasons for as there were against marriage in general and marrying Missy in particular. At all events the arguments were equally strong on both sides, and Nekhludoff laughed as he compared himself to the ass in the fable who, while deciding which of the two bales of hay before him he should have ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... worldly blessing. And in reply to some faint objections of Mrs. Amelia's (taken from certain theological works like the Washerwoman of Finchley Common and others of that school, with which Mrs. Osborne had been furnished during her life at Brompton) he told her an Eastern fable of the Owl who thought that the sunshine was unbearable for the eyes and that the Nightingale was a most overrated bird. "It is one's nature to sing and the other's to hoot," he said, laughing, "and with such a sweet voice ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Merry Devil of Edmonton" and "The Witch of Edmonton."—Lysons, in his Environs of London, says, "There is a fable (says Norden) of one Peter Fabell, that lyeth in Edmonton church, who is said to have beguiled the devell by policie for money; but the devell is deceit itselfe, and hardly deceived."—"Belike (says Weever) he was some ingenious, conceited gentleman, who did use some sleightie ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... questions; and we have sometimes to remember that there are people who 'will not hear the word,' and who must first 'be won without the word.' Heavy rains run off hard-baked earth. It must first be softened by a gentle drizzle. Luther once told this fable: 'The lion made a great feast, and he invited all the beasts, and among the rest, a sow. When all manner of costly dishes were set before the guests, the sow asked, "Have you no bran?" Even so, said ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... gives the following account of Lilith and her doings: "There are some who do not regard spectres as simple devils, but suppose them to be of a mixed nature—part demoniacal, part human, and to have had their origin from Lilith, Adam's first wife, by Eblis, prince of the devils. This fable has been transmitted to the Arabs, from Jewish sources, by some converts of Mohamet from Cabbalism and Rabbinism, who have transferred all the Jewish fooleries to the Arabs. They gave to Adam a wife formed of clay, ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... "does" the Parisian correspondence for the Adelphi Theatre, has supplied it with a vaudeville bearing the above title; the fable, of which, like some of AEsop's, principally concerns a hen, that, however, does not speak, and a smart cockscomb who does—an innocent little fair who has charge of the fowl—a sort of Justice Woodcock, and a bombardier who, because he is in the uniform of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 16, 1841 • Various
... They talk much of the union of the will and understanding, but all is mere phantasy and folly. The right and true speculation is this: "Believe in Christ; do what thou oughtest to do in thy vocation," etc. This is the only practice in Divinity. Also, Mystica Theologia Dionysii is a mere fable, and a lie, like to Plato's Fables. Omnia sunt non ens, et omnia sunt ens-All is something, and all is nothing; and so he leaveth all hanging ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... on all points which can be tested, the Pentateuchal writer states that which is not true. What, therefore, is his authority on the matter—creation by a Deity—which cannot be tested? What sort of "inspiration" is that which leads to the promulgation of a fable as divine truth, which forces those who believe in that inspiration to hold on, like grim death, to the literal truth of the fable, which demoralises them in seeking for all sorts of sophistical shifts to bolster up the fable, and which finally is discredited and repudiated ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... visitors, that the wonderful land of Cibola, with its seven cities and its untold riches, was distant but twenty days' journey by water. In truth, it was on the Gila, two thousand miles off, and its wealth a fable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... are! He said nothing of himself. He was absorbed in my stories concerning you. I told him as pretty a fable as La Fontaine related of the Avare qui avait perdu son tresor! I said you were a beautiful chatelaine besieged by an army of lovers, but the knight errant Fortunatus had alone won your favor, and would receive your hand! ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... pausing, Gebir then besought What region held his ancestors, what clouds, What waters, or what gods, from his embrace. Aroar then sudden, as though roused, renewed. "Come thou, if ardour urges thee and force Suffices—mark me, Gebir, I unfold No fable to allure thee—on! behold Thy ancestors!" and lo! with horrid gasp The panting flame above his head recoiled, And thunder through his heart and life blood throbbed. Such sound could human organs once conceive, Cold, speechless, palsied, not the soothing ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... speculation than that of George Eliot. Had she only lived earlier in the century she might easily have become the centre of a mythos. As it is, many of the anecdotes commonly repeated about her are made up largely of fable. It is, therefore, well, before it is too late, to reduce the true story of her career to the lowest terms, and this service has been well done by the author of the ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... is the fable of the crab and its mother. They were strolling along the sand together when the mother said, "Child, you are not walking gracefully. You should walk straight forward, without ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... occasioned an acquaintance between us. He took great notice of me, called on me often to converse on those subjects, carried me to the Horns, a pale alehouse in——Lane, Cheapside, and introduced me to Dr. Mandeville, author of the "Fable of the Bees," who had a club there, of which he was the soul, being a most facetious, entertaining companion. Lyons, too, introduced me to Dr. Pemberton, at Batson's Coffee-house, who promis'd to give me an opportunity, sometime or other, of seeing Sir ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... Encyclopaedia Britannica does not imitate the wise reticence of Tabourot's saving clause, but pronounces authoritatively for the porte de Hugon fable. ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... called Aurva, from the following fable. The Rishi Aurva, who had gained great power by his austerities, was pressed by the gods and others to perpetuate his race. He consented, but warned them that his offspring would consume the world. Accordingly, he ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... chariot was driven through the sky till it stood over Dwarakha, where Krishna's followers dwelt, and from there it hurled down upon the city missiles that destroyed everything on which they fell.' Here is pure fable, not legend, but still a curious forecast of twentieth century bombs from a rigid dirigible. It is to be noted in this case, as in many, that the power to fly was an attribute of evil, not of good—it was the demons who built the chariot, even as at Friedrichshavn. Mediaeval legend in nearly ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... of the other gods. So, likewise, with many of the more human [Greek: muthoi]. We find the same ideas to spring up in the agora of Athens, the wilds and snows of Norway, and the heathers and hills of Scotland. The fable of the Sirens finds an exact counterpart in the North. Like Ulysses, Duke Magnus and innumerable others escape with difficulty from the charms and enticements of sea-nymphs. Sometimes it is their wonderful song which ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... belief that some other person, who had less pretense and less inclination to be excused, could execute all the duties full as satisfactorily as myself. To say more would be indiscreet, as a disclosure of a refusal beforehand might incur the application of the fable in which the fox is represented as undervaluing the grapes he could not reach. You will perceive, my dear sir, by what is here observed (and which you will be pleased to consider in the light of a confidential ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... still lies in the coffin in the same state as when it was first buried. There is also a story that the coffin of Mohammed rests somewhere between heaven and earth, suspended in the air. But this fable was invented by enemies to bring ridicule on the prophet and ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... the object of Whig idolatry, and Tory abhorrence; and at every weapon of attack and defence the non-juror, on the ground which is common to both, approves himself at least equal to the prelate. On the appearance of the Fable of the Bees, he drew his pen against the licentious doctrine that private vices are public benefits, and morality as well as religion must join in his applause. Mr. Law's master-work, the Serious Call, ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... almost universally advocated, is to avoid drugs. The importance of this and its union with right exercise have been demonstrated in the impressive language of fable. ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... were stilled, pens forgotten, chisels thrown aside, brushes were useless, and oratory was silent, dumb. Yet we know the man Pericles quite as well as the popular mind knows George Washington, who lived but yesterday, and with whom myth and fable ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the naked legend of the negro's origin, one of those nursery tales in which the ignorant of Christendom still believe But the deduction from the fable and the testimony to the negro's lack of intelligence, though unpleasant to our ignorant negrophils, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... Christie looks as though a good puff of wind might blow him away, and he is as tough as a pin-wire. I stand like a tower, and they tell me the foundations are sinking. It sounds like a fable to ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... many other Publishers, who make the Works of other People their own, without acknowledging the Piracy they are guilty of, or so much as paying the least Complement to the Authors of their Wisdom: No, Gentlemen and Ladies, I am not the Daw in the Fable, that would vaunt and strut in your Plumes. And besides, I know very well you might have me upon the Hank according to Law, and treat me as a Highwayman or Robber; for you might safely swear upon your Honours, that I had stole the ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]
... the Sailor and Aladdin's wondrous lamp; for that was an uncritical age, and its spirit breathed hot and cold, east and west, from all quarters of the globe at once, confusing the traditions and tales of all times and countries into one incongruous mass of fable, as much tangled and knotted as that famous pound of flax which the lassie in one of these Tales is expected to spin into an even wool within four-and-twenty hours. No poverty of invention or want of power on the ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... more influenced by some other characteristics of Scotland than he was by its scenery. There was, first, its romantic history. That had not then been separated, as it has since been, from the mists of fable, but lay exactly in that twilight point of view best adapted for arousing the imagination. To the eye of Burns, as it glared back into the past, the history of his country seemed intensely poetical—including the line of early kings who pass ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... at the Lodge to pass in with her basket, and would not often get it. But ladies in carriages would frequently make purchases from her trifling stock, and were usually pleased with her bright eyes and her hopeful speech. In these and her clean dress originated a fable that she was well to do in the world: one might say, for her station, rich. As making a comfortable provision for its subject which costs nobody anything, this class of ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... of all this? Is the man a clever swindler, who invented that fable for some purpose, or is he really an artist, who took me in all simplicity of soul for the living realization of his idea? That is what I intend to find out in the course of a few days, for now I am committed to your programme, and to-morrow ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... understand. He asserts that my "deleterious works" have had "an effect upon civil society, which requires," etc., etc., etc., and his own poetry. It is a lengthy poem, and a long preface, with an harmonious title-page. Like the fly in the fable, I seem to have got upon a wheel which makes much dust; but, unlike the said fly, I do not take it ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... statements of truth? Not always. The primitive human mind could only lisp its wonderful glimpses of truth in legend and myth. And so in fable and allegory the early Israelites sought to show the power of good over evil, and thereby stimulate a desire for right conduct, based, of course, on right-thinking. And thus it is that the most significant thing in their sacred records is their many, many stories of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... any means," she gave a hard little chuckle, "but because when you talk, I hear again the voice of youth. It rings in your tones and smiles in your eyes; it's something as effervescent and sparkling as the bubbles that rise in this wine. You are exactly like the nightingale in the old French fable. Just as irresponsible. You remember he sang all summer while the ants toiled unceasingly getting in their winter stores, and then when winter came, and he pined with hunger, the thrifty ants said: 'Do you not know that winter follows summer, ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... we deem it, for the honour of humanity that, the whole account was demonstrated to be a fable." ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... "before these terrible days"; her conduct towards her husband then was "enough for" Nurse Brown, so she said. No sooner had the poor gentleman gone off on some errand for her pleasure than she called for him to be with her, and was only to be pacified by a fable of Jeanette's devising, who always said that "the King" had summoned Monsieur de Vandaleur. Jeanette was well aware that, the childless old Duke being dead, her master had succeeded to the title, and she often spoke of him as Monsieur le Duc to ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... sang and slew is now The fable outworn of an age remote, And the women to whom to-day we bow Have long abjured her sinister note; She heals, she helps, she follows the plough, And her song has ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... abate the contention and at the same time cheer the meal with a pleasant tale: "it is a very old story, it has to be unearthed from the very oldest authors. I will tell you what I found about it in literature, if you will promise me first that you will not look upon it as a fable."' ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... may be a pure fable, but the lesson it teaches is true and important. It illustrates forcibly the facility with which even wise men accept doubtful propositions, and then apply the whole power of their minds to explain them, and perhaps to defend them. Latterly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Tyrtaeus in war matters; and Solon in matters of policy; or rather they, being poets, did exercise their delightful vein in those points of highest knowledge, which before them lay hidden to the world; for that wise Solon was directly a poet it is manifest, having written in verse the notable fable of the Atlantic Island, which was continued by Plato. {6} And, truly, even Plato, whosoever well considereth shall find that in the body of his work, though the inside and strength were philosophy, the skin, as it were, and beauty depended most of poetry. ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... awoke, and saw the Yaupon or Cassena-Tree, which was not there when he fell asleep. He follow'd the Direction of his Dream, and became perfectly well in a short time. Now, I suppose, no Man has so little Sense as to believe this Fable; yet it lets us see what they intend thereby, and that it has, doubtless, work'd Feats enough, to gain it such an Esteem amongst these Savages, who are too well versed in Vegetables, to be brought to a continual use of any one of them, upon a meer Conceit or Fancy, without ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... race strength is love of country. The only race in this country which has more than a shadow of excuse to be indifferent to the nation's welfare is the Negro. Not unlike the dog in the fable whose devotion to his master's interest was recognized only after the sacrifice of life in that master's service, the Negro's love for his country in the civil service, on the tented field, and wherever sincere devotion should command the highest commendation, is commonly rewarded with cold ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... that certain honest women act in dividing up the celibates, as the lion in the fable did? What! Surely, in that case, half at least of our altars would ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... course of things, follow them. Such an epoch of expansion seems to be opening in this country. In the first place all danger of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long disappeared; like the traveller in the fable, therefore, we begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely. Then, with a long peace, the ideas of Europe steal gradually and amicably in, and mingle, though in infinitesimally small quantities at a time, with our own notions. Then, too, in spite ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... alarming condition. To extemporize a social system, a new humanity, or at least a new Christianity, is now as common as it was formerly, on leaving college, to rhyme a tragedy. The social projector, sublimely confident in himself, seems to expect to realize, on a most gigantic scale, the fable of Mesmerism; he will put the whole world in rapport with him, and it shall have no will but his, and none but such blind, imitative movements as he shall impress on it. And it is to a sort of coma that these ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... on which they rely, and in default of positive knowledge they will always be reduced to act, as the Grecian chiefs did, according to the best of their convictions. Nevertheless, for the satisfaction of those who distrust romance and insist upon reality, we will leave fable for fact, and take as our next illustration an incident that may any ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... of genius, refused to sing "Il pleut, il pleut, Bergere," but condescended to declaim "La Cigalle ayant chante tout l'ete," and did it as he alone can do it. When he came to the end of the fable, "Eh bien, dansez maintenant," he gave such a tragic shake to his head that the voluminous folds of his cravat became loosened and ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... 'The Lion in Love,' of AEsop's fable. He will let her draw his teeth yet," said Mr. Clarence, in a low tone, quite drowned in the joyous ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... for having presumed to travel in Switzerland, but made it the greatest proof of his indulgence to keep silence on the crime I had committed, in setting my foot on the territory of the French empire. I might have said, in the words of Lafontaine's fable: ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... of this fable, he expresses no opinion as to the merits of the controversy between the Red-faced Man and the Hare that, without search on his own part, presented itself to his mind in so odd a fashion. It is one on which anybody interested in such matters ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... paces in front of them a frightful monster ran across their path, which seemed so hideous to Martin, that his mind instantly reverted to the fable of Saint George and the Dragon, and he almost expected to see fire issuing from its mouth. It was a huge lizard, with a body about three feet long, covered with bright scales. It had a long, thick tail. Its head was clumsy and misshapen, and altogether its aspect was very ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... and shrivelled; the cheeks were sunken; the cheek bones projected; and a million wrinkles were carved upon the deep-seamed brow and corrugated cheeks. Over that hideous face the gray hair wandered. Bob's blood seemed to freeze within his veins. The old fable tells of the Gorgon, whose face inspired such horror that the beholder stiffened into stone. So here. Bob beheld a Gorgon face. He felt petrified ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... courtliness and ceremony, went into a learned discussion with my lord of Montacute and Master Sandy as to the origin of the snapdragon, which he, with his customary assumption of deep learning, declared was "but a modern paraphrase, my lord, of the fable which telleth how Dan Hercules did kill the flaming dragon of Hesperia and did then, with the apple of that famous orchard, make a fiery dish of burning apple brandy which ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... was his ideal of reformation—a thing as impossible to bring into practical effect as its realization would have been absurd. It is easy to tell a crab to fly, but will he do it? As well propose to convert infallibility with a fable of AEsop as to count on bringing regeneration to the ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... reclaimed by his brother Valentine, overthrew the Green Knight, his rival in love, and married Fezon, daughter of the duke of Savary, in Aquitaine.—'Romance of Valentine and Orson' (15th cent.). Brewer's 'Reader's Handbook' and 'Dictionary of Phrase and Fable'. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... who finds he's unable To interest Luther and Liszt in his fable, While Loie continues to dance ...
— An Alphabet of Celebrities • Oliver Herford
... Callisto, in Arcadia, was a woman who was a bear. It is not at all rare in those queer philosophies, as in that of the Scandinavians, to find that the sun or moon has been a man or woman. In Australian fable the moon was a man, the sun a woman of indifferent character, who appears at dawn in a coat of red kangaroo skins, the present of an admirer. In an old Mexican text the moon was a man, across whose face a god threw a rabbit, thus making the marks ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... habit; on so much foundation of nature is based the Scythian fable—the negroes of the South, immediately succeeding the surrender, used the new greatness thrust upon them with surprising innocence. Laziness, liquor and loud asseverations of freedom and equality were its only blessings claimed; and the commission of overt acts, beyond ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... and body forth: there is room for the manifestation of this prime literary gift in all sort of subjects. It may be shown in a fable of AEsop, in Robinson Crusoe, in a children's story, in Mark Twain's boyish experiences on the Mississippi, in a Barrack-room Ballad of Rudyard Kipling, in Thackeray's Esmond, in Shelley's Ode to a Skylark, in ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... to have foretold that a river taking its name from a goose would prove fatal to him, and to have lamented that her child's career of glory had been frustrated because he had been checked in the act of devouring a live toad. This last story sounds much like a popular version of the Grecian fable of Demophooen, as told in the Homeric hymn to Demeter. But, as a matter of fact, it was a legend current of the infancy both of the Regent Morton and of Montrose himself before it was given to Claverhouse; and possibly of many other youthful members of the Scottish ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... Fable," Mr. Bulfinch endeavored to impart the pleasure of classical learning to the English reader by presenting the stories of Pagan mythology in a form adapted to modern taste. In this volume the attempt has been made to treat in the same way the stories of the second "age of fable"—the ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature. Books indeed continue to be read, for the interest of the fact or fable, in which this quality is poorly represented, but still it will be there. And, on the other hand, how many do we continue to peruse and reperuse with pleasure whose only merit is the elegance of texture? I am tempted ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... any that come into his possession, Ahto is not incapable of generosity. For example, once when a shepherd lad was whittling a stick on the bank of a river, he dropped his knife into the stream. Ahto, as in the fable, "Mercury and the Woodman," moved by the tears of the unfortunate lad, swam to the scene, dived to the bottom, brought up a knife of gold, and gave it to the young shepherd. Innocent and honest, the herd-boy said the knife was not his. Then Ahto dived ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... its illusive quality. If a play is to be a moral apologue at all, it is well to say so frankly—probably in the title—and aim, not at verisimilitude, but at neatness and appositeness in the working out of the fable. The French proverbe proceeds on this principle, and is often very witty and charming.[1] A good example in English is A Pair of Spectacles, by Mr. Sydney Grundy, founded on a play by Labiche. In this bright little comedy every incident ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... the temple of Medinet Abu. The glory of Thebes belongs to a period prior to the commencement of authentic history. It is recorded only in the dim lights of poetry and tradition, which might be suspected of fable, did not such mighty witnesses remain to attest their truth. Strabo and Diodorus Siculus described Thebes under the name of Diospolis (the city of God), and gave such magnificent descriptions of its monuments as ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... hopeless difficulties they raise as to whether a character as a whole is good or bad. Moreover, the goodness or badness of character is not absolute, but relative to the current form of civilisation. A fable will best explain what is meant. Let the scene be the Zoological Gardens in the quiet hours of the night, and suppose that, as in old fables, the animals are able to converse, and that some very wise creature ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... know. Those who know many things without knowing themselves, and without knowing God in the manner in which even in this present life he can be known and desires to be known, resemble the giants in the fable, who piled up mountains and then buried themselves ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... out of condition still, and can do nothing, and toil to be at my pen, and see some ink behind me. I have taken up again The High Woods of Ulufanua. I still think the fable too fantastic and far-fetched. But, on a re-reading, fell in love with my first chapter, and for good or evil I must finish it. It is really good, well fed with facts, true to the manners, and (for once in my works) rendered pleasing by the presence of a heroine who is pretty. Miss ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he burst forth, "that we all know, and you know that we all know, is but a fable. Doth not Madam Cavendish treat you as a son, and are you not a convict in name only, so far as she is concerned? I say, Harry, you can ride my horse to the winning on Royal Oak Day, at the ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... right or wrong, a fable which has found but too ready belief, another story was invented: the Government of Mr. Lincoln was at the end of its strength; despairing henceforth of conquering the South, it wished at any price ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... Mandeville, a London physician of French extraction, and born in Holland, had aroused attention by his poem, The Grumbling Hive; or Knaves Turned Honest, 1706, and in response to vehement attacks upon his work, had added a commentary to the second edition, The Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices Public Benefits, 1714. The moral of the fable is that the welfare of a society depends on the industry of its members, and this, in turn, on their passions and vices. Greed, extravagance, envy, ambition, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... she began, "La Ligue des Rats: fable de La Fontaine." She then declaimed the little piece with an attention to punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice and an appropriateness of gesture, very unusual indeed at her age, and which proved ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... was burning to associate his name and also that of his country with the vastest and noblest enterprise inscribed in the annals of history. And each one moved over his own favorite route toward his own goal. It was an apt illustration of the Russian fable of the swan, the crab, and the pike being harnessed together in order to remove a load. The swan flew upward, the crab crawled backward, the pike made with all haste for the water, and the load ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the Cibolo of the Spanish padre? Was it that city of golden gates and burnished towers? After all, was the story of the wandering priest true? Who had proved it a fable? Who had ever penetrated this region, the very country in which the ecclesiastic represented the golden city of Cibolo ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... forgotten, sea-buried land of Lyonesse; forests where Tristram and Iseult had ridden, lay under our rushing keel; castles and towers and churches were there—hark! could I not hear the faint bells in the steeples ringing up through the waves? The old legend, half true, half fable, was all real to me as I sat in the shadow of the sail and stared, only half seeing them, at Sally standing with her hands on the rudder and Cary leaning over her, teaching her to sail the Revenge. Their voices ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... splendors of a Syrian rose Lie unreproved upon the saddest breast,— So mythic story fits a changing world: Still the bark drifts with sails forever furled. An unschooled Fancy deemed the work her own, While mystic meaning through each fable shone. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... of a play," continued Triplet, "is the plot or fable. A gentleman of your experience can decide at once whether a plot or story is one ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... here, my dear boys, and I'll tell you a fable, Which you may believe as much as you're able; It isn't all true, nor all false, I'll be bound— Of the tree that bears apples all ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... cage" in which Bajazet was imprisoned by Timur, so long and so often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected as a fable by the modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity. They appeal with confidence to the Persian history of Sherefeddin Ali, according to which has been given to our curiosity in a French version, and from which I shall collect and abridge, a more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the ranks of the savage footmen by their mail-clad horses. The Greeks, who were wont to represent the forces of nature and the accomplishments of man by skilfully constructed myths, have left a record showing their appreciation of the strength derived from the union of horse and man, in their fable of the Centaur, which possibly grew up in a time before their people had won the use of the animal, and when they only knew the creature by chance encounters with enemies who were mounted upon them. Although ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... tale was put forth without explaining the old fable on which it was founded—a fable recurring again and again in fairy myths, though not traceable in the classic world till a very late period, when it appeared among the tales of Apuleius, of the province of Africa, sometimes called the earliest novelist. There are, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... But of that, the parable of the rich man in Luke xvi. 22, knows nothing: [Greek: apethane de kai ho plousios kai etaphe], according to his riches; it is in hell only that he receives his reward. In opposition to Gesenius, Hitzig remarks: "That transition of the signification is a fable." Following the example of Martini he derives [Hebrew: ewir] from the Arabic. But in opposition to that, Gesenius again remarks in the Thesaurus: "Sed haud minoribus difficultatibus laborat ea ratio, qua improbitatis significatum voluerunt Martinius et Hitzigius, collata nimirum radice ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... even the physical laws do not assimilate with those of other continents, lies the great charm of Australian exploration. It is the spectacle of one man pitted against the whole force of nature—not the equal struggle of two human antagonists, but the old fable of the subtle ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... writer, born at Dordrecht, Holland; bred to medicine; came to London to practise; wrote in racy English the "Fable of the Bees," intended to show, as Stopford Brooke says, how the "vices of society are the foundation of civilisation," or as Professor Saintsbury says, how "vice makes some bees happy, and virtue makes them miserable"; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... King, as soon as he had done speaking, "if the son of a chief of villains, brought up and nourished amidst guilt, could have been capable of virtuous sentiments, this phenomenon would have contradicted experience, and even proved it deceitful. I will here venture to recall to your Majesty a fable of our ancestors which ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... the translation lesson, and choosing a fable that would specially lend itself, she started the class off translating it into an English fabrication that convulsed both pupils and mistress. Hal, of course, followed suit, and the merriment grew fast and furious after a ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... misfortune. Then I remember, and take my revenge. I return the injury sevenfold, as Ivan Petrovitch Ptitsin says. (Of course he never does so himself.) Excellency, no doubt you recollect Kryloff's fable, 'The Lion and the Ass'? Well now, that's you and I. That fable ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... apples at him, but they had no more effect upon the culprit than did the grass upon the bad boy in the fable; so the farmer got a long pole and prodded the apple thief until he whined and came scratching ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... back as you did, and letting that brother of mine get away sneering and sniggering at me, with his nose cocked up in the air, and swelling with pride till he's like the frog in the fable." ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... this Coppelius, therefore, the fearful and hideous thought arose in my mind that he, and he alone, must be the Sand-man; but I no longer conceived of the Sand-man as the bugbear in the old nurse's fable, who fetched children's eyes and took them to the half-moon as food for his little ones—no! but as an ugly spectre-like fiend bringing trouble and misery and ruin, both temporal and everlasting, ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... and India. (Still less doubt is there with regard to the dwarfs in Ancient Egyptian paintings.) And whereas Strabo is, says M. Monceaux, the only writer of antiquity who questions the existence of the dwarfs, all the others are on the side of Aristotle, who says—"This is no fable; there really exists in that region (the sources of the Nile), as people relate, a race of little men, who have small horses and who live in holes." And these little men were of course the ancestors ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... a universal explanation of all ancient religions whatever. And in particular the fundamental source, origin, and true significance of the traditions we have been reviewing, including the Biblical accounts of the Fall, are all, according to him, to be looked for in this naturalistic fable of the Vedas. No doubt the allegory which served as starting-point to this myth was not unknown to the Hebrews. We find it distinctly expressed in a verse of the Book of Job (chap. xxvi. 13), where it is said of God, "By his Spirit he hath garnished ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... quarrelsome brothers, ignorant that they have a sister, fall in love with the girl. One slays the other in a frenzy of jealous rage, the other commits suicide in remorse. This invention can hardly be called plausible. Indeed, so far as the mere fable is concerned, it is a house of cards which would collapse any moment at the breath of common sense. One must remember in reading the play that common sense was not one of the nine muses. The dreams take the place of the Delphic oracle, and the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... the fore. He was back among the Greeks. Renewed study of Sophocles, particularly of the 'Trachiniae' and the 'Philoctetes', had convinced him that everything hinges upon the invention of a poetic fable. To quote again from ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... The old fable of the lion and the mouse. When the lion had exhausted his atomic armor and proud science against the invincible and immortal invaders of Earth—for they could not be killed by any means—the mouse attacked and ...
— The Mightiest Man • Patrick Fahy
... of beauty, should eagerly soar to the fair original from which they are derived. For he who rushes to these lower beauties, as if grasping realities, when they are only like beautiful images appearing in water, will, doubtless, like him in the fable, by stretching after the shadow, sink into the lake and disappear. For, by thus embracing and adhering to corporeal forms, he is precipitated, not so much in his body as in his soul, into profound and horrid darkness; and thus blind, like those in the infernal regions, converses only ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... be evident that Scott had gained greatly in narrative power since the production of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Not only are the elements of the "fable" (to use the word in its old-fashioned sense) harmonious and probable, but the various incidents grow out of each other in a natural and necessary way. The Lay was at best a skillful bit of carpentering whereof the several parts ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... written by Captain Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. On three cloths were figures of the Incas with their wives, on medallions, with their Ayllus and a genealogical tree. Historical events in each reign were depicted on the borders. The fable of Tampu-tocco was shown on the first cloth, and also the fables touching the creations of Viracocha, which formed the foundation for the whole history. On the fourth cloth there was a map of Peru, the compass lines for the positions ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... "Your father's intelligence is so high, and his principles so low, that there is no scheme which he does not think that he cannot carry out against the established laws of his country. His present tale is a made-up fable." ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... scene is remembered in connection with it, the secretary of the Birkenhead Docks fainting away during the proceedings. Mr. Hope-Scott is said to have received a fee of 10,000l.; but a friend, likely to be well informed, thinks this is a fable. ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... and coarseness. On page 111, Vol. I, we read: "The rudimentary organs clearly prove that the mechanical, or monistic conception of the nature of organisms is alone correct, and that the prevailing teleological, or dualistic method of accounting for them is entirely false. The very ancient fable of the all-wise plan according to which 'the Creator's hand has ordained all things with wisdom and understanding,' the empty phrase about the purposive 'plan of structure' of organisms is in this way completely disproved. Stronger arguments can hardly be furnished against the customary teleology, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... tut, tut, let me alone: I that have feign'd so many hundred gods, Can easily forge some fable for the turn: Whist, madam; away, away: you fright the fowl; Tactus ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... plain narrative of facts, together with another case I am going to mention, that the Christian mythologists, calling themselves the Christian Church, have erected their fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... all in a flutter. A crowd block'd the door: and a buzz and a mutter Went about in the room as a young man, whose face Lord Alfred had seen ere he enter'd that place, But a few hours ago, through the perfumed and warm Flowery porch, with a lady that lean'd on his arm Like a queen in a fable of old fairy ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... assured me that the story of applying Piso out of Tacitus(22) to Lord Treasurer's being wounded is true. I believe the Duke of Beaufort will be admitted to our Society next meeting. To-day I published the Fable of Midas,(23) a poem, printed in a loose half-sheet of paper. I know not how it will sell; but it passed wonderfully at our Society to-night; and Mr. Secretary read it before me the other night to Lord Treasurer, ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... games, just as there is an etiquette of the ballroom and dinner table. One must know how to conduct oneself on the golf links and at the chess table, just as one must know how to conduct oneself at dinner or at the opera. And in one's play, one must remember that touching little fable of the frogs who were stoned by boys, in which the poor little creatures cried, "What is play to you is death to us." Be kind, unselfish and fair. Do not sacrifice, in the exciting joyousness of the game, the little courtesies of social life. Remember Burns' pretty bit of verse—we cannot ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... traditions of the wars and conquests of their heroes; and, at a period equally remote, they glimmer in Greek mythology. When the Greeks scarcely knew Italy and Sicily by name, the Ethiopians were celebrated in the verses of their poets, and when the faint gleam of tradition and fable gives way to the clear light of history, the lustre of the Ethiopians ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... from each other. The gipsies themselves have preserved no tradition whatsoever as to their origin, and though most of them do speak of Egypt as their original fatherland, that is only because they have adopted a very ancient fable respecting their race. ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... tower, and under it a wharf for ships; and when he died his body was burned, and his ashes put into a golden urn on the top of the tower. Stow seems to doubt it. In Strype's edition, 1720, he says, concerning this gate, "Leaving out the fable thereof faming it to be builded by King Belin, a Briton, long before the incarnation of Christ." Burton, writing 1722, mentions the legend, but adds, "But whether of that antiquity is doubted." and John Brydall, ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... we have received, and accepted, and adopted as a practical philosophy, not merely in that grave department of learning in which it comes to us professionally as philosophy, but in that not less important department of learning in which it comes to us in the disguise of amusement,—in the form of fable and allegory and parable,—the proposition is, that this Elizabethan philosophy is, in these two forms of it,—not two philosophies,—not two Elizabethan philosophies, not two new and wondrous philosophies ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... had pushed up through the charred wreckage. Even where fire had tried to obtain a foothold, and had been withstood by barriers of green and living sap, in burnt spaces where bits of twisted metal lay, tender shoots had pushed out in that eternal promise of resurrection which becomes a fable only ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... as a young Christian maiden, a prisoner of Nero's day, might have felt if told she was to be flung to a lion miraculously subdued by the influence of Christianity. Such a maiden could not have been quite sure whether the story were true or a fable; whether the lion would destroy her with a blow ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... My Muse her song had ended here, But both their Genii straight appear, Joy and amazement her did strike: Two twins she never saw so like. 