"Symbolism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pallets of straw. The shelves were hard and dirty; there was no relaxation of our involuntary asceticism, but we slept well. There was music in our ears. We had attained to Jerusalem, and our dreams were with the angels. Jerusalem the earthly had not forced itself upon our minds; we held the symbolism of the journey lightly, and the mind read a mystery in delicate emotions. The time was to come when some of us would be discontented with Jerusalem, as some of the disciples who fell away were discontented with the poor and humble ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... of immorality, in which at intervals glimpses of the divine world were obtained by a sort of poetic intuition. Egypt, notwithstanding an apparent kind of Fetichism, had very early metaphysical dogmas and a lofty symbolism. But doubtless these interpretations of a refined theology were not primitive. Man has never, in the possession of a clear idea, amused himself by clothing it in symbols: it is oftener after long ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Outwardly it is a story of the War, but there is little difficulty in probing the allegory; and those who follow the hero's vicissitudes as a private in the Gasoliers, right through to his victorious advancement to the rank of Acting Lance-Corporal, unpaid (and there is a symbolism even in the "unpaid"), will readily supply the application to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... this vision was in reality but the symbolism of imagination and poetry, that Europe was not dead, but alive with the struggling vitalities of good and evil, and all those contending forces out of which American freedom was born—the vision itself was not the less true, either as feeling or insight; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... these old tales—tales that have been handed down by oral tradition alone through many generations of simple and story-loving people. The "Creation myths" and others rich in meaning have been treated very simply, as their symbolism is too complicated for very young readers; and much of the characteristic detail of the rambling native story-teller has been omitted. A story that to our thinking is most effectively told in a brief ten minutes is by him made to fill a long evening by dint of minute and ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... and discordant influences, so much mixed with foreign ingredients, so much overloaded with adventitious appendages, that it is to most of those who speak it, in a considerable degree, a conventional and arbitrary symbolism. The Anglo-Saxon tongue has a craving appetite, and is as rapacious of words, and as tolerant of forms, as are its children, of territory and of religions. But in spite of its power of assimilation, there is much of the speech of England which has never become connatural ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... and Assyria, is full of figures of the Gods, and of scenes of worship. But these figures do not rise above the human. The gods appear as conventional figures, mere ordinary men and women. And to distinguish them from mortal beings, the artists of the East proceed in the manner of symbolism: they make additions to the human types which are to signify the divine attributes, but do not really embody them. They add wings to represent the swiftness of the deity, wings not meant for actual flight, but ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... pirate cave. Oh, yes, I know very well what my fine gentlemen dabblers in the new sciences will say—the fellow was daft and delirious—he had lost grip on reality and his fevered wits mixed a mumble-jumble of ancient symbolism with his own adventures. But before you reduce all this great universe to the dimensions of a chemist's crucible, I pray you to think twice whether the mind that fashioned the crucible be not greater than the crucible; whether the Master-mind that shaped the ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... go with many a stroke against that democratic movement which desired, among other things, the Church's abolition. He had power of utterance. Roused to combat by the proletarian challenge, he could make his voice ring in the ears of men, even though he used a symbolism which he would not by choice ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Dr. Rumphius, smiling, "were wonderful architects, amazing artists, and great scholars. A priest of Memphis and of Thebes could have taught even our German scholars; and as regards symbolism, they were greater than any symbolists of our day. But we shall succeed eventually in deciphering their hieroglyphs and penetrating their mysteries. The great Champollion has made out their alphabet; we shall easily read their granite books. Meanwhile, let us strip, as delicately as possible, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... subject must have been attracting considerable attention at that time. Indeed, the struggle to have the Hindu numerals replace the Arabic did not cease for a long time thereafter. 'Al[i] ibn A[h.]med al-Nasaw[i], in his arithmetic of c. 1025, tells us that the symbolism of number was still unsettled in his day, although most people preferred the ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... Some several square yards of yellow bunting, charged with the image of another double-headed eagle, floating from the highest flag-staff above the building, betrayed to the initiated the fact that a Russian Grand Duke was concealed somewhere on the premises. Unannounced by heraldic symbolism but unconcealable by reason of nature's own blazonry, were several citizens and citizenesses of the great republic of the Western world. One or two Cobdenite members of the British Parliament engaged ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... elaborate interpretation of the symbolism of this hymn, going back at least as far as 1731, in which the kid denotes the Hebrews, the father is Jehovah, the cat is the Assyrians, the dog is the Babylonians, the staff is the Persians, the fire ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of capture. This would eliminate Proserpine. No more beautiful myth exists than this one of the springtime, but its beauty and its symbolism do not make it suitable for the kindergarten. It is more suited to the elementary child of the fourth grade. In fact, very few myths of any sort find a legitimate place in the kindergarten, perhaps ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... inform as it was potent to move. Adelaide Neilson was one of those strange, exceptional natures that, often building better than they know, not only interpret "the poet's dream" but give to it an added emphasis and a higher symbolism. Each element of her personality was rich and rare. The eyes—now glittering with a mischievous glee that seemed never to have seen a cloud or felt a sorrow, now steady, frank, and sweet, with innocence and trust,—could, in one moment, flash with the wild fire of defiance or the ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... the peoples of the earth. Never had the hues of the universe been so assembled, grouped, and modulated. And the human eye, adapting itself to the new synthesis of arabesque and rhythm, evoked order and symbolism from these novel chords of colour. There were solemn mountains of opalescent fire which burst and faded into flaming colonnades, and in an enchanting turquoise effervescence became starry spears and scimiters and sparkling shields, and ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... holds in its symbolism the whole essence of a great artist's nature. I quote the passage. It describes Sordello, and it ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... sacrifices there is no elaborate ritual or suggestion of symbolism. The animal is beheaded and the inference is that Kali likes it. Similarly simple is the offering of coco-nuts to Kali. The worshipper gives a nut to the pujari who splits it in two with an axe, spills the milk and hands ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... more than revolutions. Fashion cut into the living flesh, attacked the very skeleton and framework of art; it chopped and hewed, dismembered, slew the edifice, in its form as well as in its symbolism, in its logic no less than in its beauty. But fashion restored, a thing which neither time nor revolution ever pretended to do. Fashion, on the plea of "good taste," impudently adapted to the wounds of Gothic architecture ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... like awe spread over his face. "Yet ... the prophecy and the monument were right! You have unlocked the impossible! Yet you seem to know nothing of the laws of similarity or of magic, Dave Hanson. Is that crystal similar to the sky, by association, by contagion, or by true symbolism? A part may be a symbol for the whole—or so may any designated symbol, which may influence the thing it is. If I have a hair from your head, I can model you with power over you. But not with the hair of a pig! ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... he freed from the dread of Napoleonic invasion and towards that ancient church wherein the most sacred memories of English talent and English toil are clustered together,—it is impossible, I say, to look at this, and not admire both the artistic instinct that devised so happy a symbolism, and the rare good-fortune of our Teutonic ancestors in securing a territorial position so readily defensible against the assaults of despotic powers. But it was not merely in the simple facility of warding off external attack that the insular position ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... the figure of Christ and the symbol of the Holy Ghost, the centre towards which every line, every attitude in the picture converges. Towards the holy spot walk, on the right, the pilgrims and the hermits, on the left, the good judges and the soldiers of Christ. The symbolism of the picture which enfolds the majestic plan of the redemption of man through Christ's sacrifice, of the second creation through the Spirit, as contrasted with the first creation through the flesh, is directly inspired by the mystic writings of the time, while the harmony ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... opal is from Australia, the platinum from Siberia, the diamonds from Africa, the setting was designed in Paris. And here it is, the circle of the world has been made to secure this little thing of beauty for you. What symbolism! ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... Heraclitus of Ephesus, taught that the world was created from fire, the omnipotent and omniscient essence, and with many savage and barbaric peoples fire-worship has nourished or still flourishes. The Indie Aryans of old produced fire by the method of the twirling stick, and in their symbolism "the turning stick, Pramanta, was the father of the god of fire; the immovable stick was the mother of the adorable and luminous Agni [fire]"—a concept far-reaching in its mystic and ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... nature not only alive to all life but alive to surrounding lifeless things. Much alone in the house, she had sent her happiness overflowing its dumb environs—humanizing these—drawing them toward her by a gracious responsive symbolism—extending speech over realms which nature has not yet awakened to it or which she may have struck into speechlessness ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... large is the—Loomis calls it "Musical Symbolism," for Adelaide Ann Proctor's "The Story of the Faithful Soul." Of the greatest delicacy imaginable is the music (for piano, violin, and voice) to William Sharp's "Coming of the Prince." The "Watteau Pictures" are poems of ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... nude would have been necessary. But Claude became obstinate, and resorted to lame and violent explanations, for he would not avow his real motive: an idea which had come to him and which he would have been at a loss to express clearly. It was, however, a longing for some secret symbolism. A recrudescence of romanticism made him see an incarnation of Paris in that nude figure; he pictured the city bare and impassioned, resplendent with the beauty ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... which their bricks and marble are to stand. They have brought into happy companionship architectural suggestions of the North and of the South; and have wrought into construction and ornament in a hundred ways the art, the symbolism, the traditions, and the history of all the American republics; and they have made the building a true expression of Pan Americanism, of open mind and open heart for all that is true and noble and worthy ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... apocalyptical writing from that which he would employ in a report of the life and words of Jesus. Without any reflection, indeed, he would instinctively use the apocalyptic imagery; his pages would flare and resound with the lurid symbolism peculiar to the apocalypses. How definite a type of literature this was we shall presently see; no writer, while using it, would clearly manifest his own personality. And if through all this disguise we do discern symptoms of ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... Tennyson's poem, "The Eagle"—an indulgence which the most exigent champion of programmatic reserve would probably condone. In the main, MacDowell's predilection for what he chose to call "suggestive" music finds expression in such continent symbolism as he employs in those elastically wrought tone-poems, brief or vigorously sustained, in which he sets forth a poetic concept with memorable vividness—in such things as his terse though astonishingly eloquent apostrophe "To a Wandering Iceberg," and his "In Mid-Ocean," from the "Sea Pieces"; ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... ancient Egyptian similarity to a characteristic usage of Canticles leads to the remark, that Maspero and Spiegelberg have both published hieroglyphic poems of the xixth-xxth Dynasties, in which may be found other parallels to the metaphors and symbolism of the Hebrew Song. As earlier writers exaggerated the likeness of Canticles to Theocritus, so Maspero was at first inclined to exaggerate the affinity of Canticles to the old Egyptian amatory verse. It is not surprising, but it is saddening, to find that Maspero, summarizing ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... case;—so far, the means here have been simple and innocent,—my hand, my eye, my brain, my purpose; but—Mac!" added he, suddenly, after a pause, "did you never, in reading Rabelais, feel that somehow there was a profound and reverential symbolism underlying the wild froth of words in which the histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel have come down to us? that in all that olla-podrida of filth, quip, jest, wicked folly, and mad wisdom, was yet hidden, like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... labour of epic invention, by the spell of the preacher. The task of representing characters—Waldere or Theodoric or Attila—was forgotten in the lyrical rapture of devotion, in effusion of pathos. The fascination of religious symbolism crept over minds that had hardly yet begun to see and understand things as they are; and in all their reading the "moral," "anagogical," and "tropological" significations prevailed against ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... the mere, simple thing itself. It's the symbolism back of it. Maybe even now I'm premature in telling ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... via Quattro Fontane, Rome, party of the second part.' A beau vers, is n't it? The lilt, the swelling cadence, the rich rhyme, the hidden alliterations,—and then the sensitive, haunting pathos, the eternal verities adumbrated by its symbolism. I 've stood upon Achilles' tomb, and heard Troy doubted. Time—that monster-mother, who brings forth her children only to devour them—Time shall doubt ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... we always regarded as accordant with the principles of God's Word, and sufficient for the necessities of the church. Amid the recent progress of more rigid symbolism, and symbolic sympathies, it has, however, been disparaged by some connected with the General Synod. We still believe it sufficient, provided all the Synods embraced in the General Synod will adhere to ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker
... compendium of their science, of which the Church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was so complete a hieroglyph. Thus, the Roman abbey, the philosophers' church, the Gothic art, Saxon art, the heavy, round pillar, which recalls Gregory VII., the hermetic symbolism, with which Nicolas Flamel played the prelude to Luther, papal unity, schism, Saint-Germain des Pres, Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie,—all are mingled, combined, amalgamated in Notre-Dame. This central mother church is, among the ancient churches ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.—Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his "wisdom" is precisely a pure ignorance[11] of all such things. He has never heard ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... something to satisfy an inward demand for immense expansions of thought, a desire for all sorts of proportioned and balanced extremes. This is no superficial suggestion, though it may seem so. But in such cases it is not the positive horror and its direct effect which attract the poet: a deeper symbolism and an effect both aesthetic and moral recommend the element to him. With Milton, however, there follows a curious result. He produces his manufactured myth of Sin and Death and his ludicrous Limbo of Vanity with a gravity and earnestness as convincing ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... because they were impervious to artistic influence or impatient of spiritual discipline. It will hardly do to divide the nation into intelligent Protestants and illiterate Catholics: the point is that the somewhat crude symbolism which had satisfied the cravings of the average man had ceased to be sufficient for his newer intelligent needs; he demanded either a higher symbolism or else as little as possible. Some felt the symbol a help, others felt ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... fate of Erigone, daughter of Ikarios, a festival had been ordained at Athens at which the maidens indulged in the joys of the swing. Illustrations of this pastime occur frequently on vases, free from any mythological symbolism, even in cases where Eros is ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... nature can reveal the | presence in the world of divine ideas | and archetypes. Bacon's rejection of | any natural philosophy founded on | allegorical interpretations of | Scriptures meant a withdrawal from | exemplarism and symbolism, both | common features of mediaeval | philosophy and still flourishing in | the seventeenth century. As all works | —says Bacon—show the power and | ability of their maker, but not his | image, so God's works "do shew the | omnipotency and wisdom ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... lord. At the very least, we can get him for possession of materials. Black magic is a matter of symbolism and intent." ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... digest the general definitions and explanations at the beginning of the book. Still, I can take but little of the blame, when I consider how I fared through my geography, right to the end of the grammar-school course. I did in time disentangle the symbolism of the orange revolving on a knitting-needle from the astronomical facts in the case, but it took years of training under a master of the subject to rid me of my distrust of the map as a representation of the earth. To this day I sometimes blunder back to my early impression ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... without the Irish leaven!' So Tony in exile still managed to do something for her darling Erin. The solitary woman on her heights at Copsley raised an exclamation of, 'Oh! that those two had been or could be united!' She was conscious of a mystic symbolism ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the scene of the future glories of redeemed humanity, it may be the theatre of a fulfilment of such visions as this. But we cannot dogmatise on a subject of which we know so little, nor be sure of the extent to which symbolism enters into this sweet picture. Enough that there surely comes a time when the King of men and Lord of nature shall bring back peace between both, and restore 'the fair music that all creatures ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... 