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More "Imaginary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... recognised, are the chief supporters of the Papal system. Uneasily he thought of a certain wealthy American heiress whom he had persuaded into thinking herself specially favoured and watched over by the Virgin Mary, and who, overcome by the strong imaginary consciousness of this heavenly protection, had signed away in her will a million of pounds sterling to a particular "shrine" in which he had the largest share of financial profit. Now, suppose she should chance to come within the radius of Leigh's attractive ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... and inspires a consciousness of her real dignity. The moment that an intelligent being is by any injurious treatment, or by any prevailing error, induced to form a degrading estimate of itself, that moment it begins to approximate a state of meanness which was hitherto only imaginary. Let such an one be conscious of being held in no esteem, or prized solely as the tool of servitude or the food of appetite, and all majesty of character is lost; all aim or wish to rise above the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... claim to any other: Grant, Oh ye Gods, who play with Mortals thus, That him for whom ye have design'd your Slave, May look like this Unknown, And I'll be ever grateful for the Bounty. —But these are vain imaginary Joys. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... became troubled with the passion for reforming the world.[2] He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species. As he intended to institute a perfect republic, he invested himself with absolute sovereignty over these mystical dispensers of liberty. He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... tip of the nose should touch an imaginary line drawn from the extremity of the lower jaw to the top of the centre of the skull. This angle of the nose and face is known as the lay-back, and can only properly be ascertained by viewing the dog from ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... were invited to Winnie's party, so we went out to shop. The children wanted lettuces from their own garden, but the grass was too wet, so we pretended. The shop was on the edge of the grass and we talked to imaginary shopmen, Cecil often exclaiming, "Eightpence! why, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... association might become so powerful as to form a state within the state, and to contend with government on no unequal terms. The history of some revolutionary societies, of some ecclesiastical organizations, even of some American trusts might be quoted to show that the danger is not imaginary. Short of this, an association may act oppressively towards others and even towards its own members, and the function of Liberalism may be rather to protect the individual against the power of the association than ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... with this heroic resolution, his task somehow did not seem so interesting as before, and he found himself listening now and then for the siren's song. He dramatized imaginary situations, which is always bad for practical work. He saw the frail craft shattered or overturned, and beheld himself bravely buffeting the waves rescuing the fair girl in white. Then he remembered with a sigh that he was not a good swimmer. Possibly she was more at home in the waves ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... to make last till the end of the season. When he had finished the survey his eyes travelled complacently back to his own immaculate attire, and his well-polished shoes fresh from the hands of the city station bootblack. With a well-manicured thumb and finger he flecked an imaginary bit of dust from ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... have an opposite character to portray,—the elegant Don Giovanni, for example"; and drawing himself up and wrapping an imaginary cloak about him, with the old well-remembered courtly gesture, his face and manner were instantly transformed at the thought of his favorite character. He turned and smiled on us, his strong features lighted, and his whole appearance expressed ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... grievance would have drawn forth incessant complaints. Mr. Huskisson said, that he doubted whether the present motion was calculated to remove any grievance. The grievances, indeed, complained of were of an imaginary character: he had yet to learn what obstacles existed against the honourable ambition of the dissenters. They had, he said, their full share of the civil power of the country, and were qualified to fill the first offices in the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Seagrave, "recollect how Providence has preserved us in such awful dangers - how we are landed in safety. And now, will you not put trust in that Providence, when the dangers are, as I trust, only imaginary?" ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... has received. So far the presence of these lower creatures in our society has generally been accepted as a matter of course. Sentimentalists, after the fashion of Laurence Sterne, have dwelt upon the imaginary woes of the creatures. Associations of well-meaning people have endeavored to diminish the cruelty which people of the towns, rarely those bred on the soil, often inflict upon them. It seems, however, desirable ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... greater chance of it. But then I have hopes—I—" The dreamy look, which I have described by the simile of a haze, gathered and increased on his fair ingenuous young face, and his eyes quite ignored me for a moment, being fixed on some imaginary outlook very entrancing to him, until he recalled his flagging voice, to add: "Well, I don't know that I can put it before you, but there are possibilities which may make a great difference in my ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Hamilton-Wells, nodding slowly, as if in profound consideration, and shaking back his imaginary ruffles. "Is that your opinion, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Lillian slipped in an imaginary plate, then springing to one side stood pretending to clasp the bulb of the shutter in her hand, while she counted: "One, two, three, ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... outside the cheeks, and pivoted close to the segment races on the outside, and with a system of link work between the gun itself and the crosshead of the ram of the hydraulic cylinder, which gives motion to the gun in elevation or depression, through a vertical arc, the imaginary center of which, and of the segments of the side cheeks, is situated in the horizontal diameter across the muzzle of the gun. This is in brief the muzzle-pivoting part of the arrangement, of which, were it worth while to go into its details, we should ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... His guess was so far from the truth that I was more than willing to help it along. If the Lawrenceburg people could only be persuaded that our imaginary coup was to be postponed until the bottom of our shaft should be out of sight from the surface, we ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... bird of which you can make a pet in your mind, as you may of the chickadee, for instance, or the bluebird, or the hermit thrush. He does not lend himself naturally to such imaginary endearments. But it is pleasant to have him on one's daily beat. I should count it one compensation for having to live in Florida instead of in Massachusetts (but I might require a good many others) that I should see him a hundred times as ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... consideration of justice or humanity, the dignity of age and the tenderness of youth were alike exposed to the most cruel tortures; and the terrors of a malicious information, which might select them as the accomplices, or even as the witnesses, perhaps, of an imaginary crime, perpetually hung over the heads of the principal citizens of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... clicked and thumped, and a single boy in an ancient red handkerchief and chalks danced into the light, and, keeping time with the music, began in pantomime to fashion the sapling into a sword, using a fictitious shell, with which he scraped off imaginary bark. While absorbed in his work, his companions came from the screen in haste, skipping round him and mimicking all his actions and grunting in unison with him, while making the sand-ridge to quiver with intensity ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... thro' which they are hurried to the Catastrophe; when they take up Clarissa, not considering that it is another kind of Work, or rather a new Species of Novel, are apt to think it tedious, towards the Beginning especially, because they have not the same Palate for natural Incidents, as for imaginary Adventures; for the Workings of private and domestic Passions, as for those of Kings, Heroes, Heroines; for a Story English as to its Scenes, Names, Manners, as for one that is foreign: But a Reader of true Taste and Judgment will like ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... the olden times may have been is conjectural. Modern science has put the advent of man sixty million years ago. Chaldean chronology is less spacious. But its traditions stretched back a hundred thousand years. The traditions were probably imaginary. Even so, in the morning of the world, already there were ancient cities. There was Nippur, one of whose gods, El Lil, was lord of ghosts. There was Eridu, where Ea was lord of man. There was Ur, where Sin was lord of ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... three-tenths in length, stand well asunder, and are in nowise disproportionate. The eyes are small, and rather sunken than prominent, but quick and lively. They are placed about two inches and five tenths asunder, a little below the centre of the imaginary triangle towards the nose. The nice co-adaptation of their ciliary processes, which are covered with a fine hair, seems to afford the animal an extraordinary power of excluding whatever might ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... afraid of the wrong object? to be hurtful, ruinous to animals as well as to man? Any one will confess that, who has ever seen a horse inflict on himself mortal injuries, in his frantic attempts to escape from a quite imaginary danger. I have good reasons for believing that not only animals here and there, but whole flocks and swarms of them, are often destroyed, even in the wild state, by mistaken fear; by such panics, for instance, as cause a whole herd of buffalos ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the ideal with the imaginary: the ideal is rather that which the real requires to invest it with that beauty which it would have possessed had the spirits of Death and sin never thrown their dark shadows over God's perfect work. Let not the poet fear the reproach that his characters are too ideal; if harmoniously ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... what little I can to put another one in God's name, so that we will worship a supreme human god, so that we will worship mercy, justice, love and truth, and not have the idea that we must sacrifice our brother upon the altar of fear to please some imaginary phantom. See what Christianity has done for the world! It has reduced Spain to a guitar, Italy to a hand organ and Ireland to exile. That is what religion has done. Take every country in the whole world, and the country ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... yet entertaining doubts afterwards that it might not perhaps be recognised, he added the central stone cupola of the National Gallery, appearing over all like a hastily bestowed blessing, but covered the remaining space upon his canvas with imaginary stalls of glowing flowers, and even more imaginary flower-sellers. His picture was greatly admired, and very much resembled the Market Square in Havre upon ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... medals and more valuable articles. They have likewise small bags, which they preserve in their great medicine-bag, from whence they are taken, and worn around their waists and necks as amulets against any real or imaginary evils. This was the first time we had been apprised that the Indians ever carried from the field any other trophy than the scalp. These fingers were shown with great exultation; and, after an harangue, which we were left to presume was in praise of his exploits, the chief carefully ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... the imaginary lines of demarcation dividing city from city, the artificial boundaries of water ...
— Warm • Robert Sheckley
... season of anticipation. She was afraid her mother was secretly irritated at her natural rejoicing; and so she did not speak to her about it, but she kept awake till Nancy came to bed, and poured into her sympathizing ears every detail, real or imaginary, of her past or future intercourse with Mrs. Buxton, and the old servant listened with interest, and fell into the custom of picturing the future with the ease and simplicity ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... themselves, they were always ready to help others; and their conversation, though not distinguished by brilliant information, was often full of interest. In nearly every case boasting quitted them with their youth, and the bravest were always the most modest. Influenced by no imaginary points of honor, they estimated themselves at their real worth; and all fear of being suspected of cowardice was beneath them. With these brave soldiers, who often united to the greatest kindness of heart a mettle no less great, a ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... favored daughter of the Virgin, that her eyes were like votive tapers, and yet in the same breath accusing her of being a "brigand" and "assassin" in her attitude toward "his heart," he balanced with quivering timidity toward her, threw an imaginary cloak in front of her neat boots as a carpet for her to tread on, and with a final astonishing pirouette and a languishing twang of his guitar, sank on one knee, and blew, with a rose, a kiss at ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... suffered enough—but to have this imaginary Bessy called from the grave, dressed in a semblance of self-devotion and idealism, to see her petty impulses of vindictiveness disguised as the motions of a lofty spirit—it was as though her small malicious ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... until he had sought the advice of an imaginary friend, and stating that he would probably call again in the evening, Manning took his leave of the little tailor. The detective then repaired to the railroad ticket office, where he had a friend of long standing, from whom he hoped to derive ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... his friend is, like himself, rather pressed for ready money, but is prepared to back a bill for any amount. Shylock passes that way, and is introduced by Antonio as a gentleman in the city who is in the habit of making advances on personal security without inquiry. Shylock extracts imaginary ink from his chest, and writes with one hand on the palm of the other, and cringingly produces a paper-knife—whereupon the transaction is complete, and the parties, becoming aware that a Grand ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... barriers of separation are removed by the legislature; and why should not the same result take place in the south? In the north, the whites are deterred from intermingling with the blacks by the fear of an imaginary danger; in the south, where the danger would be real, I cannot imagine that the fear would ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... the protestations of Gabriel, Father d'Aigrigny continued his imaginary picture of the dangers of the Company, which, far from being really in peril, was already beginning ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the hall, followed by the captain. Mangan, carefully frock-coated as for church or for a diHECTORs' meeting, is about fifty-five, with a careworn, mistrustful expression, standing a little on an entirely imaginary dignity, with a dull complexion, straight, lustreless hair, and features so entirely commonplace that it is impossible ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... and Prince Djalma while she was yet at school, and had settled the divorce question, and the rights of woman, with Indiana, before she had left off pinafores. The impetuous little lady played at love with these imaginary worthies as a little while before she had played at maternity with her doll. Pretty little poetical spirits! It is curious to watch them with those playthings. To-day the blue-eyed one is the favourite, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... indifferent in a marked degree. If you hear thieves in the chicken coop during the night, don't move a muscle; if you smell smoke and know the house is on fire, lie perfectly still and count imaginary sheep jumping over an imaginary fence; if you feel the folding bed closing up let it close and go on with your counting; if you know that burglars are in the room pay no attention to them and let them burgle—you have ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... masterpiece is, as far as I am aware, imaginary. But it represents a sort of reductio ad absurdum of thousands of lyrics which have been echoing over the post-war world. Nearly all these lyrics are melancholy, with the profound and primitive melancholy of the negro swamp, and they are all ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... mountains as are found over all the earth in general, and as are employed in fashioning or shaping every species of material, it will be allowed us to conclude, that, in this situation of things, we have what is general in the formation of land, notwithstanding imaginary distinctions of certain parts which had been formed one way, and of others which are supposed to be ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... full, day after day, of glowing pictures of herself and Farnham in tete-a-tete; she would seek in a thousand ways to tell her love—but she could never quite arrange her avowal in a satisfactory manner. Long before she came to the decisive words which were to kindle his heart to flame in the imaginary dialogue, he would himself take fire by spontaneous combustion, and, falling on his knees, would offer his hand, his heart, and his fortune to her in words taken from "The Earl's Daughter" or the ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... first order, Darwin replied, "What you say about teleology pleases me especially."[9] Later still, in 1878, Romanes sent him a copy of his Candid Examination. Darwin in his letter of acknowledgment wrote more than half seriously, in the person as it were of an imaginary correspondent, ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... troops marched past; after which, they formed in order for a supposed attack upon an imaginary enemy, and fired away about ten thousand rounds of blank cartridge in the advance down the long slope which led to the temporary camp and tents erected for the entertainment. Here the bugle sounded "disperse," and all ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... a fierce look. He was an educated soldier, of unquestioned courage, but the responsibilities of outpost duty bore rather heavily on him, and he kept all hands in a state of constant worry in anticipation of imaginary attacks. His ideas of discipline were not very rigid either, and as by this time there had been introduced into my brigade some better methods than those obtaining when it first fell to my command, I feared the effect should he, have any control over it, or meddle with its internal affairs. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... be loved by an angel without knowing it, is to lift its phantasmal hand and thrust me aside—me, Gustave Lenoble, a man, and not an idiot? Ah, thus we blow him to the uttermost end of the world!" cried M. Lenoble, blowing an imaginary rival from the tips of his fingers. "Thus we dismiss him to the Arctic regions, the torrid zone—to the Caucasus, where await vultures to gnaw his liver—wherever earth is most remote and uncomfortable—he and the ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... this opportunity for self-education came many real hardships—to say nothing of imaginary hardships—which nearly resulted disastrously to my health. I was poorly clad for the extraordinary winter then setting in. I had only one undershirt and one pair of drawers. I could not, of course, put ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... to sleep. How long she slept she did not know, but it seemed to her that she had just fallen into slumber when something caused her to open her eyes. For a few moments she lay in that strange debatable region between sleeping and waking when the mind cannot distinguish between the real and the imaginary. All at once she sat up, fully awake, every sense strained and alert. Something was wrong. What was it? She listened intently, but such an intense stillness reigned throughout the house that Sally's soft breathing smote ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... create for their plays. For these two were children in a big child world. The wilderness is never grown up. It is Nature's little one waiting to be led on and disciplined to mature uses. Asher and Virginia had already peopled the valley with imaginary settlers, each one of a certain type, and they adapted their pastime to the particular neighbors whom they chose to invite for the evening. How little the helpless folk in the city, bored with their own dullness, and dependent ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... concern. Now came a great struggle. Tom stroked him backward and forward, and although he was a proud boy, he sobbed aloud. Tiger whined, licked his face, rushed off into dark corners, and barked savagely at some imaginary enemy, and then came back, and putting his paws on Tom's knees, wagged his tail in anxious sympathy. At last Tom took his hands from his pale, tear-stained face, and looking into the dog's great honest eyes, he cried with a queer ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... to put as far as we can our cramped minds in easier postures, and to let our spirits have a wider range. We know how a dog who is perpetually chained becomes fierce and furious, and thinks of nothing but imaginary foes, so that the most peaceful passer-by becomes an enemy. I have felt, since the war began, a certain poison in the air, a tendency towards suspicion and contentiousness and vague hostility. We must exorcise that evil spirit if we can; and I believe it is best ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... striking in "The Chanson de Roland" and "The Quatre Fils Aymon;" a confusion and unreality further increased by the fact that the Italians had no original connection with those tales, that to them real men and plans were no better than imaginary ones, and that the minstrels who sang in the market-place, and the laborious prose-writers who compiled such collections as that called of the "Reali di Francia," were equally free in their alterations and adaptations, creating unknown relationships, inventing new adventures, suppressing essential ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the Department The Imaginary Mistress The Middle Classes Cousin Betty The ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... difficult to see how all the gossip got out. The school-master once played an unmanly trick on her, with the view of catching her in the act. He was a bachelor who had long been given up by all the maids in the town. One day, however, he wrote a letter to an imaginary lady in the county-town, asking her to be his, and going into full particulars about his income, his age, and his prospects. A male friend in the secret, at the other end, was to reply, in a lady's handwriting, ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... that he should know nothing of this matter, and, his thoughts automatically reverting again to Helen Cumberly, he enjoyed that imaginary companionship throughout the remainder of his walk, which led him along Cambridge Road, and from thence, by a devious route, to the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... countryman, van Calcar, are very much in advance of anything previously seen, except those of Leonardo. The title-page, one of the most celebrated pictures in the history of medicine, shows Vesalius in a large amphitheatre (an imaginary one of the artist, I am afraid) dissecting a female subject. He is demonstrating the abdomen to a group of students about the table, but standing in the auditorium are elderly citizens and even women. One student is reading from an open book. There is a monkey on one side of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... constantly on the look-out for land, and were inclined, first from one thing, then from another, to think we saw signs of its proximity; but they always turned out to be imaginary, and the great depth of the sea, moreover, showed that, at all events, land ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... satire on French manners and vices which it contained, might have endangered the author, and as it was he had no small difficulty, when it was known he was the writer, in escaping from its effects. It consists in a series of letters from an imaginary character, Usbeck, a Persian traveller, detailing the vices, manners, and customs of the French metropolis. The ingenuity, sarcasm, and truth, which that once celebrated production contains, must not make us shut our eyes to its glaring defects; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... doors, stood some hundred more or less complete bodies shrouded in sheets. They retained, or had been arranged, in the same form they had presented in life—peon carriers bent as if still under a heavy burden, old market women in the act of haggling, arrieros plodding behind their imaginary burros. Some had their mouths wide open, as if they had been buried alive and had died shouting for release. One fellow stood leaning against a support, like a man joking with an elbow on the bar, a glass between his fingers, in ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... de Ventadour, whose lays, mysteriously addressed to Bel Viser and Conort, had gained him so much fame; Rudel, the enthusiast, who devoted his life to an imaginary passion; Adhemar and Rambaud d'Aurenge, whose songs were some of the sweetest of their time; and Pierre Rogiers, who sighed his soul away for "Tort n'avetz;" and, amongst them all, his poems were held in the greatest esteem. ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... by some one person, by an "I," though that "I" might have been omitted from the composition or replaced by the journalistic "we." To some extent the journalist does sink his personality in that imaginary personality of his paper, a personality built up, like the human personality, by its past; and the result is a pompous, colourless, lifeless simulacrum. But in every other department of letters the trail of the "I" is over ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Julians was indirectly the cause of it, and that had it not been for the anticipation of her official entrance into the royal apartments the conspiracy would not have been more real than the Meal-tub plot or any other of the many imaginary machinations that still haunt the page of history, and occasionally flit about the prejudiced memory of nations. Lady St Julians on the contrary wrung her hands over the unhappy fate of her enthralled sovereign, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... foolish planet. Many corresponding circumstances are detected by readers, of which the author did not suspect the existence. He must, however, regard it as a great compliment, that in detailing incidents purely imaginary, he has been so fortunate in approximating reality, as to remind his readers of actual occurrences. It is therefore with pleasure he notices some pieces of local history and tradition, which have been ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... and hospitality assigned to this most ancient of Lincolnshire families, by history and tradition, was my only reason for giving its name to an imaginary lord of Torksey. Ingulphus, the Croyland chronicler, in a passage full of grateful eloquence,—(commencing, "Tunc inter familiares nostri monasterii, et benevolos amicos, erat praecipuus consiliarius quidam. Vicecomes Lincolniae, dictus Thoroldus,"—but ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... communicator off. He stood there for a moment, feeling depressed and betrayed. Automatically he reached down and flicked imaginary dust from his blue sleeve with its narrow solitary gold band. Ten minutes later the Gypsy's ship ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... make her angry (that was undeniably true) and did not dare write her. I refused utterly to tell her just what was in the letter, but I did succeed in quieting her and making her think that Harry had not broken faith with her, but was blaming himself for some unknown and imaginary wrong he had done her. Peggy rushed immediately up to her room to write reassuring pages to Harry, and her old-maid aunt had the horse put in the runabout and was driven over to Whitman, where nobody knows her—at ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... intercepted between the extant Particles, without being so much greater in Black Bodies than in White ones, as to be perceptibly so to the Gross Organs of Touch, may be very much greater in reference to their Disposition of Reflecting the imaginary subtile Beams of Light. For in Black Bodies, those Little intercepted Cavities, and other Depressions, may be so Figur'd, so Narrow and so Deep, that the incident Beams of Light, which the more extant Parts of the Physical Superficies are dispos'd to Reflect inwards, may be Detain'd there, and ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... joy. That is never a bad wind that blows where we want to go, and you may be sure there was nothing unwelcome in a circumstance that carried me back to Edinburgh and Flora. From that hour I began to indulge myself with the making of imaginary scenes and interviews, in which I confounded the aunt, flattered Ronald, and now in the witty, now in the sentimental manner, declared my love and received the assurance of its return. By means of this exercise my resolution daily grew stronger, until at ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... absolutely no ground for your fears. If you should meet trouble in any way you have only to send me word and I will be with you. But your imaginary terrors you must yourself subdue. Come, now, be reasonable. You must go back—it is decided. Take note of all landmarks as we did in coming; if messengers are needed it is much better that you inform yourself ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... for her mind was so preoccupied by the danger her husband ran at that hour of the night, in a lawless region filled with determined foes, that the anguish of her soul was powerful enough to deaden and momentarily subdue those of the body. In vain her servant-woman declared her fears were imaginary; she seemed not to comprehend a word that was said to her, and sat by the fire in her bed-chamber listening to every sound. In her terror, which increased every moment, she had the man wakened, meaning to give him some order which still she did not give. At last, the poor woman wandered up ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... about some wonderful roses I saw at Primton's green-house," said the unabashed visitor, and he forthwith laid aside his cigar—on the tablecloth!—and launched into a glowing description of the imaginary flowers. ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... ships—ah! Jerry had been a sailor in his youthful days—which sailed round and round a centre one and stationary by using an apparatus not unlike small bellows. And there in the west window stood the warrior Indian, chopping and cutting at imaginary foes among the sunbeams. But the father's eyes sought his children. Ah! yes, he was thankful to see, there they were, both sweetly sleeping, Mab in the old man's bed, a stray sunbeam flitting over her face, like a smile from somewhere, Jack wrapped ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... he would like to see it while it was still on the loom. So, accompanied by a number of selected courtiers, among whom were the two faithful officials who had already seen the imaginary stuff, he went to visit the crafty impostors, who were working away as hard as ever they could at ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... from which an imaginary singular 'eave' has sometimes been evolved, as when Tennyson speaks of a 'cottage-eave' (In Memoriam, civ.), and Cotgrave ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... and observed that the birds ceased to sing, and sat solitary on the housetops, by reason of the sight of a painted serpent set openly to view. So fares it with us novices, that here betray our imperfections: we, afraid to look on the imaginary serpent of envy, painted in men's affections, have ceased to tune any music of mirth to your ears this twelvemonth, thinking that, as it is the nature of the serpent to hiss, so childhood and ignorance would play the gosling, contemning ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... remembered that in this matter the detractors had it all their own way during the struggle. Anybody harbouring a grievance, real or imaginary, was at liberty to air his wrongs, whereas the mouths of soldiers in a position to reply had perforce to remain closed and have to a great extent still to remain closed. The disgruntled had the field pretty well to themselves. Ridiculous stories for which there ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... at the White House, of which so many imaginary versions have been given, was this: having received so many expressions of approval from all sections of the country on his appointment of ex-Governor Jones to a Federal judgeship in Alabama, which appointment was made, as described in a previous ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... jointed board, was a three-masted schooner, sleek of line, painted—at one time—a dazzling white. Now with dust dulling the green sides of the bottle, its sails looked loose, its sides grimed. But the name still showed at the prow, and many a time Chris, safe at home in bed, had sailed imaginary voyages in the Mirabelle. It lay there snug and captured, as if at the bottom of a tropical sea, seen through the glass sides of the bottle, and Chris never tired ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... which happens to the popularity attendant on the real or imaginary hero of the multitude, happens also in ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... found. The Comte Jean du Barry, already married himself, found no difficulty in getting his brother, Comte Guillaume, a poor officer of the marine troops, to accept the post of husband. In the marriage-contract, signed on 23d July, 1768, she was described as the daughter of Anne Becu and of an imaginary first husband, Sieur Jean Jacques Gomard de Vaubernier," and three years were taken off her age. The marriage-contract was so drawn as to leave Madame du Barry entirely free from all control by her husband. The marriage was solemnised ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... plums. Stoker, who knew the fruit well enough, carelessly ventured the remark that it might be all right, but he had never heard of anybody eating it, which set Gillis off into eloquent praises of its delights, all of which he knew to be purely imaginary; whereupon Stoker told him if he liked the fruit so well, to buy some of it. There was no escape after that; Jim had to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... from the starlight, and the dark, even forest-line that surrounded us, doubled by reflection in the water, presented a broad, unbroken belt of utter blackness. The effect was quite startling, like some huge conjurer's trick. It seemed as if we had crossed the boundary-line between the real and the imaginary, and this was indeed the land of shadows and of spectres. What magic oar was that the guide wielded that it could transport me to such a realm! Indeed, had I not committed some fatal mistake, and left that trusty servant ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... or imaginary, drive him away from Dux; he considers his genius bids him go, and, as before, he obeys. Casanova has but little pleasure or profit out of this his last journey; he has to dance attendance in ante-chambers; no one will give him any office, whether ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... lent additional interest to the prospective bonanza. The fishing business again came to a standstill, and the old settlers looked upon each other as bloated bond-holders. Such a drilling and blasting was never seen before in these parts, and soon the whole territory was dotted with huge mounds of imaginary ore. Farms that could scarcely be given away suddenly possessed enormous values in the minds of their lucky owners. Some of the mines were developed extensively, and shipments began which have continued at intervals, but only a few of them furnished the best quality. The ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... perturbation are not imaginary or based on the hallucinations of a hypersensitive mind. They are prompted and justified by the notorious facts, established by the leading psycho-analysts, that, just as mellifluous and melodious names exercise a mollifying influence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... long practice in the art. If he had been content with a small fee, he needed only to have told the truth; but his story was required to put a fair face on the amount of his request. And in what an amiable light it sets Elisha! He would not take for himself, but he has nothing to give to the two imaginary scholars, who have come from some of the schools of the prophets in the hill-country of Ephraim, thirsting for instruction. How sweet the picture, and what a hard heart that could refuse the request! Truly said Paul, 'The ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... had already changed to darkness; the evening was warm and still. Impatient with what he thought the slow progress of the vehicle, Hugh sat with his body bent forward, straining as did the horse, on which his eyes were fixed, and perspiring in the imaginary effort. The address he had given was Mrs. Fenimore's; but when he drew near he signalled to the driver: 'Stop at the gate. Don't ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... of,—in how far it may be the due and inevitable chastisement of some former sin; how, finally, it may turn to your present profit, by giving you a keener insight into the evils of your own heart, and a more indulgent view of the often imaginary wrongs ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... band of "mariners of the Volga," sitting on the ground, as on the deck of their vessel, imitating the action of rowing, guided by the stick of the master of the orchestra, the veritable helmsman of this imaginary vessel! A ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... not forget these and other words. She pondered over them as she lay in her stifling little dark bedroom at night, or attended to her work by day, and she waged many an imaginary battle for the beautiful, idle woman who represented the grace ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... of those white men who came flying upon the water, and left some of the secret fire upon the peaceful coast: and when again the white sails of the explorer glisten in the distant horizon, all the imaginary terrors of the Boyl-yas,* will be invoked to avert the coming of those who bring with them the unspeakable blessings ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... sword in hand on a blood-stained deck, in a gory uniform trimmed with skulls and cross-bones, and order his enemies to be thrown one by one into the sea. "The shark awaits your car-casses!" spouted the imaginary desperado with a vicious snap of his teeth; and when Aunt Greg interrupted by asking him to bring in an armful of kindling, he glared at her like the Red Rover himself. Poor Aunt Greg! how little she guessed what was ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... two or three horsemen running at full speed, and as if demented, through these boundless spaces; they disappeared at intervals in the depressions of the meadows, and suddenly came to sight again, still galloping with the same frenzy. I could not imagine toward what imaginary goal these equestrian phantoms were thus madly rushing. I took good care not to inquire; mystery is ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... creatures like a tiger; its form itself is unascertainable. Besides this, some imagine Yama to be Death. This, however, is due to the weakness of the mind. The pursuit of Brahman or self-knowledge is immortality. That (imaginary) god (Yama) holdeth his sway in the region of the Pitris, being the source of bliss to the virtuous and of woe to the sinful. It is at his command that death in the form of wrath, ignorance, and covetousness, occurreth among men. Swayed by pride, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... selecting a heroine from the educated classes of his country-people M. Conscience has demonstrated how superior a genuine woman becomes to all the mishaps of fortune, and how successfully she subdues that imaginary fate before which so ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... stars had various influences assigned to them by astrologers. These influences were mostly associated with the imaginary figures of the constellations. Thus the bright star in the head of Aries, called by some the Ram's Horn, was regarded as dangerous and evil, denoting bodily hurts. The star Menkar in the Whale's jaw denoted sickness, disgrace, and ill-fortune, with danger from great beasts. Betelgeux, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... matters of business, must, as every body knows, be paid for exorbitantly. There are men who, upon such terms, will be as expeditious in lending money as extravagance and ambition united can desire. Mr. Hopkins was one of these: and he was the money-lender who supplied the baronet's real and imaginary wants. Sir Hyacinth did not know the extreme disorder of his own affairs, till a sudden dissolution of parliament obliged him to prepare for the expense of a new election. When he went into the country, he was at once beset with duns and constituents who claimed from him favours and ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... kingdoms of man's mind, with a chasm between. For the point is this: that the umbrella is a shield against an enemy so actual as to be a mere nuisance; whereas the stick is a sword against enemies so entirely imaginary as to be a pure pleasure. The stick is not merely a sword, but a court sword; it is a thing of purely ceremonial swagger. One cannot express the emotion in any way except by saying that a man feels more like a man with a stick in his hand, just as he feels more like a man with ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... intellectual and religious conditions of the Massachusetts colony that it may properly be described here. Belief in witchcraft was not by any means confined to Massachusetts. The statutes of England, as well as of the American colonies, dealt with the imaginary crime. Among the intelligent and educated classes, however, both in Europe and America, the subject was generally considered of too doubtful a nature to be dealt with by the infliction of the penalties which ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... was altogether an imaginary person conjured up by Chatterton as a vehicle for his wonderful forgeries. He was described by him as the intimate friend of Canynge, his constant companion, and a collector of books and drawings for ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... the center of the earth as the place from which to observe these celestial bodies and, in imagination, transfer our eye there. Then we will find projected on the celestial sphere not only the heavenly bodies but the imaginary points and circles of the earth's surface. Parallels of latitude, meridians of longitude, the equator, etc., will have the same imaginary position on the celestial sphere that they have on the earth. Your actual position on the earth will be ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... the major had been babbling of wine and water, been beholding things that were not, been hurling jewels at imaginary vultures. Now, well, the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... did not in his letter caution Fanny against going out alone. She remarked this; and having completely recovered her own alarm at the attempt that had been made on her liberty, she thought she was now released from her promise to guard against a past and imaginary peril. So after dinner she slipped out alone, and went to the mistress of the school where she had received her elementary education. She had ever since continued her acquaintance with that lady, who, kindhearted, and touched by her situation, often employed her industry, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... sole of my foot, I was commencing to feel rather flat, in fact, anything but bright. What is the use of civilization? if we are to go on butchering our neighbours, or allowing them to make targets of us for every imaginary cause. Why be civilized in some matters, and in others remain savages? If a man strike me I shall knock him down, if he strike someone else even, in whom I am interested, he must fight his own battles, and let me look after my ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... it must be something of the kind. "Though," she said, "dogs always seem to have some end in view, or perhaps a dozen ends, for though they tear off after an imaginary interest as if there was nothing else in the world, they get tired of it, or else start another, and forget all about ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... statue to which various feelings were successively imparted. Its first feeling was supposed to be one of fragrance. But to avoid all possible complication with the question of genesis, let us not attribute even to a statue the possession of our imaginary feeling. Let us rather suppose it attached to no matter, nor localized at any point in space, but left swinging IN VACUO, as it were, by the direct creative FIAT of a god. And let us also, to escape entanglement with difficulties about the physical or psychical nature ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... is waiting, waiting. Waiting, I may say, on the affairs of State. Youth," continued the Hon. Mr. Gashwiler, addressing an imaginary constituency, "is nothing but a season ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... fought against the superstitions of the Russian peasantry. He had seen the work of his hands brought to naught, and a boring abandoned just short of the oil because a cross-eyed man, attracted by curiosity, had come and looked at the work. He had seen his wells go up in smoke for some imaginary act of witchcraft on the part of his foreman, and, though he laughed, he was in no ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... I should," I said, not too civilly. "Why should I be at her beck and call? If she had been in any trouble, any serious trouble, such as she anticipated when talking to me at the buffet, and a prey to imaginary alarms since become real, I should have been ready to serve her or any woman in distress, but nothing of this could have happened in the ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... which present an imaginary picture of the interior structure of the great geysers of the Park, that bears a striking resemblance to what the two caves of the Black Hills prove to be the true conditions; although it is evident he had in mind caverns ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... Greek and Roman authors. Those authors, and the conversation of contemporaries, are Gellius' professed sources, but in some cases the author he names is evidently quoted at second-hand, and many of the conversations are doubtless quite imaginary. Our obligations to ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... look to, at this moment, is to destroy the Rio squadron. The usurper who rules in that Capital thinks that, reaching the bar with the squadron of his imaginary Empire, we should be attacked on all sides, and compelled to make a shameful capitulation. How much you are mistaken—new-born monster! We have abundant force at our disposal; but in the meantime we must overthrow the plans of ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... region, when the sudden attack at sunset of 25,000 Bulgarians drove the Greek defenders back some six miles upon their supports. On each occasion the Bulgarian Government disclaimed all responsibility, and attributed the bloodshed to the personal initiative of individual soldiers acting under (imaginary) provocation. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... anybody. Being a master of the pianoforte and a composer of rare talent, he can hardly be called sane. And yet, though I have seen him enthusiastic, misled, moved to tears over nothing, indignant over an imaginary insult, or ready to forgive any one who could be fool enough to be his enemy, I have never known him so thoroughly upset or so positive in his convictions as when the other morning, as I sat loafing before my fire, he entered ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... considered to be ruling in some mystical fashion over an imaginary country, might have welcomed this species of circular communication. It was certainly wasted on the inhabitants of Hispaniola, who were considerably more concerned with their own health and prosperity than with that of Ferdinand and Isabella, ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... as follows:—Taking an imaginary line drawn from the Areonal to Mars as the base line of an isosceles triangle, we were moving along the left side of the triangle, and Mars was moving in a slightly curved line along the right side. Our paths were therefore converging, and ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... Carpi said of Erasmus he was so thin-skinned that a fly would draw blood from him. The author of the "Imaginary Conversations" had the same infirmity. A very little thing would disturb him for hours, and his friends were never sure of his equanimity. I was present once when a blundering friend trod unwittingly on his favorite prejudice, and Landor went off instanter like a blaspheming ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... rulers being selected on the hereditary plan. There was a federal union between them for purposes of offense and defense, and they called themselves, collectively, the "People of the Long House." This imaginary house had an eastern door at the mouth of the Mohawk River, and a western door at the Falls ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... his people. When that is effected, how will the perfect sunshine break out from that face! Ah! how blest must Scotland be under his reign, when all will be light, virtue, and joy!" Bliss hovered like an angel over the image of this imaginary Bruce; while sorrow, in mourning weeds, seemed ever dropping tears, when any circumstance recalled ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... first having prepared, to some extent, at least, his closing address to the jury. He has thought about this for weeks and perhaps for months. In his dreams he has formulated syllogisms and delivered them to imaginary yet obstinate talesman. He has glanced through many volumes for similes and quotations of pertinency. He has tried various arguments on his friends until he knows just how, if he succeeds in proving certain ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... contradict each other, as in the case of the 4th-century Christian pilgrim to Jerusalem who boasted that she had not washed ner face for eighteen years for fear of removing therefrom the holy chrism of baptism. The purport, then, of ablutions is to remove, not dust and dirt, but the—-to us imaginary—stains contracted by contact with the dead, with childbirth, with menstruous women, with murder whether wilful or involuntary, with almost any form of bloodshed, with persons of inferior caste, with dead animal ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... feeling. To take a single example among many: in a passage in his de Legibus he says that to worship private or strange or foreign gods, "confusionem habet religionum";[969] and again he calls his own imaginary ius divinum in that treatise a constitutio religionum, a system of religious duties.[970] In many other passages, on the other hand, we find both the feeling which prompts and the cult-acts which follow on it equally connoted by the word; for example, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... Paul Jones. The latter hero actually made a voyage in the brigantine 'John' about the time he picked up Richard Carvel from the Black Moll, after the episode with Mungo Maxwell at Tobago. The Scotch scene, of course, is purely imaginary. Accuracy has been aimed at in the account of the fight between the 'Bonhomme Richard' and the 'Serapis', while a little different arrangement might have been better for the medium of the narrative. To be sure, it was Mr. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... correct. This is true: because to make it perfectly accurate, would be to make it also unintelligible to nine out of ten readers, and this not so much on account of obsolete words, which might be explained in a note, as of the entirely different turn of the phraseology. An imaginary diary of the reign of Elizabeth can be written in pure Elizabethan language, and with an occasional explanatory note, it will be understood by modern readers: but a narrative prior to 1400 at the earliest cannot be so treated. The remaining possibilities are either to use as much ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... bailie named Landenburg, who publicly reproved a peasant for living in a house above his station. On another occasion, having fined an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of Melchi, a yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's messenger jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if he lost his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, that if he wanted to use a plough he had better draw it himself, being only a vile peasant. To this insult Henry's son Arnold responded by attacking ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... had made his old comic entrance, tripping his right toe over his left heel, and turning to shake his fist at an imaginary enemy. The boys, determined to be pleased, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... First Cause, least understood.' No man can be so fully and perfectly satisfied there is a God in heaven as the Author of this Apology cannot but be of his own existence on earth. No man's faith in the imaginary is ever half so strong as his belief in the visible ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... the ceremonial performance. In one of the formulas it is specified that the doctor must blow first upon the right hand of the patient, then upon the left foot, then upon the left hand, and finally upon the right foot, thus making an imaginary cross. ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... concluded his examination, seemed a little puzzled. No doubt I had, in my ignorance, described some imaginary symptom which was not in accordance with what he expected to find. He, however, gave me another prescription, and as he wrote it I wondered how he would act if he knew that my object in becoming his patient was to probe the mystery of ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... he always wandered off to accounts of previous outrages committed by the press-gang, or to passionate abuse of the trick by which men had been lured from their homes on the night in question to assist in putting out an imaginary fire, and then seized and carried off. Some of this very natural indignation might possibly have some effect on the jury; and this seemed the only ground of hope, and was indeed a slight one, as the judge was likely to warn the ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... he rejected the humiliating aid; he secretly compared the ignominious, at least the inglorious, period of his own reign, with the fame of a beardless youth; and Valens rushed into the field, to erect his imaginary trophy, before the diligence of his colleague could usurp any share of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... go faster would have rendered careful exploration of the country difficult. Having completed ten miles without passing over a single spot of clear ground, he flew about five miles due west, then turned the machine and steered back towards the fort along the next imaginary radius of his circle. He had arranged that Rodier should scan the country to the left while he himself kept as good a look-out to the right as was possible when he had engine and compass to attend to. They had not flown far on this backward ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... have employed in some six or eight other stories, and whom I made as much the hero and heroine of 'Their Wedding Journey' as the slight fable would bear. In venturing out of my adoptive New England, where I had found myself at home with many imaginary friends, I found it natural to ask the company of these familiar acquaintances, but their company was not to be had at once for the asking. When I began speaking of them as Basil and Isabel, in the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... P—— is too accomplished a politician to go the simple straight road to her object. I now perfectly comprehend why she took such pains to persuade me that an imperial lover was alone worthy of my charms. She was alarmed by an imaginary danger. Believe me, I am incapable of disputing with any ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... lawyers? How the laws of the two States could be said to come into conflict in such circumstances, I question whether any lawyer in this audience can explain or understand. No matter whether the line that divides one sovereign State from another be an imaginary one or ocean-wide, the moment you cross it, the State you leave is blotted out of existence, so far as you are concerned. The Czar might as well claim to control the deliberations of Faneuil Hall, as the laws of Missouri ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Porte. A Turkish kawwas in attendance on him, I observed to shrug up his shoulders when he heard nothing but Arabic being spoken among us. They arrived here in the company of Shaikh Yusuf, whose son is nominally a Turkish military officer, commanding three hundred imaginary Bashi-Bozuk, or irregular cavalry. By means of such titles they tickle the vanity of the Arab leaders, and claim an annual tribute of 218 purses, (about 1000 pounds,) and are thus enabled ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... gongs and two large bamboo drums. The men stood up first, in war costume, brandishing their spears and shields, and throwing themselves into the most extraordinary attitudes, as they cut with their knives at some imaginary enemy; at the same time uttering the most unearthly yells, in which the Dyak spectators joined, apparently highly delighted with the exhibition. The women then came forward, and went through a very unmeaning kind of dance, keeping time with their hands and feet; but still it ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... on with submissive wonder as his master, transfigured with enthusiasm, went hastily to and fro through the room, occasionally clinching his fist and smiting an imaginary Dutchman. The valet at last ventured to remind him that he had forgotten ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... occupy my leisure in constructing imaginary cases, mostly criminal, for the purpose of study and for the acquirement of experience. For instance, I would devise an ingenious fraud and would plan it in detail, taking every precaution that I could think of against failure or detection, considering, and elaborately ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... whose red hair as she wound it round her throat fascinated Heine with its grim suggestion of blood. There had been his cousin Amalie, whose marriage to another is said to have been the secret spring of sorrow by which Heine's laughter was fed. And there had been others, whose names—imaginary, maybe, in that they were doubtless the imaginary names of real women—are familiar to all readers of Heines poetry: Seraphine, Angelique, Diane, Hortense, ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... of young trees do not extend to any great distance away from the trunk. In distributing the fertilizer this fact should be remembered. A safe rule for all small-sized trees is to commence just outside an imaginary circle of two feet radius and apply the fertilizer in a circular band extending out some distance beyond the spread of the branches. Old trees, or those having a considerable spread of top, when planted in orchard form, should be fertilized by broadcasting ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... What's his private judgment to me, or mine to him? But for the sake of it, he'll make everything mud and puddle! Of course you may say to me—it is perfectly open to you to say'—he looked away from her, half-forgetting her, addressing with animation and pugnacity an imaginary opponent—'what do morals matter?—how do you know that the present moral judgments of the world represent any ultimate truth? Ah! well'—he shrugged his shoulders—'I can't follow you there. Black ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Shakespeare. While as a rule it is deemed wrong to assume to possess any virtue that we do not possess, we may and no doubt should, at times, appear to be happy even though we may feel more like indulging in lamentations. To come to the breakfast table enumerating a list of real or imaginary ailments is a most ill-advised thing to do. We should endeavor to forget our troubles and above all we should be slow to give voice to them so that thereby they will be multiplied in the minds of others. It has been truly said that most people who are unhappy are really miserable and ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... out of his hate of cruelty itself, and of treachery itself. Partly no doubt he did; and entirely he thought he did. But see how the notions of such retribution react upon the judge, and produce in him the bad passions he punishes. It is true the punishments are imaginary. Were a human being actually to see such things, he must be dehumanised or he would cry out against them with horror and detestation. But the poem draws them as truths; the writer's creed threatened them; he himself contributed to maintain the belief; and however we may suppose such a belief ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... dark, and he never went without his staff." How it came about that Angelical Thomas was burned in company with his staff, and his sister in gentler manner hanged, and whether these two were simply religious maniacs of the more furious order, or had real as well as imaginary sins upon their old-world shoulders, are points happily beyond the reach of our intention. At least, it is suitable enough that out of this superstitious city some such example should have been put forth: the outcome and fine flower of dark and vehement religion. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and bravery that overcame them. Peasants gazed with wild astonishment on the village lad returned, after a few years absence, a veritable 'Jack tar.' The credulity of these delighted listeners tempted Jack to 'spin his yarns,' and tell his tales of nautical adventures, real or imaginary. Hence, he was everywhere greeted with a genial and profuse hospitality. The best seat in the house, the choicest drinks in the cellar, were for Jack. Our ships of commerce, like so many shuttles, were rapidly weaving together the nations ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... not one golden ray of all our thoughts is sped ineffective through the dark; not one drop of the magical elixirs love distils is wasted. Let us consider how this may be. There is a habit we nearly all have indulged in. We weave little stories in our minds, expending love and pity upon the imaginary beings we have created, and I have been led to think that many of these are not imaginary, that somewhere in the world beings are living just in that way, and we merely reform and live over again in our life the story of another life. Sometimes these far-away intimates assume ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... Druce, Lord Weston, and other eminent breeders, as finding from experience that close interbreeding does produce bad effects; and it cannot be supposed that there would be such a consensus of opinion on this point if the evil were altogether imaginary. Mr. Huth argues, that the evil results which do occur do not depend on the close interbreeding itself, but on the tendency it has to perpetuate any constitutional weakness or other hereditary taints; and he attempts to prove this by the argument that "if ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... that Constancy profess'd Was but a well Dissembler at the best; And that imaginary Sway She feign'd to give, in seeming to obey, Was but the height of prudent Art, To deal with ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... the fable are closely akin to allegory. A parable is a brief narrative of real or imaginary incidents for the purpose of inculcating some moral or religious truth. It has been described as "an earthly story with a heavenly meaning." A considerable part of Christ's teaching was in parables, many of which are as beautiful as ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... Clarence, that he had unwarily, to his own ruin, become the instrument of Warwick's vengeance, and had thrown himself entirely in the power of his most inveterate enemies; that the mortal injuries which the one royal family had suffered from the other, were now past all forgiveness, and no imaginary union of interests could ever suffice to obliterate them; that even if the leaders were willing to forget past offences, the animosity of their adherents would prevent a sincere coalition of parties, and would, in spite of all temporary and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... It is a very domestic bird, and fond of notice, its voice on such occasions is pleasing, on some others very harsh and hawk or eagle-like. Its manners are curious, depressing its tail, and arching its neck, and pecking at imaginary objects in a curious way. From the expressive manner in which it looks up at sunset on surrounding objects, especially trees, it ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... say, I have no wish to make your life harder than it is. I do not want our engagement to impose impossible laws upon you, nor do I set up an imaginary standard for you. You have your honour and your own self-respect, and I know I shall always be satisfied with the standard ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... bear in mind that Sir E. Arnold's poem is written in the person, and from the stand-point of an imaginary Buddhist. This is indicated plainly on the title-page, in the preface, and in the course of the poem itself; and when the book comes to be read by the light of this explanation, a limitation is cast about much of its more startling language. To take, for ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... State bank-notes. The bank-notes were in fact practically worthless, for the State finances were suffering a violent reaction from the extravagant legislation of 1836 and 1837. One of the popular ways of attacking an obnoxious political doctrine in that day was writing letters from some imaginary backwoods settlement, setting forth in homely vernacular the writer's views of the question, and showing how its application affected his part of the world. These letters were really a rude form of the "Bigelow Papers" or "Nasby Letters." Soon after the order was issued by the Illinois ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... pretends that he does not apply his views to the human body, but only to an imaginary machine which, if it could be constructed, would do all that the human body does; throwing a sop to Cerberus unworthily; and uselessly, because Cerberus was by no means ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... away his wife's money on race-horses until the sheriff had seized the business), and she was acting now as companion to a Mrs. Wititterly, a pale, languid lady who considered herself a very fashionable person indeed, and was always suffering from imaginary ailments. Lord Frederick and Sir Mulberry Hawk came often to the house, pretending to flatter Mrs. Wititterly, but really to see Kate, who heartily ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... just the effect he designed it to have. It was an apology for the children, as it classed them with other real children, in contradistinction to the imaginary offspring of the unmarried, that are known by every one to ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... in a little mild blasphemy; hardly blasphemy—imaginary details, say, about hell, in the manner of Mark Twain. "Aw, my dear soul!" she exclaims. "How yu du go on! Aw, my dear soul! Yu'm going to hell, sure ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... this the night o' the mix-up" he explained as he returned it. He looked hard at Bob. "When you're ready to toddle about" he added, with a lightning wink and a slight movement of his fat thumb and forefinger, as if counting a stack of imaginary bills, "send Sam Singer up to let ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... devours the labours of the trader and the husbandman; that carries with it corruption, rapine, pollution, and devastation; that threatens without courage, robs without fear, and is pampered without labour.' In The Idler, No. 21, he makes an imaginary correspondent say:—'I passed some years in the most contemptible of all human stations, that of a soldier in time of peace.' 'Soldiers, in time of peace,' he continues, 'long to be delivered from the tyranny of idleness, and restored ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... lots of bob-tail stories,—docked short in from one to three months. Can't you give us a switch-tail one, that will hang on so as to touch next December? Something imaginary, based on your recollections,—the incidents of the War of 1812, for instance;—but, at any rate, a regular "to be continued" "piece ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... reading men and rowing men, as arbitrary and most illogical; there being a great many who have no claim to be reckoned either in one class or the other, and a great many who hover between both. And this imaginary distinction, existing as it notoriously does at Oxford, and fostered and impressed upon men by the tutors, (often unintentionally, or with the very best intentions,) is productive in many cases of a great deal of harm. A man (or boy if you please) ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... of the Indian nature. We all know that the carnal Indian man is a bad enough fellow at the best, and capable of dreadful crimes and misdemeanors, if only to gratify his whim or the caprice of the moment. And when he is bent upon satiating his revenge for some real or imaginary wrong, I would back him in the horrible ingenuity of his devices for torture, in the unrelenting malice of his vengeance, against any—the most fierce and diabolical—of all the potentates in the kingdoms of eternal and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... took place just as I, driving the five mules, entered the great mountain gateway, thrilled with anticipation which almost amounted to foreboding. As I was about to set foot across the imaginary frontier which divided the world from the unknown land, Professor Smawl hailed me and I halted ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... the grizzly bear, at this night encampment, were not imaginary, was proved on the following morning. Among the hired men of the party was one William Cannon, who had been a soldier at one of the frontier posts, and entered into the employ of Mr. Hunt at Mackinaw. He was ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... readily substitute a familiar word with similar letters. Everybody knows how difficult it is to read proofs. We overlook the misprints, that is, we replace the wrong letters which are actually in our field of vision by imaginary right letters which correspond to our expectations. Are we not also familiar with the experience of supplying by our fancy the associative image of a movement when only the starting point and the end point are given, if a skillful suggestion influences our mind. The prestidigitator ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... for many a comfortable round hole in life. But under the stress of present circumstances he persuaded himself that the end justified the means. Ignoring the fact that he was as devoid of relations as a tree is of leaves in December, he developed a sudden sense of obligation to an imaginary cousin whom he added, without legal authority, to the population of Peru, Indiana. By means of Miss Bartlett's white hand he frequently informed her that she was not to worry about him, because he was "doing splendid," and that a hospital ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... Mrs. Wiggs. "I'm 'feared I use' to worry some over Mr. Wiggs. T'words the last he uster pretty often—" Here Mrs. Wiggs tipped an imaginary bottle to her lips, and gave Lucy a significant wink. Even in the strictest confidence, she could not bear to speak of the weakness of ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... up, and we were left alone, Mr. Fellows, turning to me, said, "You lay great stress on the origination of such a character as Christ. But can we make its reality a literary problem? May it not have been imaginary? As Mr. Newman says, Human nature is often portrayed in superhuman dignity; Why not in ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... different scenes. As the man went on he watched him keenly and earnestly. He heeded not the oaths, or the taunts, or the threats which flowed from his lips; but as word followed word, and gesture gesture, and look look, he became gradually convinced that the resemblance was more than imaginary—that, indeed, this blaspheming convict was one whom he had once known ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... normal man, is always a momentary delusion; with the dog, however, it may last for some little time. Thus, I have seen my dog chase imaginary rats around my room after having been aroused while in the midst of a dream. His chagrin when he "came to himself" and saw me laughing was ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... Cavities, intercepted between the extant Particles, without being so much greater in Black Bodies than in White ones, as to be perceptibly so to the Gross Organs of Touch, may be very much greater in reference to their Disposition of Reflecting the imaginary subtile Beams of Light. For in Black Bodies, those Little intercepted Cavities, and other Depressions, may be so Figur'd, so Narrow and so Deep, that the incident Beams of Light, which the more extant Parts of the Physical Superficies are dispos'd to Reflect inwards, ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... fell, dread, premonitory. It was plain to every man of the outfit, awake and listening, that Dorgan had a grievance—whether real or imaginary, it made little difference—and that