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More "Imagination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of a great man, improbable as are some of the incidents narrated, is no fiction of imagination. Sir Everard Home's statement, read before the Royal Institution, corroborates every particular. The mental constitution of the philosopher, puzzling enough during his life, was shrouded certainly in even greater mystery in ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... across that account of the correspondent who described what he had seen on the stricken field? Did you get at the inwardness of it all? You are a fellow with imagination, Nancarrow; didn't you feel a ghastly terror ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... sheep and horses. I have seen, however, no horses here. It is reported amongst the people of the town, that the Touaricks attacked me and took away all my money. As this continues to spread amongst the oases, I shall soon be murdered by the helping imagination of the people, at any rate, before I arrive at Tripoli. A gardener tells me, many palms grow and bear fruit without being watered, or having any ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... new world to Wolford's imagination. Two and a half per cent. a month, and six per cent. per annum, could hardly be compared together. He sat down and began to figure up the result of the one operation in comparison with the other, and found that while his investment in ground-rents yielded only three hundred dollars a year, ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... kissed her and turned away. Through the open window came the soft roar of the sea. It was very still to-night; the moon shone across it, but that she could not see: she had seen it so often that it was there in her imagination. On Ben Grief the shadows lay inky in the silver light. She looked at the syringe, and then at the tabloids, and sighed a little; the pain was a thing tearing and burning; several times she tried to begin to write and had to lie back with closed eyes floating away ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... physically capable of enduring the terrors of this country. I was now scarcely a hundred miles from the camp, and the horses had plenty of water up to nearly halfway, but now they looked utterly unable to return. What a strange maze of imagination the mind can wander in when recalling the names of those separated features, the only ones at present known to supply water in this latitude—that is to say, the Murchison River, and this new-found Rawlinson Range, named after two ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... Her vivid imagination saw her conduct in its worst light: vacillating, feeble, deserting the man she loved at the moment she had led him to expect triumph; dismissing her faithful servant without his reward. Then, in a flash, came the other ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... nebulae, on the constitution of the Milky-way, on the universe as a whole; ideas which almost by themselves constitute the actual history of the formation of the worlds, and we cannot but have a deep reverence for that powerful genius that has scarcely ever erred, notwithstanding an ardent imagination. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... Beast with ten horns, if you will, but hers are all the heirlooms, hers that vast spiritual estate of tradition, nowhere yet everywhere, whose revenues are none the less fruitful for being levied on the imagination. We may claim that England's history is also ours, but it is a de jure, and not a de facto property that we have in it,—something that may be proved indeed, yet is a merely intellectual satisfaction, and does not savor of the realty. Have we not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... temperament—in nothing more than the exuberance of her untruths which were poured out in so torrential a flood, with such burning conviction at the opulence of detail that persons who knew her well used to stand aghast (Catholics had been known to cross themselves) at the fertility of her constructive imagination, while the most hardened sceptics protested that, even if her facts were wrong, there could be no doubt as to her sincerity, her ingenuousness. Ah, she was a woman in a thousand! Often had Mr. Parker sat at her feet, a respectful disciple, listening spellbound and ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... our second line. It was the first time that these two had come together on the battlefield, and the occasion was not fortunate, for both were unable to make headway and lost severely. The plan of attack showed great lack of imagination, and shook general confidence in the staff of the 5th Army. The lessons of the 16th seemed to have been entirely thrown away. The same impossible advance was expected. The ground was far worse than before. The water lay knee-deep in the valley. As the men struggled forward they ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... In imagination I stood already in the box of the Old Bailey and heard myself sentenced to the treadmill, and was unable to offer the slightest explanation in palliation of my ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... to him by that little pianist who comes here. Again through the same channel he received word that the day of departure was fixed. Can you think what it means, Mrs. Hawthorne? Have you in your experience or imagination the wherewith to form any conception, dear Mrs. Hawthorne, of what it means? The day of departure fixed! The day of parting! Do you realize? No more sight or sound of each other! The end! The sea between! Silence! And it is to ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... father's way of comforting my widowhood," said Bim. "He has made a wonderful beauty mask and often he claps it on me and whistles up a band of sighing lovers. As a work of the imagination I am a ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... the Saint, "time spares neither men nor gods. These last are immortal only in the imagination of the short-lived race of men. In reality they suffer the penalties of age, and verge, as the centuries go by, towards irreparable decay. Nymphs grow old as well as women. No rose but turns into ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... received us with the same demonstrations of friendship which I had experienced before; and the moment we landed, I ordered some of my people to begin their operation of cutting. I had not the least imagination, that the natives could make any objection to our furnishing ourselves with what seemed to be of no use to them, but was necessary for us. However, I was mistaken; for, the moment that our men began to cut, some of the inhabitants interposed, and would ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... absorbed in his own schemes, it did not occur to him that his daughter, who seemed so devoted to the cause he advocated, could do so weak a thing as fall in love. At all events, Alick lived in an elysium partly created by his imagination, and did not allow the future to interfere with his present happiness. Jack and Adair still thought Stella very charming, but, observing Alick's devotion to her, they would have considered it a gross breach of friendship to attempt cutting him out. ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... sacrifice, its vast and eternal issues, was the single fact that filled his mind. It was this that delivered him from that nervous self-consciousness, the preacher's curse, that paralyses the mental activities, chills the passions, and cloggs the imagination, so that his sermon becomes a lifeless repetition of words, previously prepared, correct, even beautiful, it may be in form, logical in argument, sound in philosophy, but dead, dull and impotent, bereft of the fire that kindles the powers of the ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... and a weaker banking-account, that I should dare to think of such things? She was a unit, a factor,—nothing more. If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination. ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all the senses up in arms to subdue the influence of the thoughts: here was vanity, here was passion, here was the spot of all spots in the world, and here were also the life, and the manners and the habits and the pursuits that I delighted in: here was every thing that imagination can conceive, united in a conspiracy against the poor little brunette in England! What, then, did I fall in love at once with this bouquet of lilies and roses? Oh! by no means. I was, however, so enchanted with the place; I so much enjoyed its tranquillity, the shade of the maple ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... their abhorrence of crime in their admiration of its magnificent exhibitions. Ordinary vice is reprobated by them, but extraordinary guilt, exquisite wickedness, the high flights and poetry of crime, seize on the imagination, and lead them to forget the depths of the guilt, in admiration of the excellence of the performance, or the unequalled atrocity of the purpose. There are those in our day who have made great use of this infirmity of our nature, and by means of it done infinite injury to the cause of ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... way. We worked in swamps that smelled like there was a leak in the gas mains, trampin' down a fine assortment of the most expensive hothouse plants and vegetables. The scene was tropical beyond the wildest imagination of the geography man. The trees was all sky-scrapers; the underbrush was full of needles and pins; there was monkeys jumpin' around and crocodiles and pink-tailed mockin'-birds, and ye stood knee-deep in the rotten water and grabbled roots for the liberation of Guatemala. Of nights we would ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... some capricious despot, in his career of ordinary tyranny, were to tax his imagination to produce something more monstrous and unnatural than himself, and were to place a dove amongst vultures, or engraft a thorn on the olive tree, much as we should marvel at the caprice, we should be still more astounded ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and only one of my friends—and not at all a great friend—who had the imagination to understand, as you understand too, Joan, just what that journey would have meant to me, if anything had gone wrong, and the kindness to put himself out to make ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... gray cape-coat of the Confederate cavalry and a battered white gauntlet sticking from the pocket. Involuntarily, trembling foolishly, she looked to see if there might not be an old cob pipe also. There was not, but the other familiar objects made her imagination leap fearfully to what might be. Both hope and dread will always override common sense, and convoy imagination perforce. If he did live here—if they should meet! Could such a coincidence happen, could it, outside the neat ordering of a ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... grinned as he looked around the room. "My dear friends are badly fooled," he chuckled with glee. "They believe the chief is with you, and he is not here. Why, they have already spent, in imagination, the money that they are going to derive from the sale of his plumes. What a shock it will be to them when they learn that the bird has flown. I wish I could see their faces when ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... and some day you shall sit on a bench with peers of France. What would you have been at this moment if I had not amused you by my conversation?—An undiscovered corpse in a deep bed of mud. Well and good, now for an effort of imagination——" ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... had first poisoned and then blown into ten thousand pieces through my folly. I had brain fever. It set in that night. For two weeks I raved deliriously; for two weeks I was doing the things I ought not to have done—in imagination. I took a young lady skating, and slipped down with her on the ice, and broke her Grecian nose. I went to a grand reception, and tore the point lace flounce off of Mrs. Grant's train, put my handkerchief in my saucer, and my coffee-cup in my pocket. I was left to entertain ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... delivered by revolution. Sentiment urged them in the same direction. Proud and sensitive they resented the dominance of an alien race; they held the wrongs of their forefathers in remembrance, and looked back with mournful longing to the age, invested by their poetic imagination with glory and happiness, when Ireland was yet unconquered. The United Irishmen told them that a fresh conquest would be attempted, that the Orangemen, encouraged by government, designed to rob them of their land and destroy them. They looked ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... of well-marked individuality and brilliant imagination. She could never separate fact from fiction in any form of narrative, and narrative was her speciality. She was always recounting something. Beth used to follow her from room to room, as she went about her work, listening with absolute faith and the deepest interest to the stream of narrative which ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excell. It is not an Imagination that teems with Monsters, an Head that is filled with extravagant Conceptions, which is capable of furnishing the World with Diversions of this nature; and yet if we look into the Productions of several Writers, who set up for Men of Humour, what wild irregular Fancies, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... young men of the movement with a fierce spirit of nationality. The clubs read them with ecstasy, and John Mitchell was the idol and hero of all men of extreme opinions. His defiance of government, his incitements to rebellion, were so open and intrepid, that they seized upon the imagination of the people, and much disturbed the government. Pikes and side-arms were manufactured in every part of the country, and John Mitchell wrote various articles on the proper pattern of a pike, on the best way of using that "queen ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Andy said; "but don't let's tell the whole; let's leave something to his imagination;" and so the telegram which went to Governor Markham read simply: "Come home immediately. Don't ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... Our cities are the abiding places of wealth and luxury; our manufactories yield fortunes never dreamed of by the fathers of the Republic; our business men are madly striving in the race for riches, and immense aggregations of capital outrun the imagination in the magnitude of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... up the steep ascent, she found her room without any difficulty. As it was again a clear, starlit night, there was light enough for her to find everything she wanted; and the trouble at her heart kept her imagination from being as active as it would otherwise have been, in recalling the terrible stories of ghosts and dead people with which she was far too familiar. She soon got into bed, and, as a precautionary measure, buried her head under the clothes before she began ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... raises is that if Smith's theory were true, those in whom the power of imagination was strongest would feel the force of the moral duties most sensibly, and vice versa, which, he says, is contradicted by experience. His last objection is that while the theory proposes to explain the origin of the moral sentiments so far as they respect other persons, ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... had a strong imagination. The brickfields, at that date, were a mile away from the town, and the bringing in of their flames was an impossibility. Perhaps, however, the word is a misprint for fumes; yet even then this earliest quotation indicates part of the source of the subsequent ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Then