'Evening Walk' will illustrate Wordsworth's way of dealing with his earlier text in his later editions. This Poem showed from the first a minute observation of Nature—not only in her external form and colour, but also in her suggestiveness—though not in her symbolism; and we also find the same transition from Nature to Man, the same interest in rural life, and the same lingering over its incidents that we see in his maturer poems. Nevertheless, there is much that is conventional in the first edition of 'An ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... Deity might be caught up through clouds, and hidden for a moment from the eyes of his disciples. The demonstration of the simplest truths of astronomy destroyed at a blow the legends that were most significant to the early Christians by annihilating their symbolism. Well might the Church persecute Galileo for his proof of the world's mobility. Instinctively she perceived that in this one proposition was involved the principle of hostility to her most cherished conceptions, to the very core of her mythology. Science was born, and the warfare between ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Fisbee," said Harkless, as he took the manuscript. "Have you finished your paper on the earlier Christian symbolism? I hope the 'Herald' may have the honor of printing it." This was the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... society, which derived its name and its symbolism from the trade of the charcoal-burner, as Freemasonry from that of the builder, is uncertain. Whether its first aim was resistance to Bourbon tyranny after 1799, or the expulsion of the French and Austrians from Italy, in the year 1814 it was actively working for constitutional ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... be admitted that the story of 'Tannhaeuser' is better suited for dramatic purposes than that of 'Der Fliegende Hollaender,' apart from the lofty symbolism which gives it so deeply human an interest. This would go far to account for the manifest superiority of the later work, but throughout the score it is easy to note the enhanced power and certainty of the composer in dealing even with the less interesting parts of the story. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... importance in mysticism; indeed, symbolism and mythology are, as it were, the language of the mystic. This necessity for symbolism is an integral part of the belief in unity; for the essence of true symbolism rests on the belief that all things in Nature have something in common, something in which they are really alike. In order ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... The symbolism of dress is a subject which has never received its due share of attention, yet it stands for attributes in the human race which otherwise defy analysis. It is interwoven with all our carnal and with all our spiritual instincts. It represents a cunning triumph over hard conditions, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... such a monument was the grave which Keeler sought. The symbolism was striking,—a broken column, an angel holding out an olive branch, and Father Time. And this was the verse of ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... seen that the only photographer who could lay any claim to artistic work was the man who selected and altered and posed—arranged his subject, that is to say, in more or less symbolic form. Then people began to see again that Symbolism was the underlying spirit of Art—as they had known perfectly well, of course, in medieval days: that Art consisted in going beneath the material surfaces that reflected light, or the material events that happened, ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... present altar-piece he would have designed his east front somewhat differently. Be this as it may, upon this magnificent specimen of modern art it is waste of time to lavish praise, and the names of the designers, Messrs. Bodley and Garner, will always be associated with it. The symbolism is expressed in the frieze above the Crucifixion, "Sic Deus dilexit mundum" ("God so loved the world"). The lower part is pierced with doors on either side: and "Via Electionis" ("A chosen vessel") over the north door refers to St. Paul, and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... ship of battle, to be together types of war and peace, and of the one as the foundation of the other, I leave it to the reader to decide. My own impression is, that although Turner might have some askance symbolism in his mind, the present design is, like the former one, in many points a simple reminiscence of a ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... seek for that form of psychologic exuberance in the stage of development attained by the tribes now under consideration. All predetermination to interpret either their signs or their pictographs on the principles of symbolism as understood or pretended to be understood by its admirers, and as are sometimes properly applied to Egyptian hieroglyphs, results in mooning mysticism. This was shown by a correspondent who enthusiastically lauded ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... upon her. Christianity, when it entered Italy, came among a people every act of whose life was colored and consecrated by symbolic and ritual acts of heathenism. The only possible way to uproot this was in supplanting it by Christian ritual and symbolism equally minute and pervading. Besides, in those ages when the Christian preacher was utterly destitute of all the help which the press now gives in keeping under the eye of converts the great inspiring truths of religion, it was one of the first offices of every saint whose preaching stirred ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... having its vogue, while poets are desperately pictorial. Soul landscapes and etched sonnets are not unpleasing to the ear. What if they do not mean much? There was a time when to say a "sweet voice" would arouse a smile. What has sugar to do with sound? It may be erratic symbolism, this confusing of terminologies; yet, once in a while, it strikes sparks. There is a deeply rooted feeling in us that the arts have a common matrix, that they are emotionally akin. "Her slow smile" in fiction has had marked success ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... emotions, and prides itself on its morality. If a man wins popularity in that section, the impulse which his name can give to it may be irresistible (Jefferson, Jackson). The middle section is greatly affected by symbolism. "The flag" can be developed into a fetich. A cult can be nourished around it. Group vanity is very strong in it. Patriotic emotions and faiths are its favorite psychological exercises, if the conjuncture is favorable ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... of antiquity are remarkable, and worthy of the closest inspection. Their texture, designs, and symbolism show the greatest patience and thought. Antique wool rugs woven in China are very scarce, and because of this, and for their historical interest as well as their uniqueness and attractiveness, they bring large prices. In fact, they ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... of literature and history. Every extravagance of hagiology can be found in hero-worship. Every folly alleged in the worship of saints can be found in the worship of poets. There are those who are honourably and intensely opposed to the atmosphere of religious symbolism or religious archaeology. There are people who have a vague idea that the worship of saints is worse than the imitation of sinners. There are some, like a lady I once knew, who think that hagiology is the scientific study of hags. But these slightly prejudiced persons generally have ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... be received into the Church." Calvin says: "By these images, the Prophet indicates that, among the people of Christ there will be no disposition for injuring one another, nor any ferocity or inhumanity." The circumstance that the use of animal symbolism is widely spread throughout Scripture is in favour of this interpretation. One may, e.g. compare Ps. xxii., where the enemies of the righteous are represented under the image of dogs, lions, bulls, and unicorns; ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... corridor leading to the bureau of marriage licenses in the City Hall. There must have been something more than accident in its discovery just in this spot. Men of thoughtful temper will do well to heed the symbolism of this incident. Plainly not only the constitution of the United States is to be made a quaffing-stock, but the very sanctity of the marriage bond is assailed. To this form of terrorism there is ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... to S. John is of a somewhat later date, and bears a different character. It is reflective and meditative, and is penetrated throughout by a mystical symbolism. In many ways it suggests rather a spiritual interpretation of the significance of Jesus than a literal portrait of Him. Again, it is the product of a Greek rather than of a Jewish atmosphere, though its narrative presents so many touches of extraordinary vividness, and the author shows so exact ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... lives, in reaction against which he develops his powers, and to which, on one whole side of his nature, he belongs. Even in respect of that which men reverently took to be thought concerning God, they seem to have been unaware how much of their material was imaginative and poetic symbolism drawn from the experience of man. The traditional idea of revelation proved a disturbing factor. Assuming that revelation gave information concerning God, and not rather the religious experience of communion with God himself, men accepted statements of the documents ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... or whether it were a delusion for the temptation of men's souls. It was a debate on which his old and his new guides seemed to him at issue, and he was drawn in both directions—now by the beauty, order, and deep symbolism of the Catholic ritual, now by the spirituality and earnestness of the men among whom he lived. At one moment the worldly pomp, the mechanical and irreverent worship, and the gross and vicious habits of many of the clergy repelled him; at another the reverence and ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Mickleham. It was a pretty little bit of jewelry—a pearl heart, broken (rubies played the part of blood) and held together by a gold pin, set with diamonds, the whole surmounted by an earl's coronet. I had taken some trouble about it, and was grateful when Miss Dolly asked me to explain the symbolism. ...
