"Metamorphosis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... always seems to be undergoing a certain kind of metamorphosis; and with its sand-hills and generally unfinished condition, reminds the traveller of some remote part of the world, such as Panama, for instance. Some day it may possibly be able to digest the passenger traffic from England to the continent, but at present much time is lost there ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... with the great National attribute of self-protection, and the re-establishment of peace, and order, and security, the revival of business and trade, and the restoration of the Southern States on the basis of loyalty and equal justice to all, will be the happy results of this astonishing metamorphosis, provided the party which has inaugurated this policy remains in power to ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... began with a T, and Kalo is usually Taro. It is a very musical language. Each syllable and word ends with a vowel, and there are none of our rasping and sibilant consonants. In their soft phraseology our hard rough surnames undergo a metamorphosis, as Fisk into Filikina, Wilson into Wilikina. Each vowel is distinctly pronounced, and usually with the Italian sound. The volcano is pronounced as if spelt Keel-ah-wee-ah, and Kauai as if Kah-wye-ee. The name Owhyhee for ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... faith, while I only carry those of nature." He speaks of "the lies of Josephus," and makes merry over "the rude and shapeless block" which the guide assured him was the statue of Lot's wife, explaining the want of human form in the salt pillar by telling him that this complete metamorphosis was part of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... mycelium, and produce a sporular mass within the active pupa, when many are probably destroyed; but should some be only affected so far as not to destroy the organs immediately essential to life, they might undergo their metamorphosis into the imago, in which case they would be affected in ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... each cringing menial you will see a black token of that Asiatic metamorphosis through which we all have passed. What a picture! Look at yourself as you stand there in purple sublimity, trailing clouds of darkness from the middle ages whence you come, planting your imperial foot on all the manly traditions of your own free country, and pleased ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... metamorphosis our dame surprised; To give relief her tears but just sufficed; She scarcely spoke; the husband, days remained, Reflecting on the circumstance that pained. Himself a cuckold could he ever make, By mere design a liberty to take? But, horned or not? the question seemed to be, When Neria ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... metamorphosis!" he said; "scarce imagined ere it is realized: a lowly nymph develops to an inaccessible goddess. But Henry must not be disappointed of his recitation, and Olympia will deign to oblige him. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... took Mrs. Sidney Dale out to dinner at the house of a common friend in New York. In the course of conversation I remarked, "I believe it is you, Mrs. Dale, who is responsible for the metamorphosis in ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... This metamorphosis may well excite wonder. But, in truth, Sieyes and his colleagues were too weary and sceptical to oppose the one "intensely practical man." To Bonaparte's trenchant reasons and incisive tones the theorist could only reply by a scornful ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the later Unity of Type, he uses his amassed details of scientific knowledge most effectively in support of nonscientific propositions. Thus, he uses the facts of embryonic development, alchemy, and insect metamorphosis as a part of his argument for the immortality of ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... from being a dramatic poet, if he was destitute of that supreme creative power which involves the transformation of an author's own personality, he possessed, on the other hand, in the highest degree, that faculty of demi-metamorphosis which is the exercise and the triumph of criticism, and which consists in putting one's self in the the place of the author, occupying the point of view to the subject under examination, and reading every writing in the spirit by which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... which makes them look like fish; when the time of their metamorphosis arrives, this skin will split all down their back, and a little frog will come out of it. Look at this tadpole I have just caught; you can see the feet through its transparent skin. To-day it is a fish, that is to say, it breathes through gills—those little tufts you see ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... tradition of his association with Kartavirya Arjuna, who, in spite of all the mythical tales that are related of him, really seems to have been a king of flesh and blood. Thus we may venture to see in him yet another example of the metamorphosis so common in India from a saint to an incarnation of the god ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... annulled, in the name of—" He shook his head—looked at me with a dark frown. I began again: "I will sell you nothing more of my possessions, though you may offer as high a price as for my shadow; and I will sign nothing. Hence you may conclude that the metamorphosis to which you invite me would perhaps be more agreeable to you than to me. Forgive me, but it cannot be ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... manly resolution; but she was kept in leading strings by the need for money. And so, slowly and in spite of the ambitious protests and grievous recriminations of her own mind, she underwent the provincial metamorphosis here described. Each day took with it a fragment of her spirited determination. She had laid down a rule for the care of her person, which she gradually departed from. Though at first she kept up with the fashions and the little novelties of elegant life, she was obliged to limit ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... facilitate their drying, the bell struck eight, the flag was hoisted, and close on the drums followed the band playing the "Star-Spangled Banner," while the ship's company went to breakfast. It was the transformation scene of a theatre; within five minutes the metamorphosis was complete. There was doubtless a flavor of the circus about it all, but it was a wholesome flavor and tonicked the professional appetite. Yes, and the natural appetite, too; your breakfast tasted better, especially if some other ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... "po Bhon"[2] illustrates the belief in the metamorphosis of these demons. po Bhon was a Manbo of the Kasilaan River. One day, in the olden time, he went forth to hunt but had no luck, though three times he had offered his tributes to the Lord of the Agibwa ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... The metamorphosis of these men could not have been more complete. They hated themselves, they grew to hate the home which was theirs, the wild in which they lived. They set their traps and hunted because it was their habit to do so, but always ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... required more revision to render it fit for the public eye than those of the series which have preceded it; nor should it be concealed that the sentiment and tone of the affair may have undergone some slight—or perchance more than slight—metamorphosis in its transmission to the reader through the medium of a thoroughgoing democrat. The tale itself is a mere sketch with no involution of plot nor any great interest of events, yet possessing, if I have rehearsed ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in his office. Was it possible, he was thinking, that the charming woman before him exercising so cleverly all the arts of society, as if born to the purple, and the light-headed, frivolous, little wife of the Central's engineer were one and the same person? The metamorphosis ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... Here was an almost entirely new element, gradually eliminating from the scene of the struggle other elements which had grown old through centuries of war, and while this transformation was taking place in Northern and Central, a similar revolution was effecting a no less surprising metamorphosis in Southern Syria. There, too, newer races had gradually come to displace the nations over which the dynasties of Thutmosis and Ramses had once held sway. The Hebrews on the east, the Philistines ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... achievement of, the ultimate design of a specific tool is not so easily pinpointed. Only by comparing illustrations and surviving examples can such an evolution be appreciated and in the process, whether pondering the metamorphosis of a plane, a brace and bit, or an auger, the various stages of change encountered coincide with the rise ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... that fateful afternoon! Who, what had induced him, enticed him to venture out? And even with the thought welled up into his mind an intense desire to go to the old green time-worn churchyard again; to sit there contentedly alone, where none heeded the completest metamorphosis, down beside the yew-trees. What a fool he had been. There alone, of course, lay his only possible chance of recovery. He would go to-morrow. Perhaps Sheila had not yet discovered his absence; and there would be no difficulty in ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... stormy youth was replaced by the measured objective realism of ripe manhood. Hence the difference between his letters from Switzerland and those from Italy, where this inner metamorphosis was completed; as he said, 'Between Weimar and Palermo I ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... see," quoth Baba; while Don Juan, turning to his comrade, who Though somewhat grieved, could scarce forbear a smile Upon the metamorphosis in view,— "Farewell!" they mutually exclaimed: "this soil Seems fertile in adventures strange and new; One's turned half Mussulman, and one a maid, By this old black enchanter's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... certain of it, for her dress was just the same as one I have upstairs in my collection—in a pale pink or salmon-coloured skirt, looped up over a pea-green slip—the picture of the shepherdess is repeated again on the saucer, and there it still is as I tell you. But the strangest metamorphosis has taken place in the cup. I left it one morning as I describe, for you know I always dust my best china myself. Two days after, when I looked at it again, the shepherdess's attire was changed—she had on no longer ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... reasons why knowledge received through the ear makes a more ready and lasting impression than when it comes through the eye. He attempts to apply the method to Arithmetic and Geography, and in a short time is forming plans for the complete metamorphosis of his school. When engaged in hearing a recitation, his mind is distracted with his schemes and plans, and instead of devoting his attention fully to the work he may have in hand, his thoughts are wandering continually ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... like worms; in these cases Cortlandt brought his gun into play, raking them with duck-shot to his heart's content. "As the function of these reptiles," he explained, "is to form a soil on which higher life may grow, we may as well help along their metamorphosis by artificial means." They were impressed by the tremendous cannon-like reports of their firearms, which they perceived at once resulted from the great density of the Jovian atmosphere. And this was also a considerable aid to them in making muscular exertion, for it had just the reverse effect of ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... claim, in stating that the essential character of the literature of Germany is, that it is philosophical. The philosophers there are poets, and the poets are philosophers. Goethe is to be found no more, or no less, in his 'Theory of Colors' or in his 'Metamorphosis of Plants,' than in his 'Divan' or his 'Faust'; and lyrism, if I may use this trite expression, "is overflowing" in Schleiermacher's theology and in Schelling's philosophy. Is this not perhaps at least one of the reasons of the inferiority of the German drama? It is surely the reason of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... room, he walked up to Wharton, and said, with some gravity, "Now, sir, may I beg to examine the quality of that wig? And if I could persuade you to exchange this old surtout for that handsome blue coat, I think you never could witness a more agreeable metamorphosis." ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... enough to see a hair-dresser or a lackey converted into a governor; a sailor or a deserter, transformed into a district magistrate, collector, or military commander of a populous province, without other counsellor than his own crude understanding, or any other guide than his passions. Such a metamorphosis would excite laughter in a comedy or farce; but, realized in the theatre of human life, it must give rise to sensations of a very different nature. Who is there that does not feel horror-struck, and tremble for the innocent, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... Next, she related her betrayed and deluded love in a short novel, one of the masterpieces of that period. This book, of a dangerous example, was classed with "Adolphe," a dreadful lamentation, the counterpart of which is found in Camille's work. The true secret of her literary metamorphosis and pseudonym has never been fully understood. Some delicate minds have thought it lay in a feminine desire to escape fame and remain obscure, while offering a man's name and ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... with this absurd process? The least sparrow, even the dusky bat, has an advantage over us in that it can fly through the air. Think how inferior are our conditions, since the man of greatest genius, the most exquisite woman, are nailed to the soil like any vulgar caterpillar before its metamorphosis! Would it be a disadvantage to inhabit a world in which we might fly whither we would; a world of scented luxury, full of animated flowers; a world where the winds would be incapable of exciting a tempest, where several suns of different colors—the diamond glowing with the ruby, ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... represented by five succeeding formations. There is no progression. If fish rose into reptiles, it must have been by sudden transformation. There is no getting rid of miracle in the case,—there is no alternative between creation and metamorphosis. The infidel substitutes progression for Deiety;—Geology ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... dread, his legs trembled under him, he staggered, and finding that his strength failed him, he forgot the dervish's advice, turned about to run down the hill, and was that instant changed into a black stone; a metamorphosis which had happened to many before him who had attempted the ascent. His horse, ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... conditions must prevail in any given place in order that fossils shall be formed, how unusual such conditions are, and how probable it is that fossils once imbedded in sediment of a sea-bed will be destroyed by metamorphosis of the rocks, or by denudation when the strata are raised above the water-level. Add to this the fact that only small territories of the earth have been explored geologically, he says, and it becomes clear that the paleontological record ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... moment, seemed like the work of fate. Bagley was to be absent from town a week, and Murray Davenport was about to undergo a metamorphosis that would make detection impossible. It really appeared as though destiny had gone in for an act of poetic justice; had deliberately planned a restitution; had determined to befriend the new man as it had afflicted the old. For the new man would have to begin existence with a very small cash ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... of the ball visitors then took place, and the squire did not suffer many days to elapse before the spiritual metamorphosis of eight into four was effected by the clerical dexterity of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... of the regiment saluted each other as American citizens and not as soldiers, and though the metamorphosis was sudden, it seemed to have the ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... scene is succeeded on a sudden by a scene quite different,—a cottage by a palace, and a windmill by a fortress. But the history of Rome changes as a good diorama changes; while you look, you hardly see it alter; each moment is hardly different from the last moment; yet at the close the metamorphosis is complete, and scarcely anything is as it began. Just so in the history of the great prevailing city: you begin with a town and you end with an empire, and this by unmarked stages?