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More "Literal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shell-trumpets and beating the ground with the stalks of coco-nut fronds they chase the ghost clean away from their own village and on to the next. The inhabitants of that village meantime are ready to receive their unwelcome visitor, and beating their bounds in the most literal sense they soon drive him onwards to the land of their next neighbours. So the chase goes on from village to village, till the ghost has been finally hunted into the sea at the point of the shore which faces the setting ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... of course agree with that of Rome. (2) Irenaeus asserts that every Church, i.e., believers in all parts of the world, must agree with this Church ("convenire" is to be understood in a figurative sense; the literal acceptation "every Church must come to that of Rome" is not admissible). However, this "must" is not meant as an imperative, but [Greek: anagke] "it cannot be otherwise." In reference to principalitas [Greek: authentia] (see I. 31. 1: ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... paseo was completed this has ceased to be the favorite resort for driving. It is situated in the southern suburb of the city, and seems to be rather deserted, though as we view it there passes a typical horseman, a description of whom shall be literal. ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... are only a few of many. The Memoires of Retz far surpass the rest not only in their historical interest, but in their literary excellence. Arranging facts and dates so that he might superbly figure in the drama designed for future generations, he falsifies the literal truth of things; but he lays bare the inner truth of politics, of life, of character, with incomparable mastery. He exposes the disorder of his conduct in early years with little scruple. The origins of the Fronde are expounded in pages of profound ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... outhouse, and thoroughly enjoying a task which might have daunted one of less boyish confidence. He was, in fact, recasting the 'Fasti' of Ovid into English verse, using for that purpose a spirited, if literal, prose translation (published by Mr Bohn) in default of the original, from which his ignorance of the Latin language ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... disciple has felt his particular applications of the method to be satisfactory. Many have let them drop entirely, treating them rather as a sort of provisional stop-gap, symbolic of what might some day prove possible of execution, but having no literal cogency or value now. Yet these very same disciples hold to the vision itself as a revelation that can never pass away. The case is curious and ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... passes in those words from the region of symbol to that of literal description. A great horror fell upon all nations, when the news came. Rome taken? Surely the end of all things was at hand. The wretched fugitives poured into Egypt and Syria—especially to Jerusalem; perhaps with some superstitious hope that Christ's ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... than that of the migratory laborer, and though they often have ties of family and other stabilizing responsibilities, their lives are subject to periods of unemployment, and these fluctuations serve to feed their innate restlessness. They are, in quite the literal sense of the word, American proletarians. They are more volatile than any European proletarian, for they have learned the lesson of migration, and they retain the socialistic and anarchistic ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographical novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal sense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a century and ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... sake of argument, that there was a servitude in the patriarchal families which was approved by God. But what does this avail in your defence of slavery, unless you show, that that servitude and slavery are essentially alike? The literal terms of the relation of master and servant, under that servitude, are not made known to us; but we can, nevertheless, confidently infer their spirit from facts, which illustrate their practical character; and, if this character be found to be opposite to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... positive chemistry, so longed for by the present generation. The child 'supposes' the handkerchief a tail, and it becomes a tail. He has but to say to his companion: 'This shall be a whip and this shall be the harness,' and the things are there; not as matters of literal fact, but of imaginative truth. He plays for the enjoyment of the game and the exercise of his imagination; and therefore the handkerchief serves every purpose. This is the procedure of nature. But the modern parent, anxious to realize for the child, and to instil a love of accuracy ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... bull by the horns in a literal as well as figurative sense, the lad began gradually to develop into that terrible embodiment of unrest—a boy. He exhibited no very marked peculiarities up to this time to distinguish him from other youths; but just grew into the conglomerate mass of good, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... for a knock on the eye against his gun, which he was carrying before him; and after a minute's rueful look he joined heartily in the shouts of laughter of his father and brother at his expense, "Ah, Charley, brag is a good dog, but holdfast is a better. I never saw a more literal proof of the saying. There, jump up again, and I need not say ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... four children of a rich Chinese merchant, attended by a train of Chinese and Malay servants, came to see Mrs. Shaw. There were a boy and girl of five and six years old, and two younger children. A literal description of their appearance reads like fiction. The girl wore a yellow petticoat of treble satin (mandarin yellow) with broad box plaits in front and behind, exquisitely embroidered with flowers in shades of blue silk, with narrow box plaits between, with a trail of blue silk flowers on each. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... GO RY is a word of Greek origin. It is made up of two parts; ALL, other; and EGORY, discourse; the literal meaning of the compound being, discourse about other things; that is, things other than those expressed by the words, literally interpreted. Allegory is, therefore, the general name for that class of compositions, as Fables, Apologues, Parables, and Myth, in which there is a double ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... both, of the ball of the Khedive," he continued in his English, which was, though amazingly fluent and ready, a literal sounding translation of the French, which was in reality his mother tongue. "My sister thinks she can arrange that invitation. You are sure that you will be returned ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... unbelief. He puzzled himself continually, and if Mr. Deval, who was then under sentence, would have given leave, attempted to puzzle him too, as to the doctrines of a future state, and an identical resurrection of the body. He said he could not be persuaded of the truth thereof in a literal sense; that when the individual frame of flesh which he bore about him was once dead, and from being flesh became again clay, he did not either conceive or believe that it, after lying in the earth, or disposed ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... literal; and the tomb of the poet himself, near the southeast window, completes the impression of the scene. It is a plain brick altar tomb, covered with a blue slate slab, and, besides his own ashes, contains those of his mother and aunt. On the slab are inscribed the following lines by Gray himself: ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... had a high-school course in Latin can experiment with Virgil, turning it either into couplets like Pope's Iliad or into the more appropriate meter used by Longfellow in his Evangeline. With a dictionary and a literal translation it is easy enough to puzzle out Horace, who is more modern in his thought and who is, in a way, the ancestor of our present vers-de-societe writers. There is also this advantage in the translation of Horace: ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... number of notes are introduced. These notes the compiler had some hesitation in inserting, from a feeling that many of them were mere literal explanations or illustrations, conveying generally but a very poor idea of the deeper meaning which the proverbs themselves are capable of yielding; and also in deference to opinions which have been expressed as to the ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary were accompanied by lively protests against the bare idea of an Austro-Serbian war, which, so far as the Southern Slavs on both sides of the frontier were concerned, would have been a civil war in the most literal sense of the word (and this civil war, it must be remembered, is now actually being waged). The politicians, however, though well-nigh unanimous in their enthusiasm for the cause of the Balkan allies, could not at one breath throw off the habits of a lifetime. ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... popular sentiment; for the various sections are built each upon the same eccentric plan that obtains in the corresponding house. The result is an irregular succession of steps equally irregular, with enough literal jumping-off places to relieve any possible monotony attending the promenade. If the growth of the town seems to continue satisfactory, its houses—at least those in or near its central portions—begin gradually to pass through the next stage in their development. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... to be gathered yet from the words of Pindar. He is thinking, in his brief, intense way, at once of Athena's work on the soul, and of her literal power on the dust of the Earth. His "[Greek: keleuthoi]" is a wide word meaning all the paths of sea and land. Consider, therefore, what Athena's own work actually is—in the literal fact of it. The blue, clear air is the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... in private at Mrs. Errol's attitude towards her adopted son, but the subject was never mentioned between them. Often she would recall Capper's words and wonder if they had expressed the literal truth. She wondered, too, what Capper would say to his ally when he returned at the end of the summer and found the charge he had laid upon her unfulfilled. But, after all, Capper was scarcely more than a stranger, and it seemed to her, upon mature reflection, that he had ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... happened would inevitably lead to a painful scene, perhaps even to violence; to refrain from telling him would seem like condoning Don Carlos's conduct. She was torn by conflicting emotions and could not make up her mind how to act. Act, however, she did, in a literal sense, for although her heart was still throbbing wildly and her mind was in a whirl, she managed somehow to assume an ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... quotation, Bunyan has followed the Genevan or Puritan version. It was a favourite version with our pilgrim forefathers, and is in many texts more faithful than our authorized translation; but, in this passage, our present version is more literal. The same Hebrew word, to 'break' or 'bruise,' is used as to Satan's head ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... keep it to themselves. They did not care to disturb the simple, whole-souled faith of their wives and mothers and children. But when these men went to church with the family, and had to listen to the literal, orthodox expoundings of antiquated dogmas, they were apt to feel mildly bored and annoyed. They began to beg off from going to church. Then, little by little, in the various church congregations, there was a disquieting falling off ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... perspiration and washes her little face and fans herself and goes on again, flatfooted. All the motions are most elegant and graceful and subtle and serpentine, never an abrupt or sudden gesture, and never quite literal in any sense. After the dance was finished she came and sat by me and her skin was hot as if she had a fever. All the men were older and I must say ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... and, in art, the uselessness of attempting to copy an object exactly, the desire to give the object full expression, are the impulses which drive the artist away from "literal" colouring to purely artistic aims. And that brings us to the question of composition. [Footnote: Here Kandinsky means arrangement of ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... Alfred translated was the History written by a Spanish priest called Orosius, a disciple of St Augustine's (of Hippo), which "was looked upon as a standard book of universal history." Alfred by no means gave a literal translation, but used great freedom, and omitted some things and put in others which he judged of greater interest and importance for Englishmen. Alfred enlarged the account of Northern Europe, which he knew a great deal of. He also added the accounts ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... of Recognition of the first of Queen Elizabeth, chap. 3rd, and of that of James the First, chap. 1st, both acts strongly declaratory of the inheritable nature of the crown; and in many parts they follow, with a nearly literal precision, the words, and even the form of thanksgiving which is found ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... corruption of athanasia, derived from two Greek words meaning immortality. When some monks in reading Lucian came across the passage where Jove, speaking of Ganymede to Mercury, says, "Take him hence, and when he has tasted immortality let him return to us," their literal minds inferred that this plant must have been what Ganymede tasted, hence they named it athanasia! So great credence having been given to its medicinal powers in Europe, it is not strange the colonists felt they could not live in the New World without tansy. Strong-scented pungent ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Another version of great merit, of both the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is that of Mr. A. J. Butler. It is accompanied by a scholarly and valuable comment, and I owe much to Mr. Butler's work. But through what seems to me occasional excess of literal fidelity his English is now and then somewhat crabbed. "He overacts the office of an interpreter," I cite again from Howell, "who doth enslave himself too strictly to words or phrases. One may be so over-punctual in words that ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... had another volume in press—a collection of his sketches—among them the "Jumping Frog," and others of his California days. The "Jumping Frog" had been translated into French, and in this book Mark Twain published the French version and then a literal retranslation of his own, which is one of the most amusing features in the volume. As an example, the stranger's remark, "I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better than any other frog," in the literal retranslation becomes, ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... David, Elijah, who were obedient to the commandments of God. He did not speak of patriotism, although an intense lover of his country. He exhorted his sons to be simply obedient to the Law,—not, probably, in the restricted and literal sense of the word, but in the idea of being faithful to God, even as Abraham was obedient before the Law was given. The glory which he assured them they would thus win was not the eclat of victory, or even of national deliverance, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... Well then, for this simple reason—the force of which will be admitted by anyone who ever had the happiness of grasping Charles Dickens's hand in friendship—that his description of Scrooge's Nephew was, quite unconsciously but most accurately, in every word of it, a literal description of himself, just as he looked upon any day in the blithest of all seasons, after a brisk walk in the wintry streets or on the snowy high road. "He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this Nephew of Scrooge's, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... entrance) she asked herself what they would have to show twenty years later for the frame that made them just then a picture. Would they be wonderfully ripe and noble, the perfection of human culture? The contrast was before her again, the sense of the same curious duplicity (in the literal meaning of the word) that she had felt at Plash—the way the genius of such an old house was all peace and decorum and the spirit that prevailed there, outside of the schoolroom, was contentious and impure. She had often been struck with it before—with ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... wife about the singular trial and about the impression which Jesus had made upon his mind. When he left her, she had fallen asleep and dreamed about it; for, though our version makes her say, "This night I have dreamed about Him," the literal translation is "this day"; and of course there might be many causes why a lady should fall asleep in the daytime. Her dream had been such as to fill her with a vague sense of alarm, and her message to her ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... the Puy de Dome of Auvergne. But the life of Mortain as Mortain is, or rather as Mortain, with its counts and its canons, once was, began at a lower point, at a point lower than the town itself. The Moretolian akropolis, like some others, was not an akropolis in the literal sense, for the good reason that the point of most value for military purposes was not the most lofty. The windings of the little stream allow of the projection of a bold peninsular rock, joined by a kind of isthmus to the main hill on which the ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... their great significance, says: "Pietism went back from the cold faith of the seventeenth century to the living faith of the Reformation. But just because this return was vital and produced by the agency of the Holy Spirit, it could not be termed a literal return. We must not forget that the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century was only the extreme elaboration of an error, the beginning of which we find as far back as Luther's time, and which became more and more a power in the Church through the influence of Melanchthon. It was ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... from the Latin at the end of the fifteenth century, 'human beings are mere puppets, inhabiting the great fabric of mediaeval thought and mediaeval institution.... It was the work of the Renaissance to recover the literal and obvious sense of human life, as it was the work of the closely-allied Reformation to recover the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Papers, as they were meant; not understanding every thing perversely in the absolute and literal sense, but giving fair construction as to an after-dinner conversation; allowing for the rashness and necessary incompleteness of first thoughts; and not remembering, for the purpose of an after taunt, words spoken peradventure after the fourth glass. The Author wishes ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... dispute the fact that periphrasis tends much to sublimity. For, as in music the simple air is rendered more pleasing by the addition of harmony, so in language periphrasis often sounds in concord with a literal expression, adding much to the beauty of its tone,—provided always that it is not inflated and harsh, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... gathering his forces, a menace to Christendom itself. The times were indeed evil, and the "servants of God," of whom then, as now, there were no inconsiderable number, withdrew for the most part into spiritual or literal seclusion, and in the quietude of cloister or forest cell busied themselves with the concerns of ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... not as quaint," would flash back the retort from Mrs. Tims, whose conception of loyalty was more literal than ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... that it often proves a very difficult matter to trace the connexion between the figurative and the literal sense of the stanza. The essentials in the composition of the pantun, for such these little pieces are called, the longer being called dendang, are the rhythmus and the figure, particularly the latter, which they consider as the life and spirit of the poetry. I had a proof of this in an ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... accidents. First, Sir William Harcourt got up and explained that the notice he had given was exactly the same kind of notice that was always, and had been always, given in like circumstances. Everybody who knows anything about Parliamentary matters knows that this was the literal truth. The dirty trick which Mr. Chamberlain had attributed to Sir William Harcourt existed only in his own uninstructed and treacherous memory; and so he was crushed. Still he wanted to have a word in, and more than once he showed signs of rising to his feet. But ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Fallata chief. They started from the town of Labogee, or Nyffee, and, crossing the Quarra, travelled south fourteen days along the banks of the river, until they were within four days journey of the sea, where, according to his literal expression, "the river was one, and the sea was one," but at what precise point the river actually entered the sea, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... their lives, of their thorough power over themselves, and power over circumstances. They were troubled with no subjective speculations; no social problems vexed them with which they were unable to deal; and in the exuberance of vigor and spirit, they were able, in the strict and literal sense of the word, to play with the materials of life." So says ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... clearly shown than in this peculiarity of its structure. As in the common law, so in the constitution, change has been effected in substance without any corresponding change in terminology. There is hardly one of the phrases used to describe the position of the crown which can be understood in its literal sense, and many of them are currently accepted in more senses than one. The American constitution of 1789 reproduced, however, in essentials, and with necessary modifications, the contemporary British ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... brings me to a third reason why, under the stress of war, English Christianity is hardly in revival, namely, Bible difficulties. The Prayer Book comes down to us from men who were held by a belief in the literal truth of the whole Bible. In so far as it has been an effective manual for ordinary people, it has been on the strength of an absolute dogma in their minds as to the "Word of God." That dogma has in a vague and somewhat ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself. Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... story-telling in most of the best essays of Elia, but it is a kind which he had to find out, by accident and experiment, for himself; and chiefly through letter-writing. 'Us dramatic geniuses,' he speaks of, in a letter to Manning against the taking of all words in a literal sense; and it was this wry dramatic genius in him that was, after all, the quintessential part of himself. 'Truth,' he says in this letter, 'is one and poor, like the cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face that ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of the extinction of this highly distinguished and ancient family is so well known that it need not be recapitulated here, and its literal fulfilment is one of the most curious instances of the kind on record. There is no doubt that the "prophecy" was widely known throughout the Highlands generations before it was fulfilled. Lockhart, in ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... words 'natural selection,' do not express a cause in the physical sense." "Kindred objections," he continues, "may be urged against the expression into which I was led when seeking to present the phenomena in literal terms rather than metaphorical terms—'the survival of the fittest.' In the working together of those many actions, internal and external, which determine the lives and deaths of organisms, we see nothing to ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... with Christ after death is to rise with Him. It implies Resurrection. Here again Arnold is constrained to admit the validity of Catholic interpretation. He cannot deny that Paul believed absolutely in the physical, literal, and material fact of Christ's bodily Resurrection. But he insists that, while accepting this fact, Paul lays far more stress upon the spiritual interpretation of it. For Paul, death is living after the flesh; life is mortifying the flesh by the ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... angel said. 'It shall not be literal annihilation, although akin to it, for all your earthly desires must be swept away; all ambition, fame, learning, friends, must be sacrificed upon this altar. The light you will bear is fed alone from heavenly sources. Think again, child, if all these ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... the most interesting period, that is, of the second and third centuries, there is no attempt at literal portraiture or historic accuracy. They were to be understood only by those who had the key to them in their minds, and they mostly arranged themselves in four broad classes. 1st. Representations of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... that the onlooker could scarcely distinguish between Boer and Briton, friend or foe. Now when the Boers behaved thus towards their prisoners-of-war they only did what they ought to have done. When a man is captured or wounded he is no more an enemy in the literal sense of the word, and should not be treated as such. Military precautions must necessarily be taken to prevent the escape of prisoners, but, apart from that, men forced to surrender should neither be regarded nor treated as criminals, but as an honourable ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... the chief impression made on a near observer. In politics the Americans are first and foremost jurists, and indeed in a narrower and more literal sense than the English Imperialists, with whom, according to their old traditions, justice only serves as a cloak for their political ambitions. I cannot judge how far the Americans have become full-blooded Imperialists since their ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... "acquired," then began to serve the "purpose" assigned, the argument would not have involved the fallacy which we are now considering. But, as it stands, the argument reverts to the teleology of pre-Darwinian days—or the hypothesis of a "purpose" in the literal sense which sees the end from the beginning, instead of a "purpose" in the metaphorical sense of an adaptation that is evolved by the ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... husbandmen, and artificers"; men with little property or none at all; uneducated and home-keeping men whose outlook was bounded by the parish; Puritans by temperament and habit rather than by reasoned conviction: followers in a very real and literal sense. Few of them would have come as individuals; but they came as families and groups of families from the same community, yielding to the call of a favorite minister or trusted neighbor. And few would ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... into the other and each opening in its turn on to a broad wooden verandah. The latter ran round three sides of the house, and in summer the delicate pink of Dorothy Perkins fought for supremacy with the deeper red of the Crimson Rambler, converting it into a literal ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... word with its literal translation, "tail-horn-hoofed Satan," and be shy of compound epithets, the components of which are indebted for their union exclusively to the printer's hyphen. Henry More, indeed, would have naturalized ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... business principle. For according to information sedulously spread abroad, it was doubtful whether the "Clarion" would long survive. Elias M. Pierce's boast that he would put it out of business gained literal interpretation, as he had intended that it should. Contrary to his accustomed habit of reticence, he had sought occasion to inform his friends that he expected verdicts against the libeler of his daughter which would throw ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... more than a very vapid imitation of the scriptural narrative of the appearances of angels to Abraham and Manoah. But Giotto has put life into it; and I am aware of no other composition in which so much interest and awe has been given to the literal "burnt sacrifice." In all other representations of such offerings which I remember, the interest is concentrated in the slaying of the victim. But Giotto has fastened on the burning of it; showing the white skeleton left on the altar, and the fire still hurtling up round it, typical ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... countries are quite willing to stop when the idea is suggested to them. I have known horses content to go even quite slowly. But your German horse, seemingly, is built for one particular speed, and is unable to depart from it. I am stating nothing but the literal, unadorned truth, when I say I have seen a German coachman, with the reins lying loose over the splash-board, working his brake with both hands, in terror lest he would not be in time to avoid ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... outward rites, that a command so wide and profound was supposed to be kept by fastening little boxes with four slips of parchment containing extracts from the Pentateuch on arm and forehead. Jewish rabbis are not the only people who treat God's law like that. Even if literal, the injunction is for the purpose of remembering. Taking that meaning, then, the text sets forth principles that apply quite as much to us. You will observe 'hand,' 'eyes,' 'mouth'; the symbols of practice, knowledge, expression; work, thought, and word. Observe also that there is a slight ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... detect some typographical inaccuracies they are merely literal accidents, and the books reflect credit on author, publishers, and stereotyper. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... is commonplace, but what can a man do in this region of trivial souls? Soar, my mind! What does "ambience" mean, by the way? Never mind, if the Sublime is unfettered by literal meaning, all the better ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... to put his Spirit upon you when there is need of it, you may overcome Satan as easily as Samson did the lion. Daniel was thrown into the lions' den, but they did not eat him. God put a muzzle on them, not a literal muzzle, but something still more effectual, and ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... of which he admits as fully as any Darwinian, Mr. Booth tells men whose evil case is one of those consequences that envy is a corner-stone of our competitive system." Mr. [287] Cunningham's physiological studies will have informed him that the process of "shutting the eyes," in the literal sense of the words, is not always wilful; and I propose to illustrate, by the crucial instance his own letter furnishes, that the "shutting of the eyes" of the mind to the obvious consequences of accepted ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... seeking and exacting always his own advantage, playing the game under harsh rules of his own devising which had enabled him to win—until this last time—how could he see the last bit of prestige wrested from him and still be cheerful? How could he earn his daily bread in the literal sweat of his brow, endure blistered hands and sore muscles and the sting of slime-poison in fingers cut by hooks and traces, with less outward protest than men who had never ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Mr. Oke was despatching his Saturday heap of Conservative manifestoes and rural decisions—he was justice of the peace in a most literal sense, penetrating into cottages and huts, defending the weak and admonishing the ill-conducted—one morning while I was making one of my many pencil-sketches (alas, they are all that remain to me now!) of my future sitter, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... difficult matter to find that which one has in his hand, Major Dunwoodie," replied the surgeon, coolly, preparing his dressings. "It took what that literal fellow, Captain Lawton, calls a circumbendibus, a route never taken by the swords of his men, notwithstanding the multiplied pains I have been at to teach him how to cut scientifically. Now, I saw a horse this day with his head half severed ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... for an instant to propose that every one should read poetry. The man whose imagination has never taken fire from literature of any kind, whose brain is literal and dislikes any embroidery upon the surface of plain fact, who is deaf to music, unresponsive to ideas, and limited in his emotions—such a man in my opinion is unfortunate, although he is often an excellent citizen, lives happily, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... 'increase' and 'diffusion' should receive literal interpretation in accordance with the evident intention of the testator; that such terms being logically distinct, the two purposes mentioned in the bequest were to be kept in view in the organization of the institution; that the increase of knowledge should be effected by the encouragement ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... poetry in form and material is all his own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science, and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe the life and emotions of a woman whose whole life is given up to love, and then, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... Thomas Picton has described him as a "thieving blackguard." But I am sure that this was merely the downright, rather extravagant manner, of censure peculiar to that distinguished general, and that those who have taken the expression at its purely literal value have been lacking at once in charity and in knowledge of the caustic, uncompromising terms of speech of General Picton whom Lord Wellington, you will remember, called a rough, ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... hundred towns, and entirely constructed the fortifications of thirty-three others; was present at one hundred and forty battles, and conducted fifty-three sieges. The body of this eminent man was, in literal compliance with his orders, interred in a black marble tomb, under the damp flagstones of the castle chapel; but his heart, in melancholy violation of the spirit which dictated them, is enclosed in a monument, surmounted by his bust, in the church of the ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... Perseus, and so forth, in the reader succeeding the primer, and the stories of Odysseus, or Ulysses, as we commonly call him, following as a third book, answering to our second or third reader. This book I brought home with me and had a careful, literal translation made. I submitted this translation to that notable scholar, Zenaide A. Ragozin, with whom I faithfully traversed the ground, word by word and sentence by sentence. This version I have carefully compared with Bryant ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... Zwingli and Oecolampadius, in their anti-literal and figurative interpretation of the words of institution, endeavour to support it by Scriptural analogies, more or less appropriate, but in the practical objections they raised, which Luther treated as over-curious subtleties of human reason, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... thought about it, the farther he found himself from his desire. Later in the process, he knew, came a big barrier called "stealing a kiss," and James with his literal mind provided this game with an aggressor, a defender, and the final extraction by coercion or violence of the first osculatory contact. If the objective could be carried off without the defense repulsing the advance, the rest was supposed to come with less trouble. But ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... transverse series of filaments, and the geometric color patterns of the basketry were reproduced in incised lines. When these peoples came to paint their wares it was natural that the colored patterns native to the basketry should also be reproduced, and many more or less literal transfers by copying are to be found. A fine example of these painted textile designs is shown in Fig. 354. It is executed in a masterly style upon a handsome vase of the white ware of ancient Tusayan. Not only are the details ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... had taught her wasn't so; if all that she had accepted so blindly wasn't the literal truth, inexorable for every individual (life was a too bitterly personal thing for her to concern herself with a doctrine which, accurate in the main, could be shrugged aside when it failed in isolated cases) then all the rest, all that she had clung to just as ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... Ralph!" exclaimed Peterkin hastily, fearing that he had hurt my feelings; "why, man, I do but jest with you—you are so horridly literal. I'm overjoyed to be pressed to go on the maddest wild-goose chase that ever was invented. My greatest delight would be to go gorilla-hunting down Fleet Street, if you were so disposed.—But to be serious, Jack, do you think we shall be in ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... etiquette he obtained from books, and was often quite as literal in his observance of prescribing modes and forms, as was the Frenchman in showing off his skill in our idioms, when he informed a company of ladies, as an excuse for leaving them, that he had "some fish to fry." That he was no gentleman, internally or externally, was ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... is a good one it shows us that Duerer was no more consistently literal than he was realistic. The most striking features of his illustration are just those to which his text offers no counterpart, i.e., the nudity and physical maturity of his goddess. Neither has he girdled her about with cloud nor ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... radically changed him into her own likeness. He passes on to the volume entitled The Divine Adventure, which interprets the spirit of Columba. Nature and the spiritual meet in the psychic phase into which Sharp passed, not only in the poetic and native sense, but in a more literal sense than that. For the Green Life continually leads those who are akin to it into opportunities of psychical research among obscure and mysterious forces which are yet very potent. With a nature like his it was inevitable that he should be eventually lured irresistibly ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... at night in Bowling Green There comes a rumbling sound, Which literal minds are wont to think The Subway. But I found That still the Dutchmen ease their souls By playing ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... asserted that the Quichuas had other and very circumstantial terms to express the cardinal points drawn from the positions of the son (Ansichten der Natur, ii. p. 368). But the distinguished naturalist overlooked the literal meaning of the phrases he quotes for north and south, intip chaututa chayananpata and intip chaupunchau chayananpata, literally, the sun arriving toward the midnight, the sun arriving toward the midday. These are evidently translations of the Spanish ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... descended the steps to take their seats, each face was enveloped in a handkerchief, and there were passionate embraces, literal pressings to the breast, and violent sobs, as each victim, one after the other, ascended the carriage steps and fell back on the seat; while in the background, Honor Callaghan was uttering Irish wails over the Abbe and Laurence, and the lamentable sound set the ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... parallel to this habit of preaching was a fond love for the water, and it may be said in a literal sense that I was as fond of it as a duck. I am told that when an infant under the care of any person other than my mother, nothing in the world would quiet me except a bowl of water and a sponge to play with. Naturally this liking ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... that, in order to help on the slaughter of his enemies on the part of a barbarian general, God stopped the whole machinery of the universe for hours until he got through with his killing. We must believe the literal story of Jonah's being swallowed by the whale. We must believe no end of incredibilities; and then, if we dare to read with our eyes open, we must believe immoral things, cruel things, about men and about God, things which our civilization ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... devoted to the enumeration of methods for restoring human life after such casualties as drowning, hanging, poisoning, &c., some hours and even days after vitality has to all appearances ceased. We shall quote as before from our own literal translation. ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... fireside' (the open grate fire was a novelty to one who had come from the land of closed stoves), 'in my own four walls ... and could you see the immense four-post bed in the next room in which I might go to sleep in the most literal sense of the word, the many-coloured curtains and quaint furniture, my breakfast-tea with dry toast still before me, the servant-girl in curl-papers, who has just brought me my newly-hemmed black necktie, and asks what further orders I have ... and could you but see ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... with which we are in immediate contact, which we see and touch and taste and handle every hour of our lives. It may, therefore, sound a rather startling paradox to say that matter—matter in the sense of the Materialist—is something which nobody has ever seen, touched, or handled. Yet that is the literal and undeniable fact. Nobody has ever seen or touched or otherwise come in contact with a piece of matter. For in the experience which the plain man calls seeing or touching there is always present another thing. Even if we suppose that he is Justified in ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... observed the prudent Barbaro, "take that word in its literal sense, but the wretched man is dead ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... silver advisedly, for the Malagasy take the simplest and most literal way of making small change; they clip their dollars into little pieces of various sizes, and therewith transact the business that in other lands is settled with pence. As these clippings are not very accurate, however, they weigh the pieces, and ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... relations, sometimes sought this end in unwise ways. Many good people in Canada were still fighting the War of 1812. The desire to use the inshore fishery privileges as a lever to force tariff reductions led to a rigid and literal enforcement of Canadian rights and claims which provoked widespread anger in New England. The policy of discrimination in canal tolls in favor of Canadian as against United States ports was none the less ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... Hibbert Lectures, 1883, p. 119, "It was a mediaeval maxim, which no one thought of questioning, that the language of the Bible had four senses—the literal, the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical, of which the last three were mystical or spiritual, in contradistinction to the first." The learned Erasmus, who lived and died a devout Roman Catholic, seems to have accepted this allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures. ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... this is the literal English:—"Your Electoral Serenity will doubtless rejoice with us that the little Prince Fritz has now got his sixth tooth without the least INCOMMODITE. And therein we may trace a pre-destination, inasmuch ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... to inquire with the solicitude of seeming friendship, but outside that house he was busy breathing life into a scheme of broad and parlous scope, and in all but a literal sense that scheme was a violation of his ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... strongest emotions are excited by ideas. Hence, on the hypothesis, the impression radiating downwards to the emotional centres from the cerebral hemispheres, would counteract a sensory impression radiating upwards from them, by a literal interference analogous to that observed in opposing waves of sound. But as the direction of the impression generating emotion coincides with that of the motor impulses, the latter would not ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... hand to do the right thing at the right time - having produced the ink in a twinkling, tendered him the further service of recalling him to himself by the application of her elbows; with which gentle flappers she so jogged his memory, in a more literal construction of that phrase than usual, that he soon became quite ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... from eery blemish, made august and beautiful by the artistic imagination. The subjects of architectural sculpture were mainly mythological, historical scenes being very rare in purely Greek work; and these legendary themes offered little temptation to a literal copying of every-day life. But what is most noteworthy is that even in the representation of actual human persons, e.g., in athlete statues and upon grave monuments, Greek sculpture in the best period seems not to have even aimed ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... nothing, either by their mistresses or their mythology, but attacks on the court of Rome. Suffice it, that besides all other possible meanings, Dante himself has told us that his poem has its obvious and literal meaning; that he means a spade by a spade, purgatory by purgatory, and truly and unaffectedly to devote his friends to the infernal regions whenever he does so. I confess I think it is a great pity that Guido ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... him I was of opinion that his interpretation of Hamlet was based only upon the translated text, but in the course of a very long conversation on the subject I discovered that he was well acquainted (through literal translations) not only with the text, but also with the notes and comments of our leading critics. In speaking of the part in which he is altogether unrivaled he said, "I am of opinion that Shakespeare ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... accuracy is disclaimed, Judge Temple is easily identified as an idealized Judge Cooper, and a faithful picture of life in the early village may be recognized; for, as the author says in his introduction, while the incidents of the tale are purely fiction, "the literal facts are chiefly connected with the natural and artificial objects, and the customs of the inhabitants." The village of Templeton, in the novel, is the Cooperstown of reality in its early days. The spirit of the times, and the character ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... I trouble some kind reader to give me the origin, derivation, full and literal meaning, and the several senses, in their regular succession, of the above word Quadrille? There seems to be much uncertainty attached to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... the literal underworld of the great city? What of the babes who cry in fetid cellars for the light and are denied it? What of the Subway track-walker, purblind from gloom; the coal-stoker, whose fiery tomb is the boiler-room of a skyscraper; sweatshop workers, a flight below the ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... beauty or power discerned; and the eye and hand of the pupil gained intelligence, quickness, penetration. Month after month passed in what seemed to be a monotony of mechanical imitation; but in this arduous and literal reproduction of the skill of others was laid the sure foundations of individual skill. This devout attention to methods secured for a considerable number of men a technical expertness for which we look, as a rule, only in the work of the greatest ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... address in the explanation of the new dispensation he began by saying, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." The literal rendering would be, "Blessed are the poor, to the Spirit." This is the dative singular with the definite article. He is speaking of external conditions as contrasted with spiritual blessings, and those conditions thought wretched in the world ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... the cold of a sky concealed by the kind of clouds last mentioned, or rendered totally invisible by mist." He rescues the clear-obscure from the meaning commonly attached to it as light and shade. "In the literal sense, this word means nothing but the obscure which is at the same time clear." It should rather be defined to be light in shadow; but it will be difficult to establish any other sense for it than the disposition of the light and shade in a picture. The inventor of it, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... When they met in companies to lighten the load of life, prayer and songs of praise were among the usual indulgences of the entertainment. To them, a sermon was like a gay scenic exhibition in other and vainer communities, and none listened to the word with cold and inattentive ears. In literal obedience to the command of the preacher, and sympathizing with his own action, every eye in the congregation had been turned towards the naked rafters of the roof, when the unknown tones of him who spoke broke the momentary delusion. It is ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... good English, because "O te" is good Latin? No: nor is it bad for the reason which our grammarians assign, but because our best writers never use it, and because O is more properly the sign of the vocative. The literal version above should therefore be changed; as, "O Bollanus, thou happy numskull! ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... begins to tell the adventures of the night before. I hesitate, therefore, to enter upon an account of my dreams; for it is a literary sin to bore the reader, and a scientific sin to report the facts of a far country with more regard to point and brevity than to complete and literal truth. The psychologists have trained a pack of theories and facts which they keep in leash, like so many bulldogs, and which they let loose upon us whenever we depart from the straight and narrow path of dream ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... judged some of them to be about four months old, and was not at all astonished when informed by disinterested spectators that they ranged from twelve to fifteen years. Nothing, in fact, could astonish me after learning that the horses in Iceland are fed during the winter on dried fish. This is a literal fact. Owing to the absence of grain and the scarcity of grass, it becomes necessary to keep life in the poor animals during the severest months of the season by giving them the refuse of the fisheries; and, what is very surprising, they relish it in preference to any other ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... We cannot always press the words of the Lord to their utmost literal meaning. I suppose He used language a great deal as we do, to be taken at its face value, and not screwed and pressed and tortured into literal exactness until all the spirit is taken out of it? But these words sound very bald and unequivocal. I wish I knew what they ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... now hoisted to the staff-heads, returned to the ship realising fully, perhaps for the first time, the fact that we had lost for ever a genial, brave, devoted, and sympathetic friend. "In the midst of life we are in death." Never did I so thoroughly realise the absolute literal truth of this as whilst sitting in the gig, silently struggling with my feelings, on our return from poor Austin's funeral. We had just laid him in his lonely grave on a foreign shore, far away from all that he held dearest and best ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... when events, at the close of the twelfth century, showed that the prophecy was about to be accomplished. It is not, of course, our meaning, that the ominous flight of birds, the prophetic interpretation, and its almost literal fulfilment, were any thing more than an accidental coincidence; but, it must be confessed, that it was one of the most remarkable ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... Guynemer had for his first friend a comrade who knew exactly his own limits. Guynemer could save Jean Krebs from his excess of literal honesty by showing him the enchantment of his own ecstasies, but Jean Krebs furnished the motor for Guynemer's ambitious young wings. Without the technical lessons of Jean Krebs, could Guynemer later have got into the aviation field at Pau, and won so easily his diploma as pilot? Would ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... fluidajxo. Liquidate likvidi. Liquidation likvido. Liquidator likvidanto. Liquor likvoro. Liquorice glicirizo. Lisp lispi. List registro. List of names nomaro. List (index) tabelo. Listen auxskulti. Listless senvigla. Litany litanio. Literal lauxlitera. Literally lauxlitere. Literary literatura. Literateur literaturisto. Literature literaturo. Lithe aktiva. Lithograph litografi. Lithographer litografisto. Lithography litografarto. Litigation procesado. Litigious procesema. Litre litro. Litter ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... some profitable substance, till the black country shall be black no longer, the streams once more crystal clear, the trees once more luxuriant, and the desert, which man has created in his haste and greed, shall in literal fact once more blossom as the rose. And just so can I conceive a time when by a higher civilisation, formed on a political economy more truly scientific, because more truly according to the will of God, our human refuse shall be utilised like our material refuse; when man as man, down to ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... me report the case of a friend—a distinguished lawyer at the English bar. I had the circumstances from himself, which lie in a very small compass; and, as my friend is known, to a proverb almost, for his literal accuracy in all statements of fact, there need be no fear of any mistake as to the main points of the case. He was one day engaged in pleading before the Commissioners of Bankruptcy; a court then, newly appointed, and differently constituted, I believe, in some respects, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... William Cowper (Very literal and inattentive to melody, but has more of simple majesty and ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... as the literal rule of the smallest details of her life, she never wore a mixture of wool and cotton, as that was forbidden to the Jews, nor would she wear any imitation of linen for the same reason. In consequence, her clothes, which were of sound material, ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... Bowen's Corners. Near their house was the tavern, its proprietor known to all the people roundabout as "Uncle Sam" Bowen. He and Daniel Read never wearied in setting forth the merits of "free salvation." They were the only two persons in all that section of the country who did not believe in a literal hell. It was the common sentiment then that only those disbelieved in endless punishment who had reason to be afraid of it, and, since both these men were exemplary in every other respect, it was impossible ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... the latter condition to-night, he joined a company of male and female intimates, and with them strolled aimlessly from one familiar rendezvous to another. Would that it were possible to set down a literal report of the conversation which passed during hours thus spent! Much of it, of course, would be merely revolting, but for the most part it would consist of such wearying, such incredible imbecilities as no human patience could endure through five minutes' perusal. Realise ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... term Anglicised, as were many other foreign words by the trappers in the mountains. Its literal meaning is, arrow fender, for from it the plains Indians construct their shields; it is buffalo-hide ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... the gods in the literal sense; the gods were supposed to dwell in them, their spirits having entered into the graven images or blocks of stone. It is probable that like the Ancient Egyptians they believed a god had as many spirits as he had attributes. The ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... or rather imitations, the first published under the title of William and Helen, which it retains, the other as The Chase, which was subsequently altered to the better and more literal rendering, show unmistakably the result of the study of ballads, both in the printed forms and as orally delivered. Some crudities of rhyme and expression are said to have been corrected at the instance of one of Scott's (at this time rather numerous) Egerias, the beautiful ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... As a Biblical critic he is sometimes classed with the destructive school, but, as Otto Pfleiderer says (Development of Theology, p. 102), he "occupied as free a position as the Rationalists with regard to the literal authority of the creeds of the church, but that he sought to give their due value to the religious feelings, which the Rationalists had not done, and, with a more unfettered mind towards history, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... story may be found complete in the book of Ruth in the Old Testament by those who wish the literal Bible narrative as it ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... produces. An individual can do so by living on his capital, a nation may do so for a time by living upon its capital, giving to other nations by means of an increased debt a lien upon its future wealth. But a whole industrial community can never live upon its capital, can never in the literal sense of the term "spend too much." This statement requires a single qualification. While a community can never by "spending" deplete its capital, while it cannot increase its "spending" without at the same time increasing its real ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... years they have maintained their religious views, and applied them with remarkable consistency.