|
|
|
More "Fable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to mind it. Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do not count a man's years, until he has nothing else to count. The vast inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus. In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we shall all be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... force as, named with these, Could merit more than that small infantry Warred on by cranes—though all the giant brood Of Phlegra with th' heroic race were joined That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side Mixed with auxiliar gods; and what resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son, Begirt with British and Armoric knights; And all who since, baptized or infidel, Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore When Charlemain ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... the world there came a time when there was danger of truth being corrupted and mingled with fable among those who did not follow the guidance of God, as did Abraham and the patriarchs; then the great lawgiver, Moses, was given the divine commission to make a written record of the creation of the world and of man and to transmit it to later ages; and because ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... discovered, the fable of "the dog in the manger" began to be enacted in the Transvaal. The Boers were quite incompetent to start mining operations on their own account, and yet were intolerant of the presence of outsiders who were ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... of Lyonesse; forests where Tristram and Iseult had ridden, lay under our rushing keel; castles and towers and churches were there—hark! could I not hear the faint bells in the steeples ringing up through the waves? The old legend, half true, half fable, was all real to me as I sat in the shadow of the sail and stared, only half seeing them, at Sally standing with her hands on the rudder and Cary leaning over her, teaching her to sail the Revenge. Their voices came to me clear and musical, yet carrying no ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... they may fall—but who shall date thy end? Lo! all the past has giv'n its light to thee: Expiring Rome, like a departing friend, Gave solemn warning to thy liberty: And e'en the empires, fabulously old In fruitful fable, have a moral told; What say their fallen kings and shrineless God? There is no "right divine" ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... stone is no fable, if words of yours could extract gold from a heart of flint. Brave Anthony! you have wrought a miracle. But let me look at the order. Seeing's believing; and I cannot believe such an improbable thing without I witness ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... struck it to good purpose by the publication of the "Biglow Papers" and "A Fable for Critics," and stood revealed as one of the wisest, wittiest, most fearless and most patriotic of moralists and satirists. For the "Biglow Papers" mark a culmination of American humorous and satiric poetry which has never since been rivalled; and the "Fable for ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... this stay in Berlin, I went with a party of fellow-students through Austria to Italy. The whole journey was a delight, and the passage by steamer from Trieste to Venice was made noteworthy by a new acquaintance,—James Russell Lowell. As he had already written the "Vision of Sir Launfal,'' the "Fable for Critics,'' and the "Biglow Papers,'' I stood in great awe of him; but this feeling rapidly disappeared in his genial presence. He was a student like the rest of us,—for he had been passing the winter at Dresden, working ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... rose to be the royal governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish ship, sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... imitating some other maker of verse. But if there be anything in me, it will work itself out in original form. And, after all, the verse-maker is not the inventor of ideas. Adventure on foot is a notion that remounts to the age of fable. Hercules, for instance; that was the way in which he got to heaven, as a foot-traveller. How solitary the world is at this hour! Is it not for that reason that this is of all hours ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... neither breed confusion nor fatigue."—Kames, El. of Crit., i, 266. "Such a clatter of sounds indicate rage and ferocity."—Music of Nature, p. 195. "One of the fields make threescore square yards, and the other only fifty-five."—Duncan's Logic, p. 8. "The happy effects of this fable is worth attending to."—Bailey's Ovid, p. x. "Yet the glorious serenity of its parting rays still linger with us."—Gould's Advocate. "Enough of its form and force are retained to render them uneasy."—Maturin's Sermons, p. 261. "The works of nature, in this respect, is extremely ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... you waited for may have come," said Milburn undauntedly, "even in me; for love often springs from an ambush, nor can you prepare the heart for it like a field. I recollect a fable I read of a god loving a woman, and he burst upon her in a shower of gold; and what was that but a rich man's wooing? We get gold to equalize nobility in women; beauty is luxurious, and demands adornment and a rich setting; the richest man in Princess Anne is not good enough for you, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... disturb Charmian's sleep by revealing her own distress. It was fortunate that she was going early the next morning to seek the aid of Archibius, whom Anukis believed to be the wisest of men; but this by no means soothed her. She knew the fable of the lion and the mouse, which had been told in her home long before the time of the author for whom she was nicknamed, and already more than once she had been in a position to render far greater and more powerful persons an important service. To soothe Charmian ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Goths in that flourishing spot. It is very likely that Billy's first impulse was to boil his egg and eat it; but a moment's reflection convinced him that this would be conduct very like that of the boy in the fable, who slaughtered the goose that laid golden eggs. But how to hatch his egg—for this was what he thought of—became now the question. The good woman of the house noticed that Billy was unusually silent at supper-time, and thought at first that ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... compelled to impose a threefold punishment upon their wives—they were to lose their votes; the children were to receive no more the mother's name; and they themselves were no longer to be called Athenians, after the goddess." It seems to me this fable teaches that physical force was indeed the governing power in Athens at that day, and that men were ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... general plaudits speak the fable o'er, Which mute attention had approv'd before; Though under spirits love th' accustomed jest, Which chases sorrow from the vulgar breast; Still hearts refin'd their sadden'd tints retain— The sigh gives ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... them, I dare say, are false, and I've not the least doubt that Miss Lorton will tell us that the story that she was about to elope with him from Wolfer House one morning, but that she was stopped by Lord Wolfer, is an absurd fable. The story goes that she did not know, until Lord Wolfer told her at the very moment that she and Sir Archie were leaving the house, that Sir Archie was a married man. Now that's the whole affair, and I really think ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... they not seize this famous robber? First of all, she kept on asking her husband about it, and he replied that the whole story about Fatia Negra was only a Wallachian fable. It was true that robberies were committed by men who regularly wore black masks, but it was never one and the same man who was guilty of these misdeeds. Nevertheless the name had won a sort of nimbus of notoriety among the common people, many had made use of it as well as of the mask attaching ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... technical curiosity which spurred Poe and Whitman to experiment with new forms. But Lowell revealed early extraordinary gifts of improvisation, retaining the old tunes of English verse as the basis for his own strains of unpremeditated art. He wrote "A Fable for Critics" faster than he could have written it in prose. "Sir Launfal" was composed in two days, the "Commemoration ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... shadows of our childishness, and they show that we have a long journey before us; and they gain their strength from the fact that we gather them together out of the future like the bundle of sticks in the fable, when we shall have the strength to snap them singly as ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... for the construction of Solomon's temple were sent thither in floats, by Hiram, the king of Tyre, whence they were easily conveyed by land to Jerusalem. Jonah, in his flight from the presence of the Lord, embarked at this port, and gave occasion to the mythological fable of Andromeda. Here the apostle Peter enjoyed that remarkable vision, in which he saw heaven opened, and a great sheet descending to the earth, which seemed to contain every variety of beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air; intimating to him the abolition of the Mosaic ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... ages of misery and darkness this story gained implicit belief; but at length men arose who suspected that it was a fable and imposture, and that Jesus Christ, so far from being a God, was only a man like themselves. But a numerous set of men, who derived and still derive immense emoluments from this opinion, in the shape of a popular belief, told the vulgar that if they did not believe in the Bible ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... would treat it so," replied the King. "Oh, yes—break your sticks one at a time as the wise man did in the fable!" ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... scorn as well as defiance in her voice—scorn because he stood before her so silently; scorn because the fierce torrent of her anger had flowed unchecked. She had only to stand up to him, it seemed, and like the giant of the fable he dwindled to a pigmy. She was no longer hurt by his passivity. She ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... journalism, the art of repeating a name again and again with some ridiculous or evil association. The preparation had begun after the first performance of 'The Shadow of the Glen,' Synge's first play, with an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had taken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but 'from a writer of the Roman decadence.' Some spontaneous dislike had been but natural, ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... those who are equal in birth and in power; and that for men of pre-eminent virtue there is no law—they are themselves a law. Anyone would be ridiculous who attempted to make laws for them: they would probably retort what, in the fable of Antisthenes, the lions said to the hares—'where are your claws?'—when in the council of the beasts the latter began haranguing and claiming equality for all. And for this reason democratic States have instituted ostracism; equality is above all things their aim, and therefore ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... 350 of his work, says, "In her little library she had a Bible, a prayer-book, Shakespeare, and Lowell's 'Fable for the Critics,' with two or three other books." Shirley (p. 100, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... subsided into a feeling of pain and extreme weariness. Youth, invigorated by health and lightness of spirits, requiring soon that what it loses should be immediately restored—youth knows not those endless, sleepless nights which enable us to realize the fable of the vulture unceasingly feeding on Prometheus. In cases where the man of middle life, in his acquired strength of will and purpose, and the old, in their state of natural exhaustion, find incessant augmentation of their bitter sorrow, a young man, surprised by the sudden appearance ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... persons allege that this story has no better foundation than the fable of the poets, that the giant Enceladus, son of Titan and Terra, having offended Jupiter, the infuriated god first felled him with a thunderbolt, and then put Mount Etna as a sort of extinguisher on the top of him—his restlessness underneath fully accounting ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... wheeled round to the same direction with ours, and then came briskly after us. He sets open a window in the coldest day or night, and stands before it. It may do with his constitution; but most people, amongst whom I am one, would say, with the frogs in the fable, 'This may be sport to you; but it is death to us.' It is in vain to try to find a meaning in every one of his particularities, which, I suppose, are mere habits, contracted by chance; of which every man has some that ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... heard him mutter. "It can't be true—the thing I've heard. Only a fable, surely! ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... keep our wits is, that there are so few natural chords between others' voices and this string in our souls, and that those which at first may have jarred a little by and by come into harmony with it.—But I tell you this is no fiction. You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a fable, but what will you say to Mario and the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... enough," said Victoria, unconsciously repeating his words. "But that doesn't explain you," she exclaimed: "You are like nobody I ever met, and you have a supernatural faculty of appearing suddenly, from nowhere, and whisking me away like the lady in the fable, out of myself and the world I live in. If I become so inordinately grateful as to talk nonsense, you mustn't blame me. Try not to think of the number of times I've seen you, or when ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in the services, and elsewhere, that greater privileges grow out of larger responsibilities, and that the latter justifies the former. This is part truth and part fable. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... compartments by Telamones, two feet high, in high relief, and supporting a rich cornice. These are male, as Caryatides are female statues placed to perform the office of pillars. By the Greeks they were named Atlantes, from the well-known fable of Atlas supporting the heavens. Here they are made of terra-cotta, or baked clay, incrusted with the finest marble stucco. Their only covering is a girdle round the loins; they have been painted flesh-color, with black hair and beards; the moulding of the pedestal and the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Pictures of the Floating World Can Grande's Castle Men, Women and Ghosts Sword Blades and Poppy Seed A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (already online) A Critical Fable ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... the little brook We've heard of in the fable, Employ our hearts, our heads and hands, In doing what we're able; Till all Columbia praise our deeds, And nations, o'er the waters, Will tune their harps and chant their song, For ...
— The Snow-Drop • Sarah S. Mower
... tale of an appearance is Lord Brougham's. His Lordship was not reckoned precisely a veracious man; on the other hand, this was not the kind of fable he was likely to tell. He was brought up under the regime of common-sense. "On all such subjects my father was very sceptical," he says. To disbelieve Lord Brougham we must suppose either that he wilfully made a false entry in his diary in 1799, or that in preparing his Autobiography in 1862, he ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... not unwholesome fable of Dr. Faustus, with its rebuke to the mere arrogance of learning, is sound and stringent enough; but it is not a fair sample of the mediaeval soul at its happiest and sanest. The heart of the true Middle ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... years old, contemporary with prehistoric times! I was walking in the very place where contemporaries of early man had walked! My heavy soles were crushing the skeletons of animals from the age of fable, animals that used to take cover in the shade of these trees ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... has taken place in personal reputation. Many of the men on whom the country depended as most likely to prove able defenders in the day of need, have not only discovered to the world their worthlessness, but filled up the fable of the man who leaned upon a reed, by fatally piercing those whom they had betrayed to their fall. Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them brave and true, have shown ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... too, but let that pass: for I must tell thee it will please his Grace, by the world, sometime to lean upon my poor shoulder, and with his royal finger thus dally with my excrement, with my mustachio: but, sweet heart, let that pass. By the world, I recount no fable: some certain special honours it pleaseth his greatness to impart to Armado, a soldier, a man of travel, that hath seen the world: but let that pass. The very all of all is, but, sweet heart, I do implore secrecy, that the King would have me present the princess, sweet chuck, with some ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... and yet in my present pass of horror and despair, it was to these very men that I turned for help. I waylaid upon the stair one of the Mormon missionaries, a man of a low class, but not inaccessible to pity; told him I scarce remember what elaborate fable to explain my application; and by his intermediacy entered into correspondence with my father's family. They recognised my claim for help, and on this very day I was ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... pleasing diversion. As a very young child I was present at two funerals which for special reasons have impressed themselves upon my memory. I had heard much of a widowed sister of my father, supposed to be rich; this proved to be a fable. Her husband had left the bulk of his estate to foreign missions, and only a bare support to his wife. As he had acquired his property by selling liquor it was but natural he should wish to make a restitution in the land of the heathen. The widow, my aunt, ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... Atlantis.'"—Evening Standard. | | | | "We have now the material for forming a very | | fair conception of the fruitful contribution | | made by Crete to Grecian and European | | civilisation. What was long accounted | | fable—statements of Herodotus and | | Thucydides—have been turned into | | established fact. The book supplies material | | for forming judgments on some of the most | | interesting and still highly debated | | problems of ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... or not, and worried themselves over Gaultier de Claubry's stratified layers of the skin, or Breschet's blennogenous and chromatogenous organs. The dartos was a puzzle, the central spinal canal a myth, the decidua clothed in fable as much as the golden fleece. The structure of bone, now so beautifully made out,—even that of the teeth, in which old Leeuwenhoek, peeping with his octogenarian eyes through the minute lenses wrought with his own hands, had long ago seen the "pipes," as he called ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... was once embraced in Windsor Forest, where the Norman laid his broad palm on a space a hundred and twenty miles round, and, like the lion in the fable of the hunting-party, informed his subjects that that was his share. The domain dwindled, as did other royal appurtenances. Yet in 1807 the circuit was as much as seventy-seven miles. In 1789 it embraced sixty thousand acres. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... in the superstitions of Keltic races, in the Mediterranean basin. The dragon of Wantley lived in a well; the Lambton Worm began life in fresh water, and only took to dry land later on. I have elsewhere spoken of the Manfredonia legend of Saint Lorenzo and the dragon, an indigenous fable connected, I suspect, with the fountain near the harbour of that town, and quite independent of the newly-imported legend of Saint Michael. Various springs in Greece and Italy are called Dragoneria; there is a cave-fountain Dragonara ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Dunsinnane the old prejudice broke out. "Sir," said he to Boswell, "Macbeth was an idiot; he ought to have known that every wood in Scotland might be carried in a man's hand. The Scotch, Sir, are like the frogs in the fable: if they had a log, they would make a king of it." We will quote here a stanza which contains quite a serious application of the pun; and for Hood's purpose no other word could so happily or so pungently express his meaning. The poem ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... "The Fable of the Oak and the Violet." In a large garden there grew a fine oak tree, with its wide-spreading branches, and at its foot there grew a sweet and modest violet. The oak one day looked down in scorn upon the violet, and said: "You, poor little thing, will soon be dead and ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... Rome was crooked in her birth, or rather prodigious. Her twins, the patrician and plebeian orders, came, as was shown by the foregoing story, into the world, one body but two heads, or rather two bellies; for, notwithstanding the fable out of AEsop, whereby Menenius Agrippa, the orator that was sent from the Senate to the people at Mount Aventin, showed the fathers to be the belly, and the people to be the arms and the legs (which except that, how slothful soever it might seem, they were nourished, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... because, even while making the discovery, he still hopes vainly that he may yet, in his own person, give the maxim the lie. For ever soaring to the sun, he was for ever realizing the fine Grecian fable of Icarus; and the sea of disappointment into which he perpetually fell, with its tumultuous tides and ever-chafing billows, bearing him on from whirlpool to whirlpool, for ever battling and for ever lost. He was unconscious, as we have ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... whether, if the dead of past ages could revive, they would be able to reconnoitre the events of their own times, as transmitted to us by ignorance and misrepresentation. All very ancient history, except that of the illuminated Jews, is a perfect fable. It was written by priests, or collected from their reports; and calculated solely to raise lofty ideas of the origin of each nation. Gods and demi-gods were the principal actors; and truth is seldom to be expected where the personages are supernatural. The Greek historians have no advantage ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... crown of abundant white hair, was as firm and polished as marble; not a wrinkle ruffled the corner of his eye, and the gem-like lustre of his blue orbs revealed a freshness of soul and an eternal youth such as fable grants to the sea-gods. He displayed his bare arms and muscular neck with an old man's vanity. Never had a gloomy idea, an evil prepossession, or a keen remorse, arisen to disturb his long and peaceful life. He had never ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... feeling by personal merit. The respect of which we speak should, in the strongest degree, be a possession of the immediate occupant, and will naturally become dim,—or perhaps be exaggerated,—in regard to the past, as history or fable may tell of them. No one need hesitate to speak his mind of King John, let him be ever so strong a stickler for the privileges of majesty. But there are degrees of distance, and the throne of which we wish to preserve the dignity seems to be assailed when unmeasured ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... fable they may invent, we should select, and what is not so, we should reject: and we are to prevail on nurses and mothers to repeat to the children such fables as are selected, and fashion their minds by ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... thousand years it would be just the same—nothing would come of it; so I just made up my mind to throw the whole thing up. I don't want you to think that I ever turned against religion. I never did that; nor did I ever set up against those who say that the Bible is only a mixture of history and fable. I did something quite different, and I can't agree with you when you say that we must be either for or against. For here am I, neither for one thing nor the other. On one side are those who have the Bible in their hands, and tell us that it is an ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... literally means the celestial army. This fable seems to be an allegorical representation of the attempts made by Indra to procure a ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the fable of the boys and the frogs with the poor old Dominie, forgetting that what may be sport to ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... scourging was performed; of the grid-iron of Saint Lawrence, and the stone below it, marked with the frying of his fat and blood; these set a shadowy mark on some cathedrals, as an old story, or a fable might, and stop them for an instant, as they flit before me. The rest is a vast wilderness of consecrated buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one with another; of battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the ground, and forced, like giant captives, to support ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... habits and the reconciliation of interests. France is agonizing, that is certain; we are all sick, all corrupt, all ignorant, all discouraged: to say that it was WRITTEN, that it had to be so, that it has always been and will always be, is to begin again the fable of the pedagogue and the child who is drowning. You might as well ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... related of Arthur, he tells us, have been recounted so often that they have become fables. "Not all lies, nor all true, all foolishness, nor all sense; so much have the storytellers told, and so much have the makers of fables fabled to embellish their stories that they have made all seem fable." [4] He omits the prophecies of Merlin from his narrative, because he does not understand them. "I am not willing to translate his book, because I do not know how to interpret it. I would say nothing that was not exactly as I said." [5] ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... widely in the Greek world and in the East, as a preparation for his great task of writing an account of the rise of the Oriental nations and the struggle between Greece and Persia. Herodotus was not a critical historian, diligently sifting truth from fable. Where he can he gives us facts. Where facts are lacking, he tells interesting stories in a most winning style. A much more scientific writer was Thucydides, an Athenian who lived during the epoch of ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... a graceful and all too little known fable by Mr. Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, which gives, I think, not only the relation of Socialism to philosophic Anarchism, but of all discipline to all idealism. It is the story of a beautiful mask that was worn by a ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... King, chuckling greatly over the lad's show of courtliness and ceremony, went into a learned discussion with my lord of Montacute and Master Sandy as to the origin of the snapdragon, which he, with his customary assumption of deep learning, declared was "but a modern paraphrase, my lord, of the fable which telleth how Dan Hercules did kill the flaming dragon of Hesperia and did then, with the apple of that famous orchard, make a fiery dish of burning apple brandy ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... children give little credit to the stork fable and similar stories invented for their mystification, has made an interesting psychological investigation into the real theories which children themselves, as the result of observation and thought, reach concerning the sexual facts of life (S. Freud, "Ueber Infantile Sexualtheorien," Sexual-Probleme, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... kindred. To each of these he dedicated one of his minor poems; to Lady Strange, the Tears of the Muses; to Lady Compton, the Apologue of the Fox and the Ape, Mother Hubberd's Tale; to Lady Carey, the Fable of the Butterfly and the Spider, Muiopotmos. And in each dedication he assumed on their part the recognition ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... says: "It has been the misfortune of churches that they have imagined a primitive condition which never existed. The reluctance to look the facts of history in the face has favored the growth of a vast superstructure of fable." ...