'Twas taught by wise Pythagoras, One soul might through more bodies pass. Seeing such transmigration there, She thought it not a fable here. 70 Such a resemblance of all parts, Life, death, age, fortune, nature, arts; Then lights her torch at theirs, to tell, And show the world this parallel: Fix'd and contemplative their looks, Still turning over Nature's books; Their works chaste, moral ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... is at endless pains to establish his credit as a staunch upholder of the Bourbons, and has tried already to gain admittance into my set. When his wife took Mme. de Langeais' box, she thought that she could take her charm, her wit, and her success as well. It is the old fable of the jay ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... begins to wander in the Adriatic, and Odysseus in the Tyrrhene Sea;(18) as indeed the latter localization at least was naturally suggested by the Homeric conception of the legend. Down to the times of Alexander the countries on the Tyrrhene Sea belonged in Hellenic fable to the domain of the legend of Odysseus; Ephorus, who ended his history with the year 414, and the so-called Scylax (about 418) still substantially follow it. Of Trojan voyages the whole earlier poetry has no knowledge; ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... could not reach you, if I would, Nor sit among your cloudy shapes; And (spare the fable of the Grapes And Fox) I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... manifestation of the child's convalescence was the renewal of his interest in the wonderful adventures of Brother Rabbit, Brother Fox, and the other brethren who flourished in that strange past over which this modern AEsop had thrown the veil of fable. "Miss Sally," as Uncle Remus called the little boy's mother, sitting in an adjoining room, heard the youngster pleading for a story, and after a while she heard the old man clear up his throat with a great affectation of formality ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... a vagabond impulse to resume the language of Smilash and fable to the man of hampers of turkey and plum-pudding in the van. But he repressed it, got into a hansom, and was driven to his father-in-law's house in Belsize Avenue, studying in a gloomily critical mood the anxiety that surged upon him and ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... himself that here in the rue Mueller he would make a home, and to add that, coming in the light of day, he found a door open to him, sounds at the least fabulous; yet, as he stood there—eager, alert, with face lifted expectantly, and bright gaze winging to right and left—fable was made fact: the legend 'Appartement a louer' caught his glance like a pronouncement ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... waited for may have come," said Milburn undauntedly, "even in me; for love often springs from an ambush, nor can you prepare the heart for it like a field. I recollect a fable I read of a god loving a woman, and he burst upon her in a shower of gold; and what was that but a rich man's wooing? We get gold to equalize nobility in women; beauty is luxurious, and demands adornment and a rich setting; the richest man in Princess Anne is not good enough for you, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... general supposition is, that it arose from a feint on the part of a great sea-admiral, which he made in order to try the courage and loyalty of the nation. To the last report, however, I attach no credit. The fable informs us, that the shepherd laddie lost his sheep, because he cried, "The wolf!" when there was no wolf at hand; and it would have been policy similar to his, to have cried, "An invasion!" when there was no invasion. Neither nations nor individuals like ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... and them, I using a great deall of liberty citing frome his oune authors as Bellarmine, etc., I angred him exceedingly. Then Patrick Hume, David, Mr. Grahame and I went to walk: and particularly to the pierre leve or stone erected a litle way from the city. The story or fable wheirof is this: once as Ste. Radegonde was praying the Devil thought to have smoored[106] or crushed her wt a great meikle stone greater than 2 milstones, which God knows whence he brought, but she miraculously supported it wt hir head, as the woman heir carries the courds and whey on their head. ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... Circe, who changed the soldiers or companions of Ulysses into swine. We know also the fable of the Golden Ass, by Apuleius, which contains the account of a man metamorphosed into an ass. I bring forward these things merely as what they are, that is to say, simply ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... undertone, in answer to Eurie's inquiring look. "I don't believe the stuff myself, but I always supposed the ministers did. I gave some of them at least credit for sincerity, but it seems it is nothing but a fable to ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... the story of that ship, that story before which, with its fresh-water pump like a spring of death, its man with the weapon, the sea ruled by iron necessity, its spectral band swayed by terror and hope, its mute and unhearing heaven?-the fable of the Flying Dutchman with its convention of crime and its sentimental retribution fades like a graceful wreath, like a wisp of white mist. What is there to say that every one of us cannot guess ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... which forms the subject of a "fable" by Enguerrand d'Oisi (Le Meunier d'Aleu) also used by Boccaccio (Decameron 8th Day, 4th Story) and Poggio. Has since been imitated by Margaret of Navarre (story VIII) Boucher, Chapuys, ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... Backbite himself. Whether all Sir Benjamin's laurels, however, should fall to the person by whom the tale is told,[19] or whether any part belongs to the authority alleged for it, is unfortunately not quite clear. There would hardly have been a doubt, if the fable had been confined to the other side of the Atlantic; but it has been reproduced and widely circulated on this side also; and the distinguished artist whom it calumniates by attributing the invention to him has been left undefended from its slander. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... while, on the wonderful, blameless, glorious life that had ended in the shame and cruelty of the Cross, when suddenly, like a cloud swooping darkly across the heaven of my thoughts, came the suggestive question: "Is it all true? Was Christ indeed Divine—or is it all a myth, a fable—an imposture?" Unconsciously I struck a discordant chord on the organ—a faint tremor shook me, and I ceased playing. An uncomfortable sensation came over me, as of some invisible presence being near ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... when meditating his writings there, he was wont to walk along a gallery, at each end of which stood a separate bottle, out of both of which he never failed, en passant, to sip! This, after all, however, may be only a mythical fable. ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... made a sort of myth of him? Isn't he only a fable to us now? And haven't we got real facts ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... refuge! If no saviour had yet come, the tortured world of human hearts cried aloud for one with unutterable groaning! What would Bascombe do if he had committed a murder? Or what could he do for one who had? If fable it were, it was at least a need—invented one—that of a Saviour to whom anyone might go, at any moment, without a journey, without letters or commendations or credentials! And yet no: if it had been invented, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... haplography[obs3]. illusion, delusion; snare; false impression, false idea; bubble; self- decit, self-deception; mists of error. heresy &c. (heterodoxy) 984; hallucination &c. (insanity) 503; false light &c. (fallacy of vision) 443; dream &c. (fancy) 515; fable &c. (untruth) 546; bias &c. (misjudgment) 481; misleading &c. v. V. be erroneous &c. adj. cause error; mislead, misguide; lead astray, lead into error; beguile, misinform &c. (misteach) 538[obs3]; delude; give a false impression, give a false idea; falsify, misstate; deceive &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... however, always brings relief. Experience shows that every effort comes at its proper time, and that there is variety or rest in the intervals. People who have to wash and dress every morning have other things to do in the after part of the day; and, as the old fable tells us, the clock that has to tick, before it is worn out, so many millions of times, as it perplexes the mind to think of, has exactly the same number of seconds to do it in; so that it never has more ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... as its name implies.7 The origin of the Peruvian empire, like the origin of all nations, except the very few which, like our own, have had the good fortune to date from a civilized period and people, is lost in the mists of fable, which, in fact, have settled as darkly round its history as round that of any nation, ancient or modern, in the Old World. According to the tradition most familiar to the European scholar, the time was, when the ancient races of the continent were all plunged in deplorable barbarism; when they ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... S—— (nine years old) when he was reading in Ovid the fable of Perseus and Andromeda, said that he wondered that Perseus fought with the monster; he wondered that Perseus did not turn him into stone at once with his Gorgon shield. We believe that S—— saw that his father was pleased with this observation. A few days afterwards ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... said and often, that America is not old enough to have developed a legendary era, for such an era grows backward as a nation grows forward. No little of the charm of European travel is ascribed to the glamour that history and fable have flung around old churches, castles, and the favored haunts of tourists, and the Rhine and Hudson are frequently compared, to the prejudice of the latter, not because its scenery lacks in loveliness or grandeur, but that its beauty has not been humanized by love ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Oliver comes up in his field-dress, from the croft or the mill; I can hear his merry laugh, and the sound of his horse's hoofs ringing along the gravel-way. Our sweet Chaucer telleth of a mirror in the which he that looked did see all his past life; that magical mirror is no fable, for in the memory of love, old things do return and show themselves as features do in the glass, with a perfect and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... shrank back from him with loathing, as a mean and paltry dastard. "No, no," she cried, "you are no longer the man I loved; our vows of fidelity were pledged over the Bible; that book you have renounced as a fable; and he who has proved himself false to Heaven, can ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... groping for the fable and the character required, behold I found them lying ready and nine years old in my memory. Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine years old. Was there ever a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... forego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feel that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs. And if I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down its lion-strength, I shall be more than rewarded ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... pewter he lifted in sport, And, believe me, I tell you no fable, A gallon he drank from the quart And planted it down on the table. 'A miracle!' every one cried, And they all took a pull at the stingo. They were capital hands at the trade, And they drank till they fell; yet, by jingo! The pot ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... for instance, in Hebrew, tells us, in verses one and two, "As to origin, created the gods (Elohim) these skies (or air or clouds) and this earth. . . And a wind moved upon the face of the waters." Here we have the opening of a polytheistic fable of creation, but, so strongly convinced were the English translators that the ancient Hebrews must have been originally monotheistic that they rendered the above, as follows: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. . . . And ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... marry me. Don't look like that, Aunt Sarah. It is true;—it is, indeed." She had now dragged her chair close to her aunt's seat upon the sofa, so that she could put her hands upon her aunt's knees. "All that about Miss Brownlow has been a fable." ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... mankind and that of Augustus Caesar, is wholly inadmissible. Therefore the Biblical chronology, which Canon Rawlinson trusted so implicitly in 1859, is relegated by all serious critics to the domain of fable. ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... called on Benjamin to converse upon the subject-matter of his pamphlet, and, at one time, he says, "He carried me to the Horns, a pale-ale house in ——— Lane, Cheapside, and introduced me to Doctor Mandeville, author of the 'Fable of the Bees,' who had a club there, of which he was the soul, being a ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... question, whether, if the dead of past ages could revive, they would be able to reconnoitre the events of their own times, as transmitted to us by ignorance and misrepresentation. All very ancient history, except that of the illuminated Jews, is a perfect fable. It was written by priests, or collected from their reports; and calculated solely to raise lofty ideas of the origin of each nation. Gods and demi-gods were the principal actors; and truth is seldom to be expected where the personages ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... ought to esteem themselves more able, then those to whom they give them, and are blame-worthy, if they fail in the least. But proposing this but as a History, or if you will have it so, but as a Fable; wherein amongst other examples, which may be imitated, we may perhaps find divers others which we may have reason to decline: I hope it will be profitable to some, without being hurtfull to any; and that the liberty I take will be gratefull ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes
... welcomes Vol. No. IV. of ROUTLEDGE's Carisbrooke Library, which contains certain Early Prose Romances, the first and foremost among them being the delightful fable of Reynart the Fox. Have patience with the old English, refer to the explanatory notes, and its perusal will well repay every reader. How came it about that modern Uncle Remus had caught so thoroughly the true spirit of this Mediaeval romance? ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... heaven and earth (significant only because of the Me in the centre), creeds, conventions fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth and spreads to the roof of heaven. The quality of BEING, in the object's self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto—not criticism by other ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... of pins, the Sermons of Mr. Peden, or the Life of Jack the Giant-Queller, (not Killer, as usually erroneously written and pronounced.—See my essay on the true history of this worthy, where real facts have in a peculiar degree been obscured by fable.) In short, all in the village were under the necessity of doing something which they would rather have left undone, excepting Captain Doolittle, who walked every morning in the open street, which formed the high mall of our village, in a blue coat ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... This Fable teaches that the Love of Money is the Root of All Evil, and that When Poverty Comes In At the Door, Loves Flies ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... extraordinary effects attributed to him were produced.' 'The bloody sweat is an evident fiction—how could blood have been distinguished in the dark?' He pronounces the story of 'the wise men from the east an evident fable.' Mr. Furness puts no faith in the miraculous conception, but believes in the resurrection. He says: 'Bound by irresistible evidence to believe that Jesus was again alive on that memorable morning, I believe it will hereafter appear that He came to life through the extraordinary force ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... framework of them all, from eels to elephants. The identity reaches still further,—across a mighty gulf of being,—but bridges it over with a line of logic as straight as a sunbeam, and as indestructible as the scymitar-edge that spanned the chasm, in the fable of the Indian Hades. Strange as it may sound, the tail which the serpent trails after him in the dust, and the head of Plato, were struck in the die of the same primitive conception, and differ only in their special adaptation to particular ends. ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... exclusively among themselves, their manners and feelings were homogeneous; and living, too, almost entirely upon the products of their plantations, independent of their market-crops, they grew rich so rapidly as to mock the fable of Jonah's gourd. This wealth afforded the means of education and travel; these, cultivation and high mental attainments, and, with these, the elegances of refined life. The country was vast and fertile; the Mississippi, flowing ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... seems to be preserved in a phrase which forms the local slogan of the town of Hawick, and which, as the name of a peculiar local air, and the refrain, or 'owerword' of associated ballads, has been connected with the history of the town back to 'fable-shaded eras.' Different words have been sung to the tune from time to time, and none of those now extant can lay claim to any antiquity; but associated with all, and yet identified with none, the refrain 'Tyr-ibus ye Tyr ye Odin,' Tyr haeb us, ye Tyr ye Odin! ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... King Arthur (if the whole story be not a fable) who was so famous for beating the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... that can't be mended, and that shattered my whole fortunes early," Warrington answered. "I said I would tell you about it some day, Pen: and will, but not now. Take the moral without the fable now, Pen, my boy; and if you want to see a man whose whole life has been wrecked, by an unlucky rock against which he struck as a boy—here he is, Arthur: and so ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fable and romance is that it's about us, about you and me—or people whose power to suffer and to enjoy is the same as ours. In other words, we live their experience, for the time, and that's hardly ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... contemporary heathen nations. The old Greek was large in brain, but not in heart. He had created his gods in his own image, and they were—what they were. There was no goodness in his religion, and we can tolerate it only as it is developed in the Homeric rhapsodies, in the far-off fable-time of the old world, and amongst men who were but partially self-conscious. In that remote Homeric epoch it is tolerable, when cattle-stealing and war were the chief employments of the ruling caste,—and we may add, woman-stealing, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... generally considered to be a fable due to Colline's wealth of imagination, and it was unanimously declared that his mistress ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... are the most closely connected; and that if they are of humble parentage, and have kindred of slender ability or fortune, they may increase their means of well-being, and reflect honor and worth upon them,—as in fable those who were long in servile condition through ignorance of their parentage and race, when they were recognized and found to be sons either of gods or of kings, retained their love for the shepherds whom for many years they supposed to be their ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... horse's allowance was to be reduced to pure water, and when its owner's hope appeared certain of speedy realisation, the animal died. There are men who act almost as foolishly as the parsimonious horse owner in this fable did; and who are as properly punished as he was. Such men are to be found in the farmers who overstock their sheep pastures, and whose "lean kine" are the laughing stock ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... who was an ardent admirer of the fair sex, of which he had had but little experience, used to take upon himself, like a true French knight, to defend all the beauties that we were attacking so unmercifully. He would laughingly accuse the abbe of arguing about women as the fox in the fable argued about the grapes. For myself, I used to improve under the abbe's criticisms; this was an emphatic way of letting Edmee know how much I preferred her to all others. She, however, appeared to be more scandalized than flattered, and seriously ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... was a mere fable of poor Birch's imagination. I recollect the lady showed me a Spanish motto upon her ring; that is all I can remember about rings.—She had no diamonds, and very few clothes. Now," cried Captain Walsingham, growing a little impatient of the length of his trial, for he had not ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... sand, To sweep the idle Dreamer from the land! Young Damon started, and his dream was o'er, But to his soul, the seeming vision bore A solemn meaning, which he could not spurn— And Youth, perchance, may from our fable learn, That while the beckoning passions woo and sigh, TIME, with his ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... applied to Spenser's Fairy Queen, that it may pass for a second invention. But the peculiarly ingenious novelty of the piece consists in the combination of the irony of a chimerical abuse of poetry with another irony exactly the contrary, of the incapacity to comprehend any fable, and the dramatic form more particularly. A grocer and his wife come as spectators to the theatre: they are discontented with the piece which has just been announced; they demand a play in honour of the corporation, and Ralph, their apprentice, is ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... nephew, became sole regent—a man of good ability, but of easy, indolent nature; and who, in the enforced idleness of his life, had become dissipated and vicious beyond all imagination or description. He was kindly and gracious, and his mother said of him that he was like the prince in a fable whom all the fairies had endowed with gifts, except one malignant sprite who had prevented any favour being of use to him. In the general exhaustion produced by the wars of Louis XIV., a Scotchman named ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and there a dead branch thrust itself out against the sky, in that hideous likeness to a fleshless hand which night and darkness always lend to them. Even Gypsy, though she had been in the woods many times at night before, shuddered as she stood looking up. A queer thought came to her, of an old fable she had sometime read in Tom's mythology; a fable of some huge Titans, angry and fierce, who tried to climb into heaven; there was just that look about the trees. It was very still. The birds were in their nests, their singing done. From far away ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... must be excused for calling a most unworthy performance. "Purgatory," &c. (he says) "was in fact, neither more nor less than the old schoolmaster come back to bring some new scholars to CHRIST." (p. 42.) (Is the Romish fable of Purgatory then to be put on the same footing as the Divine Revelation to Moses on Sinai?) It follows,—"When the work was done, men began to discover that the Law was no longer necessary." (Ibid.) (Is it thus that the head-master of Rugby accounts for, and explains the ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... of the head, and the curved neck, remind you of a horse. It is also rather like the knight of the chess-board; or it may make you think of the dragon of the fable; but, really, the Sea-horse is like nothing on the earth, or in the waters. Nature has given it a ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... mastery, after all, is the property of a very few minds; and no precaution of the prudent, no forethought of the wary, nor any expedient of charters, constitutions, or restrictions, will prevent the few from placing their feet on the neck of the many. We may revive the fable of King Log and King Stork, as often, and in as many forms as we will; it will ever be the fable of King Log and King Stork. We are no admirers of political aristocracies, as a thousand paragraphs ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... into pits of quicklime, then leaps in himself, to deceive the world and leave no trace of mortality behind. His enemies believe, as he desired, that he and his people have been taken up into heaven. The whole, however, is dimly prescient, and the concluding lines of the fable have been thought by believers in augury to be prophetic. "Incredible instance! How far can the passion for fame go!" Among the papers of this period are also a constitution for the "calotte," a secret society of his regiment organized to keep its members up to the mark ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of it is that the moral is written at the end of the fable, not at the beginning. The organization in youth is so dangerously elastic that the result of these intellectual excesses is not seen until years after. When some young girl incurs spinal disease from some slight fall, which she ought not to have ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... heard in this very Gulf of Paria, and that at certain seasons the Nymphs and Tritons assembled therein, and with ravishing strains sang their watery loves. The story of the music has been usually treated as a sailor's fable, and the Sirens and Tritons supposed to be mere stupid manatis, or sea-cows, coming in as they do still now and then to browse on mangrove shoots and turtle-grass: {110} but if the story of the music be true, the myth may have ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... laughing, for I took the drift of her meaning, and was wishful to prove myself alert. "Most allegorical lady," I protested, "I take you very clearly when you explain your own fable." And I rubbed my hands, instantly pleased ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... reverence for the ministers of the church, gave some color to the suspicion, which prevailed in his own times, that the emperor himself was become a convert to the faith; and afforded some grounds for a fable which was afterwards invented, that he had been purified by confession and penance from the guilt contracted by the murder of his innocent predecessor. The fall of Philip introduced, with the change of masters, a ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... is a lie," observed Sir Robert Walpole, the corruptionist, mindful of what was likely to be written about himself; and "What is history," asked Napoleon, the conqueror, "but a fable ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... monks and Sicilian nuns. Shakespeare's characters were legion—Portias, Cymbelines, Katherines and Shylocks, all laughed and jested together, their identity concealed beneath their black velvet masks. It seemed as if every character and fable had risen to throng the halls of ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... evidently an unusual activity among the gendarmerie of the lower valley, the Val di Non; for Jacopo had to repeat his fable more than once, and Angelo thought it prudent not to make inquiries about travellers. In this valley they were again in summer heat. Summer splendours robed the broken ground. The Val di Non lies toward the sun, banked by the Val di Sole, like the southern lizard under a stone. Chestnut forest and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ants; tho the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... tinkling, her curls waving, and her heart beating, she felt as if her fun had really begun at last, for the mirror had plainly told her that she was 'a little beauty'. Her friends repeated the pleasing phrase enthusiastically, and for several minutes she stood, like a jackdaw in the fable, enjoying her borrowed plumes, while the rest chattered like a ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... to me," he said, "that if AEsop had observed this he would have made a fable from it, how the Deity, wishing to reconcile these warring principles, when he could not do so, united their heads together, and from hence whomsoever the one visits the other attends immediately after; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... therefore the olde men called it the lernyng that perteined to man. And ther is no cause why profite maye not folowe pleasure, and honestie ioyned to delectacion. [Sidenote: Wherfore lernyng is called humanitie] For what letteth that they shulde not lerne eyther a proper fable, arte of poets, or a sentence, or a notable prety hystorie, or a learned tale, as well as they lerne and can wythout boke a piuyshe songe, and oft[en]times a baudy one to, & folishe old wiues tatlynges, & very trifles of triflyng wom[en]? What a s[um]me of dreames, vaine ...
