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More "Imagination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "You and your religion are as far apart as the poles!" Had he, Hodder, outgrown the dean's religion, or had it ever been his own? Was there, after all, such a thing as religion? Might it not be merely a figment of the fertile imagination of man? He did not escape the terror of this thought when he paused to consider his labour of the past two years and the vanity of its results. And little by little the feeling grew upon him, such being the state ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the miser in both these people," said Esmeer, and the thing was perfectly true. For, after all, the miser is nothing more than a man who either through want of imagination or want of suggestion misapplies to a base use a natural power of concentration upon one end. The concentration itself is neither good nor evil, but a power that can be used in either way. And the Baileys gathered and reinvested usuriously not money, but knowledge of the utmost value ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... superadded. He should require the fullest explanations and guarantees before committing himself,—indeed, her present call might be an advance that it would be necessary for him to check. He even pictured her pleading at his feet; a very little stronger effort of his Alnaschar imagination would have made him reject her like the fatuous Persian ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... our own Jack gained his renown, the Norse Trolls, the Ogres of southern romance, the Drakos and Lamia of modern Greece, the Lithuanian Laume—these and all the other groups of monstrous forms under which the imagination of each race has embodied its ideas about (according to one hypothesis) the Powers of Darkness it feared, or (according to another) the Aborigines it detested, differ from each other to a considerable and easily recognizable extent. An excellent illustration of this statement ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... And, as it is of the nature of man to hate those whom he fears, Elsley began to have dark and ugly feelings toward Lucia. Instead of throwing them away, as a strong man would have done, he pampered them almost without meaning to do so. For he let them run riot through his too vivid imagination, in the form of possible speeches, possible scenes, till he had looked and looked through a hundred thoughts which no man has a right to entertain for a moment. True; he had entertained them with horror; but he ought not to have entertained them at all; he ought to have kicked them ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... passion, worked another way, and threw us into the vapours; it bewildered our understandings, and set the imagination at work to form a thousand terrible things that perhaps might never happen. We first supposed, as indeed everybody had related to us, that the seamen on board the English and Dutch ships, but especially the Dutch, were so enraged at the name of a pirate, ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... have been, it surpassed even my capacity, with this specimen of "the bootiful" before me, to surmise; but my companion was evidently one of those enviable individuals, whose ignorance is indeed their happiness, or whose imagination supplies the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... he was among the donkeys, dogs, pilgrims, and muleteers. Out on the Mount of Olives and in starlit Bethlehem, by ancient Hebron, and then down to low-lying Jericho and at the Dead Sea, he was refreshing memory and imagination, shedding old fancies and traditions, discriminating as never before between figures of rhetoric and figures of rock and reality, while feeding his faith and cheering his spirit. Then from Jerusalem, after a twenty days' stay, the party rode northward to Shechem, the home of the Samaritan, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... hers at thought of these two royal men suffering for her and because of her; for she did not hide from herself the conviction that if Dick knew, or, rather, since he did know, he, too, must be suffering. She assured herself that she was a woman of imagination and purpose in sex matters, and that no part of her attraction toward Graham lay merely in his freshness, newness, difference. And she denied to herself that passion played more than the most minor part. Deep down she was conscious of her own recklessness and madness, and of an end ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... timidity, to which he was extremely subject, allowed him to make full use of those talents and that penetration with which he was endowed.[**] The captivity and other misfortunes which he had undergone by entering into a league against Charles, had so affected his imagination, that he never afterwards exerted himself with vigor in any public measure; especially if the interest or inclinations of that potentate stood in opposition to him. The imperial forces were at that time powerful in Italy, and might return to the attack of Rome, which was still defenceless, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... who has, under various circumstances, given me proofs of the most sincere friendship, though he was of quite a different opinion from your father, who embraced the new ideas with all the enthusiasm of a lively imagination. He fancied liberty was to be secured by obtaining concessions from the king, whom he venerated. But all was lost, and nothing gained but anarchy. Who will arrest the torrent? O God! unless thy powerful hand control and restrain ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Deschamps well and lovingly. For years she had seen the letters that at long intervals came from him at Grande Pointe to her mother here. In almost every one of them she had read high praises of Claude. He had grown, thus, to be the hero of her imagination. She had wondered if it could ever happen that he would come within her sight, and if so, when, where, how. And now, here at a time of all times when it would have seemed least possible, he had, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... character especially appealed to the English people, and his loyalty to his friends and colleagues remained unshaken throughout his whole life. He impressed not only his own countrymen, but also foreigners, with his splendid gifts of imagination and foresight. ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... ape the crowded city streets? With much to apologize for in barn and pigsty, why place them in the seat of honor? Moreover, many things which take place on the farm gain enchantment from distance. It is best to leave some scope for the imagination of the passer-by. These and other things will change as farmers' lives grow more gracious, and more attention is given to beautifying ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... in the bathroom, and dried, without the slightest disguise, in the bedroom. He never hurried in anything. The way he cleaned his teeth, shaved, and made his toilet almost transformed the place, in my imagination, into a ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... religious thinkers bow the knee to an aristocracy so vilely proud to stretch forth its hand of fellowship to a slaveholding brotherhood beyond the sea! We need not denounce them. The ideas they pretend to stand for hold them in scorn. The imagination whose pictures they drew will quench all her lustre for the deserters that devote themselves to the slavish passions of the hour. The history whose tales of glory and ignominy they related will rear a gibbet for their own reputation in the future time. As for us, at the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... send a couple of men to his office in the Empire State Building to see that nothing happens to him on the way home this evening. I talked to him by telephone and he pooh-poohed the whole thing. Hard-headed business executives have no imagination." ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... likely to—now," she declared, and, though it may have been pure imagination, I thought she leaned a little nearer, and the bare idea of such graciousness on her part seemed to change my whole nature. All the folly of youth went out of me, and love came in and took its place and filled my whole being. What I had been belonged to the remote past; I knew that I should never ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... fine, M. Baillet, who had examined the many opinions given of Grotius, assures us, that all who read his poems approved of them; that those of fine taste, and who could judge of epigrams, found many of his admirable, some discovering the subtilty of his genius, and the fertility of his imagination; others, the happy turn which he could give to his ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... to think of such things? She was a unit, a factor,—nothing more. If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination. ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... teacher as Miss Huntley, and Winona tried her temper at times. Winona was subject to curious fits of stupidity. Her brains were like a clock with a broken cog. Sometimes they would work easily, and on other days she seemed quite unable to grasp the most obvious problems. A lively imagination may be a very delightful possession, and of use in the writing of history and literature exercises, but it cannot supply the place of solid facts, nor is it of the least aid in mathematics, so Winona's form record ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... matched. It is a romance of 1632, and so in a way competing with the most successful efforts of the great Romantics. But for such a task Paul had no gifts, except his invariable one of concocting a readable story. As for style, imagination, atmosphere, and such high graces, it would be not so much cruel as absurd to "enter" the book with Notre-Dame de Paris or the Contes Drolatiques, Le Capitaine Fracasse or the Chronique de Charles IX. But even the lower ways he could not ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... which I looked down from my giddy height, on the monsters of the deep at their uncouth gambols. Shoals of porpoises tumbling about the bow of the ship, the grampus slowly heaving his huge form above the surface; or the ravenous shark, darting, like a spectre, through the blue waters. My imagination would conjure up all that I had heard or read of the watery world beneath me; of the finny herds that roam its fathomless valleys; of the shapeless monsters that lurk among the very foundations of the ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... woman's face—a wan white face, with dark, expressive, fervent eyes, in which a whole volume of agony and love was written. She never knew who that woman was. Indeed, she sometimes wondered whether it were really a remembrance, or only a picture drawn by her own imagination. But there it was always, deep down in the heart's recesses, only waiting to be called on, and to come. Whoever this mysterious woman were, it was some one who had loved her— her, Philippa, whom no one ever loved. ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... fear thoughts become intrenched in your mind and your imagination. Do not dwell upon them. Apply the antidote instantly, and the enemies will flee. There is no fear so great or intrenched so deeply in the mind that it can not be neutralized or entirely eradicated by its opposite. The opposite ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... momentarily seemed a blow of fate to both of them. But for Mungo's voice at intervals in the kitchen, the house was wholly still, and through the calm winter night there came the opening bars of a melody, played very softly by Sim MacTaggart's flageolet. At first it seemed incredible—a caprice of imagination, and they listened for some moments speechless. Count Victor was naturally the least disturbed; this unlooked-for entertainment meant the pleasant fact that the Duchess had been nowise over-sanguine in her estimate of the Chamberlain's condition. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... poet; yet my friend could not fail to perceive that the creation of the Landscape-Garden offered to the true muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here was, indeed, the fairest field for the display of invention, or imagination, in the endless combining of forms of novel Beauty; the elements which should enter into combination being, at all times, and by a vast superiority, the most glorious which the earth could afford. In the multiform of the tree, and in the multicolor of the flower, he recognized the most ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... case, I persist in believing that the embalming and the lying in state are required to make a good effect upon the public. The people are already frightened at the cholera, and such funeral pomp would have no small influence on the imagination." ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the figure. But the proposition of the heroic enthusiast, I think, deals with the imbecility of human nature (ingegno) which, intent on the Divine undertaking, finds itself all at once engulphed in the abyss of incomprehensible excellence, and the sense and the imagination become confused and absorbed, and not knowing how to pass on, nor to go back, nor where to turn, vanishes and loses itself as a drop of water vanishes in the sea, or as a small spirit, becomes ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... confusion, produced an effect opposite to that intended. The Americans perceiving their advantage, now regained possession of the western post, and instantly brought the long nine to rake the whole line of the enemy. Imagination can scarcely figure to itself a throng of human beings in a more capital state of exposure to the destructive power of the machinery of modern warfare! Eight hundred men were here pressed shoulder to shoulder, in so compact ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... happiness and for the benefit of others. And she sought in her bosom if the letters were safe. Yes; there they were; she felt them. Her happiness had seemed a dream without that proof of its reality. For once she gave way to imagination, and allowed that magician to build castles in the air at will. Thurston and herself must go to England immediately to take possession of the estate; that was certain. Then they must return. But ere that she would confide to him her darling project; one that she had never breathed ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... churchyard, which he usually avoided. He was not a little surprised to find here, too, traces of Charlotte's delicate hand. Sparing, as far as possible, the old monuments, she had contrived to level it, and lay it carefully out, so as to make it appear a pleasant spot on which the eye and the imagination could equally repose with pleasure. The oldest stones had each their special honor assigned them. They were ranged according to their dates along the wall, either leaning against it, or let into it, or however ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... mind's eye, near the old discoverers; and a feeling that we should come suddenly upon their ships around some near headland took deep hold upon our thoughts as we drew in with the shores. All was there to please the imagination and dream over in the same balmy, sleepy atmosphere, where Juan Ponce de Leon would fain have tarried young, but found death rapid, working side by side with ever springing life. To live long in this clime one must obey great Nature's laws. So stout Juan ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... letter to Joanna Baillie, Scott makes some very sensible remarks as to the incapability of such a man as Jeffrey appreciating a work of the imagination, distinguished ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... character of the American Indian as a whole is totally incorrect. Parkman shows that the Indian was, throughout