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More "Symbolic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its simplicity, among nations now in a savage state, a tradition which the Greeks embellished with all the charms of imagination! A few leagues from Encaramada, a rock, called Tepu-mereme, or the painted rock, rises in the midst of the savannah. Upon it are traced representations of animals, and symbolic figures resembling those we saw in going down the Orinoco, at a small distance below Encaramada, near the town Caycara. Similar rocks in Africa are called by travellers fetish stones. I shall not make use of this term, because fetishism ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... are frequently on artificial mounds, being probably intended for religious or ceremonial purposes. The walls both within and without are elaborately decorated, sometimes with symbolic figures. Sometimes officials in ceremonial costumes are seen apparently performing religious rites. These are often accompanied by inscriptions in low relief, with the peculiar Mayan characters which some archeologists call ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... translated Virgil and Demosthenes, he had begun to write a Treatise upon the Will, a symbolic work which contained the germs of his entire destiny. His fellow students, rendered curious by his sustained application, continuing month after month, tried in vain to steal glimpses over his shoulder, but Honore de Balzac would permit ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... account of the myth. For the various interpretations of its symbolic meaning, the general reader is referred to Mr. Blackwell's edition of MALLETT's Northern ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... also a belief in the virtue of precious stones, which added a value to them beyond their real value as ornaments. An investigation into this matter would tend to throw much light upon many ancient practices and beliefs, as each stone had its own symbolic meaning, and its own peculiar influence for imparting good and protecting from evil and from sickness, its fortunate possessor. Probably John's description of heaven with its windows of agate, its ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... prose, must prepare for a second: that he has actually been talking potential verse. The three acoustic properties of speech—duration, intensity, pitch—modified by the logical and emotional content of which the sounds are symbolic, combine to produce an incredibly subtle and elastic medium which the poet moulds to his metrical form. In this process of moulding and adjustment, each element, under the poet's deft handling, yields somewhat to the other, the natural rhythm of language and ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... security, and toward softer targets—schools, restaurants, places of worship, and nodes of public transportation—where innocent civilians gather and which are not always well secured. Specific targets vary, but they tend to be symbolic and often selected because they will produce mass casualties, economic damage, ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - September 2006 • United States
... dress is attractiveness, so that by its aid our persons may be set off to the best advantage; dress should also be individual and symbolic, so as to indicate clearly the position and character which we desire to obtain and hold. It is not of men's attire that we have now to speak; that has been settled for them by the tailors' strike, which practically ordained that he that was shabby should ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... of Roman superficiality, incuriousness and ignorance. Every old Egyptian city had its idols (images of metal, stone or wood), in which the Deity became incarnate as in the Catholic host; besides its own symbolic animal used as a Kiblah or prayer-direction (Jerusalem or Meccah), the visible means of fixing and concentrating the thoughts of the vulgar, like the crystal of the hypnotist or the disk of the electro-biologist. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... like the sort of play that haunted the "anti-Ibsenite" imagination in the year 1893 or thereabouts. It is a piece of self-caricature, a series of echoes from all the earlier plays, an exaggeration of manner to the pitch of mannerism. Moreover, in his treatment of his symbolic motives, Ibsen did exactly what he had hitherto, with perfect justice, plumed himself upon never doing: he sacrificed the surface reality to the underlying meaning. Take, for instance, the history of Rubek's statue and its development into a group. In actual sculpture this development is a grotesque ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... desk, in the inner of three successively smaller offices on the second floor of the converted warehouse, checking over a symbolic-logic analysis of a relay system and, at the same time, sharpening a pencil, his knife paring off tiny feathery shavings of wood. He was a tall, sparely-built, man of indeterminate age, with thinning ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... fantastic and unreal, as embodied in the edifice three blocks distant from Fillmore Street which he had attended for a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival in Hampton. The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and bewildered Puritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age, to compromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley of rounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in the Greek Church, represents the initial of [Greek: Christos], the Messiah, the symbolic affixing of which (sealing) before and after baptism indicates that the name of Christ is imposed on the believer, who takes his new or Christian name at baptism. This mark on the forehead refers to Revelation vii. 3., xiv. 1., xxii. 4. The longer catechism of that ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... and her mistrust of her son-in-law made her prefer the humble Ghetto garret. Against all reasoning, she continued to feel something antipathetic in Henry's clothes and even in his occupation—perhaps it was really the subconscious antagonism of the old clo' and the new, subtly symbolic of the old generation and the smart new world springing up to tread it down. Henry himself was secretly pleased at her refusal. In the first ardours of courtship he had consented to swallow even the Polish crone who had strangely mothered ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... burning sign of the degeneracy of the times and the tendencies of Jefferson. On the other hand, the Republicans quoted the Rights of Man and the Declaration of Independence, and made the name of Lewis Rand as symbolic as a liberty pole. He was bon enfant, bon Republicain. Virginia, like Cornelia, numbered him among her starry gems. He was of the Gracchi. He was almost anything Roman, Revolutionary, and Patriotic that the mind of a perfervid poet ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... symbolic. It stands for a vaster obscurity. This is an encampment on the edge of a continent, the proportions of which are unknown, the form of which is only conjectured. Behind this screen of forest are there hills, great streams, with broad valleys, ranges of mountains ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... radiance, but it was upon a condition that saved the situation—they must be worthy specimens,—sincere, authentic, archetypal; they must have made connection with what he calls the Moral Sentiment, they must in some way act as symbolic mouthpieces of the Universe's meaning. To know just which thing does act in this way, and which thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret (somewhat incommunicable, it must be confessed) of ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... distrust of Homer. His love of justice, and reverently religious nature, made him dread, as death, every form of fallacy; but chiefly, fallacy respecting the world to come (his own myths being only symbolic exponents of a rational hope). We shall perhaps now every day discover more clearly how right Plato was in this, and feel ourselves more and more wonderstruck that men such as Homer and Dante (and, in an inferior ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... we know, be a case of phonetic symbolism, and, if so, it should be treated on its own merits. The lengthening of the vowel in the subjunctive mood was formerly represented by Professor Curtius as a symbolic expression of hesitation, but he has lately recalled that explanation as untenable. Ipointed out that when in Hebrew we meet with such forms as Piel and Pual, Hiphil and Hophal, we feel tempted to admit formative agencies, different ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... presented, in this interval between the opera and the ballet, with a look half contemptuous, half dreamy. It was a figure wholly out of keeping—in spite of its conformity in dress—with the splendid opera-house, and the bejeweled crowd which filled it. In some symbolic group of modern statuary, it might have stood for the Third Estate—for Democracy—Labor—personified. But it was a Third Estate, as the modern world has developed it—armed with all the ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... [453]serpents, and still made the same frantic exclamation. One part of the mysterious rites of Jupiter Sabazius was to let a snake slip down the bosom of the person to be initiated, which was taken out below[454]. These ceremonies, and this symbolic worship, began among the Magi, who were the sons of Chus: and by them they were propagated in various parts. Epiphanius thinks, that the invocation, Eva, Eva, related to the great [455]mother of mankind, who was deceived by the serpent: and Clemens of Alexandria ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... by me into the room, I was seized by the alarmed official. Of course I apologised for my stupidity in taking the wrong turning, and I asked him about Mr. Gladstone's three mysterious hats in the hall, which he informed me Mr. Gladstone always had by him,—three hats symbolic of his oratorical peculiarity of using the well-known phrase, "There are three ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... of state: President Kay Rala Xanana GUSMAO (since 20 May 2002); note - the president plays a largely symbolic role but is able to veto some legislation; he formerly used the name Jose Alexandre GUSMAO head of government: Prime Minister Mari Bin Amude ALKATIRI (since 20 May 2002) cabinet: Council of Ministers elections: president elected by popular vote for a five-year ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... in the tents of Shem, and possessed the Isles. Here again, and in the usual form of an historic Solution, we find the same Fact, and as characteristic of the Human Race, stated in that earliest and most venerable Mythus (or symbolic Parable) of Prometheus—that truly wonderful Fable, in which the characters of the rebellious Spirit and of the Divine Friend of Mankind ([Greek: Theos philanthropos]) are united in the same Person: and thus in the most striking manner noting the forced amalgamation of the Patriarchal Tradition with ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... with some verisimilitude, and yet with a symbolic syncopation that indicated the Lion Dance was a very ancient and conventional ceremony. These dancers gave way to a chorus of singers. For interminable hours, so it seemed, they chanted a high, shrill recitative, carried in fugue by deeper voices. The burden of the ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... These symbolic dances were not mere ceremonials for the Plains Indians; they were their one means of expressing their emotions en masse rhythmically, of maintaining their sense ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... however unexcitable his ordinary mood. To confess the truth, I myself, though belonging to another parish, have been deeply sensible to the sublime recollections there aroused, acknowledging that Nelson expressed his life in a kind of symbolic poetry which I had as much right to understand as these burly islanders. Cool and critical observer as I sought to be, I enjoyed their burst of honest indignation when a visitor (not an American, I am glad to ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Yemen, which has a plain white band and of Iraq, which has three green stars (plus an Arabic inscription) in a horizontal line centered in the white band; also similar to the flag of Egypt, which has a symbolic eagle centered in ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the ridiculous styles of this city. I meet no ladies here of subtle taste. There is wealth, frequently there is even taste, but common, according to pattern. For you it is necessary to think out something new—something symbolic, or rather something which symbolizes. A woman's dress should be a symbol of her individuality. For you it is necessary to think out a dress which would symbolize aristocracy of ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... use for the word "threshold" as a symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into another. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man's consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... enough, so that by the time the company assembled there the ladies were already startled and already soothed. Meanwhile the good priest and the good atheist stood at the head and foot of the dead man motionless in the moonlight, like symbolic statues of ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Mr. Moore has published the two books of his that since "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) reveal his deepest knowledge of Irish life, the volume of stories of varying length to which he gives that title, so symbolic, "The Untilled Field" (1903), and "The Lake" (1905), but there are few incidents in either that he is likely to develop into plays. "The Lake" could not be dramatized, but if it could be dramatized, it would be as little likely to be presented in Ireland as "The Tinker's Wedding." Mr. Moore, for ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... doctrine by means of miracles. The translation of Enoch, the Deluge, the destruction of Sodom, the plagues of Egypt and deliverance of Israel, the giving of the law from Sinai, the passage of Jordan, the ascension of Elijah, and the resurrection of Christ, are all symbolic miracles, the interpretations of which have intimate relation to the doctrine of man's immortality. This being understood, I shall proceed to discuss particularly the meaning of the Scriptural account of the beginning of sin through temptation by the serpent, and on the supposition that the ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... enjoy," he says, "those of Ibsen's dramas which are sane and clear, but those generally termed symbolic have been unintelligible to me, and I have never found the pleasure in them which those may who can disentangle their intricate meaning." What a curious statement, in the light of the other preface, written eight years later! ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... door of the chamber of death clapped angrily, and he went down to the parlour, where he examined the holy candle for a while, with a tipsy gravity, and then with something of that reverential feeling for the symbolic, which is not uncommon in rakes and scamps, he thoughtfully locked it up in a press, where were accumulated all sorts of obsolete rubbish—soiled packs of cards, disused tobacco pipes, broken powder flasks, his military sword, and a dusky bundle of the "Flash ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... man thus spake—as if in symbolic answering to his prayer—a sudden glory from the setting sun streamed through the funereal pile of clouds which filled the western horizon, and flooded the chamber ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... be here only touched upon, but the results of study go to show, in general, two main directions of primitive expression: pictorial representation, aiming at truth of life, and symbolic ornament. The drawings of Australians, Hottentots and Bushmen, and the carvings of the Esquimaux and of the prehistoric men of the reindeer period show remarkable vigor and naturalness; while the ornamentation of such tribes as the South Sea Islanders ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Lord himself gave both the parable and its explanation; he became his own interpreter. The Master takes us, like little children, by the hand and leads us through all the turnings of his first symbolic lesson, lest in our inexperience we should miss our way. The Son of God not only gave himself as a sacrifice for sin; he also laboured as a patient painstaking teacher of the ignorant: he is the Apostle as well as the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... soul and concentrated upon it, as the plastic expression of the same influence concentrated in Goujon. Very central in time, half soldier, half priest, all student; traveller and almost adventurer, a pilgrim throughout of the Idea, everything about him is symbolic ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... have found difficult to analyze led him to descend the steps and pick up the symbolic bud, now torn and withering fast, and to place it between ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... recommends Theocritus as a model far superior to Pope because of the greater exactitude of his references to objects, and because of his more realistic appeal to the imagination. Description, Warton says, should be uncommon, exact, not symbolic and allusive, but referring to objects clearly, by their real names. He very pertinently points out that Pope, in a set piece of extraordinary cleverness—which was to be read, more than half a century later, even by Wordsworth, with pleasure—confines himself to rural ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... often used in Logic instead of concrete terms, not only in Symbolic Logic where the science is treated algebraically (as by Dr. Venn in his Symbolic Logic), but in ordinary manuals; so that it may be well to explain the use ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... side), with a red border around the flag; there are seven yellow, five-pointed stars with three centered in the top red border, three centered in the bottom red border, and one on a red disk superimposed at the center of the flag; there is also a symbolic nutmeg pod on the hoist-side triangle (Grenada is the world's second-largest producer of nutmeg, after Indonesia); the seven stars ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... memory? It was the act of an unthinking few. Didn't he notice what the rest of London was doing that day? Didn't he remember that she flew the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes together from every symbolic pinnacle of creed and government that rose above her continent of streets and dwellings to the sky? Couldn't he feel that England, his old enemy and old mother, bowed and stricken and struggling, was opening her arms to him wide? ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... between various kinds of symbolic tales see Canby, The Short Story in English (pp. 23 ff.); Trench, Notes on the Parables (Introduction); Smith, "The Fable and Kindred Forms," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... gladdened by their decay. The hawthorns in Wimperfield Park glowed in the distance like patches of crimson flame, and the undulating sweeps of bracken showed golden-brown against the green-sward; while the oaks-symbolic of all that is solid, ponderous, and constant in woodland nature, slow to bloom and slow to die—had hardly a faded leaf to murk ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... rather to a primitive perversion, to a sort of congenital malice in the will of man. As to the question how a being could have perverted and corrupted itself ORIGINALLY, the ancients avoided that difficulty by fables: Eve's apple and Pandora's box have remained celebrated among their symbolic solutions. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... straight to the carriage, addressing herself to the invalid within by pointing to her breast, and making divers motions of the like signification, which were not easy to be understood, even by the party for whom they were intended. The prophetess seemed fully to comprehend that her symbolic representations were unintelligible, and no fitting place being at hand whereon they could be readily portrayed, she strove with the greater vehemence to explain her meaning. There appeared a more than ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... regret been given to understand that, in your writings published in and since the year 1854, you have advanced doctrines and principles that are in the most important points at variance with the doctrines and principles of the symbolic books of our Evangelical-Lutheran Church and of our rules of Church Discipline, to such an extent as to amount to an attempt to shake to the very foundation the basis whereon these doctrines and principles and our church rest. In order to reach more exact certainty on these ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... habitat), as in the Yankton, Yanktonai, and Hunkpapa; more frequently they referred to geographic or topographic position, e.g., Teton, Omaha, Pahe'tsi, Kwapa, etc; while some appear to have had a figurative or symbolic connotation, as Brule, Ogalala, and Ponka. Usually the designations employed by alien peoples were more definite than those used in the group designated, as illustrated by the stock name, Asiniboin, and Iowa. Commonly the alien appellations were terms of reproach; ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... in the light of later events it assumed a tragic significance. Oscar Wilde ought to have known that in this world every real superiority is pursued with hatred, and every worker of miracles is sure to be persecuted. But he had no inkling that the Gospel story is symbolic—the life-story of genius for all time, eternally true. He never looked outside himself, and as the fruits of success were now sweet in his mouth, a pursuing Fate seemed to him the most mythical of myths. His child-like self-confidence was pathetic. The laws that govern human affairs ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Himself lived on the earth in poverty,—He visited only the poorest and simplest habitations,—and never did He set His sacred foot within a palace, save the palace of the High Priest where He was condemned to die. Much symbolic meaning did Cardinal Felix discover in this incident,—and often would he muse ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... while she did it; he hardly dared to move and interrupt that reverent and symbolic act of gratitude. But once again, as when on the pavement she had held the child to him in frantic appeal, the simple soul within him flamed into splendor, and he was in touch with great passions and mighty emotions. ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... toward the moment when she would know that she had been too late. For the rest of her life she would only review them: the Bar, the wet roads, the detour, and the frightful seconds on the bridge. There had been something expiatory, something symbolic in this mad adventure, this flight through the night. The fires that had been burning in her heart for the past terrible hours were purged, she must be changed forevermore after to-night. But for the new birth, Derry ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... forbidden fruit or apple seems to have borne somewhat the same symbolic meaning that the egg did. But while the apple not only represented Life, but also, and primarily, that union between two sexes or principles which produces life, the egg more or less lacked the latter meaning, ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... to sever all connections with his former life remains and it is perhaps symbolic of his purpose that he now recalls the hunch-back girl, Kubja, takes Udho with him and in a single ecstatic visit becomes her lover. As he reaches her house, the girl greets him with delight, takes him inside and seats him on a couch of flowers. Udho ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... each child cripple makes here is a little symbolic ladder. In making it he climbs a rung on the way to his sky of self-support; and when at last he leaves this home, he steps off the top of it into the blue, and—so they say—walks there upright and undismayed, as if he had never suffered at Fate's hands. But what do ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... signify a certain object just as words are used down here to distinguish one thing from another, and so a knowledge of symbols is necessary for the reading of a myth. For the original tellers of great myths are ever Initiates, who are accustomed to use the symbolic language, and who, of course, use symbols in their ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... brilliance, he hesitated, his foot already upon a way strange to him. He realized numbly how symbolic of his future that present moment might be. New conditions arose suddenly to confront him, only to find him halting, incompetent. He took a step forward. In his embarrassment his foot caught beneath a rug's edge. Calvert Carter's hand, alone, kept the ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... eye fell on Gerald as he said so; at all events, the Rector of Wentworth moved sadly from where he was standing and went to the window, where he was out of his father's range of vision. Gerald's looks, his movements, every action of his, seemed somehow to bear a symbolic meaning at this crisis in his life. He was no longer in any doubt; he had made up his mind. He looked like a martyr walking to his execution, as he crossed the room; and the Squire looked after him, and once more breathed out of his impatient breast ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... human shape, are merely modes of representing and drawing into unity a variety of phenomena and agencies that seem one, by means of their unintermitting continuity, and because they tend to one common purpose. Now, from such a symbolic god as this, let him pass to Jupiter or Mercury, and instantly he becomes aware of a revolting individuality. He sees before him the opposite pole of deity. The river-god had too little of a concrete character. Jupiter has nothing else. In Jupiter you read no incarnation ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... without fire and smoke. At the end of three days this simple negative impression—the fact is, that there are no soldiers nor spies, nothing but plain black coats—begins to affect the imagination, becomes vivid, majestic, symbolic. It ends by being more impressive than the biggest review I saw in Germany. Of course, I'm a roaring Yankee; but one has to take a big brush to copy a big model. The future is here, of course; but it isn't only that—the present is here as well. You will complain that I don't give you any personal ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... the state. The highest stage of spirit incarnate is that of absolute spirit, embracing art, religion, and philosophy. In art the absolute idea obtains expression in sensuous existence, more perfectly in classical than in the symbolic art of the Orient, but most perfectly in the romantic art of the modern period. In religion the absolute idea is expressed in the imagination through worship. In Oriental pantheism, the individual is overwhelmed by his sense of the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... "I" is in direct contact with the myself, with Life, with God, with the actuality moving beneath all symbolic representations. ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... lilies. Climbing palms and massive creepers, splashed with orange, scarlet, and gold, tumble in masses from lofty branches, and the dazzling Bougainvillea flings curtains of roseate purple over wall and gateway. A dense thicket of frangipanni scents the air with the symbolic blossoms, shining like stars from grey-green boughs of sharp-cut leaves. A copse of splendid tree-ferns flanks the forest-like plantation known as "The Thousand Palms," and beneath dusky avenues of waringen (a variety of the banyan species, which strikes staff-like boughs into the earth ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... impressed, that no other words could express the nearness and clearness of it, than the expression 'walking and talking with God.' Sometimes wonderful pictures appear before our mind's eye, and reading their symbolic meaning, we catch hints of higher wisdom that would ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... the skin and are far more frequent than ordinarily supposed. Nearly all the older writers cite examples. Aldrovandus, Amatus Lusitanus, Boerhaave, Dupre, Schenck, Riverius, Vallisneri, and many others mention horns on the head. In the ancient times horns were symbolic of wisdom and power. Michael Angelo in his famous sculpture of Moses has given the patriarch a pair of horns. Rhodius observed a Benedictine monk who had a pair of horns and who was addicted to rumination. Fabricius saw a man with horns ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... ecarte," said Ladislas, shuffling the cards. "You see, Countess, I am very fond of cards. Why? Because card-games are symbolic. Cut, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... added to what I know, better than the most hostile critic could inform me, of my comparative weakness; and the other, that any work in Poetry strikes me with more than common awe, as proposed for realization by myself, because from long habits of meditation on language, as the symbolic medium of the connection of Thought with Thought, and of Thoughts as affected and modified by Passion and Emotion, I should spend days in avoiding what I deemed faults, though with the full preknowledge that their admission would not have offended perhaps three ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... earth in the story of the gospels and in the lives of the saints, or in its glory in the circles of heaven. Then, too, it represented the thought, philosophy, and knowledge of its own time and of the past in symbolic series of quiet figures, in symbolic pictures of the struggle of good with evil, of the Church with the world, of the virtues with their opposites. Naturally, then, the expression on the face of secular passions, the ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... appeared far more than six years the junior of the clear cut, smoothly shaven face that belonged to his prospective brother-in-law; and their countenances contrasted as vividly as the portraiture of bland phlegmatic Norse Aesir, with some bronze image of Mercury, as keenly alert as his sacred symbolic cocks. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... conflict with their own monotheistic belief, very little is definitely known, since their sacred books, if they had any, have not come down to us. Our knowledge is mostly confined to monuments, on which the names of their deities are inscribed, the animals which they worshipped, symbolic of the powers of Nature, and the kings and priests who officiated in religious ceremonies. From these we learn or infer that among the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Phoenicians religion was polytheistic, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... doubtless, for the sounds carrying so far in the tranquil summer air. The breeze was south-by-southwest; the hour was midnight; the theme was a bit of feminine gossip by wireless mythology. Three hundred and sixty-five feet above the heated asphalt the tiptoeing symbolic deity on Manhattan pointed her vacillating arrow straight, for the time, in the direction of her exalted sister on Liberty Island. The lights of the great Garden were out; the benches in the Square were filled with sleepers in postures so strange that beside ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... Pasqual, further denuded him of ten dollars. Into the heart of this cluster of fragrance he caused to be secreted a tiny envelope enclosing a card, upon which he had drawn a heart with a feathered arrow sticking through it; and for fear this symbolic declaration of undying devotion might not be sufficient, he scrawled ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... to this Administration by banners; we have protested by speeches; we now protest by this symbolic act. ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... instructing Gladys in the mysteries of symbolic decoration, Sahwah and Hinpoha, finishing their tennis game, strolled into the woods beyond the court, looking for berries. "Let's make a leaf cup and fill it ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... a more vivid sense of what pain in fiction may be. But to him belongs philosophy in fiction. His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate to him or influence ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... was yet more dull, and uninterested in the work, than he had been before. Instead of caring that his pupil should understand this or that particular, he would be speculating on Euphra's behaviour, trying to account for this or that individual look or tone, or seeking, perhaps, a special symbolic meaning in some general remark that she had happened to let fall. Meanwhile, poor Harry would be stupifying himself with work which he could not understand for lack of some explanation or other that ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... around their perished Air Trust plant, a throng of silent, earnest watchers stood, with faces illumined by the symbolic, sacrificial flames—a throng of emancipated workers, of toilers from whose bowed shoulders now forever had been lifted the frightful ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... as simply the sublimest sight which in this sight-seeing world I had seen. It was the Memnon's head, then recently brought from Egypt. I looked at it, as the reader must suppose, in order to understand the depth which I have here ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a symbolic head; and what it symbolized to me were: 1. The peace which passeth all understanding. 2. The eternity which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation; the eternity which had been, the eternity which was to be. 3. The diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon waves ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... lady was carried in a litter. A carriage was often taken to pieces at Conway, and carried to the Menai Straits on the peasants' shoulders round the dangerous cliff of Penmaenmawr. Mr. B. and Mr. D. remain mysterious symbolic initials of gossip and scandalmongering. St. Gregory's near St. Paul's, was a church entirely destroyed ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... the other king's deliverance. Hezekiah 'went unto the house of the Lord,' and found Him a very present help in trouble. Sennacherib was slain in the house of his god. The two pictures of the worshippers and their fates are symbolic of the meaning of the whole story. Sennacherib had dared Jehovah to try His strength against him and his deities. The challenge was accepted, and that bloody corpse before the idol that could not help preaches a ghastly sermon on the text, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... face might be an uninteresting one; still, as sharing the inevitable changes wrought by time, it would be worth looking at as it passed through the curve of life,—the vital parabola, which betrays itself in the symbolic changes of the features. An inscription is the same thing, whether we read it on slate-stone, or granite, or marble. To watch the lights and shades, the reliefs and hollows, of a countenance through a lifetime, or a large part of it, by the aid of a continuous series of photographs ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... about Juli's wrists clashed as she twisted her hands together. I stared somberly at the fetters. The chain, which was long, did not really hamper her movements much. Such chains were symbolic ornaments, and most Dry-town women went all their lives with fettered hands. But even after the years I'd spent in the Dry-towns, the sight still brought an uneasiness to my throat, ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... pale in comparison to the times in which the four musketeers had their great exploits. D'Artagnan and Athos are endlessly commenting on these youngsters, always unfavorably, and they are generally accurate. Raoul, the true son of Athos, and the symbolic son of the four, is never as quick to draw his sword as D'Artagnan would have been at that age, though he is equally as skillful in its use. Although he loses his one true love, Louise, as D'Artagnan did forty years ago, Constance, this loss kills the ...