— Dolly Dialogues • Anthony Hope
... conservatism; but we are none the less sensible of Mr. James's surpassing merits as a writer upon the philosophy of society. We dedicate this paragraph to him on account of the series of lectures he has just delivered in New-York, upon "The Symbolism of Property," "Democracy and its Issues," "The Harmony of Nature and Revelation," "The Past and Future Churches," &c. We understand that these splendid dissertations will be given to the public in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... which the girls had just begun was the painting of their paddles with their symbols. Gladys, having neither paddle nor symbol, was at a loss what to do. "Here, take the symbol book," said Migwan, "and begin working on your symbol." Gladys took the book and began idly turning the pages. Symbolism was an entirely new thing to her, and she was unable to decide on any of the queerly shaped things ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... design for the cover of this edition certain Elian symbolism will be found. The upper coat of arms is that of Christ's Hospital, where Lamb was at school; the lower is that of the Inner Temple, where he was born and spent many years. The figures at the bells are those which once stood ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... mind that he, Jacob Boehme, got an insight into its nature and significance which is of real worth to the modern world, but he is seriously hampered by the poverty of his categories, by the difficulties of his symbolism and by his literary limitations, when he comes to the almost insuperable task of expressing what he has seen. He is himself perfectly conscious of his limitations. He is constantly amazed that God uses such "a mean instrument," he regrets ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... realism and various other movements current in those turbulent decades. Sometimes the changes came not as a natural phase of literary evolution, but rather as the consequence of pure imitation. Thus, Verissimo tells us, Symbolism, in Brazil, was a matter of intentional parroting, in many cases unintelligent. It did not correspond to a movement of reaction,—mystical, sensualist, individualist, socialistic or anarchistic,—as ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... of symbolism, and these symbols must be interpreted according to the age, or of the individual consciousness of the interpreter, or the translator. But the fundamental doctrine of Buddha is essentially one of renunciation ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... writings were saturated with the spirit of the early Pagan authors; while in his pursuit of glory and his love for natural, sensible beauty, he manifested tendencies opposed directly to the self-restraint, symbolism, and purity of the Middle Ages. His longest poem is /Africa/, devoted to a rehearsal of the glories of ancient Rome and breathing a spirit of patriotism and zeal for a long lost culture, but it is rather for his love songs, the /canzoni/, that ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... of Analogy flows from the inherent harmonies of Nature. Of this wise men have ever been intuitive. The eldest Scriptures express it. It is in the Zend-Avesta, primal Japhetic utterance. It vivified that subtile Egyptian symbolism. The early Greeks and the Mystics of Alexandria knew it. Jamblicus reports of Pythagoras, that "he did not procure for himself a thing of this kind through instruments or the voice, but, by employing a certain inevitable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... defends his position by an illustration of the use (as also abuse) of symbols spiritual and material; Carlyle retorts somewhat impatiently that in thinking of God we have no need of symbolism; we know Him as Immensity, Eternity, and other abstract qualities, and to fancy Him under human attributes is superfluous; and Mr. Browning dismisses this theology, with the intellectual curiosities and intellectual discontents which he knows in the present case to have accompanied ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... an artist. He writes pure, not applied poetry. I care little for his theories of symbolism, magic and what not. Poets are judged not by their theories, not by the "schools" to which they give passionate adherence, but simply and solely by the quality of their work. No amount of theory, no correctness of method, no setting ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... "Princess Louisa Drawing" which is a very maze; the little paths of verse and fancy turn in upon one another, and the turns are pointed with artificial shouts of joy and surprise. But, again, what a reader unused to a certain living symbolism will be apt to take for a careful and cold conceit is, in truth, a rapture—none graver, none more fiery or more luminous. But even to name the poem where these occur might be to deliver delicate and ardent poetry over to the general sense of humour, which one distrusts. Nor is Lovelace ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... "What does life mean? As one may define it in a hundred different ways, so one may find a hundred different meanings in this picture. Its symbolism is as many-faceted as a well-cut diamond. Who, for instance, is that divine lady? Is it she who is the true Lux Mundi—the light reflected from jewels and young eyes, from polished marble and clear waters and statues ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... the table in ritualistic challenge, exchanged gestures, bent his neck and passed on. He circled the broad floor, sabre twirling, arms darting in an intricate symbolism. The orchestra blared shrilly, unmuffled now by the surf-roar of conversation. The Yill, Retief noticed suddenly, were sitting silent, watching. The dancer was closer now, and then he was before Retief, poised, ...