North America, in his native strength furious in his ferocity, relentless as death, cruel beyond imagination, and occupied a territory he neither cultivated nor attempted to. The Indians were military vagabonds, whose continued control had left America an unpeopled wilderness to this day. Huntsmen and warriors they were; citizens and cultivators and civilizers they were not, and never ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... on the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its horrid, wearisome dinner-parties and miseries. How we can put up with those things passes my imagination! It is a perfect bondage. At those dinner-parties we are all in masks, saying what we do not believe, eating and drinking things we do not want, and then abusing one another. I would sooner live like a Dervish with the Mahdi, than go out to dinner every night ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... to be permitted five minutes' freedom to put into operation the basest and filthiest of actions. My thoughts were thus occupied when, to my amazement, I suddenly heard the sound of voices—human voices. At first I listened with incredulity, thinking that it must be merely a trick of my imagination or some further ingenious, devilish device, on the part of the ghostly brains, to torture me. But the voices continued, and drew nearer and nearer, until I could at length distinguish what they were saying. The speakers were two men, Francois and Jacques, and ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if ever, that he had come near loving her; though even then his sentiment had lived only in the intervals of its expression. Later, when to be loved by her had been a state to touch any man's imagination, the physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old papers, his hand lit on her letters, the touch ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... said, in a manner that left little to the imagination, "I have only one answer for you. You have become offensive to me on this ranch, and I shall be glad if you will remove yourself as quickly as possible. I shall refund you the money you have paid, and your agreement ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and orphans on board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio. This had early been a favourite home of my imagination; I have played at being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my person being still unbreeched. My preference was founded on a work which appeared in CASSELL'S FAMILY PAPER, and was read ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... regarding author or illustrator, this book is a jewel rarely to be found nowadays. Not a whit inferior to its predecessor In grand extravagance of imagination, and delicious ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... the sound of these natural voices. There was a tremor in her voice sometimes, and, when she was taken unawares, a sidelong look in her eyes. There was something about her in these serious moods that laid hold of the imagination. She had surely a well of strength which had been given for her own support and the solace of others at some future moment, only too terrible. But not to-night, as she tripped along under the moonlight, did the consciousness of that moment ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... Paris, and another at Rome. He has got the whole thing at his fingers' ends, and would make a splendid master if he would but go in for pupils, but with all that he can't paint a picture. He has not a spark of imagination, nor an idea of art; he has no eye for color, or effect. He can paint admirably what he sees, but then he sees nothing but bare facts. He is always hard up, poor fellow, and it would be a real boon to him to take me for three months ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... that feller figured all wrong! Like all the rest of you simple minded and innocent New Yorkers, you get brains and imagination mixed. They is a big difference! Brains is what puts a man over, and imagination is what keeps him back. The ideal combination is all brains and no imagination! The feller with brains sets his mind on what he wants, forgets everything else, goes to it and gets it. He don't for a minute consider what might happen if he fails, or that the thing he proposes has never been done before, or that maybe his scheme ain't really as good as he first ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... is just what there will not be?" he cried excitedly. "We are going to do away with the confining limits. Your imagination is too cramped! You sit there, huddled up in a corner, as if we had let loose a ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... too far-away ideas of God. It has contemplated God at a great distance. It puts Him beyond the stars. Indeed, the stars fade away from view in the distance behind us, as we ascend in imagination to the dwelling-place of the Most High. The world can never be suitably impressed with God's presence while it holds Him at a distance. He can never be sensibly near unto us while we keep Him beyond the stars. Nor can we be influenced ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... Luckily, then, there exist some of our friends, and very amusing ones, who, if they meet the countess, will amuse her, and as they are going the same way, it is probable they will. Oh, I see them from here; do you not, Henri; you, who are a man of imagination? There they go, on a good road, well mounted, and saying sweet things to Madame la Comtesse, which she ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... form-rooms could not be tolerated one hour longer. He personally did not care to think of the time he must spend in eliminating the traces of their evil influences. How far Beetle had pandered to the baser side of youthful imagination he would ascertain later; and Beetle might be sure that if Mr. Prout came across any ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,—"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... already reached us. The western inhabitants are not a silent and uncomplaining sacrifice. The voice of humanity issues from the shade of their wilderness. It exclaims, that while one hand is held up to reject this treaty, the other grasps a tomahawk. It summons our imagination to the scenes that will open. It is no great effort to the imagination to conceive that events so near are already begun. I can fancy that I listen to the yells of savage vengeance and the shrieks of torture. Already they seem to sigh in the west wind—already they mingle ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... green hand commands a ship and defeats a mutiny out of sheer smartness; rides on runaway locomotives, strokes of good luck, and a persistent turning up of things just when they are wanted —all of which is calculated in the long run to lead away the young imagination and impart discontent with the common ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... o'clock to the clipped shriek of a whistle. Shortly after, a key turned in his door. There followed the sound of scores of bare feet pattering up and down the hall. Was it imagination or did these muffled footfalls have an inhuman softness?... Suddenly his door flew open. He shrank beneath the bedclothes, peering out with ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... merely as to the old faith, but as to their very selves; the fearful crises of a fifty years' revolution, the instinctive feeling that the civil war was still far from being at an end, increased the anxious suspense, the gloomy perplexity of the multitude. Restlessly the wandering imagination climbed every height and fathomed every abyss, where it fancied that it might discover new prospects or new light amidst the fatalities impending, might gain fresh hopes in the desperate struggle against destiny, or ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... immersed in thoughts excited by the hints which hail been thus wantonly thrown out to inflame his imagination, when all at once, on lifting his eyes, he saw Clement Lindsay coming straight towards him. Gifted was unarmed, except with a pair of blunt scissors, which he carried habitually in his pocket. What should he do? ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... people who become "fascinated with the idea of direct communication with heaven through the medium of a prophet," and to whom the missionary brethren prudently "leave the mysteries of polygamy to the imagination," while they inculcate the importance of "gathering to Zion." She outlined the educational status and the discouragement given by Brigham Young to all educational progress. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... victim. Applause for ingenious argument was hushed in a moment, when the dead body of the gambler appeared in view! What a tribute to the power of truth—what a tremendous triumph of nature, and her sacred laws, over the flimsy artifices of passion, fiction, and a diseased imagination, fevered by ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... leave the scene that ensued to the reader's imagination. We could tell, how Mrs. Tibbs forthwith fainted away, and how it required the united strength of Mr. Wisbottle and Mr. Alfred Tomkins to hold her in her chair; how Mr. Evenson explained, and how his explanation was evidently disbelieved; how Agnes repelled the accusations ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... seem! What art is shown in bringing in real things to give food to the imagination and to stimulate the interest that carries the little reader away from herself where she may riot in the wonders her active mind can so readily conceive. Some time when she has grown much older, and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... the foreground, perhaps five hundred yards away only, there was that farm to which Jules had pointed—a typical German farm, its outhouses clustered about it, cattle in its yard, and poultry feeding round it. Smoke was issuing from one of the chimneys, and it required no great imagination on the part of those three to visualize the kitchen at the other end of the chimney—a broad, stone-flagged kitchen maybe, with a deep, old-fashioned ingle-nook, and ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... George Eliot with Dickens, it must first of all be noted that each is the superior of the other in his own special province. Dickens has more imagination; he appeals to more universal sentiments, touches a wider circle of experiences, captivates his readers with a resistless interest and tenderness of spirit. His characters are unreal, mere caricatures often, mere puppets. Yet he had an imagination of marvellous ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... 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 for historical truths. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... and at the expiration of that period, was placed by my guardian in the house of the celebrated Doctor Sanazio of Padua, as a student of medicine. Here, novel and delightful studies, speculations, and scenes, opened upon my inquisitive, ardent mind, and amused my enthusiastic imagination. Sanazio was regarded in learned Padua, as little less than a demi-god; at certain hours he visited his patients, amongst whom might generally be numbered three-fourths of the population of Padua; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... not at all likely. The savages have no doubt heard the cries many times. It is your imagination which is playing you tricks. Do you suppose the savages know we are here ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... introduction of his young friend. He began a most flattering account of Shirley Roseleaf, describing him as a genuine paragon among men, both in talent and goodness. He drew heavily on his imagination as he proceeded, feeling that he was "in for it," and might as well do his best at once. And he could see the cheek of the young listener taking on a new and more enticing color as he went farther ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... of a Rousseau, going on with a very enthusiasm of iniquity, with fiery imagination seizing upon all the impulsive natures of his day? or David Hume, who employed his life as a spider employs its summer, in spinning out silken webs to trap the unwary? or Voltaire, the most learned man of ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... there was a scene of horror passing the powers of imagination. A luminous cloud gathered above the chain of the Kandangs, which run along the southeastern coast of Java. This cloud increased in size each minute, until at last it came to form a sort of dome of a gray and blood-red color, which hung over the earth for a considerable distance. In proportion ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... utterly devoid of dignity as of grace. I have often wondered as I have looked at this grand and celebrated work, what could be Michael Angelo's idea of Christ. He who was so good, so religious, so pure-minded, and so high-minded, was deficient in humility and sympathy; if his morals escaped, his imagination was corrupted by the profane and pagan influences of his time. His conception of Christ is here most unchristian, and his conception of the Virgin is not much better. She is grand in form, but the expression is too passive. She ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... his violin, and they heard a marvelous specimen of real Tzigany inspiration. Vanity disappeared—passion, nerve and sentiment took its place. He had all the qualities demanded by science, together with those of imagination. It was the passionate inspiration of genius. After his performance was over, he went gravely to the mantelpiece, stopped the clock, and said to the master of the house, "Let this hand mark for ever the hour when Remenyi played at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... sympathy made her impatient,—as very robust people are often intensely impatient with sickness and infirmity. She never would say, "I have no patience with such and such or so and so." She had plenty of patience. It was simply that she had no imagination whatsoever. Whatever she saw or heard or read, she saw or heard or read exactly as the thing presented itself. If she saw a door she saw merely a piece of wood with a handle and a keyhole. It may be argued that a door is merely a ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... eyes, effeminacy grow bold, and such vigorous impressions on our memories be left, as might still possess us with the same fancies and raise new inclinations. For the sight (according to Plato) receives a more vigorous impression than any other bodily organ, and joining with the imagination, that lies near it, works presently upon the soul, and ever causes fresh desires by those images of pleasure which it brings. But the night, hiding many and the most furious of the actions, quiets and lulls nature, and doth not suffer it to be carried to intemperance by the eye. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... as she springs out of bed with the dawn's earliest touch on her "large mean airy chamber" at Asolo[24:1]—the lovely little town of Northern Italy which Browning loved so well. In that chamber, made vivid to our imagination by virtue of three consummately placed adjectives (note the position of "mean"), Pippa prepares for her one ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... came to an end. He had been in the land of the Shawnees and Miamis, and Wyandots and he knew of the Great Lakes beyond, but north of them the wilderness still stretched to the edge of the world, where the polar ice reigned, eternal. There was no limit to the imagination of Shif'less Sol, and in all these gigantic wanderings the faithful four, his friends, were ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... open; sunshine flooded the garden; but Alma was not tempted to go forth. All the walks and drives of the neighbourhood had become drearily familiar; the meanest of London streets shone by contrast as a paradise in her imagination. With a deep sigh of ennui, she turned and slowly ascended ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... changed its complexion. The smiling landscape seemed to darken, and the cool air of evening to become hot and noisome, as if laden with the deadly exhalations of the pestilence. Nor did the workings of his imagination stop here. He fancied even at this distance—nearly seven miles—that he could discern Solomon Eagle on the summit of Saint Paul's. At first the figure looked like a small black speck; but it gradually dilated, until ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of Representatives did not understand what they were doing when they passed this bill, it arises from the fact that they did not give the rein to their imagination, as the honorable Senator from Ohio seems to have done to his, and take it for granted that the Secretary of the Treasury had a purpose to accomplish, and that he would not hesitate to take any means in his power to accomplish it, improperly against ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... sea captains, merchants, doctors and gentlemen, schoolteachers, dentists, artisans, artists and actors, began to fill my empty houses. Ships, sail lofts, ropewalks, horses, pigs, and fire engines took their proper places, and the town lived again as of yore—in my imagination. ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... he could shriek aloud, and he had to set his teeth hard as his eyes rolled round and up and down the gorge in search of some wandering pack that would scent him out at once, and in imagination he went through the brain-paralysing horror of seeing them approach, with their red, hungry, glaring eyes, their foam-slavered lips ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... somebody after wearying of Wildeve. Believing that she must love him in spite of herself, she had been influenced after the fashion of the second Lord Lyttleton and other persons, who have dreamed that they were to die on a certain day, and by stress of a morbid imagination have actually brought about that event. Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... manuscript an account of it, any how; 'tis like a hungry man dreaming of a good dinner at a feast, and afterwards awaking and finding his front ribs and back-bone on the point of union. Reader, is that a black-thorn you carry—tut, where is my imagination bound for?——to meet ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... also without prejudice. Hitherto the pacifists' quest of a basis for enduring peace, it must be admitted, has brought home nothing tangible—with the qualification, of course, that the subsidised pacifists have come in for the subsidy. So that, after searching the recesses of their imagination, able-bodied pacifists whose loquacity has never been at fault hitherto have been brought to ask: ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... kindness. We soon reached the Methye Portage, and had a very pleasant ride across it in our carioles. The track was good and led through groups of pines, so happily placed that it would not have required a great stretch of imagination to fancy ourselves in a well-arranged park. We had now to cross a small lake, and then gradually ascended hills beyond it, until we arrived at the summit of a lofty chain of mountains commanding the ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... my lady, you have finally the answer to the mystery that has—I hope—puzzled you. I killed my friend the captain in my second letter to you, and all the odd developments that followed lived only in my imagination as I sat here beside the green-shaded lamp in my study, plotting how I should write seven letters to you that would, as the novel advertisements say, grip your attention to the very end. Oh, I am guilty—there ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... oneself in a Turkish city. The houses, even though in most cases built of wood, are in good repair; and the trellis-work marking the feminine apartments, and behind which a pair of bright eyes may occasionally be seen, materially heightens the charms of imagination. The road for the first six miles was hard and good. It is a specimen of Osman Pacha's handiwork, and is raised considerably above the surrounding fields, the sides of the road being rivetted, as it were, with wattles. At the end of that ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... there was, right enough. And through the gap—someone must have been working here a very short time before—a square of turf, cut carefully out and laid upon one side, revealed to their astonished eyes a wooden trap-door, exactly suggestive of the pirates' den of a child's imagination, and with a huge iron ring fastened to the centre ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... the university, enjoyed a revenue of forty Scottish marks, about two pounds four shillings and sixpence of sterling money. In the present age of trade and taxes, it is difficult even for the imagination so to raise the value of money, or so to diminish the demands of life, as to suppose four and forty shillings a year, an honourable stipend; yet it was probably equal, not only to the needs, but to the rank of Boethius. The wealth of England was undoubtedly to that of Scotland more than five to ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... that morning. Creeping old age where you still awoke readily enough but found it more and more difficult to keep awake. You couldn't rid yourself of the temptation of going back to bed and dreaming again—dreaming, perhaps, of an Ohio town that his own imagination had gilded and varnished and adorned until sometimes he thought it existed only in his imagination and not ...
— Decision • Frank M. Robinson
... Stuart cared for Miss Delamar, however, was an open question, and a condition yet to be discovered. That he cared for some one, and cared so much that his imagination had begun to picture the awful joys and responsibilities of marriage, was only too well known to himself, and was a state of mind already suspected by ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... extreme, wild, or immoderate views, was in no sense a Whig. To tread the narrow, uphill, and rather stony path of the via media, fretted him. He liked large enterprises and large ways of carrying them out, and, though it would be a great mistake to call him imprudent, he was distinctly a man of daring imagination in politics. He liked to prophesy and to help fulfil his prophecies. He was not content to wait and watch things grow. He was, indeed, one of the political gardeners who thoroughly enjoy the forcing-house. If he had been a grower of vegetables instead of Orchids, he would have ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... "trap" military critics of the moment foresaw for the Germans. Quite likely the two German generals Von Buelow and Von der Goltz, chatting in their motor car, referred to this gap, and it is hardly a stretch of imagination to suggest a twinkle in the huge glasses of the old gentleman in the August overcoat, when now and then the name of Von ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Europeans came among them for the first time, they were mistaken for creatures of a higher race. When this sheik comes to speak of to-day's meeting, he will not fail to embellish the circumstance with all the resources of an Arab imagination. You may, therefore, judge what an account their legends will ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... I mean except what I say? I do not see how even your imagination can fancy any dark meaning lurking beneath the common-place desire to waste an afternoon in a visit to ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... triumphantly, whereupon his sirname was Pacificus, most aptly and iustly. This peaceable king Edgar had in his minde about six hundred yeeres past, the representation of a great part of the selfe same Ida, which from aboue onely, & by no mans deuise hath streamed downe into my imagination, being as it becommeth a subiect carefull for the godly prosperitie of this British Empire vnder our most ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... is reported to have been sad and gloomy, as he was rowed back to Durham House. With his nature, and his gifts of imagination, he could not but have been awed by the consummation he had witnessed of a tragic doom. Later he believed he had always lamented the fate of Essex as the beginning of a new peril to himself from those who before ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... above the shuttered windows, making jewelled patterns on the wall—pink, green, and golden, according to the different colours of the glass. There was just enough light to reflect these patterns faintly in the mirrors set in the closed door, opposite which Saidee lay in bed; and to her imagination it was as if she could see through the door, into a lighted place beyond. She wondered if Victoria had gone to bed; if she were sleeping, or if she were crying softly—crying her heart out with bitter grief and disappointment she ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to conceive this universe before we study its evolution. I do not adopt any of the numerous devices that have been invented for the purpose of impressing on the imagination the large figures we must use. One may doubt if any of them are effective, and they are at least familiar. Our solar system—the family of sun and planets which had been sheltered under a mighty dome resting on the hill-tops—has turned out to occupy a span of space ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... could instruct her how they might be fully realized in the attainment of divine knowledge, and the experience of Christian love. No wonder, then, that Henrich held already the first place in her heart and imagination, and was endowed by her lively fancy with every quality and every perfection, both of mind and body, that she could ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... It needs little imagination to lift, as it were, the roofs off a hundred homes, and see and hear what was going on there in those early days of the war, after the clear call went out over England, "Your King and ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... and colourless sketch of the richest of all facts is as far from the truth as possible, we may allow ourselves to fill in the picture as best we can, if we remember the risks which we run in doing so. There are, it seems to me, two chief risks in allowing our imagination to create images of the bliss of heaven. One is that the eternal world, thus drawn and painted with the forms and colours of earth, takes substance in our minds as a second physical world, either supposed to exist somewhere in space, or expected ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... many advantages; the climate is healthy; there are no insect pests; the soil is fertile and capable of growing all kinds of tropical produce (the coffee of the Rio Negro, especially, being of very superior quality), and it is near the fork of two great navigable rivers. The imagination becomes excited when one reflects on the possible future of this place, situated near the centre of the equatorial part of South America, in the midst of a region almost as large as Europe, every inch of whose soil is of the most exuberant fertility, and having water ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... they found that the path was descending into a deep and narrow valley. On the way they passed many of the fetish signs, so terrible to the negro's imagination. Pieces of blue string, with feathers and rags attached to them, were stretched across the path. Clumps of feathers hung suspended from the trees. Flat stones, with berries, shells, and crooked pieces of wood, were nailed against the ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... there is no truth at all in these reports. I believe that extraordinarily there have been such apparitions; but where one is true a hundred are figments. There is a lecherie in lyeing and imposeing on the credulous; and the imagination of fearfull people is to admiration: e.g. Not long after the cave at Bathford was discovered (where the opus tessellatum was found), one of Mr. Skreen's ploughboyes lyeing asleep near to the mouth of the cave, a gentleman in a boate ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... in the course of the summer; I had, therefore, only six months more to wait in Venice before taking the road which would lead me, perhaps, to the throne of Saint Peter: everything in the future assumed in my eyes the brightest hue, and my imagination revelled amongst the most radiant beams of sunshine; my castles in the air ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... certainly an animal that, when he lives at all, lives for ideals. Something must be found to occupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love and hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort and discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now that the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part is so vague and accommodating, when even ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... right sort, or else went on to seek it elsewhere. But one ingredient, in particular, seemed almost impossible to be found. Some chemists plainly admitted they had never seen it; others denied that such a drug existed, excepting in the imagination of crazy alchemists; and most of them attempted to satisfy their customer, by producing some substitute, which, when rejected by Wayland, as not being what he had asked for, they maintained possessed, in a superior degree, the self-same qualities. ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... struck a path across some fields leading to the river, and amused herself throwing sticks for Archie to fetch off its half-frozen surface—a diversion which soon palled on the Skye, who was not fond of water; so Bluebell wandered on, soliloquizing, as usual. Suppose this uncle, who loomed in her imagination like some dread Genie in his disposition over their fate should receive the intelligence by cutting off the supplies and hurling maledictions at Harry's head, what on earth would they do? She had always been very fond of acting,—indeed, had been quite an authority in drawing-room ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... This is the mysterious situation that is presented in this big breezy out-of-doors romance. When Craig Schuyler, after several years' absence, returns home, and without any apparent reason fastens on Nell Sutphen an iron bracelet. A sequence of thrilling events is started which grip the imagination powerfully, and seems to "get under the skin." There is a vein of humor throughout, which relieves the story ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... us a brief but very extraordinary account of a cavern about seven miles off; our curiosity was so much excited by the marvellous details we heard, that we determined to delay our departure for the purpose of ascertaining how much of his story was due to the wild imagination of our informant. We accordingly gave orders to unsaddle, and communicated our intentions to the khan. At first he strongly urged us not to put our plan into execution, declaring that the cave was the domicile of the evil one, and that ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... much more than half as high as the hyperbolous memory of his reverend friend had made it, and he much feared that the Padre, in the course of forty years, had so frequently repeated a picture of his early imagination as to have, at length, cherished it as a reality." This was said in smooth and elegant Spanish, but says the Senor, "with an air of dignified sarcasm upon our credulity, which was far from being agreeable to men broken down and dispirited, by almost incredible toil, ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... to my imagination, of course. It was assumed, very kindly, that I understood the relations existing between this nobleman and the other, as touching Sir William's precise influence and sphere in the world of politics. Naturally, when the Party Whip heard ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... there are two different ideas, for settlement of Ireland, before the public imagination, viz.: (A) ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... "he isn't a curmudgeon. But he's a very peculiar man. He's a Spartan, and he lacks imagination. It has simply never entered his head that I could need an allowance. And, if you come to that, I can't say that I positively do. I have a tiny patrimony—threepence a week, or so—enough for my humble necessities, though scarcely ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... an odd imagination, that you could never have suspected my small gallant, if your little villainous Frenchman had not been a ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... the English language."