—So shrouded, so shielded, in the coarse fibre of other qualities—was the delicate principle of progress, that ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... be annoyed at this mingling of praise and badinage, especially when she relieved me from all sense of intrusion. Moreover, she looked so brilliant, so sparkling and happy, that I watched her, amazed at the metamorphosis from her ordinarily calm, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... This was William Basse, a retainer of the Wenman family near Thame, the author, probably or certainly, of a quaint defence of retainership, Sword and Buckler (1602), and of other poems—Pastoral Elegies, Urania, Polyhymnia, etc.—together with an exceedingly odd piece, The Metamorphosis of the Walnut-Tree of Boarstall, which is not quite like anything else of the time. Basse, who seems also to have spelt his name "Bas," and perhaps lived and wrote through the first forty or fifty years of the seventeenth century, is but a moderate poet. Still he is not contemptible, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... its walls were constructed of the ancient stones; the altar was raised on the spot where shone the bright image of the Peruvian deity, and the cloisters of the Indian temple were trodden by the friars of St. Dominic.6 To make the metamorphosis more complete, the House of the Virgins of the Sun was replaced by a Roman Catholic nunnery.7 Christian churches and monasteries gradually supplanted the ancient edifices, and such of the latter as were suffered to remain, despoiled of their heathen insignia, were placed under ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... economic and material conditions. History confirms the expectations which we should thus have been led to entertain. The impotence of spiritual and moral agencies alone in bringing about this great metamorphosis, is shown by such facts as these. For centuries after the new faith had consolidated itself, slavery was regarded without a particle of that deep abhorrence which the possession of man by man excites in us now. In the ninth and tenth centuries the slave trade was the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... indeed, as fresh and radiant as the morning dew upon the meadows. When they set out on the love-path, that is. When they came home from it, and from all the fatigues and fervors of the German, a metamorphosis. The gauzy dress was so fringed and trodden on and torn that it seemed to hold together, like many an ill-assorted marriage, by the cohesion of habit alone; the hair—Madge Wildfire's was of more respectable appearance; the powder had fallen on arms and shoulders; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... power had occasioned the metamorphosis, the countenance of the dying woman rapidly changed, and her features bore the same appearance they had in years gone by. A smile lingered round her lips, and over her face was a beautiful and saint-like expression. The husband gazed upon it, and her resemblance to what she was in days ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... another metamorphosis for the work and new and considerable work for the musician. And this work was by no means easy. Until this time Barbier and Carre had been as close friends as Orestes and Pylades, but now they had a ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... that he saw, in Malebolge, a strange encounter between a human form and a serpent. The enemies, after cruel wounds inflicted, stood for a time glaring on each other. A great cloud surrounded them, and then a wonderful metamorphosis began. Each creature was transfigured into the likeness of its antagonist. The serpent's tail divided itself into two legs; the man's legs intertwined themselves into a tail. The body of the serpent put forth arms; the arms of the man ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was detected in this country by Mr. H. Corder, on whose notification Mr. Espin, on August 21, examined its nearly monochromatic spectrum.[1492] The metamorphosis of Nova Cygni seemed repeated.[1493] The light of the new object, like that of its predecessor, was mainly concentrated in a vivid green band, identified with the chief nebular line by Copeland,[1494] Von Gothard,[1495] and ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call "death," is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... wives, but, neither of them pleasing him, he divorced them and espoused sixteen thousand shepherdesses. The people imagined that he would appear some time or another in the form of a horse, but thought that until that metamorphosis took place he would wallow in a sea of milk, with his head supported by a ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... grocer put up his shutters two hectic hours later, he was a weary man. In the interval he had been respectively a toad, a picture post-card, and a tin of baked beans. And somebody had knocked him off the counter during his third metamorphosis, so he felt like death. All the same, before going to bed, he sat down and wrote to the Lord Chamberlain, asking for permission to display the Royal Arms. Just to make it quite clear that he wasn't relying on hoof-oil, he added that ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... "the Ancient,"[367] is probably an old divinity of Gwyned, of which he is called lord. He is a king and a magician, pre-eminent in wizardry, which he teaches to Gwydion, and in a Triad he is called one of the great men of magic and metamorphosis of Britain.[368] More important are his traits of goodness to the suffering, and justice with no trace of vengeance to the wrong-doer. Whether these are derived from his character as a god or from the Celtic kingly ideal, it is impossible to ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... After him, came his wife, shorn of all her proper accompaniments—except the baby. Without her novel, without her jacket, petticoat, or shawl, without even the handkerchief which she was always losing—clothed, for the first time in my experience, in a complete gown—the metamorphosis of damp Mrs. Finch was complete. But for the baby, I believe I should have taken her, in the dim light, for a stranger! She stood (apparently doubtful of her reception) hesitating in the doorway, and so hiding a third member ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... awaited his pleasure as humbly as that of the sovereign himself, now swarmed in the gilded galleries and stately halls of the Luxembourg; feathers waved and jewels flashed on every side; the wand of an enchanter had passed over the Court, and the metamorphosis was complete. In the centre of this brilliant throng stood Marie de Medicis, radiant with joy, and holding the young Queen by the hand; while Monsieur took up his station a few paces from them, laughing and jesting with ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... my dream that a great change had taken place in the home of the Priggs. The furniture had undergone a metamorphosis almost so striking that I thought Mr. Prigg must be a wizard. The gentle reader knows all about Cinderella; but here was a transformation more surprising. I saw that one of Mr. Bumpkin's pigs had been turned into a very pretty walnut-wood ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... Constantine suddenly made that which had been the faith of a despised and persecuted sect, the religion of the world. The Fathers can have thought thus only because their minds rested upon that which was outward and spectacular. Not unnaturally the metamorphosis in the inward nature of Christianity which had taken place a century and a quarter earlier was hidden from their eyes. In truth, by that earlier and subtler transformation Christianity had passed permanently beyond the stage in which ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... simulacrum idoli, and, besides the passages under consideration, refers to Jud. viii. 27, xvii. 5, xviii. 