— The Education of Children • Desiderius Erasmus
... poem—not its prose translation—were printed as headnotes on each page. For this e-text, only the line numbers of each complete "Fable" are given. Line numbers used in footnotes are retained from the original text; these, too, refer to the Latin poem and are independent of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the Mons Sacer, some five hundred years before the Christian era, the Consul Menenius Agrippa brought them back by his well-known fable of the Belly and the Members. Perhaps it would be too much to expect to call back our seceders with a fable which they will hardly have the opportunity of reading in the present condition of the postal service, but the state of the case may be put with a certain degree of truth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... central region of Peru, as its name implies.7 The origin of the Peruvian empire, like the origin of all nations, except the very few which, like our own, have had the good fortune to date from a civilized period and people, is lost in the mists of fable, which, in fact, have settled as darkly round its history as round that of any nation, ancient or modern, in the Old World. According to the tradition most familiar to the European scholar, the time was, when the ancient races of the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... literary manner wins by its simplicity and tenderness. Years ago, Miss Mitford said that she knew no one so thoroughly original. For him she could find no living prototype. And so she went back to the time of John Dryden to find a man to whom she might compare him. And Lowell in his "Fable for Critics," describes ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... ascended again to the court of the castle, the custodian, abetted by his wife, would have interested us in two memorable wells there, between which, he said, Hugo was beheaded; and unabashed by the small success of this fable, he pointed out two windows in converging angles overhead, from one of which the Marquis, looking into the other, discovered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now walled up, but are neatly represented to the credulous eye by a ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... Parable, and the Fable are all common and popular modes of conveying instruction. Each is distinguished by its own special characteristics. The Tale consists simply in the narration of a story either founded on facts, or created solely by the imagination, and not necessarily associated ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... Amerinus, with all his misfortunes, injustices, and miseries, is now to us no more than the name of a fable; but to those who know it, the fable is, I think, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... would treat it so," replied the King. "Oh, yes—break your sticks one at a time as the wise man did in the fable!" ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... on paper. Fortunately, the book he produced was AEsop, whose fables had been so thoroughly studied by me two years before, that I even knew some of them by heart. Still, as I was not very well versed in the niceties of English, I thought it prudent to make my version of the selected fable in French; and, as there was a neighbor who knew the latter language perfectly, my translation was soon rendered into English, and the proficiency of the "Italian ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... place, we object to the whole plan and conception of the fable, as turning mainly upon incidents unsuitable for poetical narrative, and brought out in the denouement in a very obscure, laborious, and imperfect manner. The events of an epic narrative should all be of a broad, clear, and palpable description; ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... I know; it was, from beginning to end, a wholly unconscious plagiarism of David Copperfield. Had there been no Peggotty, there would have been no Sally Troman; had there been no Steerforth, there would have been no Gascoigne. The greater part of the fable and nearly all the characters I owed to Dickens, and yet I can aver in perfect honesty that, at the time of writing and for years afterwards, I was entirely unconscious of the fact One thing in ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... earth. This story has been embodied, with great variety of form and motive, in more than a hundred works. Every one is, without the writer's intention, a disguised sermon of gigantic force on the benignity of death. As in classic fable poor Tithon became immortal in the dawning arms of Eos only to lead a shrivelled, joyless, repulsive existence; and the fair young witch of Cuma had ample cause to regret that ever Apollo granted her request for as many years as she ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Libyan fable it is told That once an eagle stricken with a dart, Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft, "With our own feathers, not by others' hands, Are we ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... a short fable[31] for use in a speech. Follow either the ancient form (AEsop) or the modern (George ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Harivarsha with the northern Kurus. The region of Hari or Vishnu belongs to the system of mythical geography; but the case is different with the Uttara Kurus. Here there is a real basis of geographical fact; of which fable has only taken advantage, without creating it. The Uttara Kurus were formerly quite independent of the mythical system of dvipas, though they were included in it at an early date." Again the same writer says at p. 65: "That the conception of the Uttara Kurus is based upon an actual ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... word of his story," repeated Mr. Grey. "Your father's intelligence is so high, and his principles so low, that there is no scheme which he does not think that he cannot carry out against the established laws of his country. His present tale is a made-up fable." ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... It will willingly forego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feel that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs. And if I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down its lion-strength, I shall be more than ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... imagination; to see animal life with his "vision," and not with his corporeal eyesight; to hear with his transcendental ear, and not through his auditory nerve? This may be all right in fiction or romance or fable, but why call the outcome natural history? Why set it down as a record of actual observation? Why penetrate the wilderness to interview Indians, trappers, guides, woodsmen, and thus seek to confirm your observations, if you have all the while been "struggling against fact and law," ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... condemn with disgust the societies of villains which hung on the flank of the conspirators, and which deterred many of the best families and ablest gentlemen in Romagna from joining them. Lord Malmesbury believes the report therefore to be a fable, and at some future period will, if it should interest your Majesty, relate to your Majesty some details respecting the Emperor's share in the conspiracies ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... wives—they were to lose their votes; the children were to receive no more the mother's name; and they themselves were no longer to be called Athenians, after the goddess." It seems to me this fable teaches that physical force was indeed the governing power in Athens at that day, and that men were ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... breast. "Boy," he said, "you have done wrong: you shall repair it by remembering all your life that your father blessed God for giving him a son who spoke truth in spite of fear! Oh! Mrs. Primmins, the next fable of this kind you try to teach him, and we ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Cataracts, in the strait of Baraguan, there are caverns filled with bones, similar to those I have just described: but I was informed of this fact only after my return; our Indian pilots did not mention it when we landed at the strait. These tombs no doubt have given rise to a fable of the Ottomacs, according to which the granitic and solitary rocks of Baraguan, the forms of which are very singular, are regarded as the grandfathers, the ancient chiefs of the tribe. The custom of separating the flesh from the bones, very anciently practised by the Massagetes, is ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... people they had seen abroad, till she came to the name of Laura, and some lines to her by which she discovered that the author must be their former governess, Miss Murphy, now married to a very clever lawyer. [Footnote: Mrs. Jameson.] All the woes and heart-breakings are mere fable in the Diary. Her last book, Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad, I like; there is a great deal of thought ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the new theatres sometimes found their account in it, it could not be safe for us wholly to neglect it. To give even dancing, therefore, some improvement, and to make it something more than motion without meaning, the fable of Mars and Venus was formed into a connected presentation of dances in character, wherein the passions were so happily expressed, and the whole story so intelligibly told by a mute narrative of gesture only, that ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... production was a farce, or rather play, in three acts, called "Jupiter," written in imitation of the burletta of Midas, whose popularity seems to have tempted into its wake a number of these musical parodies upon heathen fable. The amour of Jupiter with Major Amphitryon's wife, and Sir Richard Ixion's courtship of Juno, who substitutes Miss Peggy Nubilis in her place, form the subject of this ludicrous little drama, of which Halhed furnished the burlesque scenes,—while the form of a rehearsal, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... of fable and fairy-tale flavour, with the wild things of the woodland for their heroes. In the heart of each some nature secret is ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... [3] "What resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son, Begirt with British and Armoric knights; And all who since, baptized or infidel, Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... universe to me. When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch out to the utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwellings of my countrymen, and subdued to fertility by their labours, the earth's very centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a fable, to have forgotten which would have cost neither my imagination nor understanding ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... in a minute, Tom," she said. "A cup of hot coffee'll do the poor craythur, yer grandfather, a power of good. So he's fable, ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... knows the truth,—but what are Poets? Only the Prophets and Seers! Only the Eyes of Time, which clearly behold Heaven's Fact beyond this world's Fable. Let them sing if they choose, and we will hear them in our idle hours,—we will give them a little of our gold,—a little of our grudging praise, together with much of our private practical contempt and misprisal! So say the unthinking and foolish—so will they ever say,—and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Africa, though perhaps none now remain there, and we are told that there is a remnant in the heart of China. From the relics of the African branch of this root-race, the old Egyptian priests had knowledge regarding the sunken continent, knowledge which was no fable, but the traditionary lore and history of the ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... never parted, But among the evil-hearted; Time's sure step drag, soon or later, To his judgment, such a Traitor; Lady Lukshmi, of her grace, Grant good fortune to this place; And you, Royal boys! and boys of times to be In this fair fable-garden wander free.' ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... common errand bound, One common fate o'erwhelms; and so, me-seems, A fable have we of our daily round, Who in these groves of learning here are found Climbing Parnassus' slopes. Our aim is one, And one the path by which we strive to soar; Yet, truer still, or ere the prize be won, A common ruin hurls us to our doom. 'Twere best we parted, ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... born, What time in dark we dwelt and framed our lore? Woe, woe, if then regretful we should mourn "What wisdom left we on that human shore!" For brooding kindness can a charm beget, Not duly won, and from Heaven's parapet These terrene colours shine with starry gleam— But this is all a fable and a dream; A fable, for this axiom it brings, Immortal loves must love immortal things; Dream is it, for uncurbed it took its flight, And roamed afar, a fancy ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... the great mind—the power of seeing both sides of everything. In literature, my boy, every idea is reversible, and no man can take upon himself to decide which is the right or wrong side. Everything is bi-lateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is a fable signifying criticism and the symbol of Genius. The Almighty alone is triform. What raises Moliere and Corneille above the rest of us but the faculty of saying one thing with an Alceste or an Octave, and another with a Philinte ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... considered to be a fable due to Colline's wealth of imagination, and it was unanimously declared that his mistress was ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... This Ode is founded on a fable that Edward I., after conquering Wales, put the native Poets to death. After lamenting his comrades (st. 2, 3) the Bard prophesies the fate of Edward II. and the conquests of Edward III. (4); his death and that of the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the door and dropped from the platform. Then he threw off his hat as he always did when excited, and ran. And how he ran! With his fists clenched and his arms tight against his sides he ran as though the hip-boots were the seven-league boots of fable. ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... terms of their agreement, are bound to cry each other up—to defend one another from the virulent attacks of common sense and plain reason. They are sworn to stick together, like the bundle of rods in AEsop's fable. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... such attempts, I was nicknamed the Poet, but mockery did not cure me. I was always rhyming, in spite of good advice from Monsieur Mareschal, the headmaster, who tried to cure me of an unfortunately inveterate passion by telling me the fable of a linnet that fell out of the nest because it tried to fly before its wings were grown. I persisted in my reading; I became the least emulous, the idlest, the most dreamy of all the division of "little boys," and consequently the most ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... his children; he dimly sees before him their rosy faces, and their mother who is dressing them. How weary, too, must the long days be for her, separated from her husband. Last year she had taught the baby to repeat a fable, and she brought him all trembling to recite it to the father. She, too, trembles like a child. She follows him with her looks, she whispers to him a word when he hesitates, but so low that he reads it on her lips, and the father hears nothing. Poor man! Sorry indeed ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... whether, if the dead of past ages could revive, they would be able to reconnoitre the events of their own times, as transmitted to us by ignorance and misrepresentation. All very ancient history, except that of the illuminated Jews, is a perfect fable. It was written by priests, or collected from their reports; and calculated solely to raise lofty ideas of the origin of each nation. Gods and demi-gods were the principal actors; and truth is seldom to be expected where the personages ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... fortune—Robespierre had become to my imagination like the slave of Aladdin's lamp; and to conjure him up was to be all-powerful. Even to Boivin himself this influence extended; and it was easy to perceive that he regarded the whole narrative of the pocket-book as a mere fable, invented to obtain a position as a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... where'er thy bones are hurled; Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visitest the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, Sleepest by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great Vision of the guarded mount Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold.... Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth; And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth. Weep no ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... it. Love may be purchased; and as for contentment, there is no such thing. It is a dream, a fable, a pretty story that ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... or the other, you know, or you'll be like the bat in the fable who was neither bird nor beast, and so was out of all the fun on both sides. I may be prejudiced, but I advise you to be a cadets' lady. And you'd better decide now on ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... scriptures monkeys figure as counsellors of nonplussed heroes, and in the crisis of the Titan war the Devas themselves condescend to seek the advice of the monkey Honuman, who contrives to outwit the prince of the night-spirits. In the international fable of "Reynard the Fox," a she-monkey on the eve of the trial by battle suggests the stratagem that turns the scales against the superior strength of the wolf Isegrim. The mens aequa in arduis is, indeed, a simian characteristic. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... follow me in spirit to the very home and birth-place of freedom, to the land where we need not myth or fable to add aught to the fresh and gladdening feeling with which we for the first time tread the soil and drink the air of the immemorial democracy of Uri. It is one of the opening days of May: it is the morning of Sunday; for men then deem that the better the day the better the deed; they deem ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... her a fable of the countryside, of that Abbot who, having duly served his God, died and appeared at the heavenly gates for admission. "A slave of the Lord," he replied, when asked his name. But he was refused. So he went away and laboured seven years again at good deeds and returned. "A ...
— The Truce of God • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... examined the house. A large building, square and new, very high, seemed, as in the fable of the mountain and the mouse, to have given birth to a tiny little white house, which nestled near it. This little house was the original dwelling, and had been built by the former owner. The tower ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... of steam man realizes the fable of Aeolus's bag, and carries the two-and-thirty winds in the boiler of his boat.—Emerson. 2. The Angel of Life winds our brains up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the Angel of Resurrection.—Holmes. 3. I called the New World into ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... foremost ranks; his military conduct had secured the victory; and the captive king of the barbarians was presented to him on the field of battle," from which he was at that time distant about forty days' journey. So extravagant a fable was incapable, however, of deceiving the public credulity, or even of satisfying the pride of the emperor himself. Secretly conscious that the applause and favor of the Romans accompanied the rising fortunes of Julian, his discontented mind was ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... orders. It was an awkward dilemma for the President and his minister to France. But by this time, the Presidential nomination impending, Mr. Madison had made up his mind what to do. He was not exactly a wolf; neither was Great Britain a lamb; but the argument he used was the argument of the fable. Instead of advising—Bassano having declared the decrees still in force—a repeal of the non-importation act, as Great Britain claimed was in justice and comity her due, he recommended a war measure. But Barlow evidently felt himself ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... arising from their habits of improvisation and competitive versifying. They have also the epic or sjair, generally a pure romance, with much naive simplicity and natural feeling. And finally, they have the popular song, enigma, and fable. ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... making his visit to the gardens on the evening of a balloon ascent, "and thus I witnessed the most wonderful sight I ever saw—a sight which a hundred millions of people in India consider to be a Feringhi fiction, an incredible fable; for though a Frenchman made an ascent at Lucknow some years ago, nobody believes it who did not see it, and many even who were present, believed that their senses had been beguiled by magic.... A car in the shape of a howdah was swung by ropes beneath the balloon, in which six individuals seated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... many men, dear CONTINENTAL, who quite unwittingly are ever crying aloud, 'Look at me, chickens.' After all, 'tis only the old fable of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... upholder of the Bourbons, and has tried already to gain admittance into my set. When his wife took Mme. de Langeais' box, she thought that she could take her charm, her wit, and her success as well. It is the old fable of the ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... of the sexual impulse corresponds closely to the poetic fable of dividing the person into two halves—man and woman—who strive to become reunited through love. It is therefore very surprising to hear that there are men for whom the sexual object is not woman but man, and that there are women ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... just as unjust as you like, A conscienceless, 'cute special-pleader; As spiteful as Squeers was to Smike, (You may often trace Squeers in a "leader.") Impute all the vileness you can, Poison truth with snake-venom of fable, Be fair—as is woman to man, And kindly—as CAIN was to ABEL. Suggest what is false in a sneer, Suppress what is true by confusing; Be sour, stale, and flat as small-beer, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... power to rob us of our joy, they have a very formidable power to interfere with the cultivation of that faith, which is the essential condition of our joy. They cannot force us away from Christ, but they may tempt us away. The sunshine did for the traveller in the old fable what the storm could not do; and the world may cause you to think so much about it that you forget your Master. Its joys may compel Him to hide His face, and may so fill your eyes that you do not care to look at His face; and so the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... our wits is, that there are so few natural chords between others' voices and this string in our souls, and that those which at first may have jarred a little by and by come into harmony with it.—But I tell you this is no fiction. You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a fable, but what will you say to Mario and the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the world there came a time when there was danger of truth being corrupted and mingled with fable among those who did not follow the guidance of God, as did Abraham and the patriarchs; then the great lawgiver, Moses, was given the divine commission to make a written record of the creation of the world and of man ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... the same consideration of guarding against the pursuit of those scribblers, who having no talents of a writer but what is taught by the writing-master, are yet nowise afraid nor ashamed to assume the same titles with the greatest genius, than their good brother in the fable was of braying in ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... evidence to be thoroughly convinced that all which is taught by the Romish church of the supremacy of St. Peter, and of the sovereignty of the popes, his pretended successors, was a fable destitute of the slightest foundation; at all events, a doctrine no more to be found in the Gospel ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... it to good purpose by the publication of the "Biglow Papers" and "A Fable for Critics," and stood revealed as one of the wisest, wittiest, most fearless and most patriotic of moralists and satirists. For the "Biglow Papers" mark a culmination of American humorous and satiric poetry which has ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... is an ancient fable of the Jews, which, though it is not true, yet has a deep and holy meaning, and teaches an ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... strove to bind him fast, And turned away once more; and, as he pressed A trembling hand against his throbbing breast, His aimless fingers touched a treasured part Of the green holly-branch of Elfinhart, Laid in his breast when he put off his arms. What perils now are left in fairy charms? For poets fable when they call love blind; Love's habitation is the purer mind, Whence with his keen eyes he may penetrate All mists and fogs that baser spells create. Love? What is love? Not the wild feverish thrill, When heart to heart the thronging pulses fill, And lips that close in parching kisses find No ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... neither apples nor plums. But I wish you would not wipe my face with your curls. I have got the clue to my fable; I will have Mrs. Adair, and I think your ...
— The Boarding School • Unknown
... world above." The hero pausing, Gebir then besought What region held his ancestors, what clouds, What waters, or what gods, from his embrace. Aroar then sudden, as though roused, renewed. "Come thou, if ardour urges thee and force Suffices—mark me, Gebir, I unfold No fable to allure thee—on! behold Thy ancestors!" and lo! with horrid gasp The panting flame above his head recoiled, And thunder through his heart and life blood throbbed. Such sound could human organs once conceive, Cold, speechless, palsied, not the soothing ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... Decorations might be very limited, but champagne was as essential as music! Cotillion favors were also an important item which no longer exists; and champagne has gone its way with nectar, to the land of fable, so that if you eliminate elaborate decorations, ball-giving is not half the expense ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Browning's Saul of anything that could have happened in Judea, a thousand years before Christ? To Lowell, Mrs. Child was and remained "Philothea." Higginson says that the lines in which Lowell describes her in the "Fable for Critics," are the one passage of pure poetry it contains, and at the same time the most charming sketch ever made of ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... The humorous rhyme "did it—quiddit" is but one of the many whimsical rhyming effects in the poem. The use of a light, semi-jocose form to give the greater emphasis to serious subject-matter is characteristic of Browning. Lowell in "A Fable for Critics" ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... amuse you, tell you, if you like, the story of the Ass's Skin or the fable of the Fox and the Crow, ...
— The Imaginary Invalid - Le Malade Imaginaire • Moliere
... had tried to obtain a foothold, and had been withstood by barriers of green and living sap, in burnt spaces where bits of twisted metal lay, tender shoots had pushed out in that eternal promise of resurrection which becomes a fable only ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... sink every other qualification in the single one of turning faultless periods; and a gentleman possessing this, has been adjudged fully capable of purging the annals of Spain and her quondam colonies, from the mass of modern fable and forgery which now disfigure them. Incapable of submitting Cortez' statement to the test, he assumes it to be true, even in those parts where it is impossible. Unable to detect the counterfeit in Diaz—he pronounces him the 'child of nature,' but does not on the testimony of this natural ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... canvassing the State, with a view to a final rally of its resources, preparatory to his last great effort—to scotch the serpent of the North, which finally, however, wound its insidious folds around the heart of brotherly affection, stifling it, as the snakes of fable were sent to ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... very well when he wrote his fable of the old man and his ass, who tried to please everybody and ended up by pleasing nobody. Bearing this in mind, Madame Midas determined to please herself, and take no one's advice but her own with regard to Vandeloup. ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... these windows were more mysterious than that; it was a more triumphant blue; it was like the Mediterranean seen with the eyes of Shelley, on a happy day in his youth, or like the sea round Western islands of fable seen by the fancy of Keats. They were no windows for any need of ours, unless our dreams be needs, unless our cries for the moon be urged by the same Necessity as makes us cry for bread. They were clearly concerned only with magic or poetry; though the ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... generation after generation by wealthy penitence Erasmus encourages the bold friar Erasmus of Rotterdam Even for the rape of God's mother, if that were possible Excited with the appearance of a gem of true philosophy Executions of Huss and Jerome of Prague Fable of divine right is invented to sanction the system Felix Mants, the anabaptist, is drowned at Zurich Few, even prelates were very dutiful to the pope Fiction of apostolic authority to bind and loose Fifty thousand persons in the provinces (put to death) Fishermen and river ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... better be omitted in the following sentence."—Priestley's Gram., p. 162. "They appear, in this case, like excrescences jutting out from the body, which had better have been wanted."—Blair's Rhet., p. 326. "And therefore, the fable of the Harpies, in the third book of the AEneid, and the allegory of Sin and Death, in the second book of Paradise Lost, had been better omitted in these celebrated poems."—Ib., p. 430. "Ellipsis is an elegant Suppression (or the leaving out) of a Word, or Words in a Sentence."—British ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... acquainted with the manner of his introduction to me at Linlithgow. By the account that he then gave of himself, you all know as much of him as I did, till on the night that he left me at Berwick and then I found him, like this story of Lady Strathearn, all a fable." ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... that it is exactly what is called the unpractical part of the thing that is really the practical. The chief difference between men and the animals is that all men are artists; though the overwhelming majority of us are bad artists. As the old fable truly says, lions do not make statues; even the cunning of the fox can go no further than the accomplishment of leaving an exact model of the vulpine paw: and even that is an accomplishment which he wishes he hadn't got. There are Chryselephantine ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... Kronos, and to him they sacrifice their own children, to him who had many sons by Rhea, and in a fit of madness ate his own children. And they say that Zeus cut off his privy parts, and cast them into the sea, whence, as fable telleth, was born Aphrodite. So Zeus bound his own father, and cast him into Tartarus. Dost thou mark the delusion and lasciviousness that they allege against their gods? Is it possible then that one who was prisoner and ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... banish the scenes and characters of this book from my memory. To me it can never appear like an amusing fable, or lose its interest and importance, the story is one which is continually before me, and must return fresh to my mind, with painful emotions, as long as I live. With time, and Christian instruction, and the sympathy and example of the wise and good, I hope to learn submissively to bear ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... thought to be the opposite; for they never come to a man together, and yet he who pursues either of them is generally compelled to take the other. They are two, and yet they grow together out of one head or stem; and I can not help thinking that, if Aesop had noticed them, he would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their strife, and when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is the reason why when one comes ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... 27th day of February, 1795, Gen. Marion died at his house in St. John's parish. As his fame is yet but indistinctly known, and much of that through the medium of fable, the present attempt has been made to arrest its progress, to do honour to his memory, and to ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... its painful memories of guilt? The whelming flood, or the renewing fire, Or the slow change of time?—that so, at last, The horrid tale of perjury and strife, Murder and spoil, which men call history, May seem a fable, like the inventions told By poets of the gods of Greece. O thou, Who sittest far beyond the Atlantic deep, Among the sources of thy glorious streams, My native Land of Groves! a newer page In the great record of the world is thine; Shall it be fairer? Fear, and friendly Hope, And Envy, watch the ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... his height, played only his own music; he played divinely and incomprehensibly; next to his passion for music was his greed for gold. These three facts sum up all we really know about the master—the rest fades off into mist—mystery, fable and legend. We do know, however, that he composed several pieces of music so difficult that he could not play them himself, and of course no one else can. Imagination can always outrun performance. Paganini had no close friends; no confidants: he never ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... near to the village the old men and the women began to meet them, and now a scene ensued that proved the fallacy of the old fable of Indian apathy and stoicism. Parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters met with the most rapturous expressions of joy; while wailings and lamentations were heard from the relatives of the killed and wounded. The procession, however, continued on with slow ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... beg—No, I won't, I will take it—permission, To state, that I think there's a word to be said, From a different text, on the opposite head. And so I'll invent, as well as I'm able, A new home-made, allegorical fable; And my honest purpose shall be, to see If the scoundrel rich have not borne a part In those noble charities, which are The pride of this jolly old city's heart. And if I shall find that the virtuous mob Have ever been ...