—Dr. Ash's Gram., p. xii. "The Redcross Knight runs through the whole steps of the Christian life."—Spectator No. 540. "There were not less than fifty or sixty persons present."—Teachers' Report. "Greater experience, and more cultivated society, abate the warmth of imagination, and chasten the manner of expression."—Blair's Rhet., p. 152; Murray's Gram., i, 351. "By which means knowledge, much more than oratory, is become the principal requisite."—Blair's Rhet., p. 254. "No less than seven illustrious ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... mulberry tree; but Laura, too, was only half-alive to their magnificence. Her thoughts ran on suicide, on making an end of her blighted career. God was evidently not going to be generous or long-suffering enough to come to her aid; and in imagination she saw the fifty-five gaining on her like a pack of howling hyaenas; saw Mrs. Gurley, Mr. Strachey—Mother. Detection and exposure, she knew it now, were the most awful things the world held. But she had nothing ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... small feeling of self-importance, I pushed my way to the foot of the stone. The man who stood on it seemed to have been speaking some time. His words, like all I heard that day, were utterly devoid of anything like eloquence or imagination—a dull string of somewhat incoherent complaints, which derived their force only from the intense earnestness, which attested their truthfulness. As far as I can recollect, I will give the substance of what I heard. But, indeed, I heard nothing but ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... of much thought and preparation on my part. I have not flaunted the star-spangled banner in your faces, or indulged in oratorical fireworks. Mine have been the words of a plain business man, and I have not indulged in wild accusations or flights of imagination. Perhaps, if I had," he added, "there are some who would have been better pleased. I thank my friends for their ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... business of my microscope to be shown some of the observables of that, and then down to my office to looke in a darke room with my glasses and tube, and most excellently things appeared indeed beyond imagination. This was our worke all the afternoon trying the several glasses and several objects, among others, one of my plates, where the lines appeared so very plain that it is not possible to thinke how ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... and who was still frail and weak from the injuries he had received during the hurricane, looked round at the boys. Being the Forecaster's nephew, he had come to his uncle's house to recuperate and the work of the League had fired his imagination. ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... learned to read, he possesses the instrument of highest culture, but at the same time the instrument of greater danger. Bad books or bad methods of reading good books lead the reader's mind astray or stimulate a destructive imagination that affects character forever; but good books and right methods of reading make the soul sensitive to right and wrong, improve the mind, inspire to higher ideals and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... penetrating even to the lowest cellar, and against which human skill could devise no effectual protection; all these things must have combined into a whole of such unusual and such awful terror that the imagination cannot adequately realize it. The stoutest heart was appalled; the best-balanced mind lost its composure. The stern Roman soldier stood rigidly at his post, content to die if discipline required it, but even his iron nerves quailed at the death and ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... preceding. My time was passed in keeping a regular journal; mapping; and in writing letters to friends in England, although there was no communication. This task afforded the greatest pleasure, as I could thus converse in imagination with those far away. The thought frequently occurred to me that they might no longer exist, and that the separation of years might be the parting forever; nevertheless there was a melancholy satisfaction at thus blankly corresponding with ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... the lady of the castle was on foot. She at once ascended to the summit of her tower, and gazed eagerly up the Sound, half expecting to find that she had been deceived by her imagination on the previous night, and that the ship she had seen was but a creation of the brain. There, however, floated the beautiful fabric, but there was not the slightest movement or sign of life on board. At all events, it seemed improbable that she would soon move from her present ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... is only some mode of an extended thing; as all the properties we discover in the mind are only diverse modes of thinking. Thus, for example, we cannot conceive figure unless in something extended, nor motion unless in extended space, nor imagination, sensation, or will, unless in a thinking thing. But, on the other hand, we can conceive extension without figure or motion, and thought without imagination or sensation, and so of the others; as is clear to any one ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... ordered it so," replies Tom, recognizing the voice, and again imploring the jailer to bring him some brandy to quench the fires of his brain. The thought of his mother floated uppermost, and recurred brightest to the wandering imagination of this ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... at me, exclaiming, 'I wish I never had known him; for he has several times borrowed money of me, and shown his friendship by not returning it. He is a queer fellow,—good-hearted and all that, but full of illusions! always an imagination on fire! I will do him this justice,—he does not mean to deceive; but as he deceives himself about everything, he manages to behave like a dishonest man.' 'How much does he owe you?' I asked. 'Oh! a good many hundred francs. He's a basket with ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... game; impulse alone governs his conduct. But two other elements enter in to modify impulse, as experience teaches wisdom. The self-indulgent man remembers after a little that indulgence of impulse has resulted sometimes in pain rather than satisfaction, and his imagination pictures a recurrence of the unhappy experience. Feeling becomes a guide to regulate impulse. Feeling in turn compels thought. Presently the individual who is going through the civilizing process formulates a resolve and a theory, ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... with care along the nearest thwart of the bateau. Mandy Ann was making what the children of the Settlement knew and esteemed as a "Chaney House." There was keen rivalry among the children as to both location and furnishing of these admired creations; and to Mandy Ann's daring imagination it had appeared that a "Chaney House" in the old bateau ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... more subtle," said Craig, "than the tube which I hold in my hand. The imagination of the most sensational writer of fiction might well be thrilled with the mysteries of this fatal tube and its power to work fearful deed. A larger quantity of this substance in the tube would produce on me, as I now hold it, incurable burns, just as it ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... experience, by observation, and by conversation with all manner of men. He became one of the most effective and persuasive popular speakers ever known in English agitation. He was not an orator in the highest sense. He had no imagination and little poetic feeling, nor did genuine passion ever inflame into fervor of declamation his quiet, argumentative style. But he had humor; he spoke simple, clear, strong English; he used no unnecessary words. He always made his meaning ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... been grateful, for the possibilities of his own musical subject were surely unfolded to him for the first time. In the music here, even more than in the vision of the stage, we have the grey Wanderer of the Scandinavian imagination—the mystery of wood, mountain, river and ravine, with human sadness superadded, is clearly communicated to us. Passing over the repetitions from the preceding operas, concerning which I have already said sufficient, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... accurate costumes by the young people taking part; the collecting of suitable stage properties such as hearthbrooms, Indian pipes, and dishes of pewter. The greater the research, the keener the stimulus for imagination and ingenuity, two things that go to the making of every successful production. Fortunately, the patriotic play is inherently simple, its appeal is along broad general lines, so that it requires no great amount of money or energy to adequately produce ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... look up at the window, thinking he wished it might open and let in the good Father. He had come and passed away like a dream; but for the swords and books Harry might almost think the Father was an imagination of his mind—and for two letters which had come to him, one from abroad, full of advice and affection, another soon after he had been confirmed by the Bishop of Hexton, in which Father Holt deplored his falling away. But Harry Esmond felt so confident ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... world, as a reality of [110] experience, that regenerate type of humanity, which, centuries later, Giotto and his successors, down to the best and purest days of the young Raphael, working under conditions very friendly to the imagination, were to conceive as an artistic ideal. He felt there, felt amid the stirring of some wonderful new hope within himself, the genius, the unique power of Christianity; in exercise then, as it has been exercised ever since, in spite of many hindrances, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen. This matter is, I think, of some importance; for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words—and at the same time to give the reality which is at the root of all poetry, in a natural and comprehensive form." This quotation explains ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... sir, it is certain that the public mind will run in a great and eminent degree upon the production of dwarfs. Perhaps the failures only will be brought up, wild. The imagination goes a long way in these cases; and all that the imagination can do, will be done, and is doing. You may convince yourself of this, by observing the condition of those ladies who take particular notice of General Tom ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... there and reflected. He was altogether disillusioned. All the covert allusions had evoked something terrifying, but at the same time impressive. In his imagination the ordeal had grown into something that constituted the great barrier of his life, so that one passed over to the other side as quite a different being; it was something after the fashion of the mysterious circumcision in the Bible, a consecration ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... old Rose had sprinkled over Peter and Cissie by calling them "he-nigger" and "she-nigger" somehow minimized them, animalized them in the old lawyer's imagination. Rose's speech was charged with such contempt for her own color that it placed the mulatto and the octoroon down ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... his wealth, and rumour immediately disposed of her hand to all the young gallants of the quarter; but whether it was that grief for the loss of her parent had turned her head, or that the gloomy fanaticism of that time had worked with too fatal effect on her pure and inexperienced imagination, she took not only marriage and the male sex into utter abomination, but resolved to quit the world for ever, and to make herself a perpetual prisoner for religion's sake. She determined, in short, to become what was then called a recluse, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... considered the normal meetings of lovers. Now we turn to the dream-meetings—the great encounters which all of us feel might be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so marvellously uttered in Mesmerism. Here, in these breathless stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or rather ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... most of life's rapids, seemed oddly dormant. Sub-consciously she was aware that on past performances Fillmore was decidedly not the man to be allowed control of anybody's little fortune, but somehow the thought did not seem to grip her. He had touched her imagination. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... is hindered from freely confessing Christ's name, by two things—by fear and by shame. Now both these things betray themselves principally on the forehead on account of the proximity of the imagination, and because the (vital) spirits mount directly from the heart to the forehead: hence "those who are ashamed, blush, and those who are afraid, pale" (Ethic. iv). And therefore man is signed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... not be so. He stretched himself idly. A mocking bird uttered a phrase outside. No dregs of drowsiness remained in him, so he dressed and walked out into the freshness of the new morning. Here the rumbling sound, which he had concluded had been an effect of his half-conscious imagination, came clearer to his ears. He listened for a moment, then walked rapidly to the Lone Pine Hill from whose slight elevation he could see abroad over the low mountains to the west. The gray light before sunrise ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... meantime, all he knew was that whereas he was once lame he could now walk. Even the most bigoted and prejudiced now agree that the cures of Christian Science are genuine. People who think they have trouble have it, and it is the same with pain. Imagination is the only sure-enough thing in the world. Mrs. Eddy's doctrines abolish pain and therefore abolish poverty, for poverty, in America at least, is a disease. Mrs. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... Hoping against hope that this would never become necessary, he had put off the evil moment till the postponement had become cruel. But he had lived through it so often in thought, he had so acutely suffered with her in imagination the staggering humiliation of it all, that now, when the time had come, his feelings were benumbed. As he turned into his own grounds that day it seemed to him that his deadness of emotion was such that he could carry the thing through mechanically, ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... struck me—a strange thought—which had no sooner flashed through my mind, than I resolved to act upon its suggestion. 'Twas a glorious plan of revenge, and one which could only have emanated from my fertile imagination. ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... among the lively bevies of that literature's graces—ever since the Middle Ages, with some touches of waking—hardly more than motions in a dream—at the Renaissance. The comic Phantasy had been wakeful and active enough; the graver and more serious tragic Imagination had been, though with some limitations, busy at times. But this third sister—Our Lady of Dreams, one might call her in imitation of a famous fancy—had not shown herself much in French merriment or in French sadness: the light of common day there had been too much ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... discover no defect or blemish. With his free and noble attitude, with the bow in his hand, and the quiver at his back, he might seem, but for his face, the Pythian Apollo himself. Such a figure rose before the imagination of West, when on first seeing the Belvidere in the Vatican, he exclaimed, "By God, ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... terrible trouble. She hardly believed the story, which seemed to tell her of a degree of villany greater than ever her imagination had depicted to her;—and yet, if it were true, she would be driven to look for means of excusing it. The story as told was indeed hardly just to Ralph, who in the course of his transactions with Mr. Neefit had almost taught himself to believe that he ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... imagination to see that it meant much for the practical man so to express himself. Love of her drew him out of his character, and, though he could not resist, he resented the effect it had on him. She found nothing to reply, but ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... of the incident is sufficient to prevent its having occurred in reality or to more than one inventive imagination. It must therefore have been brought to Europe from the East and adapted to local conditions at Dort and Swaffham. Prof. Cowell suggests that it was possibly adapted at the latter place to account for the effigy of the pedlar ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... it be alleged, that if this managing of matters be so fit for the imagination, then must the historian needs surpass, who brings you images of true matters, such as, indeed, were done, and not such as fantastically or falsely may be suggested to have been done. Truly, Aristotle himself, in his Discourse of Poesy, plainly determineth ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... considered beautiful (for, strictly speaking, we may say only this, not that it is beautiful) when its form puts the powers of the human mind in a state of harmony, brings the intuitive and rational faculties into concordant activity, and produces an agreeable proportion between the imagination and the understanding. In giving the occasion for an harmonious play of the cognitive activities (that is, for an easy combination of the manifold into unity) the beautiful object is purposive for us, for our function of apprehension; it is—here ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... not be thought to talk barely of their own imagination, but of things as really they are; therefore they often suppose the WORDS TO STAND ALSO FOR THE REALITY OF THINGS. But this relating more particularly to substances and their names, as perhaps the former ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... dancing girls with their father. Those people had been away for some time as the girls had engagements in some Italian summer theatres, but apparently they had secured a re-engagement for the winter and were now back. I let Therese talk because it kept my imagination from going to work on subjects which, I had made up my mind, were no concern of mine. But I went out early to perform an unpleasant task. It was only proper that I should let the Carlist agent ensconced in the ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... spite of the fact that Rabbit had none of the fiery traits of an Arabian steed; nor could he by any stretch of the imagination be accused of being shod with fire, he who planted his hoofs so sedately! Shod with velvet would have come ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... Somme we had seen a derelict tank, wrecked, despoiled of her guns, and forsaken in No Man's Land. We had swarmed around and over her, wild with curiosity, much as the Lilliputians must have swarmed around the prostrate Gulliver. Our imagination was fired. ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... again as to the fate of the spirit that had informed the body and made it what it was; but his imagination refused to work. After all, he asked himself, what were all the teachings of theology but words gabbled to break the appalling silence? Heaven ... Purgatory ... Hell. What was known of these things? The ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... Street house when the boy had dawned upon him in his overalls and red silk stockings. He had never considered Allen's interest in Marian serious; for Allen had to Dan's knowledge paid similar attentions to half a dozen other girls. Allen's imagination made a goddess of every pretty girl, and Dan had settled down to the belief that his friend saw in Marian only one of the many light-footed Dianas visible in the city thoroughfares, whom he invested with deific charms and apostrophized in glowing phrases. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... disused for many years, had evolved into a sort of lumber-room, and she could see, in her imagination, the pathetic picture of her little brother fiddling away among the piled-up boxes and old furniture, trying to hasten the moment when his beloved master would find him worthy of ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... road, and if you will not be daunted by the unsavoriness of the immediate neighborhood, you will find it quite worth your while. The house presents only a casual side to the street—one fancies it does not take much interest in its upstart neighbors—but imagination makes us believe that it regards with brooding tenderness the lovely tidal river which winds away through the marshes to the sea. Interesting as the house is for its architectural features and for its delightful location—despite the nearness of the ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... During a happily prolonged youth (he was now eighteen and a half) he had developed very slowly, but normally. Surrounded by pleasant friendships and home influences he had never really become aware of evil. Now it broke upon him suddenly—probably to a degree exaggerated by his strong imagination and distorted by the fact that he was undergoing physical changes usually belonging ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the railroad company was magnanimous enough to furnish a velocipede for their use in going to and from the station. How I felt the first night, stuck away out there in that box-car, two miles from the nearest house and twelve miles from the nearest town, I must leave to the imagination. My heart sank and I had many misgivings, in fact, I was scared to death, but I set my teeth hard and determined to do my best, with the hope that I might be promoted to a better office. I did win that promotion but I wouldn't go through my experiences again ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... George Sand says very strikingly of Rousseau and Therese Levasseur, "His true fault was in persevering in his attachment for that vulgar woman, who turned to her own profit the weaknesses of his ill starred character and his self torturing imagination. One does not with impunity live in company with a little soul. When one is a Jean Jacques Rousseau, one does not acquire the faults of littleness, does not lose his native grandeur; but he feels his genius troubled, combated, worried, distempered, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... of language finds its base in the very essence of our being. The poet is one gifted to seize upon these hidden analogies, to read these mystic symbols, and, through the force of his own imagination, to reveal them to his brethren ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... for word the whole of this interview, he might have had misgivings of the effect of one thing he had said unawares. It was his reference to Uncle Mo's absence at The Sun during the late afternoon. Manifestly, it left the house in Mr. Wix's imagination untenanted, during some two hours of the day, except by Aunt M'riar, and the children perhaps. And ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... secret stairway in the wall, because I wanted Barrie to miss no thrill this place could give; but it was not the thought of the murder-scene which most caught her imagination. She listened to my dramatic version of the tragedy of the room, and of the dark closet where Rizzio tried to hide, and shuddered a little; but soon she was drawn, as if beckoned by an unseen hand, ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... hesitate a moment. The public owes the count's wife a great debt of gratitude, and not of reproaches, for bravely opposing his fatal desire to live in every detail the life of a peasant laborer. Can any one blessed with the faintest particle of imagination fail to perceive how great a task it has been to withstand him thus for his own good; to rear nine healthy, handsome, well-bred children out of the much larger family which they have had; to bear the entire responsibility of the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... replied, still keeping his eyes fixed upon the burning logs and striving to follow the outlines of a fairy island with palms and tropical plants and ferns as tall as forest trees, which, in his imagination, he saw there. ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... animal, the everyday producers of shock are pain, fright and wounds. The adrenal mechanisms oversecrete to encounter the enemy, and then there is a period of rest and recuperation. Man, however, with the growth of his imagination and the increase in number and density of his surrounding herd, has become the subject of continuous stimulation. In the past, this was balanced by the almost universal dominance of some religious belief, as an effective opiate. Concepts like Fate, Predestination, an all-guiding and all-wise ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... forget the ills that have been done us, and to do good to those who have sought to injure us: your conduct towards me is admirable; I confess, that, though my reclamations were just at the first, I have suffered myself to be carried too far by the first impulse of a weak and exalted imagination, which led me to decry my unhappy companion in misfortune, because I fancied, that the account which he had drawn up of our misfortunes might render us odious to all our relations and friends.[52] Such are the reasons which I alledged to you at Rochefort, and you must ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... so. He had long wished to marry—wished ardently; he had even got into the way of regarding every woman he met—and he met many—in the light of a possible partner. 'Can it be she? he had asked himself a thousand times, and then answered half sadly, 'No.' Not one woman had touched his imagination, coincided with his dream. It is strange that after seeing Eva Brunt he forgot thus to interrogate himself. For a fortnight, while he went his ways as usual, her image occupied his heart, throwing that once orderly ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... in an attempt to persuade them to accompany him; but all except Taglat and Chulk refused. The latter was young and strong, endowed with a greater intelligence than his fellows, and therefore the possessor of better developed powers of imagination. To him the expedition savored of adventure, and so appealed, strongly. With Taglat there was another incentive—a secret and sinister incentive, which, had Tarzan of the Apes had knowledge of it, would have sent him at the ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... too fat, Mrs. Schump. I always tell her it's her imagination. I know a girl bigger than she is that's keeping company with an expert piano-tuner. Why, I know girls twice her size. Stella's got a right good figure, ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... there a sudden disabling storm of thought—misgiving—argument—swept through her brain. She seemed to hear on all sides voices in the air—the voices of friends and foes, of applause and execration—Delia's voice among them! And at the mere imagination of it, a shiver of anger ran through her. She thought of Delia now, only as of one who had deserted ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... strive to make his voice heard above the roar of wind and waves, in order the better to face the boisterous Assembly. Before long he came to be regarded as the prince of speakers even in the city of orators. Demosthenes was a man cast in the old heroic mold. His patriotic imagination had been fired by the great deeds once accomplished by free Greeks. Athens he loved with passionate devotion. Let her remember her ancient glories, he urged, and, by withstanding Philip, become the leader of Hellas in ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... woman like this, with her hair turned grey. Before him were the ashes of a dead fire that had once burned bright. This was the woman he had loved. This was the woman he had lost. Such had been the constancy of his imagination to her, so had Time spared her under its withholding, that now, seeing how roughly the inexorable hand had struck her, his soul was filled with ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... of November[180] was at that time kept with great solemnity at Pembroke College, and exercises upon the subject of the day were required[181]. Johnson neglected to perform his, which is much to be regretted; for his vivacity of imagination, and force of language, would probably have produced something sublime upon the gunpowder plot[182]. To apologise for his neglect, he gave in a short copy of verses, entitled Somnium, containing a common thought; 'that the Muse had come to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... The water, on the other hand, presented a spectacle superbly grand. Let any one fancy himself (says Captain Ross) in the midst of an immense plain, extending further than the eye can penetrate, and filled with masses of ice, which present a greater variety of form than the most fertile imagination can conceive; and as various in size as in shape, from the minutest fragments, to stupendous islands, more than one hundred feet in perpendicular height above ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... afforded were served up at their table, the best liquors were broached for them, and music, with its enlivening charms, crowned the banquet; the officers' hearts were quite open and cheerful, as they already enjoyed, in imagination, all the booty they were to seize on the morrow. Thinking they could not do enough for the honest sailor, they inquired if he knew any thing of accounts; promising, if he did, to get him a place in the customs. In the morning, after a good hearty breakfast, they set forward ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... closed the door behind him, seeing the line of balled fern which had marked his passage, he heard a faint rustling, a sound as if a wind had swept across the green room within. The imagination which was a Trader's asset (when it was kept within bounds) suggested that the plants inside guessed—With a frown for his own sentimentality, Dane strode down the corridor and climbed to ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... conclusions on no other authority than their own ignorant assumption, and to Deify errors on no other authority than their own heated imagination, has in all ages been the practice of Theologians. Of that practice they are proud, as was the mouse of our Fabulist. Clothed in no other panoply than their own conceits they deem themselves invulnerable. While uttering the wildest incoherencies ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... reader to be