[92] Their church grew out of the Anabaptist movement, which had its origins in Switzerland shortly after 1520. The Anabaptists believed in the literal acceptance of the teachings of the Bible, and their application as rules of conduct in daily life. Since they did not depend for their interpretations upon the authority of any priesthood or ministry, differences grew up among them at an early date. The more radical wing, from which ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... in the territory eastward of Jordan. It is not merely the right to inhabit, but, in spite of all apologetic rationalism, the right of absolute possession that they receive (Josh. xxi. 12), inclusive of a portion of land two thousand ells square (square in the strictly literal sense; Numbers xxxv. 5), which ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... his conscience stood over against the Ten Commandments, one of which he had broken. He became primitive, literal in his conception; the ramifications were, for the nonce, fairly relegated to limbo. He could not kiss Ruth because the acquired conscience—struggling on its way to limbo—made the idea repellant. Analysis would come later, when the primitive conscience, satisfied, would cease to dominate ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... to read to-day; they quote in a rather literal translation from their Paris Correspondent word for word what we read in the Paris papers yesterday. I wonder what the English hospital people in Brussels are doing in the German occupation,—pretty hard times ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... first time encompassed by the temptations of being unknown in a crowd. Some of you may be in new domestic circumstances, some with new sorrows, or tasks, or difficulties pressing upon you, calling for wisdom and patience. It is quite likely that there may be some who, in the most prosaic and literal sense of the words, are entering on a path altogether new and untrodden. But they will be in the minority, and for the most of us the days that were full of new possibilities are at an end, and we have to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... him to me (a me lo 'ntrodussi); but Boccaccio here uses the word introdurre in its rarer literal sense to lead, to ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... from another life—she had asked her mother to show her Norway on the map, and her strange convictions concerning the trees had seized her. When her mother said that they had come from that northernmost land of Europe, Ellen, to whose childhood all truth was naked and literal, immediately conceived to herself those veritable trees advancing over the frozen seas around the pole, and down through the vast regions which were painted blue on her map, straight to her father's west yard. There they stood and sang the songs of their own country, with a melancholy sweetness ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... place within the last seventeen years. There has been no exaggeration as to their extent, no great departure from their details; the means employed, even that which seems most far-fetched,—the instrument of the poisoned ring,—have their foundation in literal facts. Nor have I much altered the social position of the criminals, nor in the least overrated their attainments and intelligence. In those more salient essentials which will most, perhaps, provoke the Reader's incredulous wonder, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... failed in his interpretations of prophecy, is not unfrequently mistaken, even in this more enlightened age. He never considered or understood, that all prophecy is delivered in figurative language; every prophecy in the Old Testament having first a literal and incomplete fulfilment, the complete and spiritual fulfilment being future. He did not see that the Jews, according to the flesh, were types of the Spiritual Israel; that David was the emblem of the Saviour; and that the universal kingdom promised to the seed of David, was no other than ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... ourselves. Of another class of virtues—of all those which admit of being directly contrasted with justice, and which may for shortness' sake be without much inaccuracy comprehended under the general designation of generosity—it may, with literal truth, be said that the practice of them is no part of our duty to our neighbour. Provided we are careful to let every one have what, between him and us, are his bare dues, we may be selfish, mean, sordid to excess, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... Teachings regarding the Animals and Man. Ancient and medieval representations of the creation of man Literal acceptance of the book of Genesis by the Christian fathers By the Reformers By modern theologians, Catholic and Protestant Theological reasoning as to the divisions of the animal kingdom The Physiologus, the Bestiaries, the Exempila Beginnings ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... which we call "Character" is the workings of the Law of Karma. There is no such thing as Chance. Nothing ever "happens." All is regulated by the Law of Cause and Effect or Karma. As a man sows so shall he reap, in a literal sense. You are what you are to-day, by reason of what you were in your last life. And in your next life you will be what you are making of yourself to-day. You are your own judge, and executioner—your own bestower of rewards. But ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... not at the disposal of the author of a "History of Java." As I have embodied in the text some extracts from Raffles' translations, it may be well to say a word as to the value of these versions. What Vreede says of a particular passage is true of these renderings in general: "They are not literal translations, but the spirit of the work is ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... seen that a few words of this letter are in cipher. It is published, however, as written, because enough of it is literal to interest the reader, to whom also a specimen of the cipher, used by the Author, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... word "dizening" is perhaps the most literal translation of [Greek: kosmos], which, however, here means the whole preparations for the funeral. Something like it is ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... be found complete in the book of Ruth in the Old Testament by those who wish the literal Bible narrative as it ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... education of music teachers for schools, organists for churches, and singers for the stage. Although I try to do my best with the unsatisfactory and often contradictory newspaper reports and dictionary articles from which I have to draw my data, I cannot vouch for the literal correctness of my notes. In making use of Sowinski's work I am constantly reminded of Voltaire's definition of dictionaries: "Immenses archives de mensonges et d'un peu de verite." Happy he who need not consult them! In 1816 Elsner was entrusted by ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... extremities of their exhaustion, and very fast approaching to that final stage of privation and killing misery beyond which few or none could have lived, but also, happily for themselves, fast approaching (in a literal sense) that final 5 stage of their long pilgrimage at which they would meet hospitality on a scale of royal magnificence and full protection from their enemies. These enemies, however, as yet, still were hanging on their rear as fiercely as ever, though this day was destined ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... watching him quietly, with those wistful, earnest eyes, as a cat watches a mouse-hole; watching him with mute inquiry, as if she expected each moment to see him do something different from what the rest of us expected of him. Slowly I gathered that Hilda Wade, in the most literal sense, had come to Nathaniel's, as she herself expressed it, "to ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... and eminent Greeks too, who took the legends of their gods and heroes in their literal sense. But what do these say of Homer and Hesiod? Xenophanes, the contemporary of Pythagoras, holds Homer and Hesiod responsible for the popular superstitions of Greece. In this he agrees with Herodotus, when he declares that these two poets made the theogony for the Greeks, and gave to the gods ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... the Glossary the editors found it necessary to abandon a literal and exact translation of Heyne for several reasons, and among others from the fact that Heyne seems to be wrong in the translation of some of his illustrative quotations, and even translates the same passage in two or three different ways under different headings. ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... order of administration totally distinct from that which actually exists in the visible Church of God. And, accordingly, various Calvinistic communions, which have separated from the Church since the Reformation, have attempted a literal "fellowship of saints," presuming to discriminate from the mass of nominal Christians those who have experienced the conclusive and saving change of Calvinistic conversion, and admitting such only to the full enjoyment of Church privileges ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... the best adapted for translation into stone (Fig. 114). During the thirteenth century the more advanced stages of plant growth, and leaves more complex and detailed, furnished the models for the carver, who displayed his skill in a closer and more literal imitation of their minute veinings and indentations (Fig. 115). This artistic adaptation of natural forms to architectural decoration degenerated later into a minutely realistic copying of natural foliage, in which cleverness of execution took ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... it is true, was a practical dramatist. His background characters are often present in the plays not in order to be entirely real but in order to furnish amusement; and even in the case of the chief ones, just as in the treatment of incidents, he is always perfectly ready to sacrifice literal truth to dramatic effect. But these things are only the corollaries of all successful playwriting and ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... silence. I am not the man calmly to let pass black insinuations against the character of a friend. No, I stood up for him. I am glad to think how I stood up for him, not only metaphorically, but in the most literal sense of the term; for I found myself continually getting up, and Marston as often pulling me down again ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... particle of it—as with matter no atom—is ever added to or removed from the universe. Now, if we could succeed in removing from this inexpansible, universal ocean of ether even the most ultimate portion, there would be a literal vacuum with nothing to fill it, and the equilibrium of the universe would be destroyed. Now, gentlemen, is or is ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... bard were well known; and a decision favourable to the clergy was the result. This decision was given in a short poem of four quatrains which is preserved in the preface to the "Martyrology" of Aengus. The following is a literal translation:— ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... miller got up to leave, and was followed by Mrs. Shchapoff. Hardly had she shut the door, when I heard, as though from far off, a deep drawn wail. The voice seemed familiar to me. Overcome with an unaccountable horror I rushed to the door, and there in the passage I saw a literal pillar of fire, in the middle of which, draped in flame, stood Mrs. Shchapoff. . . . I rushed to put it out with my hands, but I found it burned them badly, as if they were sticking to burning pitch. A sort of ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... The words of Holy Writ express different sets of ideas, bearing a certain relation to each other, the one set having reference to physical, the other to spiritual, qualities. By applying this rule, he thinks that nearly all discrepancies between the literal interpretation of the Bible and his own philosophic theories disappear. Having passed over the domain of metaphysical speculation, he finally reaches the consideration of the practical side of the Bible, that is to say, the Mosaic legislation. These last investigations of his are ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... and the letters of the Marquis de Lauraguais, have held up to such unsparing ridicule and contempt. This milky and cheese-producing Brie, this inexhaustible Io, was, at the epoch of the regent Orleans and his deplorable successor, a literal cavern of pleasures, in the most impure acceptation of the term; every chateau which the Black Band has not demolished is, as it were, a half-volume of memoirs in which may be read the entire history of the times. Here ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... two individual," or, as the Chinaman puts it, in pidgin English, "two piecey man." For in this respect Chinese resembles Japanese, though in very little else, and pidgin English is nothing but the literal translation of the Chinese idiom into Anglo-Saxon words. The necessity for such elaborate qualification arises from the excessive simplicity of the Japanese nouns. As we have seen, the noun is so indefinite a ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... the serjeant, who was his first acquaintance among these military gentlemen. Unluckily that worthy officer having, in a literal sense, taken his fill of liquor, had been some time retired to his bolster, where he was snoring so loud that it was not easy to convey a noise in at his ears capable of drowning that which issued from ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... families that to this day show their Highland origin in their names and in their faces, but never a trace of it in their speech or in their customs.[2] The Americans were longer in coming back. But, after more than a hundred years they, too, were to come again, not to destroy but in a very literal sense to build; their many charming cottages now stretch along the shore of the Bay that looks across ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... this age of indifferentism, holds on with both hands to the creed of the Pilgrims, writes of Margaret, whom she saw but once:—"She looked very sensible, but as if contending with ill health and duties. She lay, all the day and evening, on the sofa, and catechized me, who told my literal ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... genius and morals. A mighty fondness, it is true, and attachment, he expresses to his consort, and often professes that he never would embrace any measures which she disapproved: but such declarations of civility and confidence are not always to be taken in a full, literal sense. And so legitimate an affection, avowed by the laws of God and man, may perhaps be excusable towards a woman of beauty and spirit, even ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... modern interest to allow it. We require every possible help and attraction of sound in our language to smooth the way for the admission of things so remote from our present concerns. My own notion of translation is, that it cannot be too literal, provided these faults be avoided: baldness, in which I include all that takes from dignity; and strangeness, or uncouthness, including harshness; and lastly, attempts to convey meanings which, as they cannot be given but by languid circumlocutions, cannot in fact be said to ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... which one takes off from one's own person, to bestow upon a messenger of good tidings or any other whom it is desired especially to honour. The literal meaning of the phrase, here rendered "he bestowed on him a dress of honour," is "he put off on him [that which was upon himself." A Khilaah commonly includes a horse, a sword, a girdle or waist-cloth and other articles, according to the ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... l. 3, for baste read haste; p. 336, l. 6, the speaker should evidently be not Do. (the reading of the MS.) but Sis., and noble Sir Richard should be noble Sir Francis; p. 422, l. 12, del. comma between Gaston and Paris. Some literal errors may, perhaps, still have escaped me, but such words as anottomye for anatomy, or dietie for deity must not be classed as misprints. They are recognised though erroneous forms, and instances of their occurrence will be given in ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... picture was a joking, profligate, careless king, nominally absolute—the heads of great houses paying court to, but in reality governing, that king, whilst revelling with him on the plunder of a nation, and a set of crouching, grovelling vassals (the literal meaning of vassal is a wretch), who, after allowing themselves to be horsewhipped, would take a bone if flung to them, and be grateful; so that in love with mummery, though he knew what Christianity was, no wonder he admired ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... his friends who are left? As we read over the story of the sorrow of the Bethany home we find the answer to our question. You say, "He brought back their dead, thus comforting them with the literal undoing of the work of death and grief. If only he would do this now, in every case where love cries to him, that would be comfort indeed." But we must remember that the return of Lazarus to his home ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... race—our business is with the question What is he? rather than with the inquiry, Whence did he come? The shortest argument, however—and, if the assumption be admitted, the most conclusive—is that, which assumes the literal truth of the Mosaic account of the creation of man; for from this it directly follows, that the aboriginal races are descendants of Asiatic emigrants; and the minor questions, as to the route they followed—whether across the Pacific, or ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... religious book, and, instead of understanding each sentence according to the main purpose and intention, interpret every phrase in its literal sense as conveying, and designed to convey, a metaphysical verity, or historical fact:—what a strange medley of doctrines should we not educe? And yet this is the way in which we are constantly in the habit of treating the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... evaded the spirit of Mr. Skinner's ultimatum while conforming to its literal terms, Cappy Ricks hurried home leaving his general manager a stunned and horrified man. In this instance, however, Cappy had erred in his strategy. Skinner was calm, cold-blooded, suave, politic and deferential, but in his kind of fight he never bluffed. He never played his ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... weather, with light airs, calms, and squalls. In lat. 28 N., long. 177 W., his water going rotten, and misled by Hoyt's North Pacific Directory, which informed him there was a coaling station on the island, Captain Trent put in to Midway Island. He found it a literal sandbank, surrounded by a coral reef mostly submerged. Birds were very plenty, there was good fish in the lagoon, but no firewood; and the water, which could be obtained by digging, brackish. He found good holding-ground off the north end ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... very things which he declares to be so widely different as not even to have a "necessary connexion." Errors of this kind are very common in all our English grammars. Two instances occur in the following sentence; which also contains an error in doctrine, and is moreover obscure, or rather, in its literal sense, palpably absurd: "To substantives belong gender, number, and case; and they are all of the third person when spoken of, and of the second person when spoken to."—Murray's Gram., p. 38; Alger's Murray, 16; Merchant's, 23; Bacon's, 12; Maltby's, 12; Lyon's, 7; Guy's, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... himself at the Ear of Eve under the [form [4]] of a Toad, in order to produce vain Dreams and Imaginations, is a Circumstance of the same Nature; as his starting up in his own Form is wonderfully fine, both in the Literal Description, and in the Moral which is concealed under it. His Answer upon his being discovered, and demanded to give an Account of himself, [is [5]] conformable to the Pride and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... finite man, does arrival in one place necessitate withdrawal from another. Jesus uttered a saying concerning himself so mysterious and seemingly contradictory that many attempts have been made to explain away its literal and obvious meaning: "And no man hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man who is in heaven"—Christ on earth, and yet in glory; here and there, at the same time, just as a thought which we embody ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... in feminine guise, like 'L'Ingenu' of Voltaire, struck, as was Huron, with all that was illogical in our social code; but she did not make, after his fashion, a too literal application of its rules, and knew where to draw the line, if she found herself on the point of making some hazardous remark, declaring frankly: "I was about to say something foolish!" which lent ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Christians have as foolish notions as any one else. Some think that they win Heaven by believing something with their minds about our Lord's atonement. Some think they go to Heaven by soaring up through the air. Some of them, taking in its literal meaning the glorious imagery of the Apocalypse, picture to themselves streets of beaten gold and walls of flashing emerald and jasper, and the wearing of crowns and the singing of Psalms over and over again through ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... four hundred and twenty-six marginal changes, a very large proportion, quite one-half, and we should think more, are mere insignificant literal changes or additions, such as an editor in supervising manuscript, or an author in reading proof, passes over, and leaves to the proof-readers of the printing-office, by whom they are called "literals," we believe. Such are the change of "Whon yond same starre" to "When yond," etc.; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... violently and beat upon the soft earth. The incident of surprise and disgust helped Dorn at least in one way. His mind had been set upon a strange and supreme condition of his being there, of an emotion about to overcome him. The bite of a rat, drawing blood, made a literal fact of his being a soldier, in a dugout at the front waiting in the blackness for his call to go on guard. This incident proved to Dorn his limitations, and that he was too terribly concerned with his feelings ever to last long as a soldier. But he could not ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... lead. Then followed the heavy naval guns, then the munition and baggage waggons; the troops of the Line, the Marines, and the National Guard were ordered to cover the retreat. It was no easy matter to descend from the plateau to Rosny. The frost had made the road a literal ice-hill. The drivers walked by the side of their animals, holding the reins and pulling them up when they stumbled. Until four o'clock, however, everything went well. The march slowly continued, and the Prussian batteries were comparatively calm. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... obscenities of Zola, whereat Ouida protested that they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe the life and emotions of a woman whose whole life ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... the same time, true, in that the material of which they are moulded consists of facts,—facts as precise as painstaking observation and anxious regard for truth can make them. Certain of the stories, of course, are true literally. Literal truth may be attained by stories which treat of a single incident, or of action so restricted as to lie within the scope of a single observation. When, on the other hand, a story follows the career of a wild creature ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... grasp or take in thus actively are not the sensations themselves, but the relations between these sensations, and it is of these relations, more truly than of the sensations themselves, that a shape is, in the most literal sense, made up. And it is this making up of shapes, this grasping or taking in of their constituent relations, which is an active process on our part, and one which we can either perform or not perform. When, instead of merely seeing a colour, we look at ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... which the foreign litigant came. The expedient to which they resorted was that of selecting the rules of law common to Rome and to the different Italian communities in which the immigrants were born. In other words, they set themselves to form a system answering to the primitive and literal meaning of Jus Gentium, that is, Law common to all Nations. Jus Gentium was, in fact, the sum of the common ingredients in the customs of the old Italian tribes, for they were all the nations whom the Romans had the means of observing, and who sent successive swarms of immigrants to Roman soil. ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... to death with his preaching. I know he thinks her fairy stories are lies. He told Mrs. Curtis that Tania never spoke the truth." Madge lowered her voice. "I am sure we have never caught her in a lie. I suppose this Philip will think my exaggerations are as bad as Tania's fairy stories. I hate too literal people." ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... evening, the 1st of September, we arrived at the Blackfoot crossing of the Bow River, one hundred and eighteen miles from where we forded the Red Deer River. The Bow River is a noble stream. The current is pretty rapid, but at this "ridge under the water" (which is the literal translation of the Blackfoot name for the ford) the bed of the river is pebbly and the footing consequently good. Though we found the water almost as deep as at the Red Deer River, yet under the guidance of Mr. French, a small trader who lives ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... meaning to the interpreters of the chiefs of Africa, in whatever tongue it may be spoken; being that which they use in translation; and when they are addressed in this phraseology, they convey their ideas with more perspicuity and literal interpretation. But to return to ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... fighting and carnage, and as an interesting glimpse of the monotheistic ideas which underlie the Hindu religion. The hymn does not readily lend itself to metrical translation, and I have not attempted here to give a faithful rendering of the whole. A literal version of the text and the commentary given in the Calcutta edition will be ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... have a stye on the eye. Again, a stye on the eye was removable by rubbing it with a wedding ring. I suspect these two superstitions are portions of an ancient allegory, which, in time loosing their figurative meanings, came to be treated as literal facts. ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... Mr. Taylor, who commanded the Bell Rock tender, and had in his possession one of the Protection Medals. Unfortunately, however, for Dall, the Regulating Officer thought proper to disregard these documents, as, according to the strict and literal interpretation of the Admiralty regulations, a seaman does not stand protected unless he is actually on board of his ship, or in a boat belonging to her, or has the Admiralty protection in his possession. This order of the Board, however, cannot ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and crept through my whole frame. I have often wondered whether the sensation of moral suffering is as nearly allied to physical pain in every one else as in myself. The expression of an aching heart has always appeared to me to have a literal as well as a figurative sense; there is a sort of positive pain that accompanies certain kinds of mental sufferings, different in its nature from the feeling of grief, even in its highest degree; and disappointment in its various forms is perhaps the species ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... scarcely free in any measure from trammels and Popes, and, what is worse, when flippancy of language was too apt to accompany immaturity of opinion. The miscellaneous verses are, still more than the chief poem, 'childish things' in a strict literal sense, and the whole volume is of little interest even to its writer except for personal reasons—except for the traces of dear affections, since rudely wounded, and of that love of poetry which began with her sooner than ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... main purpose, when the reader finishes it he should feel that his understanding of life and of people has been increased and broadened. But it should always be remembered that truth is quite as much a matter of general spirit and impression as of literal accuracy in details of fact. The essential question is not, Is the presentation of life and character perfect in a photographic fashion? but Does it convey the underlying realities? 2. Other things being equal, the value of a book, and especially ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... to convey faithfully the meaning of the author, and although not rigorously literal, he has, he trusts, avoided such wild departures from the text as are found in the versions of Echard, Cooke, ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Retz far surpass the rest not only in their historical interest, but in their literary excellence. Arranging facts and dates so that he might superbly figure in the drama designed for future generations, he falsifies the literal truth of things; but he lays bare the inner truth of politics, of life, of character, with incomparable mastery. He exposes the disorder of his conduct in early years with little scruple. The origins of the Fronde are expounded in pages of profound ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... artists, statesmen, and religious reformers of the world, have done their best work by middle life. All theories upon all subjects can be proved from history; and the great Sidonia is not to be pinned down by too literal an interpretation. But at least he is expressing Disraeli's admiration for intellect which has the fervour, rapidity, and reckless audacity of youth, which trusts its intuitions instead of its calculations, and takes its crudest guesses for flashes of inspiration. The exuberant ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... and Wu dynasties (25-280 A. D.), we are told, were too diffuse, and those of the later periods, the T'ang and Sung dynasties, too literal. The best is said to be that by Ko-so-gai, a priest of Tibetan descent, which was made during the early Wei dynasty, about 252 A. D. This may be the same which was read in ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... demands serious treatment. Let us, therefore, begin with definitions. What is a poet? and what is a publisher? Popularly speaking, a poet is a fool, and a publisher is a knave. At least, I am hardly wrong in saying that such is the literal assumption of the Incorporated Society of Authors, a body well acquainted with both. Indeed, that may be said to be its working hypothesis, the very ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... LE GO RY is a word of Greek origin. It is made up of two parts; ALL, other; and EGORY, discourse; the literal meaning of the compound being, discourse about other things; that is, things other than those expressed by the words, literally interpreted. Allegory is, therefore, the general name for that class of compositions, as Fables, Apologues, ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... his local and national quality between the lines of his writing and in the indirect testimony of his tone, his accent, his temper, of his very omissions and suppressions. The House of the Seven Gables has, however, more literal actuality than the others, and if it were not too fanciful an account of it, I should say that it renders, to an initiated reader, the impression of a summer afternoon in an elm-shadowed New England town. It leaves ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... we now read of the necessity of the wise governing the weak and ignorant are almost literal reproductions of the arguments advanced by the slaveholders of the South in defence of slavery just preceding the outbreak of the Civil War. That divergence from our original ideal produced the pregnant sayings of Mr. Lincoln, "A house divided against itself can not stand," ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... father, because of his Quaker tendencies, did not lock—and of crossing the wide and black expanse of the living room in order to reach his door. I would invariably cling to the newel post while I contemplated the perils of the situation, complicated by the fact that the literal first step meant putting my bare foot upon a piece of oilcloth in front of the door, only a few inches wide, but lying straight in my path. I would finally reach my father's bedside perfectly breathless and having panted out the history of my sin, invariable received the same assurance that if ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... illustration, had had some judicious and wide-minded friend, to correct and supplement the mainly admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my mother, he would have been saved years of spiritual wandering; but, as it was, he fell in with one after another, each in his own way as literal and unspiritual as the other—each impressed with one aspect of religious truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhaps the widest-minded and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but no one from his early manhood could have augured this result; on the contrary, he showed every ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... is varied and interesting, but the whole drawing lacks that individual something which we call Style. In the Lalanne drawings we see foliage convincingly represented by means