— Dumas Commentary • John Bursey
... always shrouded in mist, as if to conceal it from the profane gaze. Tradition avows that Noah's dove alighted on its peak, and plucked thence the mystic branch which has ever since been hallowed as symbolic of peace ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... rowed away a sailor sprang to the flagstaff whence the signal of distress had been flying since the morning when help from the Bridgewater had been hoped for, and hauled down the blue ensign, which was at once rehoisted with the union in the upper canton. "This symbolic expression of contempt for the Bridgewater and of confidence in the success of our voyage, I did not see without ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... quoted passage is in the Odyssey, Bk. XXII, 10. When Ulysses reached home he wreaked vengeance on the suitors of his wife. Antinous was the first to fall. The story of the "bitter shaft" blotted out by a flower is symbolic of the story of the hatred of Lutwyche, which was robbed of its bitterness ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... law the ruling principle was the lex talionis. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, limb for limb was the penalty for assault upon an amelu. A sort of symbolic retaliation was the punishment of the offending member, seen in the cutting off the hand that struck a father or stole a trust; in cutting off the breast of a wet-nurse who substituted a changeling for the child entrusted to her; in the loss of the tongue that denied father ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent. We simply do not attempt to unite with Reality. But now and then that symbolic character is suddenly brought home to us. Some great emotion, some devastating ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... understood to represent the patriarch and the twelve pigs his clergy; and the ceremonies of the day consisting in the decapitation of these representatives, and a distribution of their joints among the senators; together with a symbolic record of the attack on Aquileia, by the erection of a wooden castle in the rooms of the Ducal Palace, which the Doge and the Senate attacked and demolished with clubs." ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... this in the country since our Motherhood began!" Somel said softly to me, while we watched the symbolic marches. "You see, it is the dawn of a new era. You don't know how much you mean to us. It is not only Fatherhood—that marvelous dual parentage to which we are strangers—the miracle of union in life-giving—but ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... the conception that the initial action of the series determines the character of events sequent in order. It is still a universal practice to consecrate every baby by a rite not ecclesiastical. The infant, on his first journey, must be taken to a height symbolic of his future fortune, an elevation believed to secure the prosperity of his whole subsequent career. It would be of interest to learn what analogies the practice has among races in a primitive ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... these Byzantine pictures that while the figure-painting is often really excellent, the design skilful, and the pose natural, the landscape, trees, etc., are quite symbolic and fanciful. The painters seem to have been utterly ignorant of perspective. Buildings, too, without any regard to relative proportion, are coloured merely as parts of a colour scheme. They are pink, pale green, yellow, violet, blue, just to please the eye. ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... each accompanied by the symbolic animal, usually assigned to him, occupy nearly the whole of their respective pages. They are taken from Byzantine models, of which, as Westwood points out, nothing remains but the attitudes, the fashion of ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... should play a secondary role in this "new" music; no longer through the porches of the ear must filter plangent tones, wooing the tympanum with ravishing accords. It is now the "inner ear," which is symbolic of a higher type of musical art. A complete disassociation of ideas, harmonies, rhythmic life, architectonic is demanded. To quote an admirer of the Vienna revolutionist: "The entire man in you must be made ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Democracy. These young and able men, having renounced their earlier socialism, their sense of humor recognizing its disharmony with high salaries and pleasant living, were hot for Democracy. Nothing paid like Democracy in this heaving world. The Democratic wave rose and roared. Symbolic was this violent eruption of small-town fiction, as realistic as the kitchen, as pessimistic as Wall Street. All virtue, all hope, all idealism, had gone out of the world. Romance, for that matter, never had existed and ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the wealth of flowers massed all over the chancel, and wondered if that was its regular state. The pulpit and the lectern; the altar, which he easily identified; the stained-glass windows with their obviously symbolic pictures; the bronze pipes of the little organ; the unvested choir, whose function he vaguely made out—over all these his intelligent eye swept, curiously; and lastly it went out of the open window and lost itself in ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... for my Bonnie." It was a circlet pin of sapphires. He fastened it against the soft, white folds of her dress. "You know what a ring is symbolic of, Isobel? Things eternal—everlasting—never ending. That's like my faith in you." He lifted the pretty, flushed, happy face and kissed it. "Come ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... and renewed, and rehearsed again with amendments and additions: he could not have believed that saying good-bye to a person could be turned into so complicated and symbolic a ceremony: but, at last, his daughter, with many a backward look and wave of hand, departed in one direction, and the gentleman, after similar signals, ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... and now there were moments of even diffusion. At night the lights were in multitude, and in multitude the flaring and strange decorations. Day and night swung processions, stood spectacles, huge symbolic movements and attitudes, grown obscure and molded to the letter, now mere stage effects. Day by day through carnival week the noise increased, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... be no doubt about the meaning of this word in the marriage covenant, the usages of nations often add symbolic explanations. These are generally simple, and brutal enough to be understood. The Hebrew ceremony, when the bridegroom took off his slipper and struck the bride on the neck as she crossed his threshold, was unmistakable. As my black sergeant ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... farcical purposes in the Induction to the Shakespearean "Taming of the Shrew." But with Calderon the theme is lifted altogether out of the atmosphere of comedy, and is worked up with poetic sentiment and a touch of mysticism into a symbolic drama of profound and universal ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... the Formularies, Confessions of Faith, or Symbolic Books, of the Roman-Catholic, Greek, and ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... this class, there is no doubt that the Daphnephoria is the most technically complete. The procession is seen defiling along a terrace backed by trees through which the clear southern sky gleams. A youth carrying the symbolic olive bough, called the Kopo, adorned with its curious emblems, leads the procession. He is clad in purple robes and crowned with leaves. The youthful priest, known as the Daphnephoros (the laurel-bearer) ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... meekness and humility in him at this moment, as well as in the average of the white-cravated gentlemen who trotted along that same pavement about eleven o'clock this forenoon. Why should not his white cravat, like theirs, be held symbolic of that fact? However, Scoutbush belongs rather to the former than the latter of Chaucer's categories; for a "smale foule" he is, a little bird-like fellow, who maketh melodie also, and warbles like a cock-robin; ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... symbols, as we know, have in many cases retained a certain significance long after the ideas they were meant to convey have been lost, or abandoned, or modified. If we bear these things in mind, it is not difficult to discover a religious origin for the symbolic wand ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... a formal parapet at the end of the basin of water, sixty feet from the fountain, is a colossal figure symbolic of the setting sun, Helios, the great orb having thrown off the nebulous mass that subsequently resolved itself into ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... contains many passages such as these. We have space to quote but one of the poems complete, to show the manner in which Mr. De Vere unites the real, the symbolic, and the external, with the spiritual. Like most of his poems, it is marked by artistic finish and grace, and many of the lines have a natural beauty of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... title). It is a great novel, probably the most perfect Russian novel since the death of Dostoyevsky. It breaks away very decidedly from Realism and all the traditions of the nineteenth century. It is symbolic, synthetic, and poetical. But it is so intensely personal and its achievements are so intimately conditioned by the author's idiosyncrasies that it was quite plainly impossible to imitate it, or even to learn from it. This is still more the case with the later works of Sologub, like ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... time, the coffin. All eyes survey the record of name, of sex, of age, and the day of departure from earth—records how shadowy! and dropped into darkness as if messages addressed to worms. Almost at the very last comes the symbolic ritual, tearing and shattering the heart with volleying discharges, peal after peal, from the final artillery of woe. The coffin is lowered into its home; it has disappeared from all eyes but those that look down into the abyss ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... girdled with ivy, symbolic of Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry, whose forehead was crowned with ivy. See ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... Halo. l. 358. I believe it is not known with certainty at what time the painters first introduced the luminous circle round the head to import a Saint or holy person. It is now become a part of the symbolic language of painting, and it is much to be wished that this kind of hieroglyphic character was more frequent in that art; as it is much wanted to render historic pictures both more intelligible, and more sublime; and ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... open window in a nightdress that she had found in one of the chests—a frail, yellowish thing with many frills of cobwebby lace made and worn by some dead woman on a forgotten bridal. It was symbolic of Hazel's whole life that she came in this way both to Undern and the Mountain—as bare of woman's regalia as a winter leaf is ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... are painted along conventional lines; the favorite colors for the inua masks are red (Karekteoak),[11] black (Auktoak), green (Cungokyoak), white (Katektoak), and blue (Taukrektoak), in the order named. These colors[12] may hold a sacred or symbolic significance. The inua masks are decorated with some regard to the natural colors of the human face, but in the masks of the tunghat the imagination of the artist runs riot. The same is true of the comic masks, ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... or "sacred book" of the Quiches of Guatemala was published by the Abbe Brasseur in 1861. The study (51) is an effort to analyze the names of the gods which it contains and to extract their symbolic significance. ...