14, 17. But one requires only to examine these passages a little more minutely, to be convinced that the metamorphosis of Jehovah into an idol is as little justified as the changing of the mantle into a statue. From the personal character of Gideon, who was so zealous for the Lord against the idols, we cannot at all think of idolatry in Jud. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... switches, and began to wind those around his skull. Necklace, fetich, and the plume that adorned his sidelock, he put in the quiver. He was now so far transformed that any one, Nacaytzusle excepted, might have taken him in the night for a Navajo warrior. This metamorphosis was performed rapidly, but without anxious haste or confusion. The howls had meanwhile been repeated. They sounded nearer than before from the east, the south, and the southeast. Nacaytzusle alone, to judge from the signals which ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... can point nowhere to anything final but tendency; but tendency appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming something else; is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars." "In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on us is this, that it does not exist to any one, or to any number ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... neighbourhood, one of those which reminds one of the life of an animal undergoing a metamorphosis. Once it had evidently been a rather nice residential section. The movement of population uptown had left it stranded to the real estate speculators, less desirable to live in, but more valuable for the future. The moving in of anyone who could be got to live ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... recognised the features of that individual, the absence of whose brown locks had produced such a metamorphosis as, I believe, was never effected by ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... was the giddy whirlwind of a crowd of new circumstances; all the light and shade of a metamorphosis; inexpressibly strange confrontations; the shock of the past against the future. Two Gwynplaines, himself doubled; behind, an infant in rags crawling through night—wandering, shivering, hungry, provoking laughter; in front, a brilliant nobleman—luxurious, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... his hand, and, directly he did so, it happened as on the previous evening, that a metamorphosis took place in the very abysses of my being. I woke from my torpor, as he put it, I came out of death, and was alive again. I was far, yet, from being my own man; I realised that he exercised on me a degree of mesmeric force which I had never dreamed that one creature could exercise on ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... darkened against the evening sun Pierson was sitting on a sofa reading. The sight of that figure in khaki disconcerted Fort, who had not realised that there would be this metamorphosis. The narrow face, clean-shaven now, with its deep-set eyes and compressed lips, looked more priestly than ever, in spite of this brown garb. He felt his hope suddenly to be very forlorn indeed. And rushing at the fence, he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... leading authorities on that subject and besides making a discovery which had escaped the investigations of professional Anatomists (that of the intermaxillary bone), Goethe was the discoverer of a law, that of the metamorphosis of leaves and flowers, which may be said to have almost revolutionised the science ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... sacred tree? That, too, might undergo a metamorphosis in the minds of men. The conquerors would see their aboriginal slaves of the old race still haunting the tree, making stealthy offerings to it by night: and they would ask the reason. But they would not be told. ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... known under the title of Baphomet. In any case it failed to spread, and it is uncertain whether the New and Reformed Palladium, also an androgyne order, with which we shall presently be concerned, is a metamorphosis or reconstruction of the original institution, but a connection of some kind is affirmed. For a period exceeding sixty years we hear little of the legendary Palladium; but in 1801 the Israelite Isaac Long is said to have carried the original Baphomet and the skull of the Templar Grand ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... the gallant commander of the Orient was secretly amazed by the metamorphosis effected in Robert's appearance since he scrutinized him through his glasses. Iris, too, unaccustomed to the constraint of high-heeled shoes, clung to the nondescript's arm in a manner that shook ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... upon itself[216]. Thus I find in his hand-writing the number of lines in each of two of Euripides' Tragedies, of the Georgicks of Virgil, of the first six books of the AEneid, of Horace's Art of Poetry, of three of the books of Ovid's Metamorphosis, of some parts of Theocritus, and of the tenth Satire of Juvenal; and a table, shewing at the rate of various numbers a day (I suppose verses to be read), what would be, in each case, the total amount in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... rather unsatisfactory. Anglo-Saxonism is a very good thing; simplicity and common sense are very good things too. May not {421} berefellarius, the dirty raggamuffin with tattered clothes, be good monkish Latin for bare-fell (i.e. bare-skin), or rather bare-fellow? the most natural metamorphosis imaginable. Bere is the old orthoepy of bare; and every one knows that in London (east) a fellow naturally ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... to the rage for improvement, as they called it. There was a general remodelling and modernizing of houses, and, where nothing more expensive could be afforded, the paint-brush wrought its cheap metamorphosis. "You wouldn't know Hilton was the same place," was the complacent verdict of her neighbours, to ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... and oil. Their social rules are peculiar. Though considered impure by the higher castes, they will not take cooked food from a Brahman, whom they call a Kumhati Kida, or an insect which effects the metamorphosis of others into his own form, and who will therefore change them into his own caste. Nor will they take cooked food from members of their own caste, but they accept it from several of the lower castes including Gonds, whose leavings they will eat. This is probably ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... decomposes and disappears—it also rests: but the living protein mass neither tends to exhaustion of its forces nor to any permanency of form, but is essentially distinguished as a disturber of equilibrium so far as force is concerned,—as undergoing continual metamorphosis and ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... intuition, growing till it all but became an idea, and then remaining short of expressibility, unable to perceive even its own indefiniteness—a film for impressions where there is no light—such was the vagueness of my guess concerning the metamorphosis that was taking place. Yet I began to understand that Auber Hurn, the real man, was not there, not on the bed, not in my house at all. It was as if the Person were being gradually deducted, leaving only the prime flesh to vouch for the man's existence. Even ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... ship's spars were projected as dusky shadows against the Milky Way. Now, the sea was ablaze with opaline light, and the yards and sails were painted in faint tints of blue on a background of ebony. The metamorphosis was sudden and wonderful beyond description! The polar aurora seemed to have left its home in the higher regions of the atmosphere and descended in a sheet of vivid electrical fire upon the ocean. As we stood, silent with amazement, upon the quarter-deck, this sheet of ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... over the fire. He put forth all his skill and all his power, and was successful; the diamond disappeared, and there remained a few drops of water. He looked at his wife and smiled; she raised her eyes to his, astonished and pleased, took the cup from his hand, and looked at the precious metamorphosis. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... the Arabian myrtle, which exudes a bitter but fragrant gum. The allusion is to the wounding of Myrrha by her father and her metamorphosis into this tree. ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... and darkly, as the idolatrous Jews with their pictures on cavern walls, which men had to dig to detect. The justice we do not execute, we mimic in the novel and on the stage; for the beauty we destroy in nature, we substitute the metamorphosis of the pantomime, and (the human nature of us imperatively requiring awe and sorrow of SOME kind) for the noble grief we should have borne with our fellows, and the pure tears we should have wept with them, we gloat over ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... lucre of a little money, finding it to be of pure gold, melted one half, and of the other made this headpiece, which, as thou sayest, has some resemblance to a barber's basin: but to me, who know the worth of it, the metamorphosis signifies little; for as soon as ever I come to some town where there is an armorer, I will have it altered so much for the better, that then even the helmet which the god of smiths made for the god of war shall not deserve to be compared with it. In the meantime ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... pass two-thirds of their lives in the water, it is not surprising that these noxious insects become less numerous in proportion as you recede from the banks of the great rivers which intersect the forests. They seem to prefer the spots where their metamorphosis took place, and where they go to deposit their eggs. In fact the wild Indians (Indios monteros) experience the greater difficulty in accustoming themselves to the life of the missions, as they suffer in the Christian establishments a torment ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... has undergone a similar metamorphosis. He has been credited with a full moon of a face, the rubicund nose of an incorrigible toper, and thick coarse lips always apart because always laughing. The picture would have surprised his friends no less ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... What? was I a Saxon, then, when I went hence?' Again, when the same speaker had said, 'Your garb shows that you are changed from a Batavian into a Gaul,' he puts 'Briton' for 'Gaul'; and when the speaker had replied, 'I had rather that metamorphosis, than into a Hen,' alluding to 'Cock:' he changed 'Hen' into 'Bohemian.' Presently, when there is a joke, 'that he pronounces Latin in French style,' he changes 'French' into 'British,' and yet allows the following to stand, 'Then you will never make good verses, because you have ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... ends and ultimates of all things accord in some mean and measure with their inceptions and originals, that same multiplicit concordance which leads forth growth from birth accomplishing by a retrogressive metamorphosis that minishing and ablation towards the final which is agreeable unto nature so is it with our subsolar being. The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend. First, saved from ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... interesting figure in the office was Mr. Fein, the junior partner, a Harvard Jew, who was perfectly the new type of business man. Serious, tall, spectacled, clean-shaven, lean-faced, taking business as a profession, and kindly justice as a religion, studying efficiency, but hating the metamorphosis of clerks into machines, he was the distinction and the power of Truax & Fein. At first Una had thought him humorless and negligible, but she discovered that it was he who pulled Mr. Truax out of his ruts, his pious trickeries, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... bordering on that of the hibernating animals—a condition in which I had neither eaten, nor slept, nor thought, nor moved, when I could help it—into not only a full, but a keen and joyous, possession of my health and faculties. It was almost a metamorphosis. I was no longer the clod I had been, but a bird exulting in the earth and air, and in the liberty of motion. Then to remember it was a new earth and a new sky that I was beholding,—that it was England, the old mother at last, no longer a faith or a fable, but an actual fact ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... to blame for the metamorphosis which followed Hilda Ryder's death. For the first time he had loved a human being better than himself; so that the reaction which fell upon his spirit when he realized that his love was no longer needed was in its ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... replying, Pan grasped a wand that leaned against the wall of his grot, and with it touched the maiden and the flower. O strange metamorphosis! Where the latter had been pining in its vase, a lovely girl, the image of Iridion, lay along the ground with dishevelled hair, clammy brow, and features slightly distorted by the last struggles of death. On the ferny couch stood an earthen ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... was metamorphosis more complete than that which now took place. Shaking off detaining hands, Andrew Jackson sprang from our line, ran up to the fallen foe and in a frenzy of rage began to belabor and kick his body, winding up by catching him by the ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... fish becomes a reptile as the tadpole changes to a frog. The same process we observe in toads; and it is also the same in our newts, excepting that in newts the tail remains. There is no parallel in nature to this marvelous and instructive metamorphosis. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... tinge the tip of his nose with the rosy hue which suggests a convivial nature. After this was accomplished, and the baron had convinced himself by a careful examination in the mirror that he was transformed into a charming, gay, young fellow, he began a similar metamorphosis of his costume. Taking the diamond pin from his lace jabot he hid it under his vest, which he buttoned to the necktie. Then removing the light silk long-skirted dress-coat, he turned it completely on the other side and, by taking out some pins ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... activity of his movements, he is liquid as water, rapid as fire; he is the raging lion, the savage panther, the trembling bough; he is what he will. The legend takes these data, and gives them a supernatural turn,—for mimicry substituting metamorphosis. Our modern pantomimes have the same gift, and Proteus himself sometimes appears as the subject of their rapid transformations. And it may be conjectured that in that versatile lady Empusa we have but another artist of the same kind, ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... threaten you, young lady,' he resumed, 'and I think, besides, that I can trust your kind face. Will you promise me not to reveal this metamorphosis until your journey's end?' ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... his Excellency's man, no longer the smug gentleman in a black suit, with a visage as prim as his neck-cloth, but blazing in a red woollen shirt, and grinning incessantly with amazement at his own metamorphosis. Strapped to his waist by a broad belt of leather, was a large tin-kettle, for the purpose of making his Excellency's tea in the evening. Huge saddle-bags contained provisions, knives and forks, plates, and everything necessary for ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... but consent to the proposal, and the chief was so kind as to assist my friend and his family in effecting that very day the desired metamorphosis. My hair was cut off, and my head shaved, with the exception of a spot on the crown, of about twice the diameter of a crown piece. My face was painted with three or four different colours; some parts of it red, and others black. A shirt was ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... time, a poor man had been kidnapped, also at night, and forced into the same illegal jail. He sat in the dock—an innocent man, to be made into a beast. The metamorphosis had begun;—he was already in chains and his human heart seemed dead in him; sixty ruffians were about him, aiding in this drama, hired out of the brothels and rum-shops for a few days, the lust of kidnapping serving to vary the continual glut of those other and less brutal appetites of unbridled ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... greatest depredations and ravages until their sheep, goats, and dogs are swept away, and are roused to self-defence only when a human being becomes the victim of the daring beast. With this superstition is united another similar to the werewolf of Germany, viz., a belief in the power of human metamorphosis into a leopard. A person so metamorphosed is called 'Uvengwa.' At one time in Benito an intense excitement prevailed in the community. Doors and shutters were rattled at the dead of night, marks of leopard claws were scratched ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Lodona. Addison had in his Campaign derided the rivers that "rise from their oozy beds" to tell stories of heroes; and it is, therefore, strange that Pope should adopt a fiction not only unnatural but lately censured. The story of Lodona is told with sweetness; but a new metamorphosis is a ready and puerile expedient; nothing is easier than to tell how a flower was once a blooming virgin, or a rock ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... characteristic of his "Art of Love." His "Metamorphoses" contain a series of mythological narratives from the earliest times to the translation of the soul of Julius Caesar from earth to heaven, and his metamorphosis into a star. In this poem especially may be traced that study and learning by which the Roman poets made all the treasures of Greek literature their own. "The Fasti," a poem on the Roman calendar, is a beautiful specimen of simple narrative in verse, and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... and get satisfaction of him." This George Sandys is the famous traveler who made a journey through the Turkish Empire in 1610, and who wrote, while living in Virginia, the first book written in the New World, the completion of his translation of Ovid's "Metamorphosis." ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... pleasant thoughts were springing up within his bosom. Any one who had seen that face but the moment before, and had looked upon it now, could not fail to have noticed the change that had so suddenly come over it—a perfect contrast in its expression. What had produced this metamorphosis? Something of importance, I warrant; for the young botanist, naturally of a sober turn, but now more than ever so, was not given to sudden transitions of feeling. What, then, was the cause ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... other stimuli. But why is this high order of concentration so easy under hypnosis when Asians, notably the Chinese, have been trying for centuries to concentrate on one subject for as long as four or five seconds. We do not know the mechanics of this metamorphosis of an ordinary brain into an organ of concentrated power. According to Janet, this is accomplished through the formation of a group of unconscious memories and activities which takes over the usual stream-of-consciousness type of thinking. ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... all with war conducted for its own sake, with a model army, as efficient as an imaginative training can make it, and with a model organization for warfare of the State behind it, and then the experience of the confused modern social organism as it is impelled, in an uncongenial metamorphosis, towards this imperative and finally unavoidable efficient state, will come most easily within the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... notable change!" says he, surveying my rich attire, so that I yearned for my rags again. "Here is strange metamorphosis! The sullen and rustic Cymon bloometh at Beauty's mandate, Caliban is tamed!" At the which sally his ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... translation of the "Lusiad" occurs the following allusion to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and the metamorphosis of the mulberries. The poet is describing ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... of the theology of the day would fall before the standard of him who had got even the insects. And let any one set about studying these creatures carefully, and he will see the force of the remark. We learn the tremendous doctrine of metamorphosis from the insect world; and have not the bee and the ant taught man wisdom from the first? I was highly edified the past summer by observing the ways and doings of a colony of black hornets that established themselves ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... principles of the other's business, but any one who has watched the habits of the two classes will perceive that for them in any real sense to exchange interests, or that either should adopt the scheme of proportion which the other assigns to the events of nature and of life, a metamorphosis well ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... parents; he is the supreme director of religious ceremonies and duties,and even has the power of influencing the lot of man in the future world. He is worshipped under a threefold form, fire on earth, lightning and the sun. His cult survived the metamorphosis of the ancient Vedic nature-worship into modern Hinduism, and there still are in India fire-priests (agnihotri) whose duty is to superintend his worship. The sacred fire-drill for procuring the temple-fire by friction—symbolic of Agni's daily miraculous ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... as if the physical ecstasy of the dance and the sensuous joy of all nature's finery had breathed their spirit into the aspiration and that the beauty of leaf and flower, all of them familiar forms of the god's metamorphosis—accessible to their touch and for the regalement of their senses—had brought such nearness and dearness, of affection between goddess and worshiper ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... the house, in a state of black melancholy, hoping to revive my spirits in the fresh air, but scarcely had I set foot upon the public promenade when a girl, by no means homely, met me, and, calling me Polyaenos, the name I had assumed since my metamorphosis, informed me that her mistress desired leave to speak with me. "You must be mistaken," I answered, in confusion, "I am only a servant and a stranger, and am by no means worthy of ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... imitates Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, ll. 427-450. Only Mirrha among these poems, however, makes specific acknowledgment of a debt to Shakespeare (see p. 177). Finally, Dom Diego's plangent laments at Ginevra's cruelty recall Glaucus' unrestrained weeping at Scylla's cruelty in Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis. But whereas the "piteous Nimphes" surrounding Glaucus weep till a "pretie brooke" forms,[29] "the fayre Oreades pitty-moved gerles" that comfort Dom Diego are loath to lose the "liquid pearles" he weeps. Consequently they gather (and ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... SOCRATES. They take what metamorphosis they like. If they see a debauchee with long flowing locks and hairy as a beast, like the son of Xenophantes,[505] they take the form of a Centaur[506] in ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... and more than fair abilities, but caring less and less for success since its possession had only the inherent values of gain and was hallowed by no sweet and holy expectation of bestowal. He could have wept for the metamorphosis! Whatever he might yet become, he could never be again this self. This bright, full-pulsed identity was dead—dead for all time! Icarus-like, he had fallen midway in a flight that under other conditions might have been long and strong and sustained, and he ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... is frequently the case. When a Touarghee wears his litham, and when he pulls it off, he undergoes a complete metamorphosis, so that strangers cannot recognize the parties in their change ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... matter of being shut in, and a house without cobwebbed shadows became a place bereft of decent seclusion. About him, now, all this undesirable metamorphosis was taking place. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... change of raiment which had been tight squeezed in my portmanteau. The old overcoat was the best part of it, as in a finite world it often is. I sold my felt hat to Zekiel, and appeared with a light travelling-cap. I do not know how Fausta liked my metamorphosis. I only know that, like butterflies, for a day or two after they go through theirs, I felt ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... and the more that, in particular instances, they became dreaded for their power, the more they were detested, under the conviction that they derived it from the enemy of man. The deities of the northern heathens underwent a similar metamorphosis, resembling that proposed by Drawcansir in the "Rehearsal," who threatens "to make a god subscribe ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... too late in the season, of course, for much new growth in the vegetable beds; but the half-hearted attention of John-Ed, junior, had never brought about this metamorphosis, Tunis well knew. He went on to the Latham house, feeling well pleased. Aside from all other considerations, he was glad to know that his Machiavellian plan had brought ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... transformed that new Actaeon into a stag. But there, entre nous, it is possible that she would have preferred first to transform him into a husband, regardless of a more exact rendering of the classical metamorphosis. ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... a metamorphosis in all the pages of Ovid so wonderful as that which the great magician of the shears and thimble is capable of effecting. If there be the most unpleasant disproportions in the turn of your limbs—any awkwardness or deformity in your figure, the enchantment ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... stand the public buildings of the place. Here is the tavern, a low two-story building, without porch or piazza, and entered by a door in the middle of the longest side. Over the door swings a sign, on which a former likeness of King George has, by a metamorphosis common at this period, been transformed into a soldier of the revolution, in Continental uniform of buff and blue. But just at this time its contemplation does not afford the patriotic tipler as much complacency as formerly, for Burgoyne is thundering at ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... that exclusiveness which is like the atmosphere of a great painting. One feels by instinct that the master hand has been here. Although aware that good fortune had wrought a marked change in Anne, Monsignor was utterly taken aback by a transformation as remarkable in its way as the metamorphosis of Horace Endicott. ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... laying numerous eggs, but hatching their young in an imperfect state, and the Scaly Reptiles, which lay comparatively few eggs, but whose young, when hatched, are completely developed, and undergo no subsequent metamorphosis. Yet, notwithstanding this difference in essential features of structure, and in the mode of reproduction and development, there is such an external resemblance between certain animals belonging to the two groups that they were associated together even by so ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... gondola, and then unfolding a cloak, which had lain on his arm, he threw it, without asking permission, over the shoulders of the other. A cap, like that he wore himself, was next produced, and being placed on the grey hairs of the fisherman, effectually completed his metamorphosis. ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Poterloo this extraordinary field, that would seem to have been traversed by a giant plow. But he is absorbed to his very vitals in the metamorphosis ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... as Hume remarks, does not go off the stage at once, and another succeed, like silkworms and butterflies. No more did this metamorphosis of Masonry, so to name it, take place suddenly or radically, as it has become the fashion to think. It was a slow process, and like every such period the Epoch of Transition was attended by many problems, uncertainties, and difficulties. Some of the ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... the needle, she had gradually reformed his habits of dress until now he might pass for a London tradesman of the superior class, decently attired, well shaven and clean in his person. He resigned himself to these improvements with much good-nature and so passed through his metamorphosis almost without knowing it. She practised small economies too; and he owned (though he set it down to his own industry) that his worldly affairs were more prosperous than ever they had been before his marriage. But the fumes of the lead-works affected his appetite, ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... variations.—These must be useful at once.—Difficulties as to the giraffe; as to mimicry; as to the heads of flat-fishes; as to the origin and constancy of the vertebrate, limbs; as to whalebone; as to the young kangaroo; as to sea-urchins; as to certain processes of {viii} metamorphosis; as to the mammary gland; as to certain ape characters; as to the rattlesnake and cobra; as to the process of formation of the eye and ear; as to the fully developed condition of the eye and ear; as to the voice; as to shell-fish; as to orchids; as to ants.—The ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... should know that this was the very block of useless stone which had been on the Ta Huang Hills, and which had dropped into the Ch'ing Keng cave, in a state of metamorphosis. A later writer expresses his feelings in a ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... external influences; which are assuredly competent to alter the character of the tegumentary covering, to change colour, to increase or diminish the size of muscles, to modify constitution, and, among plants, to give rise to the metamorphosis of stamens into petals, and so forth. But however they may have arisen, what especially interests us at present is, to remark that, once in existence, varieties obey the fundamental law of reproduction that like tends to produce like; and their offspring exemplify it by tending ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... moments after, their bodies took the forms and features of various animals; some unwieldy, some small. Ulysses alone, having the wisdom to withstand the temptation of the treacherous cup, escaped the metamorphosis. He, besides possessing wisdom, bore the look of a hero and had the gift of honeyed speech, so that it came about that the goddess herself imbibed a poison little different from her own; that is to say, she became enamoured of the hero and declared her love to him. Now ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... independence, and horrible from its antagonism to Aristotle, the Atlas of the church. This was no less than pure Pantheism,—God in and through all, the infinite Intelligence. Deus est monadum monas—nempe entium entitas. This creed, by an incomprehensible metamorphosis, was styled, in the language of