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More "Imagery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... literature; his knowledge of life, extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by which he attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse communion with certain orders of society and classes of human creatures. The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he was congenitally melodramatic; and before very long his habit of attributing special catch-words, gestures, and the like to his characters, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... That should thy little limbs have quicken'd? Limbs so firm, they seem'd to assure Life of health, and days mature: Woman's self in miniature! Limbs so fair, they might supply (Themselves now but cold imagery) The sculptor to make Beauty by. Or did the stern-eyed Fate descry That babe or mother, one must die; So in mercy left the stock And cut the branch; to save the shock Of young years widow'd, and the pain When Single State comes ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... in which marched the Duke of Alva, the Prince of Orange, and other great personages, carrying the sword, the globe, the sceptre, and the "crown imperial," contained no emblems or imagery worthy of being recorded. The next day the King, dressed in mourning and attended by a solemn train of high officers and nobles, went again to the church. A contemporary letter mentions a somewhat singular incident as forming the concluding part of the ceremony. "And the service being ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... suppose the young ladies interested in this picture to be affected by any chagrin at the loss of an invitation to a ball, or the like worldliness,)—it seems to me the stress of such calamities might be represented, in a picture, by less appalling imagery. And I can assure my fair little lady friends,—if I still have any,—that whatever a young girl's ordinary troubles or annoyances may be, her true virtue is in shaking them off, as a rose-leaf shakes off rain, and remaining debonnaire and bright in spirits, or even, as the rose ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth) which could by any literary ingenuity be turned into a stage play except the parables with which Christ enforced and illustrated His sermons. The sublime language and imagery of the Apocalypse have furnished forth the textual body of many oratorios, but it still transcends the capacity of ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... is excellent, and the somewhat homely imagery only enhances in my mind the truth of the sentiment. PIERPONT, Sir, is a ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... the contrary, he likes it. But the ordinary Boy, I believe, is not a prey to ambition and, if he can find service to his mind, easily reconciles himself to living on his wages, or, as he terms it, in the practical spirit of oriental imagery, "eating" them. The conditions he values seem to be,— permanence, respectful treatment, immunity from kicks and cuffs and from abuse, especially in his own tongue, and, above all, a quiet life, without ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... oracles of | God's word and to vanish in the mixture of | their own inventions; so in the self-same | manner, in inquisition of nature they have | ever left the oracles of God's works, and | adored the deceiving and deformed imagery | which the unequal mirrors of their own | minds have represented unto them{53}. Nay | 53. compare this with the later idea of it is a point fit and necessary in the | Idols front and beginning of this work without | hesitation or reservation to be professed, | that it ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... stock of the Italian people, is seasoned with proverbial sayings, the wisdom of centuries condensed in a few nervous words. When emotion fires their brain, they break into spontaneous eloquence, or suggest the motive of a poem by phrases pregnant with imagery. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... upon the door of his native state, and mighty was the reverberation. In a few weeks Page's Greensboro address had made its way all over the Southern States, and his melancholy figure, "the forgotten man" had become part of the indelible imagery of the Southern people. The portrait etched itself deeply into the popular consciousness for the very good reason that its truth was pretty generally recognized. The higher type of newspaper, though it winced somewhat at Page's strictures, manfully ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... rendered them into English, with all their original fire? Yes, I was confident I had; and I had no doubt that the public would say so. And then, with respect to Ab Gwilym, had I not done as much justice to him as to the Danish Ballads; not only rendering faithfully his thoughts, imagery and phraseology, but even preserving in my translation the alliterative euphony which constitutes one of the most remarkable features of Welsh prosody? Yes, I had accomplished all this; and I doubted not that the public would receive my ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... prospect brightens, and we are led to expect some liveliness of imagery, some warmth of poetical colouring;—but here is no such thing.—There is no task more difficult to a Poet, than that of Rejection. Ovid, among the ancients, and Dryden, among the moderns, were ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... "Beware Nahoum!" But those who had been at the Palace said: "Beware the Inglesi!" This still Quaker, with the white shining face and pontifical hat, with his address of "thee" and "thou," and his forms of speech almost Oriental in their imagery and simplicity, himself an archaism, had impressed them with a sense of power. He had prompted old Diaz Pasha to speak of him as a reincarnation, so separate and withdrawn he seemed at the end of the evening, yet with an ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... may weave his wreath of victory for the conqueror; the historian, with all the pomp of splendid imagery, may describe the heroism of the day of slaughter; but, after all, and none know this better than the men most familiar with it, a great battle is the most hateful and hellish sight that the sun looks on in all ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... text is from the Book of Daniel, a Book which takes us into a world of visions and trances and mystical imagery. There is a world within the world; a life beyond life. That world is not only the sphere of God, but of recognizable beings, meditating presences subject to rule, with organization and degrees, activities and authorities. It is a host, a kingdom, swayed by law and purpose. In ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... What is solid and simple, carve out; what is thin and entangled, beat out. I give you all kinds of forms to be delighted in;—fluttering leaves as well as fair bodies; twisted branches as well as open brows. The leaf and the branch you may beat and drag into their imagery: the body and brow you shall reverently touch into their imagery. And if you choose rightly and work rightly, what you do shall be safe afterwards. Your slender leaves shall not break off in my tenacious iron, though they may be rusted a little ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... that the older British poets, with that true feeling for nature which distinguishes them, have closely adhered to the simple and familiar imagery which they found in these popular superstitions; and have thus given to their fairy mythology those continual allusions to the farm-house and the dairy, the green meadow and the fountain-head, that fill our minds with the delightful associations of rural life. It is curious ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... unreservedly, he would not have dwelt upon them afterwards, or have troubled himself to recall their circumstances. Here we trace his human weakness. Yet again we are reminded that it was the weakness of Caesar; for the dreams were noble in their imagery, and Caesarean (so to speak) in their tone of moral feeling. Thus, for example, the night before he was assassinated, he dreamt at intervals that he was soaring above the clouds on wings, and that he placed his hand within the right hand of Jove. It would seem that perhaps some obscure ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of subjects and the widest ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... sun-burst with the cry of David: 'Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth so shalt thou drive them away!' Even to common minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse, gave a loftiness and ardor of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip-shod vulgarisms ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... thing more than the imagery of your own fancy, or selections from the numberless slanders of a time-serving and corrupt press? If they are founded on facts, it is in your power to state the facts. For my own part, I am utterly ignorant of any, even the least, justification for them. I am utterly ignorant that the abolitionists ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... how to begin with quiet beauty and serene grace: the hurrying measures, the crowding epithets, and startling imagery of the northern poetry suited his intoxicated fancy. His "Thor battering the Serpent" was such a favorite that he presented it to the Academy as his admission gift. Such was his love of terrific ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... the town. The imagery and carved work on the front of the cathedral was much injured in 1641. The cross upon the west window is said to have been frequently aimed ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the allegorical interpretation which Krishna's romances now received. In Christian literature, the longing of the soul for God was occasionally expressed in terms of sexual imagery—the works of the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, including 'songs of the soul in rapture at having arrived at the height of perfection which ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... portion of knowledge. Science has of late "been enlisted under the banners of imagination," by the irresistible charms of genius; by the same power, her votaries will be led "from the looser analogies which dress out the imagery of poetry to the stricter ones which form the ratiocination of philosophy[1]."—Botany has become fashionable; in time it may become useful, if it be not so already. Chemistry will follow botany. Chemistry is a science well suited to the talents and situation ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... anger of Elizabeth, sure to be aroused by the preference of any beauty to her own. To deceive the Queen,—to whom, in gratitude for past favors, and, mayhap, with a lively appreciation of others yet to come, he is offering up homage,—he describes her Majesty by the very same imagery he had elsewhere employed to depict his lady-love; and ostensibly applies to the royal Elizabeth the amatory terms which are covertly meant for an Elizabeth of his own,—between whom and her royal type he either saw or affected to see a personal resemblance. Here we find ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... conception of sculpture as the art of fiction in solid substance, we are now to consider what its subject should be. What—having the gift of imagery—should we by preference endeavor to image? A question which is, indeed, subordinate to the deeper one—why we should wish to ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... would fain bow in reverence. But it may not be; we cannot receive him as a true poet—as in any poetic quality the peer of his matchless wife. We hear much of his subtile psychology—we deem it psychological unintelligibility. His rhythm is rough and unmusical, his style harsh and inverted, his imagery cold, his invective bitter, and his verbiage immense. His illustrations are sometimes coarse, his comparisons diminish rather than increase the importance of the ideas to which they are applied. His pages are frequently as chaotic as those of Wagner's music; leaf after leaf ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... which he gave it. He swore to Berry: he swore to me: and in all honesty he swore to the car. For this, since Ping and Pong were duplicates, he may be forgiven. He described the morning's incident with a wealth of picturesque detail and an abundance of vivid imagery, while an astute cross-examination only served to adorn the ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... and Honor,' introduced as a song of one of the shepherds into these pastorals, exhibits no very masterly strokes of a sublime and inventive fancy. It has much of the trite imagery usually applied in the fabrication of these ideal edifices. It, however, shows our author in a new walk of poetry. This magnificent tower, or castle is built on inaccessible cliffs of flint: the walls are of gold, ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... John Moore;" Gray's "Elegy;" Mrs. Hemans's "Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers;" Cowper's "My Mother's Picture;" Jones's "What Constitutes a State;" Scott's "Lochinvar;" Halleck's "Marco Bozzaris;" Drake's "American Flag;" and Mrs. Thrale's "Three Warnings." As an introduction to the thought, imagery and diction of Shakespeare, there were "Hamlet's Soliloquy," "Speech of Henry Fifth to his Troops," "Othello's Apology," "The Fall of Cardinal Wolsey" and his death, the "Quarrel of Brutus and Cassius" (often ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... thenceforth Icarian. Between what we have assumed to be the base of fact, and the legend which has been invested with such poetic grace in Greek story, there is no more than a century or so of re-telling might give to any event among a people so simple and yet so given to imagery. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... fanning themselves with diabolical irony, only to see a painting of a female form over whose writhing body boats were sailing, or a four-headed ram, or birds with human heads flying away with a mummified corpse. On the ceiling, too, there was strange imagery; and when she looked at the floor to rest her bewildered fancy, her eyes fell on a troop of furies pursuing the wicked, or a pool of fire by which horrible ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... nudity of his statues.