— A Record of Study in Aboriginal American Languages • Daniel G. Brinton
... wall has the "Fortitude," the "Calumny," and the two little "Judith and Holofernes" pictures. Upon the "Fortitude," to which I have already alluded, it is well to look at Ruskin, who, however, was not aware that the artist intended any symbolic reference to the character and career of Piero de' Medici. The criticism is in "Mornings in Florence" and it is followed by some fine pages on the "Judith". The "Justice," "Prudence," and "Charity" of the Pollaiuolo brothers, belonging ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... fruit was peddled by itinerant dealers about the streets of ancient Grecian and Roman cities. Virgil sings of it in pastoral poems, and Ovid mentions it in words of praise. The name by which the fruit was known to the Greeks indicates its size; with the Latins its name was symbolic of its perfume. The name strawberry probably came from the old Saxon streawberige, either from some resemblance of the stems to straw, of from the fact that the berries have the appearance when growing of being strewn upon the ground. In olden ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... within the limits of ordinary experience. The young man rejoiced that, in the heart of the barren city, he had the privilege of overlooking this spot of lovely and luxuriant vegetation. It would serve, he said to himself, as a symbolic language to keep him in communion with Nature. Neither the sickly and thoughtworn Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it is true, nor his brilliant daughter, were now visible; so that Giovanni could not determine how much of the singularity which he attributed to both was due to their own qualities ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... inherited habit, and even to some extent habit in the individual; and therefore he fails, as it seems to me, to give the right explanation, or any explanation at all, of many gestures and expressions. As an illustration of what he calls symbolic movements, I will quote his remarks (p. 37), taken from M. Chevreul, on a man playing at billiards. "Si une bille devie legerement de la direction que le joueur pretend zlui imprimer, ne l'avez-vous pas vu cent fois la pousser du regard, de la tete et meme des epaules, comme si ces mouvements, ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... were refreshed by the gossipy peasants, who repeated the tales that had come down as ancestral memories. In wandering around the site of his proposed labors Sir Arthur noticed some ruined walls, the great gypsum blocks of which were engraved with curious symbolic characters, crowning the southern slope of a hill known as Kephala, overlooking the ancient site of Knossos, the city of Minos. It was the prelude to the discovery of the ruins of a palace, the most wonderful archeological ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... the more prudent bishops condescended to indulge a visible superstition, for the benefit of the multitude; and, after the ruin of Paganism, they were no longer restrained by the apprehension of an odious parallel. The first introduction of a symbolic worship was in the veneration of the cross, and of relics. The saints and martyrs, whose intercession was implored, were seated on the right hand if God; but the gracious and often supernatural favors, which, in the popular belief, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... chanting voices growing ever more loud, where paced the black-robed priests. First came acolytes swinging censers, and next, others bearing divers symbolic flags and standards, and after these again, in goodly chair borne on the shoulders of brawny monks, a portly figure rode, bedight in full canonicals, a very solid cleric he, and mightily round; moreover his nose was bulbous and he had a ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... and process of mythical and symbolic facts led in course of time to the evolution and beginning of knowledge, which is first empirical and then rational. Therefore, we must repeat, the extrinsic and intrinsic perception, the specification of types, and their modification into a unity which was always ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... composed of women. As I passed from block to block I could not get away from the thought that the vastest number of these were sick of heart and ashamed that they, too, were not in line behind the kilted band that headed the procession, the historic symbolic floats, and the inscribed banners, along with their three thousand or more sisters. Here were women, fighting a good fight for the cause of women—for the underpaid factory workers and the overfed lady of fortune who is deprived the right of voice in the government ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... the drum, sound the trumpets, raise a cry. sign, seal, attest &c (evidence) 467; underline &c (give importance to) 642; call attention to &c (attention) 457; give notice &c (inform) 527. Adj. indicating &c v., indicative, indicatory; denotative, connotative; diacritical, representative, typical, symbolic, pantomimic, pathognomonic^, symptomatic, characteristic, demonstrative, diagnostic, exponential, emblematic, armorial; individual &c (special) 79. known by, recognizable by; indicated &c v.; pointed, marked. [Capable of being denoted] denotable^; indelible. Adv. in token of; symbolically ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and certain depths of the soul of antiquity we must leave unsounded. If a fortunate windfall could give us possession of some sacred book of the later paganism its revelations would surprise the world. We could witness the performance of those mysterious dramas whose symbolic acts commemorated the passion of the gods; in company with the believers we could sympathize with their sufferings, lament their death and share in the joy of their return to life. In those vast collections of archaic rites that hazily perpetuated ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... was seeking a governess for his three children. It was written in a style all its own; it revealed a person accustomed to specify exactly what he wanted, and it occupied three or four inches, as if symbolic of the fact that he did not consider expense. He described the life of his children; they had servants and a tutor to attend to their physical and mental needs, and the father now sought a friend and, companion, to take charge of their spiritual ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... comfortably remote. Archery has no ugly smell of brimstone; breaks nobody's shins, breeds no athletic monsters; its only danger is that of failing, which for generous blood is enough to mould skilful action. And among the Brackenshaw archers the prizes were all of the nobler symbolic kind; not properly to be carried off in a parcel, degrading honor into gain; but the gold arrow and the silver, the gold star and the silver, to be worn for a long time in sign of achievement and then transferred to the next who did excellently. These ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... manifest; it is meant as a witness to others and ourselves; it must find expression in the external, if internally it is to be real and strong. It is the characteristic of a symbolic action that it not merely expresses a feeling, but nourishes and strengthens the feeling to which it corresponds. When the soul enters the fellowship of God, it feels the need of external separation, sometimes even from what appears to others harmless. If animated by ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... value for mourners; and he has expressed those thoughts, if lispingly, yet with no faults of commission, with a befitting grace, and, in truth, at some points, with something already of a really Hellenic definition and vigour. He really speaks to us in his work, through his symbolic and [276] imitative figures,—speaks to our intelligence persuasively. The surviving thought of the lad Trypho, returning from his tomb to the living, was of athletic character; how he was and looked when in the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... The first sunlight had begun to warm and colour the pale light of the dawn. Mauve pyjamas and white pyjamas; they were a young and charming couple. The rising sun touched their faces. It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical. Profound ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... action, the very throwing down of the money, somehow restored his earlier exhilaration, the assurance of a man who can pay the bill. It seemed symbolic of future accounts of whatever kind, all of which he meant to square. The web he had woven for himself was now so complete, his discomfiture so inevitable, that his spirits rose to meet the odds ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... in convention can ever be satisfactory. Convention is not the essence of life, but it is the protecting garment and preservative of life, and it is also one very valuable means by which life can express itself. It is largely symbolic; and symbols, while being expressive, are also great time-savers. The despisers of petty artificialities should think of this. Take the striking instance of that pettiest artificiality, leaving cards. Well, searchers ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... perfect to endure beyond Chapter 10, where he expires eloquently of heart-failure, leaving Alan, the third, to bear the white man's burden and clasp Frieda to his maidenly heart. This sentimental progress is, I suppose, what is implied by the title and the symbolic staircase (if it is a staircase?) on the wrapper. But my trouble was that I could never discern in the sweet girl-graduate any development of character from the pretentious futility of her earliest appearance. Perhaps I am prejudiced. Undeniably Miss McLEOD can draw a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... been only a vague name until a few days ago, when a symbolic group of his had been placed in the entrance hall of the Agricultural Institution, and had at once attracted attention. The critics spoke of him as a new force in art, and a bust of the famous dancer by him was therefore, under the ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... pocketful of rye was the yield of the earth, and the twenty-four blackbirds sang at sunrise while the king counted out the golden drops of the rain, and the queen ate the produce while the maid's performance in the garden was, beyond all doubt, symbolic of the clouds suddenly broken in upon by ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... time and money and ambition as nothing. But a dream, or a cloud in the sky, or a bird flying across the trail from the wrong direction, or a change of the wind will challenge their deepest thoughts. To the Indian mind all signs are symbolic. Their ceremonies are as complicated as any of ancient Hebrew or Greek tradition. The Indian aspires to be a great hunter, he seeks fame as a noble warrior; he struggles for the eagle feathers of ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... purely imitative process of pouring water over the stone. A similar rain-charm may possibly be seen in the curious ritual of the argeorum sacra, when puppets of straw were thrown into the Tiber—a symbolic wetting of the crops to which many parallels may be found among other primitive peoples. A sympathetic charm of a rather different character seems to survive in the ceremony of the augurium canarium, at which a red dog was sacrificed for the prosperity ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... of the East—that stretched out a yellow hand to the West. It was symbolic of the subtle, intangible power manifested in Dr. Fu-Manchu, as Nayland Smith—lean, agile, bronzed with the suns of Burma, was symbolic of the clean British efficiency which sought to combat the ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Symbolic Perversion of Courtship. The Impulse to Defile. The Exhibitionist's Psychic Attitude. The Sexual Organs as Fetiches. Phallus Worship. Adolescent Pride in Sexual Development. Exhibitionism of the Nates. The Classification of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... he immediately became one. When the transformation was over he found himself in the midst of an immense plain, covered with a tall green jungle and above which, at intervals, rose strange trees each with a head like the sun in symbolic pictures, with gigantic rays of silver and a huge heart of gold. Toward the middle of this prairie stood up a mountain of such romantic and impossible shape, yet of such stony height and dominance, that it looked like some incident of the end of the world. ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... said: for it seemed to me a strange allegory of England as she is now; this little town that had lost its glory; and forgotten, so to speak, the meaning of its own name. And I thought it yet more symbolic because from all that old and full and virile life, the great cheese was gone; and only the beer remained. And even that will be stolen by the Liberals or adulterated by the Conservatives. Politely disengaging myself, ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... investitures. An Emperor of the Swabian House would have been compelled by precedent and superstition to observe this form. It is true that the coronation of a German prince as the successor of Lombard kings and Roman Augusti, had always been a symbolic ceremony rather than a rite which ratified genuine Imperial authority. Still the ceremony connoted many mediaeval aspirations. It was the outward sign of theories that had once exerted an ideal influence. To dissociate the two-fold ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... one's grip slid a little lower. The car had now stopped, and the conductor came forward, brandishing what was apparently the wand of authority, designed to be symbolic rather than utile, since at no point was it thicker than a man's finger. From a safe distance on the running-board, he flourished this, whooping the while in a shrill and dissuasive manner. Somewhere down the street was heard a responsive ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... outer side) with a red border around the flag; there are seven yellow five-pointed stars with three centered in the top red border, three centered in the bottom red border, and one on a red disk superimposed at the center of the flag; there is also a symbolic nutmeg pod on the hoist-side triangle (Grenada is the world's second-largest producer of nutmeg, after Indonesia); the seven stars represent ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... be my last day, he thought. My eyes are going fuzzy, and I can't breathe right, and the throbbing's hurting my head. Whether he lived through the night wouldn't matter, because delirium was coming over him, and then there would be the coma, and the symbolic fight to keep him pumping and panting. I'd rather die tonight and get it over with, he thought, but they ...