of the mere outlines and a few subtle strokes of the pen. There is no attempt at the literal rendering of natural objects in detail, all is accomplished by suggestion: and while I do not wish to be understood as insisting upon such a severely simple style, much less upon the purist theory that the function of the pen is concerned with form alone, I would impress ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... know what it is you're afraid of," he said in a carefully literal but carefully inaudible tone. He did that sort of ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... print reproduce it in black and white keeps ever fresh and fascinating to me, gratifying an instinct for composition in one whose fingers are too clumsy to attempt to draw or paint. In those early days of my adventures in photography an editor came very near the literal truth when he sarcastically observed: "Young man, life to you seems to be just ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... whose first draught of air had been tinctured with Doctor Haggage's brandy, was handed down among the generations of collegians, like the tradition of their common parent. In the earlier stages of her existence, she was handed down in a literal and prosaic sense; it being almost a part of the entrance footing of every new collegian to nurse the child who had ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... faith. His holy desires trembled within him like earthquake throbs. In his eyes there was but one object worth living for—the performance of religious duty; and but one way to accomplish that object—a strict and literal compliance with Franciscan rules. He could never understand that there was anything beyond the narrow field of his vision. He could apply religious enthusiasm to practical affairs. Because he was a grand missionary, he was none the less a money-maker ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... puts it; but more of a leveler was this old coach, for there was of necessity the forceful putting of people of the most heterogeneous character together in the most homogeneous manner as the omnibus (most literal word here), made up its hashy load at the hand and command of the driver, whose word was unappealable law as complete as that of another captain on the high seas. Prodigal, profligate, and pure, maiden or Magdalene, millionaire ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... In the sense of illumination of mind. It has been necessary to give a literal translation of this phrase to enable the reader to realise the point of subsequent witticisms in which Clemence and Gavard ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... eye against his gun, which he was carrying before him; and after a minute's rueful look he joined heartily in the shouts of laughter of his father and brother at his expense, "Ah, Charley, brag is a good dog, but holdfast is a better. I never saw a more literal proof of the saying. There, jump up again, and I need not ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... represent school or college leisure. Good times that interfere with good work have no place in ideally free hours. But, indeed, the odours from the chafing-dishes do suggest that some of the girls are trying to put into literal execution the wish of a great German professor in Oxford. The professor, eager to try a dish he saw on the hotel bill of fare, but with his English and German verbs not quite disentangled, said to the waiter, "Hereafter I vish to become a Velsh Rabbit." Perhaps ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... represented in normal prose. Poetical prose is appropriate for the expression of deeds and sentiments of high and mystical import only, but not for the expression of the more commonplace or definitely and complexly articulated phases of life. For the latter, the broader and freer and more literal method of strict prose is the only appropriate medium of expression. The unmusical character of prose style is not determined by weakness, but by ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... time, when man first emerged amongst the beasts, our Lord the Sun has always been his chiefest God, and legend says that He raised this circle of stones Himself to be a place where votaries should offer Him worship. It is the fashion amongst us moderns not to take these old tales in a too literal sense, but for myself, this one satisfies me. By our wits we can lift blocks weighing six hundred men, and set them as the capstones of our pyramids. But to uprear the stones of that great circle would be beyond all our ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... an extraordinary case!' gasped Mrs. Bloss, as if she understood the communication in its literal sense, and was astonished at a gentleman without a stomach finding it necessary ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... but the letter of the law, Yet it shews well to preach it to the vulgar; Wine is against our law; that's literal too, But not denied to kings and to their guides; Wine is a ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... threw away the kernel. Faust becomes insignificant in this play to which he gives his name. In Goethe he was a thinker, even more than a poet. Here he speaks bad verse full of emptiness. Even where Goethe's words are followed, in a literal translation, the meaning seems to have gone out of them; they are displaced, they no longer count for anything. The Walpurgis Night is stripped of all its poetry, and Faust's study is emptied of all its wisdom. The Witches' Kitchen brews ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... in the kitchen, and then go and fetch Melissa." The woman was, perhaps, wise to defer the evil moment as long as possible. Matters might soon change for the better, and good or evil could come only from without. So Dido clung to the literal sense of her master's question, and something note-worthy had actually happened in the kitchen. She drew a deep breath, and told him that a subordinate of the night-watch had come in and asked whether Alexander were in the house, and where his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... lateral rocks in the manner they are now seen to lie. The greater energy and more extended range of igneous action in those very remote periods when Africa was formed, embracing all the flanks, imparted to it its present very simple literal outline. This was the length ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... free translation, so far as lessons were concerned, and the girls realised as much, being accustomed to Pixie and her ways, but they allowed that part of the story to pass without comment, and referred only to what was obviously a literal repetition. ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... our Richmond dreams had come true,' she wrote once—'as though our favourite castle in the air were built. "Not really, mother? you don't think this beautiful house and garden belong to us really?" asks Mollie, in her stupid way. You know what a literal little soul she is. "Oh, go away, Mollie!" I exclaim quite crossly. "How can I help it if you have no imagination?" For all I know, the place is ours: no one interferes with us; we come and go as we like; ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of the Old Testament, and urged in the New, being sometimes not to be found in the Old, nor urged in the New, according to the literal and obvious sense, which they appear to bear in their supposed places in the Old, and, therefore, not proofs according to the rules of interpretation established by reason, and acted upon in interpreting every other ancient book— almost all Christian commentators ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... a literal copy of the original grant, now (Sept. 25, 1880) on file at the United States Surveyor-General's office at Santa Fe, made to the inhabitants of the Indian pueblo of Pecos in New Mexico. The language of the document is not altogether clear, but ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... meaning of the word in English; but, whatever his motives for so doing, certain it is that he called it the death or the loss of the Sieur Jumonville. So we received and so we understood it, until, to our great surprise and mortification, we found it otherwise in a literal translation." Sparks, Writings of ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... comprehend the nature of the illustration, understood him in a literal sense, and, in a whimpering tone, exclaimed, "Sha't then, I tell thee, cursed tuoad!" Tom, however, was so transported with his subject, that he took no notice of poor Dolly's mistake, but proceeded in his harangue upon ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... strange transformation; she was naturally gentle. In one instant she had gone mad. Mad? Not in the literal interpretation; but figuratively. She sprang back, snapping; her teeth bared, her hair bristled. Her nostrils drawn. With one bound she leaped ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... poet, in a sense not entirely literal, for reasons which are not necessary to be explained, this man of wondrous wisdom saw that he had been made a dupe. Cunning as a fox were his would-be friends; but having got him to the bush, there they let him gambol as he would, ensnaring him to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... Greek and Latin studies; in one direction, however, and that the one in which it would least have been expected, did my excellent teacher find much to do; namely, in religion. He closely adhered to the literal meaning of the Bible; with this I was acquainted, because from my first entrance in the school I had clearly understood what was said and taught by it. I received gladly, both with feeling and understanding, the doctrine, ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... even families, of extraordinary stature and strength existed in the earliest ages cannot be denied, except by those who regard the narrative of Scripture as equally fabulous with the fictions of the poets; although the statements are literal and exact, occur in a variety of incidental notices, and are confirmed by discoveries related by authors ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... or drove to the graveyard down in the "hollow" carried rifles and pistols than he was by the strange solemnity of the occasion, for, while he realized in a vague, mistrustful way that his mother was to be put under the ground, his trust clung resolutely to God's promise, accepted in its most literal sense, that the dead shall rise again and that "ye shall be born again." That was what the preacher said,—and he had cried a little when the streaming-eyed clergyman took him on his knee and whispered that all was well with his dear mother ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... conviction that the Epifanovs were foemen of ours who would at any time stab or strangle both Papa and his sons if they should ever come across them, as well as that they were "black people", in the literal sense of the term. Consequently, when, in the year that Mamma died, I chanced to catch sight of Avdotia ("La Belle Flamande") on the occasion of a visit which she paid to my mother, I found it hard to believe that she did not come of a ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... as on many other occasions, the cynicism of Bonaparte's language does, not admit of a literal translation.]— ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... "purpose"), and, when so "acquired," then began to serve the "purpose" assigned, the argument would not have involved the fallacy which we are now considering. But, as it stands, the argument reverts to the teleology of pre-Darwinian days—or the hypothesis of a "purpose" in the literal sense which sees the end from the beginning, instead of a "purpose" in the metaphorical sense of an adaptation that is evolved by the very modifications ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... years, if the war had happened to last so long, he would have fastened upon me the imputation of meaning, or wishing, at least, to do what he called "pettifogulizing"—that is, to plead some distinction, or verbal demur, in bar of my orders, under some colorable pretence that, according to their literal construction, they really did not admit of being fulfilled, or perhaps that they admitted it too much as being capable of fulfilment in two senses, either of them a practicable sense. True it was that my ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... coins showed the Hellenic influence. The Hindu astronomical terminology reveals the same relationship to western thought, for Var[a]ha-Mihira (6th century A.D.), a contemporary of [A]ryabha[t.]a, entitled a work of his the B[r.]hat-Sa[m.]hit[a], a literal translation of [Greek: megale suntaxis] of Ptolemy;[306] and in various ways is this interchange of ideas apparent.[307] It could not have been at all unusual for the ancient Greeks to go to India, for ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... mean for an instant to propose that every one should read poetry. The man whose imagination has never taken fire from literature of any kind, whose brain is literal and dislikes any embroidery upon the surface of plain fact, who is deaf to music, unresponsive to ideas, and limited in his emotions—such a man in my opinion is unfortunate, although he is often an excellent citizen, lives happily, makes a good husband, and may ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... never attempted any such defence. He pleaded, with literal justice, that the phrase "a criticism of life" was only part of his formula, which adds, "under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty." But this does ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... of a pleasant letter we have received from a distinguished Washington lady; we do not print the accentuations, because the Chicago patwor admits of none. A literal rendering of the letter into English is as follows: "From after your article in 'The New York Tribune,' copied from 'The Chicago News,' I to myself have figured that the inhabitants of Chicago having great want of a system of pronunciation French, I take the liberty to you to send by the ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... man, when this expression was used to him, was known occasionally to interpret the words in their literal sense, and in more than one instance he had the credit of having adroitly made his court to a lady in that manner. He would watch for an opportunity, or give a turn to the conversation, which would afford him ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... "that Laura is gone. She is very literal-minded. She might not understand that we could be hastily married and even lease a house, this way, and still ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... possibly supply such a lost MS. in a child's roundhand. At school, chiefly as a young Carthusian, I frequently broke out into verse, where prose translation was more properly required: seeing that it pleased my indolence to be poetical where I was not sure of literal accuracy, and (I may add) it rejoiced me to induce a certain undermaster to suspect and sometimes to accuse this small poetaster of having "cribbed" his metrical version from some unknown collection of poems: however, he had always to be satisfied with ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... one hand, daily events and common circumstances became a part of his spiritual experience in a far more intimate sense than is the case with other men, while, on the other, his fancies and his visions assumed the absoluteness and the literal existence of positive external facts. The remotest flights of his imagination never carry him where his sight becomes dim. His journey through the spiritual world was no less real to him than his journeys between Florence and Rome, or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... the sepulchral. I need not specially recommend you to write in "Wardour-street English," the sham archaic, a lingo never spoken by mortal man, and composed of patches borrowed from authors between Piers Plowman and Gabriel Harvey. A few literal translations of Icelandic phrases may be thrown in; the result, as furniture-dealers say, is a ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... power of the others; and so the Socialist movement was a world movement, an organization of all mankind to establish liberty and fraternity. It was the new religion of humanity—or you might say it was the fulfillment of the old religion, since it implied but the literal application of all the ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... crutches besides his two legs. The machinery is simple enough: a strong spiral spring, three or four cog-wheels and pinions, a fly to regulate the motion as in a musical box, and the cams before mentioned. As a toy, it or she is very taking to grown people as well as children. It is a literal fact, that the police requested one of our dealers to remove Miss Autoperipatetikos from his window, because the crowd she drew obstructed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... over to where Ben Sansome was still standing by the door. Sansome did not like Mrs. Sherwood. He considered that she had no social tact at all. This was mainly—though he did not analyze it—because she was quite apt to speak the direct and literal truth to him; because she had a disquieting self-confidence and competence in place of appropriate, graceful, feminine dependence; but especially because she had never and would never ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... mind. Finally he shot down like an arrow, making my head fairly whirl, and landed lightly on the ground, where he skipped about and resumed his roundelay as if he had not performed an extraordinary feat. This was certainly skylarking in a most literal sense. With the exception of a similar exhibition by Townsend's solitaire—to be described in the closing chapter—up in the neighborhood of Gray's Peak, it was the most wonderful avian aeronautic exploit, accompanied with song, of which I have ever been witness. It is odd, too, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... gubernatorial commissions—gubernatorial in the literal sense of the word, because entirely dominated by the governors—were holding their sessions, the satraps-in-chief of the Pale of Settlement, the governors-general, were busy sending their expressions of opinion to St. Petersburg. The governor-general of ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... might yet have weathered the rocks—for his tact was only equalled by his good temper—if the Countess had not precipitated matters. There came a day, and an hour of a day, when she spoke to him. She had spoken before; her ambitions had always been verbal—but now they were literal, all the "t's" were crossed. That was a moment for Angioletto to take with ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... have returned to the French that which they had borrowed of them. Formerly, people did not go to walk on the boulevard, but on the boule-verd, from which the english have made bowling-green, a literal translation. From this word, the ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... work-righteousness were alleged to co-operate in the pardon of sin with the "one obedience" by which "many are made righteous." The sacraments were asserted to produce their effect ex opere operato,—not by the working of the Spirit in them that by faith receive them. Belief in the literal transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper was rigidly enforced and substituted for that spiritual presence and spiritual manducation which the earlier church had maintained. The doctrine of a purgatory after this life ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... of virgins, of crucifixions,—he could remember sixteen,—of these solar myths. He caught tripping in a thousand cases the translations of our holy books. The Ox and Ass legend at the Nativity he realized was the Pseudo-Matthew's description to Habakkuk of the literal presence: "In the midst of two animals thou shalt be known;" which is a mistranslated Hebrew text in the Prayer ascribed to Habakkuk. It got into the Greek Septuagint version of the Prophet made by Egyptian Jews ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... heaven. Let him go to work, he will have opportunities enough to earn a comfortable support, and even the means of procuring some land; which ought to be the utmost wish of every person who has health and hands to work. I knew a man who came to this country, in the literal sense of the expression, stark naked; I think he was a Frenchman, and a sailor on board an English man-of- war. Being discontented, he had stripped himself and swam ashore; where, finding clothes and friends, he settled afterwards at Maraneck, in the county of Chester, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... seemed to radiate a light of their own. This last statement (about the eyes) must not be taken for a conventional exaggeration, such as writers of fiction employ in describing heroines who never existed. On the contrary, it expresses a literal fact; and moreover, as the reader will see further on, this peculiarity of the eyes was shared, in varying degrees, by all these people of Venus, and was connected with the most amazing of all our discoveries on that planet. I should say here that, while the eyes of the inhabitants of the day ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... sounded to our most spiritual sin. And it is this discovery that has given to fasting the place it has held in all the original, resolute, and aggressive ages of the Church. With little or nothing in their Lord's literal teaching to make His people fast, they have been so bent on their own spiritual deliverance, and they have heard and read so much about the deliverances both of body and of soul that have been attained by fasting and its accompaniments, that they have ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... two Greek words, a literal translation of which would signify the "arrangement of skins," appears to have been practised in a limited degree ages ago, for may we not say without doubt that the first taxidermists were the ancient Egyptians, who, despite the fact that they seldom or never appear ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... death with his preaching. I know he thinks her fairy stories are lies. He told Mrs. Curtis that Tania never spoke the truth." Madge lowered her voice. "I am sure we have never caught her in a lie. I suppose this Philip will think my exaggerations are as bad as Tania's fairy stories. I hate too literal people." ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... to this habit of preaching was a fond love for the water, and it may be said in a literal sense that I was as fond of it as a duck. I am told that when an infant under the care of any person other than my mother, nothing in the world would quiet me except a bowl of water and a sponge to play with. Naturally this liking developed, ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... interview with Hedouville before interruption came from the side of the town. As he entered the gardens, he looked, to the wondering eyes he met there, as if he had just risen from rest, to enjoy a morning walk in the shrubberies. They were almost ready to understand, in its literal sense, the expression of his worshippers, that he rode at ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... said No—which was the literal truth—but then it would not have been the whole truth, for they knew quite well that Dolly had been milked, and also who had done it. And their mother had always taught them that to make a person believe a lie ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... accepted among the most educated clergy. Very few of them would now deny the antiquity of the world, the antiquity of man, or the antiquity of death, or would maintain that the Mosaic cosmogony was a true and literal account of the origin of the globe and of man, or would very strenuously argue either for the Mosaic authorship or ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... idea of the dinner and procession really had a good deal in it. I had been in New York, and knew the length of Broadway; and at the recollection, felt flattered by the thought of being conveyed in an open chariot drawn by four or even eight horses, with nodding plumes, (literal ones for the horses,—only metaphorical ones for me,) past those stately buildings fluttering with handkerchiefs, and through streets black with people thronging to see the man who had solved the riddle of Africa. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... course of delirious dreams she finds herself in the "Tell-Tale Forest" (which threatens to recall The Palace of Truth), and here all the picturesque phrases which she has been in the childish habit of misinterpreting in their literal sense—"a bee in the bonnet," to "ride hobbies," "to play ducks and drakes," "to pay the piper," and so forth—are realised in human or animal form. With these are mixed the familiar figures of her waking life, all of them exposed in their true characters so that you can distinguish ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... few extracts from hymns addressed to some of the gods we have spoken of. The versions are those of the late Dr. John Muir. A metrical version can scarcely represent the hymns with the accuracy the scholar would desire, but, on the other hand, a literal translation, such as that of Professor Max Mueller in vol. xxxii. of the Sacred Books of the East, gives a less true idea of the spirit of the pieces, and is less fitted at least ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... abounded. There was always something for the really needy, and I remember that one of her most painful experiences came from having refused food to a begging woman, to whose deathbed she was called the next day, a deathbed of literal starvation. She recognized the woman, who had come to our house with a story of a family of starving children, but as my mother's experienced eye assured her she had never been a mother, she refused her as a deceiver what the poor always got. "Why did you tell me you had children," ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... expected too much. Nothing so terrorizes a blushing girl as a blushing man. And then—though they did sometimes digress—Clotilde and her partner met to talk "business" in a purely literal sense. ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... much in his class-room tone. He was all brown like a leaf with Valley dust and sun and rain. The old cadet cap was older yet, the ancient boots as grotesquely large, the curious lift of his hand to Heaven no less curious than it had always been. He was as awkward, as hypochondriac, as literal, as strict as ever. Moreover, there should have hung about him the cloud of disfavour and hostility raised by that icy march to Romney less than three months ago. And yet—and yet! What had happened since then? Not much, indeed. The return of the Stonewall Brigade to Winchester, Loring's representations, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... her from intercourse with other children when she, a child, needed such companionship, and required her to bend almost unceasingly over her books. This impression has, certainly in part, arisen from an autobiographical sketch, never written for publication nor intended for a literal or complete statement of her father's educational method, or the relation which existed between them, which was most loving and true on both sides. While the narrative is true, it is not the all she would have said, and, therefore, taken alone, conveys ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... hour of our lives. It may, therefore, sound a rather startling paradox to say that matter—matter in the sense of the Materialist—is something which nobody has ever seen, touched, or handled. Yet that is the literal and undeniable fact. Nobody has ever seen or touched or otherwise come in contact with a piece of matter. For in the experience which the plain man calls seeing or touching there is always present another thing. Even if we suppose that he is Justified ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... diabolical capacity for heckling Ministers on every conceivable topic under the sun. Our hostility to the Boer War also brought us into perennial conflict with the Government. The Irish members in a very literal sense once more occupied "the floor of the House," and there were some fierce passages-at-arms, resulting on one occasion in the forcible ejection of a large body of Nationalists by the police—an incident which had no relish for those who were jealous of the prestige and fair fame ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... good bluff if he wished to save his kinky scalp upon his return to Leslie Manor, so he set about planning to "hand out dat fool 'oman a corker." Moreover, Petty was inclined to take the situation seriously. Petty was sweetly romantic, but stupidly literal. At times a hopeless combination. The riding party had cantered along in the fleeing Beverly's wake for a little more than a mile when Petty spied the hat upon the bush. Nothing further was needed to ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... the man in charge of the twinters, two-year-old colts. This may be so, but there is a German confectioner in Hampstead called Zwanziger, and there are Parisians named Vingtain. Lover is confirmed by the French surnames Amant and Lamoureux, and Wellbeloved by Bienaime. Allways may be the literal equivalent of the French name Partout. On the other hand, the name Praisegod Barebones has been wrongly fixed on an individual whose real name ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... own experience, of her own environment, and of her own observations. It is nothing more or less than the living over in rhythmic form of the daily routine of her morning dressing. Her story remarks are either literal quotations or adaptations of her actual every day responses. The little verse refrains are the type of thing almost anyone can improvise. I have found that any simple statement about a familiar object ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... rushing madly cross stage at top-speed (if we take the literal word of the text for it), with girded loins, in search of somebody right under his nose, the while unburdening himself of exhaustive periods that, however great the breadth of the Roman stage, would carry him several times across ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... just because of his imaginative nullity: his tremendous revelations could be the more distinctly and unmistakably inscribed upon an intelligence of that sort, which alone could render again a strictly literal ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... you were a trifle vague upon some of the Articles of Religion, and the Table of Kindred and Affinity. You must remember that these articles are not to be subjected to your own sense or comment, but must be taken in the literal and grammatical meaning. However, you show outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. It so happens that I know of a small chapel, in the country, that has been closed for lack of a