[140] Some of the work of Bandinelli and Bronzino had to be removed. What was a rational and healthy protest has survived in grotesque and ill-fitting drapery made of tin—very negation of propriety. Although needed for biblical imagery, the nude in Italy was always exotic; in Greece it was indigenous. From the time of Homer there had been a worship of physical perfection. The Palaestra, the cultivation of athletics in a nation of soldiers, the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... Yochai, who lived in the second century. The Zohar, it was pretended, had been concealed in a cavern in Galilee for more than a thousand years, and had now been suddenly discovered. The Zohar is, indeed, a work of genius, its spiritual beauty, its fancy, its daring imagery, its depth of devotion, ranking it among the great books of the world. Its literary style, however, is less meritorious; it is difficult and involved. As Chatterton clothed his ideas in a pseudo-archaic English, so Moses of ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... an inspired orator who owes much of his advancement to eloquent tongue. Their platform manner is totally different. Lloyd George is fascinatingly magnetic in and out of the spotlight while Smuts is more coldly logical. When you hear Lloyd George you are stirred and even exalted by his golden imagery. The sound of his voice falls on the ear like music. You admire the daring of his utterance but you do not always remember everything ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... to establish any legal parentage whatever, that others had enjoyed a State's guardianship and discipline, and that a majority had left their paternal roofs without any embarrassing preliminary formula, were mere passing clouds that did not dim the golden imagery of the writer. From that day the Saints were adopted as historical lay figures, and entered at once into possession of uninterrupted ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... taken place with the weak Laplander, or with the well-grown, strong, bold Fin. It makes a difference in temperament, as great as between minor and major in the same piece of music. That touch of rich colour in our nation, of which the poet Wergeland's endless wealth of imagery and flight beyond logic are a representation, is certainly Finnish—at any rate, there is very little of it in our old Sagas. And it can be understood from this, what grandeur of nature the Fin has added to the Norwegian character. The Fin admixture has been a great and ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... perhaps another Celtic trait that his affections and emotions, passionate as these were, and liable to passionate ups and downs, found the most eloquent expression both in words and gestures. Love, anger, and indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what we read of Southern races. For all these emotional extremes, and in spite of the melancholy ground of his character, he had upon the whole a happy life; nor was he less fortunate in his death, which at the last ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... most were the Revelations and the Prophecies,—parts whose dim and wondrous imagery, and fervent language, impressed her the more, that she questioned vainly of their meaning;—and she and her simple friend, the old child and the young one, felt just alike about it. All that they knew was, that they ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Wandsworth, Homer would have found imagery by which to improve his description of the abode of Vulcan; for how feeble must have been the objects of this nature, which a poet could view on the shores of the Mediterranean, compared with the gigantic machinery of an English iron-foundry. The application of the expansive ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... slighted them unreservedly, he would not have dwelt upon them afterwards, or have troubled himself to recall their circumstances. Here we trace his human weakness. Yet again we are reminded that it was the weakness of Csar; for the dreams were noble in their imagery, and Csarean (so to speak) in their tone of moral feeling. Thus, for example, the night before he was assassinated, he dreamt at intervals that he was soaring above the clouds on wings, and that he placed his hand within the right hand of Jove. ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... horror of Winter, take in their turns possession of the mind. The poet leads us through the appearances of things as they are successively varied by the vicissitudes of the year, and imparts to us so much of his own enthusiasm that our thoughts expand with his imagery and kindle with his sentiments. Nor is the naturalist without his part in the entertainment, for he is assisted to recollect and to combine, to arrange his discoveries, and to amplify the sphere of his contemplation. The great ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... boyhood. And I have met with no conjecture on the point that bears greater likelihoods of truth, than that another three, far different in merit, were addressed, much later in life, to the same object. The prevailing tone and imagery of them are such as he would hardly have used but with a woman in his thoughts; they are full-fraught with deep personal feeling, as distinguished from exercises of fancy; and they speak, with unsurpassable tenderness, of ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... written a really great poem on these terms, though deprived of the concrete imagery of a Dante or a Milton. If he had fairly grasped some definite conception of the universe, whether pantheistic or atheistic, optimist or pessimist, proclaiming a solution of the mystery, or declaring all solutions to be impossible, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... this preference for one particular kind of mental imagery, and that the motor, or muscular kind, which gives this type of child his peculiarity in this more psychological period. When we pass from the mere outward and organic description of his peculiarities, attempted above in the case ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... Diaz, was published in the Echo du Morvan, a review which for eighteen months maintained its existence in spite of provincial indifference. Some knowing persons at Nevers declared that Jan Diaz was making fun of the new school, just then bringing out its eccentric verse, full of vitality and imagery, and of brilliant effects produced by defying the Muse under pretext of adapting German, English, and ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... that a book is by the author of "Mehalah" is to imply that it contains a story cast on strong lines, containing dramatic possibilities, vivid and sympathetic descriptions of Nature, and a wealth of ingenious imagery.'—Speaker. ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... sense in which the full corn in the ear may be said to be wrapped up in its kernel, and it can unfold only according to the laws of its being. The first account of Creation sets forth, with the beautiful imagery of the Orient, the general and ultimate truth. The second account, with the same grand simplicity, foreshadows the method and the long, slow process by which this ultimate end ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... parents of the baby I buried yesterday? Are there no pictures in these stricken souls worth viewing? As you pass through these chambers of imagery, and view one of these exquisitely painted pictures after another, you have the whole splendid career mapped out before you. Such triumphs, such honours, such laurels for his brow! The glory of ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... of which the sea is driven through some unknown subterranean channel, roaring and thundering with a fearful noise, which rises in hollow echoes through the aptly-named "Devil's Throat." About this hole no grass grew: the rocks rose wild, jagged, and precipitous, all around it. If ever the ghastly imagery of Dante's terrible "Vision" was realized on ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... put it elsewhere with Wandering Willie's Tale, which it more specially resembles in the way in which the ordinary turns into the extraordinary. It falls short of Scott in vividness, character, manners, and impressiveness, but surpasses him in beauty[90] of style and imagery. In particular, Nodier has here, in a manner which I hardly remember elsewhere, achieved the blending of two kinds of "terror"—the ordinary kind which, as it is trivially called, "frightens" one, and the other[91] terror which accompanies the intenser pleasures ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... as distinct from the individuals who compose it, has no apparatus for feeling pain or pleasure. There are no social sensations. Perceptions and mental imagery are individual and not social phenomena. Society lives, so to speak, only in its separate organs or members, and each of these organs has its own brain and organ of control which gives it, among other things, the power of independent locomotion. This ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... for picturesque and appropriate imagery, for keen and faithful portraiture Mr. McGaffey has no superior. And there will be many to say that this book entitles him to recognition as the interpreter of his ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... in Herodotus (VI., 105-106) with Browning's more spirited and poetic version. Observe how the strong patriotism, the Greek love of nature, and the Greek reverence for the gods are brought to the fore. What imagery in the poem is especially effective? What is the claim of Pheidippides—as Browning presents him—to memory as a hero? What ideals are ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... and impressive, in the teaching of our Lord. The Sermon on the Mount is a most pleasing specimen of His method of conveying instruction. Whilst He gives utterance to sentiments of exalted wisdom, He employs language so simple, and imagery so chaste and natural, that even a child takes a pleasure in perusing His address. There is reason to think that He did not begin to speak in parables until a considerable time after He had entered upon His ministry. [23:1] By these symbolical discourses He at once blinded ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the stories in the book this was the last one would have supposed Dan would like best, and even Mrs Jo was surprised at his perceiving the moral of the tale through the delicate imagery and romantic language by which it was illustrated. But as she looked and listened she remembered the streak of sentiment and refinement which lay concealed in Dan like the gold vein in a rock, making him quick to feel and to enjoy fine colour in a flower, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... rest, what imagery, what exaltation we find in this Appendix! Dazed with imagined beauty we pass from one splendid haunt to another. One of them has three golf-courses of its own; several are replete with every comfort (and is not "replete" the perfect epithet?). Here is a seductive one "on the sea-edge," and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... "wide in range, of profound significance and infinite ingenuity," to defend and justify immoral intercourse with a gipsy trull. The poem consists of the speculations of a libertine, who coerces into his service truth and sophistry, and "a superabounding wealth of thought and imagery," and with no further purpose on the poet's part than the dramatic delineation of character. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is spoken of in a similar manner as the justification, by reference to the deepest principles of morality, of compromise, hypocrisy, lying, and a selfishness that ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... the same with the poetry of outward nature as with the poetry of human passion.[31] In Addison's "Letter from Italy," in Pope's "Pastorals," and "Windsor Forest," the imagery, when not actually false, is vague and conventional, and the language abounds in classical insipidities, epithets that describe nothing, and generalities at second hand from older poets, who may ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... is the imagery of the fairy-songs in the Tempest and the Midsummer Night's Dream; Ariel riding through the twilight on the bat, or sucking in the bells of flowers with the bee; or the little bower-women of Titania, driving ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... attempt to alter or supersede the originals. Nor could any attempt have succeeded. There are specimens which exist, independent of those collected by Macpherson, which present a peculiarity of form, and a Homeric consistency of imagery, distinct from every other species of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... thou prove,"[209] is a charming song; but "Logan burn and Logan braes" is sweetly susceptible of rural imagery; I'll try that likewise, and, if I succeed, the other song may class among the English ones. I remember the two last lines of a verse in some of the old songs of "Logan Water" (for I know a good many different ones) which ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Ode to Evening is that here at least Collins can tell the truth without falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of the world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use of personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into imagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up his view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent upon expressing any other man's experiences but his own when ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... your picture, twice show truth, Beyond mere imagery on the wall,— So note by note bring music from your mind Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,— So write a book shall mean beyond the facts, Suffice the eye and save ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... to rise to the idea; but he could feel it enough to make any sacrifice that still remained to be made. As to what such sacrifice was now to be made to, here Newman stopped short before a blank wall over which there sometimes played a shadowy imagery. He had a fancy of carrying out his life as he would have directed it if Madame de Cintre had been left to him—of making it a religion to do nothing that she would have disliked. In this, certainly, there was ...