— Water Baptism • James H. Moon
... with the faith in fable which children are able to command, and said, "Oh, tell me about them!" while she pushed up closer to him, and began to admire her presents, holding them up before her, and dwelling fondly ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... King Alfred found us to his sorrow a thousand years ago, very slow to move, even when we see a thing ought to be done. Let us hope that in this matter—we have been so in most matters as yet—we shall be like the tortoise in the fable, and not the hare; and by moving slowly, but surely, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... or Remarks on a book intituled The fable of the bees; or, Private vices publick benefits. London, for W.Mears, ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... the cause of Voltaire's astounding statement: "Plusieurs curieux ont encore le petit livre que ce Chancelier composa en faveur de la Polygamie." On this point Lord Campbell, confidently advancing an opinion which can scarcely command unanimous assent, says, "The fable of the 'Treatise' is evidently taken from the panegyric on 'a plurality of wives,' which Mrs. Manley puts into the mouth of Lord Cowper, in a speech supposed to be addressed by Hernando to Lousia." But whether Voltaire accepted the 'New Atalantis,' or the Examiner, as an authority ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... figure (for I was a small, delicate child), called me up to read to her, and opened the book at the alphabet. Deeply injured, I informed her that I knew my letters, and could read over in 'An old man found a rude boy in one of his apple-trees,'—a fable that all familiar with ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... intelligence is so high, and his principles so low, that there is no scheme which he does not think that he cannot carry out against the established laws of his country. His present tale is a made-up fable." ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... instincts. The individual stands alone confronted by the eternities; between these and his own soul exists the one central relation. This has all the fundamental egotism of the doctrine of personal salvation, emancipated from fable, and varnished with an emotional phrase. The doctrine has been very widely interpreted, and without any forcing, as a religious expression for the conditions ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... surely it needed some refuge! If no saviour had yet come, the tortured world of human hearts cried aloud for one with unutterable groaning! What would Bascombe do if he had committed a murder? Or what could he do for one who had? If fable it were, it was at least a need—invented one—that of a Saviour to whom anyone might go, at any moment, without a journey, without letters or commendations or credentials! And yet no: if it had been invented, it could hardly be by any ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... cor. "Such a clatter of sounds indicates rage and ferocity."—Gardiner cor. "One of the fields makes threescore square yards, and the other, only fifty-five."—Duncan cor. "The happy effects of this fable are worth attending to."—Bailey cor. "Yet the glorious serenity of its parting rays, still lingers with us."—Gould cor. "Enough of its form and force is retained to render them uneasy."—Maturin cor. "The works of nature, in this respect, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... a by-street, very coolly, taking the gauger's horse along with him. The reader may remember the fable of the cat that had been transformed into a lady, and the unfortunate mouse. The Rapparee, whose original propensities were strong as ever, could not, for the soul of him, resist the temptation of selling the ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... are Metaphorical pieces, in which the poet has under his language a different meaning from what it expresses,—a meaning which there should be nothing in that language to indicate. Such a piece may be compared to the sopic fable; but, while it is the object of the fable to inculcate the virtues of morality and prudence, an historical interpretation has to be sought for the metaphorical pieces of the Shih. Generally, moreover, the moral ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... but several Fathers of the Church, regarded physical research as superfluous and absurd, and even as godless. "What happiness shall be mine if I know where the Nile has its source, or what the physicists fable of heaven?" asked Lactantius. And, "Should we not be regarded as insane if we pretended to have knowledge of matters of which we can know nothing? How much more, then, are they to be regarded as raving madmen who imagine that they know the ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... Jews compose the fable that Lamech, when he had grown old and was blind, was led by a youth into the woods to hunt wild beasts, not for the sake of their flesh but for their skins; circumstances which are altogether absurd, and at once prove the whole fable to be a lie. And they hold that Cain was there, concealed among ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... in Aru, and to buy tripang and birds' nests. It is not impossible that something similar to what they related to me really happened when the early Portuguese discoverers first came to Aru, and has formed the foundation for a continually increasing accumulation of legend and fable. I have no doubt that to the next generation, or even before, I myself shall be transformed into a magician or a demigod, a worker of miracles, and a being of supernatural knowledge. They already believe that all the animals I preserve will ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... few days went a long way in Chellaston towards making a stranger, especially if he was a young man with good introduction, feel at home there, and the open friendliness of Chellaston society, acting like the sun in AEsop's fable, had almost made this traveller take off his coat. Had Robert been a person who had formerly agreed with him, it is probable that when the subject was opened, he would have confessed the dubious condition of his heart, and they would together have very carefully ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... there I think party differences in the Church, and even the variations between Christian sects are concerned, both being different ways of viewing the same truth. These may, like the knights in the old fable, find that both were right about the shield, both have the same foundation. But where the foundation is not the same, the results of ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... care that not a leaf remains on that tree by the morning.' The woman understood the metaphor, and in an hour or two, aided by other strapping Zulu females, attacked the unfortunate Basuto and killed him with clubs. But Cetywayo having thus, like the monkey in the fable, employed a cat's paw to do his dirty work, began to think the Basuto's untimely death might have an ugly appearance in my eyes, so gave orders in my presence that, as a punishment, six of the women who had killed the Basuto should also be put to death. This was too ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... properly considered. With all the splendor of versification in the work, it contains but few metres of which the English tongue is not equally capable. Hood has familiarized us with dactylic (triple) rhymes, and they are remarkably abundant and skillful in Mr. Lowell's "Fable for the Critics": even the unrhymed iambic hexameter of the Helena occurs now and then in Milton's Samson Agonistes. It is true that the metrical foot into which the German language most naturally falls is the trochaic, while in ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... | |will find it sustaining is a question that| |would seem to be answered by the | |announcement, just received from the | |Lyric, that the engagement closes next | |Saturday evening. | | | | The fable relates how the Honorable Mrs.| |Bayle discovered that her husband and Lady| |Ensworth had been flirting with peril | |during her absence in Egypt, how she | |blithely threw them much together, with | |the result that they grew intensely weary | |of ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... "Fable indeed!" was the exclamation that greeted him on two sides, on the one from her ladyship, on the other from the neat little maid, the latter crying out how much she had been frightened; that she was still all of a tremble; the ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... Proserpine and her nymphs gathered flowers, was famous for delicious honey; and according to an ancient writer, hounds lost their scent when hunting, in consequence of the odoriferous flowers which perfumed the air; and this may be no fable; for in Spring, as I myself have seen, the flowers are abundant and fragrant beyond description; and it seemed to me that the gardens of Europe had been supplied with two-thirds of their choicest treasures from the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... no one knew. Year after year, like a splendid dream, a glittering procession moved through the streets at dusk of Shrove-Tuesday, representing the fairest myths of fable and the most gorgeous pageants of history. Mrs. Long, who had seen a Roman Carnival, declared it far surpassed in magnificence by that of our own Southern city. And we—lucky, lucky girls that we were!—were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... the soul, "the dawn that the dreamers dread. The sails of light are paling on those unwreckable galleons; the mariners that steer them slip back into fable and myth; that other sea the traffic is turning now at its ebb, and is about to hide its pallid wrecks, and to come swinging back, with its tumult, at the flow. Already the sunlight flashes in the gulfs behind the east of the world; the gods have seen it from their ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... "The demon of curiosity has a hold of you, Molly; remember the fable they made us repeat: De loin c'est quelque chose, et de pres ce n'est rien. Now you shall go straight into your bed, and ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... with his inseparable friend the Prince of the Peace is well known. Napoleon, who had undertaken to be arbiter between the father and son, thought the best way of settling the difference was to give the disputed throne to his brother Joseph, thus verifying the fable of the "Two Lawyers and the Oyster." The insurrection in Madrid on the 2d of May accelerated the fate of Ferdinand, who was accused of being the author of it; at least this suspicion fell ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... story of the stolen Proserpina is itself an afterthought, a fable invented to explain the Mysteries; and, however much it may have modified them in detail, certainly could not have been their ground. Nor is the sorrowing Demeter herself adequate to the solution. For the Eleusinia are older than Eleusis,—older than Demeter, even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... have set down, Only for this meridian, fit to be known Of your crude traveller.... First, for your garb, it must be grave and serious, Very reserv'd and lock'd; not tell a secret On any terms; not to your father: scarce A fable, but with caution: make sure choice Both of your company, and discourse; beware You never speak a truth— PEREGRINE. How! SIR P. Not to strangers, For those be they you must converse with most; Others I would not know, sir, but at distance, So as I still might be a saver in them: ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... me a sight of one of the remarkable Cretan women, whose reputation for beauty I had always regarded, judging from the women in the cities, as a classical fable. I had been making a visit to the mudir of the province through which we were passing, and, after pipes and coffee, and the usual ceremonies, I mounted my horse, and, at the head of my escort, rode out of the mudir's courtyard, when my eye was ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... his memory in vain for this "actress's" name and fame. Could it be possible, he wondered, at this late day, that any one would try for publicity by such an obvious worn-out road? Hardly. The answer was simple. Another fable was being spun from whole cloth beneath the roof of Baldpate Inn. "We have a New York paper here," he went on, "but as yet there seems to be no news ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... you I believed in God as firmly as any girl believed; but you laughed me out of my faith, and proved to me what a string of lies and folly it all was; and then I believed in you as firmly as before I had believed in God, and I knew that Christianity was a fable." ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... union was left; and each man stood alone, proud of his "individuality"—his complete social isolation; till he discovered that, in ridding himself of superiors, he had rid himself also of fellows; fulfilling, every man in his own person, the old fable of the bundle of sticks; and had to submit, under the Consulate and the Empire, to a tyranny to which the Ancien Regime was ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... world, no more? Return, thou virgin-bloom on Nature's face; Ah, only on the Minstrel's magic shore, Can we the footstep of sweet Fable trace! The meadows mourn for the old hallowing life; Vainly we search the earth of gods bereft; Where once the warm and living shapes were rife, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Phaeton Matthew Prior The Lure John Boyle O'Reilly The Female of the Species Rudyard Kipling The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue William Watson Suppose Anne Reeve Aldrich Too Candid by Half John Godfrey Saxe Fable Ralph Waldo Emerson Woman's Will Unknown Woman's Will John Godfrey Saxe Plays Walter Savage Landor Remedy Worse than the Disease Matthew Prior The Net of Law James Jeffrey Roche Cologne Samuel Taylor Coleridge Epitaph on Charles II John Wilmot Certain Maxims of Hafiz Rudyard Kipling A Baker's ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... series, MacFlecknoe, is Dryden's masterpiece of satiric irony; a purely personal attack upon his rival, Shadwell, "Crowned King of Dulness, and in all the realms of nonsense absolute". Finally, the Hind and the Panther represents a new development of the "satiric fable". Dryden gave to British satire the impulse towards that final form of development which it received from the great satirists of the next century. There is little that appears in Swift, Addison, Arbuthnot, Pope, or even Byron, for which the way was ...
— English Satires • Various
... or allusion to a well known passage in literature or a fact of history. Examples: Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, we Sinais climb and know it not. (Reference to Moses on Mt. Sinai). He received the lion's share of the profits. (Reference to the fable of the lion's share). Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed by a kiss. (Reference to the betrayal ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... which he had originally lived. Now this process of re-scription and personal rectification, pursued by various individual sages from time to time, had the effect of preventing our history from degenerating into absolute fable." ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... something and does not know how to save his soul, does not yet know what it is most important to know. Those who know many things without knowing themselves, and without knowing God in the manner in which even in this present life he can be known and desires to be known, resemble the giants in the fable, who piled up mountains and then buried ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... and notions, are all the discourses of our LORD—conveyed in parable, or similitude, what easy access do they win to the heart, through the medium of the delighted imagination! speaking of heavenly things in fable, or in simile, drawn from earth, from objects ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... a rich man finds in entering into the kingdom of heaven; and, combining all these denunciations against opulence, let us heartily congratulate one another upon our lucky escape from the calamity of a twenty or thirty thousand pound prize! The fox in the fable, who accused the unattainable grapes of sourness, was more of a philosopher than we are generally willing to allow. He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy which turns everything to gold, and converts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... poem of essential worldly wisdom, to be bracketed with Browning's equally oracular "The Statue and the Bust," fable ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Old fable tells us, that this gentle spirit sprung from the box of Pandora, else crammed with evils; but these were unseen and null, while all admired the inspiriting loveliness of young Hope; each man's heart became her home; she was enthroned ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... remarkable passage in Plut., 'de plac. Philos.', ii., 13, runs thus: "Anaxagoras teaches that the surrounding ether is a fiety substance, which, by the power of its rotation, tears rocks from the earth, inflames them, and converts them into stars." Applying an ancient fable to illustrate a physical dogma, the Clazomenian appears to have ascribed the fall of the Nem¾an Lion to the Peloponnesus from the Moon to such a rotatory or centrifugal force. (®lian., xii., 7; Plut., 'de Facie in Orge Lun¾' c. 24; Schol. ex Cod. Paris., in 'Apoll. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... starched by fairy laundresses. With a cry of delight Sheila jumped off her horse, tied him by his reins to a tree, and began gathering flowers with all the eager concentration of a six-year-old. And, like all the flower-gatherers of fable from Proserpina down, she found herself the victim of disaster. When she came back to the road with a useless, already perishing mass of white, the pony had disappeared. Her knot had been unfaithful. Quietly that mild-nosed, pensive-eyed, round-bodied animal had pulled himself free and ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... There's a fable of Grimm's about a man without a shadow, a man who's lost his shadow. And that's his punishment for something. I never could understand how it was a punishment. But a woman must dislike being ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... than of their setting—a too preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse. I might envy, though I couldn't emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make out his agents afterwards: I could think so little of any situation that didn't depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their way of ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... The fable about a Prince of Baden had not a single shred of evidence in its favour. It is true that the Grand Duchess was too ill to be permitted to see her dead baby, in 1812, but the baby's father, grandmother, and aunt, with the ten Court physicians, the nurses ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... Decorations might be very limited, but champagne was as essential as music! Cotillion favors were also an important item which no longer exists; and champagne has gone its way with nectar, to the land of fable, so that if you eliminate elaborate decorations, ball-giving is not half the expense it ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... subdued by the Persians, sent messengers to Cyrus at Sardis, desiring to be his subjects on the same terms as they had been subjects of Croesus. And when he heard that which they proposed to him, he spoke to them a fable, saying that a certain player on the pipe saw fishes in the sea and played on his pipe, supposing that they would come out to land; but being deceived in his expectation, he took a casting-net and enclosed ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... Ministers endeavouring to take advantage of the difference between his opinion and that of the First Consul; and it must be owned that the utter ignorance of the police respecting this event was a circumstance not very favourable to Fouche. He, however, was like the reed in the fable—he bent with the wind, but was soon erect again. The most skilful actor could scarcely imitate the inflexible calmness he maintained during Bonaparte's paroxysm of rage, and the patience with which he ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... was of the opinion that the light waves were themselves electric currents, and whether this is the actual fact or not, certainly it is true that the electro-magnetic theory of light is no mere fable or myth, but that it ranks as one of the most advanced and correct hypotheses in regard to light that has ever been given to the world. According to that theory, which we shall look at subsequently, ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... aghast! Just then Alfred felt, he could scarcely tell why, Within him the sudden strange sense that some eye Had long been intently regarding him there,— That some gaze was upon him too searching to bear. He rose and look'd up. Was it fact? Was it fable? Was it dream? Was it waking? Across the green table, That face, with its features so fatally known— Those eyes, whose deep gaze answer'd strangely his own What was it? Some ghost from its grave come again? Some cheat of a feverish, fanciful brain? Or was it herself with those ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... Hampton Court is that from first to last it lies in an air clearer of fable or tradition than that which involves most other seats of power. For we do like to know what we are dealing with, in the past as in the present, and in proportion as we are ourselves real, we love reality in other people, whether they still live or whether ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... salutary remedies. But the most eager search of Arabian chemistry was the transmutation of metals, and the elixir of immortal health: the reason and the fortunes of thousands were evaporated in the crucibles of alchemy, and the consummation of the great work was promoted by the worthy aid of mystery, fable and superstition.'' It may be noted that the word "alembic'' is derived from the Greek ambix, "cup,'' with the Arabic article prefixed, and that the instrument is figured in the MSS. of some of the Greek ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... quartered on Rock Street. On the assumption that the men were misinformed as to the merits of the quarrel, it was proposed that they be interviewed. To do that was to cross the line and enter the enemy's territory. It was not unlike the query of the rats in the fable, Who shall bell the cat? I was solicited, and, learning I had friends in the company, consented to go. Going south on Center Street to cross the line by a circuitous route, I reached Rock Street, and nearly the rendezvous. But the "best laid plans of men and mice oft gang a glee." ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... gladness, with contented love, was certain to reflect heart-sunshine. On the other hand, there was Mr. Drummond! To be glad and sorry in a breath was as provoking to a feeling woman as the traveller's blowing hot and cold was to the satyr in the fable. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... awe, and he gazed upon me with a kindly smile. Then he commenced examining me about my studies, and finally he drew a volume of La Fontaine's 'Fables' from his pocket, opened the book and asked me to translate the fable on the page he showed me. I did so—but when he afterward was going to praise me for the skill with which I had rendered it, I told him it was but yesterday that I had translated the same fable under the supervision of my teacher. A gentle smile immediately lighted up his face, ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... were led into the ring, and one acted the gardener of the fable, went on a hunting trip, waltzed, took off its hat, and played dead. After this performance came the donkey. But it defended itself well; its kicks sent the dogs flying through the air like balloons; with its tail between its legs and its ears back, it ran around the ring trying ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... discourses fully on that head. It is not a little amusing that Wilkins should have been seriously accused of plagiarizing Godwin, Wilkins writing in earnest, or nearly so, and Godwin writing fiction. It may serve to show philosophers how very near pure speculation comes to fable. From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step: which is the sublime, and which the ridiculous, every one must settle for himself. With me, good fiction is the sublime, and bad speculation the ridiculous. The number of bishops in my list is small. I might, had I possessed the book, have opened ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... resolution. My heart is full of pity, and of dread for some women here, who admit their guilt, yet have sought no pardon from the Maker their sins insult. Sick souls cry out to me louder than dying bodies; and who dare deny me the privilege of ministering to both? The parable of the sparrows is no fable to me; and if, while trying to comfort my unhappy associates here, God calls me out of this dark stony vineyard, His will alone overrules all; and I can meet His face in peace. We say: 'Lord what wilt Thou have us to do?' and when the answer comes, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... on the lawn! But it really is a great worry. They must all begin digging, and keep on until they find something definite. It will be good for the shrubbery and the plantation, like the silly old man in the parable—no, I mean fable—who pretended he had hidden a treasure. Oh, Jim, don't look so distressed. I ought not to pour out all these trivial things to you; but since I have known Michael is coming back, my mind seems to have become foolish and trivial again. Michael always has that effect upon me; because—though he himself ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... tedium of Madame d'Arnim's book," he added, "is easily discoverable by a soul that loves. Goethe did not love Bellina. Put a big stone in Goethe's place—the Sphinx no power has ever been able to wrest from its desert sand—and Bellina's letters are understandable. Unlike Pygmalion's fable, the more Bellina writes, the more petrified Goethe becomes, the more glacial his letters. True, if Bellina had perceived that her sheets were falling upon granite, and if she had abandoned herself to rage ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... the narrative is quite true, the same subject had been dealt with by most of the old story-tellers prior to her time, and Deslongchamps points out the same incidents even in the early Hindoo fables (see the Pantcha Tantra, book I., fable vi.). A similar tale is to be found in the Gesta Romanorum (cap. cxxii.), in the fabliaux collected by Legrand d'Aussy (vol. iv., "De la mauvaise femme"), in P. Alphonse's Disciplina Clericalis (fab. vii.), in the Decameron ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... priests, the Hierophants of the sanctum sanctorum of the old temples, under the guise of religious fables, it may not be amiss to search for universal truths even under the patches of fiction's harlequinade. This fable about the Pleiades, the seven Sisters, Atlas, and Hercules exists identical in subject, though under other names, in the sacred Hindu books, and has likewise the same occult meaning. But then like the Ramayana "borrowed from the Greek Iliad" and the Bhagavat-Gita and Krishna plagiarized ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... all too little known fable by Mr. Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, which gives, I think, not only the relation of Socialism to philosophic Anarchism, but of all discipline to all idealism. It is the story of a beautiful mask that was worn by a man in love, until he tired even of that much ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... himself; and he was well advanced in it before he was sixteen years of age. His memory and his imagination must both have served him well; for he not only acquired a style fit for narrative, exposition, or argument, but also learned to use the fable, parable, paraphrase, proverb, and dialogue. The third element in his education was writing for publication; he began very early, while he was still a young boy, to put all he had learned to use in writing for the press. When ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... very fierce assault that they had to endure. In the first place there was such a shower of darts and stones and arrows that the very light of the sun itself was darkened, a thing which I had always before judged to be a fable, but saw that day to be possible. The greater part of them, it is true, fell without effect to the ground, for of twenty missiles scarce one served its purpose, but some were not cast in vain. As for the number, they lay so thick upon the ground that a man ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... regarded as a just reward for his atrocious massacre. Jotham, the only one who is said to have escaped, boldly appeared on Mount Gerizim and denounced the ingratitude of the townsmen towards the legitimate sons of the man who had saved them from Midian. "Jotham's fable'' of the trees who desired a king may be foreign to the context; it is a piece of popular lore, and cannot be pressed too far: the nobler trees have no wish to rule over others, only the bramble ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... be avoided, as much as possible, in moral education; for prohibitions may often become the cause of greater immorality, than they were intended to prevent. The fable of the hen, whose very prohibition led her chickens to the fatal well, has often been realized in life, there is a certain curiosity in human nature to look into things forbidden. If Quaker youth should have the same desires in this respect as others, they cannot gratify them ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... very much doubt it. I am a child in these matters. I had only seen a chicken in its wild state once or twice before we came down here. I had never dreamed of being an active assistant on a real farm. The whole thing began like Mr. George Ade's fable of the author. An author—myself—was sitting at his desk trying to turn out something that could be converted into breakfast food, when a friend came in and sat down on the table and told him to go right on and not ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... Amerinus, with all his misfortunes, injustices, and miseries, is now to us no more than the name of a fable; but to those who know it, the fable is, I think, more attractive than ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... lands where people walked about with their heads hanging downwards, and their feet exactly opposite to those of Europeans, was too much for some of the scribes who debated "about it and about." The Greek, Cosmas Indicopleustes, denounced the "old wives' fable of Antipodes," and asked how rain could be said to "fall," as in the Scriptures, in regions where it would have to "come up"* (* The Christian Topography of Cosmas, translated by J.W. McCrindle, page 17 (Hakluyt Society).) Some would have it that a belief in Antipodes ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... times, pointing out the evils and dangers connected with them, and dwelling specially on neglected truths. It is not surprising that the first class are by far the most popular. The public is much like Narcissus in the fable, who fell in love with his own reflection in the water. All men like to find their own opinions expressed with a power and eloquence they cannot themselves attain, and most men dislike a writer who, in the first flush of a great enthusiasm, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... your cunning head; do not deny with your smooth lips, which once uttered the death-sentence of Louis XVI., and which now are used to teach a fool and a pretender that he is the son of the murdered king. Truly, it is ridiculous. The regicide wants to atone for his offence by hatching a fable, and making a king out of ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... replied, that if I thought it necessary to submit to be cheated he could make no objection, except where it might come under his cognizance, and then he must take the liberty to remonstrate, or to give up his agency to some of the many, who could play better than he could the part of the dog in the fable, pretending to guard ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... and stories appeared everywhere. The more ignorant of these story-tellers produced the fable, and the educated monks produced the simple, crude and disjointed tales. The Gesta Romanorum is a wonderful storehouse of these mediaeval stories. In the Decameron Boccaccio deals with traditional and contemporary materials. He is a born story-teller and presents many interesting ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... work of time; and the nature of Addison and Goldsmith at least was too genial to allow of any approach to it. But, with all their difference of temperament, the method of the earlier critics is hardly to be distinguished from that of Johnson. There is the same orderliness of treatment—first the fable, then the characters, lastly the sentiment and the diction; the same persistency in applying general rules to a matter which, above all others, is a law to itself; the same invincible faith in "the indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism". It is this that, in spite ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... memory could not die. Lethe was only a fable of the olden times. A place of safety is not always a place of freedom from pain. It could not be so in this instance. Yet, for a time, like the exhausted prisoner borne back from torture to his cell, the ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... a devil dance of his own in the smoke-clouds; the gong is ringing, cymbals clashing, onlookers shouting; the tresses of the women have fallen down and in the half-light look like black snakes writhing in torture; the women themselves are as mad as the Bacchantes and Menads of old fable: in a word, ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... a poor tinker," said I; "but I may never have undergone what you have. You remember, perhaps, the fable of the fox who had ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... rhadiourgos, panourgos, kakourgos]. Cf. Liddell and Linwood, s. v. The interpretation and derivation of the etym. magn. [Greek: ho ton anthropon plastes], is justly rejected by Dindorf, who remarks that AEschylus paid no attention to the fable respecting Prometheus being the ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... family picture with his wife "as the Virgin" and himself "as St. George"): and a good anatomical study of a human body as Argus. In the days of Rubens, you must remember, mythology was thought of as a mere empty form of compliment or fable, and the original meaning of it wholly forgotten. Rubens never dreamed that Argus is the night, or that his eyes are stars; but with the absolutely literal and brutal part of his Dutch nature supposes the head of Argus full of real eyes all over, and represents Hebe cutting them out with ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... however, always brings relief. Experience shows that every effort comes at its proper time, and that there is variety or rest in the intervals. People who have to wash and dress every morning have other things to do in the after part of the day; and, as the old fable tells us, the clock that has to tick, before it is worn out, so many millions of times, as it perplexes the mind to think of, has exactly the same number of seconds to do it in; so that it never has more ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... summer weather, and I shall think of them whenever the thermometer registers eighty-nine. Don't you see the advantage of that? I believe I can ultimately get some literature out of them. If I can think of a fitting fable for them Fulkerson will feature it in Every Other Week. He'll get out a Saratoga number, and come up here and strike the hotels ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... which had led to this, though not resentfully, for she had too much staunchness of heart to decry a parent's misdirected zeal. Had the clanship feeling been universally as strong as in the Chickerel family, the fable of the well-bonded fagot might have ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... characterization. We can guess at the tragic intensity of human sorrow from the difference between the simple-minded little Marshal who acts as Master of the Revels in arranging a 'show' and illustrates his reason for preferring Horatio's claim to be Balthazar's captor by quaint parallels from some old fable, and the arch-deceiver who can converse easily with the Duke of Castile as he fixes up the curtain that is to conceal Horatio's corpse and be the background to the murder of the duke's only son and ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... welcome a foreigner of modest condition, provided he speaks and thinks like themselves upon two or three capital questions, has a profound veneration for certain time-honoured lumber, and curses heartly certain innovations. You must show them the white paw of the fable, if you wish them to open ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... reply, that the story of the astrologer reminded him of "one he had heard in his youth;" that is to say, as the Introduction explains, from this MacKinlay; but Mr. Train has, since his friend's death, recovered a rude Durham ballad, which in fact contains a great deal more of the main fable of Guy Mannering than either his own written, or MacKinlay's oral edition of the Gallovidian anecdote had conveyed; and—possessing, as I do, numberless evidences of the haste with which Scott drew ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... could scarce have been born of mortal parents. His body was bare, but round his neck was a glistening chain of marvellously wrought gold, fastened to which was this gem lying on his breast. This was doubtless the origin of the Hebrew fable of the finding of Moses, who, as all scholars know, was not a Hebrew, but an Egyptian priest ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... little collection from his 240 Fables is meant, first of all, for children. In assembling it no Fable was admitted that has not been approved by generations of the young and old. No apologue addressed to the mature intelligence alone, or framed to fit the society of his ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... the Jatakas, from the Bidpai, and from the more recent collections—I have selected those stories which throw most light on the origin of fable and folk-tales, and at the same time are most likely to ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... gardens, the magnificent water-view of Genoa, failed to charm,—"I saw, not felt, how beautiful they were." Only at Naples have I found my Italy, and here not till after a week's waiting,—not till I began to believe that all I had heard in praise of the climate of Italy was fable, and that there is really no spring anywhere except in the imagination of poets. For the first week was an exact copy of the miseries of a New England spring; a bright sun came for an hour or two in the morning, just to coax you forth without your cloak, and then came ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... but a deputy-marshal on his way to Asheville. Not knowing the official position of his visitor, von Rittenheim sold him a quart of whisky of his own vintage. Whereupon, like all other chilled vipers that have been warmed by this or other means, even from the far days of fable, the beast retaliated. He returned the next day ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... wolf in the fable appreciated the kindness of the crane. Why not thank him with the same simplicity with which he served you. You are a real wolf; you are for ever disparaging, detracting, or blaming someone, either from ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... welcome to them which would taint his reputation. Cleopatra herself favored the story, and afterward produced a child, whom she named Caesarion. Oppius, Caesar's most intimate friend, proved that the child could not have been his—of course, therefore, that the intrigue was a fable; and the boy was afterward put to death by Augustus as an impostor. No one claims immaculate virtue for Caesar. An amour with Cleopatra may have been an accident of his presence in Alexandria. But to suppose that such a person as Caesar, with the concerns of the world upon his hands, would ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... concerned, things are merely groups of actual and potential reactions on our own part, that is to say of expectations which experience has linked together in more or less stable groups. The practical man and the man of science in my fable, were both of them dealing with Things: passing from one group of potential reaction to another, hurrying here, dallying there, till of the actual aspect of the landscape there remained nothing in their thoughts, trams and funiculars in the future, volcanoes and icecaps in the ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... hardly be shown that the novel is not a drama, not a history, nor fable, nor any sort of philosophical treatise. It may have sentences, paragraphs, or perhaps chapters, in every style and of the highest excellence, as a shapeless architectural pile may rejoice in some exquisite features or ornaments; but combined passages, though they ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... near to the village the old men and the women began to meet them, and now a scene ensued that proved the fallacy of the old fable of Indian apathy and stoicism. Parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters met with the most rapturous expressions of joy; while wailings and lamentations were heard from the relatives of the killed and wounded. The procession, however, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... literature be examined, it will be found that it deals with things as opposed to ideas; incidents as opposed to propositions. Sometimes, it is true, the author of a story is in reality dealing with ideas. In the fable about "The Hare and the Tortoise," the tortoise stands for the idea of slow, steady plodding; while the hare is the representative of quick wits which depend on their ability to show a brilliant burst of speed when called ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... to a regular examination of the tragedy before us, in which I shall treat separately of the Fable, the Moral, the Characters, the Sentiments, and the Diction. And first ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... this string in our souls, and that those which at first may have jarred a little by and by come into harmony with it.—But I tell you this is no fiction. You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a fable, but what will you say to Mario and the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... part of the painful economies of half a century in the Northwest-Passage Tunnel. After a somewhat animated discussion with this gentleman, a few days since, I expanded, on the audi alteram partem principle, something which he happened to say by way of illustration, into the following fable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... Plutarch, in his life of Crassus, tells us that after the defeat of Carhes (Carrhae?) some Milesiacs were found in the baggage of the Roman prisoners. The Greek text; and the Latin translation have long been lost. The only surviving fable is the tale of Cupid and Psyche,[FN1] which Apuleius calls 'Milesius sermo,' and it makes us deeply regret the disappearance of the others." Besides this there are the remains of Apollodorus and Conon, and a few traces to be found in ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... sometimes he has thought, as some People Fable of the Platonick Year, that after such a certain Revolution of Time, all Things are Transacted over again, and the same People live again, are the fame Fools, Knaves, Philosophers and Mad-men they were before, tho' without any Knowledge of, or Retrospect to what they acted before; so why should ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint[6] of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... live much in London seem to me to have tasted the lotus which, according to the fable of old, induced forgetfulness of the past, so wholly are they engrossed by the present, and by the vortex in ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... hay left by his companions. The musketeer sifted all he possibly could out of the host, whom he found cunning, mistrustful, and devoted, body and soul, to M. Fouquet. In order not to awaken the suspicions of this man, he carried on his fable of being a probable purchaser of some salt-mines. To have embarked for Belle-Isle at Roche-Bernard would have been to expose himself still further to comments which had, perhaps, been already made, and would be carried to ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... rule them. They wish to honor themselves through their master; they elevate him on their shoulders as on a pedestal; they surround him with a halo of light, in order that some of it may be reflected upon themselves. It is still the fable of the dog who contents himself with the chain and collar, so that they ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... they were that Gotland should fall to Sweden, welcomed any movement intended to root out this impediment to the Baltic trade, and raised no opposition when Gustavus offered, in the winter of 1524, to attack the island in the coming spring. The attitude of Fredrik to Gustavus recalls the fable of the monkey and the cat. The Danish king hoped ultimately to secure the chestnuts for himself, but in the mean time was not sorry to see an army gathering in Sweden to bear the brunt of the assault. ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... wonderful appear possible, and creating in the mind a pleasing interest, they may both surprise and entertain; which cannot be effected where no regard is paid to probability. I have never yet found a regular, well-connected fable in any of our books of chivalry—they are all inconsistent and monstrous; the style is generally bad; and they abound with incredible exploits, lascivious amours, absurd sentiment, and miraculous adventures; in short, they should ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... be put between two empty dishes, and the cook should be recompensed with the jingling of the poor man's money, as he was satisfied with the smell of the cook's meat." This is affirmed by credible writers as no fable, but an undoubted truth.—FULLER'S Holy State, lib. iii. c. ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... lest we act as he did in the fable, who stood watch in the lighthouse, and gave to the poor in the cabins about him the oil of the mighty lanterns that served to illumine the sea. Every soul in its sphere has charge of a lighthouse, for which there is more or less need. The humblest mother who allows her whole life to ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... more lively illustration of the principle here insisted upon, if I recall to the reader's recollection the legend of the Seven Sleepers. The scene of that popular fable was placed in the two centuries which elapsed between the reign of the emperor Decius and the death of Theodosius the younger. In that interval of time (between the years 249 and 450 of our era) the union of the Roman empire had been dissolved, and some ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... in Syracuse pleased themselves with the fable that their fountain, Arethusa, had been a Grecian nymph, who, like themselves, had crossed the sea to Sicily. The poetry of Theocritus, read or sung in sultry Alexandria, must have seemed like a new welling up of ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... of those confused moments, deafening, blinding, filled with violence and rage and din—an eternity in semblance, a second in duration—that can never be traced, never be recalled; yet in whose feverish excitement men do that which, in their calmer hours, would look to them a fable of ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... page 350 of his work, says, "In her little library she had a Bible, a prayer-book, Shakespeare, and Lowell's 'Fable for the Critics,' with two or three other books." Shirley (p. 100, post) says ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... front of them a frightful monster ran across their path, which seemed so hideous to Martin, that his mind instantly reverted to the fable of Saint George and the Dragon, and he almost expected to see fire issuing from its mouth. It was a huge lizard, with a body about three feet long, covered with bright scales. It had a long, thick tail. Its head was clumsy and misshapen, ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... Pauline would be in my room, in her shabby dress, but her slightest movement revealed her slender figure in its attractive grace, in spite of the coarse materials that she wore. As with the heroine of the fable of 'Peau-d'Ane,' a dainty foot peeped out of the clumsy shoes. But all her wealth of girlish beauty was as lost upon me. I had laid commands upon myself to see a sister only in Pauline. I dreaded lest ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... dyspeptic constitutes an extremely frequent variety. Dyspeptics rarely complain of suffering from the stomach; many of them will even say to you that their stomach is excellent. But let us remember the old fable of Menenius Agrippa: The whole organism suffers when the stomach ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... dearly loved fable and allegory. Argument or truth, dressed out in such fanciful garb, gained double force and acceptance. We may not be able to follow a poet in his wanderings; his local allusions may obscure to us much of his meaning; ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... Though fast youth's glorious fable flies, View not the world with worldling's eyes; Nor turn with weather of the time. Foreclose the coming of surprise: Stand where Posterity shall stand; Stand where the Ancients stood before, And, dipping in lone founts thy hand, Drink of the never-varying ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... wagged a melancholy head, "you've got the Golden Bride! Keep her if you can. That's a pretty fable of your father's. I gave him the idea, though. Austin filches a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... railroad, and become the carriers to a great extent for Europe. But this is but a portion of the advantage of this work. Our western mountains are almost literally mountains of gold and silver. In them the Arabian fable of Aladdin is realized.... Let the road be completed, and the comforts as well as the necessaries furnished by Asia, the manufactures of Europe, and the productions of the States can be brought by the iron horse almost to the miner's door; and in the production ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... to every Body. But besides this fabulous Device, which is a sufficient Instance of their Wickedness and Malice, I think it worth my while to add a remarkable Letter of Pope Stephen, adapted to the foregoing Fable; by which we may make a judgment of the Madness and folly of that old crafty Knave. This Letter is extant in Rhegino, a Benedictine Monk, and Abbot of Prunay, [Footnote: Abbot Pruniacensis] an irrefragable Testimony in an Affair of this Nature; ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... blamed me for having presumed to travel in Switzerland, but made it the greatest proof of his indulgence to keep silence on the crime I had committed, in setting my foot on the territory of the French empire. I might have said, in the words of Lafontaine's fable: ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... of {Discordianism}, often invoked by hackers to explain why authoritarian hierarchies screw up so reliably and systematically. The effect of the SNAFU principle is a progressive disconnection of decision-makers from reality. This lightly adapted version of a fable dating back to the early ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... if the great and glorious spirits of the olden ages were greeting me with this laurel which came from the grave of one of their greatest poets. My sister sends it to me, accompanied by some beautiful verses of her own. An old fable says that these laurels grew spontaneously upon Virgil's grave, and that they are indestructible. May this be a blessed omen for me! I greet you, Virgil's holy shadow! I bow down before you, and kiss in all humility your ashes, which ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... and knights in armor—silent, lonely. The effect was quite different from the old Gothic ruins I had seen. This spoke of courts, of princes; and the pride and grandeur of the past, contrasted with the silence and desertion, reminded me of the fable of the city of enchantment, where king and court were smitten to stone as they stood. A mournful lion's head attracted my attention, it had such a strange, sad look; and there was a fountain broken ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Fables with his Life in English, French and Latin, 'illustrated with One hundred and twelve Sculptures' and 'Thirty One New Figures representing his Life', by Francis Barlow, the celebrated draughtsman of birds and animals. Each plate to the Life has a quatrain appended, and each fable with its moral is versified beneath the accompanying picture. In his brief address to the Reader Barlow writes: 'The Ingenious Mrs. A. Behn has been so obliging as to perform the English Poetry, which in short comprehends the Sense of the Fable and Moral; Whereof to say ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... remarkable keeping properties (which would appear to depend on the aromatic substances which it contains), that a myth has arisen that it will keep for ever. The fable finds many believers even in scientific circles; thus W.H. Johnson, in the Imperial Institute Handbook on Cocoa, states that: "When pure, it has the peculiar property of not becoming rancid, however long it may be kept." Whilst this overstates the case, we find that under suitable ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... had elaborated the fable I had begun to tell in the corridor without. I had it ready now: it was thin, but it ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... jar, Clubfoot tucked it under his arm tenderly and walked out erect, just as in the old days he was wont to walk away from a farmyard with a calf or a pig under each arm. It has been said of him that he could carry off a steer in that fashion, but probably that is an exaggeration or even a fable. ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... cage" in which Bajazet was imprisoned by Timur, so long and so often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected as a fable by the modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity. They appeal with confidence to the Persian history of Sherefeddin Ali, according to which has been given to our curiosity in a French version, and from which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 574), and with Mitford's Greece (Don Juan, Canto XII. stanza xix. line 7). Hence his knowledge of Aristomenes. The thought expressed in lines 5-11 was, possibly, suggested by Coleridge's translation of the famous passage in Schiller's Piccolomini (act ii. sc. 4, lines 118, sq., "For fable is Love's world, his home," etc.), which is quoted by Sir Walter Scott, in the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Industry is crippled, honest toil is robbed, and even beggary is taxed to defray the expenses of Christian murder. There must be some other way to reform this world. We have tried creed and dogma, and fable, and they have failed—and they have failed in ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the Titans and had fallen back on the spot from whence they were torn up. It is indeed very probable that this volcano which vomited forth rocks and stones in a very remote age, gave rise to the Fable of the war between Jupiter and the Giants; just as the volcanos in Sicily and Stromboli gave rise to the story of the Cyclops with one eye (the crater) in their forehead. But the mountain of Radicofani must have been a volcano anterior even to Aetna; it presents ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... abundant cheap supply, firstly, of English and French books, in English and French, but in the Russian character, by means of which Russians may rapidly learn French and English—for it is quite a fable that these languages are known and used in Russia below the level of the court and aristocracy—and, secondly, of Russian books in the Latin (or some easy phonetic development of the Latin) type, will do ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... old father, who, by the way, is almost at the end of his tale. So, when this old chest flashed its bewildering dazzle upon us, we, being poor folk, were not more dazzled than afraid. For—like the poor man in the fable—such good fortune was all too likely to be our undoing, should it come to the ears of the great, or the indigent criminal. The 'great' in our thought was, I am ashamed to say, the sacred British Treasury, by an ancient law of which, forty per cent. ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... the labours of the fields into holidays; I see the young couple in the midst of the rustic sports which they have revived, and I hear the shouts of joy and the blessings of those about them. Men say the golden age is a fable; it always will be for those whose feelings and taste are depraved. People do not really regret the golden age, for they do nothing to restore it. What is needed for its restoration? One thing only, and that is an impossibility; we must love the ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... pins, the Sermons of Mr. Peden, or the Life of Jack the Giant-Queller, (not Killer, as usually erroneously written and pronounced.—See my essay on the true history of this worthy, where real facts have in a peculiar degree been obscured by fable.) In short, all in the village were under the necessity of doing something which they would rather have left undone, excepting Captain Doolittle, who walked every morning in the open street, which formed the high mall of our village, in a blue coat with a red neck, and played at whist the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... Pilate and make our moan, Have done, and dwell not long. [They go to Pilate. Pilate, yonder is a false table, Thereon is written naught but fable, Of Jews he is not king, He calls him so, but he not is, It is falsely written, I wis, This is a ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... drew a long breath. He remembered in a vague sort of way the stories which used to be told of the terrible Apulian spider, but he had consigned them to the limbo of medical fable where so many fictions have clothed themselves with a local habitation and a name. He looked into the round eyes and wide pupils a little anxiously, as if he feared that she was in a state of undue excitement, but, true to his professional training, ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... abnormal shape and his absorption in business it had been easy for him to miss what lay beneath the surface. But for the accident of his meeting with Clara, his temperament would have carried him through life, unconscious of love from his own experience and regarding it as a fable ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... famous of French poetry. Compare Ronsard's reference to the pelican, p. 8, 1. 19. With this view of the poet's lot and mission compare that expressed in les Montreurs of Leconte de Lisle, p. 199, and in l'Art of Gautier, p. 190. The fable of the pelican giving his blood to his young is current in the literature of ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... circumstance that their subsistence is derived in great measure from the spontaneous produce of the land, which, yielding without cultivation the timber and turpentine, by the sale of which they are mainly supported, denies to them all the blessings which flow from labor. How is it that the fable ever originated of God's having cursed man with the doom of toil? How is it that men have ever been blind to the exceeding profitableness of labor, even for its own sake, whose moral harvest alone—industry, economy, patience, foresight, knowledge—is in itself an exceeding ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... friendship never parted, But among the evil-hearted; Time's sure step drag, soon or later, To his judgment, such a Traitor; Lady Lukshmi, of her grace, Grant good fortune to this place; And you, Royal boys! and boys of times to be In this fair fable-garden wander free.' ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... untrained tenor voice, and takes a pleasure in singing airs of a popular and cheerful character. He is fond, but not morbidly fond, of reading,—chiefly fiction pervaded with a vaguely pious optimism,—sleeps well, and rarely dreams. He is, in fact, the very last person to evolve a fantastic fable. Indeed, so far from forcing this story upon the world, he has been singularly reticent on the matter. He meets enquirers with a certain engaging—bashfulness is almost the word, that disarms the most suspicious. He seems genuinely ashamed ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... little more than a child's knowledge of the honey-bee. There is little fact and much fable in his fourth Georgic. If he had ever kept bees himself, or even visited an apiary, it is hard to see how he could have believed that the bee in its flight abroad carried a ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... Phoebe Baines Carew, Gentleman Thomas Winterbottom Hance The Reverend Micah Sowls A Discontented Sugar Broker The Pantomime "Super" To His Mask The Force Of Argument The Ghost, The Gallant, The Gael, And The Goblin The Phantom Curate. A Fable The Sensation Captain Tempora Mutantur At A Pantomime. By A Bilious One King Borria Bungalee Boo The Periwinkle Girl Thomson Green And Harriet Hale Bob Polter The Story Of Prince Agib Ellen McJones ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... whatever about dominion; all he dared conjecture for his city was safety. Even that is put in a highly hypothetical mood. The augury begins with an "if," regarding the apocryphal story of Romulus and the twelve vultures. But whether the fable of the vultures be true or not, the augury of twelve centuries of safety deduced from it is undeniably false, whether it refers to the material city, or to the political constitution then established. The city then built was burnt by Brennus, the Gaul. Its successor was taken ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... The Poet knows the truth,—but what are Poets? Only the Prophets and Seers! Only the Eyes of Time, which clearly behold Heaven's Fact beyond this world's Fable. Let them sing if they choose, and we will hear them in our idle hours,—we will give them a little of our gold,—a little of our grudging praise, together with much of our private practical contempt and misprisal! So say the unthinking and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... was more influenced by some other characteristics of Scotland than he was by its scenery. There was, first, its romantic history. That had not then been separated, as it has since been, from the mists of fable, but lay exactly in that twilight point of view best adapted for arousing the imagination. To the eye of Burns, as it glared back into the past, the history of his country seemed intensely poetical—including the line of early kings who pass over the stage of Boece' ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... maid of honour to her Majesty. She had told Mr. Esmond this little story of having met a gentleman, somewhere, and forgetting his name, when the gentleman, with no such malicious intentions as those of "Cymon" in the above fable, made the answer simply as above; and we all laughed to think how little Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix had profited by ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the heroes of Grecian history and even of Grecian fable. We are inspired by ancient poetry and eloquence, as well as by the bards and orators of modern times. Painting and sculpture are the equal admiration of every refined age. The virtue of patriotism has ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... public, at festivals, for the instruction and delight of the audience; and rehearsed before battle, as incentives to deeds of glory. Thus tragedy and the epic muse were born, and, in the progress of taste, arrived at perfection. It is no wonder that the ancients could not relish a fable in prose, after they had seen so many remarkable events celebrated in verse by their best poets; we therefore find no romance among them during the era of their excellence, unless the Cyropaedia of Xenophon may be so called; and it was not till arts ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... business to provide for you there." Paulus interrupted with a decision that was almost boastful, and that somewhat disturbed Sirona. "You know the fable of the ass in the lion's skin, but there are lions who wear the skin of an ass on their shoulders—or of a sheep, it comes to the same thing. Yesterday you were speaking of the splendid palaces of the citizens, and lauding the happiness of their owners. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Excellent fun it was. I shall make her hear my diary, if I persuade myself to encounter this intolerable kiss of peace. It will be a mercy if I don't serve her as the thief in the fable did his mother when he ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of our Confederation? I will tell you. It is not dead but sleepeth. A Gentleman of this City told me the other day, that he could not believe the People without doors would follow the Congress PASSIBUS AEQUIS if such Measures as SOME called spirited were pursued. It put me in mind of a Fable of the high mettled horse and the dull horse. My excellenct Colleague Mr J. A. can repeat this fable to you; and if the Improvement had been made of it which our very valueable Friend Coll M——- proposd, you would have seen that Confederation compleated ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... the stolen Proserpina is itself an afterthought, a fable invented to explain the Mysteries; and, however much it may have modified them in detail, certainly could not have been their ground. Nor is the sorrowing Demeter herself adequate to the solution. For the Eleusinia are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... certain description, either probably or necessarily [to which the aim of poetry is directed in giving names]; but particular consists in narrating what [for example] Alcibiades did, or what he suffered. In comedy, therefore, this is now become evident. For comic poets having composed a fable through things of a probable nature, they thus give whatever names they please to their characters, and do not, like iambic poets, write poems about particular persons. But in tragedy they cling to real names. The cause, however, of this is, that the possible ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Mahatma of this fable, he expresses no opinion as to the merits of the controversy between the Red-faced Man and the Hare that, without search on his own part, presented itself to his mind in so odd a fashion. It is one on ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... with nets and looking-glasses, as it is so beautifully described by a poet of my acquaintance, (the Sieur Lebrun himself.) I hope the same accident won't happen to us that befell the bird-catcher in the fable. It is for you to be on your guard, if you enter into such amusements; for love keeps constantly prowling in the scenes frequented by the Graces. We are, therefore, in safety here, in spite of his wings. We expect the family of M. and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... a proof of the inconsistency of the human mind, that, having built his castle with so little view to durability, Walpole entailed the perishable possession with a degree of strictness, which would have been more fitting for a baronial estate. And that, too, after having written a fable entitled "The Entail," in consequence, of some one having asked him whether he did not intend to entail Strawberry Hill, and in ridicule of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... Tagalog from Pasig, Rizal. He says, "This is a primitive Tagalog fable. I think. I ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... way through subterranean channels, till it again appears on the surface. It was said that the Sicilian fountain Arethusa was the same stream, which, after passing under the sea, came up again in Sicily. Hence the story ran that a cup thrown into the Alpheus appeared again in Arethusa. It is this fable of the underground course of Alpheus that Coleridge alludes to in his poem ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoy by seeing how much he ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... granted, that a Christian is not bound to believe any Thing to have been of Divine Institution, that has not been declared to be such in Holy Writ. Yet great Offence has been taken at an Essay, in the First Part of the Fable of the Bees, call'd An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue; notwithstanding the great Caution it is wrote with. Since then, it is thought Criminal to surmise, that even Heathen Virtue was of Human Invention, and the Reader, ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... fiction. The world is always more ready to be amused than to be instructed, and the literary purveyor of amusement has opportunities for fame ten times greater than those which fall to the lot of the literary instructor. The epic delight—the delight in fable and story—to which the former appeals, is a fundamental trait in human nature; it appears full grown in the child, and has small need of cultivation. But the faculty of generalization to which the critic appeals ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Further, the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 6) that "men take more shame from those who retail their information to many, such as jokers and fable-tellers." But those who are more closely connected with a man do not retail his vices. Therefore one should not take ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... Your sex's much-lov'd enemy; For other foes we are prepar'd, And Nature puts us on our guard: In that alone such charms are found, We court the dart, we nurse the hand; And this, my child, an Aesop's Fable Will prove much ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... horror of which is gone with the dawn. They are the shadows of our childishness, and they show that we have a long journey before us; and they gain their strength from the fact that we gather them together out of the future like the bundle of sticks in the fable, when we shall have the strength to snap them singly ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to extend beyond the period of the flood, and from these the "dark idolater of chance," who would rejoice to prove that "Book of Books" a splendid fable, draws his deductions. But how he fails. The learned men of China, those held in the greatest repute amongst a people where such a reputation is not easily obtained, themselves admit, that the history of their empire in its infancy, is, for the most part, apocryphal, ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... private views, except in so far as to say that I agree with the majority. But, as the question cannot be ignored, I should like to say that I hold firmly the conviction that all trade should be carried on for the mutual advantage of the parties engaged. The old fable of AEsop may be quoted, which relates to a quarrel between the different members of the body. Every one of us can be, and should be, helpful to every other, independent of nation, country, and creed. That is, I am sure, what lies on the conscience of each one of us, as an ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Immortals, Psyche, moulded men from sods That Maids from them might learn the ways of Gods. Think, would a wakeful Youth his hard fate weep, Lock'd to the tired breast of a Bride asleep?' 'Ah, me, I do not dream, Yet all this does some heathen fable seem!' 'O'ermuch thou mind'st the throne he leaves above! Between unequals sweet is equal love.' 'Nay, Mother, in his breast, when darkness blinds, I cannot for my life but talk and laugh With the large impudence of little minds!' 'Respectful to the Gods and meek, ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... well. Their complexion is of the lily and the rose. I can assure you that since they have been here they have not had the slightest indisposition. I must relate to you a very pretty response on the part of Oui Oui. The Abbe Bertrand caused him to read a fable where there was a question about metamorphosis. Being called to explain the word, he said ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... judges in their quarrels. They yielded an equal esteem to some pretended soothsayers. One of these, gazing upon Iermak with a holy terror, predicted long glory for him, but kept silence about his approaching death. Here fable creates new giants among the dwarfs of Vogulie, who are scarcely two archines in height. According to one of these stories, the Russians saw with surprise, near the town of Tabarin, a giant two fathoms tall, who seized a dozen men at a time ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... writings there, he was wont to walk along a gallery, at each end of which stood a separate bottle, out of both of which he never failed, en passant, to sip! This, after all, however, may be only a mythical fable. ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... are too short, as well as those which are too long, have this feature in their changed form. The change in a short story is applied oftenest where it becomes desirable to amplify a single anecdote, or perhaps a fable, which is told in very condensed form. Such an instance is the following anecdote of heroism, which in the original is quoted in one of F.W. Robertson's lectures ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... repeated Mr. Grey. "Your father's intelligence is so high, and his principles so low, that there is no scheme which he does not think that he cannot carry out against the established laws of his country. His present tale is a made-up fable." ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... saw fiery times in those remote parts, and knew times of dule afterwards, and the difficulty about any authentic tale of events, is that, in its passage down time, from mouth to mouth, it necessarily loses immediacy of phrase, even of fable, and that rude frame of living and loving, fighting and dying, in which it was originally set. But human nature does not change, we only think it does in changed circumstances, and if Jock Farquharson, ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining today sole master of the field. The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress'd speculators and vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, enacted on the visible ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... was one of those destructive monsters of which many ravaged Greece in the age of fable. It had the body of a man and the head of a bull, and so great was the havoc it wrought among the Cretans that Minos engaged the great artist Daedalus to construct a den from which it could not escape. Daedalus built for this purpose the Labyrinth, a far-extending edifice, in ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... to grow enormous bats' wings, which spread out until they obscured the whole sky. The ghostly figure resembled a wild creature of fable, born of the weird fancy of a Dore, or an avenging angel of the Apocalypse. Then the rider shrank together again and seemed to be bouncing up and down on the back of his horse like a little ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... and in the great room rose the busy silence of those minutes which precede repasts. Suddenly the four men by the breakfast fable stood back. Lord Valleys had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... collects himself and meets the occasion with spirit he will enjoy it until, while sailing over the hedge, he has leisure to reflect once more. It is clear to me," he proceeded, "that the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the old fable was not, as has hitherto been supposed by a puritanical people, the mere knowledge of sex, but symbolised rather general self-consciousness; for I have little doubt that Adam and Eve sat together under one umbrella long before ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... interesting than a doll; and they prove it by themselves supplying the doll with speech and motions out of their own minds, so as to make it as much like a real person as possible. In the same way, they do not perceive the philosophical truth which is the cause of existence of the hermetic fable; but they find that fable far more juicy and substantial than the ordinary narrative of every-day facts, because, however fine the surface of the latter may be, it has, after all, nothing but its surface to recommend it. It has no soul; it is not alive; and, though they cannot explain why, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... was the great canyon, which had seemed like a hunter's fable rather than truth. Slone's sight dimmed, blurring the spectacle, and he found that his eyes had filled with tears. He wiped them away and looked again and again, until he was confounded by the vastness and the grandeur and the vague sadness ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... "A fable, I think. Someone was telling me about her the other day. She is only a camp-follower and protegee; and a compatriot of mine. She is an orphan ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of warmth, then ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... migrations are a proof of the rude and infant state of their communities; and whose warlike exploits, so much celebrated in story, only exhibit the struggles with which they disputed the possession of a country they afterwards, by their talent for fable, by their arts, and their policy, rendered so famous ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... civilization, and his life, as critic and essayist, has left an impression which we shall not soon lose. Professor Richardson thinks that the three problematical characters in American literature are Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe. The shrewdest estimate of Poe that has ever been given us is in Lowell's Fable for Critics: ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... ardent Frenchman; this rendered me a politician, and I attended in the public square, amid a throng of news-mongers, the arrival of the post, and, sillier than the ass in the fable, was very uneasy to know whose packsaddle I should next have the honor to carry, for it was then supposed we should belong to France, and that Savoy would be exchanged for Milan. I must confess, however, that I experienced some uneasiness, for had this war ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... me of the fable of the Persian who had two men to fight, both as strong as himself. To the one he sent ambassadors, with the key of his favorite gardens; the other he fought. It is a great policy to deal with your ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... remember that little assemblage of flower ghosts in wax! They had no more right to associate with human beings than the ghosts of fable. Uncle Peabody used to call them the "Minervy flowers" because they were a present from his Aunt Minerva. When Aunt Deel returned to the kitchen where I sat—a sorrowing little refugee hunched up in a corner—she said: "I'll have to ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... the first time, to take a really serious view of my plan "to see the world." It became evident with startling abruptness, that a man might be both hungry and cold in the midst of abundance. I recalled the fable of the grasshopper who, having wasted the summer hours in singing, was mendicant to the ant. My weeks of careless gayety were over. The money I had spent in travel looked like a noble fortune ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... woman. He was right. Those that I had met and by whom I had judged the sex had, by contrast with this child, little claim to the title. Virtue I had accounted a shadow without substance; innocence, a synonym for ignorance; love, a fable, a fairy tale for the delectation of ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... bracing himself to demolish this absurd fable, and secure his release at a stroke. "Now, I don't understand very much about the doctrine of reincarnation, but I suppose, if I were really Manco Capac come to earth again, I should have some recollection of my former state of existence, ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... it is dangerous for learned men sitting in libraries to regard as incredible facts stated by these old writers. The legend of Romulus and Remus having been suckled by a wolf has been dismissed as a childish fable. Yet it is certain that this very thing has happened more than once in the forests of India within the memory of living men. You cannot be particular about details, you must take the story as ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... supposed," she said, in scorn, and hardly in undertone, in answer to Eurie's inquiring look. "I don't believe the stuff myself, but I always supposed the ministers did. I gave some of them at least credit for sincerity, but it seems it is nothing but a fable to ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... VIth dynasty loses itself in legend and fable. Two more kings are supposed to have succeeded Papi Nofirkeri, Mirniri Mihtimsaut (Metesouphis II.) and Nitauqrit (Nitokris). Metesouphis II. was killed, so runs the tale, in a riot, a ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... youth leaning on his unstrung bow, with a broken arrow at his feet. A poem, "To Psyche," came with it, and Rose was much surprised at the beauty of the lines, for, instead of being witty, complimentary, or gay, there was something nobler than mere sentiment in them, and the sweet old fable lived again in language which fitly painted the maiden Soul looking for a Love worthy to ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... rebelled, because they were exhausted by taxes and military service. A large part of them left the city, and crossed the Anio to a mountain (Mons Sacer) near by. The Senate sent MENENIUS AGRIPPA to treat with them. By his exertions (Footnote: Menenius is said to have related for them the famous fable of the belly and members.) the people were induced to return to the city, and for the first time were allowed to have officers chosen from their own ranks to represent their interests. These ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... I think party differences in the Church, and even the variations between Christian sects are concerned, both being different ways of viewing the same truth. These may, like the knights in the old fable, find that both were right about the shield, both have the same foundation. But where the foundation is not the same, the results of the teaching ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Madam, this is all a fable. Mephistopheles—the real, vital, moving Mephistopheles—has outlived Goethe, and will outlast the very memory of the unhappy heroine of his noble poem. He walks the streets to-day as fresh and persuasive as when, in ophidian form, he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... darling, who finishes his fable with a burst of laughter. Joy is communicative, and we take our places at table amid the ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... curious that almost every nation on earth has some particular traditions regarding the dog. The Esquimaux, a nation inhabiting the polar regions, have a singular fable amongst them respecting the origin of the Dog-Rib Indians, a tribe which inhabits the northern confines of the American continent. It is thus detailed in Captain Franklin's "Second Journey to ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... of true inspiring and illuminating power belongs to the gospel, or gospels, airily encouraging or gravely didactic, which are set forth in the essays with so captivating a grace? Or whether in romance and tale he had a power of inventing and constructing a whole fable comparable to his admitted power of conceiving and presenting single scenes and situations in a manner which stamps them indelibly on the reader's mind? And whether his figures are sustained continuously by the true spontaneous breath ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not, Leuconoe, the finish of the fable; Eliminate the worry as to what the years may hoard! You only waste your time upon the Babylonian Table— (Slang for the ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... himself. Whether all Sir Benjamin's laurels, however, should fall to the person by whom the tale is told,[19] or whether any part belongs to the authority alleged for it, is unfortunately not quite clear. There would hardly have been a doubt, if the fable had been confined to the other side of the Atlantic; but it has been reproduced and widely circulated on this side also; and the distinguished artist whom it calumniates by attributing the invention to him has been left ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... "La Ligue des Rats: fable de La Fontaine." She then declaimed the little piece with an attention to punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice and an appropriateness of gesture, very unusual indeed at her age, and which proved she had been ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... a romance founded on the Icelandic Sagas. "What is a saga?" "Is it a fable or a true story?" The answer is not altogether simple. For such sagas as those of Burnt Njal and Grettir the Strong partake both of truth and fiction: historians dispute as to the proportions. This was the manner of the saga's growth: In the early days of the Iceland ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... consequently the Concord of the People,) and they shall not onely not flourish, but in short time be dissolved. And they that go about by disobedience, to doe no more than reforme the Common-wealth, shall find they do thereby destroy it; like the foolish daughters of Peleus (in the fable;) which desiring to renew the youth of their decrepit Father, did by the Counsell of Medea, cut him in pieces, and boyle him, together with strange herbs, but made not of him a new man. This desire of change, is like the breach of the first ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... of mythology or fable ever dared such dragons to rescue some captive goddess as did this dauntless champion of civilization. Theseus, or Siegfried, or any knight of the fairy books might envy the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the world would call him so. Afy thought such an Adonis had never been coined, out of fable. He had shiny black hair and whiskers, dark eyes and handsome features. But his vain dandyism spoilt him; would you believe that his handkerchiefs were soaked in scent? They were of the finest cambric, silky as a hair, as fine as the one Barbara ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... You seem to be in the dumps! Don't like the figures; wish they were a cunningly devised fable. How did it happen? Big vote and intolerable cheating cooked our goose. But we are india-rubber and steel springs, and no amount of hard usage can take ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... down towards his feet; but that's a fable. If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... claimed kindred. To each of these he dedicated one of his minor poems; to Lady Strange, the Tears of the Muses; to Lady Compton, the Apologue of the Fox and the Ape, Mother Hubberd's Tale; to Lady Carey, the Fable of the Butterfly and the Spider, Muiopotmos. And in each dedication he assumed on their part the recognition ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... his Northern crowds the fable of negro suffering in the South until he believed the lie himself. He believed it with every beat of his stern Puritan heart. And he had repeated and shouted it until the gathering Abolitionist mob believed it as a message from God. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... there, and we are told that there is a remnant in the heart of China. From the relics of the African branch of this root-race, the old Egyptian priests had knowledge regarding the sunken continent, knowledge which was no fable, but the traditionary lore and history of the survivors of the ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... in which the poet has under his language a different meaning from what it expresses,—a meaning which there should be nothing in that language to indicate. Such a piece may be compared to the sopic fable; but, while it is the object of the fable to inculcate the virtues of morality and prudence, an historical interpretation has to be sought for the metaphorical pieces of the Shih. Generally, moreover, the moral of the fable is subjoined to it, which is never done. ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... before the mind, but they are recognised as old suggestions, or as inadequate to reveal what is sought; the experiments by which the problem may be solved have to be imagined; and to imagine a good experiment is as difficult as to invent a good fable, for we must have distinctly PRESENT—clear mental vision—the known qualities and relations of all the objects, and must see what will be the effect of introducing some new qualifying agent. If any one thinks this is easy, let him try ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... which was lost in the Middle Ages) all have the same general character, with the single exception of the Amphitruo. This is more of a burlesque than a comedy, and is full of humour. It is founded on the well- worn fable of Jupiter and Alcmena, and has been imitated by Moliere and Dryden. Its source is uncertain; but it is probably from Archippus, a writer of the old comedy (415 B.C.). Its form suggests rather a development of the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... deadly and terrible engines of death. Industry is crippled, honest toil is robbed, and even beggary is taxed to defray the expenses of Christian murder. There must be some other way to reform this world. We have tried creed and dogma, and fable, and they have failed—and they have failed in ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... in the last [eighteenth] century was the calumny known as mercheta mulierum, now known as a malignant fable popularized by novelists and playwrights. Another suggestion is that it is a custom that has survived from some prehistoric race; a third that it has grown up at different points...." Mr. Peacock regards the last as the most likely. "It is only when the population ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... sarcastically, "you have now transferred to my daughter. I congratulate you, Sir James, upon the possession of a ready wit and an invention which does not fail you at a pinch, and of a tongue which repeats unfalteringly any fable which your mind may dictate. You do not, I suppose, expect me to believe the tale. Still, I own that it is a well-devised one, and might, at a pinch, pass muster; but fear not, Sir James. As hitherto I have kept silence as to the author of the ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... represents the actual thanks of the poet to Lord Clare for an actual present of venison, part of which he promptly transferred to Reynolds, is probably the fact. But, as the following notes show, it is also clear that Goldsmith borrowed, if not his entire fable, at least some of its details from Boileau's third satire; and that, in certain of the lines, he had in memory Swift's 'Grand Question Debated', the measure of which he adopts. This throws more than a doubt upon the truth of the whole. 'His genius' (as Hazlitt says) 'was a mixture of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... sense a dead man; in the sense that he was moveable. His locomotion was not his own: his master moved his arms and legs for him as if he were a marionette. Now it is important in the first degree to realise here what would be involved in such a fable as I have imagined, of a stool rooting itself like a shrub. For the general modern notion certainly is that life and liberty are in some way to be associated with novelty and not standing still. But it is just because ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... Plebeians seceded to the Mons Sacer, some five hundred years before the Christian era, the Consul Menenius Agrippa brought them back by his well-known fable of the Belly and the Members. Perhaps it would be too much to expect to call back our seceders with a fable which they will hardly have the opportunity of reading in the present condition of the postal service, but the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... his early life, he wrote a work in their defence. The theory that errors of transcription might possibly have crept into the text, was totally rejected. No such thing could, by any contingency, occur. The fable of Aristeas was still considered worthy a place in the canon. The sanctity of the Hebrew language, and other Rabbinical notions, were defended. Christ was discovered in every book of the Old Testament; the perfect purity of the Greek of the New Testament was ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... canyon, which had seemed like a hunter's fable rather than truth. Slone's sight dimmed, blurring the spectacle, and he found that his eyes had filled with tears. He wiped them away and looked again and again, until he was confounded by the vastness and the grandeur and the vague sadness of the ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... default of positive knowledge they will always be reduced to act, as the Grecian chiefs did, according to the best of their convictions. Nevertheless, for the satisfaction of those who distrust romance and insist upon reality, we will leave fable for fact, and take as our next illustration an incident ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... would rebuke a companion on the street for bowing to a white person; and if such a man replied, "We are slaves," he would say, "You deserve to be." If the man then asked what he could do to better his condition, he would say, "Go and buy a spelling-book and read the fable of Hercules and the wagoner."[1] At the same time if he happened to engage in conversation with white people in the presence of Negroes, he would often take occasion to introduce some striking remark on slavery. He regularly held up to emulation the work of the ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... is called the unpractical part of the thing that is really the practical. The chief difference between men and the animals is that all men are artists; though the overwhelming majority of us are bad artists. As the old fable truly says, lions do not make statues; even the cunning of the fox can go no further than the accomplishment of leaving an exact model of the vulpine paw: and even that is an accomplishment which he wishes he hadn't got. There are Chryselephantine statues, but no ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... and with a sudden impulse Mrs. Snowdon bent her head and kissed the fair forehead which had bent lower and lower as she went on. Each listener understood the truth, lightly veiled in that hasty fable, and each found in it a different meaning. Sir Jasper frowned and bit his lips, Annon glanced anxiously from face to face, Octavia hid hers, and Treherne's flashed with sudden intelligence, while Rose laughed low to herself, enjoying the scene. Blanche, who was getting sleepy, said, with a stifled ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... not stop here. The sources of the Mississippi—were it even possible that they should ever be otherwise—are still unknown to man. Like the stream of history, its head-springs are in the regions of fable—in the twilight of remote latitudes; and it is only after it has approached us, and assumed a definite channel, that we are able to determine which is the authentic stream. It flows from the country of the savage, toward that of civilization; and like the gradations ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... apparently I was interested at this early age in the variability of plants! I told another little boy that I could produce variously colored primroses by watering them with certain colored fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and has never been tried by me. I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once gathered much valuable fruit ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... Russian race. For nothing is better calculated to sanctify a martyrdom and make a race abhorred than a belief in its injustice. Nothing is more potent to dissolve a race and scatter its suspected members from the altar of their fathers than the fable of their unrepentant hostility to the cry of Mercy from the sacrificial Ikon. Nothing so quickly exposes their abandoned fields to the tramp of hostile feet and the subjugation of their soil. Ambitious rivalry has no ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... "Is this a fable or the posy of a ring, Sir Dragon?" she said, sharply. "Do you come to try or tempt me, or is this perchance but some part of my Lord of Misrule's Yule-tide mumming? 'Sblood, sir; only cravens sneak ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... Poetry, so of Pastoral is the very Soul. and therfore Socrates in Plato says, that in those Verses which he had made there was nothing wanting but the Fable: therefore Pastorals as other kinds of Poetry must have their Fable, if they will be Poetry: Thus in Virgil's Silenus which contains the Stories of allmost the whole Fabulous Age, two Shepherds whom Silenus had often promis'd a Song, and as often deceived, seize upon him being drunk and asleep, and bind him with wreath'd Flowers; AEgle comes in ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... Since likewise for the stricken heart of Love This visible nature, and this common world, 115 Is all too narrow: yea, a deeper import Lurks in the legend told my infant years Than lies upon that truth, we live to learn. For fable is Love's world, his home, his birth-place; Delightedly dwells he 'mong fays and talismans, 120 And spirits; and delightedly believes Divinities, being himself divine. The intelligible forms of ancient ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... who (if they have any moral sense, must be as much ashamed of their parents as these last are of them) are certainly a dangerous, because degraded part of the community. How much more so must be those unfortunate beings who stand in the predicament of the bat in the fable, whom both birds and beasts disowned? I am sorry to say that the progress of the British army, when it arrived, might be traced by a spurious and ambiguous race of this kind. But of a mulatto born before their arrival I only remember ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... the seed-time, old age the harvest. If we lay nothing up for old age it will be as related in the fable; namely: A cricket came to the ant, and said, "Give me something to eat?" The ant asked, "What did you in the summer?" "I whistled," said the cricket. "Then," said the ant, "if you whistled in summer while I was ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... scrivener and translator of Maphaeus. Note by Mr. Reed: 'It was given to me by Mr. John Sewell, bookseller, to whom Mr. Ellis bequeathed his Manuscripts. See my account of Mr. Ellis in the European Magazine, Jan. 1792: large 4to.' The volume is enriched with fine engravings, appropriate to each Fable. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... as it may, there was certainly no more enchanting way of obtaining mental and physical relaxation than in wandering through those wonderful woodlands that abound in our vicinity, and which breathed so many inspirations to the Master of Fable, who at one time was their keeper. How I wish that good La Fontaine might have seen his dumb friends under present circumstances. What fantasies would he not ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... the works of man? his labors of the past? The eye looks on ruin; or time hath swept away even that poor trace; and a fable or tradition alone remains. But time hath no power over the Eternal or the works of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... for offenses of small account, which were made to appear matters of injury. Examples of these are: failure to preserve silence for the dead (which we have already mentioned), or happening to pass in front of a chief who was bathing (alluded to in the fable of Actaeon), and other similar oppressions. They also captured slaves in war by means of ambuscades and attacks, keeping as such all those whom they did not wish to kill. Since these cruelties were so usual among ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson
... entrancing! What mistaken impressions [18]about nature; about the material world upon which childhood has alighted, and of which it must necessarily be ignorant; about clouds and storms and tempests; and of the heavens above, sun and moon and stars! I remember well when the fable of the Happy Valley in Rasselas was a reality to me; when I thought the sun rose and set for us alone, and how I pitied the glorious orb, as it sunk behind the western mountain, to think that it must pass through a ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... treatment for so old a member of Parliament as I am, and I will be heard!"—on which there was immediately a most profound silence. After he had said much more in praise of Rockingham, he sub-joined, that with regard to General Conway's remaining in the ministry, it reminded him of a fable he had heard in his youth, of a wolf, who, on having clothed himself as a sheep, was let into the fold by a lamb, who indeed did say to him, "Where did you get those long nails, and those sharp teeth, mamma?" But ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... which it came. Infidelity was triumphant and religion was on the point of expiring. Something extraordinary seemed necessary to arrest the attention of a giddy people who were ready to conclude that Christianity was a fable and futurity a delusion. This revival has done it. It has confounded infidelity and brought numbers beyond ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... doctor, with a smile, "did ever you hear the fable of the mountain and the mouse? You'll excuse me, I dare say, but you remind me of that fable. When you came in here I'll stake my wig ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwellings of my countrymen, and subdued to fertility by their labours, the earth's very centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a fable, to have forgotten which would have cost neither my imagination nor ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... in the open and die there, if need be! To live in this rat hole, breathing plague, is dying already! Caonabo is a fable! These people! Spaniards have but to ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... our streets of gold, and they will hide as many aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being of mankind is not advanced a single step. Knowledge is power, and wealth is power; and harnessed, as in Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the stars. But left to their own guidance, or reined by a fool's hand, they may bring the poor fool to Phaeton's end, and set a world on fire. One real ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... by Adrienne herself, consisting of portraits of both men and women of exquisite beauty; several consoles of oriental jasper, supporting ewers and basins of silver and of silver gilt, richly chased and filled with scented waters; a voluptuously rich divan, some seats, and an illuminated gilt fable, completed the furniture of this chamber, the atmosphere of which was impregnated ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Mrs. Wesselhoeft's "Fable Stories" are proving themselves more and more acceptable to the children. "Old Rough" is a decided acquisition ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... is the head cook: the president of the internal republic. He has charge of the stoves; the whole weight of affairs is on his hands, and he provides for the interests of all. Aesop taught us this, long ago, in his fable of "The Belly and Members." [Footnote: La Fontaine's translation is quoted in the French original, where the name of the fable is "Messer Gaster," a more correct title than our own. Gaster is a Greek word signifying stomach; and it is strictly the stomach which is meant in the fable. ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... seems to be preserved in a phrase which forms the local slogan of the town of Hawick, and which, as the name of a peculiar local air, and the refrain, or 'owerword' of associated ballads, has been connected with the history of the town back to 'fable-shaded eras.' Different words have been sung to the tune from time to time, and none of those now extant can lay claim to any antiquity; but associated with all, and yet identified with none, the refrain 'Tyr-ibus ye Tyr ye Odin,' Tyr haeb us, ye Tyr ye Odin! ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... an ancient fable—a critic picked out all the faults of a great poet and presented them to Apollo. The god received the gift graciously and set a bag of wheat before the critic with the command that he separate the chaff from the kernels. The critic did ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... human nature very well when he wrote his fable of the old man and his ass, who tried to please everybody and ended up by pleasing nobody. Bearing this in mind, Madame Midas determined to please herself, and take no one's advice but her own with regard to Vandeloup. She ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... Payne changes the Arab title to the far more appropriate heading, "Story of the Rich Man and his Wasteful Son." The tale begins with sop's fable of the faggot; and concludes with the "Heir of Linne," in the famous Scotch ballad. Mr. Clouston refers also to the Persian Tale of Murchlis (The Sorrowful Wazir); to the Forty Vezirs (23rd Story) to Cinthio and to sundry ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... and allegory; but it was all true, in the moral of the fable, as you shall hear in its place. We were very merry the rest of the day, but without any noise or clutter; for he brought not one of his acquaintance or friends, either English or foreigner. The honest Quaker provided us a very noble dinner indeed, considering how few we were ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... some of their opinions bear too directly on the subject to be entirely passed over. Moreover, Cudworth's 'Immutable Morality' was not published till 1731, at which time it had direct reference to the controversies excited by Mandeville's 'Fable of the Bees.' The popularity also of Henry More's writings continued into the century after his death, and a new edition of his 'Discourse of Enthusiasm' appeared almost simultaneously with writings of Lord Shaftesbury, Dr. Hickes, and others upon the same subject. It might have been ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... he. And truly, when I compare the former enemies to Christianity, such as Socinus,[5] Hobbes, and Spinosa,[6] with such of their successors, as Toland, Asgil, Coward, Gildon,[7] this author of the "Rights," and some others; the church appeareth to me like the sick old lion in the fable, who, after having his person outraged by the bull, the elephant, the horse, and the bear, took nothing so much to heart, as to find himself at last insulted by the spurn ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... not so sure of it after all—and with dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbows with right and left. Of course there are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten before the end is told—before the end is told—even if there happens to be ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... expresses it), I found none so fit as he who peopled the beautiful and far-famed city of Athens, to be set in opposition with the father of the invincible and renowned city of Rome. Let us hope that Fable may, in what shall follow, so submit to the purifying processes of Reason as to take the character of exact history. We shall beg that we may meet with candid readers, and such as will receive with indulgence ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... the life of Abraham Lincoln savors more of romance than reality. It is more like a fable of the ancient days than a story of a plain American of the nineteenth century. The singular vicissitudes in the life of our martyred President surround him with an interest which attaches to few men in history. He sprang from that class which ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... nay, merchants slept. I should say all slept on the camel as soundly as in a bed. So that what I saved of suffering from the heat of day-travelling, I lost in want of sleep by night-travelling. Poor human brute! I thought of the fable of the ass and his winter and summer advantages and disadvantages. The hottest day was yesterday, last of the four, when we encamped in a dry bed of a river. I shall never forget that day, forget what I may else! I was first on the point of being suffocated, and seemed ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... serving men, and live in the hills, Among the sounds of music and the light Of waters, till the evil days are done. For here some terrible death is waiting you, Some unimagined evil, some great darkness That fable has not dreamt of, nor sun nor ...