Goya (1746-1828) seems to have made a partial restoration of painting. He was a man of peculiarly Spanish turn of mind, fond of the brutal and the bloody, picturing inquisition scenes, bull-fights, battle pieces, and revelling in caricature, sarcasm, and ridicule. His imagination was grotesque and horrible, but as a painter his art was based on the natural, and was exceedingly strong. In brush-work he followed Velasquez; in a peculiar forcing of contrasts in light and dark he was apparently quite himself, ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... before us, we will recall one by one some of the best-known and most interesting works of W.M. Hunt, a painter who now holds a prominent place among the artists of America. We will try to discover by careful observation if the high gifts of Verity and Imagination, the sign and seal of the true artist, really belong to him: if so, where these qualities are expressed, and what value we should ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... paused. From the distance once more came the merry clamour of the farther drawing-room. A din of young folk, chaffing and teasing each other—a girl's defiant voice above it—outbursts of laughter. Norham, who had in him a touch of dramatic imagination, enjoyed the contrast between the gay crowd in the distance and this quiet room where he sat face to face with a visionary—surely altogether remote from the marrying, money-making, sensuous world. Yet after all the League was a big, ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... difficulty, like a ladybird on a blade of grass, and he would sit and sit upon it, as though pluming his wings and getting ready for a flight, and suddenly he would fall off and begin crawling again.... Don't be surprised at these comparisons; at that time they were always crowding on my imagination. So I struggled on there for two years. The work did not progress much in spite of all my efforts. I began to be tired of it, my friend bored me; I had come to sneer at him, and he stifled me like a featherbed; ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... to the Governor and Junta were to the same effect; for—as before noticed—having only a single ship, it was necessary to impress on their imagination—that a fleet and army were at hand to add the province to Brazil. As this is the only instance within my knowledge of a military force surrendering itself and the province which it defended, to a stratagem of this nature, ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... adverts to the influence of the Imagination on Happiness. On this, he has in view the addition made to our enjoyments or our sufferings by the respective predominance of hope or of fear in the mind. Allowing for constitutional bias, he recognizes, as the two great sources of a desponding ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... many, very many, both of Gaelic and English poets, who have attempted to embody religious sentiments in poetic forms, have, by their weak efforts, exposed themselves, unarmed, to the attacks of those who would exclude religion from the sphere of the imagination. All good poetry, in the highest sense, deals with, and appeals to, what is universal and ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... many shades and gradations there are in misfortune, for everything depends upon the character of the individual, upon the force of the imagination, upon the strength of the nerves. If it is impossible to catch these so variable shades, we may at least point out the most striking colors, and the principal attendant incidents. The author has therefore reserved this ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... nowhere greater than in this able discourse. His comprehensive politics, his beautiful sympathies, his power over language, his poetic imagination, his magnetic and melting earnestness of purpose, are blended with that depth of religious feeling which gives to his character as a patriot the sanctity and unction of the prophet. His moral and intellectual faculties are shown ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... flesh and bones, and the prairie, washed by moonlight, stretching out beyond one's imagination, I wondered that I had ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... have visited the superb queen of cities as she once flourished in our days could not, even in imagination, grasp the contrast between Paris of the present and the Paris of two hundred years ago. With a power more destructive than the petroleum of the Commune, we must, in though, sweep away the Tuileries, the boulevards, the Opera-House and superb buildings that ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... Stephen, as to this boy. You and I have done our best to make him think the world is wrong side up; but I am more to blame because I had the better opportunity to study his development, beneath my own eyes. I taught him that imagination was an essential ingredient of a successful business man, to enable him to grasp each situation as a whole, and to conceive its dangers and its possibilities. Yet, when he exercised that very quality, and came to me frankly with the results ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... absorbing and filled him with so much delight that he feared to talk on the subject so dear to his heart, for fear of a repulse and the shattering of all the beautiful castles which his glowing imagination, with love as the supervising architect, had constructed. Thus matters moved along for some time; Miss Nermal thoroughly in love with Belton, but Belton prizing that love too highly to deem it possible for him to be ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... going back in your imagination to the time and circumstances that brought it forth. Make it not a memorized historical document, but feel the emotions that gave it birth. The speech is only an effect; live over in your own heart the causes that produced ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... reference to its general structure, wrought off at once. A halt or pause, even of a day, would perhaps have injured that continuous flow of poetical language and description which argues the whole scene to have arisen at once upon the author's imagination. It seems possible, more especially in lyrical poetry, to discover where the author has paused for any length of time; for the union of the parts is rarely so perfect as not to show a different strain of thought and feeling. There may be something ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... as to communicate to me, on the antiquities found in the western country. I wish that the persons who go thither, would make very exact descriptions of what they see of that kind, without forming any theories. The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object, only the traits which favor that theory. But it is too early to form theories on those antiquities. We must wait with patience till more facts are collected. I wish your Philosophical Society ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... from the prairie in unsoftened ugliness, and there was nothing to stir the imagination in the great waste of sun-bleached grass. Day by day, while the dust whirled by them, and the gaunt telegraph posts came up out of the far horizon and sank into the east, they raced across the wide levels. The red dawns burned behind them, the sunsets flamed ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... Boston as her home, having once visited in that metropolis for three delicious weeks. She was of an ardent, impressionable nature. Her mind was nurtured upon Eastern conceptions of our common country, her imagination aglow with weird tales of the frontier, and her bright eyes perceived the vivid coloring of romance in each prosaic object west of the tawny Missouri. All appeared so different from that established life to which she had grown accustomed,—the people, ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... your head, dear, over a mere fable? I have already gone very carefully into all the facts that are proved, and have come to the conclusion that the story of the torture of his Eminence is a fairy-tale, and that the supernatural Whispers have only been heard in imagination." ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... classic and romantic interest. During the long, golden, September afternoons, she spent hours, in the Madonna room, questioning her mother anew respecting the scenes and events of her past life, and listening eagerly to her replies. The young examine distant objects as through a prism. Adele's imagination invested these scenes and events with rainbow splendors and revelled in the wealth and beauty, she had herself partially created. The new world thus opened to her was infinitely superior to the one in which she held her commonplace, ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... that he remembered all the places distinctly; and was very loth to confess that he had been mistaken. I suppose, that his imagination had had as much to do with his idea of his native place, as his memory, and when, at last, we went down the glen where your mother used to live, and where he distinctly remembered going to see her with you, not ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... historian. Macaulay, an ardent Whig, with an astonishing familiarity with political and literary facts, wrote in a spirited and brilliant style a History of England from the Accession of James II. to the death of his hero, William III. Carlyle, with a unique force of imagination and a rugged intensity of feeling, original in his thought, yet strongly affected by German literature, especially by Richter and Goethe, wrote in his earlier days a Life of Schiller. He wrote later a history of the French Revolution, in which ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... well-known musician through those fir woods one dark afternoon as the wind was making soft music above us. He was silent, and I was disappointed, for I had fancied that the new country would delight him and excite his imagination. But when we reached home he sat down to the piano in the dark, and played on and on as if he were pouring out his whole soul in the flood of sweet melody; and when, after an hour of marvellous improvisation, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... never since been able to shake off. All his herculean efforts to be sceptical and frivolous, and the twenty years he had spent in Paris mingling with every section of society, had failed to rid him of it. Magister he was, and magister he remained, even in his most strenuous flights of imagination and audacity. From the moment of his arrival he tried to show himself enraptured with Silviane. Naturally enough, he already knew her by sight, and had even criticised her on one occasion in five ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... it, again, that so few of our modern songs are truly songful, and fit to be set to music? Is it not that the writers of them— persons often of much taste and poetic imagination—have gone for their inspiration to the intellect, rather than to the ear? That (as Shelley does by the skylark, and Wordsworth by the cuckoo), instead of trying to sing like the birds, they only think and talk about the birds, and therefore, however beautiful and true the thoughts ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... time. Mrs. Evelyn promised to try to find a virtuous and godly lady who would be willing to receive Mistress Anne Woodford into her family, and Lady Oglethorpe wrote with vaguer promises of high preferment, which excited Anne's imagination during those lonely hours that she had to spend while her strict mourning, after the custom of the time, ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... field. Only in the hospital that serves the division are the events of his bit of war correlated and reduced to a comprehensive whole. Even then the resulting knowledge is usually wrong. For the imagination of officers, and of men in particular, is wonderful, and rumour has its birthplace in the hospital ward. One may take it as an established fact that the ordinary regimental officer or soldier knows little or nothing about events other than his particular bit of country. ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... coming is whence we discern not, Making your nest on the wave, and your bed on the crested billow, Skimming rough waters, and crowding wet sands that the tide shall return to, Cormorants, ducks, and gulls, fill ye my imagination! Let us not talk of growth; we are still in our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... a small part in his life, but he possessed both curiosity and a love for adventure, and his years of lonely wandering had developed in him a wonderfully clear mental vision of things, which in other words might be called a singularly active imagination. He knew that some irresistible force was drawing Baree back into the south—that it was pulling him not only along a given line of the compass, but to an exact point ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... which were started on this Occasion, presented to my Imagination so many new Ideas, that by mixing with those which were already there, they employed my Fancy all the last Night, and composed a ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... death; all this quite stunned and overwhelmed him. Every hope connected with her that he had suffered himself to form, or had entertained unconsciously, seemed to fall at his feet, withered and dead. Every charm with which his memory or imagination had surrounded her, presented itself before him, only to heighten his anguish and add new bitterness to his despair. Every feeling of sympathy for her forlorn condition, and of admiration for her heroism and fortitude, aggravated the indignation which shook ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... marriage from a very noble fellow because I could not love him. He lacked the power to control me: I felt myself the stronger of the two. Not that women like to be ruled, but that they like that power in men which can rule if need be, generously, but never despotically. I had only in my imagination a conception of that love 'which passeth understanding'—which lifts a woman out of herself into a willing sacrifice that looks to calmer eyes as the height of folly. I liked men well, but none had ever stirred more than ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... well study its itemized outlines for help in effort to understand the child that is unlike the average. The "Record" requires attention to the "general condition of the senses and nerves," to "memory and power of learning," to qualities of "imagination," to strength and expression of "emotions," to facility in "language," to "manner of work," to "relation to home and community life," and in respect to "adaptation to new demands." These things are vital not only to know about and understand ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... objects so well calculated to strike the poetic imagination as these mounds, standing alone in the wilderness. The belief that they are the workmanship of human hands, awakens curiosity and leads to a long train of reflections. For if men have thrown up these singular elevations, we feel inquisitive to know by whom, and for what purpose, ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... rejoined all of them. "But without large hills and ravines in one's breast (liberal capacities), how could one attain such imagination!