— The American • Henry James
... children of their Kings that did not inherit. At the bottom of the stairs is the Pantheon, built eighty feet square, and is, I guess, about sixty feet over; the whole lining of it in all places is jasper, very curiously carved, both in figures and flowers and imagery; and a branch for forty lights, which is vastly rich, of silver, and hangs down from the top by a silver chain, within three yards of the bottom, and is made with great art, as is also this curious knot of jasper on the floor, that the reflection of the branch and lights is ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if you will, into which we peep for a moment, and see it at work weaving strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century has its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations and subtle moralising, it is an element in the local colour of a great age. It illustrates also the faith of that age in all oracles, its desire to hear all voices, its generous belief that ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... relationship between some of the latter and the Biblical Song of Songs. In that marvellous poem, outspoken praise of earthly beauty, frank enumeration of the physical charms of the lovers, thorough unreserve of imagery, are conspicuous enough. Just these features, as Wetzstein showed, are reproduced, in a debased, yet recognizable, likeness, by the modern Syrian wasf—a lyric description of the bodily perfections and adornments of a newly-wed pair. ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... made a gesture expressive of the motion of a night bird beating its wings, and, lapsing into silence, stood smiling at Pierre, who was bewildered. Beauclair had told him all that beforehand, using almost the same words and the same imagery. Point by point, his prognostics were realised, there was nothing more in the case than natural ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the strangers attending his meetings, that this John the Baptist, mighty preacher though he be, was but the herald of one much greater than he, who should follow—that he was the forerunner of the Master, according to the Oriental imagery which pictured the forerunner of the great dignitaries, running ahead of the chariot of his master, crying aloud to all people gathered on the road that they must make way for the approaching great man, shouting ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... was already shining into poetry. Ch'u Yuan, the first great poet, belongs to this same fourth century; it is a long step from the little wistful ballads that Confucius gathered to the "wild irregular meters," * splendid imagery, and be it said, deep soul symbolism of his great poem the Li Sao (Falling into Trouble). The theme of it is this: From earliest childhood Ch'u Yuan had sought the Tao, but in vain. At last, banished by the prince whose minister he had been, he ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... however, refrain from giving a passage from Shakespeare, even though it should appear trite, which illustrates the emblematical meaning often conveyed in these floral tributes, and at the same time possesses that magic of language and appositeness of imagery for which ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... he pointed out to me numberless faults of style, incoherent and fantastic imagery, sentiment alike exaggerated and a thousand leagues removed from nature. He considered, and still considers, Pierre Corneille to be a blind enthusiast of the ancients, whom we deem great since we do not know them. In his eyes, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Too late! The only art that I ever could achieve was that of giving happiness to Isabel and being worthy of her devotion. Her letters came frequently, always so full of wise observations, striking fancies and imagery; so many with thanks for what I had been to her. She wrote me that Uncle Tom's will, as he had dictated it, had been probated and acquiesced ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... trust the everlasting hills. And was old David right, he thought that day, when he held the earthquake and the volcano as the truest symbols of the history of human kind, and of the dealings of their Maker with them? All the magnificent Plutonic imagery of the Hebrew poets, had it no meaning for men now? Did the Lord still uncover the foundations of the world, spiritual as well as physical, with the breath of His displeasure? Was the solfa-tara of Tophet still ordained for tyrants? And did the Lord still arise out ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... say. Instead of learning from the folk-song, Schiller had learned originally from Klopstock; and what he had learned was to pose and philosophize and invest fictitious sentiment with a maze of bewildering and far-fetched imagery. Then he had lost sympathy with Klopstock's religiosity, had acquired a better opinion of the things of sense, and had had his introduction to doubt and disgust and rebellion. When now these moods sought expression in verse, the verse took the form of impassioned rhetoric. He sang not as the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Savage's works; and that, though it cannot be denied to contain many striking sentiments, majestic lines, and just observations, it is in general not sufficiently polished in the language, or enlivened in the imagery, or digested in the plan. Thus his poem contributed nothing to the alleviation of his poverty, which was such as very few could have supported with equal patience; but to which it must likewise be confessed that ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... seal of their repentance. The nature of his ministry is declared to have been a fulfillment of the prediction of Isaiah who described "one crying in the wilderness," one sent of God to prepare the way for the coming of Christ. This preparation is pictured in terms of Oriental imagery. When a monarch was about to make a journey, a servant was sent before him to prepare the highway. Valleys needed to be filled, hills lowered, crooked places made straight, rough ways made smooth. Thus, before men would be ready to receive Christ, moral obstacles must be removed; men must repent ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... delight and reverence Madonna pictures like this have awakened as we read the words of an old chant. In quaint diction and with fanciful imagery the writer tried to express his feelings in the presence of a painting which, if not this veritable Madonna of the Chair, was ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... (although they are more like winged archbishops) that stand guard upon the door, of the cherubs in the corners, of the scapegoat gargoyles, or the quaint and spirited relief, where St. Michael (the artist's patron) makes short work of a protesting Lucifer. We were never weary of viewing the imagery, so innocent, sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense—in the sense of inventive gusto and expression—so artistic. I know not whether it was more strange to find a building of such merit in a corner of a barbarous isle, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at Paris. Visited the Paris office of the New York Herald, where many files of American and European papers can be perused. A visit to the "Louvre" is a joy for the layman, as for the connoisseur, galleries a mile or more in length hung with paintings grand in imagery and beauty of old masters, French and Italian, centuries old. Many showed the silent, slow and impressive steps of age. But "you may break, you may scatter the vase if you will, the scent of the roses will linger there still," for on shrunken canvas or from luster dimmed ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... frequently in the scriptures as a type of the highest human good. All of the most joyous emotions of the mental and physical natures of man are described in the imagery of light. Throughout the Book it is used to typify the ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... Emma Goldman says, "high strung." His ear is tuned to hear unintermittently the agonized cry. To follow the imagery of Shelley, he seems to be living in a "mind's hell,"[4] wherein hate, scorn, pity, remorse, and despair seem to be tearing out the nerves by their bleeding roots. Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson, Francois Coppee, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... poetry—of poetical presentation, which is independent of any subject or intention, which is capable of being adapted perhaps to all, certainly to most, which lies in form, in sound, in metre, in imagery, in language, in suggestion—rather than in matter, in sense, in definite ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... by his vehemence, Ricciardetto by his amours, Astolfo by an ostentatious rashness and self-committal; but in all these respects they appear to have been made to the author's hand. Neither does the poem exhibit any prevailing force of imagery, or of expression, apart from popular idiomatic phraseology; still less, though it has plenty of infernal magic, does it present us with any magical enchantments of the alluring order, as in Ariosto; or with love-stories as good as Boiardo's, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... of it is rich in thought and imagery, and happy expressions; and of the disjecta membra[315] scattered throughout, and as yet unarranged, a good dramatick poet might avail himself with considerable advantage. I shall give my readers ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... able and sympathetic reviewer of this essay, in the 'New York Tribune,' 'in which Mr. Martineau delights often impairs the distinctness of his statements by diverting the attention of the reader from the essential points of his discussion to the beauty of his imagery, and thus diminishes their power of conviction. 'To the beauties here referred to I bear willing testimony; but the reviewer is strictly just in his estimate of their effect upon my critic's logic. The 'affluence of illustration,' and ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... sentence, polished and balanced with rhetorical skill, and delivered with the emphasis and inflection of a great orator. One critic thought it a revelation to find a man who could be eloquent with studied composure, who could be fervid without wildness, and who could hold imagery and metaphor to the steady place of relentless logic without detracting from ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... also, certain papers, wherein is painted some babblerie or other, of imagery woork, and these they call My Lord of Misrule's badges: these they give to every one that wil give money for them, to maintaine them in their heathenrie, devilrie, whordome, drunkennes, pride, and what not. And who will not be buxom to them, and give them money for these their devilish cognizances, ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... hold to his antagonists by mixing up sentiment and imagery with his reasoning; so that being unused to such a sight in the region of politics, they were deceived, and could not discern the fruit from the flowers. Gravity is the cloke of wisdom; and those who have nothing else think it an insult ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... arts, professions, and occupations of life, grow out of our connection with matter. The natural philosopher, the physician, the lawyer, the artist, and the legislator, find the objects or occasions of their researches in matter. The poet borrows his beautiful imagery from matter. The sculptor and painter express their noble conceptions through matter. Material wants rouse the world to activity. The material organs of sense, especially the eye, wake up infinite thoughts in the mind. To maintain, then, that the mass of men are and must be so immersed in ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... that if I went again on foreign service, I might meet with some young lady who would send me out of the world with a cup of poison, or by some fatal spell break the magical chain which now bound me to Emily. This poetical imagery had no more effect on them, than my prose composition. I then appealed to Emily herself. "Surely," said I, "your heart is not as hard as those of our inflexible parents? surely you will be my advocate on this occasion? ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... is lost beneath a weight of accretion, like the thick moss blurring the chiselled outlines of some carven monument. After careful scrutiny of the miniature temple which suggests so many interpretations of symbolic imagery, we return to the little presbytery to hear of the subsiding river, and the good priest, announcing that the raft can now be safely negotiated, accompanies us to the tottering structure, a straw matting laid over three crazy boats punted across the turbulent stream. A half-hour's ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... society, such as heart disease. Such handicaps, however, are limited to relatively few of a population. The raison d'etre of the greater number of minor mental inefficiencies the psychanalyst puts down to handicaps in the unconscious. Again he mistakes figurative imagery for explanations. The conception of endocrine diversity in the make-up supplies us with the rationale of the vast majority of organic and functional defects and inferiorities, in short, subnormalities of any group, large ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... and artificial, with very little of nature, and not much of life. He formed a peculiar idea of comic excellence, which he supposed to consist in gay remarks and unexpected answers; but that which he endeavoured, he seldom failed of performing. His scenes exhibit not much of humour, imagery, or passion: his personages are a kind of intellectual gladiators; every sentence is to ward or strike; the contest of smartness is never intermitted; his wit is a meteor playing to and fro with alternate coruscations. ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... immortality of the soul."