minister. I can put you in ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... many other cases of noble history, apocryphal and other, I do not in the least care how far the literal facts are true. The conception of facts, and the idea of Jewish womanhood, are there, grand and real as a marble statue,—possession for all ages. And you will feel, after you have read this piece of history, or epic poetry, with honourable care, that there is somewhat more to be thought of ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... lat. 28 N., long. 177 W., his water going rotten, and misled by Hoyt's "North Pacific Directory," which informed him there was a coaling station on the island, Captain Trent put in to Midway Island. He found it a literal sandbank, surrounded by a coral reef, mostly submerged. Birds were very plenty, there was good fish in the lagoon, but no firewood; and the water, which could be obtained by digging, brackish. He found good holding-ground off the north end of the larger bank in fifteen ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "If received in a literal sense, I find that it gives one a far higher notion of God's majesty, power, and wisdom, if we believe that the spirit of evil is really subject to the will of the Almighty, and is as easily controlled by ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... later verse become more prosaic, but he becomes considerably less intelligible. There is a passage in "The Old Bachelor," too long to quote but worth referring to, which, though it may be easy enough to understand it with a little goodwill, I defy anybody to understand in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and Johnson saved him from one of them in the very first lines of "The Village." Yet Johnson could never have written the passages which earned Crabbe his fame. The great lexicographer knew man in general much better than ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... eleven, the twelfth, and greatest (El-Mahdi), being yet to come. The Ismailians also introduced mysticism into the interpretation of the Koran, and even taught that its moral precepts were not to be taken in a literal sense. Thus the Fatimite caliphs founded their authority upon a combination ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... certain man isn't rich, but he has "prospects;" because he has a wealthy aunt who is very fond of him, or he is employed by a business that is growing fast, or he owns property which seems sure to increase in value, or some other good fortune is likely to befall him. The literal meaning of "prospect" is "looking forward." So most of us have come to think of our prospects as just possible occurrences in the future, to the happening of which we may look ahead ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... intervals of time, and the skill to supply the lost words and syllables of history by careful collation with those which are spared. How faithfully this accidentally found MS. typifies such a labor, the reader may judge from the literal copy of it I now ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... incongruities. Every thing of this kind was now awakened; while, in order to master the Hebrew, I occupied myself exclusively with the Old Testament, and studied it, though no longer in Luther's translation, but in the literal version of Sebastian Schmid, printed under the text, which my father had procured for me. Here, I am sorry to say, our lessons began to be defective in regard to practice in the language. Reading, interpreting, grammar, transcribing, and the repetition of words, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... and international name for a French soldier. Its literal meaning is "hairy, shaggy," but the word has conveyed for over a century the idea of the virility of a Samson, whose strength lay in ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... wires are pulled by the master, which produce all the turmoil and strife that before riveted our attention. It is good for him who would arrive at all the improvement of which our nature is capable, at one time to take his place among the literal beholders of the drama, and at another to go behind the scenes, and remark the deceptions in their original elements, and the actors in their proper and ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... way in which the image is formed in the mind of the native story-teller. Foreigners and Hawaiians have expended much ingenuity in rendering the mele or chant with exactness,[5] but the much simpler if less important matter of putting into literal English a Hawaiian kaao has never ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... graceful and earnest man to be a graceful and earnest Christian teacher. The question of fitness for the position as an executive was soon settled beyond the possibility of a doubt. It required but a brief acquaintance with President Lord to teach any one, that he fully believed in the most literal acceptation of the doctrine, that "the powers that be ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... a likeness as the Abbey picture, only more literal, less "arranged." The Abbey picture, also by a French artist of another school, was younger, and had a fine, romantic, Rene-like charm. "Rene" had been her laughing name for him—her handsome, melancholy, eloquent poseur! Like many of his family, he was proud of his French culture, ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... (for example, Canto I, stanzas 11, 12), and examine the language to see what kind of words are most effective: specific or general, concrete or abstract, figurative or literal. ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... Essene he never became, but he remained throughout his life very partial to certain forms of the Essene belief, more especially those which coincided with the Greco-Roman superstitions of the time, such as the literal prediction of future events, the meaning of dreams, the significance of omens.[2] These ideas, handed down from primitive Israel, had lived on among the masses of the people, though discarded by the learned teachers, and Josephus, finding them ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... investigating and enforcing the English language, is, that by this mode of analyzing and reducing it to practice, it cannot, in this age, be comprehended as the medium of thought. Were this method to prevail, our present literal language would become a dead letter. Of what avail is language, if it can not be understood? And how can it be accommodated to the understanding, unless it receive the sanction of common consent? Even if we admit that such a manner of unfolding the principles ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... those words from the region of symbol to that of literal description. A great horror fell upon all nations, when the news came. Rome taken? Surely the end of all things was at hand. The wretched fugitives poured into Egypt and Syria—especially to Jerusalem; perhaps with some superstitious hope that Christ's tomb, or even Christ himself, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... be said that the incidents here related are literal facts, which came under the writer's observation in the midst of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... hint," said Mr. Slick, "I was in jeest like; but there is more in it, for all that, than you'd think. It ain't literal fact, but it is figurative truth. But now I'll shew you sunthin' in this town, that's as false as parjury, sunthin that's a disgrace to this country and an insult to our great nation, and there is no jeest in it nother, but a downright lie; ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the eye against his gun, which he was carrying before him; and after a minute's rueful look he joined heartily in the shouts of laughter of his father and brother at his expense, "Ah, Charley, brag is a good dog, but holdfast is a better. I never saw a more literal proof of the saying. There, jump up again, and I need not say look out ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... to which the heroine is exposed had any foundation in reality it is impossible to say; and there is a passage in Murphy's memoir which almost reads as if it had been penned with the express purpose of anticipating any too harshly literal identification of Booth with Fielding, since we are told of the latter that "though disposed to gallantry by his strong animal spirits, and the vivacity of his passions, he was remarkable for tenderness and constancy to his wife ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... he entered the store-house had felt that bacon heavier than the heaviest end of the biggest stick of timber he had ever helped to cant. He felt guilty, sneaking, disgraced; he felt that the literal Devil had first tempted him near the house, then all suddenly—with his own hunger pangs and thoughts of his starving family—swept him into the smoke-house to steal. But he had consented to do it; he had said he would take flour too,—and he would, he was so obstinate! ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... prisoner's side, were illegal; but Monseigneur de Beauvais was well aware that anything would be legal which effected his purpose, and that once Jeanne was disposed of, the legality or illegality of the proceedings would be of small importance. I have thought it right to give to the best of my power a literal translation of these examinations, notwithstanding their great length; as, except in one book, now out of print and very difficult to procure, no such detailed translation,(8) so far as I am aware, exists; and it seems to me that, even at the risk of fatiguing the reader (always capable ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... without embarrassment. When once his mind is settled, it is no trifle that will amuse this Mr. Ludlow. I do not know a more literal construer of his orders in the fleet;—a man, Sir, who thinks words have but a single set of meanings, and who knows as little as can be imagined on the difference between a sentiment ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... with the circumstances that gave rise to the mission, and the degree of estimation in which they held it. It was written in the Tartar, Chinese, and Latin languages, from the last of which, as rendered by the missionaries, the following is a literal translation. The contents were addressed to the Council of India, but on the outside wrapper, "To the King of Holland." It may serve at the same time as a ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... things that sparks do set off. Any one with even a moderate amount of what I may call mental agility would have followed me without any difficulty, and refrained from asking your very foolish question. But it is difficult to be literal enough to please you. What I ought to have said, what I would have said if I had realised at the moment that I was talking to you, is this. We are living the kind of life comparable to that of the people whose cottages are built round the ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... apoleon! Throw away another letter, and what have you but poleon! Throw away letter after letter, and what do you get but words—Napoleon, apoleon, poleon, oleon, leon, eon, or, if you like, on! Now these are all Greek words—and what, pray, do they mean? I will give you a literal translation, and I challenge any Greek scholar who may be here present to set me right, that is, to show me wrong: Napoleon the destroyer of cities, being a destroying lion! Now I should like to know a more sure word of prophecy than that! Would any one ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... honest, literal John," he said, lazily. "Listen; from my back window in the country, yesterday, I observed one of my hens scratching her ear with her foot. How would you like to be able to accomplish ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... usually went by the name of George Blaurock (Bluecoat) and whom his disciples hailed as a second Paul, was spread far and wide and made a great noise, the government ordered a conference to be held with them at the council-house. The following are the literal contents of Blaurock's Confession: "I am a door. He who enters by me will find pasture, but he who enters elsewhere, is a thief and a murderer, as it is written: I am a good shepherd; a good shepherd lays down his life for ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... eating far back into the mountain mass, forming a V-shaped depression called a cove, and between two coves thus formed is a reverse [symbol: upside-down V], called a point, always, naturally, composed of the hardest rock, and not infrequently ending in a literal point so sharp that it is like a vast granite bowsprit thrust out into the green plains far below, terminating in a sheer precipice of several hundred feet. Roughly, then, you may visualize this section of the Cumberlands as a giant double-edged saw, a thousand feet thick, laid ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... that what I have now written will by some be branded as false and malicious. It will be denied, not only that such a thing ever did transpire, as I have now narrated, but that such a thing could happen in Maryland. I can only say—believe it or not—that I have said nothing but the literal truth, gainsay it ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... for social contacts.—The position of persons and peoples on the earth gives us a literal picture of the spatial conception of social contact. The cluster of homes in the Italian agricultural community suggests the difference in social life in comparison with the isolated homesteads of rural ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... lance' is among military men, or the privateer among those of the true marine. Any one who has been familiar with one of the 'craft,' has probably heard him say at one time or another—'what I have seen would make one of the most remarkable novels you ever read;' and he spoke the literal truth. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Hell, there was less Witchcraft, less true literal Magick than there has been since; there was indeed no need of it, the DEVIL did not stoop to the Mechanism of his more modern Operations, but rul'd as a Deity, and receiv'd the Vows and the Bows of his Subjects in more State, and with more Solemnity; whereas since that, ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... saw me—sensation—whispers of "papalangai" were heard on all sides, and looks of astonishment were cast in my direction. Certainly my entrance to Natondre could not have been more dramatic, and I believe that they almost thought that I had fallen from the skies, which is the literal meaning ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... the House of Hanover has been hailed by its members with fresh hopes of a change in their favour, which hopes have ended in disappointment; but perhaps it is as well. The navy require no prophet to tell it, in the literal sense of the word, that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled; but there is a moral pitch, the meanness, the dishonesty, and servility of Court, with which, I trust, our noble service will ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... if taken in their literal sense of 350 days, would be a most unmeaning interval for Theseus to fix upon,—it would almost require explanation as much as the difficulty itself: it is therefore much easier to suppose that Chaucer meant to imply the interval of a solar year. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various
... the keen criticism they contain of the views Plato had advocated. Here at once the intellect of Europe found an exact exposition of principles, and began immediately to debate their excellence and their defect. St. Thomas Aquinas set to work on a literal commentary, and at his express desire an accurate translation was made direct from the Greek by his fellow-Dominican, William of Moerbeke. Later on, when all this had had time to settle and find its place, St. Thomas worked out his own theory of private property in two ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... and the worthy man was not yet half dressed. When I say not yet half dressed, I mean the expression to be taken in the literal sense of the word. He was sitting in the middle of the room on a rich purple ottoman, enfolded in a red burnous, sucking away at a huge chibook, puffing smoke all round him, and contemplating himself in a large mirror exactly opposite to him. At the opposite end of the ottoman sat a huge orang-outang ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... neither a great man, nor an educated one. On the contrary, he was ignorant of any life outside of his own narrow sphere, and intolerant of all spirit of advance or change, singularly devoid of tact, but literal, honest, and well-meaning. Moreover, he was absolutely self-satisfied, but utterly lacking in the sense of fun which makes conceited people so much less disagreeable, since it gives them a glimmering appreciation of ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... dealing separately with intellectual or moral or physical beauty. His appropriate sphere is swift sensibility, the intersecting line between the sensuous and the intellectual or moral. Mere sensation is too literal for him, mere feeling too blind and dumb, mere thought too cold.... Wordsworth is always exulting in the fulness of Nature, Shelley is always ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... propriety, object to the term equilibrium being applied to a body that is without weight; but I know of no expression that would explain my meaning so well. You must consider it, however, in a figurative rather than a literal sense; its strict meaning is an equal diffusion. We cannot, indeed, well say by what power it diffuses itself equally, though it is not surprising that it should go from the parts which have the ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... out a literal dish of tea, black and boiling; and I drained the tin with a feeling of relief such as one seldom knows. The place was lined round with bunks like the forecastle of a ship. After a time I rose to depart and asked the man who acted as cook how much there ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... perhaps to some seem quite absurd, that the authorities of Harvard in 1791 felt obliged publicly to deny that Gibbon's History was used as a text-book at the University. But with the exception perhaps of Tom Paine, no one in this country had then ventured to assail the literal interpretation of the Scriptures. Probably the masses of the people then believed that "Joshua commanded the sun and moon to stand still, and they obeyed him," that Jonah was swallowed by ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... his travels gave him, made him the man of the hour among Richmond children. And how much he had to tell! At Stoke-Newington it was always the boys at home that were the heroes of the stories he spun by the yard for the entertainment of his school-fellows—the literal among whom had come to believe that there was no feat a Virginia boy could not perform. Now that he was in Richmond, the Stoke-Newington boys themselves loomed up as the wonder-workers, and his playmates listened ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... the sidewalks, are in the vernacular of La Belle France. In Jackson Square, notices to warn visitors not to disturb the shrubbery, are posted in two languages, the French being first. On one poster I saw the sentence: "Ne touche pas a les fleurs," followed by the literal translation into English: "Don't touch to the flowers." I was happy to observe that the ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... of relief is necessary. In the country, even in large towns, people have a knowledge of each other, and distress never rises to that extreme height it sometimes does in a metropolis. There is no such thing in the country as persons, in the literal sense of the word, starved to death, or dying with cold from the want of a lodging. Yet such cases, and others equally ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Septuagint, with a literal translation into English (The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament; with an English Translation, and with various Readings and Critical Notes: Samuel Bagster and Sons), is a work attempted by no one, we believe, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... founded on the form and substance of ancient documents; but I have hardly ever introduced into it literal quotations; I believe that unless it possesses a certain unity of language a book is unreadable, and ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... motion and almost gauge it by miles per hour. And in the distance they seemed to brush the tops of the hills. Seeing this, the doctor remembered what he had heard of rain in this region. It would come, they said, in sheets and masses—literal water-falls. Dry arroyos suddenly filled and became swift torrent, rolling big boulders down their courses. There were tales of men fording rivers who were suddenly overwhelmed by terrific walls of water which rushed down from the higher mountains in masses four and eight feet high. In coming they ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... and wild; the clergy was corrupt almost past belief; the dreaded Turk was gathering his forces, a menace to Christendom itself. The times were indeed evil, and the "servants of God," of whom then, as now, there were no inconsiderable number, withdrew for the most part into spiritual or literal seclusion, and in the quietude of cloister or forest cell busied themselves with the ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... which electrified the world of imaginative readers, and has become the type of a school of poetry of its own-and, in evident earnest, attributes its success to the few words of commendation with which we had prefaced it in this paper.—It will throw light on his sane character to give a literal copy of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the second place, if it does, it will show that he did not do it by analysis. In the third place,—to say nothing of not doing it by analysis,—if he had analysed it before he did it, he could not have analysed it afterward in the literal and modern sense. In the fourth place, even if Shakespeare were able to do his work by analysing it before he did it, it does not follow that undergraduate ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Eastern origin. In the Sepher Haggadah there is an ancient parabolical hymn, in the Chaldee language, sung by the Jews at the feast of the Passover, and commemorative of the principal events in the history of that people. For the following literal translation we are indebted to Dr Henderson, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the room, and as Margaret stood there, the focus of all eyes, the titter changed to literal shouts and shrieks of laughter. The boys doubled themselves up into knots, the girls staggered helplessly about, and Mrs. Danvers just sank into the nearest chair and laughed until the tears ran down her face. The room fairly ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... speculation. The point here is that if a nation is really vegetarian let its government force upon it the whole horrible weight of vegetarianism. Let its government give the national guests a State vegetarian banquet. Let its government, in the most literal and awful sense of the words, give them beans. That sort of tyranny is all very well; for it is the people tyrannising over all the persons. But "temperance reformers" are like a small group of vegetarians who should silently and systematically act on an ethical assumption entirely unfamiliar to ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... creation we find a gradually ascending series. Creeping things, "great sea monsters," (chap. I, V. 21, literal translation). "Every bird of wing," cattle and living things of the earth, the fish of the sea and the "birds of the heavens," then man, and last and crowning ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... men. The last gale was the most severe; they said it was the tail of a cyclone. One is apt on land to regard such phrases as the "shriek of the storm," or "the roar of the waves," as poetical hyperboles; whereas they are very literal and expressive renderings of the sounds of horror incessant throughout a gale at sea. Our cabin, though very nice and comfortable in other respects, possessed an extraordinary attraction for any stray wave which might be wandering about the saloon: once or twice I have ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... thy face with thy hands; well mayst thou blush to look on him whose body thou didst consign to chains, his hand to guilt, and his soul to misery. Saved once more by the virtue of her who calls thee father, go hence, and may the pardon and benefits I confer on thee prove literal coals of fire, till thy brain is seared and ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... hereafter be confined to those bodies to which its literal meaning refers—fat, unctuous, inodorous (when pure), greasy substances—and can no longer be applied to those odoriferous materials which possess qualities diametrically opposite to oil. We have grappled with "spirit," and fixed its meaning in a chemical sense; we have no longer "spirit" ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... pedantic rectitude in these passages is characteristic. Every smallest thing is either right or wrong, and if wrong, can be articulately proved so by reasoning. Life grows too dry and literal, and loses all aerial perspective at such a rate; and the effect is the more displeasing when the matters in dispute have a rich variety of aspects, and when the aspect from which Mr. Spencer deduces ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... refuge in the midst of a destruction hardly less terrible than that from which the eight souls were saved of old, a destruction in which the wrath of man had become as broad as the earth and as merciless as the sea, and who saw the actual and literal edifice of the Church raked up, itself like an ark in the midst of the waters. No marvel if with the surf of the Adriatic rolling between them and the shores of their birth, from which they were separated for ever, they should have looked upon each other ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... cicatrices which he obtained without the use of any ointment, pulcherrimas cicatrices sine unguento aliquo inducebat, then further that he impugned the use of poultices and of oils on wounds, while powders were too drying and besides had a tendency to prevent drainage, the literal meaning of the Latin words saniem incarcerare is to "incarcerate sanious material," it is easy to understand that the claim that antiseptic surgery was anticipated six centuries ago is no exaggeration and no far-fetched explanation with modern ideas in mind of certain clever modes ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... these, again, we find masses varying from a few tons in weight down to only a few pounds or ounces, and these when we see them, which is not often, we call meteors or shooting-stars; and to the size of these meteorites there would appear to be no limit: some may be literal grains of dust. There seems to be a regular gradation of size, therefore, ranging from Sirius to dust; and apparently we must regard all space as full of these cosmic particles—stray fragments, ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... probably the most varied and suggestive natural vessel. We find that the primitive potter has often copied it in the most literal manner. One example only, out of the many available ones, is necessary. This is from a mound ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... fairly literal, and Malleson (a clergyman) has taken pains with the scientific portions of the work and added the chapter headings, he has made some unfortunate emendations mainly concerning biblical references, and has added a few 'improvements' of his own, which ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... chosen each from among literal hundreds, and they were cared for far more tenderly than the masters cared for themselves. There was a reason in it, for upon their speed and endurance depended the life of the outlaw. Moreover, the policy of Jim Boone was one of ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... He wastes some time, moreover, in trying to bring within the four corners of his definition some uses of the terms of beauty, which are really only applied to objects by way of analogy, and are not meant to predicate the beautiful in any literal or ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... behaved like a Christian. He did not forget that his uncle and aunt lived in that old and dilapidated house, and he did his best to keep the peace with them. In the most literal manner he returned good for evil. It is true he could not respect his uncle, or get up a very warm regard for him,—he was too mean, selfish, and unprincipled to win the respect and regard of any decent person,—but he could ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... Copleston's parody that the Edinburgh Review began conspicuously to illustrate what Copleston here satirises; it was not till a time more recent still that periodical literature generally exemplified in literal seriousness what Copleston intended as extravagant irony. It is interesting to compare with Copleston's remarks what Thackeray says on the same subjects in the twenty-fourth chapter of Pendennis, entitled 'The Pall Mall ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... herself. But shyness and a quaint disposition, dating from her childhood, to pause and hover on the threshold of discovery, thus prolonging a period of entrancing, distracting suspense, withheld her. She dared not ask—in any case dared not ask just yet; and therefore took up his words in their literal application. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... "She's a desperately literal woman, primitive, the kind you never meet—well, out here. She has a thirst for happiness, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... that the younger Darwin gave the words "natural selection" the importance which of late years they have assumed; he probably adopted them unconsciously from the passage of Mr. Matthew's quoted above, but he ultimately said, {87a} "In the literal sense of the word (sic) no doubt natural selection is a false term," as personifying a fact, making it exercise the conscious choice without which there can be no selection, and generally crediting it with the discharge of functions which can only be ascribed legitimately to living and reasoning ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... tyranny, and these princes became voluptuaries or sages. Florence, the city of Leo X., of philosophy, and the arts, had transformed even religion. Catholicism, so ascetic in Spain, so gloomy in the north, so austere and literal in France, so popular at Rome, had become at Florence, under the Medici and the Grecian philosophers, a species of luminous and Platonic theory, whose dogmata were only sacred symbols, and whose pomps were only ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... reader finishes it he should feel that his understanding of life and of people has been increased and broadened. But it should always be remembered that truth is quite as much a matter of general spirit and impression as of literal accuracy in details of fact. The essential question is not, Is the presentation of life and character perfect in a photographic fashion? but Does it convey the underlying realities? 