— The Yillian Way • John Keith Laumer
... breeze, or even the thought of a fishing rod or of a gun, is helpful. On the contrary, all suggestions of despair or misfortune— a corrugated brow, the gloomy silence of despair, or a doubtful word— are equally depressing. In like manner, one could add many illustrations of the symbolism that governs our daily lives. Thus we see that through the laws of inheritance and noci-association, we are able to read a new meaning into the clinical phenomena ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... Greek city we hear of "mysteries", the most celebrated being, of course, those of Eleusis in Attica. What exactly these "mysteries" were we are very imperfectly informed; but so much, at least, is clear that by means of a scenic symbolism, representing the myth of Demeter and Kore or of Dionysus Zagreus, hopes were held out to the initiated not only of a happy life on earth, but of a happy immortality beyond. "Blessed," says Pindar, "blessed is he who has seen these things before ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... much faith to believe that Almighty God could specially prepare a great fish which should rescue His servant, to whom He meant to give another chance, from the depths of the sea, and land him in due course upon the shore. (Applause).' These crude views, which ignored the symbolism of Nineveh as a fish, now universally accepted by educated people, were not, however, endorsed by Dr. Beeching, the learned Dean of Norwich, who in the same gathering expressed the point of view of more scholarly Christians:—'He would not distinguish inspired writing from fiction. He would ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... is a lotus, not a rose flower. The latter is never used in Hindoo symbolism. The lotus is a solar emblem, and intimately associated with ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... who have been brought up to it, know. Go up to the Parliament House and you will hear the advocates and judges talking to one another in a professional speech that the learned layman no more than the ignorant can understand. Our doctors, again, have a shorthand symbolism that only themselves and the chemists understand. And so it is with every business and profession; each several trade strikes out a language for itself. And so does divinity, and, especially, experimental divinity, ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... Eusebius (De bit. Const. iii. c. 55) describes a school of impurity at Aphac, where women and "men who were not men" practiced all manner of abominations in honour of the Demon (Venus). Here the Phrygian symbolism of Kybele and Attis (Atys) had become the Syrian Ba'al Tammuz and Astarte, and the Grecian Dionaea and Adonis, the anthropomorphic forms of the two greater lights. The site, Apheca, now Wady al-Afik on the route from Bayrut to the Cedars, is a glen of wild and wondrous beauty, fitting frame-work ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... be justice personified. All Brahmanical ceremonies exhibit, we may say, ritualism and symbolism ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... the dead amid blooming nature and fair flowers has been and is natural to men. The symbolism is most natural, deep, and beautiful, expressing the possibility of life and even of advance in the life after apparent decay. There is something very pathetic in so eager a grasping ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... no ashes for the urns we do not trouble ourselves to make them hollow, and we say their use is "emblematic." When, following the bent of our ancestral instincts, we go on, age after age, in the performance of some senseless act which once had a use and meaning we excuse ourselves by calling it symbolism. Our "symbols" are merely survivals. We have theology and patriotism. We have all the savage's superstition. We propitiate and ingratiate by means of gifts. We shake hands. All these and hundreds of others of our practices are ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... that of Giuliano; while the old man, whose head anticipates everything that is considered most original in Rodin's work, is among the best of Michelangelo's statuary. Much speculation has been indulged in as to the meaning of the symbolism of these tombs, and having no theory of my own to offer, I am glad to borrow Mr. Gerald S. Davies' summary from his monograph on Michelangelo. The figure of Giuliano typifies energy and leadership in repose; while the man on his tomb typifies Day and the woman Night, or the ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Catholic young lady whom I met spoke to me about burning our prayers, our joss-houses, and our dragon, which she had seen carried about the streets of San Francisco. "Pure symbolism," I answered, and then told her of the Christian dragon in the Divine Key of the Revelation of Jesus Christ as Given to John, by a Christian writer, William Eugene Brown. This dragon had nine heads, while ours has only one. I believe I had the best of the argument so far as heads ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... their vicissitudes the people of France have upheld, unfaltering, their ideal—liberty, equality and fraternity. Our own republic exists to-day because France helped us when England sought to crush us. It is never amiss to freshen our memories as to these historic facts. The symbolism of the colossus would therefore be very fine; it would have a meaning which every one could understand. It would signify not only the amity of France and the United States, and the republican idea of brotherhood and freedom, as I have said; but it would also ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... when the race began, and it would continue, in varied fields, until men perished from the earth. Ben fought for life—not only his own but the girl's—that old, beloved privilege to breathe the air and see and know and be. He represented, by a strange symbolism, the whole race that has always fought in merciless and never-ending battle with the cruel and oppressive powers of nature. In the grizzly were typified all those ancient enemies that have always opposed, with claw and fang, ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... in Passover and blessed the moon and counted the days of the Omer till Pentecost saw the synagogue dressed with flowers in celebration of an Asiatic fruit harvest by a European people divorced from agriculture; they passed to the terrors and triumphs of the New Year (with its domestic symbolism of apple and honey and its procession to the river) and the revelry of repentance on the Great White Fast, when they burned long candles and whirled fowls round their heads and attired themselves ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... spirit, and precision. Yet his work showed no sign of conventionality, no adherence to prescribed rules. Every outline, every fold of drapery, every attitude was pregnant, to the artist's own mind at any rate, with meaning. In spite of its symbolism, what he wrought was never mechanically figurative, but gifted with the independence of its own beauty, vital with an inbreathed spirit of life. It was a happy moment, when art had reached consciousness, and the artist had not yet become ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... musicians: but as they all affected different styles, each of them claimed that his was the only true style, and cried "Raca!" to that of their colleagues. They accused each other of sham writing and sham culture, and hurled at each other's heads the words "idealism" and "materialism," "symbolism" and "verism," "subjectivism" and "objectivism." Christophe thought it was hardly worth while leaving Germany to find the squabbles of the Germans in Paris. Instead of being grateful for having good music presented in so many different fashions, they would only tolerate their ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... throbbed when, as a youth, he had been admitted for the first time to this most sacred of all Christian privileges! He was instructed in its deep and glorious symbolism, and had often felt the purifying, saving, and refreshing effect of the sacrament, strengthening him in all goodness, when he had partaken of it with his parents and brothers. Hand-in-hand, they had gone home feeling as if newly robed in body and soul and more closely bound together ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... essentially, essentially an unaccountable character! I am sometimes quite at a loss, I assure you.... She must be forty; she says she is thirty-six, and of course she has every right to say so. But I swear I judge her intellectually, simply from the metaphysical point of view; there is a sort of symbolism sprung up between us, a sort of algebra or what not! I don't understand it! Well, that's all nonsense. Only, seeing that you are not a student now and have lost your lessons and your clothes, and that through the young lady's death she has no need to treat you as a relation, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a restaurant of the discreet sort, divided into many compartments, and situated, with a charming symbolism, at the back of St. George's, Hanover Square. Geraldine had chosen it. They did not need food, but they needed their own ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... their enemies, were made of yew. Others contend that its green boughs were used instead of palms on Palm Sunday, or for funerals. But I think that they were regarded with veneration by our forefathers when they were still heathen, and that some religious symbolism—such as of immortality—attached to them; and that