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... down every tree from the valley, and in the end goes to and fro in waste places—gnawing itself in a last hunger. I learned from Lilith that we weave our own enchantment, and bind ourselves with out own imagination. To think of the true as beyond us or to love the symbol of being is to darken the path to wisdom, and to debar us from eternal beauty. From the Wise One I learned that the truest wisdom is to wait, to work, and to will in secret. Those who are voiceless today, tomorrow shall be eloquent, and ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... with the muse when he produced Tam O' Shanter, the crowning glory of all his poems. For this marvellous tale we are indebted to something like accident: Francis Grose, the antiquary, happened to visit Friar's Carse, and as he loved wine and wit, the total want of imagination was no hinderance to his friendly intercourse with the poet: "Alloway's auld haunted kirk" was mentioned, and Grose said he would include it in his illustrations of the antiquities of Scotland, if the bard of the Doon would write a poem to ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Jacques: you are the victim of your own imagination. And who could help it in your place? M. Folgat said so only yesterday. There is no man living, who, after four days' close confinement, can keep his mind cool. Grief and solitude are bad counsellors. Jacques, come to yourself; listen to your dearest friends who speak to ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... are spirits everywhere," Stanton said. "That sort of belief, it seems to me, would grow up in any race that had imagination, and the Nipes must have had plenty of that, or they wouldn't have the technology that we know they do have. Am I on ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... more miseries and horrors than a riotous imagination could conceive; before us could certainly be nothing worse. We would put life and freedom to the hazard of a touch, and ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Bromburg (?Bydgoszcz). We were now in Poland, the poorest and nastiest country in Europe...! After the Oder, no more made roads: we marched on loose gravel or appalling mud. Most of the land was uncultivated and the few inhabitants we came across were dirty to a degree which defies the imagination. The weather which had been magnificent during October and the first part of November became frightful. We no longer saw the sun, it rained or snowed continually; food became short; no more wine, almost never any beer, and what there was atrociously ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... pond of stagnant filthy water could be seen. The pond at Warmal was of unusually ample proportions and extended through the whole length of the village, which was built on both sides of this dirty pond. Numerous canals branched off from this main reservoir, and in fact, had one had a little imagination, one might have named this place the Venice of Sistan. At sunset swarms of mosquitoes rose buzzing from the putrid water, but from a picturesque point of view the effect of the buildings reflected in the yellow-greenish water ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... bent which his creative activity in music took at the outset. To say little, but vaguely hint at much, was the rule which he adopted; to remain sententious in expression, but give the freest and most daring flight to his imagination, and spurn the conventional limitations set by rule and custom, his ambition. Such fanciful and symbolical titles as "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces," "Titan," etc., which Jean Paul adopted for his singular mixtures of tale, rhapsody, philosophy, and satire, were bound to find an imitator ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... he looked like what he was,—le bon pere de famille. As such he would have suited the people of England; but it was un vert galant like Henri IV., or royalty incarnate, like Louis XIV., who would have fired the imagination of the French people. As a good father of a family, Louis Philippe felt that his first duty to his children was to secure them a good education, good marriages, and sufficient wealth to make them important personages in any sudden change ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... and exhilarated by the animated scene and the lively music, he could not believe it. He had thought for the moment that the old American minister was a strong and disinterested philanthropist, but now he saw in him only the victim of a diseased imagination. The habit of seeing society through a haze of feeling as it should be was older than the American's entreaties that he should learn to know it as it is, and he deliberately ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... decided improvement from time to time in his compositions, indicating the industry and wise direction of his studies, in refinement of taste, elegance of finish, and a rapid and vigorous expansion of his imagination. His masterpiece, thus far, is The Castle in the Air, fitly praised by our neighbor of the Albion, as one of the finest productions of the present time. We do not know of any poet at home or ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... trip. Arolla suited us all to a T, and we are all in great force. As for me, I have not known of the existence of my liver, and except for the fact that I found fifteen or sixteen miles with a couple of thousand feet up and down quite enough, I could have deluded myself into the fond imagination that I was twenty ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... was not imagination. Until midnight the partners lay broad awake, rolled in their blankets under the open sky, talking and discussing and making plans. At last Cribbens rolled over on his side and slept. The dentist could ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... laughing matter for poor Master Harry, for it was many a day before his imagination could rid itself of the image of the dead Spaniard's face; and as he walked away down the street with his companions, leaving the crowd behind them, and the dead body where it lay for its friends to look after, his ears humming ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... inherited from both father and mother a lively imagination, and had, besides, talent and inclination for belles lettres. As an officer he was distinguished rather for his learning and culture than because of fondness for military life. He was well read in French ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... last plank of the wrecked order, and wade through seas of slaughter to restore it; the prospect of untried political innovation, under such circumstances, did not present itself to this Poet's imagination in a form so absolutely alluring, as it might have done to a philosopher of a less rigidly inductive, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the canoe, the joints bent, and a sort of noise was emitted from the mouth, which was exceedingly horrible. Had the dead face been visible, the effect would not have been so powerful, but its being covered tended to set the imagination free to ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... Indignation at the brutality of the Prussian was strong within him, and he held his head erect, and answered look for look the hostile glances of those about him. The hot blood still coursed through his veins, and the sacrifice he had made did not loom over large in his imagination. ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... waited with no little speculation as to what act of Ruth her cousin disapproved of so obviously. She like Jennie; every one who knew her recognized her sterling good heart; but almost every one who knew her agreed that a grain of flour was a whole cake, baked and iced, to Mrs. Lewis's imagination, and these airy comfits were passed around promiscuously to whoever was on hand. Not a sound broke the portentous silence but the decided snap with which Mrs. Lewis pulled her needle through, and the hurricane she raised with ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... He used to beat her at the end: and although she paid him back, of which I have authentic documentary evidence, to this day she speaks of him with tears and she throws him up to me; and I am glad, I am glad that, though only in imagination, she should think of herself as having once been happy.... And she was left at his death with three children in a wild and remote district where I happened to be at the time; and she was left in such hopeless ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... been great as an orthodox theologian of the Kirk; the cocksureness of theology would have suited you like your own coat. You are not at home in science, for you have no imagination." ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... said the young artist, bending his head still lower over his work. "Whom dost thou know who could bear a likeness to this creation of my own imagination?" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... suffering without a fault. The creditor, it is never doubted, thrives without a merit. He has no wife and children to pity. No one ever thinks it desirable that he should have the means of living. He is a brute for insisting that he must receive, in order to pay. It is not in the imagination of man to conceive that his creditor has demands upon him which must be satisfied, and that he must do to others as others must do to him. A creditor is a personification of exaction. He is supposed to be always taking in, and ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... thing? and fondly embracing the shoulders of her father with her arms, she begs, even by her own safety (and against it too), that she may visit her sister. Tereus views her, and, while viewing her, is embracing her beforehand in imagination; and, as he beholds her kisses, and her arms around {her father's} neck, he receives them all as incentives, and fuel, and the food of his furious passion; and, as often as she embraces her father, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... and he writes of this, not "as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown," but as one who, in words burning with indestructible life, lays open to us the sombre record of what was experience before it was song; who makes us the ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... its coldness, and learn to feel; and, in such a case, the charms of these two figures would produce an effect quite opposite to that of the Gorgon's head, which turned flesh into stone. Did I pretend to describe to you the Venus, it would only set your imagination at work to form ideas of her figure; and your ideas would no more resemble that figure, than the Portuguese face of Miss ——, who has enchanted our knights, resembles the sweet and graceful countenance ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... first came here, Aydelot, there wasn't nothing but imagination to make this a farming community. And it looked lots more impossible then than this looks to me now. What's to prevent a metropolis risin' right here where a decade and a half ago there ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... etymological meaning of the word is wider than that which it bears in actual use. An allegory is distinguished from a metaphor by being longer sustained and more fully carried out in its details, and from an analogy by the fact that the one appeals to the imagination and the other to the reason. The fable or parable is a short allegory with one definite moral. The allegory has been a favourite form in the literature of nearly every nation. The Hebrew scriptures present frequent instances of it, one of the most beautiful being the comparison of the history ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... day of the annual festival, hastened to adore the Apollo of Daphne, his devotion was raised to the highest pitch of eagerness and impatience. His lively imagination anticipated the grateful pomp of victims, of libations and of incense; a long procession of youths and virgins, clothed in white robes, the symbol of their innocence; and the tumultuous concourse of an innumerable people. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... very vivid imagination, and during the drive back he had amused himself by visualising the scene when he would place Josephine and her kittens in their own delightful, roomy basket in the scullery. It would be such fun, too, introducing Flick to the two kittens! At Betty's ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... A poet's imagination and a prophet's clear vision of the goal to which God will lead humanity are both at their highest in this great song of the future, whose winged words make music even in a translation. No doubt it starts from the comparatively small fact of the restoration ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... drew near with that reverence which is due to a superior nature: and as my heart was entirely subdued by the captivating strains I had heard, I fell down at his feet and wept. The genius smiled upon me with a look of compassion and affability that familiarized him to my imagination, and at once dispelled all the fears and apprehensions with which I approached him. He lifted me from the ground, and taking me by the hand, Mirzah, said he, I have heard thee in ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... formation. Will a new Europe, a new society, a new humanity, take form from the prodigious shock by which our imagination is confounded? ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... what they believe," said Roden; "nor do you or I. Men talk of belief as though it were a settled thing. It is so but with few; and that only with those who lack imagination. What sort of a time did you have down at ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... in diameter, with a proportionate stem of about five feet from the earth. The hum of insects, and sudden disturbance of rich-coloured parrots, screaming and fluttering through the branches, and the strong, short, rapid flight of the dove, with its melancholy cooing, transported us in imagination a long way inland, whereas we were not three hundred yards from the beach. We now wended our way towards a small eminence, through long grass, in most places interwoven with creepers, compelling us to tear our way through them in ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... announce the breaking-off of the engagement. Aunt Marcia also took the trouble to explain, quite confidentially, to some seven hundred and ninety-three people, just why the engagement had been broken off: and these explanations were more creditable to Mrs. Dumby's imagination than to me. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... any unpleasant mistakes. The hard palm of Labor may cross the gloved hand of Leisure, and nobody will suspect that the select is too familiar with the vulgar. Consequently, there is a good deal of affability and prime manliness, besides those associations of sentiment and imagination which, if there must be an aristocracy, lend it an artistic consistency. But here, where everybody says that all men are equal, and everybody is afraid they will be; where there are no adamantine barriers of birth and caste; people are anxiously exclusive. And ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... and down; he wanted to get away. He knew, to be sure, that the old man had been drawing heavily on his imagination, but all the same ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... threshold of this ancient pile, where the "proud porter" had in former days "rear'd himself,"[I-2] a stranger had a complete and commanding view of the decayed village, the houses of which, to a fanciful imagination, might seem as if they had been suddenly arrested in hurrying down the precipitous hill, and fixed as if by magic in the whimsical arrangement which they now presented. It was like a sudden pause in one of Amphion's country-dances, when the huts which were to form the future ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... inclined plane, telling Forester that they could have the boat. But Forester, who began to find the evening air too cold and chilly, said that he did not think it was worth while for them to set out on a voyage at so late an hour. But Marco's imagination was so much taken with the idea of a voyage in a boat by moonlight, that he was very urgent to have Forester go. So Forester consented, and they ...