— The Countess Cathleen • William Butler Yeats
... that he got his breakfast before escaping was due to his cunning. And I have seen so many instances of his cunning that, with my two scientific eyes wide open, I could believe him almost as wise as he was thought to be in the olden days of fable and folk-lore. How cool and collected ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... in the tents of Shem, and possessed the Isles. Here again, and in the usual form of an historic Solution, we find the same Fact, and as characteristic of the Human Race, stated in that earliest and most venerable Mythus (or symbolic Parable) of Prometheus—that truly wonderful Fable, in which the characters of the rebellious Spirit and of the Divine Friend of Mankind ([Greek: Theos philanthropos]) are united in the same Person: and thus in the most striking manner noting the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... concoct nice little made dishes; yet, fond as she was of eating, she also adored the theatre and cherished a vice which she wrapped in impenetrable mystery—she bought into lotteries. Can that be the abyss of which mythology warns us under the fable of the Danaides and their cask? Madame Descoings, like other women who are lucky enough to keep young for many years, spend rather too much upon her dress; but aside from these trifling defects she was the pleasantest of women to live with. Of every one's opinion, never opposing ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... arrived at the Shelley-reading age. Are these six multitudes unacquainted with this life of Shelley? Perhaps they are; indeed, one may feel pretty sure that the great bulk of them are. To these, then, I address myself, in the hope that some account of this romantic historical fable and the fabulist's manner of constructing and adorning it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hand. When the night is cold, windy, or rainy, he usually covers his body with a heap of 'Pandanus', 'Nipa', or Fern leaves, like those of which his bed is made, and he is especially careful to wrap up his head in them. It is this habit of covering himself up which has probably led to the fable that the Orang ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... frames. Jesus Christ passes His own blood into our veins and makes us immortal. The Church chose for one of its ancient emblems of the Saviour the pelican, which fed its young, according to the fable, with blood from its own breast. So Christ vitalises us. He in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... had at this time been writing some little Dramas on classical subjects, one of which was the Rape of Proserpine, a very graceful composition which she has never published. Shelley contributed to this the exquisite fable of Arethusa and the Invocation to Ceres.—Among the Nymphs gathering flowers on Enna were two whom she called Ino and Uno, names which I remember in the Dialogue were irresistibly ludicrous. She also wrote one on Midas, into which were introduced by Shelley, in the Contest between Pan and ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... is a myth, a fable. You may imagine and pretend that it is true, but you can not ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... reptile have probably given occasion to a fable, which says that cocks can lay eggs, but that these always produce serpents; and that though the cock does not hatch them, the warmth of the sand and atmosphere answers the purposes of incubation. The eggs of the tzepho, of which she lays eighteen or twenty, are equal to those of ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... make the conjecture that certain honest women act in dividing up the celibates, as the lion in the fable did? What! Surely, in that case, half at least of our ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... naked legend of the negro's origin, one of those nursery tales in which the ignorant of Christendom still believe But the deduction from the fable and the testimony to the negro's lack of intelligence, though unpleasant to our ignorant negrophils, are ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... this ruse was received has induced me at length to undertake a regular compilation and publication of the adventures in question; for I found that, in spite of the air of fable which had been so ingeniously thrown around that portion of my statement which appeared in the "Messenger" (without altering or distorting a single fact), the public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable, and several letters were sent to Mr. P.'s ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and powder, bursting every barrier, Gave new-born cravings each its speedy carrier And to the people's spirit power brought. The new day's work, as 't were the tempest's welter, In din about you seemed a dream, a fable, And with your like you built in fear a shelter From soul-unrest, ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... are! He said nothing of himself. He was absorbed in my stories concerning you. I told him as pretty a fable as La Fontaine related of the Avare qui avait perdu son tresor! I said you were a beautiful chatelaine besieged by an army of lovers, but the knight errant Fortunatus had alone won your favor, and would receive your hand! The brave Colonel! ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... at it, for we are not denying them any thing to which they lay claim; we are but denying them what they already put away from themselves as much as we can. They must not act like the dog in the fable (if it be not too light a comparison), who would neither use the manger himself, nor relinquish it to others; let them not grudge to others a manifest Scriptural privilege which they disown themselves. Is an ordinance of Scripture to be fulfilled nowhere, because it is ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... fantastic being called Life in Death. This personage crosses the oceans of the world in pursuit of a living skeleton called Death in Life—I recollect at the time very few people, among the guests of a certain elegant translator of English poetry, understood the mystic meaning of a fable as true as it was fanciful. Myself alone, perhaps, as I sat buried in silence, thought of the whole generations which as they were hurried along by life, passed on their way without living. Before my eyes rose faces of women by the million, by ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... dead long years ago; nor has this fable as yet risen from her dust. Of Ludwig Rudolf's other two Daughters, we have said that one, the eldest, was the Kaiserinn; Empress Elizabeth Christina, age now precisely forty; with two beautiful Daughters, sublime Maria Theresa the elder of them, and no son ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... disappeared merely to play a practical jest on her; but that supposition was too childish to be retained an instant. Perhaps—perhaps Pierre himself had discovered her, but having vowed never to see her again, he cared for her like the invisible hands in the old Greek fable. ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... whatever. And in particular the fundamental source, origin, and true significance of the traditions we have been reviewing, including the Biblical accounts of the Fall, are all, according to him, to be looked for in this naturalistic fable of the Vedas. No doubt the allegory which served as starting-point to this myth was not unknown to the Hebrews. We find it distinctly expressed in a verse of the Book of Job (chap. xxvi. 13), where it is ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... others, we might say that this great prerogative of genius, was exercised above all in 'Lear.' It diverges more from the model of regular tragedy than 'Macbeth,' or 'Othello,' and even more than 'Hamlet,' but the fable is better constructed than in the last of these and it displays full as much of the almost superhuman inspiration of the ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... burial-places,—or even of the interest with which one walks through the unchanged paths dug out of the rock by this tenebrosa et lucifugax natio. In the midst of the obscurity of history and the fog of fable, here is the solid earth giving evidence of truth. Here one sees where, by the light of his dim candle, the solitary digger hollowed out the grave of one of the near followers of the apostles; and here one reads in hasty and ill-spelt inscriptions something ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... he saw, Invisible to flesh, the western coasts, And the ocean way, and, far beyond, that land The Future's heritage, and prophesied Of Brendan who ere long in wicker boat Should over-ride the mountains of the deep, Shielded by God, and tread—no fable then - Fabled Hesperia. Last of all he saw More near, thy hermit home, Senanus;—'Hail, Isle of blue ocean and the river's mouth! The People's Lamp, their Counsel's Head, is thine!" That hour shone out through cloud the westering sun And paved the wave with fire: that hour not less ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... fool's paradise I had planted with all manner of fair flowers and lordly trees, and in my folly believed that those who had been my friends were forever after assured of pleasant places, lovely perfumes, and grateful shade; but like the Grecian in the ancient fable, I found I had sown dragon's teeth, and the crop I reaped was of hatred and envy, passion ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... ethical bent of his mind came to the surface. His friends were agreed that what they remembered chiefly of his stories was not the broad part of them, but the moral that was in them.(9) And they had no squeamishness as critics of the art of fable-making. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Lionel, "my opinion—as you wish for it—Would incline to the suspicion that your friend, Brother Jarrum, deceived you. That he invented the fable of the white donkey to keep you quiet while he and ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... prehensile lip, raised nearly twenty feet in the air, can browse upon these trees without difficulty. Not so the elephant, whose trunk cannot reach so high; and the latter would often have to imitate the fox in the fable, were he not possessed of a means whereby he can bring the tempting morsel within reach—that is, simply by breaking down the tree. This his vast strength enables him to do, unless when the trunk happens to be one of the ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... there with regard to the dwarfs in Ancient Egyptian paintings.) And whereas Strabo is, says M. Monceaux, the only writer of antiquity who questions the existence of the dwarfs, all the others are on the side of Aristotle, who says—"This is no fable; there really exists in that region (the sources of the Nile), as people relate, a race of little men, who have small horses and who live in holes." And these little men were of course the ancestors ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... said John Heywood, who had heard everything, and saw clearly the arrow that the earl had shot at the queen. "Princess Elizabeth, her true and dear friend, who never leaves her side. Besides, her maids of honor, who, like the dragon in the fable, keep watch ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... follow me in spirit to the very home and birth-place of freedom, to the land where we need not myth or fable to add aught to the fresh and gladdening feeling with which we for the first time tread the soil and drink the air of the immemorial democracy of Uri. It is one of the opening days of May: it is the morning of Sunday; for men then ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... service of the bath, with all which they had much ado to extinguish the fire; and his body was so burned all over that he was not cured of it a good while after. And thus it was not without some plausibility that they endeavor to reconcile the fable to truth, who say this was the drug in the tragedies with which Medea anointed the crown and veils which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... at the same time cheer the meal with a pleasant tale: "it is a very old story, it has to be unearthed from the very oldest authors. I will tell you what I found about it in literature, if you will promise me first that you will not look upon it as a fable."' ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... home work for the day, twelve sums, four pages of penmanship, and the fable of "The Dog and the Rabbit" to learn by heart. He began with the fable, reciting it in a loud voice, like the hero in the play: "'A dog was roaming about the fields, when from behind a little hill jumped a rabbit, which had been nibbling ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... as a rule that an indiscreet man is more hurtful than an ill-natured one; for as the one will only attack his enemies, and those he wishes ill to, the other injures indifferently both friends and foes. I cannot forbear, on this occasion, transcribing a fable out of Sir Roger L'Estrange, which accidentally lies before me. A company of waggish boys were watching of frogs at the side of a pond, and still as any of them put up their heads, they would be pelting them down again with stones. "Children," ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... pounds avoirdupois.—Translator's Note.) and was the size of a child's head. A twig hardly thicker than a straw served as its support. The casual sight of that lump swinging over the spot on which I had sat down made me think of the mishap that befell Garo. (The hero of La Fontaine's fable, "Le Gland et la Citrouille," who wondered why acorns grew on such tall trees and pumpkins on such low vines, until he fell asleep under one of the latter and a pumpkin dropped upon his nose.—Translator's Note.) If such nests were plentiful in the trees, any one seeking the shade ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... great taste, each fable is illustrated by a drawing by Mr. Percy Billinghurst. Mr. Billinghurst lends most comical expression to the faces of the beasts. The fox with the grapes, the dog with the shadow, the wolf with the lamb, are ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... only it can be allowed to feel that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs. And if I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down its lion-strength, I shall be more than ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... are much more highly individualized. The Tatler and the Spectator very greatly extended the range of essay-writing, and with it the flexibility of prose style; it is this extension that gives to them their modern quality. Nothing came amiss: fable, description, vision, gossip, literary criticism or moral essays, discussion of large questions such as marriage and education, or of the smaller social amenities—any subject which would be of interest to a sufficiently ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... won't have this man, and they won't have that man, from seventeen to twenty-five: but then, afraid, as the saying is, that God has forgot them, and finding their bloom departing, they are glad of whom they can get, and verify the fable of the ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... but a private in the ranks, an obscure workman among master builders. But she could offer her victory over herself, and ask her country to take back and use a character hewn and shaped in accordance with its traditions. Her husband's citizenship had become a legal fable. She would take it and weld it with her own, and, content never to know the outcome, lay them both together upon the ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... of the rock, the Tantalus of the fable, man, plunged in this world of woe with his lips thirsty for happiness, stretches out his hand to pluck the bitter Dead-Sea fruits of this earth. With his profound instincts of the Infinite, his craving for the Absolute, he seizes madly upon every object which suggests their image ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of that, the parable of the rich man in Luke xvi. 22, knows nothing: [Greek: apethane de kai ho plousios kai etaphe], according to his riches; it is in hell only that he receives his reward. In opposition to Gesenius, Hitzig remarks: "That transition of the signification is a fable." Following the example of Martini he derives [Hebrew: ewir] from the Arabic. But in opposition to that, Gesenius again remarks in the Thesaurus: "Sed haud minoribus difficultatibus laborat ea ratio, qua improbitatis significatum ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... never knew what they wanted; that they lived upon the best, and bought fresh butter; and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat, and yet were eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable. In short, it was the moral of the old nursery fable: ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... was accounted for by the presence of this great beast, which was made into the fanciful proportions most adapted to excite awe and wonder." To his friend Hogg, in after-years, Shelley often spoke about another reptile, no mere creature of myth or fable, the "Old Snake," who had inhabited the gardens of Field Place for several generations. This venerable serpent was accidentally killed by the gardener's scythe; but he lived long in the poet's memory, and it may reasonably be conjectured that Shelley's peculiar sympathy for snakes was due to the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... more solid elements of permanence and power. The Japanese have the quickness, the enthusiasm, the intelligence of the French; but the Chinese unite to equal intelligence the plodding persistence of the Germans, and the old fable of the tortoise and the hare is as true of nations as it is of individuals. Unquestionably, the Chinese are the most virile race in Asia "Wherever a Chinese can get a foot of ground and a quart of water he will make something grow.'' Colquhoun quotes Richthofen ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... youth's glorious fable flies, View not the world with worldling's eyes; Nor turn with weather of the time. Foreclose the coming of surprise: Stand where Posterity shall stand; Stand where the Ancients stood before, And, dipping in lone founts thy hand, Drink of the ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... a fable, written to show that it is of no use to expect people to do things which they have not the power to do. The wolf could catch lambs, but he could not learn his letters. So my little Alice can dress dollies, but she does not know how to take care ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... some refuge! If no saviour had yet come, the tortured world of human hearts cried aloud for one with unutterable groaning! What would Bascombe do if he had committed a murder? Or what could he do for one who had? If fable it were, it was at least a need—invented one—that of a Saviour to whom anyone might go, at any moment, without a journey, without letters or commendations or credentials! And yet no: if it had been invented, it could hardly ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... to-morrow. On the other hob sits Briney, hard at his syntax, with the Fibulae AEsiopii, as he called it, placed open at a particular passage, on the seat under him, with a hope that, when Philemy will examine him, the book may open at his favorite fable of "Gallus Gallinaceus—a dung-hill cock." Phaddy himself is obliged to fast this day, there being one day of his penance yet unperformed, since the last time he was at his duty; which was, as aforesaid, ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... Fable fablo. Fabric (stuff) teksajxo. Fabric fabriko. Fabricate fabriki. Fabrication fabrikado. Fabulist fablisto. Fabulous fabla. Faade antauxa flanko. Face vizagxo. Facet faceto. Facetious sxerca. Facilitate faciligi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... seem to be reduced to the ancient fable, that the gods, by eating a certain food, became immortal; which the Philosopher ridicules (Metaph. iii, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... (the other.) Of course I silently bowed assent; but while the officer who had spoken to me was giving similar instructions to other gentlemen, I own I felt a little nervous, lest, during the polite scramble in which I was about to engage, like the dog in the fable, grasping at the shadow of the second lady, I might lose the substance of the first, or vice versa. However, when the doors were thrown open, I very quickly, with a profound reverence, obtained my prize, and at once confiding to her—for had I deliberated I should have ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... Here was the haunt of the sybarites, whose gay barks skimmed the shallow waters of the Lucrine lake; and not far off slumbered in its volcanic hollow that other lake, Avernus, renowned in legend and poetry, through whose caverns, fable had it, lay the entrance to the world of the dead. The whole country about was one city of stately villas, of cool groves, of bright gardens; a huge pleasure world, where freedom too often became license; where the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... 2 Pet 1, 16. He says: "We did not follow cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." Such are the beautiful words and sermons which make a great show of wisdom and holiness, and naturally please men. For instance it is a cunningly devised fable when one with the aid of philosophy, which reason can understand, sets forth in grandiloquent words what a fine thing it is for a man to live honorably, chastely, and to practice good works and virtues. The aim is, with such pretense, to have us believe ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... saying in the services, and elsewhere, that greater privileges grow out of larger responsibilities, and that the latter justifies the former. This is part truth and part fable. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... "I feel free." This is an illusion, that may be compared to that of the fly in the fable, who, lighting upon the pole of a heavy carriage, applauded himself for directing its course. Man, who thinks himself free, is a fly, who imagines he has power to move the universe, while he is himself unknowingly ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... saying masses for the dead was ridiculous, and only meant to keep up a belief in the fable of purgatory, as the fate of all is finally decided, on the departure of the soul from ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... that work is a painful necessity for the preservation of life, but they do not say it is a virtue, because repose and sweet inaction are far more grateful to men and to all animals than exertion and fatigue. The fable of Paradise, the story of the Biblical God imposing the sweat of labour as a punishment in order to earn subsistence, shows that in all times the natural temperament of man considered rest as the pleasantest condition, and that work must be considered as an evil indispensable ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and silly maid, In ev'ry age, have proved the fable's aid; The fertile subject never will be dry: 'Tis inexhaustible, you may rely. No man's exempt from evils such as these:— Who thinks himself secure, but little sees. One laughs at sly intrigues who, ere 'tis long, May, in his turn, be sneered at by the throng: ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... where ere thy bones are hurl'd Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides. Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, 160 Where the great vision of the guarded Mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold; Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth. And, O ye Dolphins, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... first and passionate love—it stands alone, Like Adam's recollection of his fall; The tree of knowledge has been pluck'd—all 's known— And life yields nothing further to recall Worthy of this ambrosial sin, so shown, No doubt in fable, as the unforgiven Fire which Prometheus filch'd ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... born in Bethlehem, in Bethlehem, in Bethlehem, A child was born in Bethlehem; ah, hear my fairy fable; For I have seen the King of Kings, no longer thronged with angel wings, But crooning like a little babe, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... more. This little collection from his 240 Fables is meant, first of all, for children. In assembling it no Fable was admitted that has not been approved by generations of the young and old. No apologue addressed to the mature intelligence alone, or framed to fit the society of ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... the nature of Addison and Goldsmith at least was too genial to allow of any approach to it. But, with all their difference of temperament, the method of the earlier critics is hardly to be distinguished from that of Johnson. There is the same orderliness of treatment—first the fable, then the characters, lastly the sentiment and the diction; the same persistency in applying general rules to a matter which, above all others, is a law to itself; the same invincible faith in "the indispensable laws of Aristotelian ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... itself); and, except for Nicolai's good industry (in his ANEKDOTEN-Book), we should have difficulty even in guessing, not to say understanding, as is now partly possible. The few real particulars—and those do verify themselves, and hang perfectly together, when the big globe of fable is burnt off from them—are to the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... in la Fontaine's fable, was ready to burst her skin with the joy of going to the Grandlieus' in the society of the beautiful Diane de Maufrigneuse. This morning she would forge one of the links that are so needful to ambition. She could already hear herself ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... constantly applied to Alderman Faulkener, and showed him the first Fable of Florian, but he told me that he would not give a shilling for any original copy whatever, as there is no law or even custom to secure any property in books in this kingdom [Ireland]. From him, I went directly to Smith ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... at the government colleges. They make quick work of the Hindoo idols; but so far every one here agrees with the Rev. Dr. Field when he says: "It needs very little learning to convince the Hindoo that his sacred books are a mass of fable. But this does not make him a Christian. It only lands him in infidelity, and leaves him there." The Encyclopedia Britannica says that "the progress of Protestant missions amounts at present to almost nothing." In Dr. Mullen's report, down to 1871, ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... thirty or forty years; and we English are, as good King Alfred found us to his sorrow a thousand years ago, very slow to move, even when we see a thing ought to be done. Let us hope that in this matter—we have been so in most matters as yet—we shall be like the tortoise in the fable, and not the hare; and by moving slowly, but surely, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... that I may be on my guard against them." Thereat they laughed the more, and answered him, "Oh, foolish traveler, your head is certainly full of dreams! There are no such things as sirens; all that is an old Greek fable, a fairy tale with no meaning except for old Greeks and modern babies! You will never meet with any sirens or harpies, nor will you ever see again the Princess of whom you talk, unless, indeed, in your dreams. It is this country that is the only ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... occasion of the fable of Jupiter helping his son Hercules.] And by the order of this battell wee maye learne whereof the poets had their inuention, when they faine in their writings, that Jupiter holpe his sonne Hercules, by throwing downe stones from ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (1 of 8) • Raphael Holinshed
... many of those interpreters are of a race which is for very good reasons hostile to Russia. An abundant cheap supply, firstly, of English and French books, in English and French, but in the Russian character, by means of which Russians may rapidly learn French and English—for it is quite a fable that these languages are known and used in Russia below the level of the court and aristocracy—and, secondly, of Russian books in the Latin (or some easy phonetic development of the Latin) type, will do more to facilitate interchange and ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... liable to dispersion than the land forces, were not yet scattered. Thus provided against immediate alarms, and with the laurels of the War of Secession still fresh, the country in military matters lay down and went to sleep, like the hare in the fable, regardless of the incessant progress on every side, which, indeed, was scarcely that of the tortoise. Our ships underwent no change in ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice. It is the one calling in which at the beginning the only exertion is that of self-indulgence; all the prizes are at the commencement. It is the ever new embodiment of the old fable of the sale of the soul to the Devil. The tempter offers wealth, comfort, excitement, but in return the victim must sell her soul, nor does the other party forget to exact his due to the uttermost farthing. Human nature, however, is short-sighted. Giddy girls, chafing against the restraints ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... Speak of things, persons, and places as you see them, not as you fancy; speak to convey correct views, not to excite wonder or to rival others in "large talk," and in "strange things." Simple truth is always more welcome in society than swollen fiction. The frog in the fable killed itself by trying to be as big as the ox; so you are in danger of killing truth when you inflate it beyond its own natural proportions. Truth needs no extraneous aids to commend ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... terrible doubt of appearances, Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only, May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters, The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Illumines footing on forbidden wall; Where, 'stead of pursy jeweler's display, Parading peacocks brave the passer-by, And swans like angels in an azure sky Wing swift and silent on unchallenged way. No land of fable! Of the Hills I sing, Whose royal women tread with conscious grace The peace-filled gardens of a warrior race, Each maiden fit for wedlock with a king, And every Rajput son so royal born And conscious of his age-long heritage He looks askance at Burke's becrested page And wonders at the ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... inevitable—perhaps to-morrow—at all events in a very few years. Of futurity I had heard—and of Elysium—just as I had heard of Jupiter, greatest and best, but, with my earliest youth, these things had faded from my mind, or had already taken upon themselves the character of fable. My Virgil, in which I early received my lessons of language, at once divested them of all their air of reality, and left them naked fiction. The other poets, Livy helping them, continued the same work and completed it. But, bent with most serious and earnest desires toward ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... conjuncture, inwardly deploring the unconscionable maternal meddling which had led to this, though not resentfully, for she had too much staunchness of heart to decry a parent's misdirected zeal. Had the clanship feeling been universally as strong as in the Chickerel family, the fable of the well-bonded fagot might ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... and carried off by it at Czaslav, where his remains were buried and his big mace or battle-club, mostly iron, hung honourably on the wall close by; that his skin was tanned and made into the cover of a drum is a fable; he was a tough soldier, and is called once and again in Carlyle's "Frederick" "Rhinoceros ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... with a smile on her lips, yet with tears in the dark eyes. "I know it could not be. Yet if time should come that trouble befel you, and you sought refuge for the child, my heart and my arms would be open. Ah, you think, what could a poor Jewess do for you? Well, maybe so. Yet you know the fable of the mouse that gnawed the net in which the lion was caught. It might be, some day, that ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?" I must say in passing that it is not the right materialistic treatment which delights the world in ROBINSON, but the romantic and philosophic interest of the fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse of delighting us when it is applied, in COLONEL JACK, to the management of a plantation. But I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have been influenced either by this identical ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to saying everything must give way to the considerations of war. It is taking the argument in the fable of the wolf and the lamb as serious philosophy and accepting the position of the wolf. They fail entirely to see the humor of the fable, and hence the fallacy of ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... all. Talus, the