now as fully familiar with the scene as ourselves, let him next, in imagination, people it, as on the occasion we have chosen for his introduction. It was a warm, sunny, day in the early part of July. The town itself was as quiet as if the glaive of war reposed in its sheath, and the inhabitants pursued their wonted avocations with the air of men who had nothing in common ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... their course; or, perhaps, absorbed in his own schemes, it did not occur to him that his daughter, who seemed so devoted to the cause he advocated, could do so weak a thing as fall in love. At all events, Alick lived in an elysium partly created by his imagination, and did not allow the future to interfere with his present happiness. Jack and Adair still thought Stella very charming, but, observing Alick's devotion to her, they would have considered it a gross breach ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... shabby old garden. I felt like a mourner, bereaved of a loved one, for in a way—a schoolgirl way, perhaps—I had loved my prince of the arbour. And always since our day together, I'd compared other men with him, to their disadvantage. No one else ever captured my imagination as he captured it in those ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... blurring together into a mighty black wall, and the outlines of the houses becoming shadowy. The Ware family sat awhile that evening by the hearth fire, and John Ware was full of satisfaction. A worthy man, he had neither imagination nor primitive instincts and he valued the wilderness only as a cheap place in which to make homes. He spoke much of clearing the ground, of the great crops that would come, and of the profit and delight afforded by regular work year after year on the farm. Henry ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Sevenoaks, or a hundred towns so much like it, in most particulars, that a description of any one of them would present it to the imagination—a town strung upon a stream, like beads upon a thread, or charms upon a chain. Sevenoaks was richer in chain than charms, for its abundant water-power was only partially used. It plunged, and roared, and played, and sparkled, because it had not half enough to do. It leaped down three or ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... times without pleasure, or fished or shot here and there without success. But upon these slender foundations he could not rear the stupendous fabric of his deeds unless he had read much, and listened carefully to the narrations of others. By the aid of a lively and unscrupulous imagination, he gradually transmutes their experiences into his own. What he has read becomes, in the end, what he has done, and thus, in time, the Spurious Sportsman is sent forth into the world equipped in a dazzling armour of sporting mendacity. And yet mendacity is, perhaps, too harsh a word; for it is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... holy gloom is now but dirt and darkness. There is no more deception than in a tragedy acted by candlesnuffers. One is sorry to think that an empire of common sense would not be very picturesque; for, as there is nothing but taste that can compensate for the imagination of madness, I doubt there will never be twenty men of taste for twenty thousand madmen. The world will no more see Athens, Rome, and the Medici again, than a succession of five good emperors, like Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, and ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Imagination is blessed or cursed with a fearful magic whereby he may scale the heights of Heaven or plumb ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... were washed in the bathroom, and dried, without the slightest disguise, in the bedroom. He never hurried in anything. The way he cleaned his teeth, shaved, and made his toilet almost transformed the place, in my imagination, into a ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... suppose Jack won! What then? Dade blew a mouthful of smoke towards the camp-fire, deserted except for himself, while his vaqueros disported themselves with their neighbors, and shook his head. He had a little imagination; perhaps he had more than most men of his type. He could see a glorious row, if Jose were beaten. It would, on the whole, be more ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... politics, physics, psychology, and almost every department of knowledge that existed in his day, then the uncertainties become rather a help than a discouragement. They give us occasion to think and use our imagination. They make us, to the best of our powers, try really to follow and criticize closely the bold gropings of an extraordinary thinker; and it is in this process, and not in any mere collection of dogmatic results, that we shall find the true value and ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... could have so much as conceived the imagination of such loneliness, such utter stagnant abomination of desolation. In an open boat, bereft of comrades, I should have gone mad in ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... surveyed the room, he perceived that the blood had been washed from the floor and sand strewed over it. Had he not known that Smallbones had been on board of the cutter the day before, he would have thought that it had been the smell of the dead body not yet removed. This thought crossing his imagination, immediately made the truth flash upon him, and, as if instinctively, he went up to the bed and pulled down the clothes, when he recoiled back with horror at uncovering the face of his mother, now of a livid blue and in the last ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of a lover's imagination, he only saw her, at the end of the veiled pathway, with love lighting her softly shining eyes, and her beloved hand ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... characteristics and spirit of these colonists, we must consider the special significance of the age that gave them birth. They "were the children of a century in which the human spirit had a new birth in energy of imagination, in faith in its powers to dare greatly and achieve greatly." [Footnote: Hamilton Wright Mabie—American Ideals, ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... short months, how tremendously attached to it must be this cheerful Don Mike, who had been born and raised there, who was familiar with every foot of it, and doubtless cherished every tradition connected with it. He had imagination, and in imaginative people wounds drive deep and are hard to heal; he loved this land of his, not with the passive loyalty of the average American citizen, but with the strange, passionate intensity of the native Californian for his state. She had met many ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... powerful man was Old Joe the collier, who flourished and was known in every village in the Salisbury Plain district during the first thirty-five years of the last century. I first heard of this once famous man from Caleb, whose boyish imagination had been affected by his gigantic figure, mighty voice, and his wandering life over all that wide world of Salisbury Plain. Afterwards when I became acquainted with a good many old men, aged from 75 to 90 and upwards, I found that Old Joe's memory ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... bit of a fool over this book. It catches me at every tender corner of my nature. It has aroused all the old ardent dreams of youth and springtime puissance. I cannot lay it down, and I cannot shorten it, for story, character, soul and reflection, imagination, observation are dragging me along after them. . . . This novel will make me or break me—prove me human and an artist, or an affected literary bore. If you want it you must take the risk. But, my dear Alden, you ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... this morning, and left it with real regret; for, during the two visits, Raphael's heavenly picture of the Madonna and child had so grown into my love and admiration, that it was painful to think I should never see it again. There are many more which clung so strongly to my imagination, gratifying in the highest degree the love for the Beautiful, that I left them with sadness, and the thought that I would now only have the memory. I can see the inspired eye and god-like brow of the Jesus-child, as if I were still standing before the picture, and the sweet, holy countenance of ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... to look at Cornelli over and over again, for he hardly yet realized that this was his child. Was this really Cornelli and not a creature of his imagination? So he held the child's hand and looked again and again into her shining eyes; it really seemed as if he could ...
— Cornelli • Johanna Spyri
... to say. On hearing these stories, the heroes of which always seemed to be saints, kings, priests, or generals, even the inmates of the dosshouse spat and rubbed their eyes in astonishment at the imagination of the Deacon, who told them shameless tales of lewd, fantastic adventures, with blinking eyes and a ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... humorous representations, even on sacred edifices. Water-pipes and gutter-spouts were ended with the heads of monsters and curious animals, and even with grotesque faces; in short, the smaller details of the architecture of this period show the vividness of the imagination of the time. For example, the leaf-work which was used in the ornamental portions of sculpture had hitherto copied the antique acanthus leaf; now the flowers and leaves native to France were the models of the sculptors, and a charming variety of ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... the courts. An institution which permits evil, creates it in a great measure: in saying that men are things, it necessarily engenders more crimes, more acts of violence, more cowardly deeds, than the imagination of romancers will ever invent. When a class has neither the right to complain, nor to defend itself, nor to testify in law; when it cannot make its voice heard in any manner, we may be excused for not taking in earnest the idyls chanted ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... "Through groves of palm," sung in such a scene and by such a lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built. In Guy Mannering,[31] again, every incident is delightful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan is a model ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... between them, ancient tombs; and by the Bretons being cut off from the rest of France by the nature of the country, and shut in among the uplands, black and misty in November, and blown over by chill Atlantic winds. Under a seeming dull indifference and melancholy the Bretons conceal a lively imagination, and no place has a greater wealth of ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... mean? Father Philip's accident has turned your head, I verily believe," replied her sister, as a terrible suspicion of the truth flashed into her imagination. ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... alone, while the prince and I remained in the carriage. Some hours passed, and we began to be uneasy; for the life of the Emperor had been so often menaced, that it was very natural to fear some snare or surprise, and imagination takes the reins when beset by such fears. Prince Murat swore and cursed with all his might, sometimes the imprudence of his Majesty, then his gallantry, then the lady and her complaisance. I was not any better satisfied than he, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... answered her with a smile, for it was not worth his while to disabuse her thoughts of any imagination that glorified him to her. "Do you not want to see Rubes' world, little one? To see the gold and the grandeur, and the glitter of it all?—never to toil or get tired?—always to move in a pageant?—always to live like the hawks in the paintings you talk of, with ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... employed by art to produce illusion entirely disappears. If the work is a picture, the figures represented seem to speak and walk; the shade is shadow, the light is day; the flesh lives, eyes move, blood flows in their veins, and stuffs have a changing sheen. Imagination helps the realism of every detail, and only sees the beauties of the work. At that hour illusion reigns despotically; perhaps it wakes at nightfall! Is not illusion a sort of night to the mind, which we people with dreams? Illusion then unfolds its wings, it bears the soul aloft ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... upon their knees.—Allgemeine Zeitung, 262. On the 17th of September, the preparation of a new liturgy was announced in a ministerial proclamation, "by which the solemnity of the church service was to be increased, the present one being too little calculated to excite or strike the imagination."] ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... incentive to insure greater improvement—may serve as a situation calling for thinking. The process of apperceiving or of assimilation may involve it. Studying and trying to remember may involve it. Constructive imagination often calls for it. Reasoning, always requires it. In the older psychology reasoning and thinking were often used as synonyms, but more recently it has been accepted by most psychologists that reasoning ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... and pictured its delights, and once a crony had even taken him to visit it. After that, to him and his grandchild, the asylum had seemed like a wonderful fairyland where life was one happy holiday. When at their work, they talked of this safe "Harbor" and the little girl's imagination endowed the place with marvelous beauties. In all their dreaming they had still been together, without thought of possible separation, till Colonel Bonnicastle's sentence fell with a shock upon their ears, "They will never ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... unfortunate that the professed biographies of Homer are partly forgeries, partly freaks of ingenuity and imagination, in which truth is the requisite most wanting. Before taking a brief review of the Homeric theory in its present conditions, some notice must be taken of the treatise on the Life of Homer which has been ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... beneath the incubus, my temples clasped tight between my burning palms to stay the maddening ring of the hammer in my brain. And suspicion grew into certainty, and with certainty came madness; imagination ran riot: she was a Messalina—a Julia —a Joan of Naples—a veritable Succuba—a thing polluted, degraded, and abominable; and, because of her beauty, I cursed all beautiful things, and because of her womanhood, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... the two last months—all the story which had come to her since her mother's death-kept flitting like a series of pictures before her vivid imagination. She saw Will's face with a tender light in the eyes; she felt his breath on her cheek, and her hand seemed again to be clasped in his. Once more she heard ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... preceded them, is successive, the application of them all to the French Revolution is simply preposterous.