when the Christian teachers came they made use of this religious sentiment of the people, planted the Christian cross by the side of the yew, and under its shade preached lessons of true immortality, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... of feature, form and attitude, between the different gods created by the imagination? Or must we look upon the attribution to this or that deity, of forms borrowed from the bull, the lion, or the eagle, as a deliberate act of symbolism, meant to suggest that the gods in question had the qualities of the animals of which their persons were partly made up? In order to arrive at a just conclusion we must, of course, take account both of the resistance ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... Mantle" exemplifies the old proverb, "Pride goeth before destruction," in almost too severe a manner, but the tale is said to have a legendary foundation; and "The Minister's Black Veil" is an equally awful symbolism for that barrier between man and man, which we construct through suspicion and our lack of frankness in our dealings with one another. We all hide ourselves behind veils, and, as Emerson says, "Man crouches and blushes, absconds ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... admirable in their place; but their place is not everywhere. Poetry has many modes of music; she does not blow through one pipe alone. Directness of utterance is good, but so is the subtle recasting of thought into a new and delightful form. Simplicity is good, but complexity, mystery, strangeness, symbolism, obscurity even, these have their value. Indeed, properly speaking, there is no such thing as Style; there are ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... would be classed as those of incident and adventure merely, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and the rest, there is a sense as of some unaffected but fine symbolism that somehow touches something of possibility in yourself as you read. The simplest narrative from his hand proclaimed itself a deep study in human nature—its motives tendencies, and possibilities. In these stories there is promise at once of the most realistic imagination, the most fantastic ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... Royal Freemasons' Girls' School; The Increase of Freemasonry; On Benefit Societies, by the Rev. T. A. Buckley; Episodes in the Life of a Freemason; The Countess and the Serf, by Miss Pardoe; The Knights of St. Helen's; On Symbols and Symbolism; A Relic of the Pretender; Eleanora Ulfeld; The Prison Flower, by Miss Pardoe; Olden Holiday Customs; Si j'etais Roi; Correspondence. Masonic Intelligence:—Supreme Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons of England; United Grand Lodge; Grand Conclave of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... juices; he Should have shunned this detestable effeminacy, worthy only of the Dantes and Shakespeares. But unfortunately he was an Esotericist, with the business of helping, not plaguing, mankind: he must follow the grand symbolism of the story of the Soul, recording and emphasizing and showing the way to its victories, not its defeats. He had the eye to see deep into realities, and was not to be led from the path of truth eternal by the cheap effective expedients of realism. He must tell ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... colors and their gradations that contemporary manufacturers could produce—subjects selected from the creation down to the life of Christ, in addition containing a complete alphabet of early Christian symbolism. The roof surfaces being one succession of over-arching curves become receptive of innumerable waves of light and broad unities of soft shadows, giving the whole an incomparable quality of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... in reference to that veil, that "woman should have power on her head, because of the angels." The angels are spoken of in the New Testament as veiling their faces in the very presence of the Creator. In that truer symbolism of Christianity, man was to uncover his head in token of reverence to God and acceptance of the responsibility of the guardianship of the earth. Woman was to cover her head in token of her acceptance of man's guardianship and of her dominion over his heart, to which she ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... ornamentation, notably in the cases of the large stones illustrated in the book, p. 75, as derived from combinations of ornaments commonly found on AEgean pottery, these motives being themselves connected with the symbolism of sun-worship. In the case of other markings, it was considered these were possibly derived from the decoration of certain objects of Scandinavian origin. In an article in L'Anthropologie, vol. xxiii, p. 29, dealing with the subject, ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... he himself has ceased to speak and has returned to his customary avocations. And when members of his family visit the shrine and see the pole, they will be reminded of the particular benefit which they are entitled to expect from the souls of the departed. A certain rude symbolism may be traced in the materials and other particulars of these prayer-posts. A hard wood signifies strength; a tall pole overtopping all the rest imports a wish that he for whose sake it was erected may out-top all his rivals; ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... worship; how sex-worship has survived the ages; how it thrives today in modern religion; early stages of civilization in relation to Sex; the antiquity of the symbol of the virgin and child; its occult significance in symbolism; the reality of the "bi-une God;" some secrets of the Ancient Egyptians in regard to the function of sex; the esoteric cause of the Egyptian talismanic and symbolical revival today; the secret or esoteric meaning of the ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... world-picture—always harmonious, though not always consistent—the influences which sustain both the physical and moral system of its universe, an undercurrent of sober Gothic common sense induced it—as a kind of protest against the too material interpretation of the symbolism it had employed—to wind up its religious scheme by sweeping into the chaos of oblivion all the glorious fabric it had evoked, and proclaiming—in the place of the transient gods and perishable heaven of its Asgaard—that One undivided Deity, at whose ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... forms frequently do convey a meaning, which we term symbolism in art. If this symbolism does not detract from the first object of ornament—viz., to beautify—it is perfectly legitimate and proper. It is impossible to fully appreciate many phases of art, as, for instance, the Egyptian and the early Christian, if we leave ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... the sensibilities, the artist having left nothing to the imagination; beyond was the more human note, and Omphale bound him to her by a single thread stronger than all the chains ever riveted in Vulcan's forge. Next, with perhaps a significance of symbolism, the shirt of Nessus tortured him to madness with its scorching fires till the huge limbs writhed and the broad, kindly face was all a-sweat with agony, but—and now it was the door again—the benediction of peace crowned the ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... appearance of the second part of "Faust" the magic spell was completely broken. No work of Art of a more chilling, disenchanting character was ever produced. For the striking individuality of the first part, we have here nothing but abstractions; for its deep poetry, symbolism; for its glow and thrilling pathos, a plastic finish, hard and cold as marble; for its psychological truth, a bewildering mysticism. All the fine thoughts and reflections, and all the abundance of poetical passages, scattered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... freed from the mists of prejudice and partisanship. And the other of these two main channels will, I think, be a twisting and delicious stream, which will bear on its breast new barques of poetry, shaped, it may be, like prose, but a prose incarnating through its fantasy and symbolism all the deeper aspirations, yearning, doubts, and mysterious stirrings of the human spirit; a poetic prose-drama, emotionalising us by its diversity and purity of form and invention, and whose province ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's play Before Sunrise in 1889. It has outgrown the one-sided naturalism which had seemed the only medium of translating life directly into literature. It has turned aside from the orphic symbolism and verbal artistry rooted only in literature and having nothing in common with life. Men like Karl Schoenherr, Carl Hauptmann, and others have found in the native soil and its people and in the ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... teeming brain now turned to dust,—reproducing, with patient hand, graceful outline and deepening shadow,—his daring, yet reverent heart held high communion with the ages that were gone. The Spirit of the Past overshadowed him. The grandeur of Gothic symbolism rose before him. Voices of dead centuries murmured low music down the fretted vault. Fair ladies and brave gentlemen came up from the solemn chambers where they had lain so long in silent state, and smiled with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... to show that the engraving in Cogolludo is a relic of the purest ancient Maya symbolism,—one of the most interesting which have been preserved to us; but to enter upon its explanation in this connection would be too far from ...