he was determined to force trouble. Only Owen, apparently, knowing the real state of affairs, knew that the reference to Randerson's inefficiency was a mere pretext. But that violence, open, deadly, was imminent, foreshadowed by ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Longstreet's corps to Jackson, leaving only D. H. Hill's at Richmond. [Footnote: Id., pt. ii. pp. 177, 552.] From that moment McClellan could have marched anywhere. He could have marched to Fredericksburg and joined Pope, and Halleck could have met them with Burnside's troops. But the vast imaginary army of the Confederacy paralyzed everything, and the ponderous task of moving the Army of the Potomac and its enormous material by water to Washington went on. The lifeless and deliberate way in which it went on made it the 1st of September when Sumner and Franklin reached Centreville, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... thoroughfare reaches into the Park,) and retreats suddenly down towards the East River, as if it were disgusted with the smell of old clothes, and had determined to wash itself clean. This excellent intention it has, however, evidently contributed towards the making of that imaginary pavement mentioned in the old adage; for it is still emphatically a dirty street. It has never been able to shake off the Hebraic taint of filth which it inherits from the ancestral thoroughfare. It ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... make them any less humorous or plentiful. That debate did me good in one way, for I was so angry with this man of distinction that I wished I could have told him what I thought, and for three consecutive mornings I addressed an imaginary audience while I was having my bath. But if my remarks had been made at the Union I am afraid they would have caused a tumult, they were more suited to the House of Commons, where, if the worst happens, you have the consolation of being led out by a dignified official, and can read ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... enjoyment in it. Then she could "make believe" it had really grown out; and the comfort she took in "going through the motions"—pretending to tuck behind her ears what scarcely touched their tips, and tossing her head continually, to throw back imaginary masses of curls, was truly indescribable, and such as I could not begin ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Saturday, July 27th, that the convoy was approaching the imaginary line in the ocean that Germany had established as the dead-line, past which her U-boats were operating in unrestricted warfare. The approach of the danger zone was the signal for all on board to remove no article of clothing while asleep at night ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... background I saw a hunched, unnatural figure. The real was more dreadful even than the imaginary—for some stray beam of light touched into cold radiance a huge curved knife which the ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... preferably to the main highways, where our autos would be more easily discerned by the German aeroplanes constantly hovering about. In these lanes we found lines of men sneaking along, sometimes crawling inch by inch, to surprise an imaginary enemy down around the bend. In the fields we saw charges and counter-charges from trench to trench. We saw cavalry manoeuvres across the open country and cavalry on foot facing each other in long lines along the roadsides, fighting desperately ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... quieted it, Mr. Fogg, although a little nervous and excited, concluded to try it again. Turning on the imaginary mutton, he began. Only sixty-four sheep had slid over the fence, when Fogg's aunt knocked at the door and asked if he was awake. When she learned that he was, she said she believed he had forgotten ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... divides the end of the gallery from the bank of the stream. The house, therefore, does not literally rest on opposite edges of the Cher, but rests on one and just fails to rest on the other. The pavilion would have made that up; but after a moment we ceased to miss this imaginary feature. We passed the little drawbridge, and wandered awhile beside the river. From this opposite bank the mass of the chateau looked more charming than ever; and the little peaceful, lazy Cher, where two ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... of sex is not imaginary. In 1058, when the triumphal columns were building, and Taillefer sang to William the Bastard and Harold the Saxon, Roland still prayed his "mea culpa" to God the Father and gave not a thought to Alda his betrothed. In the twelfth century Saint Bernard recited "Ave Stella Marts" in an ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... LINCOLN arrived at Washington nine days before his inauguration. The outgoing President, at the opening of the session of Congress, had still kept as the majority of his advisors men engaged in treason; had declared that in case of even an "imaginary" apprehension of danger from notions of freedom among the slaves, "disunion would become inevitable." LINCOLN and others had questioned the opinion of Taney; such impugning he ascribed to the "factious temper of the times." ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... that is composed of something indescribable. It is an obscure feeling resembling the fantastic passions retained by the dead in the Elysian fields. The heroes who, during their lifetime, shone in the chariot races, drove imaginary chariots when they were dead. Heloise lived with you on illusions and supplements. She kissed you sometimes, and with all the more pleasure that having taken a vow at the Paraclet monastery to love you no longer, her kisses thereby became more precious as more guilty. A woman ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... began to steal from the poets and musicians that he knew in order to keep abreast of his own original powers of production. He even went so far as to draw inspiration from men of uneven heights stood in line: he would hum the intervals as scored by their heads on an imaginary staff and fashion his tune accordingly, but this tended to a somewhat compressed range and was not always happy in its results. His efforts, however, were appreciated, and the emaciated young Irishman became a most exceptional ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... or two remarks, then, turning, walked away together. And, as they walked, Dick's hand went up his back and he scratched an imaginary flea. ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... only female in the piece, is a beautiful creation; but as imaginary as her persecutor Franz. Still and exalted in her warm enthusiasm, devoted in her love to Moor, she moves before us as the inhabitant of a higher and simpler world than ours. "He sails on troubled seas," she exclaims, with a confusion of metaphors, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... from such cases, it is possible to understand how the power of impulsive feeling, the dominant factor in some natures, may, through a generous impatience, lead them to make some real attempt—and not imaginary like those which the police in all times and all countries prosecute in the courts—to spread terror among those who feel the political or economic power slipping ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... lover pendent on a willow-tree. Meanwhile I labour with eternal drought, And restless wish, and rave; my parched throat Finds no relief, nor heavy eyes repose: But if a slumber haply does invade My weary limbs, my fancy's still awake, Thoughtful of drink, and, eager, in a dream, Tipples imaginary pots of ale, In vain; awake I find the settled thirst Still gnawing, and the pleasant ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... of Gabriel, Father d'Aigrigny continued his imaginary picture of the dangers of the Company, which, far from being really in peril, was already beginning secretly ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... who live are unconscious that they are seen of them and talk with them (for indeed they are not really themselves present, or themselves make speeches, but through troubled senses these persons are wrought upon by such like imaginary visions), just so they also who have departed this life, to persons thus affected appear as present while they be absent, and are themselves utterly unconscious whether any man sees them in regard ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... it possible that this could be an imaginary cavity into which he was looking? He drew back; he was about to put out one foot to feel if it were really solid ground upon which this light was pouring, but he refrained. He got a long stick, and with it touched the centre of the light. What he felt ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... Dr. Marmion appended to his MSS.:—"Many of the conversations and monologues in this history, not heard by myself when they occurred, were told to me afterwards, or got from the diaries and notes of the persons concerned. Only a few are purely imaginary."] ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... be our magnet, and let n represent a particle of north magnetism placed exactly opposite the middle of the magnet. Of course this is an imaginary case, as you can never in reality thus detach your north magnetism from its neighbour. But supposing us to have done so, what would be the action of the two poles of the magnet on n? Your reply will of course be that the pole S attracts n while the pole N repels it. Let the magnitude and direction ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... fraternized with Sigurd too—that is, as far as he would permit them—for the unhappy dwarf was uncertain of temper, and if at one hour he were docile and yielding as a child, the next he would be found excited and furious at some imaginary slight that he fancied had been inflicted upon him. Sometimes, if good-humored, he would talk almost rationally,—only allowing his fancy to play with poetical ideas concerning the sea, the flowers, or the sunlight,—but he was far more often ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... at all clear. And I will note the point here, because it is some testimony to its vivid importance that it was really the first I had to discuss on American soil with an American citizen. In a double sense I touched Ireland before I came to America. I will take an imaginary instance from another controversy; in order to show how the apology can be worse than the action. The best we can say for ourselves is worse than the worst that ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... slumber when something caused her to open her eyes. For a few moments she lay in that strange debatable region between sleeping and waking when the mind cannot distinguish between the real and the imaginary. All at once she sat up, fully awake, every sense strained and alert. Something was wrong. What was it? She listened intently, but such an intense stillness reigned throughout the house that Sally's soft breathing smote her with a sense of disturbance. ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... Burnham points out, all talk to children; when the dew is on the grass "the grass is crying," the stars are candles or lamps, perhaps cinders from God's stove, butterflies are flying pansies, icicles are Christmas candy. Children have imaginary play-brothers and sisters and friends, with whom they talk. Sometimes God talks with them. Even the prosiest things are vivified; the tracks of dirty feet on the floor are flowers; a creaking chair talks; the shoemaker's ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Chalotais's Essai d'education nationale (1763). Rene de la Chalotais, a Solicitor-General for the Parliament of Bretagne, was one of the notable French parliamentarians of the middle of the eighteenth century. Unlike Rousseau's highly imaginary, exaggerated, sentimental, and paradoxical volume, La Chalotais produced a practical and philosophical discussion of the problem of the education of a people. Declaring firmly that education was essentially a civil affair; that it was the function of government to make citizens contented ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... them entered, and the commotion that had gone on without ceasing since Frank first heard it, quieted down. As the boy passed the apartment he saw a little man, standing in a fighting attitude, grasping the leg of a chair for a weapon, and seemingly bidding defiance to a horde of imaginary enemies. ...
— Frank Roscoe's Secret • Allen Chapman
... to the northward as the 25th degree of latitude, and more particularly Glasshouse and Harvey's Bays. The English government at length resolved that they would wipe off the reproach, which, as Captain Flinders observes, was not without some reason attributed to them, "that an imaginary line of more than 250 leagues of extent, in the vicinity of one of their colonies, should have been so long suffered to remain traced upon the charts, under the title of UNKNOWN COAST," and they accordingly appointed him to the command of an expedition fitted out in England ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... Socialists were not supposed to know "the boundaries of nations, sects or factions," but were to "speak one voice and work together as one man for one purpose," the Spartacans, it seems, would be better off if they had not only an imaginary boundary to separate barbarians of their type from the rest of civilization, but a barrier of mountains with heights towering in the clouds to divide Germany into two parts, in one of which the Spartacans could rest in peace, safe from the attacks of their beloved ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... arrow, the barbing of hooks, and so forth, we understand them at once. Nothing can be more natural than that man should believe in an original inventor of the arts, and should tell tales about the imaginary discoverers if the real heroes be forgotten. So far all is plain sailing. But when the savage goes on to say that he who taught the use of fire or who gave the first marriage laws was a rabbit or a crow, or ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... spoke Grace. "I'm sorry about the chocolates. Wait until I see Will," and she shook an imaginary brother. ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake • Laura Lee Hope
... ten months she had made a reality of her cousin's imaginary romance, believing, like her mother, that Lisbeth would never marry; and now, within a week, this visionary being had become Comte Wenceslas Steinbock, the dream had a certificate of birth, the wraith had solidified into a young man of thirty. The seal she held ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... typewriting," replied Craig, "each letter occupies an imaginary square, ten to the inch horizontally and six to the inch vertically. Typewriting letters are in line both ways. This ruled glass plate is an alinement test plate for detecting defects in alinement. I have also here another glass plate in which ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... /wuh'g* wuh'g*/ n. Imaginary sound that a computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task. Compare {cruncha cruncha cruncha}, {grind} ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... men are sometimes guilty of laying improper blame on this imaginary being, they are altogether as apt to make her amends by ascribing to her honours which she as little deserves. To retrieve the ill consequences of a foolish conduct, and by struggling manfully with distress to subdue it, is one of the noblest efforts of wisdom and virtue. Whoever, ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... is an invention of Schelling's, not known to consciousness. In other words: all our real faculties bear witness to the truth of Hamilton's statement; and the only way of controverting it is to invent an imaginary faculty for ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... Domitian VII.). It is the Album, or Book of Life, of the monastery of Durham. Nor need we add that this album affords a relief to the eye wearied with looking over the pages of a modern album, and to the mind sick of the endless but monotonous repetition of imaginary ruins, love sonnets, and ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... understanding of the term "historical novel." HUGH WYNNE exactly fits it. But SILAS LAPHAM is a novel as perfectly historical as is Hugh Wynne, for it pictures an era and personifies a type. It matters not that in the one we find George Washington and in the other none save imaginary figures; else THE SCARLET LETTER were not historical. Nor does it matter that Dr. Mitchell did not live in the time of which he wrote, while Mr. Howells saw many Silas Laphams with his own eyes; else UNCLE ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... man, is always a momentary delusion; with the dog, however, it may last for some little time. Thus, I have seen my dog chase imaginary rats around my room after having been aroused while in the midst of a dream. His chagrin when he "came to himself" and saw me laughing was always ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... Wedding. Illustrated. 12mo. Familiar Spanish Travels. Illustrated. 8vo. Fennel and Rue. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo. Flight of Pony Baker. Post 8vo. Hazard of New Fortunes. New Edition. 12mo. Heroines of Fiction. Illustrated. 2 vols. 8vo. Imaginary Interviews. 8vo. Imperative Duty. 12mo. Paper. Impressions and Experiences. New Edition. 12mo. Kentons. 12mo. Landlord at Lion's Head. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo. Letters Home. 12mo. Library of Universal Adventure. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth. Three-quarter Calf. Literary Friends and ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... needs and hopes of the human heart, they are unsubstantial as dreams and afford no foundation on which to build our faith. Heathen religions are generally woven of this legendary stuff. The Greek and Roman divinities were all mythical. But the scientific spirit has swept these imaginary deities out of our sky and rendered belief in them impossible. Our religion must be rooted in reality and cannot live in clouds, however beautifully they may be colored. We refuse hospitality to anything but fact. Give us names ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... and three hundred and sixty above its mouth, reckoning by the meanders of the river. Thence to Nashville through the town of Franklin. On the map you will see laid down a road from Nashville to Natchez as having been cut by the order of the minister of war. This is imaginary; there is ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... that my imaginary heroes are vaguely reminiscent of beings who actually exist. Subconsciousness is the novelist's principal instrument, and this subconsciousness frequently mocks us, leading us to mistake for our own creation the things which we have unwittingly observed in Nature. ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... engaged in a friendly scuffle for an apple, and Allan was tossing Rosie up to the ceiling, while Norman, perched on the bannisters high above them all, waved his left hand, bidding farewell, with many words, to an imaginary Scotland, while with his right he beckoned to the "brave new world" which was to be the scene of ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... if you please," said I to Madame, who supplied me with these details. "I perceive that both the rooms, yours and Rust's, were upon the second floor. Is it in this way, you shameless woman, that you preserved from reproach the honour of the late imaginary stove man?" ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... miser conceived the design of sponging upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up, for this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to the physician, as that of an imaginary individual. ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... carry its simplicity so far; but I have since lived long enough to know that mistakes like these are constantly occurring around us; effects being hourly attributed to causes with which they have no connection; and causes being followed down to effects, that are as imaginary as human sagacity is faulty. As for myself, I can safely say, that in scarce a circumstance of my life, that has brought me the least under the cognizance of the public, have I ever been judged justly. In various instances have I been praised for acts ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... and took his seat thereon, with his hands between his knees, as if playing with an imaginary cap. He was dressed in an ordinary suit of laborer's best clothes, and his stiff, dust-colored hair was not cut particularly short. The cheeks of his square-cut face had fallen in, the eyes had sunk back, and the prominence thus ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was extremely poor; she suffered as a child from imaginary terrors which she describes in her Autobiography, and she gradually became deaf. She bore this affliction with the greatest courage and cheerfulness, but misfortunes followed one another in rapid succession. Her elder brother ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... task was as disagreeable, and apparently as interminable as ever, but Bobby had gained this: he had not now, even in the subconscious background of his mind, any desire to quit; and there no longer pressed upon the weight and cold of the decoy he was at the moment handling, the useless and imaginary, but real, cold and weight of all the ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... pebble-ridge at Northam, and there sit, devouring, with hungry eyes, the great expanse of ocean, which seemed to woo him outward into boundless space, he used to console himself, in school-hours, by drawing ships and imaginary charts upon his slate, instead of minding ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... liberty of the slave: when beaten and bruised with blows, he requests and implores as a favour to be allowed to depart with some few of his teeth.' This will always be the event of such an imaginary resistance, when men may not strike again. He, therefore, who may resist must be allowed to strike. And then let our author, or anybody else, join a knock on the head, or a cut on the face, with as much reverence and respect as ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... going further, but he asked me to promise, and I did so without reservation; moreover, I think that for some reasons it is as well that even you should not know it. As it is, you are aware that I am going to try, and that is all. If I were to tell you how, you might be picturing all sorts of imaginary dangers and worrying yourself over it, so I think that it will be much the best that you should remain in ignorance, at any rate for a time. I can say this, that I shall for the present remain principally in London, ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... were necessary to grasp the Exhibition as a whole and in detail, but an imaginary stroll through the grounds will give the reader some general ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... The fire was almost out, but the candle in the lantern which stood by her bedside shed a feeble light upon the oaken floor; and the moon, though occasionally overcast, was still high in the heavens. Readily concluding the disturbance to have been wholly imaginary, the result of the impression made by her waking thoughts upon her sleeping fancies, Anna composed herself again to sleep; but scarcely had she lain down, when the same sounds, low at first, but gradually ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... I had just then been greeted with an epistle of * *'s, full of his petty grievances, and this at the moment when (from circumstances it is not necessary to enter upon) I was bearing up against recollections to which his imaginary sufferings are as a scratch to a cancer. These things combined, put me out of humour with him and all mankind. The latter part of my life has been a perpetual struggle against affections which embittered the earliest portion; and though I flatter myself I have in a great measure conquered ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... 13, be our magnet, and let n represent a particle of north magnetism placed exactly opposite the middle of the magnet. Of course this is an imaginary case, as you can never in reality thus detach your north magnetism from its neighbour. But supposing us to have done so, what would be the action of the two poles of the magnet on n? Your reply will of course be that the pole S attracts n while the pole N repels ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... up, and gave him a careless greeting, and went back to discussing certain "wheels" in the corner of an imaginary lunch-cloth and just how one went about making them. He made a tentative remark or two, trying to win her attention to himself, but she pushed her cup and saucer aside to make room for further fork drawings, and glanced at him with her most ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... turning the chair around, dropped into it. "And by this time George Lee's loungin' back in his chyar and smokin' his cigyar somewhar in Sacramento," she added, stretching her feet out to the fire, and suiting the action to the word with an imaginary cigar between the long fingers of a thin and ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... charity. Personally the lad was kindly and good-natured, intellectually he had become arrogant, intolerant, acrid, flinging out at old-fashioned views, giving quite unnecessary challenges, arguing with imaginary antagonists. It has ever seemed to me, although I suppose that history is against me, that if it be laid on any one to advocate a new view that will startle people, he ought of all men to be conciliatory and persuasive; but Carmichael was, at least in this time of fermentation, ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... comparison of contrary and dissimilar facts, and of inconsistent circumstances. Causes too, and those things which arise from causes, and especially similarities and instances, are efficacious; so also are imaginary characters. Lastly, mute things may be introduced as speaking, and altogether all things are to be employed (if the cause will allow of them) which are considered important; and important things are divisible into two classes. For there are some ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... his impressions. But the more I did so, the more he testified his abhorrence of me, and his conviction that I had really bewitched him. At length the curate of Notre Dame, who had married them, interfered, and after some time succeeded, though with considerable difficulty, in freeing him from his imaginary bonds. They lived together for twenty-eight years, and several children, now citizens of Rochelle, were ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... circumstances, would have hurt him if he bad known of it, but only through his sympathy and his affection—he was unacquainted with the jealousy of a father. But in Janet's eyes they made their little world together, indispensable to each other as its imaginary hemispheres. She had a quiet pain, in the infrequent moments when she allowed herself the full realization of her love for Kendal, in the knowledge that she, of her own motion, had disturbed its unities and ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... Muffet sits on a low chair eating from an imaginary dish. The spider comes creeping softly behind her. When he reaches her side, he sits quietly down. Then she sees him and, in a great fright, jumps ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... and cherish the endearments of husbands and wives, parents and children, neighbors and friends; whether they shall preserve their chastity and purity, or regard the dictates of justice and humanity. Such are some of the consequences of slavery; consequences not imaginary, but which connect themselves with its very existence. The evils to which the slave is always exposed, often take place in their very worst degree and form; and where all of them do not take place, still ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... simply to some relative.]) D'Arc was born at Domremy, a village on the marches of Lorraine and Champagne, and dependent upon the town of Vaucouleurs. I have called her a Lorrainer, not simply because the word is prettier, but because Champagne too odiously reminds us English of what are for us imaginary wines—which, undoubtedly, La Pucelle tasted as rarely as we English: we English, because the champagne of London is chiefly grown in Devonshire; La Pucelle, because the champagne of Champagne never, by any chance, flowed into the fountain of ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... Mr. Ryder's voice that stirred the hearts of those who sat around him. It suggested more than mere sympathy with an imaginary situation; it seemed rather in the nature of a personal appeal. It was observed, too, that his look rested more especially upon Mrs. Dixon, with a mingled expression of ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... parties, their prevailing electric condition. Temporarily they may seem to be in harmony, and may deceive themselves into the belief that they are at opposite poles equidistant from the equator, and certain to meet on that imaginary line in matrimonial bliss. Dreadful will be the awakening to an insipid life, if they find they both have the same sort of currents. It is said that women change their minds and their dispositions, that men are fickle, and that both give way after marriage to natural inclinations that were suppressed ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... distaste, and thus widens still more the gulf between herself and her relatives. Hence she is thrown back upon herself for companionship and comfort. She dissects, for her own bitter enjoyment, her inmost heart. She becomes the subtle analyst of her own imaginary motives. She calls up accusing phantoms to charge her before the bar of her conscience, in order that she may have the qualified satisfaction of acquitting herself, whilst returning against her relatives a verdict of guilty on every count of the indictment. In short, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 6, 1890 • Various
... fact that the monster had smashed my boat. I told them that I was not afraid of facing anything single-handed, and I even went so far as to allege that I was good enough to go out against a nation! My whole object was to impress these people with my imaginary greatness, and I constantly made them marvel at my prowess with the bow and arrow. The fact of my being able to bring down a bird on the wing was nothing more nor less than a miracle to them. I was given the name of "Winnimah" by these people, because my arrows ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... that this bay was an arm of the sea, running northward and eastward, and communicating with the Gulf of St. Lawrence, thus making New England, with adjacent districts, an island. His proposed fort on the Chesapeake, giving access, by this imaginary passage, to the seas of Newfoundland, would enable the Spaniards to command the fisheries, on which both the French and the English had long encroached, to the great prejudice of Spanish rights. Doubtless, too, these inland waters gave access to the South Sea, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... silly things have been said in the last month or two about HINDENBURG and his imaginary "line," but the silliest of all perhaps was the remark of The Nation that the German retreat on the Somme "has found our soldiers wanting." This article naturally gave great comfort to the enemy, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... of rural life, by ridding the countryside of the worst of its present pests. Those wandering dervishes of the industrial world, the hobo, the tramp—the entire family of Weary Willies and Tired Timothys—will no longer have even an imaginary excuse for their troubled and troublesome existence. But the farmer who was the prey of these pests must, if he would be permanently rid of them, learn to respect his hired farm hand. He must provide him with a comfortable ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... have, however, come down to us; they are ballads and madrigals, for imaginary Iris,[613] Court poems, imitations of Petrarch,[614] the light verses of a well-taught man. He promises eternal service to his "douce dame"; his "douce dame" being no one in particular. He writes for others, and they are welcome to draw from his works: "The love-songs thus far ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... elegiac poet, lived for the rest of the month on the rare droppings from the basket of Providence. This long Lent had no terrors for him; he passed through it gaily, thanks to his stoical temperament and to the imaginary treasures which he expended every day while waiting for the first of the month, that Easter which terminated his fast. He lived at this time at the very top of one of the loftiest houses in Paris. His room was shaped like a belvidere, and was a delicious habitation in summer, but from October ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... constitutional tendency to dreaming by night and by day; and, under the influence of an elder brother, a lad "whose genius for mischief amounted to inspiration," who died in his sixteenth year, he spent much of his boyhood in imaginary worlds of their own creating. The amusements and occupations of the whole family, indeed, seem to have been mainly intellectual; and in De Quincey's case, emphatically, "the child was father to the man." "My ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... should intrude themselves, and venture to brag of a love for his flesh and blood which might claim precedence over his own. Doubtless the feeling was unworthy of him, and he would, when the time came, play his part generously and well; but, so long as the matter was purely imaginary, we may allow him some natural ebullition ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... speculation, the Neutral Text appears hardly in history except at the Semiarian period. It was almost disowned ever after: and there is no certainty—nothing more than inference which we hold, and claim to have proved, to be imaginary and delusive,—that, except as represented in the corruption which it gathered out of the chaos of the earliest times, it ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... open camp, perpetually besieged. Speaking in a general way, it has no natural frontiers of any sort—neither mountains nor wide expanses of sea. Eastward are one hundred and thirty millions of people fanatically hostile as regards race, religion, and imaginary interests; westward is another great nation of forty millions, with a hatred on all these points intensified by desire for revenge; northward is a vigorous race estranged by old quarrels; and south is a power which is largely hostile on racial, religious, and historic ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... bottom of the sea, is an idea that is too great to be conceived easily in all the parts of its operations, many of which are perhaps unknown to us; and, without being properly understood, so great an idea may appear like a thing that is imaginary. In like manner, the co-relative, or corresponding operation, the destruction of the land, is an idea that does not easily enter into the mind of man in its totality, although he is daily witness to part of the operation. We never see a river in a flood, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... may. In every instance of war, parents look to their children with terror as they grow up to the military age. The army is a national curse, and parental feelings are a perpetual source of affliction. If the great body of the people in Europe, instead of clamouring for imaginary rights, and talking nonsense about constitutions, which they have neither the skill to construct, nor would find worth the possession if they had them, would concentrate their claims in a demand for the habeas-corpus, and the abolition of the conscription, they would relieve themselves ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... peace and plenty. I thought I was surrounded on all sides by a fair expanse of country which belonged to me, where I enjoyed that freedom the world cannot give. My dreams had all the force of reality, till a sudden awakening at day-break came to give them the lie. But the imaginary bliss I had enjoyed had so taken my fancy that I could not rest till I realized it. I arose, dressed myself hastily, and went out, fasting, without knowing ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of understanding dishonour. It was with a sort of grim pleasure that he got up after this and lighted a candle, which shone strangely yellow and smoky in the clear September sunshine. "I'll balk them," he said to himself, with fierce satisfaction, as if those respectable imaginary executors of his had been ill-natured gossips bent on exposing him. And he burnt the papers one by one at his candle, watching the last fibre of each fade away in redness and then in blackness, disappearing ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... to the paper on the Fenians, two other articles by Artemus Ward are reprinted in the present work. One relates to the city of Washington, and the other to the author's imaginary town of Baldinsville. Both are highly characteristic of the writer and of his quaint spellings—a heterography not more odd than that of the postmaster of Shawnee County, Missouri, who, returning his account ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... now that he himself would like to see the wonderful cloth while it was still on the looms. Accompanied by a number of his friends, among whom were the two faithful officers who had already beheld the imaginary stuff, he went to visit the two men who were weaving, might and main, without any fiber and ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... against them—released by the state of the city from all restraint and law—made itself felt by the most barbarous excesses. Many of the houses of the Israelites were attacked by the mob, plundered, razed to the ground, and the owner tortured to death, to extort confession of imaginary wealth. Not to sell what was demanded was a crime; to sell it was a crime also. These miserable outcasts fled to whatever secret places the vaults of their houses or the caverns in the hills within the city could yet afford them, cursing ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... confronted her. Only the ashes of all her fine fancies were remaining—ashes still concealing, nevertheless, a few red embers of hope. So subdued was she by her weakening nerves, that she ate quite in silence going over imaginary conceptions of the character of the shoe company, the nature of the work, her employer's attitude. She was vaguely feeling that she would come in contact with the great owners, that her work would be where grave, stylishly dressed men ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... of stone dotted barren garden slopes, where surely gods had once strolled in that far time when the stars sang and the moon was young. Dark red walls of regularly laid stone—huge as that the Chinese flung before the advance of the Northern hordes—held imaginary empires asunder. Poised on a dizzy peak, Jove's eagle stared into the eye of the sun, and raised his wings for the flight deferred these many centuries. Kneeling face to face upon a lonesome summit, ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... walker; his foot is too flat and the calves of his legs too small, but he is certainly the most picturesque traveler to be seen on the road. He bends his knees more than the white man, and oscillates more to and fro, or from side to side. The imaginary line which his head describes is full of deep and long undulations. Even the boys and young men sway as if bearing ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... nice and lovely maid) at shadows of things that can but frighten fools. Put me not off with these delays; rather say you but dissembled love all this while, than now 'tis born, to die again with a poor fright of nonsense. A fit of honour! a phantom imaginary, and no more; no, no, represent me to your soul more favourably, think you see me languishing at your feet, breathing out my last in sighs and kind reproaches, on the pitiless Sylvia; reflect when I am dead, which will be ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... his parishioners. [194] He was now lodged in a palace; he was followed by admiring crowds; he had at his mercy the estates and lives of Howards and Herberts. A crowd of imitators instantly appeared. It seemed that much more might be got, and that much less was risked, by testifying to an imaginary conspiracy than by robbing on the highway or clipping the coin. Accordingly the Bedloes, Dangerfields, Dugdales, Turberviles, made haste to transfer their industry to an employment at once more profitable and less perilous than any to which they were accustomed. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... found the inconveniences at which his father had hinted anything but imaginary, as will ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... proceedings. Just when the orator had reached the most important point in his harangue, and was pouring forth a torrent of impassioned eloquence, the platform would begin to move, or the audience would insist on turning the gathering into an imaginary "scrum," and almost crushing the life out of those who happened to be in the ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... nice to talk to. You may talk to him if you want to—I'm sure you're welcome!" Whereupon she surrendered the receiver and walked around the high, map-covered table, and amused herself by playing an imaginary game of billiards with the pointer for a cue and two little spruce cones which she took from her pocket ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... with my finger, in the sand, of a mule in the water; while I imitated by pantomime the struggles of the drowning. I then pointed to myself; and, using my arms as in swimming, shook my head and my finger to signify that I could not swim. I worked an imaginary paddle, and made him understand that I wanted him to paddle me across the river. Still he remained unmoved; till finally I used one argument which interested him more than all the rest of my story. I untied a ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... others, but unlike others he had not (as was the case with not a few sensible men) given an admiring glance at the face, and then, recognizing the fact that there was not a woman back of it, passed on indifferently; nor had he bestowed upon her imaginary virtues; and much less had he been satisfied with ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... him to reveal himself, Ellsworth told some first-class romances. He made Morgan's force out about four thousand, and did it with a skill that carried conviction. He would speak, in dispatches to various well-known Federals, of certain imaginary commands, under men whom they well knew. He telegraphed Prentice that Wash. Morgan was at Gallatin, with four hundred Indians, raised especially to seek for his ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... tore it open, and flopped down on the sofa. Miss Jane snatched up an imaginary letter, tore it open (in imagination), and flopping down beside her sister, looked over her shoulder, apparently to make believe to herself that she read it along with her. Thus they read and commented on the captain's ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... the ability," writes Dr. COCKE, "to resist this state or bring it on at will. Many of them describe beautiful scenes from Nature, or some mighty cathedral with its lofty dome, or the faces of imaginary beings." This writer's own first experience of self-hypnotism was very remarkable. He had been told by a hypnotizer to keep the number twenty-six in his mind. He did so, and after hearing a ringing in his ears and then a strange roaring he felt that spirits were ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... an imaginary cap in a gesture of military obedience. 'Very well, my general. I fly to prepare weapons with which to fight Satan. You, of course, will take HER; oh, my dear, I'm almost afraid you oughtn't! I choose the bullet-headed blonde twin who says his name is "Lanty," and reserve for Edith ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... give YOURSELF a good cussing, for you're the one that's entitled to it most. You hain't done a thing from the start that had any sense in it, except coming out so cool and cheeky with that imaginary blue-arrow mark. That WAS bright—it was right down bully; and it was the thing that saved us. For if it hadn't been for that they'd a jailed us till them Englishmen's baggage come—and then—the penitentiary, you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... cablegrams concerns a matter which I admit I do not know how to handle. Every one of the things you mention is a fable. I have not only yielded nothing but have been asked to yield nothing. These manoeuvres which the cablegram speaks of are purely imaginary. I cannot check them from this end because the men who sent them insist on having something to talk about whether they know what the facts are or not. I will do my best with the three ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... gaped for golden showers? No wonder if we found some poets there, Who live on fancy, and can feed on air; No wonder they were caught by South-Sea schemes Who ne'er enjoy'd a guinea but in dreams; No wonder they their third subscription sold, For millions of imaginary gold: No wonder that their fancies wild can frame } Strange reasons, that a thing is still the same, } Tho' changed throughout in substance and in name. } But you (whose judgment scorns poetic flights) With contracts furnish boys for ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... stream—I beheld the "Lass o' Newsholme Dean." She was engaged in driving home a Cochin China hen and her chickens. Instantaneously I was seized with a poetic fit, and gazing upon her as did Robert Tannyhill upon his imaginary beauty, "The Flower of Dumblane," I struck my lyre, and, although the theme of my song turned out afterwards to be a respectable old woman of 70 winters, yet there is still a charm in ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... superseded by the Kelts. Philology, then, tells us little more than history; and it may not be superfluous to add, that the occupancy of Great Britain by a stock of the kind in question, earlier than the Keltic, and different from it, is no imaginary case of the author's, but a doctrine which has taken the definite form of a recognized hypothesis, and characterizes one of the best ethnological schools of ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... "cure" of "secret diseases"—these latter, preying upon the fears of humanity, declare that every possible affliction in both sexes may result from masturbation, and recommend innumerable miraculous remedies for these often imaginary ills. Disorders and displacements of the uterus, ulcers and cancer, gastralgia and gastric spasms, jaundice, pains in the nose, are supposed in women to result from masturbation, as well as fluor albus, nymphomania, &c. There is hardly a single organ of the body of which disease ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... No imaginary contrast to a case like this, could be as complete as that which is constantly presented in the New Court, the gravity of which is frequently disturbed in no small degree, by the cunning and pertinacity of juvenile offenders. A boy of thirteen is tried, say for picking the pocket of some subject ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... began to imagine various sensations as my mind pictured the long, lancet tooth sinking deep into the skin, and the blood pumping up. I even began to feel the hot rush of my vital fluid over my arm, and then found that I had dozed for a moment and that all my sensations were imaginary. But soon a gentle tickling became apparent, and, in spite of putting this out of my mind and with increasing doubts as to the bat being still there, the tickling continued. It changed to a tingling, rather ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... am giddy; expectation whirls me round. Th' imaginary relish is so sweet That it enchants my sense; what will it be When that the wat'ry palate tastes indeed Love's thrice-repured nectar? Death, I fear me; Swooning destruction; or some joy too fine, Too subtle-potent, ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... that the glaciers once dropped along Maine valleys, when his quiet voice summoned me back to India and the convalescent camp beyond whose outer gate I stood. Two flags on lances formed the gate and the boundary line was mostly imaginary; but one did not trespass, because at about the point where vision no longer pierced the mist there stood a sentry, and the grounding of a butt on gravel and now and then a cough ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... career, he began to imagine in detail the potentialities of greatness for the loss of which Fate owed him reparation. And so absorbed did he become in this game of fancy, and so enamored was he of his own imaginary deeds, that he lost sight of the fact that they were of the stuff that dreams are made of. With frank and innocent trustfulness he told them to his friends, both young and old, and soon earned a reputation as a most unblushing liar. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... stalks in tufts from the roots by the handful. Meantime their tongues were not idle. Ulrich boastfully told her that Pater Benedictus had seen his picture of her father, recognized it instantly, and muttered something over it. His mother's blood was strong in him; his imaginary world was a very different one from that of the narrow-minded boys ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... human hand had anything to do with it. Men only made the best of this piece of work when they found it ready made. They fancy it was made for them, because they observe things in it which they know how to improve to their own conveniency; but all they ascribe to the design and contrivance of an imaginary architect, is but the effect of their preposterous imaginations. This so regular, and so well-contrived house, was made in just the same manner as a cave, and men finding it ready made to their hands made use of it, as they would in a storm, ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... friendly Assistance that she could expect from her, during Bellamora's stay in Town: which she did with so much Earnestness, and visible Integrity, that the pretty innocent Creature was going to make her a full and real Discovery of her imaginary insupportable Misfortunes; and (doubtless) had done it, had she not been prevented by the Return of the Lady, whom she hop'd to have found her Cousin Brightly. The Gentleman, her Husband just saw her within Doors, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the Department The Imaginary Mistress The Middle Classes Cousin ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... force making for ruin. What's his private judgment to me, or mine to him? But for the sake of it, he'll make everything mud and puddle! Of course you may say to me—it is perfectly open to you to say'—he looked away from her, half-forgetting her, addressing with animation and pugnacity an imaginary opponent—'what do morals matter?—how do you know that the present moral judgments of the world represent any ultimate truth? Ah! well'—he shrugged his shoulders—'I can't follow you there. Black may be really ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or more, my Sundays and the most of my evenings were riots of ink and blood. The ink was real enough and the blood purely imaginary. My heroes spilled the latter and I the former. Sometimes my yarns were refused, but the most of them were accepted and paid for. Editors of other periodicals began to write to me requesting contributions. My price rose. For one particularly ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... who had two or three separate imaginary lives, which they took up on such occasions. One was a supposed life in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Robert used to plan the whole house and grounds; just what horses he would keep, what hounds, what cows, ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... nothing very definite was known of the style of Scopas. While numerous statues by him, all representing divinities or other imaginary beings, are mentioned in our literary sources, only one of these is described in such a way as to give any notion of its artistic character. This was a Maenad, or female attendant of the god Bacchus, who was represented in a frenzy of religious excitement. The theme suggests a strong tendency ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... be better if she came up to London oftener and had a fuller life," returned Pauline, with decision. "Her ill health has always been mainly imaginary, Rose. When people have nothing else to do, they sink into invalidism. But you are making me lose my character as a hostess altogether. Let us take in the tea. Your aunt will wonder ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke
... time to interfere. She heard an imaginary bleat, and ordered Hal out to see what was the matter, hindering the girl by force from running after him, for the snow was coming down in larger flakes than ever. Nevertheless, when her husband was heard outside she threw a cloak over her head and hurried out to speak with him. 'That ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from a morbid conscience,—a conscience which magnified infirmities into crimes, and transformed our blessed Father in heaven into a stern judge, who punishes to the uttermost every real or imaginary departure from what we apprehend to be his requirements. Deceived by the false theological views in which I was educated, I was continually lashed by the scorpion whip of ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... thim weep. But it makes Hogan believe in fairies while he's at it. He's irresponsible. There ain't annything in th' wurruld f'r him but dark villyans an' blond heroes. An' he's always fightin' these here imaginary inimies an' frinds, wantin' to desthroy a poor, tired, scared villyan, an' losin' his good money to a hero. I've thried to stop him. 'Use ye'er willpower,' say I. 'Limit ye'ersilf to a book or two a day,' says I. 'Stay ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... churches within the city walls, entered the monasteries burned their invaluable libraries, and invaded the nunneries. The streets were filled with monks and nuns, running this way and that, shrieking and fluttering, to escape the claws of fiendish Calvinists. The terror was imaginary, for not the least remarkable feature in these transactions was that neither insult nor injury was offered to man or woman, and that not a farthing's value of the immense amount of property was appropriated. Similar scenes were enacted in all the other provinces, with the exception of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... to go into a detailed history of the practical working of woman suffrage in Wyoming, but I can add my testimony to the fact that its effect has been most salutary and beneficial. Not one of the imaginary evils which its opponents predicted has ever been realized here. On this frontier, where the roughest element is supposed to exist, and where women are so largely in the minority—even here, under these adverse circumstances, woman's influence has redeemed our politics. Our elections ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... own sex, and the piano forte was already sending forth its sonorous harmony from one end of the Union to the other, while the glittering usefulness of the tambour-frame was discarded for the pallet and brush. The walls of our mansions were beginning to groan with the sickly green of imaginary fields, that caricatured the beauties of nature; and skies of sunny brightness, that mocked the golden hues of even an American sun. The experience of Miss Emmerson went no further than the simple ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... upon the most unnatural explanations in return. The best refutation of his exposition is to be found in Pococke. It is absurd to suppose that the actual going forth of Christ from Bethlehem is here contrasted with one which is merely imaginary,—the action, with a mere decree. It is without any analogy that some one should be designated as actually existing, or going forth, who exists merely in the divine foreknowledge, or the divine predestination.—The ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... mind, sir, either to openly profess himself a courtier or to devote himself to his duty when he is an officer." Education in the schools for cadets, regularity in service, obligation to keep the companies full instead of pocketing a portion of the pay in the name of imaginary soldiers who appeared only on the registers, and who were called dummies (passe-volants), the necessity of wearing uniform, introduced into the army customs to which the French nobility, as undisciplined as they were brave, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... imaginary attacks, sometimes in showers, and we steaming in our ponchos or shivering without them, ploughing through the wet bushes or throwing ourselves flat in them. Then, from whatever positions we found ourselves in, we had to "simulate firing" at an enemy until ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... the last time that Lady Hester had the opportunity of playing the queen, or entertaining a distinguished guest at Dar Joon. In June, when the packet brought no news of her imaginary property, and no apology from Queen or Premier, she began at last to despair. 'The die is cast,' she told Dr. Meryon, 'and the sooner you take yourself off the better. I have no money; you can be of no use to me—I shall write no more letters, and shall break up my establishment, wall up my gate, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... bisect the circle to separate the territory for the players. In addition to the circle and line, two spots should be marked on the ground, from which the ball is served. These should be at the ends of an imaginary line crossing the first line at right angles, and should be six feet from the pole, one on each side ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... latitude, and more particularly Glasshouse and Harvey's Bays. The English government at length resolved that they would wipe off the reproach, which, as Captain Flinders observes, was not without some reason attributed to them, "that an imaginary line of more than 250 leagues of extent, in the vicinity of one of their colonies, should have been so long suffered to remain traced upon the charts, under the title of UNKNOWN COAST," and they accordingly appointed him to the command of an expedition fitted out ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... must be content to see these in imagination. But sometimes I feel disposed to regret that we are not really afloat in the 'Research;' and at other times I congratulate myself that the voyage is only imaginary; for in Polynesia particularly, we have met with so many ignorant, savage people, it is well for us that we can, if we choose, steer clear of them. I suppose it would not be possible in all Europe to find a country ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... the nature of Brahman. Death doth not devour creatures like a tiger; its form itself is unascertainable. Besides this, some imagine Yama to be Death. This, however, is due to the weakness of the mind. The pursuit of Brahman or self-knowledge is immortality. That (imaginary) god (Yama) holdeth his sway in the region of the Pitris, being the source of bliss to the virtuous and of woe to the sinful. It is at his command that death in the form of wrath, ignorance, and covetousness, occurreth among men. Swayed by pride, men always walk in unrighteous path. None amongst ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to an imaginary bellboy, "Show this gentleman to Number 2323! Are you alone, sir, or just by yourself? I think you will like the room-it faces on the coal-chute, and has hot and cold folding-doors, and running water when the roof leaks! The bed is made once a week, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... little with his exertion, "I don't think it's likely.—What say, sir?" he added, addressing an imaginary Malay fighting-man. "Have I seen your spear? No, sir. Haven't set eyes upon it, honour bright.—'Always tell the truth, Pete,' granny used to say. Well, ain't that the truth? Why, I don't believe a cat could have seen it; and if I hadn't knocked it down I shouldn't have known ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... suppose she wouldn't suffer in giving up her love? Of course she would suffer! The very extremity of her suffering would prove the extremity of her need. Passionately Rosie defended herself against her imaginary accusers, because unconsciously ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... Rousseau's Emile appeared La Chalotais's Essai d'education nationale (1763). Rene de la Chalotais, a Solicitor-General for the Parliament of Bretagne, was one of the notable French parliamentarians of the middle of the eighteenth century. Unlike Rousseau's highly imaginary, exaggerated, sentimental, and paradoxical volume, La Chalotais produced a practical and philosophical discussion of the problem of the education of a people. Declaring firmly that education was essentially a civil affair; that it was the function of government to make citizens contented ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... sleeves of her gown join them. Through the little holes in the pattern of these kindly mittens her white arms can be seen gleaming like snow beneath the faint rays of the early moon. With one hand she is playing some imaginary air upon the ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... long lying in bed. He entered hospital, I understand, towards the end of 1914, suffering from influenza. Since then he has had a nibble at every imaginable disease, not to mention a number of imaginary ones as well. Regularly four times a day he would waddle round the ward in his dingy old dressing-gown, discussing symptoms with every cot. In exchange for your helping of pudding he would take your temperature and let you know the answer, and for a bunch of grapes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... he is not an imaginary case—who is married, and has young people growing up in the home. He is wealthy, with a reputable position in society. But there is a sinister something in the background of his life, and he sets himself to do what he knows full well is an irreparable wrong to an inexperienced ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... but by far the greater number are as incomprehensible as the hieroglyphics of the Aztecs. I remember that a Korak once brought to me an old tattered fashion-plate from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper containing three or four full-length figures of imaginary ladies, in the widest expansion of crinoline which fashion at that time prescribed. The poor Korak said he had often wondered what those curious objects could be; and now, as I was an American, perhaps I could tell him. He evidently had not the most remote suspicion that they were intended to ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... prepare his summing up, for no careful trial lawyer opens a case without first having prepared, to some extent, at least, his closing address to the jury. He has thought about this for weeks and perhaps for months. In his dreams he has formulated syllogisms and delivered them to imaginary yet obstinate talesman. He has glanced through many volumes for similes and quotations of pertinency. He has tried various arguments on his friends until he knows just how, if he succeeds in proving certain ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... of every thing which reason, ridicule, malice, and falsehood could supply. They have concentrated all their hatred on me, till they have really persuaded themselves, that I am the sole source of all their imaginary evils. I hope, therefore, that my retirement will abate some of their disaffection to the government of their country, and that my successor will enter on a calmer sea than I did. He will at least find the vessel of state in the hands of his friends, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... and the Kit-kat, the great Whig club, were chiefly reserved for politics; but the fashion of clubbing having once come in, it was soon followed by people of all fancies. No reader of the 'Spectator' can fail to remember the ridicule to which this was turned by descriptions of imaginary clubs for which the qualifications were absurd, and of which the business, on meeting, was preposterous nonsense of some kind. The idea of such fraternities, as the Club of Fat Men, the Ugly Club, the Sheromp Club, the Everlasting Club, the Sighing Club, the Amorous Club, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... humour. The most notorious sinners of all those fellow mortals whom it is our business to discuss—Harry Fielding and Dick Steele, were especially loud, and I believe really fervent, in their expressions of belief; they belaboured freethinkers, and stoned imaginary atheists on all sorts of occasions, going out of their way to bawl their own creed, and persecute their neighbour's, and if they sinned and stumbled, as they constantly did with debt, with drink, with all sorts of bad behaviour, they got up on their knees, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of a hundred of the irony remarked upon above. In his first important book, Dickens lashed the loathsome corruption of our oligarchical politics, their blaring servility and dirty diplomacy of bribes, under the name of an imaginary town called Eatanswill. If Eatanswill, wherever it was, had been burned to the ground by its indignant neighbours the day after the exposure, it would have been not inappropriate. If it had been entirely deserted by its inhabitants, if they had fled to hide themselves ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... view. To a soil of inexhaustible fertility it unites a genial and healthy climate, and is destined at a day not distant to make large contributions to the commerce of the world. Its territory is separated from the United States in part by an imaginary line, and by the river Sabine for a distance of 310 miles, and its productions are the same with those of many of the contiguous States of the Union. Such is the country, such are its inhabitants, and such its capacities to add to the general ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the pledges given by both sides formed a solid basis for a modus vivendi: the King gave guarantees thoroughly safeguarding the Allies against any danger, real or imaginary; and the Allies gave guarantees equally safeguarding the King against seditious intrigues. All that remained was that the Allies should exact from the King a fulfilment of his engagements, and fulfil their own. They did not fail in the first part of the programme. The transfer of troops ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... at his heels, while the troop dismounted and watered at the stream, Mrs. Folsom's heart was gladdened by his confident and joyous bearing. Twice, thrice he had seen Red Cloud and all his braves, and there was nothing, said he, to worry about. "Ugly, of course they are; got some imaginary grievances and talk big about the warpath. Why, what show would those fellows have with their old squirrel rifles and gas-pipe Springfields against our new breech-loaders? They know it as well as we do. It's all a bluff, Mrs. Folsom. You mark my words," ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... and enabled to discard the grape system, never afterward got over the habit of talking as if they were dictating to a slow amanuensis, because they always made a pause between each two words while they sucked the substance out of an imaginary grape. He said these were tedious people to talk with. He said that men who had been cured by the other process were easily distinguished from the rest of mankind because they always tilted their heads back, between every two words, and swallowed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... introduction therein of individuals whom the author dressed in names and costumes peculiar to that country. We are authorized by M. Alphonse Daudet to declare that those scenes in the book which relate to Tunis are entirely imaginary, and that he never intended to introduce any of the functionaries ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the more freely speak what I judg'd, without being obliged to follow, or to refute the opinions which are received amongst the Learned, I resolved to leave all this world here to their disputes, and to speak onely of what would happen in a new one, if God now created some where in those imaginary spaces matter enough to compose it, and that he diversly and without order agitated the severall parts of this matter, so as to compose a Chaos of it as confused as the Poets could feign one: and that afterwards ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes
... the indiscretion to write with a diamond on the window of a public inn. At Carron, where he was refused a sight of the magnificent foundry, he avenged himself in epigram. At Inverary he resented some real or imaginary neglect on the part of his Grace of Argyll, by a stinging lampoon; nor can he be said to have fairly regained his serenity of temper, till he danced his wrath away with some Highland ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... he neither fears nor feels death; if he feels it, his sufferings make him desire it; henceforth it is no evil in his eyes. If we were but content to be ourselves we should have no cause to complain of our lot; but in the search for an imaginary good we find a thousand real ills. He who cannot bear a little pain must expect to suffer greatly. If a man injures his constitution by dissipation, you try to cure him with medicine; the ill he fears is added to the ill he feels; the thought of death makes ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... separation, and can make even the most barren country gleam as a place of refuge and consolation. With a little more experience of life I might have considered beforehand that the real Italy could not fulfil all the blessed promises of the imaginary Italy. At the beginning they did indeed all seem to be realized. It commenced with sunshine, and the vintage - golden light upon browning foliage, merry country folk and song; a gleam of a better world after the dull and solemn North: a glorious ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... which the tip of the tongue is bound down to the floor of the mouth by an abnormally short and narrow frenum, or by folds of mucous membrane on each side of the frenum, so that the tongue cannot be protruded. Although this deformity is rare, it is common for parents to blame an imaginary tongue-tie when a child is slow in learning to speak, or when he speaks indistinctly or stammers, and the doctor is frequently requested to divide the frenum under such circumstances. In the vast majority of cases nothing is found to be wrong with the frenum. In ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... miller's daughter is lost to him and he is tortured by anxiety for her future. Otherwise he does what so frequently is done by the moon walker, he carries out the apparently harmless activity of the day as he prays in the church before an imaginary audience. At least he truly imitates the formalities with which prayer begins, though the conclusion does not accord with the beginning. It sounds like a justification before the folk of Rodenstein, who have taken offence at ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... pride of colony which made the Bostonian critical of the New Yorker, or gave to the true Virginian a feeling of superiority to the "zealots" of New, England. To the Scotch-Irish or German dweller in the Shenandoah Valley it mattered little whether he lived north or south of an imaginary and disputed line that divided Maryland from Pennsylvania. Political subjection to Virginia could not remove the Blue Ridge Mountains which isolated him far more effectively from Williamsburg than from Baltimore, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... become the theme of my book; for I feel that I cannot serve the cause of education better than by trying to describe and interpret the work that is being done in it. The school belongs to a village which I will call Utopia. It is not an imaginary village—a village of Nowhere—but a very real village, which can be reached, as all other villages can, by rail and road. It nestles at the foot of a long range of hills; and if you will climb the ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... stock-jobbing." The Duke of Wharton declared that "the artificial and prodigious rise of the South Sea stock was a dangerous bait, which might decoy many unwary people to their ruin, and allure them, by a false prospect of gain, to part with what they had got by their labor and industry to purchase imaginary riches." Lord Cowper said that the bill, "like the Trojan horse, was ushered in and received with great pomp and acclamations of joy, but was contrived for treachery and destruction." Lord Sunderland, however, spoke warmly in favor of the bill, and contended that "they who countenanced the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... are acquainted; but by far the greater number are as incomprehensible as the hieroglyphics of the Aztecs. I remember that a Korak once brought to me an old tattered fashion-plate from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper containing three or four full-length figures of imaginary ladies, in the widest expansion of crinoline which fashion at that time prescribed. The poor Korak said he had often wondered what those curious objects could be; and now, as I was an American, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Meg at the window, seemed suddenly possessed with a melodramatic fit, for he fell down on one knee in the snow, beat his breast, tore his hair, and clasped his hands imploringly, as if begging some boon. And when Meg told him to behave himself and go away, he wrung imaginary tears out of his handkerchief, and staggered round the corner as if ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Kendal, under the circumstances, would have hurt him if he bad known of it, but only through his sympathy and his affection—he was unacquainted with the jealousy of a father. But in Janet's eyes they made their little world together, indispensable to each other as its imaginary hemispheres. She had a quiet pain, in the infrequent moments when she allowed herself the full realization of her love for Kendal, in the knowledge that she, of her own motion, had disturbed its unities and ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... sunshiny town, lying within certain bounds—geographical or imaginary,—these events (really or in imagination) occurred. Precisely when, the chroniclers do not say. Scene opens with the breezes which June, and the coming of a new school teacher, naturally create. After the fashion of the place, his lodgings ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... Do you think then—of course I am only putting an imaginary instance—do you think that in the case of a young married couple, say about two years married, if the husband suddenly becomes the intimate friend of a woman of—well, more than doubtful character—is always calling upon her, lunching with her, and probably ...
— Lady Windermere's Fan • Oscar Wilde
... shipping the materials for some houses there, having all the work put on them here that could be done, thus saving the difference in wages, and to have them arrive there before the rainy season set in, and thus realize the imaginary fortune that I had expected from my interest in the company. In the following spring I had twelve houses constructed. The main point upon which my speculation seemed to rest was to get them to San Francisco before the rainy season commenced. I went to New York to secure freight for them in the fastest ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... over, picking out favorites here and there and excitedly extolling the merits of the imaginary properties they represented. There were the repudiated bonds of Southern states and municipalities of railroads upon whose tracks no wheel had ever turned; of factories never built except in Doc Barrows' addled brain; of companies which had defaulted ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... convention which though it was used with manliness and entire sincerity by Sidney did not escape the fate of its kind. Dante's love for Beatrice, Petrarch's for Laura, the gallant and passionate adoration of Sidney for his Stella became the models for a dismal succession of imaginary woes. They were all figments of the mind, perhaps hardly that; they all use the same terms and write in fixed strains, epicurean and sensuous like Ronsard, ideal and intellectualized like Dante, sentimental and adoring like Petrarch. Into this ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... freely, he was hardly conscious when he was lying either on a small scale or on a large, being equally delighted with his own conceits and with the pleasure he was giving to his auditors. While thus recounting real and imaginary incidents, he could almost delude himself into the belief that he was still the bold, radiant Casanova, the favorite of fortune and of beautiful women, the honored guest of secular and spiritual princes, the man whose spendings and gamblings ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... cannot now recollect, I have no record of any part of it, except that there were several people there by no means of the Johnsonian school; so that less attention was paid to him than usual, which put him out of humour; and upon some imaginary offence from me, he attacked me with such rudeness, that I was vexed and angry, because it gave those persons an opportunity of enlarging upon his supposed ferocity, and ill treatment of his best friends. I was so much hurt, and had my pride so much roused, that I kept away from him for ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... before the baton arrives at what might be termed the "bottom" of the beat is actually more important than the "bottom" of the beat itself. When the baton is brought down for the first beat of the measure, the muscles contract until the imaginary point which the baton is to strike has been reached, relaxing while the hand moves on to the next point (i.e., the second beat) gradually contracting again as this point is reached, and relaxing immediately afterward as the hand moves on to the third beat. In the diagrams of baton ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... every Station of Life, and which methinks every Master should teach his Scholars. I mean the writing of English Letters. To this End, instead of perplexing them with Latin Epistles, Themes and Verses, there might be a punctual Correspondence established between two Boys, who might act in any imaginary Parts of Business, or be allow'd sometimes to give a range to their own Fancies, and communicate to each other whatever Trifles they thought fit, provided neither of them ever fail'd at the appointed time to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... never gay. This Noemi admitted, but to-day the cloud of sorrow seemed heavier than ever. Perhaps it was the fault of l'Intruse. Jeanne said, "Indeed it must be so," but with a look and an accent that implied that l'Intruse who had made her so sad was not the imaginary being in Maeterlinck's book but the ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... consequence by what name you called your people, whether by that of freemen or of slaves; that in some countries the laboring poor were called freemen, in others they were called slaves; but that the difference as to the state was imaginary only. What matters it whether a landlord employing ten laborers on his farm, give them annually as much money as will buy them the necessaries of life, or gives them those necessaries at short hand? The ten laborers add as much wealth annually to the state, increase its exports ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... with a shudder, not a real shudder though. The sort one makes over a purely imaginary prospect. Some expression of her feeling must have betrayed itself in Mary's face, for Paula, happening to look at her just then, sat ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... pay! He left Toashia on July 11 with 500 men, of whom 150 only were any good. On this march there was a threatened attack, which fortunately did not come off, but that he felt he was in great danger we may gather from the extract: "We have, thank God, passed our dangers. Whether they were imaginary or not, I do not know, but we were threatened by an attack from thousands of determined blacks, who knew I was here. Now very few Englishmen know what it is to be with troops they have not a bit of confidence ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... years ago, when at Harrow, a friend of the author engraved on a particular spot the names of both, with a few additional words, as a memorial. Afterwards, on receiving some real or imaginary injury, the author destroyed the frail record before he left Harrow. On revisiting the place in 1807, he wrote ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... Lord Henry, his head still bowed, and his free hand picking imaginary atoms of fluff from his trousers, "that if you tell me the truth, our two heads may make some progress. If you deliberately mislead me, although the task will even then not be beyond the wit of man, it will be a little ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... you a story in which I played a part, and after that we can discuss it, for it seems to me childish to practise with the scalpel on an imaginary body. Begin by dissecting ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... analogy to the Feng-shui or geomancy of the Chinese. Both take ancient superstitions which seem incompatible with science and systematize them into pseudo-sciences, remaining blind to the fact that the subject-matter is wholly imaginary.] ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... whole, but under the ignoble colours of religious fanaticism. Hence that strangely artificial alliance between the landlords of the South and West and the democratic tenantry, artisans, and merchants of the North; an alliance formed to meet an imaginary danger, and kept in being with the most mischievous results to the social and economic development of Ireland. Since the Protestant minority had made up its mind to depend once more on the English power it had defied in 1782, the old machine ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... inconstancy of his judgment, in consequence of which he often judges things from mere emotion, and the things which he believes contribute to his joy or his sorrow, and which, therefore, he endeavors to bring to pass or remove, are often only imaginary—to say nothing about the uncertainty of things—it is easy to see that a man may often be himself the cause of his sorrow or his joy, or of being affected with sorrow or joy accompanied with the idea of himself as its cause, so that we can easily understand what repentance ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... will look at a globe, or, if you have not a globe, at a map of the world, turning the South Pole from you, or uppermost, and, supposing yourself to be in a ship, sail across the Atlantic Ocean till you come to the Equator, which is an imaginary line that divides the northern half of the globe from the southern; then "cross the line," as it is called, and sail along the South Atlantic, in the direction of the coast of South America, till you arrive at its southern extremity, which ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... remained seated. He knew before the second act there was an interminable wait; but he did not want to chance running into Holworthy in the lobby and he told himself it would be rude to abandon Sister Anne. But he now was not so conscious of the imaginary Sister Anne as of the actual box party on his near right, who were laughing and chattering volubly. He wondered whether they laughed at him—whether Miss Flagg were again entertaining them at his expense; again making his advances appear ridiculous. He was so sure of it that he flushed indignantly. ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... an ardent and imaginative temperament, I was dissatisfied with the dull routine of ordinary things. I used to feed my fancy with creatures of the possible, and, without the aid of artificial stimulants of the brain, often conjured up imaginary beings and predicaments which had a charm for me, I cannot very well explain or account for. I cared little for dreams, or the artificial combinations produced by narcotics; they had too little of reality ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... made, by the mischievous Effects of her Beauty, will be properly genteel indirect Flattery—if it be well conducted,—otherwise, the Insipid; But it cannot be deem'd Raillery; It being impossible to suppose the Lady really chagrin'd by such an imaginary Misfortune, or uneasy at any ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... help, and tore the slender stalks in tufts from the roots by the handful. Meantime their tongues were not idle. Ulrich boastfully told her that Pater Benedictus had seen his picture of her father, recognized it instantly, and muttered something over it. His mother's blood was strong in him; his imaginary world was a very different one from that of the narrow-minded boys of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "Morse" and "Steve" were our chief song writers. Each sat on a quarter six-pounder, one on the starboard, the other on the port. "I will, if you chaps will join in the chorus," answered "Morse." "No, thank you," he added, as some one handed him an imaginary glass. "Nature has wet my whistle pretty thoroughly to-night." "Stump," in his most impressive manner, stepped forward, and in true master-of-ceremonies style introduced our entertainer. He was enlarging on the undoubted merits of the composer and singer, and had ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... styled "the new Moses," and there is a list of his Ten Commandments; in another there is a Catechism as to who is Buonaparte, with not very flattering answers. In others there are sketches of the imaginary entry of Napoleon with graphic scenes of pillage, &c., and again adaptations of theatrical language, ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... to see the kid could make me do anything I didn't want to," and Darn doubled up his fists and flung them out in the air at an imaginary adversary. ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... in war was a subject which gave much discussion, but few people, even in the army, thought that the aeroplane would be of great service except for scouting. At the airdrome where I learned to fly we used to practice dropping bombs—-imaginary ones, of course—-but we were so inaccurate at it that none of us imagined we would be of much use in that direction in actual warfare. I have heard it said that the Germans directed their artillery by signals dropped from aircraft at the very beginning. They did so before they had fought ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... come forth from that shining lake like a beautiful Ondine! Ah, if she would but step out from the green shade of that secret grove like a Dryad of sylvan Greece! O mystery of mysteries, when youth dreams his first dream over some imaginary heroine! ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... reprimanded by party leaders. Especially in international diplomacy is truthfulness far to seek. Secretary Hay, indeed, stated in the following words: "The principles which have guided us have been of limpid simplicity. We have set no traps; we have wasted no time in evading the imaginary traps of others. There might be worse reputations for a country to acquire than that of always speaking the truth, and always expecting it from others. In bargaining we have tried not to get the worst of the deal, alway remembering, however, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... words saint and hermit with a special purpose. It was by the influence, actual or imaginary, of such, that the Teutons, after the destruction of the Roman empire, were saved from becoming hordes of savages, destroying each other ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... character, my main scruple is satisfied when I have made it plain that they have no more authenticity because they happen to be written in dramatic form, than they would have were they written as political essays. These are imaginary conversations which never actually took place; and though I think they have a nearer relation to the minds of the supposed speakers than have King's speeches to the person who utters them, they must merely be taken as a personal reading of characters and events, tributes to men ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... regions, which increase considerably during the winter, and decrease during the summer seasons on that planet; but there are no canals! The fact that our largest and best telescopes failed to show these imaginary canals, was an insurmountable barrier to the advocates of these markings, but the "Canalites" made their contention ridiculous when they actually suggested that the reason for this failure to perceive ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... testifies, [Footnote: Preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.] had been to write stories. And a dearer pleasure had been—to use her own characteristic abstract and elongated way of putting it—'the following up trains of thought which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents'. All readers of Shelley's life remember how later on, as a girl of nineteen—and a two years' wife—she was present, 'a devout but nearly silent listener', at the long symposia held by her husband and Byron in Switzerland ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... the part of a little son. I remember feeling, then and afterwards, very queer and shamefaced about my histrionic papa and mamma. It is striking to observe, not only how early, but how powerfully, imagination [13] is developed in our childhood. For some time after, I regarded those imaginary parents as sustaining a peculiar relation, not only to me, but to one another; I thought they were in love, if not to be married. But they never were married, nor ever thought of it, I suppose. All that drama was wrought out in ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... friends were Bernard de Ventadour, whose lays, mysteriously addressed to Bel Viser and Conort, had gained him so much fame; Rudel, the enthusiast, who devoted his life to an imaginary passion; Adhemar and Rambaud d'Aurenge, whose songs were some of the sweetest of their time; and Pierre Rogiers, who sighed his soul away for "Tort n'avetz;" and, amongst them all, his poems were held in the greatest esteem. The beautiful and coquettish mistress ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Jimmie dismissed the taxi-cab and asked for a room adjoining an imaginary Senator Gates. When the clerk told him Senator Gates was not at that hotel, Jimmie excitedly demanded to be led to the telephone. He telephoned the office of the steamship line: and, in the name of Henry Hull, secured ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... mother-in-law drank, or that the horse drank wherefore, then, the reference to the intoxicating bowl? It does seem to me that if Mr. Bloke had let the intoxicating bowl alone himself, he never would have got into so much trouble about this exasperating imaginary accident. I have read this. absurd item over and over again, with all its insinuating plausibility, until my head swims; but I can make neither head nor tail of it. There certainly seems to have been an accident of some kind or other, but it is impossible ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Fatherland, where the truth can be freely spoken, nobody would be able to molest him in order to discover the truth. We do not attempt it. Having established the powers of the Council, it is easy to understand that the right people clung by each other, in order to maintain the imaginary sovereignty and to give a gloss to the whole business. Nine men were chosen to represent the whole commonalty, and commissions and instructions were given that whatever these men should do, should be the act of the whole commonalty. And so in fact it was, ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... given in this passage are purely imaginary. Parts of the Mahabharata are very ancient. Yudhishthira is no more an historical personage than Achilles or Romulus. It is improbable that a 'throne of Delhi' existed in 575 B.C., and hardly anything is known about the state of India ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary. The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... put his hand near the butt of his weapon. He held his arm out before him, dangling in the air. There was a convulsive moment. One could see the imaginary weapon shoot from the holster and become level and rigid, ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... in a manner altogether too logical and too violent to suit Luther or the desires of the princes. The German peasants had grievances against the old order compared with which those of the knights and towns-folk were imaginary. For at least a century several causes had contributed to make their lot worse and worse. While their taxes and other burdens were increasing, the ability of the emperor to protect them was decreasing; they were plundered by every class in the community, especially ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... the journey much as a provost-marshal leading his brother to prison.[936] Now the imaginary resemblance was turned into a sad reality. On Thursday, the thirty-first of October, the Bourbons reached Orleans.[937] Their reception soon convinced them that they had placed their heads in the jaws of the lion. None of the courtiers save the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Madame de la Mesangere.—This lady was the daughter of Madame de la Sabliere.—Translator. She was the lady termed La Marquise with whom Fontenelle sustained his imaginary "conversation" in the "Plurality of Worlds," a book which became very popular both in France and England. [44] Dido's faithless guest.—Aeneas, with whom Dido, according to Virgil and Ovid, was in love, but who loved not, and ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... Helen's objections were all overruled, and when the engagement was made known to Beauclerc, he shrugged, and shrank, and submitted; observing, "that all men, and all women, must from the moment they come within the precincts of London life, give up their time and their will to an imaginary necessity of going when we do not like it, where we do not wish, to see those whom we have no desire to see, and who do not care if they were never to see us again, except for the sake of their own reputation of playing well their own parts ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... LANDLORD ARE NOW FINALLY CLOSED, closed, and it was my purpose to have addressed thee in the vein of Jedediah Cleishbotham; but, like Horam the son of Asmar, and all other imaginary story-tellers, Jedediah has melted ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... trying to scrape acquaintance with his cousin by winks and grimaces behind his mother's back, and now made a sign of drinking out of an imaginary glass. But Tom clung to his uncle, and softly pulled him down again on his chair, from which he had risen to go to ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... is none the less recorded and enshrined in heaven; nor is that the only true ideal that has not where to lay its head. What in the sensualistic or mystical system was called reality will now be termed appearance, and what there figured as an imaginary construction borne by the conscious moment will now appear to be a prototype for all existence and an eternal ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... steal him, and he is no cannibal. He won't eat your sausage!" and the boy put up his elbow as though to ward off on imaginary blow. "You see, this dog was following off a pet dog that belonged to a woman, and she tried to shoo him away, but he wouldn't shoo. This dog did not know that he was a low born, miserable dog, and had no right to move in the society of an aristocratic ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... still and silent as a death-watch, Father Holland fumbling and pretending to pore over some holy volume, Eric with fingers tightly interlaced and upper teeth biting through lower lip, and I with clenched fists dug into jacket pockets and a thousand imaginary sounds singing wild tunes in ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... arrived. In the evening a woman shouted and yelled; all rushed to their spears, and there was great running, snorting, and blowing at some imaginary enemy. After the chief came in, we lay about the fire for some time; then to our blankets. I was beginning to nod, when some women in a neighbouring house began giggling and laughing. Our friend wakened up and began talking. I told him to sleep; he answered, Kuku mahuta, ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... But it is another world as seen by the novelist, even by such a one as Walter Scott. The romantic life which he depicts is simply the life which we see our own neighbors live, with more picturesque situations, with more to excite curiosity in the reader, and activity in the imaginary hero. We gain more from him, it is true, than from those copies of the too familiar faces around us which are the staple commodity in novels of the day. He at least carries us into scenes of adventure, where we may forget the "smooth tale" of our nineteenth-century life. But further he cannot go, ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... exercised by the missionaries, which doubtless extended to secular matters; the connection of Christianity with trade; and the astounding progress made by it in the space of half a century—all tended to confirm. Enough has been said to show that we need not go so far as the intrigues, real or imaginary, of the English and Dutch, to look for causes for the renewed stimulus given at this date to the measures ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... only by the occasional use of his imagination in reading or otherwise, that the practical man can hope to be in physical or mental condition to do them. He needs a rest from his actual self. A man cannot even be practical without this imaginary or larger self. Unless he can work off his unexpressed remnant, his limbs are not free. Even down to the meanest of us, we are incurably larger than anything ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... has a design by this conduct (sometimes complaining of my shyness, at others exalting in my imaginary favours) to induce me at one time to acquiesce with his compliments; at another to be more complaisant for his complaints; and if the contradiction be not the effect of his inattention and giddiness; I shall think him as deep and as artful ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... Wallace was at the Malay Archipelago, he observed that the quadrupeds inhabiting the various islands belonged to the same or to closely allied species. But he also observed that all the quadrupeds inhabiting the islands lying on one side of an imaginary sinuous line, differed widely from the quadrupeds inhabiting the islands lying on the other side of that line. Now, soundings showed that in exact correspondence with this imaginary sinuous line the sea was ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... whatever it was that represented Massachusetts, or Virginia, were genuine symbols. That is to say, they were fed by actual experiences from childhood, occupation, residence, and the like. The span of men's experience had rarely traversed the imaginary boundaries of their states. The word Virginian was related to pretty nearly everything that most Virginians had ever known or felt. It was the most extensive political idea which had genuine contact with ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... a name only, that you contend?" asked Mad. d'Aulney; "must our domestic peace and safety remain in jeopardy, and the din of strife forever ring around us, because a powerless enemy refuses to yield imaginary rights?" ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... blood, would excite our suspicion. These burglars made a considerable haul at Sydenham a fortnight ago. Some account of them and of their appearance was in the papers, and would naturally occur to anyone who wished to invent a story in which imaginary robbers should play a part. As a matter of fact, burglars who have done a good stroke of business are, as a rule, only too glad to enjoy the proceeds in peace and quiet without embarking on another perilous undertaking. Again, it is unusual for burglars to operate at so early ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... expression were alike tragic. In her cheap black dress her look of apprehensive despair was full of mournful intensity as she stood with one hand lifted and her expressive eyes fixed on shapes imaginary. Her friend's philosophy was equal ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... sang of the brook flowing through his upland valley, of the ‘ridged wolds’ that rose above his home, of the mountain-glen and snowy summits of his early dreams, and of the beings, heroes and fairies, with which his imaginary world was peopled. Then was heard the ‘croak of the raven,’ the harsh voice of those ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Weston, and other eminent breeders, as finding from experience that close interbreeding does produce bad effects; and it cannot be supposed that there would be such a consensus of opinion on this point if the evil were altogether imaginary. Mr. Huth argues, that the evil results which do occur do not depend on the close interbreeding itself, but on the tendency it has to perpetuate any constitutional weakness or other hereditary taints; and ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... view of a lunar crater is shown in Plate VIII. This is, no doubt, a somewhat imaginary sketch. The point of view from which the artist is supposed to have taken the picture is one quite unattainable by terrestrial astronomers, yet there can be little doubt that it is a fair representation of objects on the moon. We should, however, ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... has small effect unless it is to be seen in your disposition, in your ordinary life, in your loving consideration for other people, or in your patient endurance of injury, real or imaginary. Without that your profession of Holiness is mere talk ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... I next strove, by drawing an imaginary picture of Olla and himself in their old age, surrounded by their grown up children, to show how happy and beautiful the relation between the child and the aged parent might be. I summoned up all my rhetorical powers, and sketched what I conceived to be a perfect ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... common creed of Christendom. Milton was nearly the last of our great writers who was fully possessed of the doctrine. His readers now no longer share it with the poet. In Addison's time (1712) some of the imaginary persons in Paradise Lost were beginning to make greater demands upon the faith of readers, than those cool ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... these Memoirs is as exciting as any tale of imaginary adventure, with the real horrors of a brutal civil war for background. Byrne is no half-hearted partisan; he hates well, but is not unjust, admitting alike the errors committed by his comrades and the decencies ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... there, on the horse," added the driver, sweeping an imaginary horse's head, with a ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... seed, especially as I am using a commercial pollen with the hope of getting a hardy white walnut with possibly a coarse bark like the black to ward off sun-scald in this climate. They are on their way. I don't know when we'll be eating these imaginary nuts. However, it is not so long ago that fruit growing on the cattle range was a dream. I grew the first pears in Alberta, so far as we know. Now we are insulted if there is not a crop of fruit every year. I have many seedlings ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... escape assassination, LINCOLN arrived at Washington nine days before his inauguration. The outgoing President, at the opening of the session of Congress, had still kept as the majority of his advisors men engaged in treason; had declared that in case of even an "imaginary" apprehension of danger from notions of freedom among the slaves, "disunion would become inevitable." LINCOLN and others had questioned the opinion of Taney; such impugning he ascribed to the "factious temper of the times." The favorite doctrine of the majority of the ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... with marvellous effect, he made no advance in representing the expression of the face, nor in the treatment of the hair. He was daring in his art, for he not only imitated what he saw in life, but he also represented grotesque imaginary creatures, and in many ways proved that he had a rich ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... supposition perhaps came to him later, for at the moment he was dazed by seeing in this small light the same face he had seen over old Cameron's coffin. The sight he had had of it then had almost faded from his memory; he had put it from him as a thing improbable, and therefore imaginary; now it came before his eyes distinctly. A man's face it certainly was not, and, in the fleet moment in which he saw it now, he felt certain that it was a woman's. The match, if it was a match, went out before its wood was well kindled, and all he could see vanished from sight with its light. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... anecdote, typically oriental, which contains a bit of true philosophy. It seems that the hero, Nass-ed-Din Hodja, was a Turkish person who became chief jester to the terrible Tamerlane during his invasion of Asia Minor. He was also the hero, real or imaginary, of many other stories which originated during the close of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries. His tomb is still shown at Akshekir. The story is given entire as it appeared in "Turkey of the ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... was to Betty only a web of very confused pattern; she did not try to unravel it. Her consciousness of just two things was clear: the pleasant stimulus of the task set before her, and a little sharp premonition of its danger. She dismissed that. She could perform the task and detach Pitt from any imaginary ties that his mother was afraid of, without herself thereby becoming entangled. It would be a game of uncommon interest and entertainment, and a piece of benevolence too. But Betty's pulses, as I said, ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... first glance at him across the table. In the shadows of the room she had not seen him distinctly until now, and the sight of his trouble touched her as it never failed to do even when she believed it to be imaginary. As soon as possible she left the table and went to the door, glancing at him over her shoulder. He followed instantly and, passing her swiftly as she stood in the doorway, he beckoned her to ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... over the plate which contains the remains of his repast and scratches perfectly imaginary dust or mould ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... on guard during the black war, watched a small group in the gaol yard round their night fires. One of them raised his hands, and moved them slowly in a horizontal direction; and spreading, as if forming an imaginary fan or quarter-circle: he turned his head from side to side, raising one eye to the sky, where an eagle hawk was soaring. The action was accompanied by words, repeated with unusual emotion: at length they all rose up together, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... whose riper fame has since diffused itself, with the steady influence of moral truth, to the uttermost confines of Christendom.* A wide frontier had been laid naked by this unexpected disaster, and more substantial evils were preceded by a thousand fanciful and imaginary dangers. The alarmed colonists believed that the yells of the savages mingled with every fitful gust of wind that issued from the interminable forests of the west. The terrific character of their merciless enemies increased ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... certain of one established fact in nature, to wit, that there is no place like Japan; and no doubt they daily and hourly thank their stars that their lines have fallen in pleasant places, and pity us—slaves to imaginary wants—who deny ourselves the present happiness they consider it wisdom to enjoy, in vain hopes of banquetting to surfeit at some future time, ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... often wearing the fur, and fins, and feathers of the lower animals. Mingled with these faiths (whether earlier, later, or coeval in origin with these) are the dread and love of ancestral ghosts, often transmuting themselves into worship of an imaginary and ideal first parent of the tribe, who once more is often a beast or a bird. Here is nothing like the notion of an omnipotent, invisible, spiritual being, the creator of our religion; here is only ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... eyes fuller, as they contemplated this contingency. What supreme bliss would be theirs if Captain Bertram singled them out for attention? Already they were in love with his name, and were quite ready to fall down in a phalanx of three, and worship the hero of many imaginary fights. ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... than Pontoise, though, according to them, it will one day contain a million of inhabitants. They have already rooted up trees for ten miles round, lest they should interfere with the future citizens of this imaginary metropolis. They have erected a magnificent palace for Congress in the centre of the city, and have given it the pompous name of the Capitol. The several States of the Union are every day planning and erecting for themselves prodigious undertakings, which would astonish the ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... bellowed, he roared, he grunted; he charged me, flinging the earth high with his heels, but I was banderillero, picador, and matador in one. I was here, I was there, I was everywhere; so swiftly did I move that no eye could follow me." Jacket illustrated his imaginary movements with agile leaps and bounds. "The terror of his name frightened me, I'll admit, but it lent me a desperate courage, too. I thought of the brave men, the good women, the innocent children he had slain, and I fell upon him from this side, from that side, from the ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... he drew the line there, did he? Well, we all have to draw the line somewhere. Our friend is a novelist, and I will tell you in strict confidence that the line he has drawn is imaginary. We don't honor any kind of work any more than any other people. If a fellow gets up, the papers make a great ado over his having been a woodchopper or a bobbin-boy, or something of that kind, but I doubt ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... tremendous I should have roared a-laughing to see the doughty major and my good friend the lieutenant vie with each other in their skippings to escape the unseen enemy. But it was no laughing moment for me. At a flash my sword was out and I was hacking hither and yon at the imaginary foe. In the hurly-burly I contrived to sprawl all across the work-bench table, and the packet which would have killed my plot—and, belike, the plotter as well—was secured and quickly juggled ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... heart would break. And then all kinds of comic and incongruous tunes came into her head. She imagined herself dressing up with most priceless variations. Linger Longer Lucy, for example. She began to spin imaginary harmonies and variations in her head, upon the ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... adventures, in some Eastern country now, and less connectedly. These adventures, real or imaginary, had quite a savour of the Arabian Nights, and did not by any means make it easier for me to keep my hold on reality. The lightest weight will affect the balance under such circumstances, and in this case the weight of his talk was on the wrong scale. His words were very rapid, and I found it ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Charles James Fox and of John Paul Jones. The latter hero actually made a voyage in the brigantine 'John' about the time he picked up Richard Carvel from the Black Moll, after the episode with Mungo Maxwell at Tobago. The Scotch scene, of course, is purely imaginary. Accuracy has been aimed at in the account of the fight between the 'Bonhomme Richard' and the 'Serapis', while a little different arrangement might have been better for the medium of the narrative. To be sure, it was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was the last time that Lady Hester had the opportunity of playing the queen, or entertaining a distinguished guest at Dar Joon. In June, when the packet brought no news of her imaginary property, and no apology from Queen or Premier, she began at last to despair. 'The die is cast,' she told Dr. Meryon, 'and the sooner you take yourself off the better. I have no money; you can be of no use to me—I shall write no more letters, and shall break up my ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... to end like this," she answered, licking an imaginary plate with her tongue. I gave her a shilling (to get rid of her), and returned ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... he found the inconveniences at which his father had hinted anything but imaginary, as ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... a silly child; I thought you had more sense. Your objections I have listened to; they are imaginary and trifling; and I ask you, as a father has a right to ask his child, to waive these ridiculous notions, and grant the only request I have ever made of you. Tell me, my daughter, that you will consent to accept your cousin, and ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... found that the dean, instead of leaving a large fortune, had nothing to leave. All he had laid out at the deanery was sunk and gone; his real property all sold; his imaginary wealth, his pictures, statues—his whole collection, even his books, his immense library, shrunk so much in value when estimated after his death, that the demands of the creditors could not be nearly answered: as to any provision for Miss Stanley, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... was one wild, confusing shriek and roar. I was deafened; something seemed to clutch me by the throat and try to strangle me; huge soft hands grasped me by the body, and tugged and dragged at me, to tear me from my hold; and then, two arms that were not imaginary, but solid and real, went round me, and grasped the thwart on which I sat, holding me down, while I felt a head resting on ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... Protheroe was true to nature, and spoke with striking emphasis. He was quite red-hot with scorn at the imaginary fellow who would not take the proffered hiding, though a minute earlier, when he had told Thistlewood that he had the wrong pig by the ear, his manner had been marked by a cold and ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong. It may be that the primal ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... richer for me, but I am sorry to inform you that I am still poorer than I thought myself. I mentioned having sent for my books, clothes, etc. On Saturday evening about the time you were writing the description of your imaginary shipwreck, I was reading and feeling the effects of a real one, having then received a letter from my sister giving me an account of the vessel in which she had sent my box being stranded on the coast of Devonshire, in consequence of which ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... home by the caravan route laden with costliest treasures. Again it was all his wish to be another Nimrod: Indian tigers, American buffaloes, African elephants were to go down in thousands before his imaginary gun. While once more (this when his every spare moment was divided between Peter the Great and the Arabian Nights), he saw himself, at the head of a Cossack army, storming Constantinople and carrying ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... had lifted, but the heaps of snow were a terrible hindrance to his erratic progression. The cold air and the shock of a fall lessened his inebriety, but the imperative impulse of his imaginary mission still hypnotized him. It was past one before he reached the tall house. He did not think it at all curious that the great outer portals should be open; nor, though he saw the milk-cart at the door, and noted Cohen's uncomfortable ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... grateful—not yet, if ever she should, if his interference had been prompted by contempt. Oh! had any one such just cause to feel contempt for her? Mr. Thornton, above all people, on whom she had looked down from her imaginary heights till now! She suddenly found herself at his feet, and was strangely distressed at her fall. She shrank from following out the premises to their conclusion, and so acknowledging to herself how much she valued his respect and good opinion. Whenever ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of the country, they have merely to prognosticate all sorts of calamities—as droughts, famines, or wars—in the event of his setting eyes on the soil, and the chiefs, people, and all, would believe them; for, as may be imagined, with men unenlightened, supernatural and imaginary predictions work with more force than substantial reasons. Their implement of divination, simple as it may appear, is a cow's or antelope's horn (Uganga), which they stuff with magic powder, also ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... doubt, as well as that he was still further induced to impress so wholesome a conviction upon the minds of his haughty aristocracy by the probability of a minority, during which the disorders incident to so many conflicting and imaginary claims could not fail to convulse the kingdom and to endanger the stability of the throne; while it is no less evident that, once having forced upon their reason a conviction of his own ability to compel obedience where his authority was resisted, and ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... veterans of Europe; invigorated by rest, (the siege of Sluys having been the only enterprise in which they were employed during the last campaign,) and excited by the hopes of plunder and the expectation of certain conquest. [Davis's Holland, vol. ii. p. 219.] And "to this great enterprise and imaginary conquest, divers princes and noblemen came from divers countries; out of Spain came the Duke of Pestrana, who was said to be the son of Ruy Gomez de Silva, but was held to be the king's bastard; the Marquis of Bourgou, one of the Archduke Ferdinand's sons, by Philippina Welserine; ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... have never given me any trouble," said Mr. Phillips, "and to my mind, Mr. Dempster, the revelations, such as I have heard at least, are very puerile and contemptible; but that there must be a singular excitement attending even an imaginary conversation with the dead I can easily believe, and I do not care for ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... appendix, only to discover that that unpopular portion of his patient's anatomy already bobs in alcoholic glee in a bottle on the top shelf of the laboratory of a more alert professional brother. Your civil engineer constructs imaginary bridges which slump and fall as quickly as they are completed. Your stage favorite, in the throes of a post-lobster nightmare, has a horrid vision of herself "resting" in January. But when he who sells goods on the road groans and tosses in the clutches of a dreadful dream, it is, strangely enough, ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... about in his long arms an imaginary dog, and pushed its tail end toward the jury. This was the defensive plea of 'son assault demesne'—loosely, that 'the other fellow brought on the fight,'—quickly told, and in a way the dullest ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... venture that argument before lawyers? How the laws of the two States could be said to come into conflict in such circumstances, I question whether any lawyer in this audience can explain or understand. No matter whether the line that divides one sovereign State from another be an imaginary one or ocean-wide, the moment you cross it, the State you leave is blotted out of existence, so far as you are concerned. The Czar might as well claim to control the deliberations of Faneuil Hall, as the laws of Missouri demand reverence, or the shadow ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Some other give me thanks for kindnesses; Some offer me commodities to buy; Even now a tailor call'd me in his shop, And show'd me silks that he had bought for me, And therewithal took measure of my body. Sure, these are but imaginary wiles, ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... known as accommodation bills. This form of bill does not represent goods or other value received, and the first endorser pays the amount named for the obliging person who accepts it. This species of fraud is tolerated because it is impossible to detect it, and, moreover, it is an imaginary fraud which only becomes real if payment is ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... telephone calls he had broken the drug ring completely and forever, broken it so completely that no member of it would ever have dealings with any member of it again. All of them were out of business, fleeing with the imaginary hounds of the law baying at ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... north, of Chanzy on the Loire, of Bourbaki in the east, as if their victorious armies were already beneath the walls. The men and women who stood waiting, their feet in snow and slush, in interminable lines before the bakers' and butchers' shops, brightened up a bit at times at the news of some imaginary success of the army. After the discouragement of each defeat the unquenchable flame of their illusion would burst out and blaze more brightly than ever among those wretched people, whom starvation and every kind of suffering had rendered almost delirious. A soldier on the Place du Chateau d'Eau ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the breezes blow over, every magic isle the waves murmur round, every subterranean retreat fancy has devised, every cerulean region the moon visits, every planet that hangs afar on the neck of night, be disenchanted of their imaginary charms, and brought, by the advance of discovery, within the relentless light of familiarity, for the common gaze of fleshly eyes and tread of vulgar feet, still the prophetic MIND would not be robbed of its belief in immortality; still ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Is this an imaginary difficulty, or do you mean to deal with it in future editions of the "Origin"?—Believe me ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... far to the northward as the 25th degree of latitude, and more particularly Glasshouse and Harvey's Bays. The English government at length resolved that they would wipe off the reproach, which, as Captain Flinders observes, was not without some reason attributed to them, "that an imaginary line of more than 250 leagues of extent, in the vicinity of one of their colonies, should have been so long suffered to remain traced upon the charts, under the title of UNKNOWN COAST," and they accordingly appointed him to the ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... whom humours such as Ben describes have attained a complete ascendancy. The avarice of Elwes, the insane desire of Sir Egerton Brydges for a barony, to which he had no more right than to the crown of Spain, the malevolence which long meditation on imaginary wrongs generated in the gloomy mind of Bellingham, are instances. The feeling which animated Clarkson and other virtuous men against the slave trade and slavery, is an instance of a more ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... is sometimes held to see if there is any other security which might be included. The rascally creditor watches the crop and if the Negro may have a surplus he easily tempts him to buy more, or more simply still, he charges to his account imaginary purchases, so that at the end of the year the Negro is still in debt. The Negro has no redress. He can not prove that he has not purchased the goods and his word will not stand against the merchant's. Practically he is tied down to the land, for no one else will advance him under ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... himself inside it he was charmed with the peaceful beauty of the little domain it enclosed, and still more delighted when he perceived a slender, lovely maiden wandering among the flowers. It was not until he had sought vainly for the imaginary monster that he realised that this was the Princess herself, and by that time he was deeply in love with her, for indeed it would have been hard to find anyone prettier than Potentilla, as she sat ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... and degrade them. An oft-quoted instance of their cruelty is recorded of a bailie named Landenburg, who publicly reproved a peasant for living in a house above his station. On another occasion, having fined an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of Melchi, a yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's messenger jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if he lost his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, that if he wanted to use a plough he had better draw it himself, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the way to Barton. If anything sensible was uttered on the drive, I can't recall it. Our talk, chiefly of knights and ladies, and wild flights from imaginary enemies, had the effect of spurring Flynn to ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... descendants of ancient lineage, acted in these weird and ghastly comedies. The ladies, with hair bound high over their heads, would kneel before the inverted chairs, and place the snowwhite necks beneath this imaginary guillotine. Speeches were delivered to a mock populace, whilst a mock Santerre ordered a mock roll of drums to drown the last flow of eloquence of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Miocene flora could pass freely. But other able botanists have shown that it is far more probable that the American plants came from the east and not from the west, and instead of reaching Europe by the shortest route over an imaginary Atlantis, migrated in an opposite direction, crossing ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... the west side of the river, each painted the front of his shield; some with the figure of the sun, others with that of the moon, several with different kinds of birds and beasts of prey, and many with the images of imaginary beings, which, according to their silly notions, are the inhabitants of the different elements, Earth, Sea, Air, &c. On enquiring the reason of their doing so, I learned that each man painted his shield with the image of that being on which ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have often troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the nature of their affliction, and had even proved it by experiments upon themselves. "As to an imaginary cry," said I, "do but listen for a moment to the wind in this unnatural valley while we speak so low, and to the wild harp it makes of ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... inspired again, but, she was taken in a man's dress, which had been left—to entrap her—in her prison, and which she put on, in her solitude; perhaps, in remembrance of her past glories, perhaps, because the imaginary Voices told her. For this relapse into the sorcery and heresy and anything else you like, she was sentenced to be burnt to death. And, in the market-place of Rouen, in the hideous dress which the monks had invented for such spectacles; with priests and bishops sitting ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... where the imaginary line ran, they branched off at right angles and walked the necessary distance to bring them to a location in line with the Green farm. To make sure, Garry climbed to the top of a tree, and with his ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... particle, but that on which the crew of his university won the boat-race. And a mere chance tour on a Sunday through our churches would quickly show the lamentably frequent misapprehension of genius by itself; for many a fine genius for the actor's art is spoiled by an imaginary call to the pulpit. The presumption therefore is indeed against the great Tolstoy in his dispute with the great public. Still, I venture to side with Tolstoy. I too venture to think that Tolstoy's greatest work is found not so much ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... God in pestilence, see L'Ecole et la Science, Paris, 1887, p. 178; also Hecker, and especially Hoeniger, Gang und Verbreitung des Schwarzen Todes in Deutschalnd, Berlin, 1889. For a long list of towns in which burnings of Jews took place for this imaginary cause, see pp. 7-11. As to absolute want of sanitary precautions, see Hecker, p. 292. As to condemnation by strong religionists of medical means in the plague, see Fort, p. 130. For a detailed account ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... beautiful ocean. No matter now what might be my home in this strange, new country. With my passion for the sea, and it so near, I could not be utterly desolate. To sit on these cliffs, reddening now in the sunset and watch the outgoing tide, sending imaginary messages on the departing waves to far-off shores, would surely, to some extent, deaden the sense of utter isolation from the world of childhood and youth. Mrs. Blake shook my hand warmly, repeating again the invitation ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... I corrected. "Mayor Packard and myself both look upon the occurrence as a wholly imaginary one, caused by her secret brooding over the very manifestations you mention. If she could be convinced that these manifestations had a physical origin, she would immediately question the reality of the specter she now believes herself to have seen. To bring her to this ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... workmanship of an instrument where a generator of the cathode ray and an intricate maze of tubing surmounted electro-magnets and a round lead bulb. There were terminals for attaching heavy cables; it was a beautiful thing.... His useless arm moved to bring an imaginary hand before the window of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
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