2. Other things being equal, the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... is literal, as it ought to be, but science is not life; science takes no note of this finer self, this duplicate on a higher scale. Science never laughs or cries, or whistles or sings, or falls in love, or sees aught but the coherent reality. It says ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... French Revolution were strong in his heart. He saw the evils of life and was intent on changing them. The Catholic faith is an elastic one, both esoteric and exoteric, and those who are able can take the poetic view of dogma instead of the literal, if they prefer. Henry George and his wife took the spiritual or symbolic view, and moved steadily forward in the middle of the road. He was too gentle and considerate to quote Voltaire and Rousseau at inopportune times, and she sustained and encouraged his mental independence. All of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... which they were beset, they had spiritual troubles also. They fully believed in witchcraft as did all their contemporaries, in a personal devil who was busily plotting the ruin of their souls, in an everlasting hell of literal fire and brimstone, and in a Divine election, by which most of them had been irrevocably doomed from before the creation of the world to eternal perdition, from which nothing which they could do, or were willing to do, could help to rescue them. The ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... akin to his own imaginative mood, something which he alone could fully comprehend and interpret. From the superficial narratives of writers like Bandello he extracted a spiritual essence which was, if not the literal, at least the ideal, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... of his magic pencil the Laureate has drawn a powerful picture of such a state of things in ancient Britain, of which we can scarcely deny the literal faithfulness. It is not a poetic conception; it ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... machines like our own. She uses mechanical principles everywhere, in inert matter and in living bodies, but she does not use them in the bald and literal way we do. We must divest her mechanisms of the rigidity and angularity that pertain to the works of our own hands. Her hooks and hinges and springs and sails and coils and aeroplanes, all involve mechanical contrivances, but how differently they impress us from ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... There were among the nobles who had taken the Cross not a few to whom the law seemed less rigid and perdition less sure, and Eleanor herself gave her sins gentle names; but the Englishman was old-fashioned, and even the good Abbot of Sheering had been struck by his literal way of accepting all beliefs, in the manner of a past time when the world had trembled at the near certainty of the Last Judgment, expiating its misdeeds by barefooted pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and its venial faults by ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... the Merriams were Presbyterians, going to the Methodist church held a certain novelty—savouring of entertainment—and diversion from the same old congregation, the same old church choir, and the same old preacher. In literal truth, also, the new Methodist preacher was not old; he was quite young. Missy had already heard reports of him. Some of the Methodist girls declared that though ugly he was perfectly fascinating; and grandpa and grandma ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... these solar myths. He caught tripping in a thousand cases the translations of our holy books. The Ox and Ass legend at the Nativity he realized was the Pseudo-Matthew's description to Habakkuk of the literal presence: "In the midst of two animals thou shalt be known;" which is a mistranslated Hebrew text in the Prayer ascribed to Habakkuk. It got into the Greek Septuagint version of the Prophet made by Egyptian Jews before 150 B.C. It should read, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... bread and butter, flat buttered rusks liberally spread with 'muisjes' (sugared aniseed—the literal translation is 'mice'), together with tarts and sweets of all descriptions, are put out in endless profusion on all the best china the good wife possesses. For each of the guests two of these round ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... that we are able to love God by our own natural strength, to love God above all things, at least to the extent that we deserve grace. And, say the scholastics, because God is not satisfied with a literal performance of the Law, but expects us to fulfill the Law according to the mind of the Lawgiver, therefore we must obtain from above a quality above nature, a quality which they ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... dinner, M. Gail rose, as if in a moment of inspiration, from his seat—and recited the Latin verses which are here enclosed.[162] They will at least make you admire the good humour of the poet. He afterwards chanted a song: his own literal version of the XIXth ode of Anacreon, beginning [Greek: He ge melaina pinei]. The guests declared that they had never sat so long at table, or were more happy. I proposed a stroll or a seat upon the lawn. Chairs and benches were at hand; and we requested that the coffee might ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... hung its murky vapors about her heart, curtaining it from the sunshine of God's smile. It was not difficult to trace her gradual progress if so she might term her unsatisfactory journey. Rejecting literal revelation, she was perplexed to draw the exact line of demarcation between myths and realities; then followed doubts as to the necessity, and finally as to the probability and possibility, of an external, verbal revelation. A revealed code or system was antagonistic ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... all brown like a leaf with Valley dust and sun and rain. The old cadet cap was older yet, the ancient boots as grotesquely large, the curious lift of his hand to Heaven no less curious than it had always been. He was as awkward, as hypochondriac, as literal, as strict as ever. Moreover, there should have hung about him the cloud of disfavour and hostility raised by that icy march to Romney less than three months ago. And yet—and yet! What had happened since then? Not much, indeed. The return of the Stonewall Brigade ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... fiddler at the concert of a master, Sylvia's failures had taught her the meaning of success. Although her inexperience kept her from making at all a close estimate of the literal cost of the toilet, her shrewdness made her divine the truth, which was that Mrs. Marshall-Smith, in spite of the plainness of her attire, could have clad herself in cloth-of-gold at a scarcely greater expenditure of the efforts and lives of others. Sylvia felt that her aunt ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... to those who should lay hands upon him had been falsified, but to the literal sense of David Gillespie he had not yet been sufficiently proved an impostor: till he should bring his daughter a strand of the hair which Dylks had proclaimed it death to touch, she would believe in him, and ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... in the endeavour to make the translation a faithful reproduction of the meaning of the original, whilst literal accuracy has been aimed ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... no painter who has so well succeeded in putting a wet sky into his pictures as Turner; and in this I judge him by the literal chiaroscuro of engraving. In proof of it, I take down from my shelf his "Rivers of France": a book over which I have spent a great many pleasant hours, and idle ones too,—if it be idle to travel leagues at the turning of a page, and to see hill-sides spotty with vineyards, and great ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... inner satisfaction. He was glad that he had come back to give Storch that "even break." It was something of an achievement to have compelled Storch's faith in so slight a thing as a literal honesty. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... balanced each other in number and statements, until the spirit of Naboth appeared and turned the scale against Ahab. The spirit of Naboth it had been, too, that had let astray the prophets of Ahab, making them all use the very same words in prophesying a victory at Ramothgilead. This literal unanimity aroused Jehoshaphat's suspicion, and caused him to ask for "a prophet of the Lord," for the rule is: "The same thought is revealed to many prophets, but no two prophets express it in the same words." (42) Jehoshaphat's mistrust ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... regards language, that had no historic relation to the Greek of the past or of the future. It was not, to any great extent, derived from the Greek translations of the Old Testament—often, as Dr. Blass says, slavishly literal—nor from the literary language of the time, but was the spoken Greek of the age to which it belonged, modified by the position and education of the speaker, and also to some extent, though by no means to any large extent, by the Semitic element which, ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... ruled,—as witness the verses of Hughes, [Footnote: See Corydon.] Collins, [Footnote: See Selim, or the Shepherd's Moral.] and Thomson,[Footnote: See Pastoral on the Death of Daemon.]—it is obvious that these gentlemen were in no literal sense expressing their views on the poet's habitat. It was hardly necessary for Thomas Hood to parody their efforts in his eclogues giving a broadly realistic turn to shepherds assuming the singing robes. [Footnote: See Huggins and Duggins, and The Forlorn Shepherd's ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... study of one thing you concentrate on that thing, you deliberately and carefully study everything in it, while in a sketch you work only for general effect. The study is the storehouse of facts to the painter. By it he assures himself of the literal truths he needs, collecting them as material in color or black and white, and as mental material by his mental understanding of them, only to be gained in ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... contrast of comedy and sentiment concerning the cemetery. His impression by the epitaphs Byron gave in more letters than one. Nor is there any affectation in his remarks about his own burial, about his children, or any other subject. They did "pickle him and bring him home" (a quotation, not quite literal, from Sheridan's Rivals), and his funeral procession through London is the theme of a memorable passage in Borrow's Lavengro. "Juan" is of course Don Juan. "Allegra," his daughter by Jane (or ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... our approach to Plato's Dialogues is not a matter of indifference. They will mean more or less to us, according to our spiritual condition. Much more passed from Plato to his disciples than the literal meaning of his words. The place where he taught his listeners thrilled in the atmosphere of the Mysteries. His words awoke overtones in higher regions, which vibrated with them, but these overtones ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... qui servent de fondement la religion Chrtienne, Londres (Amsterdam), 1768. Translation of Anthony Collins, A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, London, 1724. Contains also The Scheme of literal Prophecy considered, 1727, also by Collins in answer to the works of Clarke, Sherlock, Chandler, Sykes, and especially to Whiston's Essay towards restoring the text of the Old Testament, one of the thirty-five works directed against ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... about between cold and anger, and slapping himself like a cabman, "he doesn't seem to have been very literal or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the deuce, may I ask, have you brought us out ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... that apostolic ordinance, "the kiss of peace," down through the liturgical changes and revolutions of eighteen hundred years, can fail to be interested in finding in a single clause of one of the exhortations of our communion service that which corresponds to the literal kiss of primitive times, as well as to the petrified symbol of the original reality, the silver, ivory, or wooden "osculatory" of the mediaeval Church?[94] So with "Ash-Wednesday," a single syllable opens a whole chapter of Church ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... some McGuires, two Swansons, the Costeklo twins, and Montmorency Shannon," was the literal reply. ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... I have here paraphrased, as any literal translation would have been hopelessly obscure to most modern readers. Campion could but hint darkly his comparison of the Elizabethan persecution to the Decian. The Latin runs: Etenim, ut nostrorum ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... Dorset. It has appeared in literature in our time in the most erratic and opposite shapes, set to almost inaudible music by Walter Pater and enunciated through a foghorn by Walt Whitman. But the great mass of men have always been unable to achieve this literal universality, because of the nature of their work in the world. Not, let it be noted, because of the existence of their work. Leonardo da Vinci must have worked pretty hard; on the other hand, many a government office clerk, village constable or elusive plumber may do (to all human ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... to the more genial business of defence. You attack my fight on board the COVENANT: I think it literal. David and Alan had every advantage on their side - position, arms, training, a good conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first attack, not led at all in the second, could only by an accident ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to one of the figures, a youth holding out a long bare arm, and remarked that I had never seen an arm of such length, my criticism brought out an unsuspected principle of art. "The Cubists would say that you were altogether too literal. They are making us all understand that what art ought to do is to express not what we merely see with our eyes, but what we feel. If by lengthening that arm, the painter gets an effect that he wants, he's justified in refusing to be bound by the mathematical ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... son [Greek: Deute paides,] etc., was written by Riga, who perished in the attempt to revolutionize Greece. This translation is as literal as the author could make it in verse. It is of the same measure as that of the original. [For the original, see Poetical Works, 1891, Appendix, p. 792. For Constantine Rhigas, see Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 199, note 2. Hobhouse (Travels in Albania, 1858, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... this word with its literal translation, "tail-horn-hoofed Satan," and be shy of compound epithets, the components of which are indebted for their union exclusively to the printer's hyphen. Henry More, indeed, would have naturalized the word without hesitation, and 'cercoceronychous' would have shared ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... spread enough of skirt for a modern ballroom, with bowing, reclining, or musical swains of what everybody calls the "conventional" sort,—that is, the swain adapted to genteel society rather than to a literal sheep-compelling existence. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Peter Byrne had heard Harmony's story or knew her name, Rosa having called her "The Beautiful One" in her narrative, and the delicatessen-seller being literal in his repetition. ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himself felt. Put into English, the Saga seems too Norse; and there is often a hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for literal closeness. It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, but hardly to enter into forms of thought alien both in time and in the ethics from which they are derived. "The Building of the Long Serpent" is not to be named with Mr. Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," which he ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... have been announced at a more opportune time. For some years the scientific world had been agog over the question whether such a form of lightning as that reported—appearing in a clear sky, and hurling literal thunderbolts—had real existence. Such cases had been reported often enough, it is true. The "thunderbolts" themselves were exhibited as sacred relics before many an altar, and those who doubted their authenticity had been chided as having "an evil heart of unbelief." ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... epesi poieon}: "even in the verses which he composed," in which he might be expected as a poet to go somewhat beyond the literal truth.] ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... magister aut dominus videretur esse judicum', Cic. de Orat.); and the loose and desultory style is an imitation of the 'accustomed manner' in which Socrates spoke in 'the agora and among the tables of the money-changers.' The allusion in the Crito may, perhaps, be adduced as a further evidence of the literal accuracy of some parts. But in the main it must be regarded as the ideal of Socrates, according to Plato's conception of him, appearing in the greatest and most public scene of his life, and in the height of his triumph, when he is weakest, and yet his mastery ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... with feeling. Here, now, is an exquisite piece, which soothes one like the fall of evening shadows,—like the dewy coolness of twilight after a sultry day. I shall not give you a bald translation of my own, because I have laid up in my memory another, which, though not very literal, equals the original in beauty. Observe ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... before the present truly glorious Reign, did Hibernia tune her old Harp, now newly strung to universal Harmony and Elegance, and rear her awful Head from the stupid dismal Dozes of Ages; where comes the literal Application ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... they are a stubborn lot. That the field seems barren, is nothing to them. They set up shop in a desert and carry on just the same. To them, poverty is an asset. Christ's admonition to the rich man, to give his substance away and follow Him, is a literal command to ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... to have been intended by the Writer as the dedication to some longer one. The stanza on the opposite page [1] is almost a literal translation from Dante's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... everything from the Confessions of Saint Augustine to the newspapers. He wrote a "Book of the Sword," that is the standard book on that implement for the carving of the world. His translations of the "Arabian Nights" is a Titanic work, invaluable for its light upon Oriental folk lore, and literal to a degree that will keep it forever a sealed book to the Young Person. His translations of Camoens is said to be a wonderful rendition of the spirit of the Portuguese Homer. His Catullus is familiar to students, but not edifying. He wrote a curious volume on Falconry in ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... it may sound, it is the literal fact that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his widowed mother. Furthermore, the prayer was not made to him, but offered in secret and in all sincerity at the Throne ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... city a circular was sent around asking for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese Folklore, published by Baron Vitali, Interpreter at the Italian legation, which, on examination, proved to be exactly what I wanted. He had collected about two hundred and fifty rhymes, had made a literal—not metrical—translation and had issued them in ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... James I.'s reign it is supposed that the earliest needlework pictures appeared. They were obviously literal copies of the tapestries which had now become of general use in the homes of the wealthy, being worked in what is known as "petit point," or "little stitch." This stitch was worked on canvas of very close quality, with fine silk thread, ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... most happy suggestion of Marsden's, in absence of all knowledge of the fact that the original narrative was French, that this Dor represented the Emperor of the Kin or Golden Dynasty, called by the Mongols Altun Khan, of which Roi D'Or is a literal translation. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... method the grim, but very significant formula that is employed (I believe it is a literal fact) in the exercise yards of the American penitentiaries. "What have YOU brought?" asks the San Quentin or Sing Sing convict of the new arrival, meaning, "And how long is your sentence?" There is the same human touch about this, the ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... such a man, she felt, the direct and obvious appeal of Rose Stribling would be victorious. He could discern pink and white and blue and gold; but the indeterminate shades, the subtleties and mysteries of charm were enigmatical to him. His emotions would be as literal as his convictions or his oratory. Yet there must be some faculty in him which did not appear on the surface, some primitive grasp of realities in his understanding of men. Why should the influence of this sanguine, loud-talking ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... language was yet in its infancy, visible symbols were the most vivid means of acting upon the minds of ignorant hearers. The next step was to pass to symbolical language and expressions; for a plain and literal exposition, even if understood at all, would at least have been listened to with indifference, as not corresponding with any mental demand. In such allegorizing way, then, the early priests set forth their ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... something which will pass as a settlement, either China's—and Siberia's—interests will be sacrificed in some unfair compromise, or irritation and friction will be increased—and in the end so will armaments. In any literal sense, it is ridiculous to suppose that the problems of the Pacific can be settled in a few weeks, or months—or years. Yet the discussion of the problems, in separation from the question of armament, may be of great ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... thoughtfulness. The town is old, and very mean, but has, I think, a market. In this house, the Welsh translation of the Old Testament was made. The Welsh singing Psalms were written by Archdeacon Price. They are not considered as elegant, but as very literal, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... choice. There is (barring a possible double meaning or two) nothing of the kind generally known as licentious; it is the merely foul and dirty language of common folk at all times, introduced, not with humorous extravagance in the Rabelaisian fashion, but with literal realism. If there had been a little less of this, the piece would have been much improved; but even as it is, it is a capital example of farce, just as Ralph Roister Doister is of a rather rudimentary kind ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... completely abandoned the letter of the last precept. No one except a Quaker refuses to take an oath. Every bishop on the bench has done so, and every incumbent of a living. Nowhere throughout the Sermon on the Mount have Christians felt themselves bound to a literal or legal interpretation of its teaching. No one wants a man to be tried for murder and hanged for hating his brother. No judge grants a divorce because a man or woman has "committed adultery in his heart." Christ Himself did not literally "turn the other cheek" when ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... service to them, and they were always particularly desirous of obtaining it for their younger children. They distinguished this kind of food by the name of kanibroot, and biscuit or soft bread by that of shegalak, the literal meaning of which terms we never could discover, but supposed them to have some reference ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... even in the lifetime of its founder the Franciscan fraternity crystallised under the insensible but enormous pressure of the world, the flesh and (doubtless) the devil. Saint Francis of Assisi, for instance, taught literal poverty—abstinence from money, goods and books. His Franciscans wouldn't have it. They asked for money and took it. Not always ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... the foot of the bed, gazing at the wall above his head. "I must earn our expenses until we're safe," said she, once more telling a literal truth that ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... on the bare, literal fact any more than they can live on bread alone; there is something in every man to feed besides his body. He has been told many times by men of great disinterestedness and ability that he must believe only ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... as Lord Warwick or Raoul de Fulke. The great House of De la Pole (Duke of Suffolk), the heir of which married Edward's sister Elizabeth, had been founded by a merchant of Hull. Earls and archbishops scrupled not to derive revenues from what we should now esteem the literal resources of trade. [The Abbot of St. Alban's (temp. Henry III.) was a vendor of Yarmouth bloaters. The Cistercian Monks were wool-merchants; and Macpherson tells us of a couple of Iceland bishops who got a license from Henry VI. for smuggling. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... but a composition by portions of that experience suggested. Thus while egotism was avoided, the fancy was exercised, and the heart satisfied. I translate as before, and my translation is nearly literal; it continued thus:— ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... the text in the Apocalypse (v. 12): "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing." One may question, indeed, if figurative language of the kind in question can ever be successfully transferred to canvas; whether this literal lamb, on its red-damasked table, in the midst of these carefully marshalled squadrons of Apostles, Popes, and Princes, can ever quite escape a hint of something ludicrous. One may question all this, ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... by the late Bertholdy Seemann that the "language of Hoffmann and Heine" contained a literal and complete translation of The Nights; but personal enquiries at Leipzig and elsewhere convinced me that the work still remains to be done. The first attempt to improve upon Galland and to show the world what the work really is was made by Dr. Max Habicht and was printed at Breslau (1824-25), ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... avoiding a contract which have been dealt with thus far are conditions concerning the conduct of the parties outside of the itself. [327] Still confining myself to conditions arising by construction of law,—that is to say, not directly and in terms attached to a promise by the literal meaning of the words in which it is expressed,—I now come to those which concern facts to which the contract does in ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... the terrible wits of our age are said to borrow their weapons. The Ship in danger is easily understood to be its old antitype the commonwealth. But how to analyse the Tub was a matter of difficulty, when, after long inquiry and debate, the literal meaning was preserved, and it was decreed that, in order to prevent these Leviathans from tossing and sporting with the commonwealth, which of itself is too apt to fluctuate, they should be diverted from that game by "A Tale of a Tub." And my genius ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... supreme sway, the race would be snuffed out in hopeless night. These men who come out effect their mission, not by making all men Come-Outers, but by imperceptibly changing the complexion of the mass. They are the true and literal saviors of mankind. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... and sniff gastronomic possibilities in the humblest materials. Joseph Bourgogne looked the cook. His phiz gave us faith in him; eyes small and discriminating; nose upturned, nostrils expanded and receptive; mouth saucy in the literal sense. His voice, moreover, was a cook's,—thick in articulation, dulcet in tone. He spoke as if he deemed that a throat was created for better uses than laboriously manufacturing words,—as if the object of a mouth were to receive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... "one obedience" by which "many are made righteous." The sacraments were asserted to produce their effect ex opere operato,—not by the working of the Spirit in them that by faith receive them. Belief in the literal transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper was rigidly enforced and substituted for that spiritual presence and spiritual manducation which the earlier church had maintained. The doctrine of a purgatory after this life was invented, and the virtue of masses for the ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... my predecessor as arbitrator of the claim of the Italian subject Cerruti against the Republic of Colombia, differences arose between the parties to the arbitration in regard to the scope and extension of the award, of which certain articles were contested by Colombia, while Italy claimed their literal fulfillment. The award having been made by the President of the United States, as an act of friendly consideration and with the sole view to an impartial composition of the matter in dispute, I could not but feel deep concern at such ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... before me like a map, not a cloud, not a shadow to soften the outline—there was Mont Blanc, a great alabaster pyramid, with a glacier running down each side of it; there was the Arve, and there was the Arveiron, names most magical in song, but now literal geographic realities. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... terms 'increase' and 'diffusion' should receive literal interpretation in accordance with the evident intention of the testator; that such terms being logically distinct, the two purposes mentioned in the bequest were to be kept in view in the organization of the institution; that ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... there told with the simplicity and sprightliness of which the French language is so peculiarly capable, but which a literal translation would render not only ...