[12] That event answered not to the symbol either in extent or duration. Nor indeed is there satisfactory evidence in the actual condition of the Christian world, notwithstanding the fond imagination of learned and good men, that the voice of the seventh angel has yet been ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... numerous: there were two aunts, the widows of his father's brothers, and a number of old-maid cousins; and he had an uncle in Iowa, a country minister whom he had not seen for years. But he could not cable to any of these for money; nor could he quite conjure his imagination into picturing any of them sending it if he did. And even to cable he would have to pawn his watch, which was an old-fashioned one of silver and might not bring ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... them still in walks and drives where in fancy I had placed them before. I would not have to go very far to find types of the children introduced, but the lovers, and the majority of the others, began as shadows in the background of imagination, and took form and substance with time. Dr. Marvin, however, is a reality and a most valued friend, who has assisted me greatly in my work. Any one who has the good-fortune to meet Dr. E. A. Mearns, surgeon in the regular ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... was glorious with those soft, pearly, rainbow hues that adorn the evening and the morning of a low latitude, during the soft weather of the autumnal months. To the eastward, the low line of coast was just discernible by the hillocks of sand, leaving the imagination to portray its solitude and wastes. The sea in all other directions was dark and gloomy, and the entire character of the sunset was that of a grand picture of ocean magnificence and extent, relieved by a sky in which the tints came and went like the well-known ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... trip. Arolla suited us all to a T, and we are all in great force. As for me, I have not known of the existence of my liver, and except for the fact that I found fifteen or sixteen miles with a couple of thousand feet up and down quite enough, I could have deluded myself into the fond imagination that I was ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... children and had been twenty-seven years married, yet afterwards jealous, and so impatient that she became desperate, and would neither eat nor drink in her own house, for fear her husband should poison her. 'Tis a common sign this; for when once the humours are stirred, and the imagination misaffected, it will vary itself in divers forms; and many such absurd symptoms will accompany, even madness itself. Skenkius observat. lib. 4. cap. de Uter. hath an example of a jealous woman that by this means had many fits of the ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... to gather the actual experiences which Miss Rockmetteller wishes reported to her, and to convey these to him in the shape of a careful report, on which it would be possible for him, with the aid of his imagination, ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... vain my poor imagination grapples With these new lines in fancy shades, These purple evening coats with yellow lapels, These vests composed in flowered brocades; Nor can I think that noisy checks Would help me to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... rather a hindrance. When he has once arrived at a conclusion, he shuts his eyes and stops his ears to everything else. Osborne, now, is different; while he's a plodding kind of a fellow with very little imagination, he's shrewd enough to accept advantages wherever he finds them." The speaker added another cloud to those already hovering about him. "Miss Cavanaugh was satisfied with what you told her, ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... look for delicacy there: in that period you could only have got that from a man who was practically a slave. But now, you see," said he, leading me on a little, "we have learned the trick of handicraft, and have added the utmost refinement of workmanship to the freedom of fancy and imagination." ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... situations of force and effect everywhere through the pages, an intensity of action, a certain naturalness of dialogue and 'human nature' in the incidents. But over all is the glamor of the Chambers fancy, the gauzy woof of an artist's imagination which glories in tints, in poesies, in the little whims of the brush and pencil, so that you have just a pleasant reminder of unreality and a glimpse of the author himself here and there to vary the interest."—St. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... impossible to carry on any hunting there. Not a single Polar bear now appeared to be visible in the neighbourhood, although bears' skulls are found at several places on the beach, and this animal appears to play a great part in the imagination of the natives, to judge of the many figures of bears among the bone carvings I purchased from the Chukches. The natives often have a small strip of bear's skin on the seat of their sledges, but I have not seen any whole bear's skin here; perhaps the animal is being ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... to imprint their lessons on the minds of their new subjects, these men became the guides, the priests, the sovereigns, the masters of these infant societies; they formed discourses by which they spoke to the imagination of their willing auditors. POETRY seem best adapted to strike the mind of these rude people, to engrave on their memory those ideas with which they were willing to imbue them: its images, its fictions, its numbers, its rhyme its harmony, all conspired to please their ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dulness in English thought and imagination. All the great literary reputations belonged to the beginning of the century, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, had said their say. The intellectual life of the new generation had not yet found expression. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... not shaved for days, nor washed for years. The stink of them blew off the clean sea towards him. It seemed to his imagination that the water curdled with disgust as the brutes slushed ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... of the after-events of his life I retain such mere fragmentary recollections, dissociated from date and locality, as might be most readily seized on by the imagination of a child. At one time, when engaged in one of his Indian voyages, he was stationed during the night, accompanied by but a single comrade, in a small open boat, near one of the minor mouths of the Ganges; and he had just fallen asleep on the beams, when ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... off its load of care; 'Tis only the obscure is terrible; Imagination frames events unknown, In wild, fantastic shapes of hideous ruin, And ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... look silly, if nobody comes!" she had thought every time she woke in the night. But she needn't have worried. There was an argument in that advertisement, "Easier than washing, ironing, scrubbing or sewing," that appealed to many a feminine imagination, and when the fancy, thus awakened, played around the promising phrase "$21 a week—and up," hope presently turned to ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... family ought to be understood. But, inasmuch as the Chronicler nevertheless desires to depict the older time and not his own, he by no means adheres closely to contemporary statistics, but gives free play at the same time to his idealising imagination; whence it comes that in spite of the numerous and apparently precise data afforded, the reader still finds himself unable to form any clear picture of the organisation of the clergy,—the ordering of the families and tribes, the distribution ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... we argued earnestly for Browning with a man who said it was fatal to the poetry that it needed an argument, and that he did not want to earn the quickening of his imagination by the sweat of his brow,—he could gather the same thought and beauty in less break-neck places,—all the profit was expended ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... wanted us to see that intelligence might also be a matter of seeing the connection between two things so far apart that most people would think they were always separate. I like that. It made education mean something, because it made it depend on imagination instead of grubbing. And then he told us about the history of our subject—grammar. How it began as poetry, when every word was an original creation; and then became philosophy, as people had to arrange ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... reveal Her hidden worlds, unlock her cloud-hung gates, Or snatch the keys of mystery from time, Your souls would madden at the piercing sight Of fortune, wielding high her woe-born arms To crush aspiring genius, seize the wreath Which fond imagination's hand had weav'd, Strip its bright beams, and give ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... have read thus far in my story you will have discovered one thing about me, if nothing else. I was impulsive—ridiculously impulsive. My bump of imagination was big, too. Otherwise the idea that my father was roaming about the world instead of being peacefully asleep somewhere at the bottom of the sea off Bolderhead, would never have gained such ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... jumped with joy at this sign of returning appetite, and asked her what she would like and how she would like it. Henrietta thereupon directed her to have prepared a soup of such a complicated character (only the morbid imagination of an invalid could have conceived such a monstrosity), that Clementina felt obliged to descend to the kitchen herself to superintend its concoction herself, for it was certain that any servant would have forgotten half the ingredients before she could ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... to serve the Church and the country when he was wanted. When it was written, he sat long over the closed envelope and smoked a couple of pipes. He wondered if men were killing each other, even now, just over the water. He pictured a battle scene, drawing from imagination and what he remembered of field-days at Aldershot. He shuddered a little as he conceived himself crawling through heather to reach a man in the front line who had been hit, while the enemies' guns on the crest opposite were firing as he had seen them ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... a very good working knowledge, which, in its details, would have astonished Professor Cairnsley could he have got behind the scenes. Though her knowledge was not based strictly on the text-book, her reputation in the class was good, and, as Patty admitted with a sigh, "It's a great strain on the imagination to keep up a ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... of creative intellect and imagination in second century Rome: little noteworthy production in literature after Trajan's death. The greatest energies went into building; especially under Hadrian. The time was mainly static,—though golden. There were huge and opulent cities, and they ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... consumed his own time and that of his ploughmen; and he reserved no leisure for the care of his temporal affairs. His active mind, superior to the low occupations to which he was condemned, preyed upon itself; and he indulged his imagination in visions, illuminations, revelations; the great nourishment of that hypochondriacal temper to which he was ever subject. Urged by his wants and his piety, he had made a party with Hambden, his near kinsman, who was pressed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... harassed by his education, if that brutalization of which we spoke above can be called education, in that exchange of usages and sentiments among different nations, the Filipino, to whom remain only his susceptibility and his poetical imagination, allows himself to be guided by his fancy and his self-love. It is sufficient that the foreigner praise to him the imported merchandise and run down the native product for him to hasten to make the change, without reflecting that everything has its weak side and the most sensible ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... exhaustless wealth and the rich taste exhibited in its harmonious manifestation. The Hawley-Crowles home had seemed to her the epitome of material elegance and comfort, far exceeding the most fantastic concepts of her childish imagination, when she had listened enraptured to Padre Jose's compelling stories of the great world beyond Simiti. But the gorgeous web of this social spider made even the Hawley-Crowles mansion suffer ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... analytical study to the writings of such masters of style as Flaubert and Gautier, and he chose his miscellaneous reading with a peculiar care. He wrote again to the same friend: "I never read a book which does not powerfully impress the imagination; but whatever contains novel, curious, potent imagery I always read, no matter what the subject. When the soil of fancy is really well enriched with innumerable fallen leaves, the flowers of language grow spontaneously." ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... had a vivid imagination, though it never was cultivated to literary ends. Perhaps, after all, I inherited that idle fancy, those unsatisfied yearnings of my restless heart, from her! Mental peculiarities are said to come ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... schoolfellow and except for the time of a quarrel (the blame of which Horace rather generously took upon himself but in which there were doubtless faults on both sides)[18] life-long friend—is curiously different. Gray was a poet, while Walpole, save for a touch of fantastic imagination, had nothing of poetry in him and could not, as some who are not poets can, even appreciate it. In more than one other intellectual gift he soared above Horace. He was essentially a scholar, while ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... garrulousness. Her thoughts were very busy. The first romance of her young life had come, and she still felt on her hands the kisses that had been so warm and sincere, although she knew they were given by one who cherished a hopeless love. After all, it was but her vivid Southern imagination that had been kindled by the swift, strange events of the past twenty-four hours. With the fine sense of the best type of dawning womanhood, she had been deeply moved by Graham's strong nature. She had seen in him a love for another ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... the imagination of a Dante could have equalled the lurid and pyrogriffic grandeur of the scene. Streams of fire rose into the sky, falling in bifurcated crystallations in all directions. Disregarding all personal danger, I opened one eye ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... really existed, the incredible edifice of his caprice and of Mr. Alloyd's constructive imagination! It had already reached a height of fifteen feet; and, dozen of yards above that, cranes dominated the sunlit air, swinging loads of bricks in the azure; and scores of workmen crawled about beneath these monsters. And he, ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... translation of an old Greek manuscript, gives no indication of sources. I have sought in special works for the data which the abb must have had as a basis, but I have not been able to find them. I suppose, however, that this description, which is so precise, is not merely a work of the imagination. The author goes so far as to give the dimensions of the grating (30 feet by 8), and, greatly embarrassed to explain how his hero was enabled to traverse it without being burned, is obliged to suppose it to have ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... Goneril tried to imagine what a great musician could be like: long hair, of course; her imagination did not get much beyond the hair. He would, of course, be much older now than his portrait. Then she watched Angiolino cutting the corn, and learned how to tie the swathes together. She was occupied in this useful employment ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... which brought it into mind. For some time, however, Rachel thought of it a good deal, wondering how it came about that her native name and the strange significance which they appeared to give to it had taken such a hold of the imagination of the Zulus. Ultimately she discovered that the white man, Ishmael, was the chief cause of these things. He had lived so long among savages that he had caught something of their mind and dark superstitions. To him, as to them, it seemed a marvellous thing that she should have acquired the title ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... well-known poet, a clergyman, born in Dublin in 1679, has written a few religious verses. The following have a certain touch of imagination and consequent grace, which distinguishes them above the swampy level of ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... devotedness in female love that admits of no rivalry. All the tenderness of the heart, all the powers of the imagination, are enlisted in behalf of the tyrant passion; and where all is given, much is looked for in return. Frances had spent hours of anguish, of torture, on account of Dunwoodie, and he now met her without a smile, and left ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... stress of souls, the welter of cross-purposes which begirt the youthful dreamer, his love for Palma, and his swift death when all the world thrust upon him its joys—here were motives, indeed, for any musician of lofty aim and sympathetic imagination. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... (now recently included in the limits of the colony,) is from the pen of its first discoverer, Mr. Oxley, and other travellers bear witness that it is not overcharged: "A mile and a half brought us into the valley which we had seen on our first descending into the glen: imagination cannot fancy anything more beautifully picturesque than the scene which burst upon us. The breadth of the valley, to the base of the opposite gently-rising hills, was between three and four miles, studded with fine trees, ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... pocket-book, while in vain had he tried to get some sketch or picture that would convey to the little world of his friends and acquaintances some notion of his future bride. They were left to draw on their imagination for some presentiment of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... scarcely had I dropt into a sweet sleep. Therefore I dreamed I was feasting at some table luxuriously loaded, where, eating like a glutton, the whole company were astonished to see me, while my imagination was heated by the sensation of famine. Awakened by the pains of hunger, the dishes vanished, and nothing remained but the reality of my distress; the cravings of nature were but inflamed, my tortures prevented sleep, and, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... the idol-worship of Fact. Those good friends who are always better acquainted with our faults, failings, and weaknesses than we can pretend to be ourselves, had long since discovered that my nature was superstitious, and my imagination likely to mislead me in the presence of events which encouraged it. Well! I was weak enough to recoil from the purely rational view of all that Eunice had suffered, and heard, and seen, on the fateful night recorded in her Journal. Good and Evil walk the ways of this unintelligible world, ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... pictures of the imagination. The realities are at hand. And the influence of cities, in introducing them, must be felt. For "they of the city shall flourish like the grass of the earth." "The name of the city from that day shall be, ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton
... external conditions, or how his action may respond to the impression. One may guess what opinion an augur would form concerning the appearance of a single eagle or raven; but it would be labor lost to attempt to conjecture the manner in which the imagination of the observer would explain a flight of these birds, or what complicated rules augural art might evolve to guide ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... and Holofernes; then, irrationally enough, Lucrece and Sextus; Cleopatra and the hostile generals whom she reduced to abject slavery by a surrender of her charms. Next was recounted an extraordinary story, born of the imagination of these ignorant millionaires, which told how the matrons of Rome seduced Hannibal, his lieutenants, and all his mercenaries at Capua. They held up to admiration all those women who from time to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... proportion as we draw near to an object we have long had in view, its interest seems to augment. The uninhabited banks of the Cassiquiare, covered with forests, without memorials of times past, then occupied my imagination, as do now the banks of the Euphrates, or the Oxus, celebrated in the annals of civilized nations. In that interior part of the New Continent one may almost accustom oneself to regard men as not being essential ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... mile to the right, gardens and orchards sunk in a concave, and, as it were, snipped out of the woodland. From this self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke, which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on quiet hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... did not seriously consider it. However, I was not long to remain in uncertainty, for an officer, who was an intimate friend of mine, revealed the secret to me. The enterprise was so grand and so audacious, that it instantly charmed my imagination, and I at once went to Colonel L. A. Harris, of the Second Ohio, and asked, as a favor from him, that if any detail was made for another expedition of the same kind, I should be ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... to await the result. Never for a single instant did his eyes turn from the bold swimmer: they followed his every stroke. At one time, he thought he had sunk; at another, the ripple of a wave appeared to his distorted imagination like the fin of a shark. Anxiety for the fate of his companion kept his mind on the stretch until distance rendered the object no longer visible. 'Then, indeed, did he feel that ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... have uttered could her great spirit have need to walk the earth again. Was such a thing possible, I wondered? No, it was not possible, yet it was true that her atmosphere seemed to cling about this place and that my imagination, excited by memory and Nombe's suggestions, ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... expensive for the small farm, required too much skill to operate, and were much too heavy as compared with the pull they exerted. And anyway, the public was more interested in being carried than in being pulled; the horseless carriage made a greater appeal to the imagination. And so it was that I practically dropped work upon a tractor until the automobile was in production. With the automobile on the farms, the tractor became a necessity. For then the farmers had been introduced ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... d'Orleans. Still full of his vexation, he took a glass, and, looking at the company, made an allusion in a toast to the two women, one the captain, the other the lieutenant, who governed France and Spain, and that in so coarse and yet humorous a manner, that it struck at once the imagination of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... worrying him dreadfully. He is not like himself at all. I KNOW something is wrong, and I cannot find out what it is. I want to help him SO much. Oh, please, Roscoe, don't think this is just a foolish girl's imagination, and does not amount to anything. It does. I know it does. You are his best friend. Can't YOU find out what is troubling him and help him, for my sake? I have meant to speak to you about this ever so many times, but I seldom see you alone and I could not speak while he ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Having seen what the mechanist had already performed, he was willing to fancy that he could do more, yet resolved to inquire further before he suffered hope to afflict him by disappointment. "I am afraid," said he to the artist, "that your imagination prevails over your skill, and that you now tell me rather what you wish than what you know. Every animal has his element assigned him; the birds have the air, and man and beasts the earth." "So," replied the mechanist, "fishes have the water, in which yet beasts can swim by nature and ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... finding out what it was for yourself. Miss HOLME puts in her background of mystery with skilful touches and handles her characterisation with a good deal more subtlety than your mere mystery-monger can command. She observes both men and things with affection, writes of them with imagination. Rowly Huddleston, the committee-ridden squire of Thorn, looks like a careful portrait from life, and probably somebody also sat for that faithful soul, Crane, the butler. A book to be commended. Its defects are the defects ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... insanity! She must be made on a smaller scale of necessities than herself! How was she able to love the God she said she believed in? God should at least be as beautiful as his creature could imagine him! But Miss Carmichael would say her poor earthly imagination was not to occupy itself with such a high subject! Oh, why would not God tell her something about himself—something direct—straight from himself? Why should she only hear of him ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... earth and seas within the temperate zones and by windes driuen into these stiffe regions, that moysture was no more to bee hoped for that by dissolution it should haue any returne, so that by time the world should be left waterlesse. And therefore how ridiculous this imagination of the seas frysing is, I refer to the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... superstition, and so wide-spread is the respect it still obtains in civilized and Christian lands, that it is not worth while to summon witnesses to show that it prevailed universally among the red race also. What imprinted it with redoubled force on their imagination was the common belief that birds were not only divine nuncios, but the visible spirits of their departed friends. The Powhatans held that a certain small wood bird received the souls of their princes at death, and they refrained religiously from doing it harm;[102-2] ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... discipline of party warfare, and were accustomed to stand together in a firm phalanx, acknowledged him as their captain. Pitt, on the other hand, had what Newcastle wanted, an eloquence which stirred the passions and charmed the imagination, a high reputation for purity, and the confidence and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by me," she said. "You preach the nation to me. Can the nation bring to life those who die for her? Can she even avenge them? But I—I will avenge them!" she cried. The awful images of the catastrophe filled her imagination suddenly, and the graceful creature who held modesty to be the first of women's wiles forgot herself in a moment of madness, and marched ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... he looks upon it as a pastime. A superficial reading often gives him knowledge of many of the main facts, and a mistaken idea that he knows the story. It is the task of the teacher to get him to read with careful attention and with imagination keenly alive. When a fair mastery of the facts of the story has been gained, and clear mental images of the scenes portrayed and suggested have been formed, studies of plot, character, interpretation, etc., should follow. These studies, if ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... a newspaper paragraph, do not affect the imagination. Five thousand men in the concrete are quite another matter, especially if you suddenly realize that each of them has a wife, probably children, and that the whole are dependent upon the dynasty of which you are a member ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... true countrymen of Henry IV. As to the pretty ladies in gauzy hats, whose swelling and rustling robes graze the horns of the motionless oxen as they pass, you must not look at them; they would carry your imagination back to the Boulevard de Gand, and you would have gone two hundred leagues only to remain in the same place. I am here on purpose to visit the sixteenth century; one makes a journey for the sake of changing, not place, but ideas.... It was eight o'clock in the morning; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... story of a young man helping to build this first station. With scientific accuracy and imagination Murray Leinster, one of the world's top science-fiction writers, describes the building and launching of the platform. Here is a fast-paced story of sabotage and murder directed against a project more secret and valuable ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... advantage, in a more arduous strain of poetry that it had yet attempted. The perspicuity for which it has always been remarked, and to which it owes its charms in conversation as perhaps also the dificulty with which it is adapted to works of poetical imagination, is strongly exemplified in his translation of Paradise Lost. If he has not always been able to make the french idiom bear him through the aetherial regions in which the daring wing of Milton's muse soars ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... they rock them in the cradle hung over the kitchen fire, use words, touch on subjects which we never mention; and that precisely is a noteworthy characteristic. The innocent savage is not found in Aino-land, if indeed he is to be found anywhere. The Aino's imagination is as prurient as that of any Zola, and far more outspoken. Pray, therefore, put the blame on him, if much of the language of the present collection is such as it is not usual to see in print. Aino stories and Aino conversation are the intellectual counterpart of the dirt, the ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... by Satyavat. (One should act) as a child full of simplicity and destitute of either merit or sin. As regards all creatures there is in this world neither misery nor happiness. (That which is called misery and that which is called happiness are the results of a distraught imagination.) Even this is the true nature of all living creatures. Of all creatures, their lives are superior who have betaken themselves to renunciation and abstained from acts both meritorious and sinful. I shall now tell thee those acts which are best for a king. By putting ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... visit heralded Winn's marriage. He had not had time to marry before. It would not be true to say that women had played no part in his experiences, but the part they had played was neither exalted nor durable. They figured in his imagination as an inferior type of game, tiresome when captured. His life had been spent mainly in pursuit of larger objects. He had been sent straight from Sandhurst to South Africa, where he had fought with violence and satisfaction for two years, winning the D. S. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... of awakening from the hellish nightmare of the Terror, Mr. Verity's facile imagination tended to run to another extreme. With all the seriousness of which he was capable he canvassed the notion of a definite retirement from the world. Public movements, political and social experiments ceased to attract him. His ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... offspring, while it often slumbered, could never be said to become extinct. She liked not the protracted absence of Asa. Too fearless herself to have hesitated an instant on her own account about crossing the dark abyss, into which she now sat looking with longing eyes, her busy imagination, in obedience to this inextinguishable sentiment, began to conjure nameless evils on account of her son. It might be true, as Abiram had hinted, that he had become a captive to some of the tribes who were hunting the buffaloe ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
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