iron man in Spenser, who continually ran round the island of Crete, administering gentle warning and correction to offenders, by flooring them with an iron flail, was a very ancient personage in Greek fable; and the received opinion is, that he must have been a Cretan railroad, called The Great Circular Coast-Line, that carried my lords the judges on their circuits of jail-delivery. The 'Antigone,' again, that wears the freshness of morning dew, and is so fresh and dewy in the beautiful ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... mill-house, grinding for my very bread, than be brought forth to make sport for the Philistine lords and ladies. This proceeds from no dislike, real or affected, to the aristocracy of these realms. But they have their place, and I have mine; and, like the iron and earthen vessels in the old fable, we can scarce come into collision without my being the sufferer in every sense. It may be otherwise with the sheets which I am now writing. These may be opened and laid aside at pleasure; by amusing themselves with the ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... kettle sizzled there all the evening, giving off anything but an agreeable odor. We were translating the fable of "The Mouse and the Peasant" that night, and nihil Mehurcule is still mixed up in my mind with the odor of ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... this scheme was on a par with the method of the tailor in the fable who thought to lengthen his cloth by cutting a piece off one end and sewing it on to the other; but there was one thing about it that recommended it to the Vicar—it was self-supporting. He found that there would be no need to use ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... told you before that Separ was a place once—a sort of place; but you will relish now, I am convinced, the pithy fable ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... etiquette of the ballroom and dinner table. One must know how to conduct oneself on the golf links and at the chess table, just as one must know how to conduct oneself at dinner or at the opera. And in one's play, one must remember that touching little fable of the frogs who were stoned by boys, in which the poor little creatures cried, "What is play to you is death to us." Be kind, unselfish and fair. Do not sacrifice, in the exciting joyousness of the game, the little courtesies of social life. Remember ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... choose their king, resolve on a pilgrimage to Mount Kaf, to pay their homage to the Simorg. From this poem, written five hundred years ago, we cite the following passage, as a proof of the identity of mysticism in all periods. The tone is quite modern. In the fable, the birds were soon weary of the length and difficulties of the way, and at last almost all gave out. Three only persevered, and arrived before ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... it. He is at endless pains to establish his credit as a staunch upholder of the Bourbons, and has tried already to gain admittance into my set. When his wife took Mme. de Langeais' box, she thought that she could take her charm, her wit, and her success as well. It is the old fable of the ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... make it conceal itself, we kept at some distance. Our impatience, however, made us wish that it would move faster than it was doing. It went on in a straight line, apparently not discovering us, as we followed behind. How we longed that it would break into a run. I remembered the fable, however, of the hare and the tortoise: "Sure and steady wins the race." Parched with thirst as we were, it was a hard matter for us to restrain our eagerness. On went the tortoise, turning neither to the right nor to the left. It seemed to us that the ground was sloping, ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... of his work, says, "In her little library she had a Bible, a prayer-book, Shakespeare, and Lowell's 'Fable for the Critics,' with two or three other books." Shirley (p. 100, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... of a play," continued Triplet, "is the plot or fable. A gentleman of your experience can decide at once whether a plot or story is ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... weight as well as force in what you urge, Wingfold," returned Faber. "Still it looks to me just a cunningly devised fable—I will not say of the priests, but of the human mind deceiving itself with its ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... have arrived at the Shelley-reading age. Are these six multitudes unacquainted with this life of Shelley? Perhaps they are; indeed, one may feel pretty sure that the great bulk of them are. To these, then, I address myself, in the hope that some account of this romantic historical fable and the fabulist's manner of constructing and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... details. The book is moreover remarkable in having resuscitated our knowledge of the existence of the seed-storing habit. Mr. Moggridge points out that the ancients were familiar with the facts, and quotes the well-known fable of the ant and the grasshopper, which La Fontaine borrowed from Aesop. Mr. Moggridge (page 5) goes on: "So long as Europe was taught Natural History by southern writers the belief prevailed; but no sooner did the tide begin to turn, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Literature of the Indo-Chinese Nations, recently published in Volume 10 of the Asiatic Researches. The substance of the information conveyed by them is as follows; and I trust it will not be thought that the mixture of a portion of mythological fable in accounts of this nature invalidates what might otherwise have credit as historical fact. The utmost indeed we can pretend to ascertain is what the natives themselves believe to have been their ancient history; and it is proper to remark that in the present question there ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... continued to nourish that love of the pleasant earth which forced him to keep up the habit all his life and resulted in the glorious pictorial music of the Ring. He struggled in vain to conquer the piano-keys, and, indifferent to the fable of the fox and the grapes, came to the satisfying conclusion that the instrument was not worth mastering. We must remember that through Louise he was in constant touch with the theatre, and it is evident that he kept up ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... business. But he was half an Englishman by birth and altogether one by bringing up, and he therefore could not admit that she should be apparently enjoying herself, while he was gloomily brooding over the misfortunes that put her beyond his reach. The fable of the Dog in the Manger must have been composed to describe us Anglo-Saxons. It is sufficient that we be hindered from getting what we want, even by our own sense of honour; we are forthwith ready to sacrifice ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... Dinner, which we usually had at six, was followed by a little family conversation, in which the children were interrogated concerning what they had been taught during the day. When I was well pleased with them, I promised them a story, or a fable, in the evening. Sometimes after dinner, we went to take a short walk on the banks of the river; then returned to the cottage, where Etienne had had the care of lighting a large fire, the heat of which forced the musquitoes and gnats to yield their ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... months from the date of their entering the great river. [It was during this voyage that the nation of female warriors was said to have been met with; a report which gave rise to the Portuguese name of the river, Amazonas. It is now pretty well known that this is a mere fable, originating in the love of the marvellous which distinguished the early Spanish adventurers, and impaired the credibility ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... his soul. He beheld himself to be as the dog in the fable that had dropped the substance to snatch at a ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... Bellarmine, etc., I angred him exceedingly. Then Patrick Hume, David, Mr. Grahame and I went to walk: and particularly to the pierre leve or stone erected a litle way from the city. The story or fable wheirof is this: once as Ste. Radegonde was praying the Devil thought to have smoored[106] or crushed her wt a great meikle stone greater than 2 milstones, which God knows whence he brought, but she miraculously supported it wt hir head, as the woman heir carries the courds and whey on their head. ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... existence hereafter. To the sceptic, examining the evidence for immortality by the cold light of reason, such peoples and such individuals may seem to sacrifice the substance for the shadow: to adopt a homely comparison, they are like the dog in the fable who dropped the real leg of mutton, from his mouth in order to snap at its reflection in the water. Be that as it may, where such beliefs and hopes are entertained in full force, the whole activity of the mind and the whole energy of the body are ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... with us some coils of stout rope in order to assist us in descending from the mountain heights into the valleys below, for I did not place much reliance upon the fable of the eagles and the pieces of fresh meat as a means to procure the rubies which it was said were washed down by torrential rains at certain seasons. If rubies were to be obtained, I argued, it must be by a more practical ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... up with six skilled jewelers, and endeavored to make such a gold and silver branch as he thought would satisfy the Princess as having come from the wonderful tree growing on Mount Horai. Every one whom he had asked declared that Mount Horai belonged to the land of fable and not to fact. ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... I think that many times it helps to get a different view of things. You remember the fable of the golden windows, do you not? A little boy who had very few pretty things in his own home because his parents were poor, used often to stand in his own doorway at sunset time and look longingly at the big house at the ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... the letter T, followed sometimes by a circle as a picture of the year. Hence arose among a people fond of mystery and allegory a mode of speaking of the year under the name of a palm-branch or of a bird; and they formed a fable out of a mere confusion of words. The Greeks, who were not slow to copy Egyptian mysticism, called this fabulous bird the Phoenix from their own name for the palm-tree. The end of any long period of time they called the return of the phonix to earth. The Romans borrowed ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... like that, Aunt Sarah. It is true;—it is, indeed." She had now dragged her chair close to her aunt's seat upon the sofa, so that she could put her hands upon her aunt's knees. "All that about Miss Brownlow has been a fable." ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... the Philosopher hints, as of all other sorts of Poetry, so of Pastoral is the very Soul. and therfore Socrates in Plato says, that in those Verses which he had made there was nothing wanting but the Fable: therefore Pastorals as other kinds of Poetry must have their Fable, if they will be Poetry: Thus in Virgil's Silenus which contains the Stories of allmost the whole Fabulous Age, two Shepherds whom Silenus had often promis'd a Song, and as often deceived, seize upon him being drunk and asleep, and bind him with wreath'd Flowers; AEgle comes ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... children are more moral in the country, or that they here remain longer uncorrupted than in towns, whether large or small. Nor is it proved that in former times the country possessed any advantage in these respects, as compared with our own days and with the modern town. The entire fable of rural innocence appears to rest, not upon an actual comparison between town and country, but rather upon the more lively interest felt in town life, and especially in the life of the great towns: in towns, immorality has been more carefully studied and more often described; and on account ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... force than the pilgrim travellers now claims our attention, and we turn to the frozen north, to the wild region at the back of the north wind, for new activity and discovery. Out of this land of fable and myth, legend and poetry, the fierce inhabitants of Scandinavia begin to take shape. Tacitus speaks of them as "mighty in fame," Ptolemy as "savage and clothed in the skins ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... Midsummer fires, may perhaps be thought to lend it a faint colour of probability. But it is quite possible that the uncertainty as to their fathers may not have arisen till long after the death of the kings, when their figures began to melt away into the cloudland of fable, assuming fantastic shapes and gorgeous colouring as they passed from earth to heaven. If they were alien immigrants, strangers and pilgrims in the land they ruled over, it would be natural enough that the people should forget their lineage, and forgetting it should provide them ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... blame him?" asked Thad. "Makes me think of the old fable, when the lion and the donkey went hunting together. The lion took up his station at the mouth of the cave where some goats had hidden, while the donkey went in; and made all sorts of terrible noises, braying. So the goats ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... faith,—your thought of woman runs loftily; not loftily in the realm of virtue or goodness, but loftily on your new world-scale. The pride of intellect, that is thirsting in you, fashions ideal graces after a classic model. The heroines of fable are admired; and the soul is tortured with that intensity of passion which gleams through the broken utterances ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... what happened in between) when business at last had resumed its usual working, And the nation in general was no longer engaged in painfully realistic manoeuvres, on the Downs, between Guildford and Dorking,— Then the public met and resolved like the person whose case is recorded in fable That now that the steed had been stolen (or at least suffered from exposure to the air) it was high time to close the door of the stable; And that never again no more should their cricket-fields, football grounds, croquet lawns, bunkers, Be profaned ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... Horses go up a tower to bed forsooth! Yet for the matter of that, I will engage to ride my mare up any corkscrew wide enough to turn her forelock and tail in—ay, and down again too, which is another business with most horses. But come now, mother Rees, confess this all a fable of thine own contriving to make a mock of a farm-bred lad ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... my darling, who finishes his fable with a burst of laughter. Joy is communicative, and we take our places at table amid ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... could only testify that one of the robbers was a negro, or at any rate had had his face blackened, and that the size of another had appeared to him almost superhuman. This circumstance gave rise to the fable that, during the terrible storm of the previous clay, Hades had opened and spirits of darkness had rushed into the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... could not die. Lethe was only a fable of the olden times. A place of safety is not always a place of freedom from pain. It could not be so in this instance. Yet, for a time, like the exhausted prisoner borne back from torture to his cell, the crushed members reposed in delicious insensibility. The hard pallet was a heaven of ease ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... countenance since. It is the wolf that is at the door, and the howling and prowling of their particular wolf is not to be sneezed at, let me tell you. To put a modern political face upon an ancient Greek fable, the wolf in their case symbolizes the bitter question of whose roof is going to roof them when they get out of the plaster casts that are bed and board to them just at present. Where are they to go? All those which used ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... Dangerfield and Oates. He had the impudence to persist, year after year, in affirming that he had fallen a victim to the machinations of the late King, who had spent six thousand pounds in order to ruin him. Delaval and Hayes—so this fable ran—had been instructed by James in person. They had, in obedience to his orders, induced Fuller to pledge his word for their appearance, and had then absented themselves, and left him exposed to the resentment of the House of Commons. [200] The story had the reception which it ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... truths went forth into the world among the hoi polloi from the circle of initiated priests, the Hierophants of the sanctum sanctorum of the old temples, under the guise of religious fables, it may not be amiss to search for universal truths even under the patches of fiction's harlequinade. This fable about the Pleiades, the seven Sisters, Atlas, and Hercules exists identical in subject, though under other names, in the sacred Hindu books, and has likewise the same occult meaning. But then like the Ramayana "borrowed ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... of appearances, Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only, May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters, The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... that gave a new turn of the fables into choliambics. Nobody that I know of mentions him but Suidas, Avienus, and Tzetzes. There's one Gabrias, indeed, yet extant, that has comprised each fable in four sorry iambics. But our Babrius is a writer of another size and quality; and were his book now extant, it might justly be opposed, if not preferred, to the Latin of Phaedrus. There's a whole ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... I have set down, Only for this meridian, fit to be known Of your crude traveller.... First, for your garb, it must be grave and serious, Very reserv'd and lock'd; not tell a secret On any terms; not to your father: scarce A fable, but with caution: make sure choice Both of your company, and discourse; beware You never speak a truth— PEREGRINE. How! SIR P. Not to strangers, For those be they you must converse with most; Others I would not know, sir, but at distance, So as I still might be a saver in them: ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... of Avranches supposes That all these large and varying doses Of fable mean naught ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... King Beheader is a universal hero of fable, who has left many places behind him connected with his memory, but who he was ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... lavished on that sort of research, little knowledge has been gained; and the most diligent inquirers have been compelled either to confess that they were baffled, or rather than own their disappointment, to substitute fable for fact, and pass the fictions of imagination ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... will willingly forego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feel that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs. And if I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down its lion-strength, I shall be more ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat the "Beggar's Petition"; and after all, her next sister, Sally, could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine was always stupid—by no means; she learnt the fable of "The Hare and Many Friends" as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinnet; so, at eight years old she began. She learnt a year, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Switzerland, but made it the greatest proof of his indulgence to keep silence on the crime I had committed, in setting my foot on the territory of the French empire. I might have said, in the words of Lafontaine's fable: ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... floods of blasphemies,' he says, 'against God, Christ, and the Scriptures were poured upon my spirit; questions against the very being of God and of his only beloved Son, as whether there was in truth a God or Christ, or no, and whether the Holy Scriptures were not rather a fable and cunning story than the holy and pure ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... Mortality predominates, And men are—what they name not to themselves, And trust not to each other. Hark! the note, [The Shepherd's pipe in the distance is heard. The natural music of the mountain reed— For here the patriarchal days are not A pastoral fable—pipes in the liberal air, 50 Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd;[121] My soul would drink those echoes. Oh, that I were The viewless spirit of a lovely sound, A living voice, a breathing harmony, A bodiless enjoyment[122]—born and dying ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... gave the title of La Legende des Siecles is thus described in the preface to the first scenes: 'Exprimer l'humanite dans une espece d'oeuvre cyclique; la peindre successivement et simultanement sous tous ses aspects, histoire, fable, philosophie, religion, science, lesquels se resument en un seul et immense mouvement d'ascension vers la lumiere; faire apparaitre, dans une sorte de miroir sombre et clair—que l'interruption naturelle de travaux terrestres brisera probablement avant qu'il ait la dimension revee ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... in particular the fundamental source, origin, and true significance of the traditions we have been reviewing, including the Biblical accounts of the Fall, are all, according to him, to be looked for in this naturalistic fable of the Vedas. No doubt the allegory which served as starting-point to this myth was not unknown to the Hebrews. We find it distinctly expressed in a verse of the Book of Job (chap. xxvi. 13), where it is said of God, "By his Spirit he hath garnished the heavens; ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... priests related that their kings had ruled for 150,000 years. While this is a fable, they were right in ascribing great antiquity to the Chaldean empire. The soil of Chaldea is everywhere studded with hills and each of these is a mass of debris, the residue of a ruined city. Many of these have been excavated and many cities brought to view, (Our, Larsam, Bal-ilou), ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... This trade of mastery, after all, is the property of a very few minds; and no precaution of the prudent, no forethought of the wary, nor any expedient of charters, constitutions, or restrictions, will prevent the few from placing their feet on the neck of the many. We may revive the fable of King Log and King Stork, as often, and in as many forms as we will; it will ever be the fable of King Log and King Stork. We are no admirers of political aristocracies, as a thousand paragraphs from our pen will prove; and, as for monarchs, we ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... and precious of gems. The assertions of the scientific are often the reverse of poetical. We are constrained to believe them, but like our poetical delusions better, and for the origin of the pearl prefer the quaint fable of the Persians to the unpleasant fact of the zoologist. A drop of water of ineffable purity falls from heaven to the sea, an oyster gapes and swallows it, the drop hardens and ripens, and becomes a pearl; and who is ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... some day—some of the Eddas, and the Voluspa, and Beowulf, and the noble old Romances. The old Arabs, again, had their tales, which we now call the 'Arabian Nights.' The old Romans had theirs, and they called them 'Fabulae,' from which our word 'fable' comes; but the old Hellens called theirs 'Muthoi,' from which our new word 'myth' is taken. But next to those old Romances, which were written in the Christian middle age, there are no fairy tales like these old Greek ones, for beauty, and wisdom, and truth, ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... drawback to my rejoicing over the finishing of the first hoeing is, that the garden now wants hoeing the second time. I suppose, if my garden were planted in a perfect circle, and I started round it with a hoe, I should never see an opportunity to rest. The fact is, that gardening is the old fable of perpetual labor; and I, for one, can never forgive Adam Sisyphus, or whoever it was, who let in the roots of discord. I had pictured myself sitting at eve, with my family, in the shade of twilight, contemplating a garden ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of fable are the shining moments of great men. We run all our vessels into one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the necessary and structural action of the human mind. The ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... induced a tendency in the ratio of the two metals to again advance. Gold was extremely abundant in ancient times. It was plenteously furnished by the rivers of Asia. The sands of Pactolus, the golden fleece conquered by the Argonauts, the gold of Ophir, the fable of King Midas, all tend to show the eastern origin of gold. It was abundant in Cabul and Little Thibet. It abounded in the empire of the Pharaohs, as is attested by the traces of mining operations, now exhausted, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... then leaps in himself, to deceive the world and leave no trace of mortality behind. His enemies believe, as he desired, that he and his people have been taken up into heaven. The whole, however, is dimly prescient, and the concluding lines of the fable have been thought by believers in augury to be prophetic. "Incredible instance! How far can the passion for fame go!" Among the papers of this period are also a constitution for the "calotte," a secret society of his regiment organized to keep its members up to the mark of conduct ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... book is presented to you as a token of esteem and gratitude. 10. The warrior fell back upon the bed a lifeless corpse. 11. The apple tastes and smells delicious. 12. Lord Darnley turned out a dissolute and insolent husband. 13. In the fable of the Discontented Pendulum, the weights hung speechless. 14. The brightness and freedom of the New Learning seemed incarnate in the young and scholarly Sir Thomas More. 15. Sir Philip Sidney lived ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... mainspring of it. One needn't assume that there were not other young women at the prince's ball as beautiful as Cinderella, and other gowns, perhaps, as marvelous as the one provided by the fairy godmother. The godmother's greatest gift, I should say, though the fable lays little stress on it, was a capacity for unalloyed delight. No other young girl, beautiful as she may have been, if she were accustomed to driving to balls in coaches and having princes ask her to dance with them, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Remember me Honor thy Parents Uncharitable Judgment Boys become Men To the Portrait of Father Ballou Susan's Repentance and Appeal to her Elder Sister Little Emma The Old Sabbath Schoolroom The Hunter, and his Dog Jowler—A Fable Take Care of your Books My Niece Teachers' Library Scholars' Library Agatha Responsibility Duty of Parents A Scholar's Remembrance of the Pic-Nic of 1850 Rain Drops Obey the Rules The Ways of Providence ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston
... breast the moment of ultimate self-abandonment and of renewed desire seemed to coalesce into a single instant of hitherto unimagined spiritual ecstasy. Were not life and death, time and eternity, one upon these lips? Was he not a god? Were not youth and age merely a fable; visions of men's fancy? Were not home and exile, splendor and misery, renown and oblivion, senseless distinctions, fit only for the use of the uneasy, the lonely, the frustrate; had not the words become unmeaning to one who was Casanova, and who ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... For fable is Love's world, his home, his birthplace: Delightedly dwells he 'mong fays, and talismans, And spirits, and delightedly believes Divinities, being himself divine The intelligible forms of ancient poets, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... in this district are Naragarhi, a small fort on the plain, where the Subah usually resides; Bhemagarhi, another similar place, where he occasionally resides; and Janakpur, a place of pilgrimage noted in Hindu fable, and already mentioned as the seat of a very ancient dynasty. I am told that there are no remains of former power ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... of Satire. The Excellency of Epic Satire above others, as adding Example to Precept, and animating by Fable and sensible Images. Epic Satire compar'd with Epic Poem, and wherein they differ: Of their Extent, Action, Unities, Episodes, and the Nature of their Morals. Of Parody: Of the Style, Figures, and Wit proper to this Sort of Poem, and the superior Talents ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... this account may not be quite satisfactory to you, who I know love truth more than fable, I am inclined to think you will consider Possidonius's manner of accounting for it more feasible: He says, that it was once a great lake, and having a bed of gravel at the bottom, those pebble stones, by a succession of ages, ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... would have no husband but one who could prove himself "a wise king." In our days, when every king and nearly every man thinks himself wise, such a decision would not have deterred suitors, and she would have been compelled, in the end, to choose among the few unwise. But wisdom, in those times of fable and necromancy, had a wider meaning than we give it. A wise king was one who had control of the powers of earth and air, who could call the genii to his aid by incantations, and perform supernatural ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... laid over the midst of hell, and described to be finer than a hair, and sharper than the edge of a sword; so that it seems very difficult to conceive how any one shall be able to stand upon it; for which reason most of the sect of the Motazalites reject it as a fable; though the orthodox think it a sufficient proof of the truth of this article, that it was seriously affirmed by him who never asserted a falsehood, meaning their prophet, who, to add to the difficulty ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Wind, the Salmali felt great shame. Remembering also the words that Narada had said, he began to repent greatly for his folly. Even in this way, O tiger among kings, a weak and foolish person, by provoking the enmity of a powerful one, is at last obliged to repent like the Salmali in fable. Even when possessed of equal might, people do not suddenly wage hostilities with those that have injured them. On the other hand, they display their might gradually, O king! A person of foolish understanding should never ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... peculiarly to our island (for the Continent has its forests, but England its woods) there lived, a short time ago, a charming little fairy called Nymphalin. I believe she is descended from a younger branch of the house of Mab; but perhaps that may only be a genealogical fable, for your fairies are very susceptible to the pride of ancestry, and it is impossible to deny that they fall somewhat reluctantly into the liberal opinions so much in vogue at ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "You know the fable of the fox and the grapes," Bell said, her gray eyes flashing indignantly upon her sister, who, wisely forbore further remarks upon Helen's hands and contented herself with wondering if people generally ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... perhaps, a more lively illustration of the principle here insisted upon, if I recall to the reader's recollection the legend of the Seven Sleepers. The scene of that popular fable was placed in the two centuries which elapsed between the reign of the emperor Decius and the death of Theodosius the younger. In that interval of time (between the years 249 and 450 of our era) the union ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... and bounded action, no expansive upward tendency, and thence no poetry. But courage, when it is the servant of principle for large, unselfish ends, becomes poetical, exhibiting the moral beautiful, as in the fable of Curtius and the fact (or fable) of Winkelried. In the poetical there is always enlargement, exaltation, purification; animal feeling, self-seeking propensity, becoming so combined with the higher nature as to rise above ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... rage; A third, the theme of all succeeding times, Gave to the cruel axe a darling son: Nay more, for justice some devote themselves, As he at Carthage, an immortal name! Yet there is one step left above them all, Above their history, above their fable: A wife, bride, mistress, unenjoy'd—do that, And tread upon ...