the day, Atheism; its promulgation, even its conception, was pronounced a crime whose penalty was death. And Bruno, who, from the depths of infamous superstition, had risen ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... as they are Beauties. Ask Belinda what it is a Clock, and she is at a stand whether so great a Beauty should answer you. In a Word, I think, instead of offering to administer Consolation to Parthenissa, I should congratulate her Metamorphosis; and however she thinks she was not in the least insolent in the Prosperity of her Charms, she was enough so to find she may make her self a much more agreeable Creature in her present Adversity. The Endeavour to please is highly promoted by a Consciousness that the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the same blows upon the head of the tyrant himself. It was soon reduced to a shapeless mass. Small portions were carried away and preserved for generations in families as heirlooms of hatred. The bulk was melted again and reconverted, by a most natural metamorphosis, into the cannon from which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and progress of Christologic doctrine, in its most striking features, during the first three centuries. Beginning with the apostolic view of the human Messiah sent to deliver Judaism from its spiritual torpor, and prepare it for the millennial kingdom, we shall briefly trace the progressive metamorphosis of this conception until it completely loses its identity in the Athanasian theory, according to which Jesus was God himself, the Creator of the universe, incarnate ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... uniformity in textile ornament here illustrated may be observed the world over. Every element entering the art must undergo a similar metamorphosis; hence the remarkable power of this almost universally practiced art upon the ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... Sagacious persons opined that Vassily Ivanovitch had till then been crushed under the weight of some secret trouble, that he saw chances of returning to the capital... but the true cause of Vassily Ivanovitch's metamorphosis ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... in her white dress, just as she is, but Denise overrules so great a blunder, and when Grandon returns he finds a pale little nun in black, with a close bonnet and long veil. Cecil has come with him, and is shocked at this strange metamorphosis. She ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... my pipe very quietly, take out my ink-stand and pens, seat myself in the corner of my sofa, read, correct, and now for the first time really set about thinking what I have written. To see this origin of a book, this metamorphosis of manuscript into print, is a delight to which I give myself up entirely. Look you, this melancholy pleasure, which would have furnished the departed Voss with worthy matter for more than one blessed Idyl—(the more so, as on ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... whole, throughout which the principal thought of the work, the stupendously energetic phrase which the orchestra proclaims at the outset, is presented in various forms to make it express a great variety of moods and yet give unity to the concerto. "Thus, by means of this metamorphosis," says Mr. Edward Dannreuther, "the poetic unity of the whole musical tissue is made apparent, spite of very great diversity of details; and Coleridge's attempt at a definition of poetic unity—unity in multiety—is ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the highest skill! Listen to an old man; I am speaking quite seriously. Rodion"—(on saying which Porphyrius Petrovitch, who was hardly thirty-five years of age, seemed all of a sudden to have aged, a sudden metamorphosis had taken place in the whole of his person, nay, in his very voice)— "to an old man who, however, is not wanting in candor. Am I or am I not candid? What do you think? It seems to me that a man could hardly be more so—for do I not reveal confidence, and that without the ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... Madame Haeckel heartily on the birth of your boy. Children work a greater metamorphosis in men than any other condition of life. They ripen one wonderfully and make life ten times better worth having than ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... these picturesque Arab cemeteries in Tunisia; combining firmness with a great deal of tact, they insidiously appropriate these sanctified premises and deck them with timber as a solace for coming generations. Let them go! The undiluted Orient is still wide enough; and no one will appreciate the metamorphosis more than the native citizens themselves, who love, above all things, to play about and idle in the shade of trees; perhaps, in the course of time, they will realize that not only Allah, but also man, is able to plant and take care of them. Your ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... Maufrigneuse, or Madame de Serizy, on the lowest or highest rung of the social ladder, this woman was an exquisite creature, a flash from happy dreams. These old young men, like these young old men, felt so keen an emotion, that they envied Lucien the splendid privilege of working such a metamorphosis of a woman into a goddess. The mask was there as though she had been alone with Lucien; for that woman the thousand other persons did not exist, nor the evil and dust-laden atmosphere; no, she moved under the celestial vault of love, as Raphael's Madonnas ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... separates from his father, if he has been well educated, he wishes to continue his own education: the course of his ideas is not suddenly broken; what he has been, joins immediately with what he is to be; his knowledge applies to real life, it is such as he can use in all companies; there is no sudden metamorphosis in any of the objects of his ambition; the boy and man are the same individual. Pleasure will not influence him merely by her name, or by the contrast of her appearance with the rigid discipline of scholastic learning; he will ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... seize the moment, and fasten a burden on man, which the struggles of a thousand years may not suffice to cast off. Of all the duties of an enlightened government, this of allying itself with Philosophy in the critical moment in which society is passing through so serious a metamorphosis of its opinions as is involved in the casting off of its ancient investiture of Faith, and its assumption of a new one, is the most important, for it stands connected with things that outlast ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... planets could be seen; there in the field of view of his telescope was the golden-tinted disc of the planet as smoothly rounded as the disc of Mars or Jupiter. 'What,' he wrote, 'is to be said concerning so strange a metamorphosis? Are the two lesser stars consumed after the manner of the solar spots? Have they vanished or suddenly fled? Has Saturn, perhaps, devoured his children? Or were the appearances, indeed, illusion or fraud with which the glasses have so long deceived ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... the familiar fables and tales of the "Goldilocks" variety have a firmness of surface which does not let the glamour rub off; but stories in which there is a hint of the beauty just beyond the palpable—or of a dignity suggestive of developed literature—are sorely hurt in their metamorphosis, and should be protected from it. They are ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... their environment in the extreme north is one of especial interest. Knowing, as we do, that any insect in the extreme north has at the most not more than from four to six weeks in each year for its development, we wonder how certain species can pass through their metamorphosis in so short a period. R. McLachlan adverts, in his work upon the insects of Grinnell Land, to the difficulties which the shortness of the summer appears to put in the way of the development of the insects, and expresses the belief that the metamorphosis which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various |