— Death of a Spaceman • Walter M. Miller
... at the head of every band there marched a proud youth carrying the Oriflamme—a copy of the flag of the church, which was kept at St. Denys. The design of this banner was a red triple-tongued flame, symbolic of the tongues of fire that came down at Pentecost. This banner, like the colours of a regiment, was a symbol of honour, and an object ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... established, and when the only thing which could engage wise and religious minds was sacrifice and its elaborate rituals. Free speculative thinking was thus subordinated to the service of the sacrifice, and the result was the production of the most fanciful sacramental and symbolic ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... "My little Asticot," he whispered to me, "have I really come to this, to sit at the feet of an acting pro-sub-vice-deputy infant Gamaliel and be taught the elements of symbolic poetry?" ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... seated in his tribune above the choir, observed the scene with a renewed appreciation of the Church's unfailing dramatic instinct. At first he saw in the spectacle only this outer and symbolic side, of which the mere sensuous beauty had always deeply moved him; but as he watched the effect produced on the great throng filling the aisles, he began to see that this external splendour was but the veil before the sanctuary, and to realise what de Crucis meant when he spoke of ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... dinner and festivities. And, after dinner, that evening, to Illumination; followed by balls and jubilations for days after, in a highly harmonious key. Of the lamps-festoons, astonishing transparencies, and glad symbolic devices, I could say a great deal; but will mention only two, both of comfortably edible or quasi-edible tendency:—1. That of David Schulze, Flesher by profession; who had a Transparency large as life, representing his own fat Person ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... their faces, hands and wrists, in lines, triangles and circles. On their bodies also stripes of irregular design and varying colors are often used, all having a symbolic meaning originally, now lost, however, at least to all the younger members of the tribe. Painting the face has a definite and useful purpose. It softens the skin and prevents the frosts ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... familiar with the Patron-Saint of Venice in his symbolic guise, with his terrible, flashing jewelled eyes—as a power who would guard them and confound their enemies, rather than as an Evangelist—although the paw of the fierce Venetian lion rested always on the open gospel-page. ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... with real ones. Their judgment of this morbidly naturalistic art was conclusively expressed by the sentence of Donatello, when going one morning into the Old Market, to buy fruit, and finding the animal painter uncovering a picture, which had cost him months of care, (curiously symbolic in its subject, the infidelity of St. Thomas, of the investigatory fingering of the natural historian,) "Paul, my friend," said Donatello, "thou art uncovering the picture just when thou shouldst be shutting ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... to eat with them—and found that a fitting interpretation of their experience. These were picturesque ways of saying that Jesus shares God's life and ours. While our current modes of representing the Divine do not localize heaven, the symbolic language of the Bible has so entered into our literature, that in worship and in devout thought we find the New Testament metaphors most satisfactory to express ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... has preserved. That commentary is all the wonderful discourse about Christ as the bread of life, and eating His flesh as our means of receiving His life into ourselves. We are warranted, then, in regarding this miracle as a symbolic revelation of Christ as supplying all the wants of this hungry world. If so, we may perhaps venture to take one more step, and regard the manner in which He dispenses His gifts as also significant. His agents are His disciples, or as would ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and also for the vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... life as part of a journey to the heavenly city was, I think, one of these discoveries; and its rite was the church procession to the altar. In symbolic act man learned to make the journey beyond the blank horizon. He enlarged the church procession to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and he enlarged the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to the pilgrimage of life itself. In the understanding of life as a pilgrimage, the wanderer and seeker has the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... hideous and grotesque in the appearance of the pile. The monstrous figures of the idols, with their rude carved draperies and symbolic weapons, lay in every wild variety of position, and presented every startling eccentricity of line, more especially towards the higher portions of the mass, where they had evidently been flung up from the ground by the hand that ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Immortal labor. His yearnings, his sorrows were the links that united him to the unseen world; he went there, armed with his love, to seek his mother; realizing thus, with the sublime harmonies of ecstasy, the symbolic enterprise ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... proper shrines by a sort of devotional instinct, and were soon wholly absorbed in their prayers and prostrations. It is very evident to me that the Russian race requires the formulas of the Eastern Church; a fondness for symbolic ceremonies and observances is far more natural to its character than to the nations of Latin or Saxon blood. In Southern Europe the peasant will exchange merry salutations while dipping his fingers in the holy water, or turn in the midst of his devotions to inspect a stranger; but the Russian, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... that, whatever may have been the original intention, and whatever may be the esoteric meaning, the millions that perform idolatrous practice in this country see nothing symbolic behind the image and take the whole show quite literally. And can anything be more degrading to an intelligent human being? We know that all religions are necessarily more or less anthropomorphic. But our popular Hinduism surpasses everything else in this respect, too. ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... psychology in the least, we may take this symbolic syllogism as a sort of map, on which to trace out the different exploratory processes that we have already described under the head of "varieties of reasoning". To do so may make these different processes stand ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Protestants, where Church authority is almost gone, rites have almost disappeared; considered in themselves, they have ceased to be regarded as obligatory or meritorious; the most important ones, the Eucharist itself, have been retained only as commemorative or as symbolic; the rest, fasts, abstinences, pilgrimages, the worship of saints and the Virgin, relics of the cross, words committed to memory, genuflections and kneeling before images or altars, have been pronounced vain; in the way of positive ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... all, masters and servants, who dwell under its shelter, and extending a large hospitality to the friend and the stranger. One generation after another grows up in it under all good and gracious influences; a special providence, under the symbolic forms of Cypris Urania or Artemis the Giver of Light, holds the house in keeping, and each new year brings increased blessing from the gods of the household in recompense of piety and duty.[2] Many dedications bring vividly before us the humbler life of the country ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... in this connection to observe how widespread was the symbolic significance of the canopy, or sun shade, as a mark of dignity. The student of Shakspeare will recall the lines ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... in the study of ancient American pottery, I consider the collection invaluable, as it can scarcely be possible that the forms and decorations contain nothing that has been handed down from a former age. Although the figures used have no symbolic characters connected with them in the mind of the modern artist, yet it is more than probable that at least some of them did have such a meaning to the ancient artists. For example, the little tadpole-shaped figure on the clay baskets used in their dances and sacred ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... showed Ethel the "Count" book, in which were kept records of their work and play. The leaves were of brown paper and laced together with a leather thong or cord. The cover was of leather also. Symbolic charts for recording the requirements of the Fire Maker and Torch Bearer, as well as for nearly two hundred Elective Honors, were parts of the book. The book contained ninety-six pages. It was arranged for a group of twelve girls. Should the group grow larger, more leaves could ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... more than that meant by this great promise. For notice that emphatic little word the—the glory, not a glory—in the midst of her. Now you all know what 'the glory' was. It was that symbolic Light that spoke of the special presence of God, and went with the Children of Israel in their wanderings, and sat between the Cherubim. There was no 'Shechinah,' as it is technically called, in that second Temple. But yet the Prophet says, 'The glory'—the actual presence of God—'shall ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... should murmur, "is Life. There are two symbolic figures,—Pat and the Other. The artist, with relentless sincerity, refuses to allow our attention to be distracted by the introduction of any characters unconnected with the sordid tragedy. Here is human nature ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... have been jealous of what he could see in me, of some passion that could be aroused. But if so he never repented. I shall never forget his last words. He saw me standing beside his bed, defenceless, symbolic and forlorn, and all he found to say was, 'Well, I am ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... room, I was seized by the alarmed official. Of course I apologised for my stupidity in taking the wrong turning, and I asked him about Mr. Gladstone's three mysterious hats in the hall, which he informed me Mr. Gladstone always had by him,—three hats symbolic of his oratorical peculiarity of using the well-known phrase, "There are three courses ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... everywhere, boxes full of them, carts full of them; the most popular being the one that represents the livid and cunning muzzle, contracted as by a deathlike grimace, the long straight ears, sharp-pointed teeth of the white fox, sacred to the God of Rice. There are also others symbolic of gods or monsters, livid, grimacing, convulsed, with wigs and beards of natural hair. All manner of folk, even children, purchase these horrors, and fasten them over their faces. Every sort of instrument is for sale, amongst ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... improvised melodrama. Penrod, approaching, gave the pole a look of sharp suspicion, then one of conviction; slapped it lightly and contemptuously with his open hand; passed on a few paces, but turned abruptly, and, pointing his right forefinger, uttered the symbolic word, "Bing!" ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... times owing to the poison spreading, with the result that, being far from a young man, his strength was exhausted. Men forgot their own wounds in watching this one man's fight for life. He became symbolic of what, in varying degrees, we were all doing. When he was passing through a crisis the whole ward waited breathless. There was the finest kind of rivalry between the night and day sisters to hand him over at the end of each twelve hours ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... slowly-flowing slabs of mud. She had accomplished a hideous act of renunciation and returned to the One. Margaret's own faith held firm. She knew the human soul will be merged, if it be merged at all, with the stars and the sea. Yet she felt that her sister had been going amiss for many years. It was symbolic the catastrophe should come now, on a London ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... secret, submerged, and forgotten things arose, and with the undying poignancy and subtlety of odors they entered into him again. And besides these qualities which were indefinable, the smell was vividly symbolic. It was entwined with and it stood for his experience of art and ambition and the power to move men and women; for song and for the sensuous thrill and spiritual ecstasy of singing and for the subsequent applause. It was the only form of intoxication ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... certain process suggested itself to his mind, a work partly mental and partly physical, and after two or three experiments he found to his astonishment and delight that it was successful. Here, he thought, he had discovered one of the secrets of true magic; this was the key to the symbolic transmutations of the Eastern tales. The adept could, in truth, change those who were obnoxious to him into harmless and unimportant shapes, not as in the letter of the old stories, by transforming the enemy, but by transforming himself. The ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... Symbolism. Sublimation itself is merely a symbolic expression of basic impulses. It follows the line of our make-up, which naturally and fundamentally is wont to let one thing stand for another and to express itself in indirect ways. Sublimation says: "If ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... veritable grandeur of your endowment never begot itself a body of work really symbolic of itself. For if your music, as a whole, has any grandeur, it is the hollow grandeur of inflation, of ostentation, of externality. Your music is almost entirely a monstrous decor de theatre. It is forever seeking to establish tragical and satanic and passional atmospheres, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... painters work out their expression with toil; he only can give it with a touch. All the other great Italian colourists see only the beauty of colour, but Giotto also its brightness. And none of the others, except Tintoret, understood to the full its symbolic power; but with those—Giotto and Tintoret—there is always, not only a colour harmony, but a colour secret. It is not merely to make the picture glow, but to remind you that St. Francis preaches to a fire-worshipping king, that Giotto covers the wall with purple and ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... the same in religion. In Italy, as in Hellas, there lies at the foundation of the popular faith the same common treasure of symbolic and allegorical views of nature: on this rests that general analogy between the Roman and the Greek world of gods and of spirits, which was to become of so much importance in later stages of development. In many of their particular conceptions also,—in the already mentioned ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... thus called into being; between that which makes in its own image and that which is made in that image. It is better to keep the word creation for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination of God; except it be as an occasional symbolic expression, whose daring is fully recognized, of the likeness of man's work to the work of his maker. The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... sketch of "the Author at the Age of 30 (A.D. 1880)," such as Field frequently drew of himself; the symbolic emblem, which takes the place of a dedication, was a string of link sausages "in the similitude of a laurel wreath," representing "A Chicago Literary Circle," and the tail-piece was a gallows, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... possible to doubt whether Shakespeare's plays were not put on more effectively then than in most of our modern theaters. The difference is one of principle, and even this difference may easily be exaggerated. When we say that Elizabethan stagings were 'symbolic,' whereas ours are pictorial, we mean that on the former the presence of a few selected objects suggested to the mind of the spectator all the others which go to make up the kind of scene presented. When a few trees were placed upon the stage, the audience supplied ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... in household shrines, etc., etc. Some kinds are worn about the person;—others are made into pellets, and swallowed as spiritual medicine. The text of the larger o- fuda is often accompanied by curious pictures or symbolic illustrations. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... between the Ecclesiastical and Secular embroideries of the past centuries, and anyone interested in the evolution of design would be struck with the similitude of the large leaves and flowers in these panels to those of the crewel designs of the same date; it is also noteworthy that the symbolic significance in the details of the panels is ecclesiastic, whereas in the crewel work it is always based on the legend of the Tree of Life, ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... from off the earth, pondering with a heavy heart upon its contents. He had to make his choice between the Resident at Kohara and the lady of Gujerat. Captain Phillips held that the present was not interpreted in any symbolic sense. But the lady of Gujerat had known of the present. It was matter of talk, then, in the bazaars, and it would hardly have been that had it meant no more than an earnest of good-will. She had heard of the present; she knew what it was held to convey. It was a message. There was ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... pagodas. Literally covered with sculptures composed with infinite art, they form a very unique collection. These temples seem to rest upon a fantastic base in which are carved in alto rilievo all the gods of Hindoo mythology, along with symbolic monsters and rows of elephants. These are so many caryatides of strange and mysterious aspect, certainly designed to strike the imagination of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... merely modes of representing and drawing into unity a variety of phenomena and agencies that seem one, by means of their unintermitting continuity, and because they tend to one common purpose. Now, from such a symbolic god as this, let him pass to Jupiter or Mercury, and instantly he becomes aware of a revolting individuality. He sees before him the opposite pole of deity. The river-god had too little of a concrete character. Jupiter has nothing else. In Jupiter ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... meat and drink and sex, thus generously treated; we must turn to another aspect of Rabelais' work—his predilection for excrement. This also, though few would admit it, is a symbolic secret. This also is a path of initiation. In this peculiarity Rabelais is completely alone among the writers of the earth. Others have, for various reasons, dabbled in this sort of thing—but none have ever piled it up—manure-heap upon manure-heap, until ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of American invention, can be an interesting change from ordinary games. In some the company are all asked to contribute, as in "Book Teas," where a punning symbolic title of a book is worn by each guest, and a prize is given to the person who guesses most, and to the person whose title is considered the best. Thus, a person wearing a card having the letter R represented Middlemarch, ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of life foamed most exquisitely at her lips. How would she have fared had that changeable firebrand Romeo taken to wandering once more? It is a grievously flippant question to ask when the most glorious of all love-poems is in question; yet I ask it very seriously, and merely in a symbolic way. Romeo is a shadow, the adored Juliet is a shadow; but the two immortal shades represent for all time the mad lovers whose lives end in bitterness. I say again that only reasonable and calm love brings happy marriages. It is as true ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... choice for the visitors of this pattern-room in the matter of mummy-cases and cloths, as well as of necklets, scarabaei, statuettes, Uza-eyes, girdles, head-rests, triangles, split-rings, staves, and other symbolic objects, which were attached to the dead as sacred amulets, or bound ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... shadow; he is a mere reed shaken in the winds of force. But as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is a thinking reed; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he has the power of framing for himself a symbolic conception of the universe, which, although doubtless highly imperfect and inadequate as a picture of the great whole, is yet sufficient to serve him as a chart for the guidance of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labour to enable man to look ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... but Helen lay awake with her arm growing stiff under Miriam's body, and her mind wondering if that pain were symbolic of what wild folly ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... sympathy only and respect, even when the miracle is conceived and felt in the grossest, least spiritual manner. That act of material assimilation, that feeding off the very Godhead in most literal manner, as described in the hymn to the Most Holy Sacrament, was symbolic of the return from exile of the long-persecuted instincts of mankind. It meant that, spiritually or grossly, each according to his nature, men had cast fear behind them, and—O res mirabilis!—grown proud once ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... question, which otherwise would be meaningless. Since this proposal of marriage followed on a fight between the boys and girls arising from the fact that one party had injured the other party's sex-totem, the fight may perhaps really have been a preliminary to the proposal and have represented a symbolic substitute for or survival of marriage by capture. Among the Santals, Colonel Dalton says, "the social meal that the boy and girl eat together is the most important part of the ceremony, as by the act the girl ceases to belong to her father's tribe and becomes ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... philosophy is often used for curious purposes by many scholars. One such use I wish to mention here. The nomenclature which has survived from the earlier state is supposed to be deeply and occultly symbolic and the mythic narratives to be deeply and occultly allegoric. In this way search is made for some profoundly metaphysic cosmogony; some ancient beginning of the mythology is sought in which mystery is wisdom ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... of activity is more universal than the dance, which is not only intense but may express chiefly in terms of fundamental movements, stripped of their accessory finish and detail, every important act, vocation, sentiment, or event in the life of man in language so universal and symbolic that music and poetry themselves seem to have arisen out of it. Before it became specialized much labor was cast in rhythmic form and often accompanied by time-marking and even tone to secure the stimulus of concert on both economic and social principles. In the dark background of history ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of Beaumont and Fletcher's ultra-royalism, how carefully does Shakespeare acknowledge and reverence the eternal distinction between the mere individual, and the symbolic or representative, on which all genial law, no less than patriotism, depends. The whole of this second scene commences, and is anticipative of, the tone and character of the play ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... blind to them, never looked at them, hurried on, longing to grasp the symbolic hammer, to dust, sweep out the German rags and rubbish, nail talc over the gaping windows, set their homes going, start their factories in the surrounding mountains, people the houses so long the mere shelter for passing ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... a rebellious house" (2:3, 4, 6). How well he fulfilled his mission his prophecies show, in which there is a wonderful fire and vehemence, joined with a wonderful variety of representation and imagery. Proverbs, parables, riddles, symbolic actions, vivid portraitures of human wickedness, terrible denunciations of God's approaching judgments, and glorious visions of future peace and prosperity in reserve for the true Israel—these are all familiar to him, and are set forth often with an ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... butcheries, or the arches erected to the glory of the inept Caesars. The representative works of nations have two significations—the interior or immediate one which their creators gave them, and the exterior or universal interest, the symbolic value which the centuries ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Of spirit's joys, was his, reserved, restrained. His song was like the sword Excalibur Of his symbolic knight; trenchant, unstained. It shook the world of wordly baseness, smote The Christless heathendom of huckstering days. There is no harshness in that mellow note, No blot upon those bays; For loyal ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... framed an occasional act of contrition which he was too feeble to utter. When the end came, it was a gentle transition from life to death. Through it all the old clock on the bedroom mantelpiece, dark-stained, and of a quaint design, ticked on as it had done ever since Desmond could