— Forests of Maine - Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge • Jacob S. Abbott
... said, equably. "Maybe. You can't tell. As a young one I had a powerful imagination. I might have ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... the life of a person, and in which they see themselves in relation to the rest of the world clearly. It would not be true to say that Nelly loved Donnegan. Certainly not as yet, for the familiar figure of Lord Nick filled her imagination. But the little man was different. Lord Nick commanded respect, admiration, obedience; but there was about Donnegan something which touched her in an intimate and disturbing manner. She had felt the will-o'-the-wisp flame which burned in him in his great moments. It was possible ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... to the later dialogues and to the Laws: 2. The more complete account of the nature of good and pleasure: 3. The distinction between perception, memory, recollection, and opinion which indicates a great progress in psychology; also between understanding and imagination, which is described under the figure of the scribe and the painter. A superficial notion may arise that Plato probably wrote shorter dialogues, such as the Philebus, the Sophist, and the Statesman, as studies or preparations for longer ones. This view may be natural; ...
— Philebus • Plato
... probably he will tread upon their toes—an art in which I never knew his equal. However, I always loved Bastin, perhaps because no one else did, a fact of which he remained totally unconscious, or perhaps because of his brutal way of telling one what he conceived to be the truth, which, as he had less imagination than a dormouse, generally it was not. For if the truth is a jewel, it is one coloured and veiled by ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... seems so to you," said Goethe. "There are, however, few men who have imagination for the truth of reality; most prefer strange countries and circumstances, of which they know nothing, and by which their imagination may ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... buying a piece of land in Yalta and am going to build so as to have a place in which to spend the winters. The prospect of continual wandering with hotel rooms, hotel porters, chance cooking, and so on, and so on, alarms my imagination. Mother will spend the winter with me. There is no winter here; it's the end of October, but the roses and other flowers are blooming freely, the trees are ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... communion with all which they contain of beautiful or majestic, some intercourse with the Universal God. Whosoever has maintained with his own heart the strictest correspondence of confidence, who dares to examine and to estimate every imagination which suggests itself to his mind—whosoever is that which he designs to become, and only aspires to that which the divinity of his own nature shall consider and approve—he has already ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... arms; and at the same time employed his gifts, his riches, and his friends above all things, to increase his power in the city. And now Cato's old admonitions began to rouse Pompey out of the negligent security in which he lay, into a sort of imagination of danger at hand; but seeing him slow and unwilling, and timorous to undertake any measures of prevention against Caesar, Cato resolved himself to stand for the consulship, and presently force Caesar either to lay down his arms or discover his ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... be actually before my eyes; and she was not there, nor had been, for it was a dream, an illusion, and no such being existed, or could exist, in this gross world; and at the same time I knew that she had been there—that imagination was powerless to conjure up ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... (whose nostrils were delicately expanding and contracting in the fumes of the oil-stove), and he was at once reassured. He knew that he would have to face neither rudeness, nor bluntness, nor lack of imagination, nor lack of quick sympathy. Besides, the visitor, with practical assurance, set the tone of ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... Francis! It is Philippa!" Again the breathless silence. Then, intent only on the task of gaining a response, she slipped her arm under the pillow, and leaning her face closer and closer, she called again and again. Did an eyelid flicker? Was it imagination, or was the deathly pallor changing slightly? Were the shadows round the drawn mouth ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... sleep last night till past two, and was waked before three by a noise of people endeavouring to break open my window. For a while I would not stir, thinking it might be my imagination; but hearing the noise continued, I rose and went to the window, and then it ceased. I went to bed again, and heard it repeated more violently; then I rose and called up the house, and got a candle: the rogues had lifted up the sash a yard; there are great sheds before ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... Peter Parley is a pleasant greeting for all boys and girls, wherever the English language is spoken and read. He has a happy method of conveying information, while seeming to address himself to the imagination."—The Critic. ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... pseudonym. The pseudonym shows imagination. Let us be thankful for that. Gastronomy is bankrupt. Formerly it was worshipped. Formerly gastronomy was a goddess. To-day the sole tributes consist in bills-of-fare that are just like the Sahara ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... say, that Love passeth knowledge. How could man's imagination and invention ever have produced such a loving Person as our Lord, revealing the perfection of ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... the night when sleep would not come, and when my imagination rehearsed over and over again sights I had seen and tales I had heard, I made an almost cast-iron resolution to escape to the estate of Stewart of Ards and have one letter filled up with the good deeds of a landlord. Alas for me! another storm, a rain ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... each human mind to unfold according to its genius. Nothing stirs the central wheel of the soul like the Breath of God. The whole man is quickened, his senses are new senses, his emotions new emotions; his reason, his affections, his imagination, are all new-born. The change is greater than he knows; he marvels at the powers in himself which the Breath is opening and calling forth. He finds his nature to be an unutterable thing; he is sure therefore that the future must have inconceivable ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... as has been said, was too far removed from John to make him more than an occasional companion. And so, for several terms, John, for the most part, walked alone. By the time Desmond joined him, he had gleaned a knowledge which fascinated a friend of like sensibility and imagination. Together they revisited the old and explored the new. One never-to-be-forgotten day the boys discovered a deserted house of some pretensions about a mile from the Hill. Its grounds, covering several acres, were enclosed ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... general of brigade protecting the heads of the government! I don't know; but sometimes this ridiculous self-reliance leads me to the point of believing everything possible which this strange man would have me do; and with his imagination, who can reckon what he would undertake?" This letter, though often quoted, is so remarkable that, as some think, it may be a later invention. If written later, it was probably the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... seemed like a dream city, a creation of some morbid imagination, presented to her mind's eye as the city of ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... vessel had no wheel, being steered by a tiller on deck, in the 'long-shore fashion. In stationing Biddy, the widow told her that she was to play "tricks at the wheel," leaving it to the astounded Irish woman's imagination to discover what those tricks were. Failing in ascertaining what might be the nature of her "tricks at the wheel," Biddy was content to do nothing, and nothing, under the circumstances, was perhaps the very best thing ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... aspect of luxury and elegance; with a strange new atmosphere of feminine habitation, that went a little to Anthony's head, that called up clearer than ever the dark-haired, strenuous-faced woman of the dog-cart, and turned his imagination to visions and divinings of intimate feminine things. One thought of chiffons, and faint, elusive perfumes, and the gleam and rustle of silken garments; one heard soft voices, trills of feminine laughter, the whispering of feminine secrets; one saw ladies in low chairs, reading ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... midst of a cultivated plain washed by the waters of the Guadalquivir, made it very early the favorite residence of the Arabs, who loved to surround their houses, even in the cities, with groves and refreshing fountains, so delightful to the imagination of a wanderer of the desert. [13] The public squares and private court-yards sparkled with jets d'eau, fed by copious streams from the Sierra Morena, which, besides supplying nine hundred public baths, were conducted ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... however perfect, which human wisdom can devise. Such subjects of political agitation as occupy the public mind consist to a great extent of exaggeration of inevitable evils, or overzeal in social improvement, or mere imagination of grievance, having but remote connection with any of the constitutional functions or duties of the Federal Government. To whatever extent these questions exhibit a tendency menacing to the stability of the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... imagination you have, Nell, dear," she scoffed. Then she changed the subject arbitrarily: "Is mother quite comfortable? Did you have the porter put a screen in her window?—you know she always insists ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... sure tact and swiftly working imagination. "I had just come to an end of them. It's a silly story of losses and what-not—I needn't bother you with it. I thought I would walk to London, with the traditional half-crown in my pocket"—he flashed a wistful smile—"and seek my fortune. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... step, however, of resigning a pension, and of throwing himself entirely upon the public for fame and support, was a more important one than his sanguine imagination and excitement of feeling permitted him at the time to contemplate. How far his being an unappointed composer may have hastened the production of his immortal works, is open to question; but that his life was sacrificed in struggling against the difficulties ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... image ever floated round him, and has contributed some traits to each of his heroines. This heavenly surrender of a simple, good, and tender heart contrasts wonderfully with the sensual and gloomy passion of the lover, who, in the midst of his love-dreams, is persecuted by the phantoms of his imagination and by the nightmares of thought, with those sorrows of a soul, which is crushed, but not extinguished, which is tormented by the invincible want of happiness and the bitter feeling, how hard a thing it is ...