— The Revenge - A Tragedy • Edward Young
... to the fable that Apollo had killed his beloved boy Hyacinth, while playing with him at quoits. "This" (says M. La Fosse) "is assuredly the sense of the text, and it cannot ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... said unto them, "Friends, call him not a knight, but rather a fisherman." Upon this it pleased God that he should fall asleep, and in his sleep Santiago appeared to him with a good and cheerful countenance, holding in his hand a bunch of keys, and said unto him, "Thou thinkest it a fable that they should call me a knight, and sayest that I am not so: for this reason am I come unto thee that thou never more mayest doubt concerning my knighthood; for a knight of Jesus Christ I am, and a helper of the Christians against the Moors." ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... he thought on such topics." It was asserted in many after-dinner speeches, Grub Street elegies, and academic prize poems and prize declamations, that the great minister died exclaiming, "Oh my country!" This is a fable; but it is true that the last words which he uttered, while he knew what he said, were broken exclamations about the alarming state of public affairs. He ceased to breathe on the morning of the 23rd of January, 1806, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day on which he first took his seat ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lawyers, and are the tools of our trade. If the world does not see fit to use those tools, it is our business to make them, and as for justice, that is an allegory, useful in addressing a jury, but considered a fable by the judge. Laws are useful to oppose other laws with, and various decisions are only good in so far as they help your case ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... them, and it is not likely, that they can have reared them and remained without food; they are, however, often very lean and wasted, and the absorption of their generally large portion of fat, contributes to their nourishment. The story that they live by sucking their paws is, as may be supposed, a fable; when well-fed they always lick their paws, very often accompanying the action with a peculiar sort of mumbling noise. There are a few which will never eat flesh, and all are able to do without it. They are, generally speaking, large, clumsy and awkward, possessing large claws for digging; ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... edition of this tale was put forth without explaining the old fable on which it was founded—a fable recurring again and again in fairy myths, though not traceable in the classic world till a very late period, when it appeared among the tales of Apuleius, of the province ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... of this scheme shows that Wildenvey has done no great violence to the fable nor to the characters. His shifts and changes are sensible enough. In the treatment of the text, however, he has had no scruples. Shakespeare is mercilessly cut ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... raise a prodigious uproar if they were not paid as liberally as if they had done an honest day's work. The poor planter meanwhile was at his wits' end. It was of no use to turn them off and hire another set, for, like the fox in the fable, he knew he should only fare the worse. If the estate was large enough to stand the strain for two or three years, and the manager was a man of self-control enough to keep his temper, and firmness enough to persevere in a winnowing of the whole region round ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... indeed, appear to extend beyond the period of the flood, and from these the "dark idolater of chance," who would rejoice to prove that "Book of Books" a splendid fable, draws his deductions. But how he fails. The learned men of China, those held in the greatest repute amongst a people where such a reputation is not easily obtained, themselves admit, that the history ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... records exact statements of truth? Not always. The primitive human mind could only lisp its wonderful glimpses of truth in legend and myth. And so in fable and allegory the early Israelites sought to show the power of good over evil, and thereby stimulate a desire for right conduct, based, of course, on right-thinking. And thus it is that the most significant thing in their sacred records is their many, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... come to be the commonly accepted name for the well-known collection of stories about animals, though we cannot be sure that any of them, were written by the Greek slave of that name, who, Herodotus tells us, lived about the year 55O B.C. The fable about animals is probably the oldest form of story known. Its object is to teach a lesson to men and women, without seeming to do so, and because of this concealed lesson it has always been a great favorite with all nations. In Russia, for example, where a man ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... banged faintly, and in the great room rose the busy silence of those minutes which precede repasts. Suddenly the four men by the breakfast fable stood back. Lord ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... surface. His friends were agreed that what they remembered chiefly of his stories was not the broad part of them, but the moral that was in them.(9) And they had no squeamishness as critics of the art of fable-making. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... the most part, to observe the decorum of the stage. He has certainly followed nature in the language of his tragedy, and therefore shines in the passionate parts more than any of our English poets. As there is something familiar and domestic in the fable of his tragedy, he has little pomp, but great energy in his expressions; for which reason, though he has admirably succeeded in the tender and melting parts of his tragedies, he sometimes falls into too great a familiarity of phrase in those, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... it will be evident that Scott had gained greatly in narrative power since the production of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Not only are the elements of the "fable" (to use the word in its old-fashioned sense) harmonious and probable, but the various incidents grow out of each other in a natural and necessary way. The Lay was at best a skillful bit of carpentering whereof the several parts were nicely juxtaposed; ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... suggested by her animal instinct? A mother is as cunning to get at her children as a girl can be in the conduct of a love intrigue. If your Marquise really wanted to give her children food and clothes, the Devil himself would not have hindered her, heh? That is rather too big a fable for an ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... nonsense," said Sara, "but 'tis an old-time fable; thee canst try it, child," she added, smiling, and trying to chase away ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... ruse was received has induced me at length to undertake a regular compilation and publication of the adventures in question; for I found that, in spite of the air of fable which had been so ingeniously thrown around that portion of my statement which appeared in the "Messenger" (without altering or distorting a single fact), the public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable, and several letters ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Beecher went to England, not openly, but secretly as a messenger of the government. Like other myths, the fable grew slowly, but is now well entrenched in the minds of multitudes. There is no foundation for the story. Indeed, Mr. Beecher is on record plainly, stating that no request, no suggestion, no hint, even, came from Washington. ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... finds in entering into the kingdom of heaven; and, combining all these denunciations against opulence, let us heartily congratulate one another upon our lucky escape from the calamity of a twenty or thirty thousand pound prize! The fox in the fable, who accused the unattainable grapes of sourness, was more of a philosopher than we are generally willing to allow. He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy which turns everything to gold, and converts disappointment itself into a ground of resignation and content. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a law of the whole universe. The music of the spheres is no fable. Observe, too, the rhythm of the seasons. Everywhere there is a co-ordination of the finite and the infinite, the individual and the universal,—a unity of forces acting in a sequence of ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... continent Atlantis. Perhaps its very existence is but a fable now: it has been many centuries since we have had instruments to record thought force from Earth, and we have lost touch. But, my friends, even then we of Venus had conquered space, and it was we who visited Atlantis to find a race more nearly like ourselves than were ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... an old fable that a doe that had but one eye used to graze near the sea; and in order to be safe, she kept her blind eye toward the water, from which side she expected no danger, while with the good eye she watched the country. Some men, perceiving this, took a boat ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... be regarded as a metaphor continued; or it is several metaphors so connected together in sense, as frequently to form a kind of parable or fable. It differs from a single metaphor, in the same manner that a cluster on the vine ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... and winged. So HESIOD drew The legendary Harpy crew, The "Spoilers" of old fable; Maidens, yet monsters, woman-faced, With iron hearts that had disgraced ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... December, 1559. The story of the Nag's Head is a pure legend used by controversialists for impugning the validity of Anglican Orders. As a matter of fact the main argument against these Orders is drawn neither from the fable of the Nag's Head nor from the want of episcopal orders in the case of Barlow, the consecrator of Parker, though his consecration has not been proved, but from the use of a corrupt form, which was then as it is now rejected ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... never yet in aught deceived me, my son," observed the herdsman, "else should I say thou wert mocking me with some wild fable; so passing all belief doth it seem, that the son of my lord the king should have been contented to dwell with so poor and humble a man as myself in the ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... In a fable one of the Fates spun filaments so fine that they were invisible, and she became a victim of her cunning, for she was bound to the ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... her a charge to feed a crocodile, in consequence of his believing that it was his sudara; but its coming to her out of the river when she called it by the name of white king, and taking the food she had brought it, must have been a fable of her own invention; for this being false, it was impossible that she should believe it to be true. The girl's story, however, as well as that of the man, is a strong proof that they both firmly believed the existence of crocodiles ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... it with unwillingness," said Edward; "for although, God wot, I speak but the mere truth, yet even while my tongue speaks it as truth, my own ears receive it as fable." ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... saved, but receives these gifts in abundance from faith alone. Nay, were he so foolish as to pretend to be justified, set free, saved, and made a Christian, by means of any good work, he would immediately lose faith, with all its benefits. Such folly is prettily represented in the fable where a dog, running along in the water and carrying in his mouth a real piece of meat, is deceived by the reflection of the meat in the water, and, in trying with open mouth to seize it, loses the meat and its image at the ...
— Concerning Christian Liberty - With Letter Of Martin Luther To Pope Leo X. • Martin Luther
... that, among the civilized nations of Europe, many who deny revelation, and treat the Bible as a fable, acknowledge that the world must have been made by a ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... he, gazing up at the huge boulder-strewn hill-side above us. 'One wonders at that sight, whether the fable of the giants be not true after all,—and that "Vale of Rocks," hanging five hundred feet in air, with all its crag-castles, and tottering battlements, and colossal crumbling idols, and great blocks, which ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Cyrus the Persian, like that of many another famous conqueror, is lost in a cloud of fable. According to Herodotus, to whom we owe the earliest account, Astyages the King of Media was warned in a dream that some danger threatened the kingdom from the offspring of his daughter Mandane, who as yet was unmarried. In order to remove the danger, whatever it might be, as far as possible from ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... left-handedly, Petrea!" exclaimed Sara, in ill-humour; "you are like the ass in the fable, that would break the head of his friend in driving away ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... in front of them a frightful monster ran across their path, which seemed so hideous to Martin, that his mind instantly reverted to the fable of Saint George and the Dragon, and he almost expected to see fire issuing from its mouth. It was a huge lizard, with a body about three feet long, covered with bright scales. It had a long, thick tail. Its head was clumsy and misshapen, and altogether its aspect ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... with the 'chandelier' of the Cape, bristling with wax tapers: the Guanches used it extensively for narcotising fish. This 'milk plant,' with its acrid, viscid, and virulent juice, and a small remedial shrub growing by its side, probably gave rise to the island fable of the twin fountains; one killed the traveller by a kind of risus Sardonicus, unless he used the other by way of cure. A scatter of crosses, which are impaled against every wall and which rise from every eminence; a ruined fort here and there; ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... phases through which on such an occasion public opinion must pass. What it has received with veneration it begins to doubt, then it offers new interpretations, then subsides into dissent, and ends with a rejection of the whole as a mere fable. ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... Ahnit, n. a spear Ahnebeesh, n. a leaf Ahnwabewin, n. a rest Ahnahmeawegahmig, n. a church, meeting-house, or praying-house Ahskekoomon, n. lead Ahskahtowhe, n. a skin or hide Asquach, adv. falsely, vain Ahdesookaun, n. story, fable Ahnwahtin, not boisterous Ahwebah, n. or adj. calm Ahkahkahzha, n. coal Ahyegagah, adv. soon, directly Ahnoodezeh, adv. greedy Ahnowh, prep. though Ahtoon, put it down Ahneenmenik, adv. how much Ahneendeh, adv. where Ahneendehnahkayah, ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield
... rose it was only to show the party cantering by at an easy pace and looking as if they were engaged in some trial of skill, and in spite of the peril in which he was placed Chris's thoughts played a strange prank, suggesting to him the old fable of the boys and ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... actually incorporated with England and represented in the English Parliament. What Edward had really done was to break the Welsh resistance. The policy with which he followed up his victory (for the "massacre of the bards" is a mere fable) accomplished its end, and though two later rebellions and a ceaseless strife of the natives with the English towns in their midst showed that the country was still far from being reconciled to its conquest, it ceased to be ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... tales, which it would seem even at the present time, especially in Portugal and Galicia, are told in the evening, and have rarely found their way into print, have the strong stamp of the legitimate Eastern fable, and bear a great family resemblance to those of the Arabian Nights. As, in fact, the Thousand and One Nights was very early published in Spanish, it is probable that its marvellous histories ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... Elizabeth Gray, during Warwick's negotiations in France for the alliance of Bona of Savoy (sister-in-law to Louis XI.), which exasperated the fiery earl, and induced his union with the House of Lancaster. All our more recent historians have justly rejected this groundless fable, which even Hume (his extreme penetration supplying the defects of his superficial research) admits with reserve. ["There may even some doubt arise with regard to the proposal of marriage made to Bona of Savoy," etc.—HUME, note to p. 222, vol. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... party differences in the Church, and even the variations between Christian sects are concerned, both being different ways of viewing the same truth. These may, like the knights in the old fable, find that both were right about the shield, both have the same foundation. But where the foundation is not the same, the results of the teaching ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... End, of course," the dignified stranger answered at once, descending from his perch as he spoke, with a light spring more like a boy's than a mature man's. "You must surely know those famous lines in 'Lycidas' about 'The fable of Bellerus old, Where the Great Vision of the guarded mount Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold; Look homeward, angel, now, and melt ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... you read— Romance or fairy fable? Of is it some historic page, Or kings and crowns unstable?" The young boy gave an upward glance,— "It ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... says the fable, Overflow'd a farmer's barn and stable; Whole ricks of hay and sacks of corn Were down the sudden current borne; While things of heterogeneous kind Together float with tide and wind. The generous wheat forgot its pride, And sail'd with litter side by side; Uniting ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... a saviour to deliver— A Son of Man, in love and might! A holy fire, of life all-giver, He in our hearts has fanned alight. Then first heaven opened—and, no fable, Our own old fatherland we trod! To hope and trust we straight were able, And knew ourselves ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... al hire besinesse Be daie and ek be nyhtes tyde With arwes brode under the side And bowe in honde, of which sche slowh And tok al that hir liste ynowh Of bestes whiche ben chacable: Wherof the Cronique of this fable 1270 Seith that the gentils most of alle Worschipen hire and to hire calle, And the goddesse of hihe helles, Of grene trees, of freisshe welles, They clepen hire in that believe, Which that no reson mai achieve. Proserpina, ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... been trying to read; "it is so ridiculous making the beasts talk. Of course they never do talk that way, and if they did talk, they would not be giving that kind of advice But then they never did talk. Did you ever hear of a beast talking, Ernest, except in a fable?" ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... whimsically, "I am afraid we are rather like the shepherdess and the chimney-sweep of the fable I read you very long ago. We climbed up so far that we could see the stars, once, very long ago, Patricia, and we have come back to live upon the parlor table. I suppose it happens to all ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... movement of the stars in their spheres. Yes, that which the most illustrious scholars have only been able to suspect the existence of is distinctly heard by these ears scarcely opened as yet, and ravishes them. A charming fable, giving to innocence more power than ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... you fancy; speak to convey correct views, not to excite wonder or to rival others in "large talk," and in "strange things." Simple truth is always more welcome in society than swollen fiction. The frog in the fable killed itself by trying to be as big as the ox; so you are in danger of killing truth when you inflate it beyond its own natural proportions. Truth needs no extraneous aids to commend it; or, ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... hope of us? Have we not perished utterly? To you, perhaps, it is allowed, to read The book of destiny. I am dismayed, And have no refuge from my grief; For dark to me the future is, and all That I discern is such, as makes hope seem A fable and a dream. To your old homes A wretched crew succeed; to noble act or word, They pay no heed; for your eternal fame They know no envy, feel no blush of shame. A filthy mob your monuments defile: To ages yet unborn, We have become a by-word and ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... For Fable: as I smoked a pipe And havered with a black-haired cowman, Grey-eyed, in that fine Celtic type, As much the poet as the ploughman— "Seems kind of lucky here," said I; "The very ducklings look more downy Than others do." He grinned: ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... Hallam, "that to name one as the most original seems a disparagement to others, we might say that this great prerogative of genius, was exercised above all in 'Lear.' It diverges more from the model of regular tragedy than 'Macbeth,' or 'Othello,' and even more than 'Hamlet,' but the fable is better constructed than in the last of these and it displays full as much of the almost superhuman inspiration of the poet as the ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... the policy of the ostrich, Helena," said Forbes, grimly. "It may or may not be a fable as regards ostriches— I don't know enough about them to feel certain, but it is unquestionably too often true of mankind. I believed my head was hidden and imagined the remainder of my body was safe in consequence. Now I learn that my opponents have been tracking me steadily for half ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... any one who brings an unbiased mind to the question can hesitate as to the side on which the weight of testimony inclines. Professor Weismann declares that "the transmission of mutilations may be dismissed into the domain of fable." {38} If so, then, whom can we trust? What is the use of science at all if the conclusions of a man as competent as I readily admit Mr. Darwin to have been, on the evidence laid before him from countless sources, is to be set aside lightly and without ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... patron, found himself a beneficed bishop. Nor is such preferment to be wondered at. The qualifications considered necessary to constitute a device-maker, were fully equal to those which Imlac described to Rasselas as requisite to form a poet. 'Philosophy and poetry,' wrote Pere le Moyne, 'history and fable, all that is taught in colleges, all that is learned in the world, are condensed and epitomised in this great pursuit; in short, if there be an art which requires an all-accomplished workman, that art is device-making.' Ruscelli says: ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... they say thou art Earth's satellite; yet when I gaze on thee my thoughts are not of thy suzerain. They teach us that thy power is a fable, and that thy divinity is a dream. Oh, thou bright Queen! I will be no traitor to thy sweet authority; and verily, I will not believe that thy influence o'er our hearts is, at this moment, less potent than when we worshipped in thy glittering fane of Ephesus, or trembled at the dark horrors of thine ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... farming community in the United States. Living almost exclusively among themselves, their manners and feelings were homogeneous; and living, too, almost entirely upon the products of their plantations, independent of their market-crops, they grew rich so rapidly as to mock the fable of Jonah's gourd. This wealth afforded the means of education and travel; these, cultivation and high mental attainments, and, with these, the elegances of refined life. The country was vast and fertile; the Mississippi, flowing by their homes, was sublimely grand, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... us. Is one to give free rein to his fancy or imagination; to see animal life with his "vision," and not with his corporeal eyesight; to hear with his transcendental ear, and not through his auditory nerve? This may be all right in fiction or romance or fable, but why call the outcome natural history? Why set it down as a record of actual observation? Why penetrate the wilderness to interview Indians, trappers, guides, woodsmen, and thus seek to confirm your observations, if you have all the while ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... quickly, had not comprehended that the admirer with Florent was grafted on a friend worthy to be painted by La Fontaine or by Balzac, the two poets of friendship, the one in his sublime and tragic Cousin Pons, the other in that short but fine fable, in which is this verse, one of the most tender in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... been in our car. By the way, I saved the class to-day, the school inspector has been this week and examined our class first in History and then in German, and I was the only one who knew all that Frau Doktor M. had told us about the Origin of Fable. The insp. was very complimentary and afterwards Frau Doktor M. said: its quite true one can always depend upon Lainer; she's got a trustworthy memory. When we were walking home she was awfully nice: "Do you know, Lainer, I feel that I really must ask your pardon." I was quite ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... of a stone having the property of converting the baser metals into gold being merely an absurd fable: yet, although the pursuits of Alchemy were the most preposterous that can be conceived, the ardor with which they were followed, and the amazing number of experiments made in consequence, led to the discovery of many facts to which Chemistry is ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... take the record of these events with a degree of caution. That fable and history have been indiscriminately mingled by the Spanish authors is plain enough from the fact that ridiculous miracles are constantly recorded by them as having actually occurred, which were the pure invention of the priesthood, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... federal convention, for an amendment of our federal affairs; yet I do not view them in so disadvantageous a light at present, as some do. And above all things, I am astonished at some people's considering a kingly government as a refuge. Advise such to read the fable of the frogs, who solicited Jupiter for a king. If that does not put them to rights, send them to Europe, to see something of the trappings of monarchy, and I will undertake, that every man shall go back thoroughly cured. If all the evils ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... only blamed me for having presumed to travel in Switzerland, but made it the greatest proof of his indulgence to keep silence on the crime I had committed, in setting my foot on the territory of the French empire. I might have said, in the words of Lafontaine's fable: ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