—The important thing now is to plant this entirely philosophic faith in all hearts. We introduce it into the civil order of things, we take the calendar out of the hands of the Church, we purge it of its Christian imagery; we make the new era begin with the advent of the Republic; we divide the year according to the metric system, we name the months according to the vicissitudes of the seasons, "we substitute, in all directions, the realities of reason for the visions of ignorance, the truths of nature for a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Souls, for instance, and Old Morality—the quaintness is merely decorative: the essentials are sound and human enough to be of lasting interest and to have a capacity of common application. Elsewhere his imagery is apt to become strange and unaffecting, his fancy to work in curious and desolate ways, his message to sound abstruse and strange; and these effects too are deepened by the qualities and the merits of his style. It is peculiarly his own, but it is ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... is largely due to an almost entire abstention on the part of the writers from figurative language, or at least from all imagery that is not readily recognized as Scriptural. Bread and beef are what men demand for a steady diet. Sweetmeats are well enough, now and then, ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... takes high rank among the modern poets, many of his admirers holding him to be the greatest one alive, he is a far greater orator. His diction is perfect, his wealth of imagery exhaustless; I have seen him sway a vast audience as a wheat-field is swayed by the wind. His life he values not at all; the four rows of ribbons which on the breast of his uniform make a splotch of color were not won ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... faithful rendering of the Book which, aside from its spiritual teaching, contains some of the noblest examples of style in the whole range of human literature: the elemental simplicity of the Books of Moses, the glowing poetry of Job and the Psalms, the sublime imagery of Isaiah, the exquisite tenderness of the Parables, the forged and tempered argument of the Epistles, the gorgeous coloring of the Apocalypse. All these elements entered in some degree into the translation of 1611, and the result was a work of such beauty, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... thing he needs, and the belief that fits one man will not fit another. Religious opinions are never thrown away: they evolve into something else, and we use the old symbols and imagery to express ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... above. Many of the animals have keen sensory discrimination. Feeble-minded children, unless of very low grade, do not differ very markedly from normal children in sensitivity of the skin, visual acuity, simple reaction time, type of imagery, etc. But in power of comprehension, abstraction, and ability to direct thought, in the nature of the associative processes, in amount of information possessed, and in spontaneity of ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... of a Supreme Force, and of the origin and progress of the visible world. With like ability Gotama deals with his inquiry into the nature of man. With Oriental imagery he bids us consider what becomes of a grain of salt thrown into the sea; but, lest we should be deceived herein, he tells us that there is no such thing as individuality or personality—that the Ego is altogether a nonentity. In these profound ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... which required concentration was asked, Edna was inclined to work carelessly, but in general her capacities proved to be decidedly good. She was accustomed to read nothing but the lightest literature and fairy stories and her interests were of the superficial sort. Neither in powers of imagery or imagination, nor by anything else ascertained about her mental abilities did we come to know of any point of special bearing ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... greeted the regiment held the happy mean between theatrical gush and a sermon. It was adorned with pompous imagery, and contained numerous eulogiums of the reigning family. "Christian humility" and "God's assistance" played a great part therein, and it dealt rude thrusts at those who waged war in secret upon the sup-porters of throne ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... charities, are placed high above us—legible to every eye, and shining like the stars, with a splendour that is read in every clime, and translates itself into every language at once. Such is the imagery of Wordsworth. But this is otherwise estimated in the policy of papal Rome: and casuistry usurps a place in her spiritual economy, to which our Protestant feelings demur. So far, however, the question between ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... of the profession of literature can read Dickens's private letters and not stand amazed at the unbounded affluence of imagery, sentiment, humour, and keen observation which he poured out in them. There was no stint, no reservation for trade purposes. So with his conversation—every thought, every fancy, every feeling was expressed ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... boyhood to old age he continues the idol of the imaginations of both. The boy of ten, and the old man of seventy, alike delight to read and quote him for the music of his verses, and the beauty of his sentiments, precepts, and imagery.[31] ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... I should like to dwell for a moment on what have been called the "by-products" of the Library story hour. Besides guiding his reading, a carefully prepared, well told story enriches a child's imagination, stocks his mind with poetic imagery and literary allusions, develops his powers of concentration, helps in the unfolding of his ideas of right and wrong, and develops his sympathetic feelings; all of which "by-products" have a powerful influence on character. Thus the library story hour becomes, if properly utilized, an ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... positively endows a man with beauty, happiness, and holiness—when we have got that, then the question next cries aloud for answer—this well-spring of salvation, is—what? Who? And the first answer and the last answer is GOD—GOD HIMSELF. It is no mere bit of drapery of the prophet's imagery, this well-spring of salvation; it is something much more substantial, much deeper than that. You remember the old psalm, 'With Thee is the fountain of life: in Thy light shall we see light'; and what David and John after him called life, Isaiah and Paul after him calls salvation. And ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... to the stormy western sky where the day died in splendour, added simply in the poetic imagery that so often springs to the ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... revaluation of its elements on a new esthetic basis. In "Salome" music is largely a decorative element, like the scene,—like the costumes. It creates atmosphere, like the affected stylism of much of Oscar Wilde's text, with its Oriental imagery borrowed from "The Song of Solomon," diluted and sophisticated; it gives emotional significance to situations, helping the facial play of Salome and her gestures to proclaim the workings of her mind, when speech has deserted her; it is at its ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... or be placed on an easel,—whether the bust of Psyche should stand on the marble table in the hall, or on a bracket in the library; all of which points were debated with a breadth of survey, a richness of imagery, a vigor of discussion, that would be perfectly astonishing to any one who did not know how much two very self-willed argumentative people might find to say on any point under heaven. Everything in classical antiquity,—everything in Kugler's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... possibility of all imagery, of all our pictorial modes of expression, is contained in the ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... "Religious Isolation," deserve mention; and it is with pleasure we find one, in the tenor of strong appreciation, written on reading the Essays of the great American, Emerson. The sonnet for "Butler's Sermons" is more indistinct, and, as such, less to be approved, in imagery than is usual with this poet. That "To an Independent Preacher who preached that we should be in harmony with nature," seems to call for some remark. The sonnet ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... from the antique, quite changed its character, becoming more geometrical and conventional in its form. That which particularly distinguishes Lombard from Byzantine art is its sculpture abounding with grotesque imagery, with illustrations of every-day life, of a fanciful mythology not yet quite extinct, and allusions, no longer symbolic but direct, to the Christian creed; the latter quality a striking evidence of the triumph of the Roman Church over all iconoclastic adversaries in Greece." What is here ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... woman, you are not merely the handiwork of God, but also of men; these are ever endowing you with beauty from their hearts. Poets are weaving for you a web with threads of golden imagery; painters are giving your form ever new immortality. The sea gives its pearls, the mines their gold, the summer gardens their flowers to deck you, to cover you, to make you more precious. The desire of men's hearts has shed its glory over your youth. You are one half woman ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... beliefs. "It was in answering Robert Browning;" she wrote, "that my mind refused to bring forward argument, turned recreant, and sided with the enemy." Something of this period of Browning's Sturm und Drang can be divined through the ideas and imagery ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... exposed to a hurricane at sea. We too generally limit this passage to its literal sense. To Bunyan, who had passed through such a deep experience of the "terrors of the Lord," when he came out of tribulation and anguish, he must have richly enjoyed the solemn imagery of these words, depicting the inmost feelings of his soul when in the horrible deeps of doubt and despair. But young Christians must not be distressed because they have never experienced such tempests: thousands of vessels of mercy get to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... imagine that such external decorations of the churches, where a few solemn figures told almost as shadows on the golden background brightly reflecting the sun, must have been even more glorious than the imagery of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... hardly another American woman-poet whose poetry is generally known and loved like that of Sara Teasdale. 'Rivers to the Sea', her latest volume of lyrics, possesses the delicacy of imagery, the inward illumination, the high vision that characterize the poetry that will endure the test ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... the ordinary Hebrew culture. The general manner of all the Hebrew prophets, of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, or Joel, is the same—the manner of the fiercest afflatus, of entire abandonment, finding expression in phrases of magnificent solemnity and in imagery of the profoundest awesomeness. This manner the Greeks never show. Not even AEschylus, the most Hebraic of Hellenes, has any passages in which he loses control of his artistic sense. Neither he nor any other Hellene sees ecstatic visions or dreams ecstatic dreams. There is no place ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Lords of Little Egypt; and from this fact seems originally to have arisen the notion that they were Egyptians. But this seems less like an assertion of their origin than like a piece of Scriptural phraseology. The Hussites used in that way a Biblical imagery, like the Puritans of a later age. Like the Puritans, they called their opponents Moabites, Amalekites, and so on. With the Puritans, Egypt was always "the house of bondage," and that name was the common designation of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... are fast. I would fain keep all the cry as well as all the wool to ourselves; but as for giving over work, that can only be when I am in woolen.'"[53] From this time forward the brightness of joy and sincerity of inevitable humor, which perfected the imagery of the earlier novels, are wholly absent, except in the two short intervals of health unaccountably restored, in which he wrote ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... but irresistibly that afternoon, as we rode easily across the land of the Philistines in a few hours, that we had never really read the Old Testament as it ought to be read,—as a book written in an Oriental atmosphere, filled with the glamour, the imagery, the magniloquence of the East. Unconsciously we had been reading it as if it were a collection of documents produced in Heidelberg, Germany, or in Boston, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... Prooem.) and the uniform imagery of Ossian's Poems, which, according to every hypothesis, were composed by ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... all the efforts of the king his father, despite the guards and his young men companions, despite the beauty of the dancing-girls, the mysteries of life came home to him, and he was afraid. It is a beautiful story told in quaint imagery how it was that the knowledge of sickness and of death came to him, a horror stalking amid the glories of his garden. He learnt, and he understood, that he too would grow old, would fall sick, would die. And beyond death? There was the fear, ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... apart, whom such a theme Has bound together, and hereafter aid In trivial expression, that have been So hideously dignified?—Would God That tearing you apart would tear the thread I strung you on! Would God—O God, my mind Stretches asunder on this merciless rack Of imagery! O, let me sleep a while! Would I could sleep, and wake to find me back In that sweet summer afternoon with you. Summer? 'Tis summer still by the calendar! How easily could God, if He so willed, Set back the world a little turn ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... for iron; but in this mine you will find the various metals and gems in neighbouring "pockets" and nuggets, and seams and beds. Here you may gather the golden opinions of the ancients in close proximity to those of the moderns. Here you will find pearls of thought, sparkling gems of imagery, broad seams of satire, and silvery streams of sentiment, with wealth of wisdom and of wit. Hard iron-fisted facts also, and funny mercurial fancies are to be found here in abundance, and there are tons of tin in the form of rubbish, which is usually left at a pit's ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... and delays make great havoc of both hero and heroine. They give way to melancholy, indulge in amorous rhapsodies, and become very emaciated. So far the story is decidedly dull, and its pathos, notwithstanding the occasional grandeur and beauty of imagery, often verges on the ridiculous. But, by way of relief, an element of life is generally introduced in the character of the Vidushaka, or Jester, who is the constant companion of the hero; and in the young maidens, who are ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... he saw something white and gay gleaming through the boles of the oak-trees, and presently there was clear before him a most goodly house builded of white marble, carved all about with knots and imagery, and the carven folk were all painted of their lively colours, whether it were their raiment or their flesh, and the housings wherein they stood all done with gold and fair hues. Gay were the windows ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... should fail to understand with greater ease, but that we should probably not understand at all. Wagner thus forced language back to a more primeval stage in its development a stage at which it was almost free of the abstract element, and was still poetry, imagery, and feeling; the fearlessness with which Wagner undertook this formidable mission shows how imperatively he was led by the spirit of poetry, as one who must follow whithersoever his phantom leader may direct him. Every word in ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... entertained himself with the many marvellous sights which are hidden away beneath the waters of the great ocean and which have a life and imagery of their own, stranger and more mysterious perhaps than those on which men are accustomed to look. But in time he became restless and dissatisfied with himself. The unpleasant thought crept slowly into his heart that in a moment of passion he had basely deserted ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... the same way the idea of the progress of Humanity seems to us to have been derived from the Christian belief in the coming of the Kingdom of God through the extension of the Church, and to that final triumph of good over evil foretold in the imagery of the Apocalypse. At least the founders of the Religion of Humanity will admit that the Christian Church is the matrix of theirs so much their very nomenclature proves and we would fain ask them to review the process of disengagement and ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... chief, whose death song they have sung amidst the wail of the squaws. Yet Whirlwind does not grieve. He has found another squaw, fleeter than the antelope, more graceful than the fawn, whose voice is like the singing birds, and face fairer than imagery of the spirit land. Let my brother go to his home, but Whirlwind's home is where the antelope is, he will live ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... (1809-1892), the author of The Princess, In Memoriam, and the Idylls of the King, held the first place among the poets of his day. An adept in the metrical art, he combines in these mature productions, with terseness of diction and fresh, striking imagery, deep reflection and sympathy with the intellectual questionings and yearnings of the time. In his lyrical poems the fullness of his power is seen. He was, without question, a consummate literary artist. Browning (1812-1889), careless of rhythmical art, with a defiance of form, but with dramatic ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... squander so much that is beautiful on such an orgy of blood and violence. Romeo and Juliet is full of beautiful poetry; but even here occasional lapses show the undeveloped taste of the young writer. Notice the flowery and fantastic imagery in the following passage, where Lady Capulet is praising Paris, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... of Troy divine': we begin to miss that high and equable sublimity which never flags or sinks, that continuous current of moving incidents, those rapid transitions, that force of eloquence, that opulence of imagery which is ever true to nature. Like the sea when it retires upon itself and leaves its shores waste and bare, henceforth the tide of sublimity begins to ebb, and draws us away into the dim ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... departed, and in its place is a gnawing, clamorous, ravening desire. The vitiated body, full of indescribable and mysterious pain, the still more tortured mind, sinking under a burden of remorse, guilt, fear, and awful imagery, both unite in one desperate, incessant ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... of unhappy end in imagery Of gold or jewelled bands he saw exprest; Then eagles' talons, the authority With which great lords their delegates invest: Bellows filled every nook, the fume and fee Wherein the favourites of kings are blest: Given to those Ganymedes that have their hour, And ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... doubtfully. He does not know exactly what to do. She hears him, and starts to her feet, pointing with one hand to yonder peak, and with the other to that knife-like edge that seems cleaving heaven with its keen and glistening cimeter of snow, reminding one of Isaiah's sublime imagery, 'For my sword is bathed in heaven.' She points at the grizzly rocks, with their jags and spear- points. Evidently she is beside herself, and thinks she can remember the names of those monsters, born of earthquake and storm, which cannot be named nor known but by sight, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... in the imagery of romance. He sought 'a treasure—a treasure that would destroy a Kingdom.' And his indicatory data seemed to be the dried ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... and ornamental articles, which she disposes of for her mother's benefit. She is very useful among the other pupils, and is well informed with regard to various branches of useful knowledge. She is completely matter-of-fact in all her ideas, as Dr. Howe studiously avoids all imagery and illustration in his instructions, in order not to embarrass her mind by complex images. It is to be regretted that she has very few ideas on ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... tendency was due in part to an idealizing dissatisfaction with the crudeness of their actual life (as well as to frequent inability to enter into the realm of deeper and finer thought without the aid of somewhat mechanical imagery); and no doubt it was greatly furthered also by the medieval passion for translating into elaborate and fantastic symbolism all the details of the Bible narratives. But from whatever cause, the tendency hardened into a ruling convention; thousands upon thousands of medieval ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... waterbox of the engine, in imminent peril of being jerked from his place, battering his silver trumpet insanely against the brake rods, beseeching, threatening profanely. And profanity at that time was a fine art. Men studied its alliteration, the gorgeousness of its imagery, the blast of its fire. The art has been lost, existing still, in a debased form, only among mule drivers, sailors, and the owners of certain makes of automobiles. The men on the rope responded nobly. The roar of their going over the plank road was ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... study, and quite devoid of science, she yet notes well, and interests us in, the animals, plants, human occupants and natural phenomena generally of the countries visited. And without any command or affectation of imagery or fine language she is very graphic in her descriptions of sea and shore. Her account of a visit to the great Hawaian volcano is one of the best we have ever read, being simple, terse and vivid, without the overloading with detail that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... knew him well. Who that has once read or heard his songs, can forget their rich and graceful imagery; the fertile fancy, the touching sentiment, and the "soul reviving" melody, which characterize every line of these delightful lyrics? Well do we remember, too, his "old buff waistcoat," his courteous manner, and his gentlemanly pleasantry, long after this Nestor of song had retired to enjoy the ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... that he saw the vision intellectually, and hence that chiding of the intellectual that pervades his books? Be it as it may, his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lack- lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... elements, something which has a place apart in English poetry. Death's Jest-Book is perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a page without its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A slave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parable ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... gunboats, the mortars, from all the batteries, are flashes, clouds of smoke, and thunderings, which bring to mind the gorgeous imagery of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, descriptive of the scenes of ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,—only this gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as well as in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of feeling and imagery that takes me by surprise. And then besides, and most of all, I am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy confidence in me. Perhaps I owe it to my—Well, no matter! How one must love the editor who first calls him the ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... is likely to become a more permanent part of the mental substratum than any formal logical presentation of ideas. How much more will this be the case with the child who feels more than he reasons, who delights in cadence and rhythm, and who loves a world of imagery! ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... describing his voyage from Philadelphia to London in 1772. Friend Woolman, like the sturdy Quaker that he was, was horrified (when he went to have a look at the ship Mary and Elizabeth) to find "sundry sorts of carved work and imagery" on that part of the vessel where the cabins were; and in the cabins themselves he observed "some superfluity of workmanship of several sorts." This subjected his mind to "a deep exercise," and he decided that he would have to take passage in the steerage instead ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... very sound of the language keeps for us the freshness of the imagery—the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole—which has so long become publica materies. It is not withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it is now. The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to the dead language, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 1845. In this he traces the story of the human race from the creation through the Scriptural, classical, and feudal periods down to the present century, and closes with foreshadowings of a peaceful and happy future. It is picturesque, full of lofty imagery and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... above all, a greater truth to life and nature. It was felt that the degenerated classicists were "barren of imagination and invention," offered in their insipid artificialities nothing but "rhetoric, bombast, fleurs de college, and Latin-verse poetry," clothed "borrowed ideas in trumpery imagery," and presented themselves with a "conventional elegance and noblesse than which there was nothing more common." On the other hand, the works of the master-minds of England, Germany, Spain, and Italy, which were more and more translated and read, opened new, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... other remarks fertile in the imagery of love, the two pretty cousins amused themselves until supper time, playing with ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... abstract is hardly won, and only by use familiarized to the mind. Examples are akin to analogies, and have a reflex influence on thought; they people the vacant mind, and may often originate new directions of enquiry. Plato seems to be conscious of the suggestiveness of imagery; the general analogy of the arts is constantly employed by him as well as the comparison of particular arts—weaving, the refining of gold, the learning to read, music, statuary, painting, medicine, the art of the pilot—all of which occur in this dialogue alone: though he is also aware that 'comparisons ...
— Statesman • Plato
... anticipation, I had dwelt upon the homeward ride with Mildred. A-camelback, I was, as it were, upon my native heath, master of myself, assured, and at ease. I had planned to tell her of my love, plead my cause with Oriental fervor and imagery, but before we reached shore the tempest was so loud that she could not have heard me unless I had shouted, and I had no mind to bawl my love. Worse still, when once we were going across the wind and later into it, I could ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... from the wicked (Matt. 25:31, 32; 2 Thess. 1:7, 8). Executing God's wrath upon the wicked (Matt. 13:39-42, R. V. How this is done, no human pen can describe. The most fearful imagery of the Bible is connected with the judgment work of angels (cf. Revelation; fire, hail, blood, plague of locusts, poison of scorpions, etc.)—whether actual or symbolic, it ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... of rest," have died and been forgotten! Treacherous and ungrateful is our memory even of bliss that overflowed our being as light our habitation. Our spirit's deepest intercommunion with nature has no place in her records—blanks are there that ought to have been painted with imperishable imagery, and steeped in sentiment fresh as the morning on life's golden hills. Yet there is mercy in this dispensation—for who can bear to behold the light of bliss re-arising from the past on the ghastlier ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... the entire period of agitation were little more than a paper wad compared with the solid shot "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was to slavery. Written in vigorous English, in scintillating, perspicuous style; adorned with gorgeous imagery, bristling with living "facts", going to the lowest depths, mounting to the greatest altitudes, moving with panoramic grandeur, picturing humanity forlorn and outraged; giving forth the shrillest, most despairing cries of the afflicted, and the sublimest ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... to parchment. When the Saxons had embraced Christianity they carefully weeded out from their national poetry all allusion to personages of pagan mythology, so that, in an antiquarian sense, their literature suffered. But the forcible and picturesque imagery of half-barbaric tribes still remained. The coarseness of the beer-hall is, however, subdued by the gold and silken embroideries with which it is adorned. In a vivid description of a battle, in the midst of ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... all his friends was his choice of language, the felicity of his turns of expression, his imagery, the terseness of his unadorned English, and his simple directness of manner, which none will ever be able to reproduce, however many notes they may have taken. His dignity and repose of manner, his ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... involuntary chill again invaded Howat; suddenly an unfamiliar imagery attached to the commonplace phrase uttered by his father—the Endless Mountains! It brought back his doubt, his questioning, of life. It was the inconceivable term endless, without any finality of ultimate rest, without even the arbitrary peace of death, that appalled him. He thought ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... amusement or to licentious indulgence, the delusive relief only makes his misery darker and more hopeless. At length a turn takes place. He is reconciled to his offended Maker. To borrow the fine imagery of one who had himself been thus tried, he emerges from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, from the dark land of gins and snares, of quagmires and precipices, of evil spirits and ravenous beasts. The sunshine is on his path. He ascends the Delectable Mountains, and catches from their ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... shall grow ever harder and colder with intolerance and bigotry under their influence; nor can we ever have that joy in heavenly hope that belongs to those whose hearts cleave to all that is pure and true, and whose souls are therefore filled with the imagery ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... as it is, have made things difficult enough for us. In books and plays the young man makes love with a flow of language, a wealth of imagery, that must have taken him years to acquire. What does the novel-reading girl think, I wonder, when the real young man proposes to her! He has not called her anything in particular. Possibly he has got as far as suggesting she is a duck or a ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... full of wonderful imagery!" Chrysophrasia was saying to Professor Cutter as the pair came in. "It is delightful to hear them talk,—so ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... prolific fancy, great humour, brilliant imagery and depth of feeling. Sir Reginald Mohun, in truth, is a production finished of its kind both in style and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... eyes sparkled, and flashed with that wildness which her tongue with such rapid imagery pictured forth. Had it continued, the tumult might have been dangerous; perhaps fatal; but fortunately the firmness and intrepidity of my mind were equal to the scene. With a cool and collected benevolence of look, and ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... performed not only during religious celebrations but more commonly at night. The greater part of the night is often worn away with a protracted diffuse narration in which is described, with grandiloquent circumlocution and copious imagery, the doings ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... Wordsworth and Coleridge assimilated past literary products, and how they glorified them by reproduction. There was little, however, in the poetic imagery of previous centuries that Wordsworth reproduced. His imagination worked in a sphere of its own, free from the trammels of precedent; and he was more original than any other nineteenth century poet in his use of symbol ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... exterior covered with mosaics. We may imagine that such external decorations of the churches, where a few solemn figures told almost as shadows on the golden background brightly reflecting the sun, must have been even more glorious than the imagery of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... and lips which bleed like a mountain berry"), it is easy to note how intimate an observer of nature the youthful poet was, and with what conscious but not obtrusive art he brings forward his new and striking imagery. Browning, indeed, is the poet of ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... afterwards he lay at rest. After a long interval, his next work was Amyntor and Theodora, 1747, a long story in blank verse; in which it cannot be denied that there is copiousness and elegance of language, vigour of sentiment, and imagery well adapted to take possession of the fancy. But it is blank verse. This he sold to Vaillant for one hundred and twenty pounds. The first sale was not great, and it is now ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... whose shining hair is a web for hearts, that in our world your beauty would dazzle the sight of men as would a little woman sun!" he said, in the florid imagery to which the ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... same features, and may therefore probably be classed with these as belonging to the time of his exile. Such for instance are the seventh and thirty-fourth, which have both inscriptions referring them to this period, with others which we shall have to consider presently. The imagery of the preceding group reappears in them. His enemies are lions (vii. 2; xvii. 12; xxii. 13; xxxv. 17); dogs (xxii. 16); bulls (xxii. 12). Pitfalls and snares are in his path (vii. 15; xxxi. 4; xxxv. 7). He passionately ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... there any theology or creed. There were indefinite views respecting the Father, the Son, and the Spirit,[2] from which, afterward, were drawn the Trinity and the Incarnation, but they were then only in a state of indeterminate imagery. The later books of the Jewish canon recognized the Holy Spirit, a sort of divine hypostasis, sometimes identified with Wisdom or the Word.[3] Jesus insisted upon this point,[4] and announced to his disciples a baptism by fire and by the spirit,[5] as much preferable to that of John, a baptism ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... in the 'Poet's Corner' of the 'Crusher' as the gifted effusion of the talented Manager of the Excelsior Mill, otherwise known to our delighted readers as 'Outcrop.'" The Green Springs "Arcadian" was no less fanciful in imagery: "Messrs. —— and Co. send us a gaudy green-and-yellow, parrot-colored volume, which is supposed to contain the first callow 'cheepings' and 'peepings' of Californian songsters. From the flavor of the specimens before us we should say that the nest had been disturbed prematurely. ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... originally published three years after his death under the title of "Country Rhymes for Children," there is no question. The internal evidence confirms the external. The book is thoroughly in Bunyan's vein, and in its homely naturalness of imagery recalls the similitudes of the "Interpreter's House," especially those expounded to Christiana and her boys. As in that "house of imagery" things of the most common sort, the sweeping of a room, the burning of a fire, the drinking of a chicken, a robin with a spider in ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... than anything in Western prosody. Probably few Of my readers are aware of two curious facts relating to this order of composition. Both facts are exemplified in the history and in the texts of my collection,—though I cannot hope, in my renderings, to reproduce the original effect, whether of imagery ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... a woman so young and so lovely, Jacques Ferrand felt sometimes his mind wandering; a devouring imagery pursued him, waking or sleeping. The ancient fable of the Nessus' shirt ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... monstrous stories; he compels us to. He carries us by means of the careless expenditure of many passages of somewhat ribald beauty, along with him, captive to his pervasive charm. We are constantly reminded, in endless, almost wearisome, imagery, of gold and purple, foreign languages, esoteric philosophies, foods the names of which strike the ear as graciously as they themselves might strike the tongue. From Huysmans he has learned the formula for ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... starts to her feet, pointing with one hand to yonder peak, and with the other to that knife-like edge that seems cleaving heaven with its keen and glistening cimeter of snow, reminding one of Isaiah's sublime imagery, 'For my sword is bathed in heaven.' She points at the grizzly rocks, with their jags and spear- points. Evidently she is beside herself, and thinks she can remember the names of those monsters, born of earthquake and storm, which cannot ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... solidly-established tribunal that Dr. Cyrus Pym, after passing a hand through the honey-coloured hair over each ear, rose to open the case. His statement was clear and even restrained, and such flights of imagery as occurred in it only attracted attention by a certain indescribable abruptness, not uncommon in the ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... terraces, covered in the same manner, you reach the top and passing a great gate, enter at once this sad but imposing theatre of Gaudama's glory. One's first impressions are, what terrible grandeur; what sickening magnificence; what absurd imagery; what extravagant expenditure; what long successions of devotees to procure this throng of buildings of such various dates; what a poor religion which makes such labors its chief meritoriousness! Before you, stands the huge ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... well of Sichar And the everlasting tide, With which its sparkling waters His imagery supplied. Ring of his mighty power To comfort and to heal, His gentleness and sympathy In ...
— The Mountain Spring And Other Poems • Nannie R. Glass
... Jack seemed to conceive a most distressing dislike of her. On several occasions he advised Mr. Greyne not to frequent her company so assiduously, and when Mr. Greyne asked him to explain the meaning of his monitions he took refuge in vague generalities and Eastern imagery. He had a profound contempt for women as companions, which grieved Mr. Greyne's Western ideas, and evidently thought that Mademoiselle Verbena ought to be clapped forthwith into a long veil, and put away in a harem behind an iron ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... man of wealth to the poet. Ridman, in one of his enterprises, found it necessary to procure the aid of such a person as Lingave—a writer of power, a master of elegant diction, of fine taste, in style passionate yet pure, and of the delicate imagery that belongs to the children of song. The youth was absolutely startled at the magnificent and permanent remuneration which was held out to him for a moderate exercise ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... rich in thought and imagery, and happy expressions; and of the disjecta membra[315] scattered throughout, and as yet unarranged, a good dramatick poet might avail himself with considerable advantage. I shall give my ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... as accepted and taught by the Latter-day Saints is strikingly simple; disappointing in its simplicity, indeed, to the mind that can find satisfaction in mysteries alone, and to him whose love for metaphor, symbolism, and imagery are stronger than his devotion to truth itself, which may or may not be thus embellished. The Church asserts that the wisdom of human learning, while ranking among the choicest of earthly possessions, is not essential to an understanding ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... with tenderest devotion, he pursues, untrammelled, a light and free-born fancy. His fertile, varied muse, laden with the passionate exaggerations of love-lorn swain, is yet charged with richest imagery and thought, full to overflowing with joyous abandonment, and sweet with the perfume of many flowers, culled ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... those improvisations which gave one form of dance its name, bl (from the French bel air), were often remarkable rhymeless poems, uttered with natural simple emotion, and full of picturesque imagery. I cite part of one, taken down from the dictation of a common field-hand near Fort-de-France. I offer a few lines of the creole first, to indicate the form of the improvisation. There is a dancing pause at the end of each ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... the deluge and the waters of Mara, and said, 'I am washed—I am sprinkled,' and then, pausing, bathed his thin temples and forehead with eau de Cologne; a process which was, perhaps, suggested by his imagery of ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... Philadelphia to London in 1772. Friend Woolman, like the sturdy Quaker that he was, was horrified (when he went to have a look at the ship Mary and Elizabeth) to find "sundry sorts of carved work and imagery" on that part of the vessel where the cabins were; and in the cabins themselves he observed "some superfluity of workmanship of several sorts." This subjected his mind to "a deep exercise," and he decided that he would have to take passage in the steerage instead of the cabin. ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... eye. Without a considerable degree of this sensibility, it is as vain for a man of the greatest understanding to speak of the higher beauties of poetry as it is for a blind man to speak of colours. To adopt the warmest sentiments of poetry, to realize its boldest imagery, to yield to every impulse of enthusiasm, to submit to the illusions of fancy, to retire with the poet into his ideal worlds, were dispositions wholly foreign from the worldly sagacity and stern shrewdness of Johnson. As in his judgment of life and character, ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... what delight and reverence Madonna pictures like this have awakened as we read the words of an old chant. In quaint diction and with fanciful imagery the writer tried to express his feelings in the presence of a painting which, if not this veritable Madonna of the Chair, was certainly ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... tressure-fleury and counter-fleury" of wit and fancy,—such is a Jerroldian paper of the best class in "Punch." It stands out by itself from all the others,—the sharp, critical knowingness, sparkling with puns, of a Beckett,—the inimitable, wise, easy, playful, worldly, social sketch of Thackeray. In imagery he had no rivals there; for his mind had a very marked tendency to the ornamental and illustrative,—even to the grotesque. In satire, again, he had fewer competitors than in humor;—sarcasms lurk under his similes, like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... follow or meet one another; but in the boundless regions of possibility, which fiction claims for her dominion, there are surely a thousand recesses unexplored, a thousand flowers unplucked, a thousand fountains unexhausted, combinations of imagery yet unobserved, and races of ideal inhabitants ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... imagine that he is to find in it wisdom, brilliancy, fertility of invention, ingenuity of construction, excellence of form, purity of style, perfection of imagery, truth to nature, clearness of statement, humanly possible situations, humanly possible people, fluent narrative, connected sequence of events—or philosophy, or logic, or sense. No; the rich, deep, beguiling charm of the book lies in the total ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... of some writers, that to the African is reserved, in the later and palmier days of the earth, the full and harmonious development of the religious element in man. The African seems to seize on the tropical fervor and luxuriance of Scripture imagery as something native; he appears to feel himself to be of the same blood with those old burning, simple souls, the patriarchs, prophets, and seers, whose impassioned words seem only grafted as foreign plants on the cooler stock ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... take in their turns possession of the mind. The poet leads us through the appearances of things as they are successively varied by the vicissitudes of the year, and imparts to us so much of his own enthusiasm that our thoughts expand with his imagery and kindle with his sentiments. Nor is the naturalist without his part in the entertainment, for he is assisted to recollect and to combine, to arrange his discoveries, and to amplify the sphere of his ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... the waiting secretary. He groped in the chambers of his imagery for some superlative adjective to express his emotion before this colossal display of wealth. But his ample vocabulary had faded quite. He could only shake his head and give vent to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Lamps of Architecture":—"They are but the rests and monotones of the art; it is to its far happier, far higher, exaltation that we owe those fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever filled the depths of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates, trellised with close leaves; those window-labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... impressions which they have so kindly sent to me from Norwich. Each one of them tells me something. Its device, its general character, its heraldry, its inscription, are all highly instructive. For the collector there are opportunities for the study of the historical allusions, the emblematology and imagery, the hagiology, the biographical and topographical episodes, and the other peculiarities and idiosyncrasies in all ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... cursed the war with the foulest curses of Scottish and Northern dialects. There was one fellow—the jester of them all—whose language would have made the poppies blush. With ironical laughter, outrageous blasphemy, grotesque imagery, he described the suffering of himself and his mates under barrage fire, which smashed many of them into bleeding pulp. He had no use for this war. He cursed the name of "glory." He advocated a trade—unionism among soldiers to down tools whenever there was a threat ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... uses often suggests to the mind of the reader trains of thought and imagery which were never present to his own mind. Hence many expressions which are in themselves eminently poetic, will arouse associations, oftentimes, that entirely spoil the passage. On the other hand, an expression low and vulgar may be ennobled by its associations, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... understood until there are brought to their study, a familiar acquaintance with the character and subjects of the religious poetry, national legends, and mythological scriptures that have always been their inspiration, and of which they are the perfected imagery." See Sir George Birdwood's "Indian Arts," part i. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... remote and imperfect copy, has shewn the world, how great a matter he was of Ciceronian Eloquence. Since Temple and Roscommon (says Mr. Oldisworth) 'No man understood Horace better, especially as to his happy diction, rolling numbers, beautiful imagery, and alternate mixture of the soft and sublime. His friend Mr. Philips's Ode to Mr. St. John, after the manner of Horace's Lusory, or Amatorian Odes, is certainly a master-piece: But Mr. Smith's Pocockius is of the sublimer kind; though ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... force. He called it "playing at pushpin with the lives of men"—"the reading-made-easy of judicial murder"—"the 'rule of three' of forensic assassination;—given, a villain, multiplied by a false oath, the product, an execution!" He now revelled in the boldest extravagances of imagery and language, expressions which, written, might resemble the burlesque of a public jester, or the wildness of a disturbed mind, but which were followed by the audience, whom he had heated up to the point of passion, with all but acclamation. Still he revelled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... and dark abodes, Adjure you both, (on you my fortune stands; That and my faith I plight into your hands,) Make me but happy in his safe return, Whose wanted presence I can only mourn; Your common gift shall two large goblets be Of silver, wrought with curious imagery, And high emboss'd, which, when old Priam reign'd, My conqu'ring sire at sack'd Arisba gain'd; And more, two tripods cast in antic mold, With two great talents of the finest gold; Beside a costly bowl, ingrav'd with art, Which Dido gave, ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... for one particular kind of mental imagery, and that the motor, or muscular kind, which gives this type of child his peculiarity in this more psychological period. When we pass from the mere outward and organic description of his peculiarities, attempted above in the case of very young children, and aim ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... to practise it. "We're all working in the claim of the Lord," he remarked one day, "and it don't matter a cent whether we're hired for the job or whether we waltzes in on our own account," a piece of rough imagery which appealed directly to the instincts of Jackman's Gulch. It is quite certain that during the first few months his presence had a marked effect in diminishing the excessive use both of strong drinks and of stronger adjectives which had been characteristic of the little mining ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... man: truth in the abstract is hardly won, and only by use familiarized to the mind. Examples are akin to analogies, and have a reflex influence on thought; they people the vacant mind, and may often originate new directions of enquiry. Plato seems to be conscious of the suggestiveness of imagery; the general analogy of the arts is constantly employed by him as well as the comparison of particular arts—weaving, the refining of gold, the learning to read, music, statuary, painting, medicine, the art of the pilot—all of which ...
— Statesman • Plato
... will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of subjects and the ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... of the language keeps for us the freshness of the imagery—the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole—which has so long become publica materies. It is not withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it is now. The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to the dead language, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... invariably put the book down and forget it. Having composed more verses than any man that ever lived, Hugo can only be taken in the smallest doses; if you repeat any passage to a friend across a cafe table, you are both appalled by the splendour of the imagery, by the thunder of ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... contemporary criticism. "The figures are outlined in firm strokes and painted in broad, flat tints on canvas that has the texture of tapestry. Many of these works are made repulsive by their aspect of multicoloured crude and barbarous imagery. Yet one cannot but acknowledge the fundamental qualities, the lovely values, the ornamental taste, and the impression of primitive animalism." Since that rather faint praise Gauguin is aloft with the Olympians. His art is essentially classic. Again his new themes puzzled critics. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the prospects of the neighborhood, and argued about the politics of the county, the State, and even of the nation. Jokes and stories, often most uncouth and gross, whiled away the time. It was in these groceries, and in the rough crucible of such talk, wherein grotesque imagery and extravagant phrases were used to ridicule pretension and to bring every man to his place, sometimes also to escape taking a hard fact too hardly, that what we now call "American humor," with its peculiar native flavor, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... to be the base of fact, and the legend which has been invested with such poetic grace in Greek story, there is no more than a century or so of re-telling might give to any event among a people so simple and yet so given to imagery. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... quote a hundred other hymns made thus out of royal imagery. I turn at random to the part headed "General," and find that there is hardly one hymn in which there is not "king," "throne," or some image of homage and flattery. The ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... the sweetest sacred poems we have read for a long time. With no profuse imagery, expressing a range of feeling and expression by no means uncommon, they are true and elevated, and their pathos is profound ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... its too florid style. It may be rather gorgeous and rhetorical when considered as part of an argument, yet it is very characteristic of Burke as a writer. In no other passage of the speech is there such vivid clear-cut imagery. Note the picturesque quality of the lines and detect if you can any confusion ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... which produces impressive effects out of simple elements; but they are utterly destitute of fancy, the power by which pleasure and surprise are excited by sudden varieties of situation and by accumulated imagery. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... he did. Her copiousness of language, her facility of expression, and the play of her fancy, gave her the command of a very fascinating style; and M. Roland obtained the credit for many passages rich in diction and beautiful in imagery for which he was indebted to the glowing imagination of his wife. Frequent sickness of her husband alarmed her for his life. The tenderness with which she watched over him strengthened the tie which united them. He ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... have nothing to do with matter itself ... but only with matter's form. For while the mind of man through long ages may have moulded an imagery of that space in which he lives, mind would have little conceivable influence upon the existence of that matter. What exists in our known universe shall exist always and can never be destroyed, only altered ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... wreath of victory for the conqueror; the historian, with all the pomp of splendid imagery, may describe the heroism of the day of slaughter; but, after all, and none know this better than the men most familiar with it, a great battle is the most hateful and hellish sight that the sun looks ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... speaking has always been entirely free from rhetorical artifice. He seldom made use of metaphor or imagery, or elaborate periods, or variety of gesture. His language was extremely simple and straightforward; but his mobile expression—so variable that his enemies saw in it a suggestion of Mephistopheles, and his friends a resemblance ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... Fortune, wilt thou prove,"[209] is a charming song; but "Logan burn and Logan braes" is sweetly susceptible of rural imagery; I'll try that likewise, and, if I succeed, the other song may class among the English ones. I remember the two last lines of a verse in some of the old songs of "Logan Water" (for I know a good many different ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... knew. Night before last I was requested to assist in taking their place—I, who am the most unfit of men for the post. I never made a speech. I have addressed learned bodies, but I lack that liberty of speech—the ability to present in finished style, and with that rich imagery which characterize the words of the orator, the thoughts fitting to such an occasion as this. He would limit himself, he continued, to presenting some motives why the community should patronize science, and foster such institutions ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... one, is strongly of the opinion that the feeling entertained by so many that they can think, or even reason, without language is an illusion. The illusion seems to be due to a number of factors. The simplest of these is the failure to distinguish between imagery and thought. As a matter of fact, no sooner do we try to put an image into conscious relation with another than we find ourselves slipping into a silent flow of words. Thought may be a natural domain apart from the artificial ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... and art may also be the expression of the highest truth and the purest sentiment. Plato himself seems to waver between two opposite views—when, as in the third Book, he insists that youth should be brought up amid wholesome imagery; and again in Book X, when he banishes the poets from his Republic. Admitting that the arts, which some of us almost deify, have fallen short of their higher aim, we must admit on the other hand that to banish imagination wholly would be suicidal ...
— The Republic • Plato
... degenerated classicists were "barren of imagination and invention," offered in their insipid artificialities nothing but "rhetoric, bombast, fleurs de college, and Latin-verse poetry," clothed "borrowed ideas in trumpery imagery," and presented themselves with a "conventional elegance and noblesse than which there was nothing more common." On the other hand, the works of the master-minds of England, Germany, Spain, and Italy, which ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses." Everywhere there is an Oriental profusion of gorgeous imagery, but the gorgeousness is seldom oppressive. The sensibility of the Celtic temper, so quick to perceive beauty, so eager in its thirst for life, its emotions, its adventures, its sorrows, its joys, is tempered by a passionate melancholy ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... Jesuit father who won distinction as a poet and also as an opponent of the witch-burning mania. His collection of lyric poems called Trutz-Nachtigall, or Match-Nightingale, is interesting for its singular blend of erotic imagery with sincere religious feeling. The poems indicate a genuine delight in certain aspects of nature. The selections follow Wolff's edition, in Krschner's ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... cruelty against the innocent divorced: His devilish mass: His blasphemous priesthood: His profane sacrifice for the sins of the dead and the quick: His canonization of men; calling upon angels or saints departed; worshipping of imagery, relics and crosses; dedicating of kirks, altars, days; Vows to creatures: His purgatory, prayers for the dead; praying or speaking in a strange language; with his processions and blasphemous litany, and multitude of advocates or mediators: ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... than you," said the farmer, beginning on his part to finger the broken harness. "How you come to be here passes all my imagery. That'll do smartly. Where did you learn all trades? I don't see, Squire Deacon, but he's as good at mendin' as you be at marrin'. What ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... time he entertained himself with the many marvellous sights which are hidden away beneath the waters of the great ocean and which have a life and imagery of their own, stranger and more mysterious perhaps than those on which men are accustomed to look. But in time he became restless and dissatisfied with himself. The unpleasant thought crept slowly into his heart that in a moment of passion he had basely deserted Sam-Chaong and had left him helpless ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... worthy of notice that the lavish and bold imagery of Ezekiel effectually served the immediate purpose for which it was employed; it attracted the people's regard, explained the prophecy to their understandings, and fixed the lessons in their memories. It is true, indeed, ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise,—and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... ancient sculpture, finely executed in wood, exhibiting the bearings, crests, badges, and devises, of the Percy family, in a great variety of forms, set off with all the advantages of painting, gilding and imagery.' ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... same way as that of the saga of early Germanic times projected several centuries into a later Christian age, and it possesses in every way a greater unity of sentiment. In the varied beauty of its language, its wealth of imagery, its depth of feeling and copiousness of incident the Iliad is superior to the Nibelungenlied with its language of simple directness, its few lyrical passages, its expression of feeling by deeds rather than by words. ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... horrible of Grimm's tales in incident and imagery, the excellent tale of the "Boy who Could not Shudder," and you will see what I mean. There are some living shocks in that tale. I remember specially a man's legs which fell down the chimney by themselves and ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... particularly with the children: he was obliged to maintain an endless hypocrisy about the miracles, the dogmas and affairs, of Sunday school and the church. As a child he had been so filled with a literal Presbyterian imagery that, when a degree of reason discarded figures of speech seen as concrete actualities, nothing had been left. With the lapse of a purely pictorial heaven and hell, the loss of eternal white choirs and caldrons of ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of the world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use of personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into imagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up his view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent upon expressing any other man's experiences but his own when he described ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... mind of man, weak, uncertain, stinted, full of errors. Now, who is it that put the idea of the infinite, that is to say of perfection, in a subject so stinted and so full of imperfection? Did it give itself so sublime, and so pure an idea, which is itself a kind of infinite in imagery? What finite being distinct from it was able to give it what bears no proportion with what is limited within any bounds? Let us suppose the mind of man to be like a looking-glass, wherein the images of all the neighbouring bodies imprint themselves. Now what being was able to stamp ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... are not very local; for the pastoral subject could not well admit of it. The description of Asiatic magnificence, and manners, is a subject as yet unattempted amongst us, and I believe, capable of furnishing a great variety of poetical imagery. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... of the features which gives a peculiar character to this cathedral. In the wealth of imagery on the projecting screen which forms the lowest stage of the front it is second only to Wells amongst English cathedrals. The actual west wall of the church is the work of Bishop Grandisson, who formed ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... seem, or both alive. Nature herself, amaz'd, does doubting stand, Which is her own and which the painter's hand, And does attempt the like with less success, When her own work in twins she would express. His all-resembling pencil did outpass The magic imagery of looking-glass. Nor was his life less perfect than his art. Nor was his hand less erring than his heart. There was no false or fading color there, The figures sweet ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... varied by the Romans with no particular result, until they began to bring the arch into extensive practical service; except only that the Doric capital was spoiled in endeavors to mend it, and the Corinthian much varied and enriched with fanciful, and often very beautiful imagery. And in this state of things came Christianity: seized upon the arch as her own; decorated it, and delighted in it: invented a new Doric capital to replace the spoiled Roman one: and all over the Roman Empire set to work, with such materials ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... Science has of late "been enlisted under the banners of imagination," by the irresistible charms of genius; by the same power, her votaries will be led "from the looser analogies which dress out the imagery of poetry to the stricter ones which form the ratiocination of philosophy[1]."—Botany has become fashionable; in time it may become useful, if it be not so already. Chemistry will follow botany. Chemistry is a science well suited to the talents and situation of women; it is not a ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... The imagery under which Slawkenbergius impresses this upon the reader's fancy, in the beginning of his third Decad, is so ludicrous, that the honour I bear the sex, will not suffer me to quote it—otherwise it is not ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... resting against the stone beside him, seemingly little conscious of the words that fell in oriental imagery from his lips. In other days Unorna had heard him speak like this to her, and she had loved the speech, though not the man, and sometimes for its sake she had wished her heart could find its fellow in his. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... mountains, on whose sides were mines of lead with silver, and of which there were legends from the time of Queen Elizabeth. The hills looked leaden and blue in the distance, while the glancing sea far beyond recalled silver,—for the alchemy of imagery, at least, is never wanting to supply ideal metals, though the real may show a sad ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... fashion in the study or in octavo volumes, but in the street. His audiences were not Mr. Mudie's subscribers, but men and women earning weekly wages. The coarseness of his language, the offensiveness of his imagery, have been greatly exaggerated. It is now a good many years since I heard him lecture in a northern town on the Bible to an audience almost wholly composed of artisans. He was bitter and aggressive, but the treatment he was then experiencing ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... not obtain a clue to their sublime obscurity, till an address to Mr. Wordsworth explained in what school the author had formed his taste. We perceive, through the "darkness visible" in which Mr. Shelley veils his subject, some beautiful imagery and poetical expressions: but he appears to be a poet "whose eye, in a fine phrenzy rolling," seeks only such objects as are "above this visible diurnal sphere;" and therefore we entreat him, for the sake of his reviewers ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... miles long, and its inhabitants the great writers of classic times, and is chiefly valuable as showing the estimation in which the classic writers were held in that day. This is also in octosyllabic verses, and is further remarkable for the opulence of its imagery and its variety of description. The poet is carried in the claws of a great eagle into this house, and sees its distinguished occupants standing upon columns of different kinds of metal, according to their merits. The poem ends with the third book, very abruptly, as Chaucer ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... "The Setting Sun," by Adolph A. Weinman, stand high against the heavens on tall shafts that rise from fountain bowls. They are inspired with a sort of rapturous imagery and they so inspire the beholder. "The Rising Sun," a youth with outstretched wings, a figure suggestive of gladness, hope and the dawn of high adventure, is a fitting symbol of the sunrise. He seems "a-tiptoe for a flight" on the summit of his column; his profile ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... in any high or true estimate of the meaning of human life; nor did it add greatly to her desire for such a match that Violet, with her bright hair, and soft eyes, and graceful figure—with her sweet musical voice, and the rippling silver of her laugh, and the rich imagery which filled her fancy—might well have fulfilled the ideal of a poet's dream. But Violet was still very young, and none of Lady De Vayne's hopes had ever for an ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... not to Milton the richest medal in the Temple of the Muses! Not, perhaps, for the elegant diction and sublime imagery of his PARADISE LOST, but for his grand conceptions of Divinity in all its attributes, and of humanity in all its conditions, past, present, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... usual ballad motif, is absent and is not missed. The almost human struggles and sufferings of the vessel, and the contrast between the daring, scornful skipper, and the gentle, devout maiden, in the midst of the terrors of storm and wreck, furnish abundant emotion and imagery; in truth, many of the lines are literally packed with color, ...
— The Wreck of the Hesperus • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... upon your lips. I have questioned whether the enchantments of your voice were more conspicuous in the intricacies of melody, or the emphasis of rhetoric. I have marked the transitions of your discourse, the felicities of your expression, your refined argumentation, and glowing imagery; and been forced to acknowledge, that all delights were meagre and contemptible, compared with those connected with the audience and sight of you. I have contemplated your principles, and been astonished at the solidity of their foundation, and the perfection of their structure. I have traced you ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... prose are rarely good poets. They may crowd their page with gorgeous epithet and resplendent phrase, may pile Pelions of adjectives upon Ossas of descriptions, may abandon themselves to highly coloured diction and rich luxuriance of imagery, but if their verse lacks the true rhythmical life of verse, if their method is devoid of the self- restraint of the real artist, all their efforts are of very little avail. 'Asiatic' prose is possibly useful for journalistic purposes, but 'Asiatic' ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... strange, weird dance amongst the imagery of the rings, over which my earth planet was beginning to throw a haze of light. At first it was hardly more than a walk, a slow procession round the twin circumferences of the centred tripod. But soon it increased to an extraordinary graceful measure, ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... often exchanged ideas on Shakespeare. He was lost in wonder at Shakespeare's creative power, his inexhaustible fertility, the universality of his range, the perfection of his portraiture, his mastery over all moods, his cunning artistry in the use of words, his exuberant imagery and effortless ease. He made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon to see with his own eyes the spots and scenes amid which Shakespeare's youth and declining years were spent. The smiling beauty of Stratford and the rich rural charm ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... archbishops) that stand guard upon the door, of the cherubs in the corners, of the scapegoat gargoyles, or the quaint and spirited relief, where St. Michael (the artist's patron) makes short work of a protesting Lucifer. We were never weary of viewing the imagery, so innocent, sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense—in the sense of inventive gusto and expression—so artistic. I know not whether it was more strange to find a building of such merit in a corner of a barbarous isle, or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... baptism as a sign and seal of their repentance. The nature of his ministry is declared to have been a fulfillment of the prediction of Isaiah who described "one crying in the wilderness," one sent of God to prepare the way for the coming of Christ. This preparation is pictured in terms of Oriental imagery. When a monarch was about to make a journey, a servant was sent before him to prepare the highway. Valleys needed to be filled, hills lowered, crooked places made straight, rough ways made smooth. Thus, before men would be ready to receive Christ, moral obstacles ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... put down any hints or suggestions that occurred to him. A mere piece of imagery or fancy, it might be at one time; at another the outline of a subject or a character; then a bit of description or dialogue; no order or sequence being observed in any. Titles for stories were ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... other man to hear His music, and to view his imagery. And, sooth, these two did love each other dear, As far as love in such a place could be; There did they dwell—from earthly labour free, As happy spirits as were ever seen: If but a bird, to keep them company, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... gratified with the present work. It contains poetry after our own heart—the poetry of nature and of truth—abounding with tasteful and fervid imagery, but never drawing too freely on the stores of fancy for embellishment. We could detach many passages that have charmed and fascinated us in out reading; but one must suffice ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... he began an address full of homely wit and pathos, in which, with all the rich and striking imagery culled from a varied life in the wildernesses of the great forests and the great cities of our continent, he appealed to that consciousness of "the true, the beautiful and the good" which he believed to lie dormant, but capable of resurrection, ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... beneath its phenomena, his sympathy with all men's more generous emotions—and still I have a store of satisfactory illustrations at hand for the mere trouble of turning the leaves. Consider, for instance, the imagery in his description of ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Nilghai lifted up his voice with a shout that shook the windows, in 'The Men of the Sea,' that begins, as all know, 'The sea is a wicked old woman,' and after rading through eight lines whose imagery is truthful, ends in a refrain, slow as the clacking of a capstan when the boat comes unwillingly up to the bars where the men sweat and tramp in ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... Coleridge (Greek Classic Poets, p. 182, seq.) has diligently compared this with the description of the shield of Hercules by Hesiod. He remarks that, "with two or three exceptions, the imagery differs in little more than the names and arrangements; and the difference of arrangement in the Shield of Hercules is altogether for the worse. The natural consecution of the Homeric images needs no exposition: it constitutes in itself ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... rainbow from these times indeed show supersensible beings, such as the souls of the dead, moving upwards and downwards along the two halves of the arch. It is not in this abstract way that ancient man formed his cosmic imagery. What was seen going on between the upper and nether worlds when a rainbow appeared in the heights of the atmosphere was no traffic over the arch, but an interplay across the rainbow between the realm of levity, glimmering down in the rainbow's violet border, and the realm of gravity ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... "you are my servant now, by the laws of chivalry, and you must fulfil my quest. I have long hoped for a tropic poet; one who should leave the routine imagery of European civilization, its meagre scenery, and physically decrepit races, for the grandeur, the luxuriance, the infinite and strongly-marked variety of tropic nature, the paradisiac beauty and simplicity of tropic humanity. I am tired of the old images; of the barren alternations ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
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