— Faust • Goethe
... fallen into disuse, but are still admirably preserved. Beneath the former, and extending far below the surface of the water, is the old Bastile of the Inquisition, occasionally pressed into requisition now to house recalcitrant politicians, and where no great effort of the imagination is required still to hear the groans of the tortured and the sighs of the condemned, awaiting in chains and san benitos the approaching ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the faithful—Jacker McKnight, Phil Doon, and Billy Peterson, stole through Wilson's paddock carrying mysterious bundles, and taking as many precautions to avoid observation and pursuit as if they were really, as they pretended to be with the fine imagination of early boyhood, desperate characters bent upon an undertaking of unparalleled lawlessness and great daring. They crossed the creek and crept along in the shadow of the hill, for the moon, although low down in the sky, was still bright and dangerous to hunted outlaws. Off to the ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... weary miles to the house of the brother whom in youth she shielded from the wrath of a drunken father, whose rude pictures she concealed from eyes that would have looked upon them in anger. Now he is the most celebrated painter of his time. He is rich beyond the imagination of his humble contemporaries. He never receives people into ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... feathers of this battered black hat or compressed within the forlorn squirrel-trimmed gray suit. The dragging movement, the hint of dropping on the seat not from fatigue but from desperation, completed the picture his imagination had already painted of some world-worn, knocked-about creature who had come to the point at which, in his own phrase, ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... the experiences of others. In addition, our years of work in the canyons had robbed them of their imaginary dangers, and—while we trust that we are not entirely without imagination—much of their weirdness and glamour with which they are inseparable to the idealist and the impressionist. Each of these upsets could have been avoided by a portage had we desired to make one, but success in other rapids made us a little ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... greatest villain imagination can form, I grant it; and next to the villainy of such a fact is the villainy of aspersing me with the guilt. How? which way was I to wrong her? For ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... morality truly; but it would have puzzled another than George Cruikshank to make mirth out of it as he has done. Away, surely not on the wings of these verses, Cruikshank's imagination begins to soar; and he makes us three darling little men on a green common, backed by old farmhouses, somewhere about May. A great mixture of blue and clouds in the air, a strong fresh breeze stirring, Tom's jacket flapping in ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Molic peoples of the Isles, in particular, it had been carried to a high pitch of perfection, and its forms had become the subject of assiduous study. Its technique was exact, complex, extremely elaborate, minutely regulated; yet the essential fires of sincerity, spontaneity, imagination and passion were flaming with undiminished heat behind the fixed forms and restricted measures. The very metropolis of this lyric realm was Mitylene of Lesbos, where, amid the myrtle groves and temples, the sunlit silver of the fountains, ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... loth. She had attained the reputation of an accomplished raconteuse, and she was proud of it. Her crazed imagination peopled the forest with weird uncanny things, and fearful tales she told of fays and bugaboos, of spectres and awful voices speaking from out the dank stillness of twilight hollows. Often she sent quaking to their pallets men who would have heard the war-whoop with scarcely ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... subject was 'God's love,' upon which he poured forth a mystical incomprehensible rhapsody, with extraordinary vehemence of manner and power of lungs. There was nothing like eloquence in his sermon, no musical periods to captivate the ear, no striking illustrations to charm the imagination; but there is undoubtedly something in his commanding figure and strange, wild countenance, his vehemence, and above all the astonishing power of his voice, its compass, intonation, and variety, which arrests ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... because he assumed in certain elementary demonstrations that geometrical figures could be removed from the paper, turned over and laid down again,—the so-called "method of superposition," now generally regarded as quite allowable. Of course, a figure can be treated in this way only in imagination and for this season, probably, the method was not employed by Euclid. Its use, however, leads always to true results, as anyone may see; and it was quite characteristic of Professor Newcomb that he should have taken it up, not having the fear of the ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... enter, the facts of conjugation represent a simple and natural working-out of functional bodily laws, usually with a seasonal determination. But where man is concerned these facts are so largely made to serve the purposes of pruriency, so exploited to inflame the imagination in an undesirable and directly harmful way that they can be approached only with ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... he did what he did. He told me how beautiful it made the world, where before it was miserable and friendless, how he thought of great things and made great plans, how his home seemed finer and better to him, and his work more noble. The man had a real gift of imagination and spoke with an eagerness and eloquence that stirred me deeply. I was almost on the point of asking him where his magic liquor was to be found! When he finally gave me ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... Mr. Grice and the two prefects was eagerly discussed by boys of all ages. Exaggerated reports spread from mouth to mouth, each teller of the story adding to it some details drawn from his own imagination, until, away down in the Second Form, it was confidently asserted that Oaks had called Mr. Grice a "little tin monkey," and that Allingford had boxed the master's ears; which enormities would most certainly result in the expulsion ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... may seem that my conviction was the result of an overwrought imagination, or to the actual reality of the prying eyes of the little monkeys or the curious ones of the birds; but there is a difference which I cannot explain between the sensation of casual observation and studied espionage. A sheep might gaze at you without ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... always, if they saw Prickly Porky at all, he seemed to be fast asleep, and no one liked to wake him to ask questions. Little by little they began to think that Jimmy Skunk was right, and that Peter Rabbit's terrible creature existed only in Peter's imagination. ...
— The Adventures of Prickly Porky • Thornton W. Burgess
... office and the lurid detective story from which Miss Norman's summons had torn him. He was always gratified when an officer from Scotland Yard called; it seemed to bring him a step nearer to the great crook-world of his dreams. William Johnson possessed imagination; but it was the ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... and luxury; our manufactories yield fortunes never dreamed of by the fathers of the Republic; our business men are madly striving in the race for riches, and immense aggregations of capital outrun the imagination in the magnitude of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... the black-gloved hand, resting upon the little ledge, clenched itself tightly as she listened. I fancied that tears had come into her big, dark eyes, but perhaps it was only my imagination. ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... can so exercise your imagination as to put yourself in my place, you will not be slow to recognize the terror which came over me at this unexpected sight. If I had seen a dozen armed men spring out upon us from the rocks I should have cared not. But to see these sinister-looking shadows, ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... growth of shells. When I was at Tours this summer, I inquired into the character of De la Sauvagere, from a gentleman who had known him well. He told me he was a person of talents, but of a heated imagination; however, that he might be depended on for any facts advanced on his own knowledge. This gentleman added, that he had seen such proofs of this growth of shells in many parts of the country round Tours, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... accurate costumes by the young people taking part; the collecting of suitable stage properties such as hearthbrooms, Indian pipes, and dishes of pewter. The greater the research, the keener the stimulus for imagination and ingenuity, two things that go to the making of every successful production. Fortunately, the patriotic play is inherently simple, its appeal is along broad general lines, so that it requires no great amount of money or energy to adequately produce it. And, as history is ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... within his own being a message as clear and sacred as any that ever came to prophet or teacher in other times, it will begin to realize the luxury of its liberty, and something of the grandeur of its destiny. Truth and right are not fictions of the imagination, they are realities opening before the growing soul like continents before explorers. They always invite entrance and possession. They have horizons full of splendor and beauty and music. They alone can satisfy. But the soul has not yet fully escaped from the mists ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... did not offer scope for romance or sentiment. Its daily doings were most prosaic, a round in which Latin, mathematics, and chemistry were chiefly to the fore, and the only appeal to the imagination was the weekly lecture on English literature from the Principal. Gwen liked these; Miss Roscoe had the knack of making historical dry bones live, and encouraged the girls to read for themselves. All her lessons were interesting, but in this ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... her mother were more disturbed at the failure of the bill than Rachael. Time had lifted the shadow of her husband from the race, but, never having loved, even a little, her imagination modelled no pleasing features upon the ugly skull of matrimony. It is true that she sometimes thought of herself as a singularly lonely being, and allowed her mind to picture love and its companionships. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... inscription." The stone is evidently Connecticut sandstone or freestone. Mr. Hanson says of the volume "Eliza Wharton": "The catchpenny volume of letters which pretend to give her history has but the figments of the imagination of ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... across some fields leading to the river, and amused herself throwing sticks for Archie to fetch off its half-frozen surface—a diversion which soon palled on the Skye, who was not fond of water; so Bluebell wandered on, soliloquizing, as usual. Suppose this uncle, who loomed in her imagination like some dread Genie in his disposition over their fate should receive the intelligence by cutting off the supplies and hurling maledictions at Harry's head, what on earth would they do? She had always been very fond of acting,—indeed, had been quite an authority in drawing-room ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... meeting the peasant on his own ground and the advantage of appealing to him in his own language. The idea of a benevolent ruler, an all-suffering motherland, and an all-unifying church exercised a powerful appeal upon the imagination, for a long time superseding and forcing into the background the growing, elemental, and unfulfilled longing for more land. The ideology of a perfect monarchy is so simple and its shortcomings so easily attributable to ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... gasp as if my breath was going, and in imagination I recalled my sensations when, during a bathing expedition, I went down twice before Jimmy swam to my help and held me up. The water had not touched my lips—it was only at my chest, but I fancied I felt it bubbling in my nostrils and strangling ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... which is to the human mind as the winds to the sea, stirring, and then allaying it;—farewell to poetry and deep philosophy, for man's imagination is cold, and his enquiring mind can no longer expatiate on the wonders of life, for "there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest!"—to the graceful building, which in its perfect proportion transcended the rude forms of nature, the fretted ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Churchman suggest that, if this is a sample of Mr. Sheppard's new movement, the "Life" of the Church of England is likely to be a little too lively, and its "Liberty" to verge on licence? A ministry of undenominational feminism is "a thing imagination boggles at." Here it is to be remarked that the leaders of the movement are male and female after their kind. Dr. and Mrs. Dingo sit in council side by side, and much regret is expressed that Archdeacon ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... was going to say?" she thought, as she went slowly up to Judith's room, where she was to spend the night. "It can't be my imagination this time, for she actually did start to speak, and then stopped." She frowned and then her face cleared. "What a stupid I am—always getting up in the air about trifles! Doris Leighton is tired to death, and wanted to get home. ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... and anger and lust that presented themselves so vividly and attractively that it seemed he must have willed them; it was not often that he was tempted to sin in word or deed—such, when they came, rushed on him suddenly; but in the realm of thought and imagination and motive he would often find himself, as it were, entering a swarm of such things, that hovered round him, impeding his prayer, blinding his insight, and seeking to sting the very heart of his spiritual ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... to give vent to my feelings in a letter, and half determined that it should be publicly addressed to the rank hypocrite, signed by my own name. My angry imagination teemed forth the biting taunts that should sting him to madness, and the broad shame with which he was to be overwhelmed. Active memory retraced each circumstance, that could blacken the object of my present contempt and abhorrence; and every ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... after long labour, the pioneers saw their accumulated facts falling into a significant order—sometimes in the form of a law that revolutionised the whole world of thought—have an intense human interest, and belong essentially to the creative imagination of poetry. It is with these moments that my poem is chiefly concerned, not with any impossible attempt to cover the whole field or to make a new poetic system, after the Lucretian model, out of ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... hand than Catharine. What most attracted us, and from which we most wished to make a selection, were those characteristic traits which brought us in a manner personally acquainted with Suwarrow. In person Suwarrow was unlike what the imagination would picture. He was but five feet one inch in height, and of a fragile form; his mouth was large, and his features plain; but his countenance was full of fire, vivacity, and penetration. When he was moved, it became severe, commanding, and even terrible; but this seldom happened, and never ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... chapters, of the abbots, of the priors, who had the decree of life and death,—without reckoning the judicial drownings in the river Seine; it is consoling to-day, after having lost successively all the pieces of its armor, its luxury of torment, its penalty of imagination and fancy, its torture for which it reconstructed every five years a leather bed at the Grand Chatelet, that ancient suzerain of feudal society almost expunged from our laws and our cities, hunted from code to code, chased from place to place, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... deep shade on the countenance. The two statues reclining on the urn represent Day and Night. Day is little more than blocked, yet most magnificent. To have done more would have weakened the striking effect of the whole, which is heightened by what is left to the imagination. Night is finely imagined. The attitude is beautiful, mournful, and full of the most touching expression—the drooping head and the supporting hand are unrivalled in the arts. Opposite is the monument of the nephew. The attitude of Lorenzo ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... not mean simply an imagination or dream which might come to some person who had little practical understanding of the ways of life, but we mean an appreciation of God's thought and approximate understanding of his plan and a ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... lively imagination; but during the night he had a clear and blissful vision of his future destiny, the only dream of fortune his life was ever blessed with. He was to be the landlord of the hotel, when Mrs. Cobbledick had gone to bliss, and Jemima was to be ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... colored, if not by their own interests and inclinations, at least by their enthusiasm and partial view of their own purposes; and even the description of disinterested reporters and eye witnesses may be distorted and exaggerated, either by their own peculiarities of excited imagination, or from their imperfect opportunities for observation. But in cases where numerous witnesses are questioned, and cross examined under the solemnities of judicial proceeding, each one knowing that others equally well informed have been ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... the possible, and the thought was disturbing that, in a matter which so nearly touched his own interest, he had allowed his interest to prevail over his quixotry. Self-sacrifice appealed so keenly to his imagination that the inability to exercise it gave him a sense of disillusion. He was like the philanthropist who with altruistic motives builds model dwellings for the poor and finds that he has made a lucrative investment. He cannot prevent the satisfaction he feels in the ten per cent which rewards the bread ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... hatred into love. For Madame de Stael had been disposed to lavish the whole impassioned enthusiasm of her heart upon the young hero of Marengo and Arcola—quite disposed to become the Egeria of this Numa Pompilius. In the warm impulse of her stormy imagination, Madame de Stael, in reference to Bonaparte, had even, in a slight measure, been regardless of her position as a lady, and had only remembered that she was a poetess, and that, as such, it became her ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... the game past the hiding-place of the rest. The next morning they were off with the dawn, in high hopes of reaching the lake, for the water in the stream seemed warmer than usual, though the explorer laid this to imagination. ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... impalpable obstruction of will, unintelligible and persistent. His enthusiasm grew as he perfected the details of his plan. It was a new kind of scheme, in which he took the artistic delight of the incorrigible promoter. His imagination once enlisted for the plan, he held to it, arguing, counselling, bullying. "If it's the money," he ended, "you needn't bother. I'll just put it on the bill. When I am rich, it won't make no difference, nor ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... afternoon, consumed his own time and that of his ploughmen; and he reserved no leisure for the care of his temporal affairs. His active mind, superior to the low occupations to which he was condemned, preyed upon itself; and he indulged his imagination in visions, illuminations, revelations; the great nourishment of that hypochondriacal temper to which he was ever subject. Urged by his wants and his piety, he had made a party with Hambden, his near kinsman, who was pressed only by the latter motive, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... steadily in the eye, neither quailing in the least before the fierce gaze he encountered. The form of Uncas dilated, and his nostrils opened like those of a tiger at bay; but so rigid and unyielding was his posture, that he might easily have been converted by the imagination into an exquisite and faultless representation of the warlike deity of his tribe. The lineaments of the quivering features of Magua proved more ductile; his countenance gradually lost its character of defiance in an expression of ferocious joy, and heaving ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... command of one of the bravest nations in the world; and it was under the auspices of a man who dared scarce fire a pistol, that the greatest generals in France began their careers of conquest. He had neither eloquence nor imagination; but substituted in their stead a miserable, affected, bombastic style, which, until other circumstances gave him consequence, drew on him general ridicule. Yet against so poor an orator, all the eloquence ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... "gambling" or playing "to win" in it—no one is richer or poorer for it; it also requires a number of children to play together. It is really a "play," and has survived because it has handed down some instances of custom and belief which were deeply rooted and which made a strong appeal to the imagination of our ancestors. The singing games represent in dramatic form the survival of those ceremonial dances common to people in early stages of development. These dances celebrated events which served to bind the people together and to give them a common interest in matters ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... great deal of water to be sure; and a very great deal of water it certainly is, and much more, God knows, than I ever saw before, except between the shores of Calais and Dover; yet I did feel something like disappointment too; when my imagination wandering over all that the poets had said about it, and finding earth too little to contain their fables, recollected that they had thought Eridanus worthy of a place among the constellations, I wished to see such a river ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... must say, the camisa did not mean all that I have suggested, not the sort of degradation of which it is the symbol in other men. The most extravagant imagination could not have linked him with anything that smacked of romance, romance however sordid. His vices, I had sized it, would come rather from an excess of calculation than from a lack of it. No, that camisa was just a sign of his meanness, his prodigious ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... the timorous fears of his household, during his own absence from home: terrors aggravated by the unwarrantable anxiety of an English visitor, whose ignorance of Ireland had worked upon an excited imagination; and that a copy of the resolution be presented to his lordship, either in letter or by a deputation, ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Thus one of the uses of pictures is that they give us a clear idea of what we have not seen; a second use is that they excite our imaginations, and often help us to forget disagreeable circumstances and unpleasant surroundings. The cultivation of the imagination is very important, because in this way we can add much to our individual happiness. Through this power, if we are in a dark, narrow street, in a house which is not to our liking, or in the midst of any ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... sadly. "I told you that this situation is intolerable to him. If he can't escape in space, he'll escape in time. He hasn't the imagination to go forward, so ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... it was all imagination, my young friend; there is no bear or wild animal near us—at least ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... ignominy. When the woman was dead and her betrayer gone, the husband came back, an old man; and now, as I see him bending beneath its weight, the hump upon his shoulder seems to be labelled with this price which, in my imagination, though originally the bag of gold, has by a slow and chemically unexplained process of ossification, become a part of himself, and will grotesquely deform his skeleton a hundred years to come. When, morning and evening, I see this old ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... said, "have I ever failed you yet? You have done a good deal for me, I don't deny it—you have had all the trouble, but beyond that what have you suffered except in imagination? If you choose to exaggerate dangers, it is not my fault. Your children are as safe as—as safe as the Bank of England. Now, have I ever ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... made me a big doll out of towels. It was the most comical shapeless thing, this improvised doll, with no nose, mouth, ears or eyes—nothing that even the imagination of a child could convert into a face. Curiously enough, the absence of eyes struck me more than all the other defects put together. I pointed this out to everybody with provoking persistency, but no one seemed equal to the task of ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... looking down at the trees and daffodils, he drew a long breath and tried to smile over what had been a trick of the imagination and to relegate Karen to the place of half-humorous dreams. He tried to think calmly of her. He visualized her in her oddity and child-likeness; seeing the flat blue bows of the concert; the old-fashioned gold locket of the ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... combustion theory, which, though bearing the seal of ages, is obnoxious both to common and philosophic reasoning. This theory presupposes a consumption of material beyond all conception, and the supply of which has been no small tax upon the scientific imagination. The source of this supply has been claimed to be the subsidence of useless worlds, and of asteroids, and meteors, showered down upon its surface. Estimates have been carefully made, and we are gravely ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... acres set my thoughts on fire. In imagination I extended my farm upon all sides, thinking how much better I could handle my land than my neighbours. I dwelt avariciously upon more possessions: I thought with discontent of my poverty. More land I wanted. I was enveloped ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... in silence for a little time, and then Angus Og spoke again "The Divine Imagination may only be known through the thoughts of His creatures. A man has said Commonsense and a woman has said Happiness are the greatest things in the world. These things are male and female, for Commonsense is Thought and Happiness is Emotion, and until they embrace ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... spoil-bank. The cutting was perhaps a hundred feet deep, and the artificial mounds were old enough to be covered by turf and gorse. They bore here and there a tree, and in any hollow of the hills, where the chimneys and furnace-fires were hidden, it needed no special gift of the imagination to make a rolling prairie of the scene, or ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... of mechanism, or wooden figure, which has not the true life. The sunlight of science must penetrate the poet; he must perceive truth and harmony in the minute and in the immensely great with a clear eye: it must purify and enrich the understanding and imagination, and show him new forms which will supply to him more animated words. Even single discoveries will furnish a new flight. What fairy tales cannot the world unfold under the microscope, if we transfer our human ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... God sent prophets to Israel, to tell the people of the will of God. Foretelling the future was only secondary with them. Prophecy is a supernatural gift, whether it takes place with the help of the imagination or not. If it were a natural phenomenon dependent upon the intellectual power of the individual and his faculty of imagination, as the philosophers and some Jewish theologians think, there should have ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... was traced to the same cause. Many affected to believe that Marie was the victim of sorcery, and that such was the real source of the influence of Leonora; and thus the heart-broken mother and unhappy wife, whose morbid imagination had caused her to consider her trials as the result of magical arts, was herself accused of having employed them against ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... wilful, had long cherished a strange liking for this frowning old home of her ancestors, and, at the most critical time of her life, conceived the idea of proving to herself and to society at large that no real ban lay upon it save in the imagination of the superstitious. So, being about to marry the choice of her young heart, she caused this house to be opened for the wedding ceremony; with ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Grafton brought the tears brimming to my eyes. I had thought to be there to receive his last words and blessing, to watch over him, and to Smooth his pillow. Who had he else in the world to bear him affection on his death-bed? The imagination of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and the driver are always given with scrupulous care, but such incidental details as length of ascent, minimum, maximum, and average gradient, maximum curvature, and so on, are generally left to the imagination. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... friends,—not those who scourged him, whose caprices had tormented him; not his young master, not his old master. That delightful poetry which paints a loving slave clinging fondly to the master that scourges him had never glowed in his imagination. Whatever of regard he had before cherished towards his master had been driven from his heart by the thongs of the ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... confess, these two most brilliant events in the painter's life—his first successful work of art and the triumph of his scientific discovery—were brought together, as it were, in a manner singularly fitted to impress the imagination. Six copies of his "Dying Hercules" had been made in London, and the mold was then destroyed. Four of these were distributed by the artist to academies, one he retained, and the last was given to Mr. Bulfinch, the architect ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... company, made an allusion in a toast to the two women, one the captain, the other the lieutenant, who governed France and Spain, and that in so coarse and yet humorous a manner, that it struck at once the imagination of the guests. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... an insect as you would a magnetic needle and to subject it to the current from an induction coil in order to disturb its magnetism or diamagnetism appeared to me, I must confess, a curious notion, worthy of an imagination in the last ditch. I have but little confidence in our physics, when they pretend to explain life; nevertheless, my respect for the great man would have made me resort to the induction-coils, if I had possessed the necessary apparatus. But ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... interprets human life, its activities, its ideas and emotions, and those things about which human interest and emotion cluster. It gives breadth of view, supplies high ideals of conduct, cultivates the imagination, trains the taste, and develops an appreciation of beauty of form, fitness of phrase, and music of language. The term Literature as used in this Manual is applied especially to those selections in the Ontario Readers which possess in some degree these characteristics. Such selections ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... traitor, a cheat, and a rebel. It was no easy task, either, to shake to its foundations a legitimate sovereignty, strengthened by time and consecrated by laws and religion; to dissolve all the charms of the senses and the imagination, those formidable guardians of an established throne, and to attempt forcibly to uproot those invincible feelings of duty, which plead so loudly and so powerfully in the breast of the subject, in favour of his sovereign. But, blinded by the splendour of a crown, Wallenstein observed ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... say to you that he shall be the judge of it, as you have to say to him that you must be; and this shows that the notion of any natural right of anybody of any age to participate in the government of society is an absolute absurdity. It is one of those figments of the imagination that have crawled into some people's brains within a very few years, and will go out again as ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... it!" replied the man. "But I resolved to get some money, nevertheless. I had a fertile imagination, some education and a very small amount of money. I did not want to take so cheap a way as to rob or cheat my fellow men. I was not shrewd enough to enter the business world. Therefore, I turned my attention ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... way: "I'm a fool. I know I'm a fool; a great big fool. I ought to have told her who I was. I ought to get out a poster and label myself dangerous, so people would know they were talking to a tramp. Oh, but when she finds out, as she must—and her father—." Here Dick's imagination failed him, and he laughed again and again in spite of himself, as he thought of the tramp who had applied to Adam Goodrich for work, chatting with his beautiful daughter as an equal. "Whew—but there'll be a hot time in ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... gayety; he began to laugh, and suddenly he broke down and confessed that he had come home in the steerage; and was at his last cent, beyond his fare to Chicago. His straw hat looked like a withered leaf in the light of his sad facts; his thin overcoat affected March's imagination as something like the diaphanous cast shell of a locust, hopelessly resumed for comfort at the approach of autumn. He made Burnamy sit down, after he had once risen, and he told him of Major Eltwin's wish to see him; and he promised to go round with him to the major's hotel ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of their potentiality in this respect can be easily stated. Barbara Comber, his sister (and so "one of us"), had married an extremely wealthy American, who, in Lord Ashbridge's view, could not be considered one of anybody at all; in other words, his imagination failed to picture a whole class of people who resembled Anthony Jerome. He had hoped when his sister announced her intention of taking this deplorable step that his future brother-in-law would at any rate prove to be a snob—he had a vague notion that all Americans were snobs—and ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... groins; and from overhead depended a molded ceiling of honeycomb plaster-work. This room had something, even now, in the days of its desecration, of monastic beauty about it. Where the odor of sanctity had breathed forth, the fumes of idolatry prevailed; but imagination, ever on the wing, flew back to that period—and a tradition to that effect warranted the supposition—when, perchance, it had been the sanctuary and the privacy of the ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... conversation. It is remarkable that the great sculptors were all goldsmiths, and came out of the workshop. A new generation of painters had a like practical training. In those days, there was a union of manual skill with imagination. The art of the goldsmith preceded and outstripped all the others. In such a society, there was naturally a great relish for public festivals, both sacred and secular. Everywhere in Italy the Mysteries, or religious plays, exhibiting events ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... are worth more in my eye than the body of the work. For the object of that seems to be to smother all history under the mantle of allegory. If histories so unlike as those of Hercules and Jesus, can, by a fertile imagination and allegorical interpretations, be brought to the same tally, no line of distinction remains between fact and fancy. As this pithy morsel will not overburthen the mail in passing and repassing between Quincy and Monticello, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... them every one. Old settlers, describing winter storms, have been accused of an imagination as expansive as the prairie; but I affirm no man could exaggerate the fury of a blizzard on the unbroken prairie. To one thing only may it be likened—a hurricane at sea. People in lands boxed off at short compass by mountain ridges forget with what violence a wind sweeping ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... occurrence, of events. Then came works on natural history, medicine, music, grammar, in fact all the matters in which men are interested. Poetry struggled for expression and the romantic adventures of the real men and women of the time stimulated imagination to the production of tales and romances. For historical information and for literary models the writers looked to the great authors of a previous age, and attention was given to the copying of such remains of ancient literature as had survived the fall of the old ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... beautiful women. He enjoys all the triumphs of a Don Juan, without any of Don Juan's heartlessness, and is able to conquer in all encounters, through the force of his wit and the sweetness of his voice. But this eloquence is heard only by his own inner ears, and these triumphs are the triumphs of his imagination. ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... molecular force, as extended to vital physics in the force-doctrine of life, is irreconcilably at war with the principal phenomena of life, and should be classed with the other undiscovered correlates of force, which Professor Beale speaks of as "the fictions of a mechanical imagination." The truth is that these much abused and much slandered molecules are the most innocent and harmless things in nature. They never become destructive unless some other force than that inhering in themselves drags them into its service and hurls them ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good you know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... those with a greedy appetite for sensations that a judge of the High Court had been murdered on the bench. Such an appetite easily swallowed the difficulty created by the fact that the Law Courts had been closed for the long vacation. In imagination they saw a dramatic scene in court—the disappointed demented desperate litigant suddenly drawing a revolver and with unerring aim shooting the judge through the brain before the deadly weapon could be wrenched from his hands. But though the ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... of antique hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago; and spits which have cooked for Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... her aunt Abigail in Jacksonville she would have gone engaged, her finger bound with gold and her maiden meditations fettered by promises. But she went, as it was, fancy free, and there is no tinder so inflammable as the imagination of a pretty ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... her heart a great fear lest her boy, who had too much imagination, too much ideality, would waste ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... as this, the voice had been supported by simple, full-sounding harmonies. Now, from out the depths, still of F minor, rose a hesitating theme, which seemed to grope its way: in imagination, one heard it given out by the bass strings; then the violas reiterated it, and dyed it purple; voice and violins sang it together; the high little flutes carried it up and beyond, out of reach, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... a grayish sandy plain as barren of vegetation as the shores of the Dead Sea, sweltering hot an hour after sunrise, chilly cold an hour after sunset, populated by about four hundred Boers of the old narrow-minded ultra Dutch type with as much imagination as a ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... "We see in imagination the County Council's aqueducts supplying London with pure soft water from a Welsh lake; the County Council's mains furnishing, without special charge, a constant supply up to the top of every house: the County Council's hydrants and standpipes yielding abundant cleansing fluid from the Thames ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... daughter. Undine, pale as death, turned with agitation from the parents to Bertalda, and from Bertalda to the parents; suddenly cast down from that heaven of happiness of which she had dreamed, and overwhelmed with a fear and a terror such as she had never known even in imagination. "Have you a soul? Have you really a soul, Bertalda?" she cried again and again to her angry friend, as if forcibly to rouse her to consciousness from some sudden delirium or maddening nightmare. But when Bertalda only became more and more enraged, when the repulsed parents began to weep ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... falsehood. No; he will make you understand and feel that art cannot imitate nature—that where it appears to do so, it must malign her, and mock her. He will give you, or state to you, such truths as are in his power, completely and perfectly; and those which he cannot give, he will leave to your imagination. If you are acquainted with nature, you will know all he has given to be true, and you will supply from your memory and from your heart that light which he cannot give. If you are unacquainted with nature, seek elsewhere ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... his command, gave him a great ascendency over the minds of his men, and inspired that degree of confidence which would have maintained his authority in almost any circumstances. But here, from the nature of the undertaking, every man had leisure to feed his imagination with the gloominess and uncertainty of the prospect. They found from day to day the same steady gales wafting them with rapidity from their native country, and indeed from all countries of ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... It looked very like a night in the frosty streets. The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination, and gave him a hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early night might very well happen to him before morning. And he so young! And with such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... That some of those coadjutors, in the perfect existence and life of it, may be vitiated, and the life of the whole destroyed, and yet several of the constituting contrivances remain intire, I cannot think it beyond imagination or possibility; no more then that a like accidental process, as I have elswhere hinted, may also be supposed to explicate the method of Nature in the Metamorphosis of Plants. And though the difference between a Plant and an Animal be ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... together they worked, together they crouched under the parapet when the German shells came unpleasantly close, and, all the time, Jonathan, calm and stolid, unconsciously helped the other, who, being cursed with a vivid imagination, ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... page to page, but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and the lips are limbered by downright living interests and by passions in the very throe. Language is the soil of thought; and our own especially is a rich leaf-mould, the slow growth of ages, the shed foliage of feeling, fancy, and imagination, which has suffered an earth-change, that the vocal forest, as Howell called it, may clothe itself anew with living green. There is death in the Dictionary; and where language is limited by convention, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Professor Huxley: 'Fact I know, and Law I know; but what is Necessity but an empty shadow of the mind's own throwing?'[24] A shadow it most certainly is not, though it is a bugbear, and the veriest that was ever suffered to torment a morbid imagination. It is an indisputable reality, a substantial, but at the same time perfectly harmless, or rather salutary reality, whose terrors need only to be boldly confronted in order to disappear and to transform themselves into highly attractive recommendations. For what, after all, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... possessed of a fortune, was the stake for which these workers of iniquity gambled across one of mine host's greasy tables. The latest decree of the Convention, encouraging, nay, commanding, the union of aristocrats with so-called patriots, had fired the imagination of this nest of jail-birds with thoughts of glorious possibilities. Some of them had collected the necessary information; and ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... friendless, very inhuman. The long trial, the solitude and the confinement, the thoughts of the long sleepless night before, the hangman and the pinioning and the noosing of the rope, are apt to prey on the imagination. Only a very stupid ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... in this, that both represent by a series of examples various features of the kingdom, and various obstacles with which it must contend: they differ in that, while the examples given in the Gospels are pictures drawn by the imagination, the examples given in the Apocalypse are facts taken from history. But as all the characteristics and vicissitudes of his Church were present to the Head from the beginning, it was as easy for him to exhibit an image of its condition through the ministry of Matthew, as to record ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Ninon's departure from the beaten path should not be a matter of surprise, for all the young open their hearts to ideas that spring from the sentiments and passions, and anticipate in imagination the parts they are to play in the ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... Catholic Church has been accustomed to bring before its followers in a visible form the death and resurrection of the Redeemer. Such sacred dramas are well fitted to impress the lively imagination and to stir the warm feelings of a susceptible southern race, to whom the pomp and pageantry of Catholicism are more congenial than to the colder temperament ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... to be a minnesinger, a minstrel among minstrels, and abundantly accounts for Suesskind von Trimberg's association with knights and ladies. Suesskind, then, doubtless journeyed with his brother-poets from castle to castle; yet our imagination would be leading us astray, were we to accept literally the words of the enthusiastic historian Graetz, and with him believe that "on vine-clad hills, seated in the circle of noble knights and fair dames, a beaker of wine at his side, his lyre in his hand, he sang his ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... various hues, while stalactites and stalagmites sometimes resemble familiar objects with astonishing perfection. It is, however, not advisable to place implicit confidence in accounts of the natives, for the reality, no matter how beautiful, can hardly be equal to what the vivid imagination of the Indian has pictured. Anything bearing the least resemblance to a woman is called "a most beautiful Virgin Mary." Fantastic flutings become "an organ," and a level rock "an altar." Only once we were not disappointed, when, having been told to look for a pulpit, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... in his mind told him that. But of course it was ridiculous, a quirk of the imagination. ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... to Colorado, and engaged in various mining schemes, but here he was out of his sphere, and after a three years' sojourn, returned to Chicago. His active imagination had thought out many improvements on the cars he had previously constructed; and he had also secured capital with which to carry out his ideas. Fitting up a shop on the Chicago and Alton road, he ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... unless its results are viewed through the vista of the centuries. We need the proper historical perspective in this as in all else. Thus viewed, however, the simplicity of the procedure and the universality of its application are most imposing. Vaccination does not, indeed, dazzle the scientific imagination like some of the other generalizations of biology, but it is one that has been gloriously vindicated by the subsequent ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... me quickly relieve myself of the charge of encouraging rash projects or empty theories. I am proposing no vast schemes; I believe it useless to do so. We move through life, with our backs toward, to the engine, and see all that we see after it has passed. The reason, the imagination, with their creative powers, picture for themselves the world that lies before, but so swift and so unremitting is our progress, that the new revelations constantly pouring in alter the premises before a conclusion can be reached. Only the most gifted ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... of the box again for a moment. On my theory the priest represented Jupiter in the flesh, and accordingly, if Jupiter was primarily a sky-god, his priest cannot have been a mere incarnation of the sacred oak, but must, like the deity whose commission he bore, have been invested in the imagination of his worshippers with the power of overcasting the heaven with clouds and eliciting storms of thunder and rain from the celestial vault. The attribution of weather-making powers to kings or priests is very ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... to do a thing outside the limits of his imagination. She dipped the iron spoon in the pot and, extending her left arm, deliberately allowed some drops of the scalding liquor to fall on the bare flesh. He saw the arm wince, saw red blisters spring out on the white skin, he caught ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... has been fragmentarily practised to a considerable extent in spite of the fact that the laws of all countries treat it, in effect, as criminal. Many of its advocates have been militant atheists. But for some reason the imagination of white mankind has picked out Jesus of Nazareth as THE Christ, and attributed all the Christian doctrines to him; and as it is the doctrine and not the man that matters, and, as, besides, one symbol is as good as another provided ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... upon opening his body, (which the uncommonness of his case required of us, for our own satisfaction as well as public good) there was found in his left kidney a nest of no less than seven stones, of the most irregular, figures your imagination can frame, and weighing together four ounces and a half, but all fast linked together, and adhering to his back; whereby they solve his having felt no greater pains upon motion, nor other of the ordinary symptoms of the stone. Some ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... swindle! Of course! But the experts had agreed that they were diamonds—real diamonds! Perhaps they had been deceived, or—by George! Did these two men mean to say that they were real diamonds, but that they were manufactured? Mr. Latham's tidy little imagination balked at that. Absurd! Whoever heard of a diamond as big as the Koh-i-noor, or the Regent, or the Orloff being made? They were ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... "The imagination revolts before the catastrophe which is coming at the end of our century as the goal of the progress of our era, and yet we must get used to facing it. For twenty years past every resource of science has been exhausted in the invention of engines of destruction, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... in the midst of solemn silence. The listeners closed their eyes as if such immensity stunned them. They followed in imagination Gabriel's description, but their narrowed minds wished to place a term to the infinite, and in their simplicity they imagined beyond these incalculable distances a vault of firm matter millions of leagues thick. Surely all that strange and fantastic work must have a limit. ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... tracing of distinction and resemblances where less subtle intellects fail to perceive their possibility. There is a certain Orientalism in the mind of Mr. Lamar, strangely admixed with typical Americanism. He is full of reflection, full of imagination; seemingly careless, yet closely observant; apparently ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... coast of Scotland. But her dismay was dreadful when she discovered that there was a vessel below, on board which she was to be carried without delay. On the instant, dreadful visions arose before her imagination, of her being carried to a foreign shore, to be delivered into the hands of the Stuarts, to be punished as a traitor and spy; and of those far off plantations and dismal colonies where people troublesome to their families were said to be sent, to be chained ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... her place of supremacy in his heart. His future was built about his mother. She was to share his work, her home was to be in his manse, she was to be the centre about which his life would swing; and since coming to the West he had built up in imagination a new life structure, in which his mother had her own ancient place. In this new and fascinating work of exploring, organising, and upbuilding he felt sure, too, of his mother's eager ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... the city offered. The Smithsonian Library was one of the greatest attractions. Sometime in May, 1856, I got permission from the attendant in charge to climb into the gallery and see the mathematical books. Here I was delighted to find the greatest treasure that my imagination had ever pictured,—a work that I had thought of almost as belonging to fairyland. And here it was right before my eyes—four enormous volumes,—"Mecanique Celeste, by the Marquis de Laplace, Peer of France; translated by Nathaniel Bowditch, LL. D., Member of the Royal Societies of London, Edinburg, ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... don't think that I ever did see anyone procuress more cunning. How cleverly and artfully did it occur to the jade's imagination about the mirror! ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... for the industry of the Middle Ages; the other is a desert land, far up in the sky, with an air like a knife, and a complete absence of the creative sense in nature about one. Yet in both the creation of man runs riot; in both there is a sort of endlessness of imagination; in both every detail that man achieves in art is carefully completed and different from its neighbour; and in both there is an exuberance of the human soul: but with this difference, that something in the Spanish ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... Was it his imagination, or had the purplish ink begun to fade? He ran a length of it through his fingers, and then he saw that in places there were gaps where the writing had disappeared altogether. He glanced up at the altimeter needle, which was sliding by the ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... forbore to conjecture, since it was no use anticipating trouble; but Susan had been so grandiose about the Wyses, multiplying their incomes and their acreage by fifteen or twenty, so Miss Mapp conjectured, and talking so much about county families, that the liveliest imagination failed to picture what she would make of the Faragliones. She already alluded to the Count as "My brother-in-law Cecco Faraglione," but had luckily heard Diva say "Faradiddleony" in a loud aside, which had made her a little more reticent. ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... the Butte Office and asked if the FBI was checking on the flying discs reported to have been seen by many citizens. He advised that so many had reported having seen them that it undoubtedly was not a figment of the imagination. He said that these discs had been seen on July 1, 1947, in the vicinity of Trail Creek near Sun Valley, Idaho, ...
— Federal Bureau of Investigation FOIA Documents - Unidentified Flying Objects • United States Federal Bureau of Investigation
... by Schulz (Griesbach's latest editor) that 'the quotation is not in Mark's manner; that the formula which introduces it is John's: and that it seems to be a gloss taken from Luke xxii. 37.' This is not criticism but dictation,—imagination, not argument. Men who so write forget that they are assuming the very point which they are ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... laziness or indifference he had no right to risk losing it. Until this war the colonel had commanded in Africa the regiment into which criminals are drafted as a punishment. To keep them in hand requires both imagination and the direct methods of a bucko mate on a whaler. When the colonel was promoted to his present command he found the men did not place much confidence in the gas masks, so he filled a shelter with poisoned air, equipped a squad with protectors and ordered them to enter. ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... less in the spirit of exact science than with the freedom of love and old acquaintance, yet I have in no instance taken liberties with facts, or allowed my imagination to influence me to the extent of giving a false impression or a wrong coloring. I have reaped my harvest more in the woods than in the study; what I offer, in fact, is a careful and conscientious record of actual ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Fisher's Hill, put him to flight. "Only darkness," Sheridan telegraphed Grant, "has saved the whole of Early's army from total destruction. I do not think there ever was an army so badly routed."[1013] These victories, recalling those of Stonewall Jackson in 1862, appealed to the popular imagination and quickly reassured the country. Besides, on September 21, the withdrawal of Fremont and Cochrane, the Cleveland candidates, united Radical and Conservative in a vigorous campaign for Lincoln. A private letter from Grant, who participated ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Those scientists who cherish with delight the famous handiwork of Audubon are no less enthusiastic over these beautiful pictures which are painted by the delicate and scientifically accurate fingers of Light itself. These reproductions are true. There is no imagination in them nor conventionalism. In the presence of their absolute truth any written description or work of human hands shrinks into insignificance. The scientific value of these photographs can not ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [May, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... distinctly seen; the rest was enveloped, from head to foot, in a long veil of silver gauze, which, like a feathery and light mist on a beautiful landscape, suffered you to perceive that what it concealed was rarely lovely, yet induced the imagination even to enhance the charms it shaded. Such part of the dress as could be discovered was, like the veil and the trowsers, in the Oriental taste; a rich turban, and splendid caftan, were rather indicated than distinguished through the folds of the former. The ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... romance-poetry was earlier and stronger in England, at the court of our Anglo-Norman kings, than in France itself. But it was a bloom of French poetry; and as our native poetry formed itself, it formed itself out of this. The romance-poems which took possession of the heart and imagination of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are French; "they are," as Southey justly says, "the pride of French literature, nor have we anything which can be placed in competition with them." Themes were supplied from all quarters: ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... he sometimes added a furious debauch, when his imagination was for the moment maddened by champagne. But low company disgusted him, and he shunned it; he was not a man for frequent orgies, and economized his health, his energies, and his strength. His tastes ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... vegetation. The appearance of the force, as it straggled over this wavy expanse of stone, was curious enough, and it certainly baffles all attempts at description; so I must ask my readers to allow their imagination to people the mer de glace with some thousands of Oriental soldiers, regular and irregular, pipe-bearers, and household servants formidably armed, and they will not be far from a just conception of the case. After marching for five hours over this inhospitable tract, ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... readers I must express my opinion that it was because the incidents recorded were a reminiscence of something which had actually happened, and which, owing to the youth, and possible social position, of the victim, had made a profound impression upon the popular imagination. ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... needed lesson to those laboring in error. Ah! it is a very different point of view we take when we suffer, instead of merely moralizing on the suffering of others; especially we who feel that we know what is right, and lack in great part the imagination to comprehend the other man's viewpoint. To us of that cast of mind there is only one viewpoint and that is our own, and only a bodily departure to the other man's hilltop or valley, as the case may be, will open the ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... darkness below came no sound, but Curly's imagination conceived the place as full of shining eyes glaring up at him. Any bad men down there already had the drop on them. Therefore neither Curly nor his uncle made the mistake ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... himself, was one of the best known in the county at that time. Of this fine manorial residence hardly a trace now remains; but a manuscript dated some years later than the events we are regarding describes it in terms from which the imagination may construct a singularly clear and vivid picture. This record presents it as consisting of 'a faire yellow freestone building, partly two and partly three storeys; a faire halle and parlour, both waynscotted; a faire dyning roome ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... heights and were in fine condition did they appreciate the ration to the full. Again, even when one becomes used to the ration, the sensation of full satisfaction does not last for more than an hour. The imagination reaches forward to the next meal, perhaps partly on account of the fact that marching is often monotonous and the scenery uninspiring. Still, even after a good evening hoosh, the subconscious self may assert itself in food-dreams. The reaction from even a short sledging trip, ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... quick gestures of his people, described all so graphically that I could see the road and its environments as he traversed it in imagination. ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... shipping appealed to me, to my imagination, clean washed by my illness and ready as a child's for new impressions: liners gliding down to the bay and the open sea; shrewish, scolding tugs; dirty but picturesque tramps. My enthusiasm amused the nurses, whose ideas of adventure consisted of little jaunts ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... removal of that wild Scene of Wonders, which had very much disturbed my Imagination, I took a full Survey of the Persons of WIT and TRUTH; for indeed it was impossible to look upon the first, without seeing the other at the same time. There was behind them a strong and compact Body of Figures. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
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