— Think Before You Speak - The Three Wishes • Catherine Dorset
... brought out with marvellous accuracy all its traits, except, indeed, the underlying strain of poetry, which, while it redeems plainness, sordidness, and even coarseness, is as true to life as is its veriest prose. With those who ask a literal copy of life, whether high or low, and ask no more, the Teniers and their school must always be in the highest favour; and to those who are wearied and sceptical of blunders and failures in seeking that underlying strain of life, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... narrowly. The broader view admits the idea that men are related by reason of a superior union, that their isolation is but an affair of limited consciousness. Applying this concept to conduct, we come to discern a literal truth in the words of the Master, "He who hath done it unto the least of these my children, hath done it unto me," and "Where two or three are gathered together in my name." If we conceive of each individual as a "slice" or cross-section ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... man of the world—I use the word in its most literal acceptation. He was one of those cool, keen, calculating, diplomatic men, who never lose their presence of mind, who never hesitate, and yet are never precipitate, who always say the right thing in the right time, and to the right people. No one knew anything of his antecedents, but somehow, he ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... for the last fifteen years as Mr. Headley did last Sunday, if they had told people plainly that, if the cholera was God's judgment at all, it was His judgment of the sin of dirt, and that the repentance which He required was to wash and be clean in literal earnest, the cholera would be impossible in England ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... countries. More than anything she needs money. The million pounds of which you speak would be a splendid contribution to what I may term our war chest. But as to my views, here they are. It is my intention, and the intention of my Party, to fight to the last gasp for the literal carrying out of the bill which is to grant us our liberty. We will not have it whittled away or weakened one iota. Our lives, and the lives of greater men, have been spent to win this measure, and ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... note which they produce. It is a very loud and vibrating sound of the harshest possible quality. One feels when hearing it as if the French phrase of "skinning the ears" were not a metaphorical but a literal description of the result of listening to the sound. And when hundreds of blowers of these are wandering about the streets in all parts of the town, but especially in the neighborhood of the Piazza Navona, making night ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... drawing-room, that was practically the first. It was all so different from what it's supposed to be. On the stage, or in books, a proposal is—how shall I put it? —a full-blown affair, a kind of bouquet; it loses its literal meaning. But in life a ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... The literal interpretation of this decree would have left Gordon helpless to do anything for the curtailment of the slave trade until the year 1889, and then only permitted to inflict a quite insufficient punishment on those who broke the law. ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... mother's way, she abounded. There was always something for the really needy, and I remember that one of her most painful experiences came from having refused food to a begging woman, to whose deathbed she was called the next day, a deathbed of literal starvation. She recognized the woman, who had come to our house with a story of a family of starving children, but as my mother's experienced eye assured her she had never been a mother, she refused her as a deceiver what the poor always got. "Why did you tell me you had children," ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... a Professor at the Melbourne University, on a holiday trip to New Zealand, has just told me an amusing anecdote, for the literal truth of which he vouches. A couple of young Englishmen fresh from Oxford came to Melbourne in the course of a trip round the world to open up their minds! For fear of a libel suit I may at once say I am not alluding to the Messrs. Chamberlain. They brought ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... cases, no doubt, it is the plain and literal fact that the impulse to write some play—any play—exists, so to speak, in the abstract, unassociated with any particular subject, and that the would-be playwright proceeds, as he thinks, to set his imagination to work, and invent ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... orders, or disobey Acts of Parliament. I determined upon the former, trusting to the uprightness of my intentions, and believing that my country would not let me be ruined for protecting her commerce." With this determination he wrote to Sir Richard; appealed again to the plain, literal, unequivocal sense of the Navigation Act; and in respectful language told him, he felt it his duty to decline obeying these orders till he had an opportunity of seeing and conversing with him. Sir Richard's first feeling was that of anger, and he was about to supersede Nelson; but having mentioned ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... forgiveness, non-resistance to evil, then all war is a violation of the faith. The question is not unimportant. It is not a subject which you can toy with, or put aside as having no immediate bearing on life and duty. If the literal application of the teaching of Christ to social and political life be impossible, then the rationalists are right when they urge us to drop a religion which we profess on Sunday and repudiate on Monday. If the fault lies not in the teaching itself but in ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... only now and then that critical hints have been given. In the discussion of phenomena of minor importance it has been impossible to avoid the oratio obliqua of exposition; but, wherever practicable, we have let the philosophers themselves develop their doctrines and reasons, not so much by literal quotations from their works, as by free, condensed reproductions of their leading ideas. If the principiant view of the forces which control the history of philosophy, and of the progress of modern philosophy, expressed in the Introduction and in ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... However, I was not retained to investigate the Fleming murder, and as far as I know from anything she has told me, Gladys Fleming is quite satisfied that her husband shot himself accidentally." In a universe of ordered abstractions and multiordinal meanings, the literal truth, on one order of abstraction, was often a black lie on another. "Does that answer your question?" he asked, with ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... structure. As in the common law, so in the constitution, change has been effected in substance without any corresponding change in terminology. There is hardly one of the phrases used to describe the position of the crown which can be understood in its literal sense, and many of them are currently accepted in more senses than one. The American constitution of 1789 reproduced, however, in essentials, and with necessary modifications, the contemporary British model, and, where it did ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... sent for the serjeant, who was his first acquaintance among these military gentlemen. Unluckily that worthy officer having, in a literal sense, taken his fill of liquor, had been some time retired to his bolster, where he was snoring so loud that it was not easy to convey a noise in at his ears capable of drowning that which ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... meek eyes and baby-like lips, that it impressed me with the individuality of life. Had it not been for the open dress, with its waist almost beneath the armpits, the hair cut short on the forehead, and the perfection of the neck and shoulders, I should have taken it for a literal portrait of one of the ladies of the house. As it was, I could not rid myself of the idea that one, if not both, of Mr. Leavenworth's nieces looked down upon me from the eyes of this entrancing blonde with the beckoning glance and forbidding hand. So vividly ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... of the beautiful cicatrices which he obtained without the use of any ointment, pulcherrimas cicatrices sine unguento aliquo inducebat, then further that he impugned the use of poultices and of oils on wounds, while powders were too drying and besides had a tendency to prevent drainage, the literal meaning of the Latin words saniem incarcerare is to "incarcerate sanious material," it is easy to understand that the claim that antiseptic surgery was anticipated six centuries ago is no exaggeration and no far-fetched explanation ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... health! And you, preserve for me always the honor of your good graces; and believe, my charming Sister, that never brother in the world loved with such tenderness a sister so charming as mine; in short, believe, dear Sister, that without compliments, and in literal truth, I am yours wholly ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... fruitless, or Bonaparte had, at least, only yielded to them in their literal sense. She had said: "I entreat you, do not make yourself a king!" Bonaparte did not make himself king, he made himself emperor. He did not take up the crown that had fallen from the head of the Bourbons; ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... to be "not a sport, but a science." There is no sport here. Men killed like this are like men killed by plague or the eruption of a volcano. And, indeed, what else are they? They are victims of a diseased humanity of the eruption—literal and metaphorical—of its hidden fires. And wars will grow more and more like this. What can stop them and banish these scenes? Only the hate of hate, only the love that can redeem even such a sight as this when at last we remember that it is for love's sake only that flesh and ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... reads an essay to prove that we can form a notion of inspiration which does not involve dictation. He thinks it 'more agreeable to right reason' to explain the Biblical account of the creation by literal interpretation than 'on scientific principles,' but adds the rider, 'so far as it can be reconciled with geological facts.' He denies that the Pentateuch shows 'traces of Egyptian origin.' He thinks that Paley's views of the 'essential doctrines of Christianity' ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... a wonderful affinity between the Scotch and the Norwegians and Swedes, especially in their traditionary literature, which marks a common origin and common customs at some remote period. We find among the genuine Scotch ballads many that are almost literal versions of the same Scandinavian legends no less indigenous in their own land. A large number of the most beautiful Scotch ballads plainly point to an extraneous Northern origin, and their exact counterparts in form, ideas, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Scythe of Time (for I now discovered the literal import of that classical phrase) had not stopped, nor was it likely to stop, in its career. Down and still down, it came. It had already buried its sharp edge a full inch in my flesh, and my sensations grew indistinct and confused. At one time I fancied ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... profligate, careless king, nominally absolute—the heads of great houses paying court to, but in reality governing, that king, whilst revelling with him on the plunder of a nation, and a set of crouching, grovelling vassals (the literal meaning of vassal is a wretch), who, after allowing themselves to be horsewhipped, would take a bone if flung to them, and be grateful; so that in love with mummery, though he knew what Christianity was, no wonder he admired such a church ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... Dedlock has got the better, for the time being, of the family gout and is once more, in a literal no less than in a figurative point of view, upon his legs. He is at his place in Lincolnshire; but the waters are out again on the low-lying grounds, and the cold and damp steal into Chesney Wold, though well defended, and eke into ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... that many words in common use have shades of meaning quite different from, and in some cases almost opposite to, their literal significance. But will not the student be better able to understand these derived meanings by knowing their literal significance than in any other way? At any rate, I am fully persuaded that such a study of words as this book proposes can be made very ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... overtake our game, for the big peccary is a murderous foe of dogs (and is sometimes dangerous to men). One of their number frankly refused to come or to let his dogs come, explaining that the fierce wild swine were "very badly brought up" (a literal translation of his words) and that respectable dogs and men ought not to go near them. The other fazendeiros merely feared for their dogs; a groundless fear, I believe, as I do not think that the dogs could by any exertion have been dragged into dangerous proximity with such foes. The ranch foreman, ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the two on the raft, rolling his glowing eyes over the different objects that were visible in and about the Castle, with a keenness that showed how little escaped him. "My brother is very proud, but Rivenoak (we use the literal translation of the term, writing as we do in English) is a name to make a Delaware ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... kept the shell and threw away the kernel. Faust becomes insignificant in this play to which he gives his name. In Goethe he was a thinker, even more than a poet. Here he speaks bad verse full of emptiness. Even where Goethe's words are followed, in a literal translation, the meaning seems to have gone out of them; they are displaced, they no longer count for anything. The Walpurgis Night is stripped of all its poetry, and Faust's study is emptied of all its ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... sources that may be relied upon, that his bravery, dispositions in battle, and art of enthusing his followers could not be surpassed. His signals to the fleet were almost identical with Nelson's. Here is one: "Celui qui ne serait pas dans le feu ne serait pas a son poste"; the literal translation of which is: "He who would not be in the fire would not be at his post"; or, "The man who would hold his post must stand fire," which is quite an inspiring signal. But I wonder what the eulogists ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... never heard. Boswell boasted that he had "Johnsonized the land," and that he had shown Johnson in his book as no man had ever been shown in a book before; and the boast is after a hundred years seen to be a literal statement of fact. But after all Boswell did not make Johnson's reputation. On the contrary, it was Johnson's name that sold Boswell's book. No man owes so much to his biographer as Johnson to Boswell, but that must not make us forget that Johnson was the most famous man of letters in England ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... about our spirits. We tie them into some bondage of eternity for the security of a night's lodging, and then wonder that life grows sour upon our palate. [she smiles over at CHARLES'S bewilderment] Which means, in the literal terms of those who credit reincarnation, that if we married, those things you would have to do to keep your heart up would cause your next showing to degenerate into a slight motion of slime at the base of ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... soul-life - the division which was to give him, on the one hand, an abstract experience of his own self, divorced from the outer world, and on the other a mere onlooker's experience of that outer world. As a result of these endeavours, concepts were formed which in their literal meaning seemed to apply merely to outwardly perceptible substances, while in truth they stood for the spiritual functions represented by those substances, both within ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... assuming that the figures were destroyed by Ludlow's troopers when he garrisoned the belfry. But such an assumption requires many facts to support it which are not forthcoming. We have no proof that Hollar's sketch was intended to be a literal transcript of what he saw; it is quite possible that for the sake of effect he preferred to complete the design according to the supposed intention of its builders. We are not certain that the niches ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... repeated. "Is it a figure of speech that the rich man fared sumptuously, that he died, that he was buried? Is not that literal? Why, then, is it a figure of speech that he lifted up his eyes in torment, and said, 'I am tormented in this flame'(Luke 16:24). My dear friend, be sure that there is an awful reality in that story—a most solemn reality in the fact of the impassable ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... adopted a single expression, tending to warp the judgement of the learned or unlearned reader, in favour of my own hypothesis. I attempted this translation, chiefly because I could find no other equally close and literal. Even the Version of Roscommon, tho' in blank verse, is, in some parts a paraphrase, and in others, but an abstract. I have myself, indeed, endeavoured to support my right to that force and freedom of translation which Horace himself recommends; yet I have faithfully exhibited in our language ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... follows after this was only the human mind's interpretation of the real, spiritual Creation, that Creation which is the ever unfolding of infinite Mind's numberless, perfect ideas. The book of Genesis has been a fetish to human minds; and not until the limitations imposed by its literal interpretation were in a measure removed did the human mentality begin to rise and expand. And when, reading from Isaiah, the grandest of the ancient prophets, the ringing words, "Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?" the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... very literal sense the Caribbean is a mediterranean sea; but the adjective must be qualified when comparison is made with the Mediterranean of the Old World or with the Gulf of Mexico. The last-named bodies of water communicate with the outer ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... taken out of the Old Testament, and urged in the New, being sometimes not to be found in the Old, nor urged in the New, according to the literal and obvious sense, which they appear to bear in their supposed places in the Old, and, therefore, not proofs according to the rules of interpretation established by reason, and acted upon in interpreting every other ancient book— ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... translated all this as it was delivered we know not. From the peculiar cast of his mind, however, coupled with the moderate depth of his knowledge of the Indian tongue, it is probable that his translation was neither literal nor comprehensive. Indeed, it is not unlikely that his subsequent remark to one of his comrades,—"we told Mozwa it was very good of him to come to meet us, an' the place would do well enough,"—was more like the sentence to which he had reduced it. ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... able to explain why some forms are significant and some are not; and thus he will be able to push all his judgments a step further back. Let me give one example. Of copies of pictures there are two classes; one class contains some works of art, the other none. A literal copy is seldom reckoned even by its owner a work of art. It leaves us cold; its forms are not significant. Yet if it were an absolutely exact copy, clearly it would be as moving as the original, and a ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... as he called it), not of serious production. Though he was a precocious child, his genius ripened slowly, and it was just reaching maturity when the 'wolverine,' as he called his disease, fixed its fangs in his flesh. From that time forward not only did he live with death at his elbow in an almost literal sense (he used to carry his left arm in a sling lest a too sudden movement should bring on a haemorrhage), but he had ever-recurring intervals of weeks and months during which he was totally unfit for work; while even at the best of times he had to husband his strength most jealously. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... medieval preacher except Bruno de Malpas would even have thought of alluding to the literal and primary meaning of the words. From the first moment of their joint existence, Jerusalem and Rome have been enemies and rivals. Not content with, so far as in her lay, blotting out the very name of Israel ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... him home with a quiet conscience, bidding him never to pay the devil's money back, as he tendred his own safety, which he promised for to observe." From these instances, Melanax might have quoted precedent for insisting on the literal execution of his stipulation with Malicorn, since, to give the devil his due, the strict legal interpretation appears always to have been applied to bargains of ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... would have agreed that her stepson was wonderful, but with quite a literal meaning. She found him a real cause for wonder—this poised, handsome, crippled boy of nineteen, with his tailor, and his tutor, and his groom, and the heavy social responsibilities that bored him so heartily. With the honesty of a naturally brilliant mind cultivated ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... five years not one word had passed between the lovers. It is said that the following is a literal translation of the letter which De Soto wrote. We cannot be certain of its authenticity, but it bears internal evidence of genuineness, and a manuscript copy is in the library of a Spanish gentleman who has spent his life in collecting documents in reference to the past ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... your honour," he remarked, oracularly, and in his usual manner of literal adaptation, "was also part of the news I had for your honour from my last journey; but, my faith, I did not know how to take myself to it, as your honour was so much occupied with old times this evening. But I had seen Mademoiselle at the castle, as Mademoiselle ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... doctrine or in that; not in this ism or in that ism; but "in THE TRUTH." He will accept only what is real; he will strive to get at facts; he will search for TRUTH with a humble and unbiased mind, and cherish whatever he finds at any sacrifice. But the more literal translation of the Revised Version calls for just such a sacrifice for truth's sake here. For what Paul really meant is, as we there read, "Rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth," a quality which probably no one English word—and certainly not SINCERITY—adequately ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... curious. Some, more docile than the rest; were permitted to rove at large, cropping the young herbage and tender grass; occasionally, it is true, during the service, overleaping their limits in a literal sense; neighing, whinnying and kicking up their heels to the manifest confusion of the pious and the discomfiture ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... "I believe in takin' the Scripter literal, and if I can't git my stuff there entirely unbeknown to my right ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... balance by being hauled out of the harbour against his wish. His stolidity had been profoundly stirred, else he would never have made up his mind to ask me unexpectedly whether I had not remarked that Falk had been casting eyes upon his niece. "No more than myself," I answered with literal truth. The girl was of the sort one necessarily casts eyes at in a sense. She made no noise, but she filled most satisfactorily a good ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... in Europe when they christened with the name "nihilism" this active negation of civilization and of bourgeois customs, so characteristic of the Russian "intellectuals." Taken in its literal sense, this word is inexact, since those to whom it was applied were inspired by a very high ideal. In a loose use of the word, nihilism has, on the contrary, a real significance, especially if one connects it with most of the Russian "intellectuals." ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... duties of the fraternity. Every day one of the Fathers, as the villagers called them, made his rounds, starting soon after sunrise and sometimes not getting back till after dark, for Father Philip had no belief in the efficacy of fasting and meditation and prayer unless they were supplemented by a literal obedience to the commands of Him who went about doing good. When priest or deacon entered the Retreat, no matter what he was, rich or poor, wedded or single, he had to take the vows of poverty, obedience ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... to the ladies of the Dorcas meeting that the dissection of a body was a suitable subject for the brush of a painter. The Dutchmen of Rembrandt's day were not so squeamish as we have become since. They had a passion for the literal painting of literal things, and this picture was destined not for a Tate Gallery, but for the wall of an operating theatre. Dr. Tulp desired a picture of himself performing an operation, and Rembrandt gave it to him, painted in a way that pleased his contemporaries, and that has astonished ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... exhibition. It is provocative of much reflection, aside from the mere contemplation of it as a matter of curiosity. . . . THE correspondent who sends us the following, writes upon the envelope containing it: 'I have endeavored to preserve the measure of the original, and at the same time to present a literal translation.' It will be conceded, we think, that he has been successful in his endeavor. Perhaps in some lines (as in 'Pertransivit gladius') the translation is a little ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... we need not be sorry to believe that there is no substantial basis for these tales of crime. The history of mankind is not so pure but that we can afford to lose a few dark pages out of the record. Let it be granted that of the times which Homer sung historically we know nothing literal at all—not any names of any kings, of any ministers, wars, intrigues, revolutions, crimes. They are all gone—dead—passed away; their vacant chronicles may be silent as the tombs in which their bones are buried. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... be left as they were left, and thus came to be witnesses to the history of the far past. It was a wise thing, no doubt, that the fathers of geology strongly insisted that there should be a rigorous and rather literal adhesion to the terrestrial record in all earth studies, because in those times of transition from the loose, more or less fantastic thought that marked the adolescent stage of the human race, it was imperative that students should stick close to the immediate ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... instead of rhyming alternately as in the translation, chime somewhat to the tune of Byron's Don Juan—six lines rhyming with each other, and the two last forming a separate couplet. In other respects the translation, it is hoped, is sufficiently close and literal. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... dwell equally upon all the parts of every sentence. This comes naturally in the first instance, from the mere method of learning to read, in which every word is a spoken symbol, and has to be sounded, whether it is essential to the sense, or not. This habit of reading, which may be termed the literal method, goes with most persons through life. Once learned, it is very hard to unlearn. There are multitudes who cannot read a newspaper, even, without dwelling upon every word, and coming to a full stop at the end of every sentence. Now this method of reading, while it may be indispensable ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... hither—alluding to the burden of an old love-charm which is still used by the young of both sexes on May-morning. It is a literal translation of the Irish ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... dollars a day—and lunch—" she answered clearly. She hadn't the remotest idea of being impertinent. She was merely literal. The only thing that saved her from Mrs. Alden's mounting wrath was the old man's voice ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... an escort. The Governor, a fat, swarthy personage in the full dress uniform of a general, received us in a haughty manner, and cross-questioned us in the most minute and tedious manner. Dennis somewhat puzzled him by the style of his answers, which were anything but literal translations of what Captain Hassall said. The result, however, was favourable, and we were allowed to go wherever we chose about the city, and to get the necessary repairs of our ships executed, and to obtain all the ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... that you may write, or still better, telegraph, since the wire is so handy—on business. Well, of course, it is for you to judge whether you will add postscripts of another sort. There, you make me say more than a woman ought, because you are so obtuse and literal. Good afternoon—good-bye! This will be ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... they fortunately offered the alternative of purchasing the stock from the holders. On the alternative of retention the English commissioners were resolute in refusal and resistance, but they were ready to entertain the other; and they accepted it in a literal shape. To have bought the stock at its market value would have been a farce, after the ruin that had overcome the company. But if it could not be even said that England had ruined the company, the sacrifice had been made in the prevalence of English interests, and while ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... dull serving folk," she said to those nearest her. "One cannot pay for wit with wages and livery. They can but obey the literal word. Sir John, leaving me in haste this morning, I forgot a question I would have asked, and sent a ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sermons. It is not he who divides his discourse into three parts, and refrains from passing to the second till he has learnedly expounded the first. Whether he comments upon the Psalms or the Gospels, his sermons are no more than explanations of the Scriptures which he interprets, sometimes in a literal sense, and sometimes in an allegoric. Let us acknowledge it—his allegoric discourses repel us by their extreme subtilty, sometimes by their bad taste; and when he confines himself to the letter of the text, he stumbles among small points of grammar which weary the attention. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... 'Come, then, for we belong to Thee, and bless us inexpressibly.'" As the story just quoted was written by the poetic Count, it has been supposed that in recording this famous event he added a spiritual flavour of his own. But in this case he was telling the literal truth. At that Conference the Brethren deliberately resolved to ask Christ to undertake the office which had hitherto been held by Leonard Dober; and, to put the matter beyond all doubt, they inscribed on their minutes the resolution: "That the office of General Elder be abolished, and ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... is a literal copy of a notice served by a worthy inhabitant of Gravesend upon his neighbor, whose fowl had eaten his ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... Square" is a figurative expression usually applying to a moral tendency. In this sense it is as often possessed by one type as another. But in a purely literal sense the Muscular is actually built on the square. His whole figure is a combination ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... and damnable custom. The literal meaning of bidah is "an innovation or invention, anything new;" but the word is commonly used in the sense of "heresy" or "heterodox innovation," anything new being naturally heretical in the eyes ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... readers; about a hundred of Li Po's poems have been translated, and thirty or forty of Tu Fu's. I have, as before, given half my space to Po Chuu-i, of whose poems I had selected for translation a much larger number than I have succeeded in rendering. I will give literal versions of two ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... face of astonishment, made a half-movement toward the window before she understood. There was some timidity in her glance at Hilda and in her mechanical smile. "Oh," she said, "I see what you mean; and I don't wonder. I am so literal—I have ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... failing that, at least pride, which is its shadow and in many ways its substitute. Master Francis, I fancy, would follow his own eager instincts without much spiritual struggle. And we soon find him fallen among thieves in sober, literal earnest, and counting as acquaintances the most disreputable people he could lay his hands on; fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat; sergeants of the criminal court, and archers of the watch; blackguards who slept at night under the butchers' stalls, and for whom the aforesaid archers ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... interest to allow it. We require every possible help and attraction of sound in our language to smooth the way for the admission of things so remote from our present concerns. My own notion of translation is, that it cannot be too literal, provided these faults be avoided: baldness, in which I include all that takes from dignity; and strangeness, or uncouthness, including harshness; and lastly, attempts to convey meanings which, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... sights of Amboyna. After a rest in the flower-wreathed verandah of his home, and a chat with his kindly half-caste wife, we visit the gilded and dragon-carved mansion of a leading Chinese merchant, friendly, hospitable, and delighted to exhibit his household gods, both in literal and figurative form. A visit to the Joss Temple follows, liberally supported by this smiling Celestial, whose zeal and charity may perchance plead for him in that purer sanctuary not made with hands, and as yet unrevealed to his spiritual ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... to what they are, for to you I give the charge of delivering them again. Lady Elmwood has petitioned me in the name of her father, (a name I reverence) to give his grandchild the sanction of my protection. In the literal sense, to suffer that she may reside at one of my seats; dispensing at the same time with my ever ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... was naturally gentle. In one instant she had gone mad. Mad? Not in the literal interpretation; but figuratively. She sprang back, snapping; her teeth bared, her hair bristled. Her nostrils drawn. With one bound she ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... learned philosopher will render visible to them." Yet all this while the royal family have not so much as even thought of seeing the wonders of Mr. Katterfelto. This kind of rhodomontade is very finely expressed in English by the word puff, which in its literal sense, signifies a blowing, or violent gust of wind, and in the metaphorical ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... are needed to trap silt and reduce flooding—all these elements of watershed planning are effective not only against silt but against standard urban and suburban ugliness. The translation of rural techniques to city use cannot be literal, for both urban hydrology and urban land use are distinctive, and a good deal remains to be learned about making the techniques work better there. But their basic principles are obviously ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... Pharisees do,' replied Graham, dryly; 'not that I rank you among the hypocrites, bishop, so do not take my remark in too literal a sense.' ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... were evidently subject to abrupt and prolonged interruptions. Many repetitions and trivial incidents have been omitted in this translation; but, in order to express the personality of the Author, the rendering has been as literal as possible, and it shows the strange mixture of sentimentality and ferocity peculiar to the ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... prodigal's confession this morning. So may the thought well spring up in the minds of any who in the course of this last year have wandered into sin, have found themselves beset with evil habits of wicked idleness, of wretched self-indulgence. Now that you are indeed in the literal sense of the word about to rise and go to your father, now that you will be able to shake off the bondage of bad companionship, now that the whole length of this long absence will roll between you and the past, take ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... license accorded to them, we must compel the prisoners to accept whatever injustice or outrage the unrestrained despots of the ranges have the whim to inflict upon them. There are desperate revolts at times—desperate in the literal sense, since they have no hope of relief in them, but only the tragic rage against tyranny which will sometimes blaze up in victims—and on the other hand there are officials who will resign their positions rather than connive at abuses. But every means is taken to avert this last; for guards ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... preface of his edition of "Moted'Arthur," says: "The specimens which I have seen are exceedingly curious; nor is there a greater desideratum in British literature than an edition of these tales, with a literal version, and such comments as Mr. Davies of all men is best qualified to give. Certain it is that many of the round table fictions originated in Wales, or in Bretagne, and probably ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... His literal-minded sister looked aggrieved bewilderment. She felt a bitterness at having been stirred without due cause. "Marius, you're unkind. What did you tell me she had for—when I'm so tired it seems as if I could lie down ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... Upton had just been telling Eric the splendid phrase [Greek: anerithmon gelasma pontion], which he had stumbled upon in an Aeschylus lesson that morning, and they were trying which would hit on the best rendering of it. Eric stuck up for the literal sublimity of "the innumerable laughter of the sea," while Upton was trying to win him over to "the many-twinkling smile of ocean." They were enjoying the discussion, and each stoutly maintaining his own rendering, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... things—or thought she did, and was extremely happy in that which was vouchsafed to her. Oh, she knew, did Miss Penny! She had not, indeed, had much—if put into a corner and made to confess to bare and literal truth, not any—experience, that is personal and practical experience, of such matters,—if, indeed, such matters are capable of being brought to the test of such a word as practical. But she had read much about them—in search of ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... one great broad line that divides the nations and civilizations of the earth, past and present, in all their arts of expression. We may call it that of the ideographic as against the literal. It controls the inner form of language and of languages; it manifests in the passage of thought from man to man; it determines whether the writing of the people shall be hieroglyphic or alphabetic; it gives both life and form to the ideals of their art. It is a distinction that was clearly recognized ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... on that line. There are arguments, too, from the distances. There are two journeys in the book from Eatanswill to Bury, which seem to furnish data for both theories—the Ipswich and the Norwich ones. But if we have to take the dejeuner in its literal sense, and put it early in the day, say, at eleven, and Mr. Pickwick's arrival at Bury, "wery late," as Sam had it, we have some six hours, or, say, forty miles, covered by the journey. But the events at Mrs. Leo Hunter's were certainly at mid- day—between one and three o'clock. It was, ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... altogether abolished by imperial constitutions; and we, desiring to give greater effect to the wishes of deceased persons, and to interpret their expressions with reference rather to those wishes than to their strict literal meaning, have issued a constitution, composed after great reflection, enacting that in future there shall be but one kind of legacy, and that, whatever be the terms in which the bequest is couched, the legatee may sue for it no less by real or hypothecary than by personal action. How carefully ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... to this hereafter, and to show that we at least are not guilty of exaggeration, we subjoin the passage in the original Italian, from which it will be seen that our translation is as literal as possible. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... extending along both sides of the continent, had tilted up the lateral rocks in the manner they are now seen to lie. The greater energy and more extended range of igneous action in those very remote periods when Africa was formed, embracing all the flanks, imparted to it its present very simple literal outline. This was the length to which I ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... he must go; that, talk as he would, both his duty and interest commanded an immediate and literal compliance with the summons: I stood, therefore, waiting in silence, as if he had not yet spoken. He ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Researches. Most of them were translated by his wife, an educated Ojibwa half-breed. This book is perhaps the best of Mr. Schoolcraft's works, though its value is much impaired by the want of a literal rendering, and the introduction of decorations which savor more of a popular monthly magazine than of an Indian wigwam. Mrs. Eastman's interesting Legends of the Sioux (Dahcotah) is not free from the same defect. Other tales are scattered throughout the works of Mr. Schoolcraft ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... extraordinary case!' gasped Mrs. Bloss, as if she understood the communication in its literal sense, and was astonished at a gentleman without a stomach finding ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... may have been a want of the form of giving notice; but perhaps this may have been an excuse for the want of that notice—namely, that the resolutions of this day fortnight were proposed by the founder of this Association, as simply and entirely the literal and the sole reiteration of the resolutions upon which he founded this Association. He had no doubt upon the subject. It is a maxim that all pledges and tests are to be taken in the sense and in the spirit of the person who gives or proposes the tests, otherwise they ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... is a good dry farmer on a small scale, and farming is a laborious business in the shifting sands of Hopiland. Their corn is their literal bread of life and they usually keep one year's crop stored. These people have known utter famine and even starvation in the long ago, and their traditions have made them wise. The man tends the fields and flocks, makes mocassins, does the weaving of the community (mostly ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... reason of the disgust of Heine and of every critic with the English bourgeoisie novels, describing the petty, humdrum life of the middle classes, was simply the want of art in the writers; the failure on their part to see that a literal transcript of nature is poor stuff in literature. We do not need to go back to Richardson's time for illustrations of that truth. Every week the English press—which is even a greater sinner in this respect than the American—turns out a score of novels which ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... will again understand that it is British aims rather than British achievements which are spoken of. That British rule is indispensable to Indian civilisation is indeed a literal fact to which Indian opinion bears testimony; and it is the conduct and character of generations of British administrators which have helped to bring this sense of partnership about. But individual Englishmen in India are often far from understanding, or realising in practice, the purpose ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... last so long, he would have fastened upon me the imputation of meaning, or wishing, at least, to do what he called "pettifogulizing"—that is, to plead some distinction, or verbal demur, in bar of my orders, under some colorable pretence that, according to their literal construction, they really did not admit of being fulfilled, or perhaps that they admitted it too much as being capable of fulfilment in two senses, either of them a practicable sense. True it was that my eye was preternaturally keen for flaws of language, not from pedantic exaction ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... aggrandizement, coming whence it may, Belgium were absorbed, the day that witnessed the absorption would hear the knell of public right and public law in Europe? But we have an interest in the independence of Belgium, which is wider than that—which is wider than that which we may have in the literal operation of the guarantee. It is found in the answer to the question whether, under the circumstances of the case, this country, endowed as it is with influence and power, would quietly stand by and witness the perpetration of the direst crime that ever stained ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... this singular presentiment and its literal fulfilment as merely a remarkable coincidence. I have stated only the simple facts in the case, as they occurred under my own observation; and to me, at least, they furnish additional evidence that "there are more things in heaven and earth than are ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... occasion joyously, and "put him out" in the most literal fashion; so that no more was seen of ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... with us; economic democracy is the idea; democracy in the shop, factory, business. Bolshevism is a literal interpretation, the actual application of this theory, policy, or program. And so, in the destructive period of the Russian revolution, the Bolshevik leaders led the people to destroy the old system, root and branch, fruit and blossom, too. And apparently ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... background is welcome. It has to be noted, however, that though many learned Japanese commentators have sought to rationalize the events described in the Records and the Chronicles, the great bulk of the nation believes in the literal accuracy of these works as profoundly as the great bulk of Anglo-Saxon people believes in the Bible, its ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... not of South America to anyone out of your family, for there is treason in the very name." What did he mean by that? He spoke of "digging gold in South America," and clearly did not mean it in the strict literal sense. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself. Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to have been used; ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... call our voyage an All-Over-the-World affair, the title is considerably exaggerated in the truest and most literal sense; for if we devoted the rest of our natural lives to the work, we could not go everywhere. It is impossible to visit every country on the earth even, and we must use judgment and discretion in determining where we will go. We are travelling by sea, making only such excursions ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... any such defence. He pleaded, with literal justice, that the phrase "a criticism of life" was only part of his formula, which adds, "under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty." But this does not make the matter much better, while it ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... space of sea, or looked down upon the earth with the curiosity of thought, or spiritual aspiration. I was moved and governed by my sensations, which continually changed, and passed away—to come again, and deposit vague ideas which ignorantly haunted me. The literal images of all things which I saw were impressed on my shapeless mind, to be reproduced afterward by faculties then latent. But what satisfaction was that? Doubtless the ideal faculty was active in Veronica from the beginning; in me it was developed by the experience ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... necessary to observe, on this subject, that the unhappy mother, being supported by the two uncles, influenced the afflicted father to over-rule all his son's objections, and to direct a literal observation of the will; and at the same time to give up all the sums which he was empowered by it to reimburse himself; as also to take upon himself ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... a "fisher of men." That was what the Great Teacher had promised he would make the fishermen who left their boats to follow him. What strange, literal meaning he attached to the terms, we could not tell. In vain we—especially the boys, whose young hearts had gone out in warm affection to the old man—tried to show him that he was, by his efforts to do good and make others better and happier, fulfilling the Lord's directions. ...
— Fishin' Jimmy • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... this weakness, he besought his courtiers to devise a sentence, short enough to be engraved upon a ring, which should suggest a remedy for his evil. Many phrases were proposed; none were found acceptable until his daughter offered him an emerald on which were graven two Arabic words, the literal translation of which is, "This, too, will pass." The King embraced his daughter and declared that she was wiser than all his wise men. "Now," said Hastings, "when I appear at the Bar and hear the violent ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of peace and charity respects the subject of retaliation. Whatever may be said respecting the literal construction of some of the rules of the gospel, no one can deny that they do, whether figurative or not, forbid retaliation and revenge; that they do assume that men are not to be judges and executioners of their own wrongs; but that injuries are to be ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... had proved more of a Job's comforter in the literal sense of the term, than he had intended; in fact he had overdone it—the picture was too highly coloured to appear natural, and at once threw back poor Job upon a full view of all his troubles, which Mr Smith perceiving, mildly resumed, "I'm not surprised, my good fellow, at your being ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... passengers, who were never so fluent as when sitting beside him "up in front!" There was a tallow dip or two, and no other light save that of the fire. Who that ever told a story could wish a more inspiring auditor than Jacob Bean, a literal, honest old fellow who took the most vital interest in every detail of the stories told, looking upon their heroes and their villains as personal friends or foes. He always sat in one corner of the fireplace, poker in hand, ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a hero was born in Blantyre, central Scotland. It was an age of great missionary activity, and the literal fulfilment of the spirit of the great commission had led Carey, Judson, Moffat, and scores of others to give their lives to the promulgation of the gospel of the kingdom of God in heathen lands. A dozen missionary societies were then in ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... delighted. "You see, Dane? You know it was a nightmare, but you don't really believe it even now. Your father was an alien monster to you—no adult is quite human to a child. And that literal-minded self, your subconscious, saw him after he died. So there are alien monsters who return from death. Then you come to from a concussion. Harding is sprawled out unconscious, covered with blood—probably your blood, since you say he wasn't ...
— Dead Ringer • Lester del Rey
... A literal prose translation of Homer, by Mr. T. A. Buckley, has just appeared in London. No prose version will cause any just notion of the spirit of Homer. Of the half dozen metrical translations published recently, we think that of our countryman Munford the best. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... portentous warning was better grounded and had a more literal meaning than might be supposed; for the swinging gate communicated with the burial-ground, and almost directly in little Pansie's track there was a newly dug grave, ready to receive its tenant that afternoon. Pansie, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... my dear Ralph!" exclaimed Peterkin hastily, fearing that he had hurt my feelings; "why, man, I do but jest with you—you are so horridly literal. I'm overjoyed to be pressed to go on the maddest wild-goose chase that ever was invented. My greatest delight would be to go gorilla-hunting down Fleet Street, if you were so disposed.—But to be serious, Jack, do you think we shall be in time ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... you will believe what is said in some of the Federal papers that that measure has no effect on this country. You may be assured the effects are great and severe; I am myself an eye-witness of the effects. The country is in a state of rebellion from literal starvation. Accounts are daily received which grow more and more alarming from the great manufacturing towns. Troops are in motion all over the country, and but last week measures were adopted by Parliament to prevent this metropolis from ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... men. Such people will ask you with a clever air why the servile wars were always the most fierce; desperate and atrocious of all wars. And you may make such answer as you can—even the eminently feminine one, if you choose, so typical of the women's literal mind. "I don't see what this has to do with it!" How many arguments have been knocked over (I won't say knocked down) by these few words! For if we men try to put the spaciousness of all experiences into our reasoning and would fain put the Infinite itself ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... dawn. The sound I recognized at once to be the Navajo's morning chant. I lay there and listened. Soft and monotonous, wild and swelling, but always low and strange, the savage song to the break of day was exquisitely beautiful and harmonious. I wondered what the literal meaning of his words could have been. The significance needed no translation. To the black shadows fading away, to the brightening of the gray light, to the glow of the east, to the morning sun, to the Giver of Life—to these ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... hundred and twenty-six marginal changes, a very large proportion, quite one-half, and we should think more, are mere insignificant literal changes or additions, such as an editor in supervising manuscript, or an author in reading proof, passes over, and leaves to the proof-readers of the printing-office, by whom they are called "literals," we believe. Such are the change of "Whon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... translation of this difficult passage has been left on purpose somewhat baldly literal. The idea seems to be that Basilides refused to accept projection or emanation as a hypothesis to account for the existence of created things. Compare Mansel, ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... German Bible. Here are two copies of this first impression of the Bible in the German language: both of which have distinct claims to render them very desirable. In the one is an inscription, in the German language, of which M. Bernhard supplied me with the following literal version: "Hector Mulich and Otilia his wife; who bought this Bible in the year of Our Lord, 1466, on the twenty-seventh day of June, for twelve florins." Their arms are below. The whole is decidedly ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Northern Indians the auroras have ever been associated with the ghostly or spiritual. In some of the tribes the literal translation of the northern lights is the "spirits of their forefathers ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... of the gods in the literal sense; the gods were supposed to dwell in them, their spirits having entered into the graven images or blocks of stone. It is probable that like the Ancient Egyptians they believed a god had as many spirits as he had attributes. The gods, as we have said, appear to have evolved from ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... open her cloak, and it is a literal fact that I rubbed my eyes, half believing that I dreamed. For beneath, she was arrayed in gossamer silk which more than indicated the perfect lines of her slim shape; wore a jeweled girdle and barbaric ornaments; was a figure fit for the walled gardens of Stamboul—a figure amazing, incomprehensible, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... that the jaws of a crab are metamorphosed legs, so that one crab has more legs and fewer jaws than another, they are far from meaning that the jaws, either during the life of the individual crab or of its progenitors, were really legs. By our theory this term assumes its literal meaning{460}; and this wonderful fact of the complex jaws of an animal retaining numerous characters, which they would probably have retained if they had really been metamorphosed during many successive generations from true legs, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... servent de fondement la religion Chrtienne, Londres (Amsterdam), 1768. Translation of Anthony Collins, A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, London, 1724. Contains also The Scheme of literal Prophecy considered, 1727, also by Collins in answer to the works of Clarke, Sherlock, Chandler, Sykes, and especially to Whiston's Essay towards restoring the text of the Old Testament, one of the thirty-five works directed against ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... Jackson's work clearly suggests that at a very early period in human history, long before the ideas that found expression in the Osiris story had materialized, men entertained in all its literal crudity the belief that the external organ of reproduction from which the child emerged at birth was the actual creator of the child, not merely the giver of birth but ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... of Elia, but it is a kind which he had to find out, by accident and experiment, for himself; and chiefly through letter-writing. 'Us dramatic geniuses,' he speaks of, in a letter to Manning against the taking of all words in a literal sense; and it was this wry dramatic genius in him that was, after all, the quintessential part of himself. 'Truth,' he says in this letter, 'is one and poor, like the cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face that multiplies ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... are wits more than poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical. ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... impression made on a near observer. In politics the Americans are first and foremost jurists, and indeed in a narrower and more literal sense than the English Imperialists, with whom, according to their old traditions, justice only serves as a cloak for their political ambitions. I cannot judge how far the Americans have become full-blooded ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... from her childhood, to pause and hover on the threshold of discovery, thus prolonging a period of entrancing, distracting suspense, withheld her. She dared not ask—in any case dared not ask just yet; and therefore took up his words in their literal application. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Those literal translations were always at hand, and from them he could easily obtain his author's sense with sufficient certainty; and among the readers of Homer the number is very small of those who find much in the Greek ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
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