remember. Symbolic it seemed of the world, that heeds not death; but moves, always onwards, replacing each one as ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... and another for the simple. His political work on 'Reforme intellectuelle et morale' contains the strongest argument of the last hundred years against the very principle of democracy, natural equality. His two symbolic dramas—'Caliban' and 'Eau de Jouvence'—may be summed up in this reflection of the prior of Chartreux, seated in his stall while the organ plays alone, and the crowd presses around the crowned Caliban: ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... have what is probably America's greatest manufacturing exploit. And this democratization of the automobile comprises more than the acme of efficiency in the manufacturing art. The career of Henry Ford has a symbolic significance as well. It may be taken as signalizing the new ideals that have gained the upper hand in American industry. We began this review of American business with Cornelius Vanderbilt as the typical figure. It is a happy augury that it closes with ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... tremor. As they were accustomed to talk about themselves before others, to describe their feelings in a veiled form, it often happened when there were many people near that they carried this amusement further, and before they were themselves aware of it, they were in the full tide of a symbolic language and played ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... very beautiful. Peter sat on the bed and looked at it, as a devotee before a shrine. In itself it was very beautiful, a magic thing of blue colour and deep light and pure shadow and clear, lovely form. Peter loved it for itself, and for its symbolic character. For it was a symbol of the world of great loveliness that did, he knew, exist. When he had been turned out of that world into a grey and dusty place, he had kept that one thing, to link him with loveliness and light. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... Hohenstiel-Schwangau', 'Fifine at the Fair', and 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country', he could give us 'The Inn Album', with its expression of the higher sexual love unsurpassed, rarely equalled, in the whole range of his work: or those two unique creations of airy fancy and passionate symbolic romance, 'Saint Martin's Summer', and 'Numpholeptos'. It was no ground for astonishment that the creative power in him should even ignore the usual period of decline, and defy, so far as is humanly possible, its natural laws of modification. But in the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... besides all these resources of art, we find dancing introduced; but dancing of a solemn, mystical, and symbolic character. Here, at last, we have reached the Greek tragedy. Probably the best exemplification of a Grecian tragedy that ever will be given to a modern reader is found in the Samson Agonistes of Milton. Now, in the choral ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... natural thing in the world to say, and he said it without any noticeable inflexion of the voice, only it happened to express the youth's emotions at the moment with an utterance that was symbolic of the situation and of his own helplessness as a factor in it. He was alone with Defago in a primitive world: that was all. The canoe, another symbol of man's ascendancy, was now to be left behind. Those small yellow patches, made on the ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... into gold by the childish devotion of a primitive race. These images that you view across the carved and silver-gilt work of the iconostas, where they are ranged symmetrically upon the golden screen opening their large fixed eyes and raising their brown hand with the fingers turned in a symbolic fashion, produce, by means of their somewhat savage, superhuman and immutable traditional aspect, a religious impression not to be found in more advanced works of art. These figures, seen amid the golden reflections and twinkling light of the lamps, easily assume a phantasmagorical ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... king's deliverance. Hezekiah 'went unto the house of the Lord,' and found Him a very present help in trouble. Sennacherib was slain in the house of his god. The two pictures of the worshippers and their fates are symbolic of the meaning of the whole story. Sennacherib had dared Jehovah to try His strength against him and his deities. The challenge was accepted, and that bloody corpse before the idol that could not help preaches a ghastly sermon on the text, 'They that make them are like unto them; so ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... and enjoy," he says, "those of Ibsen's dramas which are sane and clear, but those generally termed symbolic have been unintelligible to me, and I have never found the pleasure in them which those may who can disentangle their intricate meaning." What a curious statement, in the light of the other preface, written eight years later! "Symbolism," he there wrote, "would not be beautiful if ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... chamber, with its riverside open to the air, and reached a tiny apartment, where he motioned us to a divan. We squatted and looked round. Some empty bottles were the only furniture. But on the wall hung the picture we had come to see. It was a symbolic tree, and perhaps as much like a tree as what it symbolised was like the universe. Embedded in its trunk and branches were coloured circles and signs, and from them grew leaves and flowers of various hues. Below was a garden lit by a rising sun, and a black river where birds and ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... his "gift" and impressed most of those who came in contact with him with his apparent sincerity. If he duped others, it seemed he also duped himself. Moreover, and this was perhaps the secret of his continued success, his "visions" were invariably symbolic and mysterious; they possessed an adaptability of character that was truly Delphic. Indeed, his hearers were compelled to put their own interpretation upon his visions. The seer seldom pretended to understand or explain ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... Mysterious echoes repeat from the far end of the temple each of his words, and in the dim light of the sanctuary the golden candlesticks glitter like precious stones. The old stained-glass windows with their symbolic figures become suddenly illuminated, a flood of light and sunshine spreads through the church like a sheet of fire. Are the heavens opening? Is the Spirit from ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... felt as though, having given the genius something to play with, he must not spoil the game. The game included twelve thousand pounds paid to budding sculptors for monumental groups of a symbolic tendency; it included forests of onyx pillars and pillars of Carrara marble; it included ceilings painted by artists who ought to have been R.A.'s, but were not; and it included a central court of vast ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... the various animals, birds, insects, and flowers which are, apparently without rhyme or reason, placed in one great disarray in the Stuart pictures is said to have been heraldic and symbolic. The sunbeam coming from a cloud, the white falchion, and the chained hart are heraldic ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... certain sense that some of the greatest writers the world has seen—Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sterne—have written nonsense; but unless we are mistaken, it is in a widely different sense. The nonsense of these men was satiric—that is to say, symbolic; it was a kind of exuberant capering round a discovered truth. There is all the difference in the world between the instinct of satire, which, seeing in the Kaiser's moustaches something typical of him, draws ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... sort of mechanical vicissitude. This Mr. Bell did. June of 1876 was the year of the great Centennial at Philadelphia, the year that marked the first century of our country's progress. As the exhibition was to be one symbolic of our national development in every line, Mr. Bell decided to show his telephone there; to this end he set Watson, who was still at the Williams's shop, to making exhibition telephones of the two varieties they had ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... (b) Representative and Symbolic Plays. See "Education of Man" (12c) and "Letters to a Mother on the Philosophy of Froebel" (12c). Dancing and Drama from Richter's ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... the New Testament. This is done by making the body of the design of the emblematic figure indicative of each, either the eagle, angel, ox, or lion; in combination with this figure are many small groups, symbolic of the contents of the various chapters. The copy we give (Fig. 69), from the second print devoted to St. Luke's Gospel, will make the plan of this singular picture-book clearer. The winged bull is spread out as a base to the group of minor emblems, upon its head rests a funeral ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... not beauty, but ideas,— information, irony, satire, life-philosophy. Where there is a conflict, beauty, as we have defined it, goes to the wall. We may trace, perhaps, the ground of this in the highly increased amount of symbolic, associative power given, and required, in the black and white. Even to understand such a picture demands such an enormous amount of unconscious mental supplementation that it is natural to find the aesthetic centre of gravity ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... whose souls are stitched up in their flounces, and whose happiness and self-respect rise or fall according to the becomingness of their attire. The village school-children lining the churchwalk strewed flowers for the bride's material and symbolic path. Dressed in a mixture of white, scarlet and blue, they made a brilliant show of color, and gave a curious suggestion of so many tricolored flags set up along the path; but they added to the general gayety of the scene, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... first-hand experience and does not attempt to present or interpret the world according to the relationships which the child himself employs. Rather it gives the child material which he is incapable of handling. Much in these tales is symbolic and means to the adult something quite different from what it bears on its face. And much, I believe, is confused even to the grown-up. Now a confused adult does not make a child! Nor does it ever help a child ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... like these, in fact, are nothing more than symbolic expressions of the character of the compounds which they represent, the arrangement of symbols in a certain definite manner being understood to convey certain information with regard to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... frequently on artificial mounds, being probably intended for religious or ceremonial purposes. The walls both within and without are elaborately decorated, sometimes with symbolic figures. Sometimes officials in ceremonial costumes are seen apparently performing religious rites. These are often accompanied by inscriptions in low relief, with the peculiar Mayan characters which some archeologists call ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... and down, enforcing a kind of order. Amid a growing hush a suckling pig is solemnly slaughtered by some religious functionary at the altar, and the dead victim carried around the circuit of the Pnyx as a symbolic purification of ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... complete—symbolic, Ian thought, of the condition of his own heart. Besides having eight or ten feet of water on its walls, all the lower rooms were utterly wrecked. A heavy log, ready for the saw-pit, had come down with the torrent, and, taking upon it the duties of a ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... rolls, as the symbol of the Great Spirit; and no important rite or ceremony is undertaken without an offering of tobacco. This weed is lit with the sacred element, generated anew on each occasion, from percussion. To light and to put out this fire, is the symbolic language for the opening and closing of every important civil or religious public transaction, and it is the most sacred rite known to them. It is never done without an appeal, which has the characteristics of prayer, to the Great Spirit. To find ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... building of Howard University, of her structures the noblest. Observed from the high palisades or the low bed of the Potomac, that ever-present object of view from any point of the District is veritably "a city on a hill that cannot be hid,"—symbolic and typical of her mission. And then the inquiry comes as to her significance. Why standeth ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
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