— Nothing to Say - A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing - to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' • QK Philander Doesticks
... however, that this precaution proved fruitless, for he blew it at all times and seasons; and everybody became so hardened to its melodious shriek that they paid no attention to it whatever,—history, or fable, thus again ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Greek fable I remember reading as a boy at school, of the ground being sown with teeth, and out of it coming armed men. I cannot help thinking that we must have looked very much like those ready-made heroes, as I and my companions ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... edifice marvels are related by the ancient Arabian and Spanish chroniclers; 'and I doubt much,' adds the venerable Agpaida, 'whether many readers will not consider the whole as a cunningly devised fable, sprung from an oriental imagination; but it is not for me to reject a fact which is recorded by all those writers who are the fathers of our national history: a fact, too, which is as well attested as most of the remarkable events in the story of Don Roderick. None ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... Wanderer, after that which was fated had happened and I remained in my agony of solitude and sorrow, after, too, I had drunk of the cup of enduring life and like the Prometheus of old fable, found myself bound to this changeless rock, whereon day by day the vultures of remorse tear out my living heart which in the watches of the night is ever doomed to grow again within my woman's breast, I was plunged into petty troubles ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... hill country through good days and evil, apparently without serious or enduring reduction of their numbers and without visible lapse into barbarism, while the successive disconnected dynasties of their conquering rulers have come and gone, leaving nothing but an ill name. "This fable teaches" that a diligent attention to the growing of crops and children is the sure and appointed way to the maintenance of a people and its culture even under the most adverse conditions, and that eventual death ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... is to marry me. Don't look like that, Aunt Sarah. It is true;—it is, indeed." She had now dragged her chair close to her aunt's seat upon the sofa, so that she could put her hands upon her aunt's knees. "All that about Miss Brownlow has been a fable." ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... her finger on the mainspring of it. One needn't assume that there were not other young women at the prince's ball as beautiful as Cinderella, and other gowns, perhaps, as marvelous as the one provided by the fairy godmother. The godmother's greatest gift, I should say, though the fable lays little stress on it, was a capacity for unalloyed delight. No other young girl, beautiful as she may have been, if she were accustomed to driving to balls in coaches and having princes ask her to dance with them, could possibly have looked at that prince the way Cinderella must ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... with what danger this impure game of false statesmanship, this system of bribes, frauds, flatteries, and intimidations threatened the Confederacy, exposed to it on all sides. Two poems, written about the year 1510 or 1511, "The Labyrinth" and "A poetic Fable concerning an Ox and several Beasts," are to be received partly as pictures of the time, and partly as lessons of warning. Vigorous, rich in thought, original in conception, but somewhat rude in language, they exhibit a row of ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... Use of Satire. The Excellency of Epic Satire above others, as adding Example to Precept, and animating by Fable and sensible Images. Epic Satire compar'd with Epic Poem, and wherein they differ: Of their Extent, Action, Unities, Episodes, and the Nature of their Morals. Of Parody: Of the Style, Figures, and Wit proper to this Sort of Poem, and the ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... other than English.—To a second Correspondent, who signs himself 'a Wiltshire man,' and claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an equivocal phrase in my 'Christ's Hospital,' a more mannerly reply is due. Passing over the Genoese fable, which Bell makes such a ring about, he nicely detects a more subtle discrepancy, which Bell was too obtuse to strike upon. Referring to the passage (in page 484 of our second volume[3]), I must confess, that the term 'native town,' applied ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... which men pass and in which they may learn and grow, but the school itself does not go on growing. It is not that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by God and then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control it, and then it gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and from bad to worse, until at last God takes ...
— Progress and History • Various
... historical monuments; and it is rare, that the annals of so uncultivated a people as were the English, as well as the other European nations after the decline of Roman learning, have been transmitted to posterity so complete, and with so little mixture of falsehood and of fable. This advantage we owe entirely to the clergy of the church of Rome; who, founding their authority on their superior knowledge, preserved the precious literature of antiquity from a total extinction;[*] [21] and, under shelter of their numerous privileges and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... poor tinker," said I; "but I may never have undergone what you have. You remember, perhaps, the fable of the fox ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... of all the saints are not history in the strictest sense of the word. But what has that to do with the Communion of Saints? If simplicity and naivete have woven around some names an unlikely tale, a fable or a myth, it requires some effort to see how that could affect their standing with God, or their disposition to ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... subsistence is derived in great measure from the spontaneous produce of the land, which, yielding without cultivation the timber and turpentine, by the sale of which they are mainly supported, denies to them all the blessings which flow from labor. How is it that the fable ever originated of God's having cursed man with the doom of toil? How is it that men have ever been blind to the exceeding profitableness of labor, even for its own sake, whose moral harvest alone—industry, economy, patience, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... transmitted to us by the Chaldeans themselves of the antiquity of their learning, are blended with fable, and involved in considerable uncertainty. At the time when Callisthenes was requested by Aristotle to gain information concerning the origin of science in Chaldea, he was {43} informed that the ancestors of the Chaldeans had continued their astronomical observations through ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... giants; and applied to great heathen conquerors like Nimrod and the mighty rulers of Syria, the Anakim, Giants and other peoples of Hebrew fable. The Akasirah ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... gladness, with contented love, was certain to reflect heart-sunshine. On the other hand, there was Mr. Drummond! To be glad and sorry in a breath was as provoking to a feeling woman as the traveller's blowing hot and cold was to the satyr in the fable. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... Louvre, to avenge him on the Guises as they came out.[61] And the first explanation sent forth by the Government on the 24th was to the effect that the old feud between the Houses of Guise and of Chatillon had broken out with a fury which it was impossible to quell. This fable lasted only for a single day. On the 25th Charles writes that he has begun to discover traces of a Huguenot conspiracy;[62] and on the following day this was publicly substituted for the original story. Neither the vendetta of the Guises nor the conspiracy at Paris ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... honey oozing from an amber moon Illumines footing on forbidden wall; Where, 'stead of pursy jeweler's display, Parading peacocks brave the passer-by, And swans like angels in an azure sky Wing swift and silent on unchallenged way. No land of fable! Of the Hills I sing, Whose royal women tread with conscious grace The peace-filled gardens of a warrior race, Each maiden fit for wedlock with a king, And every Rajput son so royal born And conscious of his age-long heritage He looks askance at Burke's becrested page And wonders at the new-ennobled ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... he had heard in his youth;" that is to say, as the Introduction explains, from this MacKinlay; but Mr. Train has, since his friend's death, recovered a rude Durham ballad, which in fact contains a great deal more of the main fable of Guy Mannering than either his own written, or MacKinlay's oral edition of the Gallovidian anecdote had conveyed; and—possessing, as I do, numberless evidences of the haste with which Scott drew up his beautiful Prefaces and Introductions ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... ridiculous or evil association. The preparation had begun after the first performance of 'The Shadow of the Glen,' Synge's first play, with an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had taken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but 'from a writer of the Roman decadence.' Some spontaneous dislike had been but natural, for genius like his can but slowly, amid what it has of ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... afloat, grew in wonder and magnitude through pure love of the marvellous or wild expansion of the fanciful tales of the Indians. Far inland, built on a lofty hill, so the fable ran, was a mighty city, whose very street watering-troughs were made of solid gold and silver, while "billets of gold lay about in heaps, as if they were logs of ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... private in the ranks, an obscure workman among master builders. But she could offer her victory over herself, and ask her country to take back and use a character hewn and shaped in accordance with its traditions. Her husband's citizenship had become a legal fable. She would take it and weld it with her own, and, content never to know the outcome, lay them both together upon the altar ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... overland to India, the sea-passage having been closed against France by the British, but, in reality, for the purpose of awaiting there a turn in continental affairs, and, moreover, by his victories over the Turks in the ancient land of fable to add to the wonder it was ever his object to inspire. On his way thither he seized the island of Malta and compelled Baron Hompesch, the grand-master of the order of the Knights of Malta, to resign his dignity, the fortress being ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... profound allegory, was considered by degrees as a doubtful and useless opinion, and was at length rejected as the absurd invention of heresy and fanaticism." The Millennium is stigmatised, in what once stood as the forty-first Article of the English Church, as "a fable of Jewish dotage." We wonder whether the plain-spoken divines who drew up that article included Jesus Christ, St. Paul, and St. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... uncovering his eyes; the falconers always keeping their young birds hooded six weeks, till they are quite tamed. He offered to train it, if Fritz would part with it; but this Fritz indignantly refused. I told them the fable of the dog in the manger, which abashed Fritz; and he then besought his brother to teach him the means of training this noble bird, and promised to present him with ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... it), I found none so fit as him that peopled the beautiful and far-famed city of Athens, to be set in opposition with the father of the invincible and renowned city of Rome. Let us hope that Fable may, in what shall follow, so submit to the purifying processes of Reason as to take the character of exact history. In any case, however, where it shall be found contumaciously slighting credibility, and refusing to be reduced to anything like ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... time been writing some little Dramas on classical subjects, one of which was the Rape of Proserpine, a very graceful composition which she has never published. Shelley contributed to this the exquisite fable of Arethusa and the Invocation to Ceres.—Among the Nymphs gathering flowers on Enna were two whom she called Ino and Uno, names which I remember in the Dialogue were irresistibly ludicrous. She also wrote one on Midas, into which ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... as a proof of the inconsistency of the human mind, that, having built his castle with so little view to durability, Walpole entailed the perishable possession with a degree of strictness, which would have been more fitting for a baronial estate. And that, too, after having written a fable entitled "The Entail," in consequence, of some one having asked him whether he did not intend to entail Strawberry Hill, and in ridicule of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... there was certainly no more enchanting way of obtaining mental and physical relaxation than in wandering through those wonderful woodlands that abound in our vicinity, and which breathed so many inspirations to the Master of Fable, who at one time was their keeper. How I wish that good La Fontaine might have seen his dumb friends under present circumstances. What fantasies would he not have ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... Burns was more influenced by some other characteristics of Scotland than he was by its scenery. There was, first, its romantic history. That had not then been separated, as it has since been, from the mists of fable, but lay exactly in that twilight point of view best adapted for arousing the imagination. To the eye of Burns, as it glared back into the past, the history of his country seemed intensely poetical—including the line of early kings who pass over the stage of Boece' and Buchanan's ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... There was something natural and apt in the association. Then they avoided these two singular dwellers on the height. What had happened to The Man when he lived in the village became almost as great a legend as the Indian fable concerning The Stone. In the minds of the people one seemed as old as the other. Women who knew the awful disasters which had befallen The Man brooded at times most timidly, regarding him as they did at first—and even still—The Stone. Women who carried life unborn about with them had a strange ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
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