— The Books of Chilan Balam, the Prophetic and Historic Records of the Mayas of Yucatan • Daniel G. Brinton
... philosophic sense of "accident") a cause of pleasure, pain, or desire seems to explain the essence of all the particular variations of the psychological phenomena known now by all who have been aroused to the significance of their vagrant cryptic slumbers, as the phenomena of symbolism, sublimation, and fetich worship. Spinoza's proposition explains all the phenomena adequately because among the fundamental human emotions, Spinoza like Freud—if we discount the recent attempt to go beyond the pleasure-principle—reckons ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... or inspiration, resignation, and devotion. Every history is, in a certain sense, symbolical. It is the mere reflection or copy of the human mind in its activity. So are the appearance of Christ, his life, and death, in some degree symbolical. In this symbolism consists the character of the Christian revelation. Here have appeared the eternal ideas of reason in their greatest purity and fullness; and Rationalism is nothing more than a philosophical view of the Christian revelation of ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... two minutely accurate blades of grass are just as irrelevant as two million; it is the formal significance of a blade of grass or of a meadow with which the artist is concerned. The Pre-Raffaelite method is at best symbolism, at worst pure silliness. Had the Pre-Raffaelites been blessed with profoundly imaginative minds they might have recaptured the spirit of the Middle Ages instead of imitating its least significant manifestations. But had they been great artists they would not have ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... mostly portrayed in human form, but in about the first century of our era there is seen a tendency to depict them with many heads and limbs and this tendency grows stronger until in mediaeval times it is predominant. It has its origin in symbolism. The deity is thought of as carrying many insignia, as performing more actions than two hands can indicate; the worshipper is taught to think of him as appearing in this shape and the artist does not hesitate to represent ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... journeys science took the lead, the student of Nature supplanted the lover, even his symbolism took a more abstract and realistic form. But he never, even in old age, lost his love for the beauties of Nature, and, holding to Spinoza's fundamental ideas of the unchangeableness and eternity of Nature's laws, and the oneness of the Cosmos, he sought to think it out ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... a volume of critical essays on painting, music, literature and life, it concludes with a series of seven short stories which serve as a postlude to Mr. Huneker's earlier volume, "Visionaries." They are chiefly interesting as the last dying glow of symbolism, derivative as they are from Huysmans and Mallarme. I cannot regard them as successful stories, but they have a certain experimental value which comes nearest to success in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... it at all in medicine, which is usually the case with those plants to which they have given no name. In India the peculiar spiral form of the fruit has suggested its application, according to the theories of the doctrine of symbolism. Ainslie says that the Hindoos use it to treat diseases of the external auditory canal. On account of its emollient properties and probably on account of its twisted form, it is used internally as a decoction, in flatulence and the intestinal colic of children. It is indispensable ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... and every ancient myth, to be understood truly, must be understood in this light. God, the angelic hierarchies, the powers divine and infernal, are but names for the mightier Adam in whose image man was made and who is the forgotten Self in humanity. Mystic symbolism is the same the world over, and applying it to the old Celtic romances, phantasy and faeryland are transformed into history and we are reading about the ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... Hawk. The significant names of chiefs are known to all, and whoever is familiar with Indian oratory will readily recollect its garb of bold and striking metaphors. These features, while imparting energy to the language, at the same time made it easy to convey its meaning by picture writing or symbolism, the only mode of writing which the aborigine possessed.[19] Thus, too, it was easy to put upon a belt a few significant characters which by the principle of mental association should clearly depict the salient features of an event or of a series of events. Such belts carefully preserved ...
— Wampum - A Paper Presented to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society - of Philadelphia • Ashbel Woodward
... oblong, one in the center, the heart of the Maze, and facing it two smaller circles, one at each side on a visionary line. Seven mystic, seven sacred circles in all did he draw, and vanished, unconscious of the sanctity and symbolism ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... political duty, these are the things on which it lays stress. And when the Chinese spirit seeks escape from these primary preoccupations, it finds its freedom in an art that is closer to the world of fact, imaginatively conceived, than that of any other race. Chinese art purifies itself from symbolism to become interpretation; whereas in India the ocean of symbolism never ceases to roll over the drowning surface of the phenomenal world. Chinese literature, again, has this same hold upon life. It is such as Romans or Englishmen, if equally gifted, might have written. Much ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... before, our little band is shrinking in numbers day by day. The population as a whole are being educated up to higher ideals in art. On the wings of symbolism and idealism they are soaring ever higher and higher, until a whole lot of them must be getting dizzy in ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... interest in Whiggery. The new democracy was neither coldly Deist, nor austerely Republican. It has shown no inclination to inaugurate a reign of "pure reason" in religion or politics, but has boldly and cheerfully adopted symbolism and pageantry. Friendly societies and trade unions have their badges, banners, and buttons. The Roman Catholic Church grows in popularity with the working class, and in many towns and cities the Church of England and the Salvation Army are distinctly popular. ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... his mind dwelt on the symbolism of that sacred scene, the Knight remembered that the two who walked in sadness did not long walk alone. One, stepping silently, came up with them; knowing all, yet asking tenderest question; the Master, Whom they mourned, Himself drew near ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... represented with bunches of grapes and pomegranates in his hand,"[1119] emblems of productivity. The sacred conical stones and pillars dedicated in his temples[1120] may have had their origin in a similar symbolism. As polytheistic systems had always a tendency to enlarge themselves, Baal had no sooner become a separate god, distinct from El, and Rimmon, and Molech, and Adonai, than he proceeded to multiply himself, and from Baal became Baalim,[1121] either ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... and sacred symbolism represented by this staff," he continued, "I invest you both with the supreme authority. And further, I call all men to witness that, the hand of Soaring Eagle rests above that of the Giver of Life, which signifies that ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... new world that Migdal 'Oz, by its laudation of rural life, disclosed to the votaries of a literature the most enlightened representatives of which refused to see in the Song of Songs anything but religious symbolism, so far had their appreciation ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... happy, seeing in every flower and hearing in every harmony some exquisite symbol of human life. "Il Penseroso" takes us over the same ground at twilight and at moonrise. The air is still fresh and fragrant; the symbolism is, if possible, more tenderly beautiful than before; but the gay mood is gone, though its memory lingers in the afterglow of the sunset. A quiet thoughtfulness takes the place of the pure, joyous sensation of the morning, a thoughtfulness which is not sad, though like all quiet moods it is ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the motives for their erection, religious forms and symbolism governed the design. Thus we have here three principal divisions—tower, octagon, spire, and nine stories or stages in all, six belonging to the tower and octagon, and three to the spire. Then in its dimensions we find that the total height is 300 feet,[5] the plan (exclusive of buttresses) ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... have not changed while their children were being literally reborn—what does this accomplish? Doesn't Aesop tell us something of a crow that would be a dove and found himself an outcast everywhere? We are replacing the beautiful symbolism of the Indian by our materialism and leaving him bewildered and discouraged. Why should he be taught to despise his hogan, shaped after the beautiful rounded curve of the rainbow and the arched course of the sun in his daily journey across ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... presence. Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective, that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another nervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolism always settled back on him again. Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end, so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in some old-world ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... little marvel with that rare poetic discrimination which neither exhausts it of its simple wonders by pushing symbolism too far, nor keeps those wonders in the merely fabulous and capricious stage. In fact she has produced a true children's poem, which is far more delightful to the mature than to children, though it ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... seq.—First production of Hummerdinck's opera and cast, Earlier performance of the work as a melodrama, Author and composer, Opera and melodrama in Germany, Wagnerian symbolism and music, "Die Meistersinger" recalled, Hero and ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... an intellectual idea presented in any doctrinal form; it is an idea [p.160] born within the Life-process on its highest levels. On such levels it becomes obvious and indispensable. Man may be clearly conscious of the symbolism of the idea, and yet, at the same time, grasp in it an incontestable intrinsic truth which he knows to be far above all mere anthropomorphism. Eucken shows that it is not merely a human greatness that has been transferred to the Divine, but that the whole meaning here is a return ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... German philologist, born at Marburg; became professor of Ancient History and Philology at Heidelberg; his chief work, and one by which he is most widely known, "Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Voelker, besonders der Griechen," "Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Peoples, especially the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... saints whom the Church has seen rejoicing in the heavenly life, rises the form of Mary, Mother of God. S. John's vision of the "great sign in heaven" in its primary meaning has, no doubt, reference to the Church itself; but the form of its symbolism would be impossible if there were not a secondary reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is the thought of her and of her office as Mother of the Redeemer that has determined the form of the vision. The details are too clear to permit of doubt, and such has been the constant mind ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... Ghosts at the Kingsway Theatre, the critic of a halfpenny morning paper refers to it as a "medley of weird psychopathy and symbolism." Just as if he were writing for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... among the Greeks it is thus nearly always difficult to say what is symbolic and what realistic, in the range of Christian art the distinction is clear. In that, a vast division of imaginative work is occupied in the symbolism of virtues, vices, or natural powers or passions; and in the representation of personages who, though nominally real, become in conception symbolic. In the greater part of this work there is no intention of implying the existence ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... arrive soon; we were hoping to have three happy evenings playing with it before he sees it. Fine to have children; lots of fun playing with their presents. We are sure that life after death is really so, because children always kick the blankets off at night. Fine bit of symbolism that; put it in a sermon, unless Doctor Conwell gets ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... patience the lover of good books. He is the man who gets a book wrong from the start, and then plods on after his own conception, which has no reference whatsoever to the author's. He is the man who takes irony seriously, misses the symbolism when there is any, and invariably guesses wrong as to the sources of the characters ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... considered as having (in Himself the symbolism of) right side and left side. As it is written, Hosea xiv. 7, "And his ...
— Hebrew Literature
... to me the thought that I am looking at something immemorially old, something belonging to the unrecorded beginning of this Oriental life, perhaps to the crepuscular Kamiyo itself, to the magical Age of the Gods; a symbolism of motion whereof the meaning has been forgotten for innumerable years. Yet more and more unreal the spectacle appears, with silent smilings, with its silent bowings, as if obeisance to watchers invisible; and I find myself wondering whether, were I to utter but a whisper, all ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... will give some idea of the mysterious symbolism by which she was interiorly directed. During a portion of the year 1820 she performed many labours in spirit, for several different parishes; her prayers being represented under the figure of most severe labour in a vineyard. What we have above related concerning the nettles ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... and, from its simplicity, grandeur, and power, has been used in all ages with innumerable modifications in those structures whose object was to impress and overawe,—as in the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of India and Mexico, and in all the earliest funereal monuments. It involved a rude symbolism, which recommended itself to the barbarous childhood of nations. But it was not until the pyramid was sharpened and spiritualized into the spire that it gained its completest triumph over the secret emotions of men. The Egyptians made the nearest approach to it in the obelisk. That mysterious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... time upon the roof, wondering at the grotesque changes of the day. I recalled my mental states from the midnight prayer to the foolish card-playing. I had a violent revulsion of feeling. I remember I flung away the cigar with a certain wasteful symbolism. My folly came to me with glaring exaggeration. I seemed a traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was filled with remorse. I resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on into London. There, it seemed to ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... to hold up their banners for them,' laughed Vida, as though she saw a symbolism in the fact, further ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... emancipate Tea from its crude state and lead to its final idealization. With Luwuh in the middle of the eighth century we have our first apostle of tea. He was born in an age when Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism were seeking mutual synthesis. The pantheistic symbolism of the time was urging one to mirror the Universal in the Particular. Luwuh, a poet, saw in the Tea-service the same harmony and order which reigned through all things. In his celebrated work, the "Chaking" (The ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... harmless, turn out to be sinister if we take pains to interpret them. All have the mark of the beast. For example, there was that unknown woman who had fallen down and was surrounded by a crowd. If a woman dreams that, it is sexual. It can mean only a fallen woman. That is the symbolism. The crowd always denotes ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... mythical poem, as for example a poem on Proserpine or Psyche: but never an epic so full of traditions and historical memories, so intimately connected with the life of the people, as the Ramayan.(1183) Excessive readiness to find allegory whenever some traces of symbolism occur, where the myth partly veils the historical reality, may lead and often has led to error. What poetical work of mythical times could stand this mode of trial? could there not be made, or rather has there not been made a work altogether allegorical, out of the Homeric poems? ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... cobwebs formed. Things became reconciled to themselves, things lay quietly on their shelves; the troubles of the day arranged themselves in trim formation and at his curt wish of dismissal, marched off and disappeared. And with the departure of worry came brilliant, permeating symbolism. Edith became a flighty, negligible girl, not to be worried over; rather to be laughed at. She fitted like a figure of his own dream into the surface world forming about him. He himself became in a measure symbolic, a ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... upon this mystical idea, and used it at once to spiritualise the Sabbath and attach to it an ecstatic joyousness. The ritual of the 'over-Soul' was an elaborate means by which a relation was established between heaven and earth. But all this symbolism had but the slightest connection with dogma. It was practical through and through. It emerged in a number of new rites, it based itself on and became the cause of a deepening devotion to morality. Luria would have looked with ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... child's birth was such; Malacas, which signifies "a man of strength," because the mother thinks that the child will be strong, or desires that it be so. At other times they name it, without any symbolism or special reason, by the first word which occurs to them—as, for example, Daan, which signifies "road;" Babui, which means "pig;" or Manug, which signifies "fowl." All persons are called by these ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson
... the sunlight of the streets and fields. A village vicar was slain with inconceivable stripes, and his corpse set on fire with frightful jests about a roasted priest. Rape became a mode of government. The violation of virgins became a standing order of police. Stamped still with the same terrible symbolism, the work of the English Government and the English settlers seemed to resolve itself into animal atrocities against the wives and daughters of a race distinguished for a rare and detached purity, and of a religion which makes of innocence ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton |
