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More "Personification" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... repentant neighbor of how he had pleasantly reminded her of Timothy; just who Timothy was, and all about him. Mr. Watts was the personification of absorbed interest. Timothy sounded to him as if he might be a "human being," he declared, and quite ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... distinct on account of the multitude, becomes without a motive. Psyche blushed under a lamp because the hand of a single god passed over her, but when the sun gazed at her with his thousand rays from the height of Olympus, that personification of the modest soul did not blush before the whole heaven. Here is the exact image of the modesty of a writer before a single auditor, and of the freedom of his utterance before all the world. Do you accuse ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... many thousands of state palanquins glittering with their various ornaments, and escorted by a suite of a hundred kingly personages, with their martial array of the four hosts, of cavalry, elephants, chariots, and infantry, and accompanied by Amazon girls, lovely as the suite of the gods, himself a personification of majesty, bearing the white parasol of dominion, with a golden staff and tassels, began once more ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... first made a great impression upon George. The latter, already esteeming himself above the average of mentality and enterprise in what he considered the "slow-poke" town of Bayport, found in the brilliant arrival from foreign parts the personification of his ideals, a satisfying specimen of that much read of genus, "the complete man of the world." He fell on his knees before that specimen and worshiped. Such idolatry could not but have some effect, even upon as blase an idol as Mr. Phillips, so the latter ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... one of the most genial of companions; in character the personification of uprightness and honor; firm in his friendships and incapable of malice toward any one. Well situated financially, happy in his domestic circle, of wide popularity, and possessing the esteem of those who know him best, General ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... stood rigid with his hands on his thighs, leaning over the box, his hair bristling, his white face running with sweat, his jaw dropped; the very personification of horror. And of a sudden he began to ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... or the lower animals are given the attributes of human beings. Such a figure is called personification, and is in fact a modified metaphor, since it is based upon some resemblance of the lower ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... of the same "Row" we recognized a broad-hatted figure once familiar to us in the Quartier Latin and the artistic auberges of the Forest of Fontainebleau. The very personification of insouciance and laissez-aller, he whose tiny bedroom-studio up-stairs ran riot with color caught among California mountains, in cool gray France and ochreous England, was bending the whole force of his mind to sketching a pouter pigeon ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... for what I should like to hear called arrested personification, or arrested anthropomorphism. More than elsewhere mythic figures seem here to cling to the dear memories of their birth and youth. This is due in part to the unequaled impressiveness of nature in India; in part to the dogged schematism of the Hindu mind, which dislikes ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... in ways which were wasteful of his rare powers. He came by literary intuition to an idea of Scripture which others had built up from the point of view of a theory of knowledge and by investigation of the facts. He is the helpless personification of a view of the relation of science and religion which has absolutely passed away. Yet Arnold died only in 1888. How much a distinguished inheritance may mean is gathered from the fact that a grand-daughter of Thomas ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Hareton seemed to be a personification of my youth, not a human being: I felt to him in such a variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catharine connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... that is so. But oh, that we might do something!" Philip clasped his hand over his knee and gazed earnestly at the man opposite. The man returned the gaze almost as earnestly. It was the personification of the Church confronting the laboring man, each in a certain way asking the other, "What will the Church do?" And it was a noticeable fact that the minister's look revealed more doubt and anxiety than the other man's look, which contained more or less of indifference and distrust. ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... accident of this particular form of complex standing in such relation to our own subjectivity that we are able to verify the fact of its ejectivity. Thus, for aught that we can tell to the contrary, Comte may have been even more justified than his followers suppose, in teaching the personification of Humanity. ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... along Hal and Chester took stock of the Montenegrin. Big he was, fully as tall and as broad as Ivan himself, and his great arms hung below his knees. He was the personification of rugged strength and brutality. From Nicolas the lads turned their eyes to Ivan. There was scarcely a noticeable difference in the stature of the two men and from casual observation it would have been hard to choose between them in the matter of strength. ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes
... "I may have none to compare with me, yet in my personification of the 'superior man' I have not as yet ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... poetry in the world, at different periods of history—Homer, the Bible, Dante, and let me add, Ossian. In Homer, the principle of action or life is predominant; in the Bible, the principle of faith and the idea of Providence; Dante is a personification of blind will; and in Ossian we see the decay of life, and the lag end of the world. Homer's poetry is the heroic: it is full of life and action: it is bright as the day, strong as a river. In the vigour of his intellect, he grapples with all the objects ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... of the second ternary is commended, I think, beyond its merit. The personification is indistinct. Thirst and Hunger are not alike; and their features, to make the imagery perfect, should have been discriminated. We are told, in the same stanza, how 'towers are fed.' But I will no longer look for particular faults; yet let it be observed that the ode ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... line was dearly bought by the admission of its wretched correspondent, "Give ample room and verge enough." He has, however, no other line as bad. The third stanza of the second ternary is commended, I think, beyond its merit. The personification is indistinct. THIRST and HUNGER are not alike, and their features, to make the imagery perfect, should have been discriminated. We are told in the same stanza how "towers are fed." But I will no longer look for particular faults; yet let it be observed that the ode might have ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... to his feet, and stood the personification of haughty displeasure, as the poor man who dared his anger walked composedly up the path. He now stood ...
— A Cousin's Conspiracy - A Boy's Struggle for an Inheritance • Horatio Alger
... essayist. One is at loss to comprehend why so quiet and unobtrusive a scholar should have been selected for important political positions, but can easily understand why he was the admiration of the highest social circles for his wit and the elegance of his conversation. He was the personification of urbanity and every gentlemanly quality, as well as one of the best scholars of his age; but it was only in an aristocratic age, when a few great nobles controlled public affairs, that such a man could have been so recognized, rewarded, and honored. He died beloved and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... humorous soliloquy of an imaginary organist over a fugue in F minor by an imaginary composer, named in the title. It is a mingling of music and moralising. The famous description of a fugue, and the personification of its five voices, is a brilliantly ingenious tour de force; and the rough humour is quite in keeping with the dramatis persona. In complete contrast to Master Hugues is A Toccata of Galuppi's,[31] one of the daintiest, most musical, most witching and haunting ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... said I to myself, "runs this church," and instantly I found myself looking upon him as a sort of personification of the troubles I had seen ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... west, and south the grey battalions converged on Winchester; and as the enemy's columns, covered by the heavy smoke, disappeared into the streets, Jackson, no longer the imperturbable tactician, moving his troops like the pieces on a chess-board, but the very personification of triumphant victory, dashed forward in advance of his old brigade. Riding recklessly down a rocky slope he raised himself in his stirrups, and waving his cap in the direction of the retreating foe, shouted to his officers to "Press forward to the Potomac!" ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... swaying from side to side, sometimes whirling around, but with feet always flat on the floor, often turning on her heels. All the time her arms were extended and her fingers snapping, and snapping also were the black eyes. She was the personification of grace, but the dance was weird—made the more so by the setting of bright evening dresses and glittering uniforms. One never sees a dance of this sort these days, even in the South, any more than one sees the bright-colored ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... " ... one who was—for he deserves no better name—a mere narrow-minded pedant." (b) "Which could never be reversed" can be expressed in one word; or else "the supreme ... reversed" may be condensed into a personification: "a very Minos ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... expecting it: to all seeming she stood there the personification of the grief that is not to be comforted, oblivious to all surroundings. Incautiously he took another step. In an instant she had "landed" him over the head with a long narrow wooden box containing, one supposes, pencils and pens. He must have been a hard-headed youngster, ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... actual beings take part in the drama, and then only as personifications of the predominant vices or passions of the individuals whose names they bear. Thus in my own volume, Belshazzar is not treated so much as an historical character, but rather as the personification of the pride and haughtiness of a voluptuous king. In The Divine Philothea, in the same volume, there are no actual beings whatever, except The Prince of Light and The Prince of Darkness or The Demon. In truth, there is nothing analogous to a Spanish Auto in English original poetry. The nearest ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... thought she was bound to do something for Madame de Maintenon, and therefore consented to her being appointed dame d'atour. It was not until shortly before her death that she learnt she had been deceived by her. After the Queen's death, Louis XIV. thought he had gained a triumph over the very personification of virtue in overcoming the old lady's scruples; he used to visit her every afternoon, and she gained such an influence over him as to induce him ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... God, in His opinion, who had afflicted this woman; it was Satan, the personification of all evil. But in order that such references should not be misunderstood He had said of Satan, only a short time before, "I beheld Satan as ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... into the evil errors of the sister-nation. The symbolical myths—such as that of Bel's mixing his own blood with the clay out of which he fashions man,(see p. 266)—are sternly discarded, for the same reason. One only is retained: the temptation by the Serpent. But the Serpent being manifestly the personification of the Evil Principle which is forever busy in the soul of man, there was no danger of its being deified and worshipped; and as, moreover, the tale told in this manner very picturesquely and strikingly points ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... De Guiche, "De Wardes is there, who is determination itself, while Manicamp is the very personification of the ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and originating, as that does, in the tendency to presume an exact correspondence between the laws of the mind and those of things external to it. The fallacy may be enunciated in this general form—Whatever can be thought of apart exists apart: and its most remarkable manifestation consists in the personification of abstractions. Mankind in all ages have had a strong propensity to conclude that wherever there is a name, there must be a distinguishable separate entity corresponding to the name; and every complex idea which the mind has formed ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... and ecclesiastic, the poor farmer Aparicianes implores Frei Pa[c,]o to make a Court lady of his slovenly daughter, two nuns bewail their fate and two shepherdesses discuss their marriage prospects. The Auto da Mofina Mendes is especially celebrated because Mofina Mendes, personification of ill-luck, with her pot of oil is the forerunner of La Fontaine's Pierrette et son pot au lait: it was perhaps suggested to Vicente by the tale of Do[n]a Truhana's pot of honey in El Conde Lucanor; the theme of counting ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... at its door, two exquisite little dolls dressed in rough, poor kimonos, brown and white. The old man holds a rake, and the old woman holds a broom. They have very kindly faces and white silken hair. Any Japanese would recognise them at once as the Old People of Takasago, the personification of the Perfect Marriage. They are staring with wonder and alarm at the Brandan sapphires, a monumental parure designed for the massive state of ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... oftentimes. He imitates very blindly. He lacks the more childish example of a brother or sister near himself in age. And this difference is of very great importance to his development. He lacks the stimulus, for example, of games in which personification is a direct tutor to selfhood, as I shall remark further on. And while he becomes precocious in some lines of instruction, he fails in variety of imagination, in richness of fancy, at the same time that his imaging processes are more wild and uncontrolled. ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... beneath him. By the creation of matter God has out of pity preserved the world, which was corrupted by the fall, from the descent into hell, and at the same time has given man occasion for moral endeavor. The appearance of Christ, the personification of the moral law, is the beginning of reconciliation, which man appropriates through the sacrament. Nature participates in the redemption, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... steadfast eyes, or was hidden behind that smooth and placid brow, then I thought must the very angels be false! If falsehood could shroud itself behind a mask of such surpassing loveliness, such an aspect and personification of all that is pure, and innocent, and faithful, and true, "where," I asked myself, "oh! where is truth to be found?" That my mother had, all unwittingly, and in some inexplicable manner aroused my father's suspicions, ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... wrote back a flattering letter in which, however, with characteristic sincerity, she is careful to remind him that the party to which she belonged could never acknowledge any sovereign but the people; that this they considered to be incompatible with the sovereignty of one man; that no miracle, no personification of popular genius in a single individual, could prove to them the right of that ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... and sendest thy messengers far off, sendest them down into hell." The apostacy from the Lord their God is manifested not only in idolatry, but also in their not leaving untried any means to [Pg 178] procure for themselves human helpers, in their courting human aid. The personification of Israel as a woman, which took place in the preceding verses, is here continued. She leaves no means untried to heighten her charms; she makes every effort to please the mighty kings. The king is an ideal ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... talented as some of his great associates in the Confederate army, but he was a tremendous fighter when occasion offered. During that last period of our cadet life, Colonel Robert E. Lee was superintendent of the academy; he was the personification of dignity, justice, and kindness, and he was respected and admired as the ideal of a commanding officer. Colonel Robert S. Garnett was commandant of cadets; he was a thorough soldier who meted out impartial justice with both hands. At our last parade I received ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... light.—That was after Christophe's concert. She went to it with the Stevens: and she was tortured by the hideous sight of the rabble amusing themselves with insulting an artist.... An artist? The man who, in Grazia's eyes, was the very type of art, the personification of all that was divine in life! She was on the point of tears; she longed to get away. She had to listen to all the caterwauling, the hisses, the howls, and, when they reached home, to the laughter of Colette as ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... of dona Bernarda, the personification of austere, uncompromising virtue, chased the mirth from every ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... this ill-assorted household. Oh, how different everything is from what I had planned! I wanted a cheerful home, where I should be the centre of every joy; a home like Aunty's, without a cloud. But Ernest's father sits, the personification of silent gloom, like a nightmare on my spirits; Martha holds me in disfavor and contempt; Ernest is absorbed in his profession, and I hardly see him. If he wants advice he asks it of Martha, while I sit, humbled, degraded and ashamed, wondering ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... was founded on a personification of the laws of Nature, centred in a mysterious unity. Egyptian nature, however, supplied but few great objects of worship as symbols of divine power, the desert, a natural enemy, the fertilizing river, and the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... wreath away piecemeal; and then they give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the rending of their fantastic garments. It is the personification of legalized rowdyism; and if young men would but confine themselves to such rowdyism as may be looked at and laughed at by their mothers and sisters, they would find life just as amusing and a thousand times more pure ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... his voice and every glance of his eye suggested the most absolute serenity. He seemed the personification of calm wisdom. Nothing disturbed him, nothing depressed him. He was as serene and unruffled as a morning in June. He radiated kindliness from a heart at peace with all mankind. His gentleness of manner was an illustration of the possibility of ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... fresh-coloured; and beaming with health, spirit, and vivacity. Its almost womanly sweetness was chastened and redeemed by the massiveness of the head, the deep penetrating eye, and an aspect of uncommon elevation and nobleness. Till the last, he was the very personification of the old Dux—the Duke of Chivalry—the foremost leader and commander of the people. But instead of chained mail and helmet, he was to be seen every day walking about amongst his people in hoddin-gray coat, nankeen breeches, white vest, and rumpled white hat—plain, easy, manly, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... this worth receiving?" she exclaimed, holding up the well-filled letter, and looking the personification of innocent and radiant happiness, her fair luxuriant hair pushed in disorder from her open forehead and flushed cheek, her blue eyes sparkling with irresistible glee, which was greatly heightened by her glowing smiles. It was ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... dirty staircase, into a mean, slovenly back-office, where a small, uncleanly man sat tipped back in his chair, picking his teeth. He seemed the personification of nonchalance, impudence, and conceit. As I entered, he looked up with a lazy insolence, which, had I been a woman, would have brought a hot flush of indignation to my face, and, on my mentioning my name, he rose and extended a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... was most effective. It beat the spear into a pruning hook. With this to leaven them, the rough habiliments were most becoming. In a word, they supplied the very setting which manhood should have; and since Anthony, sitting there at his meat, was the personification of virility, they served, as all true settings should, by self-effacement to magnify their treasure. The ex-officer might have ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... a splendid sight, and, to her imagination, it looked the personification of the rascality of the village she had so come to love. Look at it. Its trunk, naked as the supports of a scarecrow, suggesting mighty strength, indolence and poverty. There, above, its ragged garments—unwholesome, dirty, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... form accessible to human prayer and sympathetic to human emotion the forces which rule the universe. But in this work of portraiture the Buddhists laid more emphasis on moral and spiritual law than did the Brahmans: they isolated in personification qualities not found isolated in nature. Siva is the law of change, of death and rebirth, with all the riot of slaughter and priapism which it entails: Vishnu is the protector and preserver, the type of good energy warring against evil, ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... He was exactly like that "Mr. Ratin" hit off in caricature so neatly by Topffer; he had all the marks, even to the wart with the three hairs, and fine wrinkles beyond number at the end of his old nose; to me his face was the personification of all that was hideous ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... he has been reproached with sacrificing truth to the refining process which he practised. Even in the case of Charles I., whose portraits are our most familiar examples of Van Dyck, and who thus lives in the imagination of most people as the very personification of a noble and handsome cavalier, there have not been wanting critics who have maintained that Charles,—the son of a plain uncouth father, and of a mother rather floridly buxom than delicately handsome, and who was in his childhood a sickly rickety child,—was by no means so well endowed ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... Secondly, it was often hard, if not impossible, to make up one's mind whether a so-called deity—such as Virtue, Peace, or Health—was supposed to have a real existence, or whether it was simply the personification of an abstract quality. Thirdly, many of the ancient divinities had fallen out of fashion, and to a large extent out of memory, while many new ones—Isis and Serapis for example—had come, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... complication of matters, it was enough to make one wild. They were all falsehoods: there was no truth in any of them. The only real happiness is to live to love the one who loves you, and to obey the promptings of the heart. You are the personification of fortune, of beauty, and of youth, my dear Seigneur; my only pleasure is in you. I give myself to you freely, and you may do with ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... stiff grass and stunted rushes, a baby faun in her bosom, another tiny goat-legged creature led by the hand, while she carries uncomfortably, in addition to this load, a silly trophy of wild-flowers tied to a stick; the personification almost, this lady with the wide eyes and crazy smile, of the artist's foolishly and charmingly burdened journey in quest of the unattainable. The imaginative quality, never intended or felt by the painter himself, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... with his blue eyes fixed upon her, and, as she looked at him, she knew him to be the personification of honor and magnanimity, waiting until he could see that she was ready for him to speak, ready to listen if she should speak, ready to meet her on any ground—a gentleman, she thought, above all the gentlemen in the world. And still she went on ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... over the world, change, improvement, progress are the words. The venerable minister, for his locks were grey, and time had ploughed deep furrows down his cheeks, and draws palpable lines across his brow, was, as my memory paints him, the personification of earnestness, sincerity and truth. The text and the drift of the sermon I have forgotten, save the little fragment that fixed itself in my memory by the singularity of the figure by which he illustrated his meaning. He was speaking of the operation ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... country. {7} No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem to have slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old heresies of personification, always poetically orthodox, and attribute a sort of free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband of road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the land before our eyes. We remember, as we write, some ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... threatened to come down among them and teach them manners; he declared that they should hear her. He made the piano-man play; he went and fetched the lady; he stood by her side, frowning, with his arms folded, ready to break out, the personification of angry determination and suppressed energy. The people acquiesced and listened. When the singer had finished, they applauded; and they were applauding not only her, but also Giovanni because he had dominated them. ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... wrong to make eternity feminine? I knew that the Greek word was not feminine; but imagined that the English personification should be so. Am I wrong in this? Will ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... their escape to England—where, failing news of them, I do myself a frequent pleasure to picture them at rest upon the quiet waters of domestic felicity. But I address myself rather to you, whom (albeit on the briefest acquaintance) I shall ever regard as the personification of stability and mild repose. Heracleitus and his followers may prate of a world of flux; but there are men to whom the recollections of their fellows ever turn confidently, secure of finding them in the same place; ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... have you joke in that way about Mr. Kellerman, at least, not to me." Few of her college mates had ever seen Jane angry. They all considered her the personification ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... excite passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175 most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin' Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate spoken of in the last line, in application to any human individual, would shrink from passing the verdict ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... done this?" It is not the behaviour of a barbaric king; but we must remember that Wagner's Mark is not, and is not intended to be, the legendary Mark any more than Tristan and Isolda are the legendary Tristan and Isolda: he is the personification of human affection, a thing to which they, enthralled by elemental love, are indifferent—detest, indeed, as interfering with their love. When he ends Tristan knows he has no explanation to offer—none that Mark could possibly understand: human affection and elemental human passion are unintelligible ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... of Liberty emerge above the stream of this impassioned "Return to Nature." The figure of justice is there and the figure of fraternity; while above them all the shadowy lineaments of some female personification of the Future of Humanity, crowned with the happy stars of the Age of Gold, looks ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Jashpur have three deities, whom they call Mahadeo or Siva, Sahadeo, one of the five Pandava brothers, and the goddess Lakshmi. They say that the buffalo is Mahadeo, the cow Sahadeo, and the rice Lakshmi. This also appears to be an instance of the personification of animals and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... of Petrarch, he must also have followed therein a natural inclination and no mere dictate of fashion. Even in these poems the humanity of the writer's personality makes itself felt. While Laura tends to fade into a personification of poetry, and Petrarch's strongest convictions find expression through the mouth of St. Peter, we feel that behind Boccaccio's humanistic exercise lies his own amorous passion, his own religious enthusiasm, his own fatherly tenderness and love. His eclogues, however, never attained the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... non-human character of external nature was acknowledged, while at the same time the human type of will was preserved. The river, for example, was at first regarded as itself an animated being; then the will it manifests was separated from the material phenomena, and by personification became a river-god who rules the phenomena. So the sun gave rise to the conception of Apollo; and, by a double remove, the lightning became a weapon in the hand of Zeus. There was thus added to man's world of things a second world of spiritual beings who animated and swayed the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... With the stealth and cunning of a panther she crept through the forest, circling about to get up wind from the ford, pausing often to look and listen for aught that might menace her—herself the personification of a hunted deer. Now she moved silently down upon the chosen spot. What luck! A beautiful buck stood drinking in the stream. The woman wormed her way closer. Now she lay upon her belly behind a small bush within throwing ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... coxcomb, and you are another!" replied the father, who, dressed in an old flannel dressing-gown, with a worn velvet cap on his head, and cowering gloomily over a wretched fire, seemed no bad personification of that mixture of half-hypochondriac, half-miser, which he was in reality. "Don't talk to me of going to ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is guarded by the flaming swords of the cherubim. Christ opens his golden arms wider than all our miseries. But he suffers no rival on his throne, no partnership with Moses or John Baptist. The personification of "shall come," and of "ignorance," is strikingly illustrative; as is "sin, the winding-sheet of the soul;" "unbelief, the white devil;" the sinner being a counsellor for Satan; and the two ways of taking our own likeness. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... SAWYER'S only title was plain "Mr." His ancestors were tradesmen, merchants, lawyers, politicians, and Presidents. He, too, was proud of his honored ancestry, and I have endeavored in this book to have him live up to an ideal personification of gentlemanly qualities for which the New England standard should be fully as high as that of Old England; in fact, I see no reason why the heroes of American novels, barring the single matter of hereditary titles, should not compare favorably as regards gentlemanly attributes ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... case, and yet there was one circumstance which puzzled Chupin exceedingly. In former years, he had heard it asserted that Mademoiselle Flavie was the very personification of pride, and that she adored her husband even to madness. Had this great love vanished? Had poverty and sorrow broken her spirit to such a degree that she was willing to stoop to such shameful concessions! If she were acquainted with her husband's present life, how did it happen that she ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... full-blown rose in the white ribbon that went round her head, and confined her reddish-brown hair; and her partner waltzed with a pipe in his mouth, smoking all the while; and during the whole of this voluptuous dance, his countenance was a fair personification of true German phlegm. After these, but, I suppose, not actually belonging to the party, a little ragged girl and ragged boy, with his stockings about his heels, waltzed and danced;—waltzing and dancing in the ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... objective.—Association: its role reduced to a single question, the formation of new combinations.—The principal intellectual factor is thinking by analogy. Why it is an almost inexhaustible source of creation. Its mechanism. Its processes reducible to two, viz.: personification, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... it, she rejoiced that Lise's child would not be born into a world that had seemed—so falsely—fair and sweet, and in reality was black and detestable. Her acceptance of the act—for Lise—was a function of the hatred consuming her, a hatred which, growing in bigness, had made Ditmar merely the personification of that world. From time to time her hands clenched, her brow furrowed, powerful waves of heat ran through her, the craving for action became so intense she could scarcely refrain from rising ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... this explanation, and one of the favourite sandbanks in which this particular kind of human ostrich plunges its head is "Nature." "Nature does this," and "Nature does that," forgetting entirely the fact that "Nature" is a mere personification and means either chance-medley or a Creator, according to the old dilemma. There is a very curious example of this inability or unwillingness to admit—perhaps even to understand—the force of this argument exhibited by those to whom one would suppose that it would ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... which was visible above her breast, believed her to be the priestess or oracle of their worship. This worship evidently had its origin in Ancient Egypt since, although they did not seem to know it, the priestess was nothing less than a personification of the great goddess Isis, and the Ivory Child, their fetish, was a statue of the infant Horus, the fabled son of Isis and Osiris whom the Egyptians looked upon as the overcomer of Set or the Devil, the murderer of Osiris ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... need not be terrified out of their senses every time they knock at their door, by the grim personification of a Nero at feeding time; or a tender-hearted poor-law guardian be pestered during dinner by invitations afforded to the starving poor by the benevolent expression ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... in the vale of Tempe. This legend expressed the attachment of the Laurel (Daphne) to the Sun, under whose heat the tree both fades and flourishes. It has been thought worth while to explain these allusions, because they illustrate the character of the Grecian Mythology, which arose in the Personification of natural phenomena, and was totally free from those debasing and ludicrous ideas with which, through Roman and later misunderstanding or perversion, it has ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... refused to deduct from it $77,000 of expenses connected with the formation of the company, thereby compelling it to start $77,000 in debt. This was something Marcus Daly never forgave and to the day of his death he repeatedly referred to the act as the personification of corporation meanness. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... personification of unselfish, inconsequent, tender femininity, the doctor found himself confronted by a calm cold woman, with hard unseeing eyes; a woman in whom something had died; and dying, had slain all the best and truest in ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... how hard it was for me to believe this of Jim Hosley, that great, lumbering fellow, handsome and manly, the personification of comfortable, attractive ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... stars sang together,' etc. JOB: XXXVIII., 7. In the same chapter observe the astonishing boldness of scripture personification, and the unequalled ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... the officers and ship's company. This horrid proceeding had such an effect on some of the men, as well as on the captain, as to make them sick. [Note 2.] It had a still greater effect on the native of Otaheite, Oedidee. He at first became perfectly motionless, and looked the personification of horror. When aroused from this state he burst into tears, and continued to weep and scold by turns, telling the New Zealanders that they were vile men, and that he would no longer be their friend. He would not suffer them ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... yesterday through Dark Lane, and home through the village of Danvers. Landscape now wholly autumnal. Saw an elderly man laden with two dry, yellow, rustling bundles of Indian corn-stalks,—a good personification of Autumn. Another man hoeing up potatoes. Rows of white cabbages lay ripening. Fields of dry Indian corn. The grass has still considerable greenness. Wild rose-bushes devoid of leaves, with their deep, bright red seed-vessels. Meeting-house in Danvers ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the elocutionists that I have known Miss H. V. Davis holds the highest place in my estimation. Her personification and rendition of character is complete in whatever role she appears. (J. W. Hood, Bishop ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... him across the grass and stood a few paces distant. The slender willow twigs, with their hanging catkins and tiny golden leaves, made a sort of veil between them. She was very beautiful, at least so the schoolmaster thought; perhaps she was the personification of the morning, perhaps she was a wood-nymph—it did not matter much; he felt, in his excitement and exhaustion, that her beauty and grace were not real, but only an hallucination of moving sun and shade. She took the swaying willow-twigs in her pretty hands and looked through them ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... the American Revolution, until France aided us with her money and her navy. It is doubtful if any man has ever been more popular away from home than Franklin was in France. The French regarded him as "the personification of the rights of man." They followed him on the streets, gave him almost frantic applause when he appeared in public, put his portrait in nearly every house and on almost every snuff box, and bought a Franklin stove for ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... is fond of personification, and belongs, we need not say, to that school of poets who hold that nothing more is necessary to a personification in poetry than to begin a word with a capital letter. Murder may, without impropriety, bare her arm, as she did long ago, in Mr. Campbell's Pleasures of Hope. But what possible ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wrong they suffer by it, have never denied it. It is not only false, but it is absurd. How could it be true? A man is not lovable as a woman is. How can she love him as he loves her, who is the personification and incarnation of beauty and gentleness and sweetness? That is, some are, for it must be conceded that woman is like Jeremiah's figs, the good are very, very good, while the bad are very naughty—too bad for ...
— The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism: An Address Delivered Before the Indiana Methodist Historical Society • Thomas Aiken Goodwin
... lacking in the gift of formal speech-making, as Grant was, he could talk well, in clear sentences, whose mold was set by precise thought, which brought with it the eloquence that gains its point. It was more than personality, in this instance, that had appeal. He was the personification of a great ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... make him something scornful of it. To the honours which his Sovereign delighted to shower on him—honours perhaps never before bestowed on a subject by a monarch—he was sensitive. The Queen to him was the noblest personification of the country whose good had ever been, not only the first, but the only object of his public action: and with this patriotic loyalty there mingled something of a personal feeling, more akin to romance in its paternal tenderness than seemed consistent with the granite-hewn ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... with an equally blank look of despair; as he stood with his legs apart and his arms hanging down by his side—the very personification of imbecility. "If I wos a fly I'd know wot to do. I'd walk up the side o' that cliff till I got to a dry bit, and then I'd stick on. But, not bein' a fly, ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... hours thinking, often in a drowsy, half-confused way, but rousing up from time to time to feel his resentment growing against Ram, who seemed to him now to be the personification of ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... can transmute, with Mr. Muller, these objects of a somewhat vague religious regard into a kind of gods, we have to adopt Noire's philological theories, and study the effects of auxiliary verbs on the development of personification and of religion. Noire's philological theories are still, I presume, under discussion. They are necessary, however, to Mr. Muller's doctrine of the development of the vague 'sense of the infinite' (wakened by fine old trees, and high mountains) into devas, and of devas (which means ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... omniscience, and omnipotence have a corresponding limitation.[498] (2) The assumption of divine emanations and of a differentiated divine pleroma represents the Deity as a composite, i.e.,[499] finite being; and, moreover, the personification of the divine qualities is a mythological freak, the folly of which is evident as soon as one also makes the attempt to personify the affections and qualities of man in a similar way.[500] (3) The attempt to make out conditions existing within the Godhead is in itself absurd ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... Yasose-gawa. At the foot of the hill is a curious shrine cave, containing several rude idols, a trough with tame goldfish, and one of the crudest Buddhas I ever saw. The aim of the ambitious sculptor of Buddhas is to produce a personification of "great tranquillity." The figure in the Valley of Yasose-gawa is certainly something of a masterpiece in this direction; nothing could well be more tranquil than an oblong bowlder with the faintest chiselling of a mouth and nose, poised on ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... Brown to American history does not consist in the things which he did but rather in that which he has been made to represent. He has been accepted as the personification of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... calling inanimate or artificial things "creatures of God" is the personification of all sorts of things, animate and inanimate; thus, a rat is "an old man," a dipper is "a boy." Not infrequently the object or idea thus personified is given a title of respect; thus, "Corporal Black" is the night. Akin to personification is bold metaphor and association. In this there ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... philosophers as a sect, not for those parts of their system which a good and wise man would have condemned, but for their virtues, for their spirit of free inquiry, and for their hatred of those social abuses of which he was himself the personification. But he, like many of those who thought with him, excepted Voltaire from the list of proscribed writers. He frequently sent flattering letters to Ferney. He did the patriarch the honor to borrow money of him, and even carried this condescending friendship so far as ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... on the subject of faith, once took a railroad journey for an illustration. As he pointed out, with much eloquence and force, there could be no more realistic personification of faith than the man who peacefully lay down to sleep at night in his berth of a Pullman car, relying implicitly upon the railroad men to avert the thousands of dangers which had to be encountered during the still hours ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... constitutions by strengthening the democratic basis of the State. In the same time the labor population of the cities began to assert its power and its determination to share in government. Of this frontier democracy which now took possession of the nation, Andrew Jackson was the very personification. He was born in the backwoods of the Carolinas in the midst of the turbulent democracy that preceded the Revolution, and he grew up in the frontier State of Tennessee. In the midst of this region of personal feuds ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... persons. He had a high appreciation of the enjoyments of life—vanity, ostentation, good eating, and even the austere joys of the family. At home with his wife he illustrated the tender assiduity of the young husband; abroad he was the personification of a youth just freed from parental discipline. While his wife was the happiest woman in Paris, he was rendering Miss Stille equally felicitous. The dinners he gave at home were unexcelled except by those banquets which he gave at the hotel ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... bring it out by this suggestion: "Now, Mr. Wilson, just suppose that I am your lady love, and sing to me as you could imagine yourself doing were you desirous of impressing her with your earnestness and affection." Poor Mr. Wilson hesitated, blushed, and, under doubt how far such a personification even in his case was allowable, at last remonstrated, "Ay, Mr. Dun, ye forget I'm a married man!" A case has been reported of a country girl, however, who thought it possible there might be an excess in ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... of Childe Harold, for this hero of his first poem is, in the first and second canto, the personification of youthful exquisites, with senses dulled and satiated by excesses to which Lord Byron had never yielded when he composed this type, since he was then only twenty-one years of age, and had hardly quitted the university, where he lived surrounded by intellectual friends, who have ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... continued exertion and loss of blood that but for the supporting wall I doubt that he even could have stood erect. But with the tenacity and indomitable courage of his kind he still faced his cruel and relentless foes—the personification of that ancient proverb of his tribe: "Leave to a Thark his head and one hand and he ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of sorrowing friends, and often the self-same priest. But more awful than its barren loneliness was the utter absence of peacefulness and rest in this dismal promontory. By some wicked irony of its situation and climate it was the personification of unrest and change. The incessant trade winds carried its loose sands hither and thither, uncovering the decaying coffins of early pioneers, to bury the wreaths and flowers, laid on a grave of to-day, ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... two races had originally a mythology made up partly of the personification and worship of the powers of nature, and partly of the deification of human ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... is this opposition, between romance and sobriety, that excites so strong a prejudice against the former: it is associated, in the minds of many, with folly alone. A romantic, silly girl, is the object of their contempt; and they so recoil from this personification of sentiment, that their chief object seems to be to divest themselves altogether of its delusion. Life is to them a mere calculation; expediency is their maxim; propriety their rule; profit, ease, or comfort their ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... of its relatively diminutive head; for its fearful tusks, and thick-set projecting whiskers, gave its visage a most truculent expression; and with its grotesquely fashioned ponderous carcass, provided with fin feet of strange formation, seemed to mark it as a personification of one of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... Bodhisattva, who became an object of worship of some Mahayanists. He is treated as a personification of transcendental wisdom. ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... the way some people discriminate," she whispered back. "You think because he wrote about rough people he must be rough; and when one writes about people of culture and elegance you think straightway that he is the personification of those ideas. You forget, you see, that the world is full to the brim with hypocrisy; and it is easier to be perfect on paper than it is ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... masters, especially of the Italian schools, are genuine allegories. Amongst the classics, the multitude of their gods either precluded allegory altogether, or else made every thing allegory, as in the Hesiodic Theogonia; for you can scarcely distinguish between power and the personification of power. The 'Cupid and Psyche' of, or found in, Apuleius, is a phenomenon. It is the Platonic mode of accounting for the fall of man. The 'Battle of the Soul' [1] by Prudentius is an ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... were entirely of plate looking-glass, save where occasionally a picture had been, as it were, inlaid in its rich frame. Here was the Titian Venus of the Tribune, deliciously copied by a French artist; there, the Roman Fornarina, with her delicate grace, beamed like the personification of Raphael's genius. Here Zuleikha, living in the light and shade of that magician Guercino, in vain summoned the passions of the blooming Hebrew; and there Cleopatra, preparing for her last immortal hour, proved by what we saw that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... left in charge of the station, headed by my old friends Abdulla and Mohinna, came to pay their respects again, recognising in me, as they said, a "personification of their sultan," and therefore considering what they were doing only due to my rank. They regretted with myself that Snay was so hot-headed; for they themselves thought a treaty of peace would have ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... the Hindu triad, and the most celebrated and popular of all the Indian deities. He is the personification of the preserving power, and became incarnate in nine different forms, for the preservation of mankind in various emergencies. Before the creation of the universe, and after its temporary annihilation, he is supposed to sleep on the waters, floating on the serpent ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... stood Levi Markham perplexed and awed. Slowly the meaning of the scene came to him; Matilda had somewhat prepared him; the question of the girl by Sandy's side shed a blinding light upon the confusion of his thoughts. Standing there, rugged and strong, he seemed the personification of power and solution. But he was waiting; he must know what Sandy felt! He drew back into the cold, dark passage and played the eavesdropper for the first and last time in ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... but his was a most sensitive temperament, terribly stirred by a foe whom he could yet neither see nor hear. Almost unconsciously, he placed himself by the side of Henry Ware, his old partner, to whom he now looked up as a son of battle and the very personification of forest skill. ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... somnolency in the lodge stories. He is provided with a class of little invisible emissaries, who ascend the forehead, armed with tiny war-clubs, with which they strike the temples, producing sleep. Pauguk is the personification of death. He is armed with a bow and arrows, to execute his mortal functions. Hosts of a small fairy-like creation, called Ininees, little men, or Pukwudj Ininees, vanishing little men, inhabit cliffs, and picturesque ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... had had to flee. There was hatred of law, hatred of order, hatred of everything. Every moment of the man's waking life was filled with morbid thought of hatred—he had become mentally as he was physically in outward appearance, the personification of the blighting emotion of Hate. He had little or nothing to do with the men who had rescued him. He was too weak to work and too morose for company, and so they quickly left him alone to ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... down and let his head fall upon his arms thrown out across the table, a personification of despair which might take the heart out of any observer. The action served, however, to bring. Barrington back into the present, to conserve his energies, to make him a man of action again. His frame stiffened, much ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... is not easy to bear out a personification of the King, when women are in the case. But there is only a very little light below, and ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Lessingham, body, soul and spirit; possibly another part was the procuration of fresh victims for that long-drawn-out holocaust. That this latter object explained the disappearance of Miss Lindon I felt persuaded. That she was designed by the personification of evil who was her captor, to suffer all the horrors at which the stories pointed, and then to be burned alive, amidst the triumphant yells of the attendant demons, I was certain. That the wretch, aware that the pursuit was in full cry, was tearing, twisting, doubling, and would ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... of the door. Even without the circumstances to which she owed her knowledge of this masterpiece, it would probably have struck her by the peculiar power which we must call the brio—the go—of great works; and the girl herself might in Italy have been taken as a model for the personification of Brio. ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... to work evil for children. In some parts of England, it is believed that boys beaten with an elder stick will be retarded in their growth; in Sweden, women who are about to become mothers kiss the elder. In Germany, a somewhat similar personification of the juniper, "Frau Wachholder," exists. And here we come into touch with the dryads and forest-sprites of all ages, familiar to us in the myths of classic antiquity and the tales of the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... garments of the richest description, which glittered with gold embroidery and jewels. Seated thus, stroking the cat, and with a self-satisfied smile on her fat pretty face, she seemed the very personification of contentment. Her soft brown neck was almost hidden with rows of pearls, and long rows of the same jewels depended from the high filigree cap which towered above her head. Her dress consisted of three open jackets or short caftans, one above the other, without sleeves. ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... odium, would visit these cities, would figure in the procession of riches, would have opened to her doors which she had always found closed, and she would pass through them leaning on the arm of a man who had ever seemed to her the personification of all ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... prosperity had been the very personification of hardness and insolence, was transformed into a grovelling, cringing supplicant, ready to lie face downward in the dust beneath the feet of that brother whose patronage, or charity, ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... were not painful; but from the time when I first began to notice and comprehend, I also began to bitterly feel our condition, and Gabrielle felt it far more than I did. We knew that we were half-starved, half-clad, neglected, unloved creatures, and that our parent was a personification of Selfishness. We saw other children prettily dressed, walking past with their mothers or nurses—or trotting to school, healthful and happy; and our hearts yearned to be like them—yearned for a mother's kiss! Gabrielle was habitually silent and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... the stick, for which offence the barber himself was beaten by the king's officers, and died.—In the Panchatantra, in place of a soldier, a banker who had lost all his wealth determines to put an end to his life, when he dreams that the personification of Kuvera, the god of riches, appears before him in the form of a Jaina mendicant—a conclusive proof of the Buddhistic origin of the story.—A trunkless head performs the same part in the Russian folk-tale of the Stepmother's Daughter, on which Mr. Ralston ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... think, less consummate) companion and sequel Thyrsis. With hardly an exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main dangers which so constantly beset him—too great stiffness and too great simplicity. His "Graian" personification is not overdone; his landscape is exquisite; the stately stanza not merely sweeps, but sways and swings, with as much grace as state. And therefore the Arnoldian "note"—the special form of the maladie du siecle which, as we have seen, this poet chooses to ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... hunting about no end since we came here; calling on everybody, from the man in the moon downwards, but do not at present seem to have derived much benefit from it. I daresay Henry has told you of a wild scheme in which Mr. Barnes wanted us to engage. He is a most excellent old gentleman, the personification of good nature and kindness, but is a good deal of a visionary on the agricultural settlement question. When we called upon him on Saturday, he pressed us most eloquently to up stick and go west with a friend or ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn
... their own native drinks, e.g. [Greek: chourmi], the Irish cuirm, and braccat, both made from malt (braich).[76] These words, with the Gaulish brace, "spelt,"[77] are connected with the name of this god, who was a divine personification of the substance from which the drink was made which produced, according to primitive ideas, the divine frenzy of intoxication. It is not clear why Mars should have been equated with ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... look the personification of joy! But, Agnes, here is one whom you have met before. Is it necessary to introduce ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... delighted to watch every movement of the deft fingers, to study every expression of the beautiful eyes and mobile mouth. He revelled in her beauty, because to him she was the personification of all that was lovely and noble and great. Her character he would have loved just as much had she been plain instead of beautiful, for his ideal was the inward, not the outward beauty, except as the two blended into one, as ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... effective. It beat the spear into a pruning hook. With this to leaven them, the rough habiliments were most becoming. In a word, they supplied the very setting which manhood should have; and since Anthony, sitting there at his meat, was the personification of virility, they served, as all true settings should, by self-effacement to magnify their treasure. The ex-officer might have ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... expenses connected with the formation of the company, thereby compelling it to start $77,000 in debt. This was something Marcus Daly never forgave and to the day of his death he repeatedly referred to the act as the personification of corporation meanness. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... of the Influence of Sea Power, that he present a study, from his own point of view, of the one man who in himself summed up and embodied the greatness of the possibilities which Sea Power comprehends,—the man for whom genius and opportunity worked together, to make him the personification of the Navy of Great Britain, the dominant factor in the periods hitherto treated. In the century and a half embraced in those periods, the tide of influence and of power has swelled higher and higher, floating upward before the eyes of ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... dolls dressed in rough, poor kimonos, brown and white. The old man holds a rake, and the old woman holds a broom. They have very kindly faces and white silken hair. Any Japanese would recognise them at once as the Old People of Takasago, the personification of the Perfect Marriage. They are staring with wonder and alarm at the Brandan sapphires, a monumental parure designed for the massive state ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... "mass of Anu," appears to be the designation of a meteor, which might well be described as a "mass" coming from Anu, i.e., from the god of heaven who becomes the personification of the heavens in general. In the Assyrian version (I, 5, 28) we have kima ki-is-r, i.e., "something like a mass of heaven." Note also I, 3, 16, where in a description of Gilgamesh, his strength is said to be "strong like a mass (i.e., ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... I thought she looked like a personification of her lovely namesake, the glorious creation of Byron's muse. Her beautiful chestnut hair was unfortunately (in compliance with the custom of the country) tinged with a reddish dye. It was combed to the nape of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... have the poet speaking as the personification and representative of the Aryan race, the race, which, having its origin in the plains of Kashmir, has by virtue of the spirit of conquest, the desire to be seeking what is yet unfound, finally reached the western edge of the American Continent, ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... young moon which was visible above her breast, believed her to be the priestess or oracle of their worship. This worship evidently had its origin in Ancient Egypt since, although they did not seem to know it, the priestess was nothing less than a personification of the great goddess Isis, and the Ivory Child, their fetish, was a statue of the infant Horus, the fabled son of Isis and Osiris whom the Egyptians looked upon as the overcomer of Set or the Devil, the murderer of Osiris before his resurrection and ascent to Heaven to be the ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... wanderer has brilliantly stood the test, the elders (Sec. 5) do not admit him into their college (the motive of denial recurs later); but enter him for the battle with the lion. This is surely a personification of the same obstructions as the elders themselves. In them we have, so to speak, before us the dragon (to be subdued) in a plural form. Analogous multiplying of the dragon is found, for example, in Stucken [in the astral myth]. Typical dragon fighters are Jason, Joshua, Samson, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... England. In spite of the time that has elapsed, and numberless destructions, there still remain forty-five manuscripts of the poem, more or less complete. "Piers Plowman" soon became a sign and a symbol, a sort of password, a personification of the labouring classes, of the honest and courageous workman. John Ball invoked his authority in his letter to the rebel peasants of the county of Essex in 1381.[665] The name of Piers figured as an attraction on the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... me she would be here," he mentally said, "and I should really like to mark the contrast between her and the brilliant Miss Fenton. Oh! there she is, as I live, leaning on the arm of her father, the very personification of innocence and beauty. But her face is too calm by half. I ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... the lips of the woman, who shrank away in abject terror, but her voice failed her. The impassible face that looked down upon her seemed the very personification of ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... be thought that I ought now, by way of contrast, to show something charming; some gentle virgin head, circled with a halo, some sweet personification of innocence, clasping the dove of peace to her bosom. No: I saw nothing of the sort, and therefore cannot portray it. The pupil in the school possessing the happiest disposition was a young girl from ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... of Robin Hood was the darling Maygame both in England and Scotland, and doubtless the favourite personification was often revived, when the Abbot of Unreason, or other pretences of frolic, gave an ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... PERSONIFICATION. That rhetorical figure which attributes sex, life, or action to inanimate objects, or ascribes to objects and brutes the acts and qualities of rational beings, is ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... demons." The name Mara is explained by "the murderer," "the destroyer of virtue," and similar appellations. "He is," says Eitel, "the personification of lust, the god of love, sin, and death, the arch-enemy of goodness, residing in the heaven Paranirmita Vasavartin on the top of the Kamadhatu. He assumes different forms, especially monstrous ones, ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... the requirements of both metre and sense, and the words untalk'd of and unseen make it nearly indisputable. I had at first thought it might be "rumorous eyes;" but the personification would then be wanting. Shakspeare has personified Rumour in the Introduction to the Second Part of King Henry IV.; and in Coriolanus, Act IV. Sc. 6., ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... Carmelites whom I was about to see was the personification of this restless impotence. Bound to his great arm-chair by the gout, he offered a strange contrast to the venerable chevalier, pale and unable to move like himself, but noble and patriarchal in his affliction. The prior was short, stout, and very petulant. The upper part of his ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... Mr. Darwin's reasoning; that he should confound an irrefragable deduction from the observed relations of organisms to the conditions which lie around them, with a metaphysical "forme substantielle," or a chimerical personification of the powers of Nature, would be incredible, were it not that other passages of his work leave no room for doubt upon ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... of unknown evil. The only superstition attributed to him which does not at first sight seem to have its root in dread is that of the Orphic mysteries. But of them Muller says that the Dionusos whom they worshipped "was an infernal deity, connected with Hades, and was the personification, not merely of rapturous pleasure, but of a deep sorrow for the miseries of human life." The Orphic societies of Greece seem to have been peculiarly ascetic, taking no animal food save raw flesh from the sacrificed ox of Dionusos. And Plato ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... ancient sadness of those vagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs of their own, some of which have come down to us. The eight of clubs, for instance, represented a huge tree bearing eight enormous trefoil leaves, a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. At the foot of this tree a fire was burning, over which three hares were roasting a huntsman on a spit, and behind him, on another fire, hung a steaming pot, whence emerged the head of a dog. Nothing can be more ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... of Provence. The philosopher Diderot has very aptly claimed that a man's bearing is the clue to his character, and this stocky little man was certainly a living proof of this claim. You could sense that his everyday conversation must have been packed with such vivid figures of speech as personification, symbolism, and misplaced modifiers. But I was never in a position to verify this because, around me, he used only an odd and ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... her, Cary. But if, instead of being the personification of reserve and discretion, she were something quite opposite, I should ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... both personified, where it is recorded, "'What ails thee, fool?' says the file to the viper;" but the fable gives to these names no capitals, except in the title of the story. It may here be added, that, according to their definitions of personification, our grammarians and the teachers of rhetoric have hitherto formed no very accurate idea of what constitutes the figure. Lindley Murray says, "PERSONIFICATION [,] or PROSOPOPOEIA, is that figure by which we attribute ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... a letter to a clerk who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe he proceeded to finish this task. He looked more than once at his visitor as he did so, in a preoccupied, impersonal way. To the other's notion, he seemed the personification of business—without an ounce of distracting superfluous flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame, without a trace of unnecessary politeness, or humour, or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine perfected and fined down to absolute essentials. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... dispute Riehl's interpretation of a German word, but we must think that, in literature, the epithet Philister has usually a wider meaning than this—includes his definition and something more. We imagine the Philister is the personification of the spirit which judges everything from a lower point of view than the subject demands; which judges the affairs of the parish from the egotistic or purely personal point of view; which judges the affairs of the nation from the parochial point of view, and does not hesitate to measure ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... poet in the courtier, the ambassador, and finally the minister of state. But he had already done enough to earn himself a lasting name amongst the improvers of poetry in England. In tragedy he gave the first regular model; in personification he advanced far beyond all his predecessors, and furnished a prototype to that master of allegory, Spenser. A greater than Spenser has also been indebted to him; as will be evident, I think, to all who compare the description of the figures on ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... brutal "rich man") hungry for the promised penalty, will not touch with one of his fingers. The Church quibbles well, and palters well, and, in her own pusillanimous way, means well, by her silky loyalty to the law and the profits, and by her steady hostility to some unresisting personification known as the Common Enemy. But because of that pernicious loyalty, she has reason to complain that the working man is too rational to imbibe her teachings on the blessedness of slavery and starvation. Meanwhile, as no magnanimous sinner can live down to the pseudo-Christian ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... gods' greatness and glory had to furnish sufficient solace for all mortal defeats. At the same time all criticism had to be deprecated, for reflection would at once have pointed out that the divine life in question was either a personification of natural processes and thus really in flux and full of oblivion and imperfection, or else a hypostasis of certain mental functions and ideals, which could not really be conceived apart from the natural human life which they informed and from which ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the end of his life hated the philosophers as a sect, not for those parts of their system which a good and wise man would have condemned, but for their virtues, for their spirit of free inquiry, and for their hatred of those social abuses of which he was himself the personification. But he, like many of those who thought with him, excepted Voltaire from the list of proscribed writers. He frequently sent flattering letters to Ferney. He did the patriarch the honor to borrow ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... withstand; despite and in spite of refer primarily to personal and perhaps spiteful opposition; as, he failed notwithstanding his good intentions; or, he persevered in spite of the most bitter hostility. When despite and in spite of are applied to inanimate things, it is with something of personification; "in spite of the storm" is said as if the storm had a hostile ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... generally of laurel, olive, myrtle, ivy, or oak, appear upon coins; sometimes encircling the symbolical figures, and sometimes as chaplets on their heads. According to Strabo, each of these is sacred to some particular personification of the Deity, and "significant of some particular attribute, and in general, all evergreens were Dionysiac plants, that is, symbols of the generative power, signifying perpetuity of youth and vigor." The crowns of ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... which he built to the great goddess of chance under her various attributes. The Romans of Plutarch's day thought of Fortuna in very much the way in which their poets, especially Horace, described her, as a great and powerful goddess of chance, the personification of the element of apparent caprice which seems to be present in the running of the universe. It is very much our way of thinking of her, and of course both our own concept and the later Roman concept go back to Greece. But Greece had not always had this idea ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... and her lodger walked over to the Hallett house. Miss Phipps was dressed in her best gown and looked the personification of trim, comfortable New England femininity. Galusha was garbed in the suit he wore the evening of his arrival, but it had ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... whom the voice of the people of St. Mark's would proclaim as the personification of their ideal of a pastor's wife, yet John Meredith loved her with the love that passeth all understanding. Perhaps the secret of her charm for him lay in the fact that she treated him as she did other men—men who did ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... I fear, should increase, Prophesied of by that horrible husk— When thicker and thicker the darkness fills The world through his misty spectacles, And he gropes for something more substantial Than a fable, myth or personification,— May Christ do for him what no mere man shall, And stand confessed as the God of salvation! Meantime, in the still recurring fear Lest myself, at unawares, be found, While attacking the choice of my neighbors round, With none of my own made—I choose here! The giving out of the ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... the personification of a selfish girl, and "Master Fritz" of an equally selfish boy; but his sister Katerina is delicious by contrast, as she gives heed to ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... soul" there are few men possessing more companionable qualities. His heart is perhaps one of the best that beats in a human bosom: "it is," observes a biographer, "that which should belong to the poet of Gertrude, his favourite personification." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 407, December 24, 1829. • Various
... the mind and those of things external to it. The fallacy may be enunciated in this general form—Whatever can be thought of apart exists apart: and its most remarkable manifestation consists in the personification of abstractions. Mankind in all ages have had a strong propensity to conclude that wherever there is a name, there must be a distinguishable separate entity corresponding to the name; and every complex ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the Cause: each is what it is in kindness to him, has its soul in his breast, grows out of him as truly as his hair, and the out-world is only a larger body shaped by his needs. Each thing is a passive man, and personification does no more than justice to the joint-stool and the fence or whatever creature talks and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... happened that a Dalecarlian peasant mistook the house, and came into Oedmann's chamber in his snow-covered skin cloak, and with his beard full of ice. Oedmann shouted to him to go his way, but the peasant was deaf, and therefore stepped quite close up to the bed. He was the personification of Winter himself, and Oedmann fell ill from this visit: it was his only sickness during the many years he lay here as a polypus, grown fast, and where he was painted, as we see his portrait in ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... with an angular head, smoothly shaven face, thin, pointed nose, small eyes that looked you through and through from behind large spectacles, a forehead generally contracted by a frown, lips too thin for a pleasant word ever to escape them, and long, crooked fingers, he was the very personification of an avaricious usurer or miser, and Hulda felt a presentiment that this stranger would bring no good fortune ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... are all alike in this respect. I don't suppose Mrs. Smiley realizes that 'Maudie' would be called by a doubter a falsetto disguise of her own voice, and 'Wilbur' a shrewd and humorous personification of her subconscious self; or, if she does, she probably ascribes it to the process of materialization which 'takes from' the medium. Never but once have I had the sensation of being in the presence of ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... references. I hope that this modest attempt to bring to life again some of 'our fathers that begat us', may perhaps interest for an hour or two the general reader, or the teacher, who wishes to make more concrete by personification some of the general facts of medieval ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... he from continued exertion and loss of blood that but for the supporting wall I doubt that he even could have stood erect. But with the tenacity and indomitable courage of his kind he still faced his cruel and relentless foes—the personification of that ancient proverb of his tribe: "Leave to a Thark his head and one hand ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... manuscript and rewrote it, benefited by my travelling notes and the fresh and vivid impressions of my recent tour. In constructing my chronicle I adopted the fiction of a Spanish monk as the chronicler. Fray Antonio Agapida was intended as a personification of the monkish zealots who hovered about the sovereigns in their campaigns, marring the chivalry of the camp by the bigotry of the cloister, and chronicling in rapturous strains every act of intolerance toward ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... 'Kenilworth'; it is certainly more resembling a romance than a novel; in my opinion, one of the most interesting works that ever emanated from the great Sir Walter's pen. Varney is certainly the personification of consummate villainy; and in the delineation of his dark and profoundly and artful mind, Scott exhibits a wonderful knowledge of human nature, as well as surprising skill in embodying his perceptions, so as to enable others to become participators in that knowledge. ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... The personification of abstract ideas by modern painters or sculptors, of wealth, of commerce, of health, for instance, shocks, in most cases, the aesthetic sense, as something conventional or rhetorical, as a mere transparent allegory, or figure of speech, which could please almost no one. On the other hand, such ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... comprehend why so quiet and unobtrusive a scholar should have been selected for important political positions, but can easily understand why he was the admiration of the highest social circles for his wit and the elegance of his conversation. He was the personification of urbanity and every gentlemanly quality, as well as one of the best scholars of his age; but it was only in an aristocratic age, when a few great nobles controlled public affairs, that such a man could have been so recognized, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... enquires into its particular parts with his intellect, and tries to penetrate the illusion in order to lay bare its cause. Heedless of its power and beauty, he remains uninfluenced by sentiment, and mistrusting the part played by his own mind, he tends to destroy the habit of personification. ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... Well! well! it is so everywhere. All over the world, change, improvement, progress are the words. The venerable minister, for his locks were grey, and time had ploughed deep furrows down his cheeks, and draws palpable lines across his brow, was, as my memory paints him, the personification of earnestness, sincerity and truth. The text and the drift of the sermon I have forgotten, save the little fragment that fixed itself in my memory by the singularity of the figure by which he illustrated his meaning. He was ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... been discovered in 1871 by the eminent Assyriologist, Mr. George Smith. It was probably written about 2000 B.C., though the extant edition, which came from the library of King Assurbanipal in the palace at Dur-Sargina, must bear the date of 600 B.C. The hero is supposed to be a solar personification, and the epic is interesting to modern writers not only on account of its description of the Deluge, but also for the pomp and dignity of its style, and for its noble delineation ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... desolation far worse, and she feared far more abiding than snows could make or melt away. She thought of Hugh, alone in his mill-work that rough chilly day, when the wind stalked through the woods and over the country as if it had been the personification of March just come of age and taking possession of his domains. She thought of her uncle, doing what? in Michigan leaving them to fight with difficulties as they might why? why? and her gentle aunt ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a bunk covered with straw and rags lay a woman with a little baby near her. Its body was covered with a terrible rash, perfectly bare, almost hidden within the floor rags. The shy father, himself in pain, stood near, the personification of helplessness. If only there were food in the house! The district physician? He would have been compelled to prescribe food, light, warmth and sanitation for every hut he visited, if he did not wish his science to ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... short work of Jupiter, just as Siegfried does of Fafnir, Mime, and Wotan; and the fact that Prometheus is saved from doing the destructive part of his work by the intervention of that very nebulous personification of Eternity called Demogorgon, does not in the least save the situation, because, flatly, there is no such person as Demogorgon, and if Prometheus does not pull down Jupiter himself, no one else will. It would be exasperating, if it ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... supper-table the personification of quiet geniality, but Amy thought she had never seen him look so hollow-eyed. The long strain was beginning to tell on him, decidedly, and to-night he felt as if he had received a mortal blow. But with indomitable courage he hid his ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... really be eating his supper now, at what hour can he possibly have dined! A second solid mass of rump-steak has disappeared, and he eat the first in four minutes and three quarters, by the clock over the window. Was there ever such a personification of Falstaff! Mark the air with which he gloats over that Stilton, as he removes the napkin which has been placed beneath his chin to catch the superfluous gravy of the steak, and with what gusto he imbibes the porter which has been fetched, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... some people discriminate," she whispered back. "You think because he wrote about rough people he must be rough; and when one writes about people of culture and elegance you think straightway that he is the personification of those ideas. You forget, you see, that the world is full to the brim with hypocrisy; and it is easier to be perfect on paper than it is ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... for him to see his father as others had seen him, as an unhappy not unlovable man, gifted with an erratic genius which had been perverted into an amazing facility for living on other people's money, and cursed with the temper of a maniac. To Robert Stonehouse his father was from first to last the personification of nightmare. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... they make on a sensitive soul. The external forms of things are to be presented to us as transformed through the heart and mind of the poet. The moon is endowed with life and will, "stooping", "riding", "wand'ring", "bowing her head", not as a frigid personification, and because the ancient poets so personified her, but by communication to her of the intense agitation which the nocturnal spectacle rouses in the poet's ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... a social consciousness and a social passion of his own, but it is decentralized, one might say. He knows of no greater man than his own Isak of "Growth of the Soil"—a simple pioneer in whose wake new homes spring up, an inarticulate and uncouth personification of man's mastery of nature. When Hamsun speaks of Isak passing across the yearning, spring-stirred fields, "with the grain flung in fructifying waves from his reverent hands," he pictures it deliberately in the light of a religious ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... a second God; and also because his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence have a corresponding limitation.[498] (2) The assumption of divine emanations and of a differentiated divine pleroma represents the Deity as a composite, i.e.,[499] finite being; and, moreover, the personification of the divine qualities is a mythological freak, the folly of which is evident as soon as one also makes the attempt to personify the affections and qualities of man in a similar way.[500] (3) The attempt to make out conditions existing within the Godhead is in itself ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... a Roman goddess, the personification of prosperity and good fortune. Modelled after the Greek Demeter, she is practically identical with Copia, Annona and similar goddesses. On the coins of the later Roman emperors she is frequently represented holding a cornucopia, from which ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and security for the present. If there was no dream of the future in this calm, even recurrence of placid existence, so much the better. The simple details of each succeeding day, the quaint housekeeping, the brief companionship and coming and going of her young host—himself at best a crystallized personification of the sedate and hospitable woods—satisfied her feeble cravings. She no longer regretted the inferior passion that her fears had obliged her to take the first night she came; she began to look up to this young man—so ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... neighbor of how he had pleasantly reminded her of Timothy; just who Timothy was, and all about him. Mr. Watts was the personification of absorbed interest. Timothy sounded to him as if he might be a "human being," he declared, ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... and common gender is applied to animate beings, the sex of which for the time being is indeterminable, such as fish, mouse, bird, etc. Sometimes things which are without life as we conceive it and which, properly speaking, belong to the neuter gender, are, by a figure of speech called Personification, changed into either the masculine or feminine gender, as, for instance, we say of the sun, He is rising; of the ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... arranged for the wedding, Kasatsky was at Tsarskoe Selo at his fiancee's country place. It was a hot day in May. He and his betrothed had walked about the garden and were sitting on a bench in a shady linden alley. Mary's white muslin dress suited her particularly well, and she seemed the personification of innocence and love as she sat, now bending her head, now gazing up at the very tall and handsome man who was speaking to her with particular tenderness and self-restraint, as if he feared by word or gesture to offend ...
— Father Sergius • Leo Tolstoy
... his ideal in a woman. That was the great miracle which the woman herself had performed for him. He found in her all that he had admired most, all that he had admired in the leader who hitherto had been the only personification of his ideal. But Jeanne possessed all those qualities which had roused his enthusiasm in the noble hero whom he revered. Her pluck, her ingenuity, her calm devotion which had averted the threatened ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... the late lamented and gallant Capron's flying battery of artillery, besides others—General Miles personally assumed command, and the campaign was short, sharp, brilliant and decisive. The Indians were lambasted into a semblance of order, and that personification of deviltry, Sitting Bull, given his transportation to the happy hunting grounds, but not before a score or more of brave officers and men had passes to their long reckoning. Captain George Wallace, of the 7th Cavalry; Lieutenant Mann, of ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... persuasive eloquence. At times he was almost electrical in his utterances; his reasoning was logical and luminous, and his remarks always gave evidence of careful study. As a politician Mr. Everett was not successful. The personification of self-discipline and dignity, he was too much like an intellectual icicle to find favor with the masses, and he was deficient in courage when any bold step ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... after their horses with as much care as a fond mother does her child. The harness and trappings were magnificently decorated with beautiful designs in mother-of-pearl and gold, and the men, when astride their horses and garbed in their long flowing white burnouses, looked the very personification of dignity. The Chief never handles a rifle, it would be beneath his position to do so. He is the Head, and lives up to it ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... his Hut to the Lookout came Gregg Harlan. He must recently have borrowed Shane's razor, for the soft, dark beard that had shadowed his face was gone. Bareheaded, he advanced swingingly, vigorously, his chin up, his whole figure the personification of youth, confidence, and a new strength. For the first time Ellen was glad to ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... them to it as the form of government best suited to them? This arrangement is not the product of reflection. Everywhere one man is king, and for the most part his dignity is hereditary. He is, as it were, the personification, the monogram, of the whole people, which attains an individuality in him. In this sense he can rightly say: l'etat c'est moi. It is precisely for this reason that in Shakespeare's historical plays the kings of England and France mutually ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... state palanquins glittering with their various ornaments, and escorted by a suite of a hundred kingly personages, with their martial array of the four hosts, of cavalry, elephants, chariots, and infantry, and accompanied by Amazon girls, lovely as the suite of the gods, himself a personification of majesty, bearing the white parasol of dominion, with a golden staff and tassels, began once ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... clerk to the deputy marshals for service. Our opponent in the case was a testy old member of the bar over sixty years of age and of the very highest respectability and standing, who had several times refused elevation to the bench and was regarded as the personification of dignity and learning. Unfortunately his appearance belied his position, for he was almost totally bald and his face was as weazened and wrinkled as that ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... King of Hanover has also to yield, and the King of Bavaria abdicates. These, however, are comparatively small matters. But still the flame spreads. There is a successful insurrection at Vienna, the very stronghold of despotism in central Europe; and the Prime Minister, Metternich, the grim personification of the old policy, is compelled to resign. Then follows an equally successful insurrection at Berlin; Milan, Vicenza, and Padua are also in open insurrection. Venice is proclaimed a Republic. Holstein declares itself ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... at St Andrews College under the late Dr Jackson, who was an eminent philosopher and friendly man; also under Mr Duncan, of the Mathematical Chair, whom I regarded as a personification of unworldly simplicity, clothed in high and pure thought; and I regularly attended, though not enrolled as a regular student, the Moral Philosophy Class of Dr Chalmers. Returning to Edinburgh and its university, I became acquainted, through my friend and countryman, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the stage—no, no; she withdrew to the other end of the room—and burst into the most becoming of all human tears, theatrical tears. Impulsive Iris hastened to comfort the personification of self-sacrifice, the model of all that was most unselfish in female submission. "For shame! for shame!" she whispered, ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... false, even though I should be in direst peril."[2218] The heroes fear to falsify, and the Vedas are quoted that a lie is the greatest sin.[2219] The clever hero has remained the popular hero. At the present day we are told that Ganesa, or Gana-pati, son of Siva, really represents "a complex personification of sagacity, shrewdness, patience, and self-reliance,—of all those qualities, in short, which overcome hindrances and difficulties, whether in performing religious acts, writing books, building houses, making journeys, or undertaking anything. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... want. He would give to a painted harlot a thousand pounds for a loathsome embrace, and to a player or buffoon a hundred for a trumpery pun, but would refuse a penny to the widow or orphan of an old Royalist soldier. He was the personification of selfishness; and as he loved and cared for no one, so did no one love or care for him. So little had he gained the respect or affection of those who surrounded him, that after his body had undergone an ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... had been regaling her companion with a long-winded and irrelevant, though well-meant, yarn about things in general and nothing in particular; and Nellie, who was the personification of considerate patience, had seated herself on the starboard rail to listen to and comment on ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... predominance of immediate interests and local prepossessions. The conflict, indeed, was not yet over. Two generations of civic strife were still to signalize the slow and painful growth of the love for "The Union"; that personification of national being, upon which can safely fasten the instinct of human nature to centre devotion upon a person and a name. But, through these years of fluctuating affections, the work of the War of 1812 was continuously felt. Men had been forced out of themselves. ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... into symbol and figure—but far too living and real, addressed with too intense and natural feeling, to be the mere personification of anything. The lady of the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The student's dream has been broken, as the boy's had been; and the earnestness of the man, enlightened by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and abstractions, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... idea has long prevailed that if the mother does not get what her longing soul supremely desires, that the on-coming baby is going to cry and cry until it is given what the mother wanted with all her heart and did not get. Such an idea is the very quintessence of folly and the personification of foolishness and superstition. ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... communications have ever been received by modern Spiritualists from souls confined under an altar? In glowing symbolism, John saw the dead martyrs, as if slain at the foot of the altar; and by the figure of personification a voice was given to them, just as Abel's blood cried to God for vengeance upon his guilty brother (Gen. 4:10), and just as the stone is said to cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber to answer it. ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... detested, had massacred the poor Madrilenes who remained faithful to their old rulers, then public opinion turned against the former hero of Marengo and Austerlitz and a hundred other revolutionary battles. Then and only then, when Napoleon was no longer the hero of the revolution but the personification of all the bad traits of the Old Regime, was it possible for England to give direction to the fast-spreading sentiment of hatred which was turning all honest men into enemies of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... This personification of the passion of Love, by Peyre Vidal, has been referred to as a proof of how little the Provencal poets were indebted to the authors of Greece and Rome for the imagery ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... another personification of the marvellous power of music among primitive peoples. Their parentage also is variously given, though they are usually mentioned as daughters of the river god, Achelous. They are generally represented ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... been seen or heard of from that day to this? Well, for my part," he went on, rather constrainedly, "I'm almost ready to believe the man's a myth—a mere personification of evil—an allegorical name for the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... sad, inexpressibly sad, to see the grand and good man—the image of himself, yet not himself, with bowed head and bent form, the very personification of humility—wandering forth on that lonely ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... (wandered). Note the rhetorical figure of personification consisting in representing inanimate objects as endowed with life and action, an idiom not infrequently employed, mainly as a substitute for the passive voice which is less used in German than ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... I first began to notice and comprehend, I also began to bitterly feel our condition, and Gabrielle felt it far more than I did. We knew that we were half-starved, half-clad, neglected, unloved creatures, and that our parent was a personification of Selfishness. We saw other children prettily dressed, walking past with their mothers or nurses—or trotting to school, healthful and happy; and our hearts yearned to be like them—yearned for a mother's kiss! Gabrielle was habitually silent and proud, though often passionate when ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... he stops short, and recommences his recitative, when the journey is supposed to be performed. The want of scenery is sometimes supplied by a very unclassical figure, which, just the reverse of the prosopopoeia or personification of grammarians, considers persons to represent things. If, for instance, a walled city is to be stormed, a parcel of soldiers, piling themselves on a heap across the stage, are supposed to represent the wall over which ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... "Sunday-go-to-meetings," with their little daughter Polly, named after the mother, pretty as a picture and a great friend of Masie—most distinguished people were the Codmans, he looking like an alderman and his wife the personification of good humor, her rosy cheeks matching the tint of ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of nature, she doubtless thinks herself the personification of goodness. I suppose I shall be well lectured before I get away. I had a foretaste of it this morning. 'Drawbacks of city life,' forsooth! She no doubt regards me as a result of these disadvantages. But if she should come to deem it her mission to convert or reform me, then will be lost my ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... charming personification of unselfish, inconsequent, tender femininity, the doctor found himself confronted by a calm cold woman, with hard unseeing eyes; a woman in whom something had died; and dying, had slain all the best and truest ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... equally blank look of despair, as he stood with his legs apart and his arms hanging down by his side—the very personification of imbecility. "If I wos a fly I'd know wot to do. I'd walk up the side o' that cliff till I got to a dry bit, and then I'd stick on. But, not bein' a ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... responsible for socialism. The individual who with great force of ability becomes the foremost figure in social, political, or industrial development is immediately assailed or glorified. He becomes the personification of an evil thing that must be destroyed or of a good thing that must be protected. It is a result of such reasoning that men ignorant of underlying social, political, or industrial forces seek to obstruct the processes of evolution by removing the individual. On this ground the anarchists ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... appears more plainly, as insisted upon on an earlier page, that there is not one natural selection and one survival of the fittest, but two, inasmuch as there are two classes of variations from which nature (supposing no exception taken to her personification) can select. The bottles have the same labels, and they are of the same colour, but the one holds brandy, and the other toast and water. Nature can, by a figure of speech, be said to select from variations that are mainly functional or from variations ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... to quote him a good deal, also, as a sample of a certain Shakespearian boldness of personification in which the men sometimes indulged. Once, I remember, his captain had given him a fowling-piece to clean. Henry Ward had left it in the captain's tent, and the latter, finding it, had transferred the job ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the picture of health—a personification of contentment. When I knew him, his years must have considerably exceeded threescore; but his good-natured face was as ruddy as health could make it; his hair, though mingled with grey, was as thick and strong as if he had been but twenty; ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... of enlightenment which the damsel, the personification of wisdom, whispered into the ear of the seeker," continued the persuasive voice of the Persian. "It is the heart-truth of all religion. It is the word which initiates man into the divine mysteries. 'Thou wilt accomplish thy journey ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... darkness—utter illimitable darkness. But above him the clouds were torn asunder, and through a transparent veil of light golden mist, a face of surpassing beauty was seen—a face on which youth, health, hope, love, and ecstatic joy all shone with ineffable radiance. It was the personification of Life—not life as we know it, brief and full of care—but Life Immortal and Love Triumphant. Often and often I found myself standing before this masterpiece of Cellini's genius, gazing at it, ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... of the Bishop's enemies, and from the silence of his friends, that there would be no difficulty in driving from Court, with contumely, the prelate whom of all prelates they most detested, as the personification of the latitudinarian spirit, a Jack Presbyter in lawn sleeves. They, therefore, after the lapse of a few hours, moved quite unexpectedly an address requesting the King to remove the Bishop of Salisbury from the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 500 livres.[41121] Moreover, a fortune or a competence, inspires its possessor with anti-revolutionary sentiments; consequently, he is for the moment an obstruction; "You are rich," says Cambon, making use of a personification, "you cherish an opinion, which compels us to be on the defensive; pay then, so as to indemnify us and be thankful for our indulgence which, precautionary and until peace is declared, keeps you under bolt and bar."[41122] Rich, anti-revolutionary, and vicious," according to Robespierre,[41123] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Denisov and his new acquaintance, Dolokhov, sat almost at the middle of the table. Facing them sat Pierre, beside Prince Nesvitski. Count Ilya Rostov with the other members of the committee sat facing Bagration and, as the very personification of Moscow hospitality, did the honors to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... I do not know how that may be. But go now to the personification of La Penserosa. If you do not turn her into a brighter Allegro than I am, you may say I have no ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... pink as an emblem of the season. So enchanting was her appearance altogether, so fresh the character of her beauty, so bright the bloom that dyed her lovely checks, that she might have been taken for a personification of May herself. She was indeed in the very May of life—the mingling of spring and summer in womanhood; and the tender blue eyes, bright and clear as diamonds of purest water, the soft regular features, and the merry mouth, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the classics, the multitude of their gods either precluded allegory altogether, or else made every thing allegory, as in the Hesiodic Theogonia; for you can scarcely distinguish between power and the personification of power. The 'Cupid and Psyche' of, or found in, Apuleius, is a phenomenon. It is the Platonic mode of accounting for the fall of man. The 'Battle of the Soul' [1] by Prudentius is an early ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... white ribbon that went round her head, and confined her reddish-brown hair; and her partner waltzed with a pipe in his mouth, smoking all the while; and during the whole of this voluptuous dance, his countenance was a fair personification of true German phlegm. After these, but, I suppose, not actually belonging to the party, a little ragged girl and ragged boy, with his stockings about his heels, waltzed and danced;—waltzing and dancing in the rear most entertainingly. ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... during the summer of 1710, Vendome displayed an activity which did not seem to comport with his habits, in order to reunite and arm the volunteers, who, from the summit of the Sierras, descended in swarms upon the plains of the two Castiles at the summons of a monarch become the personification of a patriot. He speedily transformed into a powerful and well-trained army the undisciplined guerillas whose bravery had hitherto been useless; in a few months, the Anglo-Austrian army, at the head of which the prince who called himself ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... full heat of midday; Chrysantheme and her mother arrived together, and I alone. We seemed to have met for the purpose of ratifying some discreditable contract, and the two women trembled in the presence of these ugly little men, who, in their eyes, were the personification of the law. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... often wrote, as we do, in direct terms and of simple things, but when they wished to rise above the commonplace they turned with a frequency which to-day appears astonishing to the devices of abstract personification and veiled meanings. No doubt this tendency was due in part to an idealizing dissatisfaction with the crudeness of their actual life (as well as to frequent inability to enter into the realm of deeper and finer thought without the aid of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... bad acts of all the English in India, of bad acts committed when he was absent, nay, of bad acts which he had manfully opposed and severely punished. The very abuses against which he had waged an honest, resolute, and successful war were laid to his account. He was, in fact, regarded as the personification of all the vices and weaknesses which the public, with or without reason, ascribed to the English adventurers in Asia. We have ourselves heard old men, who knew nothing of his history, but who still retained the prejudices conceived in their youth, talk of him as ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... human. He is always, to me, quite unhuman. Even when he is most interested, and even enthusiastic, he is a mere personification of knowledge. Nature ought to have furnished him with an ibis' head like Tahuti; then he would have ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... of Babylonia were adopted by the Assyrians. But in Assyria they were always somewhat of an exotic, and even the learned class invoked Assur rather than the other gods. Assur was the personification of the old capital of the country and of the nation itself, and though the scribes found an etymology for the name in that of An-sar, the primaeval god of Sumerian cosmogony, the fact was always remembered. Assur was purely Semitic ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... reduced to a single question, the formation of new combinations.—The principal intellectual factor is thinking by analogy. Why it is an almost inexhaustible source of creation. Its mechanism. Its processes reducible to two, viz.: personification, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... names, remembered at random; there are scores besides, and I think that they should be held up to honour and emulation throughout the formative period of youth. After all, they became, during the years when these qualities were exalted, the personification of the ideals of honour and chivalry, of compassion and generosity, of service and self-sacrifice and courtesy, and these, the qualifications of a gentleman and a man or honour, are, with the religion that fostered ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... "Lelia," which was published in 1833, during an eventful period in its author's life. The character of Lelia was drawn from George Sand herself as a personification of human nature at war with itself. The original of Stenio was Alfred de Musset, whose intimate friendship with ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... with some remarks on four of the principal works of poetry in the world, at different periods of history—Homer, the Bible, Dante, and let me add, Ossian. In Homer, the principle of action or life is predominant; in the Bible, the principle of faith and the idea of Providence; Dante is a personification of blind will; and in Ossian we see the decay of life, and the lag end of the world. Homer's poetry is the heroic: it is full of life and action: it is bright as the day, strong as a river. In the vigour of his intellect, he grapples with all the objects of ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... of her conversation was the complete absence of the note of the heiress from its accents. That, other things equal, her interest would naturally incline to a person bearing the name of De Stancy, was evident from her avowed predilections. His original assumption, that she was a personification of the modern spirit, who had been dropped, like a seed from the bill of a bird, into a chink of mediaevalism, required some qualification. Romanticism, which will exist in every human breast as long as human nature itself exists, had asserted itself in her. Veneration ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... watched him, lying back in the golden sunlight, the very personification of manly beauty. The absolute lack of self-consciousness, either for himself or for her, which allowed him to talk thus to the plainest woman of his acquaintance, held a vein of humour which diverted Jane. It appealed to her more than buying ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... one thing needful, Dan came in for a consultation, and with him a traveller, the bearer of a message from our kind, great-hearted chief to say that work was waiting for the mate at the line party. Our chief was the personification of all that is best in the bush-folk (as all bushmen will testify to his memory)—men's lives crossed his by chance just here and there, but at those crossing places life have been happier and better. For one long weary day the mate's life had run parallel ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... with our Lord. He was the very personification of it. He was love itself, and grace and truth poured from His lips incessantly. His blessed feet went about doing good, and His hands ministering to the necessities and happiness of His creatures, yet ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... known that Lady Macbeth was the personification of crime, it would still have seemed to him a profanation to bring her into contact with the plebeian ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
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