Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Allegory   Listen
noun
Allegory  n.  (pl. allegories)  
1.
A figurative sentence or discourse, in which the principal subject is described by another subject resembling it in its properties and circumstances. The real subject is thus kept out of view, and we are left to collect the intentions of the writer or speaker by the resemblance of the secondary to the primary subject.
2.
Anything which represents by suggestive resemblance; an emblem.
3.
(Paint. & Sculpt.) A figure representation which has a meaning beyond notion directly conveyed by the object painted or sculptured.
Synonyms: Metaphor; fable. Allegory, Parable. "An allegory differs both from fable and parable, in that the properties of persons are fictitiously represented as attached to things, to which they are as it were transferred.... A figure of Peace and Victory crowning some historical personage is an allegory. "I am the Vine, ye are the branches" () is a spoken allegory. In the parable there is no transference of properties. The parable of the sower () represents all things as according to their proper nature. In the allegory quoted above the properties of the vine and the relation of the branches are transferred to the person of Christ and His apostles and disciples." Note: An allegory is a prolonged metaphor. Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" and Spenser's "Faerie Queene" are celebrated examples of the allegory.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Allegory" Quotes from Famous Books



... of analogy and comparison in their various forms (allegory, parable, etc.)—a natural consequence of a mode of thinking that proceeds by means of symbols, not concepts. It has been said, and rightly, that "the only force that makes the vast field of mysticism fruitful is analogy."[100] Bossuet, a great opponent of mystics, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... as yet half unconscious, Ariadne is already under her fated star: for above is the constellation of Ariadne's crown—the crown with which Bacchus presented his bride. And observe in connection with the astronomical side of the allegory the figure in Bacchus's train with the serpent round him: this is the serpent-bearer (Milton's "Ophiuchus huge") translated to the skies with Bacchus and Ariadne. Notice too another piece of poetry: ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... being so closely interwoven that he could not have had one without the other, and if the objectionable passages in his poetry were expurgated, the life and genius of it would go with them. His story of "The Birth-mark" is an allegory of the same description. He did not agree with Shakspeare, that the best men are moulded out of faults, but believed that as we are in the beginning, so we remain essentially ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns

... companion to the "Pilgrim's Progress." It is intended to bring the ideas of that wonderful allegory within the comprehension of the ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker

... gaining immortality, namely, churning together the sea and the earth. They say the gods had the serpent by the head, and the devils had it by the tail, and out of the churning of the foam came the waters of immortality. The movement we are engaged in, may be typified by the Indian allegory; and out of the commotion we make shall be drawn a new principle which shall be one of immortal growth to all society. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... of his mother's sufferings and death (compare Wordsworth's "A deep distress hath humanised my soul"); each has his education completed by a woman's kiss. All this may seem very profound to the German mind; but to me it is crude, a somewhat too obvious allegory, partly superficial, partly untrue, a survival of windy sentimental mid-century German metaphysics, like the Wagner-Heine form of "The Flying Dutchman" story, and the Wagner form of the "Tannhaeuser" story. However, I am willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses Bruennhilde ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... for rest and recreation. If one has taught school all day, or set type, or managed a home, or read history, or labored in the field, or been shopping, heavy, solid reading may be out of the question, while under such circumstances one would really enjoy a striking allegory or a well-written novel. Or, if one is limited in knowledge, or deficient in literary taste so that he may find no interest in history, science, philosophy, or religion, still he may enjoy thrilling books of travel, of biography, or of entertaining story. In this way all may enjoy ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... chapter one or more allegories; because while it is easy clearly to express abstract thoughts in argumentative prose, whatever emotion those thoughts awaken I have not felt myself able adequately to express except in the other form. (The allegory "Three Dreams in a Desert" which I published about nineteen years ago was taken from this book; and I have felt that perhaps being taken from its context it was not quite clear to every one.) I had also tried throughout to illustrate the subject with ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner

... steps of the vast edifice beetling like a granite crag above them, with the stone groups of an allegory of life-insurance foreshortened in the bas-relief overhead. March absently lifted his eyes to it. It was suddenly strange after so many years' familiarity, and so was the well-known street in its Saturday-evening solitude. He asked himself, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... of a series of smaller processions, which had come together, each from its own metropolitan district. An infusion of allegory became perceptible when patriotic Peckham advanced. So I judged, from the circumstance of Peckham's unfurling a silken banner that fanned heaven and earth with the words, 'The Peckham Lifeboat.' No boat being in attendance, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... is nothing academic to be found in his groups; no mysterious allegory; no theatrical display of the passions; very little of what is more talked of than understood, the beau-ideal. Nevertheless, he is always original, and never vulgar; his drawing is nearly faultless; his compositions are instantly felt and understood by all who have read the Scriptures, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... representatives, influenced, in spite of prejudice and disillusioning experience, by respect for her ideals. There she loomed, seeming monolithic in her solidity, a part of the rock on which she was built, her windows sending out shafts of light into the surrounding darkness, an allegory in stone. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... of my profound respect." Colia joyfully promised to do the errand, but he demanded explanations. "What does the hedgehog mean? What is the meaning of such a present?" Aglaya replied that it was none of his business. "I am sure that there is some allegory about it," Colia persisted. Aglaya grew angry, and called him "a silly boy." "If I did not respect all women in your person," replied Colia, "and if my own principles would permit it, I would soon prove to you, that I know how to answer such an insult!" But, in the end, Colia went off ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... novel—that is, the novella or short pithy story after the manner of the Italians, and the romance of chivalry—appear in an English prose dress.' But the genius of English fiction was still loaded with the chains of allegory and pedantic moralisation; and in the Gesta Romanorum, the most popular collection of English prose stories which had been translated from the Latin at the end of the fifteenth century, 'human ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... and are apt to think that Homer, as we know that Pope, was merely an ingenious fabulist; nay, more than this, that all the nations of past time were ingenious fabulists also, to whom the universe was a lyrical drama, and by whom whatsoever was said about it was merely a witty allegory, or a graceful lie, of which the entire upshot and consummation was a pretty statue in the middle of the court, or at the end ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... yet is made to conform itself in action to real and every-day life, in such a way that the understanding is not shocked, because it reassures itself by referring the supernatural to the regions of allegory. Shall we call this a kind of bastard-allegory? Jericho, when he first appears, is a common man of the common world. He is a money-making, grasping man, yet with a bitter savour of satire about him ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... commenting on Catullus, held in common with Lampridius, Turnebus and Vossius that Lesbia's sparrow was an indecent allegory, like the "grey duck" in Pope's imitation of Chaucer. Sannazarius wrote an Epigram smartly castigating Politian, the closing lines of which were to the effect that the critic would like ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... table had pen and ink and paper upon it, just as if he had stepped out of the room. The queen's apartments were very elegantly plain, and her oratory is as pretty a little thing as you can imagine. In all these apartments are fine pictures, and one is superbly frescoed with allegory and history. The room in which the Queen of England and Prince Albert lodged, in 1845, was shown us, and the state bed was still in it. The dining hall was finely ornamented with carvings, old armor, &c. But a room devoted to antiquities ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various

... read the Fathers of the church, and see upon what arguments they have built the edifice of religion, we are inexpressibly astonished with their credulity or their knavery: but allegory was the rage of that period; the Pagans employed it to explain the actions of their gods, and the Christians acted in the same spirit when they employed it ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... Bridge, and on catching sight of a small patch of rocks near the foot of the Moench, rushed precipitately down to it and partook of our third breakfast. Which things, like most others, might easily be made into an allegory. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various

... red flags. They are the work of aspiring juvenile artists or uneducated men. I allude to art favourable to the Commune, and not that coeval with it, or the vast mass of pictorial unpleasantly born of gallic rage during the Franco-Prussian war, including such designs as the horrible allegory of Bayard, "Sedan, 1870," a large work depicting Napoleon III. drawn in a caleche and four, over legions of his dying soldiers, in the presence of a victorious enemy and the shades of his forefathers', and the well-known subject, so popular in photography, of "The Pillory," Napoleon between King ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... Bunyan wrote the "Pilgrim's Progress;" but pestilent demagogues and mutilated guardians of Eastern zenanas have not always been successful in war, nor the great and useful profession of tinkers written allegory. As men without knowledge have at all times usurped the right to criticise campaigns and commanders, they will doubtless continue to do so despite the protests of professional soldiers, who discharge this duty in a reverent spirit, ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor

... by means of them. In allusions, in similitudes, though no one known to us is happier, many are more copious than Goethe. But we find this faculty of his in the very essence of his intellect; and trace it alike in the quiet cunning epigram, the allegory, the quaint device, reminding us of some Quarles or Bunyan; and in the /Fausts/, the /Tassos/, the /Mignons/, which in their pure and genuine personality, may almost remind us of the /Ariels/ and /Hamlets/ of ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... allegory of Cupid and the arrows has never been improved upon: of Cupid, who should never in the world have been trusted with a weapon, who defies all game laws, who shoots people in the bushes and innocent bystanders generally, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... temptation, and the saying in iii. 15 becomes an anticipation of the final victory of good over evil—a view which probably arose in Jewish circles directly or indirectly affected by the Zoroastrian eschatology. But allegory was far from the thoughts of the original narrators. Another version of the Adam-story is given by Ezekiel (xxviii. 11-19), for underneath the king of Tyre (or perhaps Missor)17 we can trace the majestic figure of the first man. This Adam, indeed, is not like the first man ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... an interpretation not directly suggested by the narrative and the text. Paul himself calls it an allegory; that is, a mystic narrative, or a story with a hidden meaning. But he does not say that the literal text is necessarily the letter that killeth, and the allegory, or hidden meaning, the spirit. But the ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther

... sad. She had held aloof so long in her proud reserve that now there seemed nowhere to turn for the sympathy she longed for, and Rosalind's little allegory, with its simple message of patience and hope, fell ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard

... through every fibre of the heart, like a storm over the chords of an Tolian harp, and extorts from it those magic melodies to which a poor, troubled, and frightened woman listens with remorse and despair; but to which she listens, and with which at last she is intoxicated, for the allegory of Eve is an immortal myth, that repeats itself, through every century and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... poem is an allegory. In reading it try to get a clear picture of the scene described, and at the same time remember that everything in it has a hidden meaning; to understand it fully, you must find out what the pictures represent. The title ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... scene of all represents him the weak slave of his mistress, a quack doctor, and a revivalist—'which things are an allegory.'" ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger

... Coleridge, no doubt, took a fair view of Rossetti's theory when he said: "Rossetti's view of Dante's meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of common sense. How could a poet—and such a poet as Dante—have written the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rossetti? The boundaries between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think, at first reading." It was, doubtless, due to his devotion to studies of the Florentine that Gabriele Rossetti named after him his ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... princess,—a consumptive school-mistress,—a young woman dying of the perfidy of her lover,—a mysterious widow; and I daily expect to hear that a caterpillar which figured as hero in one of my tales was an allegory of myself, and that a cat mentioned in "The New Tobias" is a travesty of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... admirable figure. Her flat was furnished chiefly with books and rich oriental hangings and vast cushions and great bowls of scented flowers. On the mantel-shelf was the crystal that amused her lighter moments and above it hung a circular allegory by Florence Swinstead, very rich in colour, the Awakening of Woman, in a heavy gold frame. Miss Alimony conducted her guest to an armchair, knelt flexibly on the hearthrug before her, took up a small and elegant poker with a brass handle and a spear-shaped service end of ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... brave a face as they could upon it, and hoping for the best. My father assured my mother, though with trembling lip and tearful eye, that "God would temper the wind to the shorn lamb." I smiled at the part I was meant to play in this cheerful allegory, though it seemed to me rather inappropriate, as I had a new ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... from Vergil, and Edward Kirke furnished it with an elaborate prose commentary. Spenser took the same liberties with the pastoral form as did Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a vehicle for satire and allegory, made it carry political and social allusions, and planted in it references to his friends. By its publication Spenser became the first poet of the day. It was followed by some of his finest and most beautiful things—by the Platonic hymns, by the Amoretti, a series of sonnets inspired ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... second is hitting the superior kind of idiot in the eye—inventing a cheap new formula—putting a goblin upside down in one corner, an immoral-looking woman in another, and passing the arrangement off as an allegory. Then up jumps an interpreter and booms you. The third is slowly making your name by the sweat of your brow, and selling your pictures when you are fifty-five to people who never recognized their merit till they had ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston

... as of thought, and changeful Proteus will become a true image of the Poet. The work will manifest a symbolic tendency; it will have an aroma of the wisdom of the East, taught in forms of the parable, the apologue, with hints of allegory. The world, thrown outside of that transparent Greek life, becomes a Fairy Tale, which is here taken up and incorporated into a great poem. We shall be compelled to look thoroughly into these strange shapes of Egypt, and, if possible, reach down to their meaning, for meaning they must have, or ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... some time after he ceased dreaming for he had no immediate memory of this vision. It came back to him later, after he had roused himself and had walked nearly home. No great arrangement was needed to make it seem a striking allegory, and it haunted and oppressed him for the rest of the day. He took refuge, however, in his quickened conviction that the only sound policy in life is to grasp unsparingly at happiness; and it seemed no more than one of the vigorous measures dictated by such a policy ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James

... god of the Sun.' It is not for me to pronounce for or against this notion of Mr. Meyer's. I have not the knowledge which is needed in order to make one's suffrage in these matters of any value; speaking merely as one of the unlearned public, I will confess that allegory seems to me to play, in Mr. Meyer's theories, a somewhat excessive part; Arthur and his Twelve (?) Knights of the Round Table signifying solely the year with its twelve months; Percival and the Miller ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold

... George's Hall and the Chapel; but few of his works are now extant. Hans Jordaens' lively fancy and ready pencil induced his critics to affirm of him, 'that his figures seemed to flow from his hand upon the canvas as from a pot-ladle.' Certainly, from Verrio's fertility in apologue and allegory, and the rapidity of his execution, it might have been said that he spattered out his works with a mop. Nothing daunted him. He would have covered an acre of ceiling with an acre of apotheosis. As Walpole writes, 'His exuberant pencil was ready at pouring out gods, goddesses, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... and final question. And now, to avoid the traditional twenty-four hours' delay which an Indian invariably believes is due his own dignity before replying to a vitally important demand, I boldly cast precedent and custom to the four winds, and once more seized on allegory to aid me in this ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... tree is placed before our eyes, standing in the midst of time, with ages and empires revolving about it, its roots binding and embracing the earth, its top touching the heavens, its branches strong and healthful—bearing foliage and fruits in abundance. But to drop this allegory. "The Lives of the Saints" demonstrate the doctrines of the Church, by laying before us the history of the most precious portion of her children: of her martyrs, her doctors, her bishops; of holy and devout persons of all ranks and conditions; ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... be under the law, do ye not hear the law? For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondmaid was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr

... fantasy George Mac Donald has very few equals, and his rare touch of many aspects of life invariably gives to his stories a deeper meaning of the highest value. His Princess and Goblin exemplifies both gifts. A fine thread of allegory runs through the narrative of the adventures of the young miner, who, amongst other marvellous experiences, finds his way into the caverns of the gnomes, and achieves ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty

... definitions have most signally failed. Scholars have, for example, successfully distinguished parables from myths and fables; but this is laboriously to erect a fence between two flocks that in their nature manifest no tendency to intermingle; whereas, from some other forms of analogy, such as the allegory, the parable cannot be separated by a definition expressed in general terms, which shall be at once universally ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... properly and strictly applicable, not to the Paper, but to the Person bringing or carrying the News? Mercury also is, if I understand it, by a Transmutation of Meaning, from a God turned into a Book—From hence our Club thinks they have not fair Play, in being deny'd the Privilege of making an Allegory as well ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... alchymy, is "The Philosophic Summary," a poem, reprinted in 1735, as an appendix to the third volume of the "Roman de la Rose." He also wrote three treatises upon natural philosophy, and an alchymic allegory, entitled "Le Desir desire." Specimens of his writing, and a fac-simile of the drawings in his book of Abraham, may be seen in Salmon's "Bibliotheque des Philosophes Chimiques." The writer of the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... Saul, and Saul himself, were never what are properly termed Prophets; they might be attacked with those (fits) which the pagans call sacred. You must be asleep when you read, not to see that the temptation of Eve is only an allegory. It is the same with the permission given by God to Satan to tempt Job. Why wish to explain the whole book of Job literally, and as a true history, since its beginning is only a fiction? It is anything but certain that Jesus Christ was transported by the demon to the ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... beautiful evolutions, floating over the sleeping figure of Columbus. The dance they do is meant to typify, or rather to signify,—as a matter of fact we needn't worry much about what it signified. It is an allegory, done in white mosquito netting. That is generally held to be quite enough. Let us ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock

... to tribe—and the constant embellishments the most homely inventions would obtain from the competition of rival poets, rapidly served to swell and enrich these primary treasures of Grecian lore—to deduce a history from an allegory—to establish a creed in a romance. Thus the early mythology of Greece is to be properly considered in its simple and outward interpretations. The Greeks, as yet in their social infancy, regarded the legends of their ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... criticism begins to find the legend doubtful—cannot entirely believe, cannot entirely dismiss the old familiar story,—begins to interpret it as allegory, or to separate the probable incidents from the improbable, receiving the first, rejecting the second. A new rule of faith has been introduced; not what is most captivating and strange, but what best harmonises with the common occurrences of life, is to be the most readily believed. The exuberant ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various

... like Spenser's Red Cross Knight. For the accoutrements and the duties of a knight see Scott's 'Essay on Chivalry' (Miscellaneous Works, vol. vi.). Cp. 'Faery Queene,' Book I, and (especially for the personified abstractions from line 300 onwards) Montgomerie's allegory, 'The ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... weary of the myriad versifiers who strum the so-called lowly and domestic themes. Mr. Dulcet, however, in his superb free verse, has scaled olympian heights, disdaining the customary twaddling topics of the rhymesters. Such an amazing allegory as "On Raiding the Ice Box," which deals, of course, with the experience of a man who attempts to explore the mind of an elderly Boston spinster, marks this powerful poet as a man of unusual satirical and ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley

... different man was John Bunyan, not so influential or learned, but equally worthy. He belonged to the sect of the Baptists, and stands at the head of all unlettered men of genius—the most successful writer of allegory that any age has seen. The Pilgrim's Progress is the most popular religious work ever published, full of genius and beauty, and a complete exhibition of the Calvinistic theology, and the experiences ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... Wit (London, 1730), p. 31. Two months after Harte's Essay appeared Hill's Advice to the Poets, which complements the earlier allegory by urging Pope to shun "vulgar Genii" and emulate "Thy own ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... good fellow when he was sober. But my souls, the life he led that poor girl! Yes, when a man's got that tiger in him, there ought to be some quiet little war round for puttin' him out of his misery." Staniford listened silently, waiting for the mate to make the application of his grim allegory. "I s'pose I'm prejudiced; but I do hate a drunkard; and when I see one of 'em makin' up to a girl, I want to go to her, and tell her she'd better take a real tiger out ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... interest; because it was no outcome of feudalism or ecclesiasticism; because it has no tincture of chivalrous or mystic piety; because it implies no metaphysical determination; because it is pagan in the sense of being natural; because it is devoid of allegory, and, finally, ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various

... suggestion, is the finest scientific work which has been done in literature. Into this period comes his one buoyant play, An Enemy of the People, his rebound against the traditional hypocrisy which had attacked Ghosts for its telling of unseasonable truths; it is an allegory, in the form of journalism, or journalism in the form of allegory, and is the 'apology' of the man of science for his mission. Every play is a dissection, or a vivisection rather; for these people who suffer so helplessly, and are shown us so calmly in their agonies, are terribly alive. A Doll's ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... Memoirs of Marie Mushenough VII. Hannah of the Highlands: or, The Laird of Loch Aucherlocherty VIII. Soaked in Seaweed: or, Upset in the Ocean IX. Caroline's Christmas: or, The Inexplicable Infant X. The Man in Asbestos: an Allegory ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... have read any romance or poetry, antient or modern, must have been informed that love hath wings: by which they are not to understand, as some young ladies by mistake have done, that a lover can fly; the writers, by this ingenious allegory, intending to insinuate no more than that lovers do not march like horse-guards; in short, that they put the best leg foremost; which our lusty youth, who could walk with any man, did so heartily on this occasion, that within four hours he reached a famous house of hospitality well known ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding

... knit his brows; Shakib shakes his head, biting his nether lip; and here and there in the audience is heard a murmur about retrogression and reaction. Khalid proceeds with his allegory of the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... primitive cults of India gave it? Did it enunciate an oblation of virginity to the senile Herod, an exchange of blood, an impure and voluntary wound, offered under the express stipulation of a monstrous sin? Or did it represent the allegory of fecundity, the Hindoo myth of life, an existence held between the hands of woman, distorted and trampled by the palpitant hands of man whom a fit of madness seizes, seduced by a convulsion ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... of the year with her husband in Hades, though for the remainder of the year she is permitted to dwell with Ceres and the gods. This is one of the very few mythological fables of Greece which can be safely interpreted into an allegory. Proserpine denotes the seed-corn one-third of the year below the earth; two-thirds (that is, dating from the appearance of the ear) above it. Schiller has treated this story with admirable and artistic beauty; and, by an alteration in its symbolical character ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... Spenser:—Shakspeare is never coloured by the customs of his age; what appears of contemporary character in him is merely negative; it is just not something else. He has none of the fictitious realities of the classics, none of the grotesquenesses of chivalry, none of the allegory of the middle ages; there is no sectarianism either of politics or religion, no miser, no witch,—no common witch,—no astrology—nothing impermanent of however long duration; but he stands like the yew tree in Lorton vale, which has known so many ages that it belongs to none in particular; a living ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... this symbolism, of all Christian symbolism, turns on the parabolic meaning in the scheme of Creation. The early writers were far less concerned with recording the plain objective facts of history, than in pursuing the allegory and the love of the marvellous, and showing all those characteristics of what we now term an unscientific ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath

... consciously checked rather than early exhausted, towards the weird and fanciful. In Childe Roland all this latent sensibility receives full and final expression. The poem is very generally supposed to be an allegory, and a number of ingenious interpretations have been suggested, and the "Dark Tower" has been defined as Love, Life, Death and Truth. But, as a matter of fact, Browning, in writing it, had no allegorical intention ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... of allegory this story was set out it is hard to say—Tennyson himself could not in later years be induced to define his purpose—but it seems certain that many of the characters are intended to symbolize higher and lower ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... Athene, but likewise those of human kings and heroes—such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hektor—into various combinations and physical agencies, and treated the adventures ascribed to them as natural facts hidden under a thin veil of allegory. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller

... town which tradition said had been built by Gregory himself. He had lost his wife and one of his children on the way from Fulneck; he had lost his post as teacher and minister; and now, for the sake of his suffering Brethren, he wrote his beautiful classical allegory, "The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart."55 For historical purposes this book is of surpassing value. It is a revelation. It is a picture both of the horrors of the time and of the deep religious life of the Brethren. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... man." Many can remember how, in the eighties, Madame Blavatsky took advantage of our curiosity regarding such with air-borne letters from Mahatmas in Thibet. Again Ammonius, we read, "turned the whole history of the pagan gods into allegory." There we have the Neo-Krishnaites of to-day. "He acknowledged that Christ was an extraordinary man, the friend of God, and an admirable Theurgus." There we have the stand point of the educated Indians who have come under Christ's spell. For two centuries ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... imagination, is satisfactory to the reader because the author is true to his conception, and it is interesting as a curious allegorical and humorous illustration of the ruinous character in human affairs of extreme unselfishness. There is the same sort of truthfulness in Hawthorne's allegory of "The Celestial Railway," in Froude's "On a Siding at a Railway Station," and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... labor or restraint, moves on, free and unembarrassed." It may be seen that the student had the honor to study under Mathurin Cordier and to attend the lectures of Alciati; but, after all, his book is but a defective allegory; for what reader could have divined that the writer designed to represent Francis I, under the name of Nero, as addressed by the Cordovan? The treatise could produce no sensation, and, like the work of Seneca, must be shipwrecked in that sea of the passions which, at the two ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... fairy-tales Love has had a way of coming in the disguise of Duty. What is the story of Beauty and the Beast but an allegory of true love? We take this maid to be our wedded wife, for her sake it perhaps seems at the time. She is sweet and beautiful and to be desired; but, all the same, we had rather shake the loose leg of ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... strange Eastern allegory of a man wandering in the desert; he draws near to a grove of trees, when he suddenly becomes aware that there is a lion on his track, hurrying and bounding along on the scent of his steps. The man flees for safety into the grove; he sees there a roughly built water-tank of stone, excavated ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the Jacobite. There is the lesson of "Cinderella," which is the same as that of the Magnificat— EXALTAVIT HUMILES. There is the great lesson of "Beauty and the Beast"; that a thing must be loved BEFORE it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the "Sleeping Beauty," which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep. But I am not concerned with any of ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... alone proceed. If fashionable grown, and fond of power, With humorous Scots let them disport their hour, 120 Let them dance, fairy like, round Ossian's tomb; Let them forge lies and histories for Hume; Let them with Home, the very prince of verse, Make something like a tragedy in Erse; Under dark Allegory's flimsy veil, Let them, with Ogilvie,[335] spin out a tale Of rueful length; let them plain things obscure, Debase what's truly rich, and what is poor Make poorer still by jargon most uncouth; With every pert, prim prettiness of youth, 130 Born of false taste, with Fancy ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... instruments. It is a Force and a Power; and shame upon it, if it did not exert itself, and, if need be, sacrifice its children in the cause of humanity, as Abraham was ready to offer up Isaac on the altar of sacrifice. It will not forget that noble allegory of Curtius leaping, all in armor, into the great yawning gulf that opened to swallow Rome. It will TRY. It shall not be its fault if the day never comes when man will no longer have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations with the armed hand, an interruption ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... the fourteenth century there had come into existence plays of which all the characters were of this type. These, however, were probably not direct descendants of the miracles; but rather the application of the newly learned dramatic methods to another sort of subject matter, the allegory, a literary type much used by poets and preachers of the time. Such plays were called 'moral plays' or 'moralities.' Unlike the miracle plays, these remained independent of each other, and showed no tendency to grow together ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken

... his writings something of the high-bred air that the short upper-lip gives to the human countenance. In his earlier poems he was under the influence of the Provencal Troubadours, and in his "Flower and the Leaf," and other works of a similar class, he riots in allegory; he represents the cardinal virtues walking about in human shape; his forests are full of beautiful ladies with coronals on their heads; courts of love are held beneath the spreading elm, and metaphysical ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... Belphoebe; the story of Florimel and the Witch's son; the Gardens of Adonis, and the Bower of Bliss; the Mask of Cupid; and Colin Clout's vision, in the last book. But some people will say that all this may be very fine, but that they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it would bite them: they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... that it is not a single individual who is spoken of. In ver. 3, the subject is called [Hebrew: aiw]; in vers. 10 and 12 a soul is ascribed to Him; grave and death are used so as to imply a subject in the Singular. Scripture never leaves any thing to be guessed. If we had an allegory before us, distinct hints as to the interpretation would certainly [Pg 335] not be wanting. It is, e.g., quite different in those passages where the Prophet designates Israel by the name of the Servant ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... misplaced at the beginning. Epistle dedicatory to Queen Elizabeth signed by the translator. 'A preface, or rather a briefe apologie of poetrie.' Address to the reader signed Io. Har. At the end, 'Allegory of the Orlando Furioso,' Life of Ariosto by John Harington, alphabetical table of contents, table of principal tales and list of errata. Inserted at the beginning is a large engraved portrait of Queen Elizabeth, 'Printed ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg

... facts, if facts they be, remain to be dealt with. And if at last we concede the ultramundane origin of these manifestations, whether as objective reality or only as truth-teaching allegory, what a field is opened to our speculations regarding the realms of spirit and the possible punishments there in store for those who, by degrading their natures in this world, may have rendered themselves unfit for happiness in the next,—and who, perhaps, still attracted to earth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... beauty and the portrait, the Impressionist movement is based upon the old French masters, principally upon Chardin, Watteau, Latour, Largilliere, Fragonard, Debucourt, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, and Eisen. It has resolutely held aloof from mythology, academic allegory, historical painting, and from the neo-Greek elements of Classicism as well as from the German and Spanish elements of Romanticism. This reactionary movement is therefore entirely French, and surely if it deserves reproach, the one ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair

... seen in the dining-room at the Placer Hotel, but in the parquet were some fashionable costumes and cultivated faces. Mr. Hopkins was not altogether so sure that Jim had been "only gassing." But the gorgeous drop curtain, representing an allegory of Californian prosperity and abundance, presently uprolled upon a scene of Western life almost as striking in its glaring unreality. From a rose-clad English cottage in a subtropical landscape skipped "Rosalie, the Prairie Flower." The briefest of skirts, ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... that he sent his Son, the Christ, to bring it light and life. If that is true how can we avoid the conclusion that He, or his predecessors, must have come many a time before? The belief that He came but once is consistent only with the erroneous notion that Genesis is history instead of allegory, and that the earth is about six thousand years old! Science has not determined its age but we know that it is very old, indeed. Many eminent scientists have made rough estimates, taking into consideration all that we have ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers

... was this girl? Where did she go to? Why so much talk about trees? "I take it he wrote it when feeling bad," he murmured, and let it fall into the gutter. It fell face downwards, and on the back he saw a neat little resume in Miss Pembroke's handwriting, intended for such as him. "Allegory. Man modern civilization (in bad sense). Girl getting ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... "Which things are an allegory," he continued. "I felt it so at the time. Yes, I had half a mind to answer 'Backward' and give up my berth in this ship. Then I looked at you again, and something inside of me said 'Forward.' So ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard

... King," a small volume—an allegory—published in 1910, to me, is one of the most delightful of Mr. Wright's books. Possibly, it has an added charm because of certain peculiar conditions. It was written in Redlands, California, during the winter of 1909-10, although the notion ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright

... those wild gardens of the neighboring woods where we children roamed at will, shouting rapturously over the finding of a bed of scentless blue violets or delicate anemones that withered and were thrown away before we reached home,—an allegory, alas! of our ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall

... as Steele warmly declared, a "thousand beauties." Every part is splendid; there is great luxuriance of ornaments; the original vision of Chaucer was never denied to be much improved; the allegory is very skilfully continued, the imagery is properly selected, and learnedly displayed; yet, with all this comprehension of excellence, as its scene is laid in remote ages, and its sentiments, if the concluding paragraph be excepted, have little relation to general ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson

... maintained principle. It is a set of cameos, loosely strung upon a thread, a structure with countless beautiful parts, which do not however cohere into any symmetrical whole. The poems are cast in many forms; allegory, narrative, vision, didactic poetry, lyric poetry, all find a place. There is little history, but much legend, some fiction, and a good deal of mythology. The series was not designed as a whole. La ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo

... four sermons, preached at Kensington, on "The Dead and Killing Letter, and the Spirit and the Life." Here he insists, often in quaint and curious phrases, that the Old Testament, "from the first of Genesis to the last of the Prophets," is an allegory, "woven like a beautiful tapestry" to picture forth to the eye a history whose real meaning is to be found within the soul; if you dwell upon it only as picture, only as history, it is a letter that kills; if you see your own selves in it and by ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... Celebrated Trials, although it opens with the trial of Algernon Sidney, is made up largely of crime of the more ordinary type, and this sordid note continues through the three final volumes. I have said that Faustus is an allegory of 'man's inhumanity to man.' That is emphatically, in more realistic form, the distinguishing feature of Celebrated Trials. Amid these records of savagery, it is a positive relief to come across such a trial as that of ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... helped to bring allegories into vogue; commentators had early explained the New Testament by the Old, one being an allegory of the other: the adventure of Jonah and the whale was an allegory of the resurrection; the Bestiaries were series of allegories; the litanies of the Virgin lists of symbols. The methods of pious authors were adopted by worldly ones; Love had his religion, his allegories, his litanies, not to ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... day, conversing with Vane, "has two faults,—we are too subtle and too homely. We do not speak enough to the broad comprehension of mankind; we are forever making abstract qualities of flesh and blood. Our critics have turned your 'Hamlet' into an allegory; they will not even allow Shakspeare to paint mankind, but insist on his embodying qualities. They turn poetry into metaphysics, and truth seems to them shallow, unless an allegory, which is false, can be seen at the bottom. Again, too, ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the prophets that foretold it. Gloomy, fanatic, implacable and, it may be, mad, yet inspired at least by genius which itself, while madness, is a madness wholly divine, they heralded the future, they established the past. Abraham they drew from allegory, Moses from myth. They made them live, and so immortally that one survives in Islam, the other in words that are a law of ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... many heroes of adventure, before him and after him, have made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie

... taking things from their original, he considereth the causes creative of such authors—namely, dulness and poverty; the one born with them, the other contracted by neglect of their proper talents, through self-conceit of greater abilities. This truth he wrappeth in an allegory[193] (as the construction of epic poesy requireth), and feigns that one of these goddesses had taken up her abode with the other, and that they jointly inspired all such writers and such works. He proceedeth ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... was—Fight fair; fall soft; know when you've got enough; and don't cry out when you've got it: but just go home; train again; and say—better luck next fight." And so old Mark's sermon ended (as most of them did) in somewhat Socratic allegory, savouring rather of the market than of the study; but Elsley understood him, and looked up with ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... my design in the following poem to celebrate by an allegory that immortality which Shakspeare has conferred on the fairy mythology by his Midsummer Night's Dream. But for him, those pretty children of our childhood would leave barely their names to our maturer years; they belong, as the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... very blood. He understood, because he felt, the power of the ocean tides; and, flitting to and fro through the tenderer regions of his extended Self, danced the fragrance of all the wild flowers that ever blew. That strange allegory of man, the microcosm, and earth, the macrocosm, became a sudden blazing reality. The feverish distress, unrest, and vanity of modern life was due to the distance men had traveled from the soul of the world, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... different books embraced in the Holy Bible, Dr. Buckner, who is a student of the Bible said, "I believe almost every story in the Bible is an allegory, composed to illustrate some fundemental truth that could otherwise never have been clearly presented only through ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... Bernini in contrast with Angelo! How minutely expressive are the terra-cotta images of Spain! What a climax of absurdity teases the eye in the monstrosities in stone which draw travellers in Sicily to the eccentric nobleman's villa, near Palermo! Who does not shrink from the French allegory and horrible melodrama of Roubillac's monument to Miss Nightingale, in Westminster Abbey? How like Horace Walpole to dote on Ann Conway's canine groups! We actually feel sleepy, as we examine the little black marble Somnus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... of life—life coming always as relief or recovery, and always in strong contrast with the rough-hewn mass in which it is kindled—is in various ways the motive of all his work, whether its immediate subject be Pagan or Christian, legend or allegory; and this, although at least one-half of his work was designed for the adornment of tombs—the tomb of Julius, the tombs of the Medici. Not the Judgment but the Resurrection is the real subject ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... multitude, who lack the leisure and the capacity for philosophical thought, takes the place of the former,—as the metaphysics of the people, clothes the same fundamental truths which the philosopher offers in conceptual form and supports by rational grounds in the garb of myth and allegory, and places them under the protection of an external authority. When this character of religion is overlooked, and that which is intended to be symbolical is taken for literal truth (it is not the supernaturalists alone who start with this unjust ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... me, Jesus Christ, that is to say the Man-God of the Christians, copy of the Avatars of all countries, of the Hindu Chrishna as of the Egyptian Horus, was never a historical personage." Hence the story of His life was merely an allegory founded on the existence of "a personage named Jehoshua born at Lud." But elsewhere she asserted that Jesus may have lived during the Christian era or a century earlier "as the Sepher Toldoth Jehoshua indicates" (my italics). And Madame Blavatsky went on to say of the savants who deny the ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... had found expression almost exclusively in the crude though spirited historical and romantic ballads of anonymous origin: Iliads without a Homer, as Lope de Vega called them. The first to attempt a reform in Castilian verse was the Marquis of Villena (died 1434), who introduced the allegory and a tendency to imitate classical models; and although he himself left nothing of consequence, his influence is plainly revealed in the works of his far greater pupils and successors, the Marquis of Santillana and Juan de Mena. Strangely enough, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... words." Exactly. Must get HARCOURT to popularise these. Applied to AGAMEMNON. Why not to "strong men" who live after AGAMEMNON? "Evidence from extraneous sources of connection between title of Anax andron and great Egyptian Empire." Aha! I may yet have to play the Anax andron in Egypt as before. Allegory—I mean Anax andron on banks of Nile! Good—and not a Malapropism, whatever WOLSELEY may say. "Title of Anax andron descendible" (good word, "descendible") "from father to son, and accorded in the poems to personages altogether secondary, viz., ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various

... odour of true sanctity belongs only to the "Roman" of William of Lorris, which dates from the death of Queen Blanche and of all good things, about 1250; a short allegory of courteous love in forty-six hundred and seventy lines. To modern taste, an allegory of forty-six hundred and seventy lines seems to be not so short as it might be; but the fourteenth century found five thousand verses totally inadequate to the subject, and, about ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... relentless audacity, often with a touch of grotesque exaggeration, but always with almost wearying minuteness. Sometimes this great writer finds that a description of actuality fails to give the true spiritual key to a situation, and he overflows into allegory, or Swendenborgian mysticism, just as Bastien-Lepage resorts to a coating of actual gilt, in depicting that radiant light in his Jeanne d'Arc which flat pigment ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden

... allegory, were at first companions, and in the beginning of their journey inseparably kept together. But their union was soon found to be disagreeable and inconvenient to both; guilt gave shame frequent uneasiness, and shame often betrayed the secret conspiracies of guilt. After long disagreeement, ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith

... "Songs of Innocence," was succeeded by "Songs of Experience," subsequently bound in one volume. Then came the book of "Thel," an allegory, wherein Thel, beautiful daughter of the Seraphim, laments the shortness of her life down by the River of Adona, and is answered by the Lily of the Valley, the Little Cloud, the Lowly Worm, and the Clod of Clay; the burden of whose ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... clergy (exemptions from regular taxes and benefit of the clergy).... Christianity becomes a monopoly defended by the state.... Psychological power and attraction in the elaborate symbolism and ritual of the church.... Allegory put an end to all literary criticism.... Flourishing of the miraculous; any unusual or startling occurrence attributed to the intervention of either God or the Devil.... Older conceptions of disease as caused by the Devil.... Our legal expression 'act of ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski

... realises to the full the contrast between the young, fragile heads of his girl-saints and the dark, venerable countenances of the old men. The head of S. Lucy, detaching itself like a flower upon its stem, reminds us of the type which we saw in his Watcher in the sacred allegory of the Uffizi. The arched, dome-like niche opens on a distance bathed in golden light. Bellini keeps the traditions of the old hieratic art, but he has grasped a new perfection of feeling and atmosphere. Who the saints are ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... numerous family of romantic ballads followed, all glowing with heroic ardor. As another epoch drew near, the lyric form began to predominate, in which, however, the warm expressions of the Spanish heart were restricted by a fondness for conceit and allegory. The rudiments of the drama, religious, pastoral, and satiric, soon followed, marked by many traits of original thought and talent. Thus the course of Spanish literature proceeded, animated and controlled by the national character, to the end of the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... "the story seems touched with quite barbarous elements, probably Negro. Originally, though, I think there was really a hagiological story about some hermit, though some of the higher critics say St. Securis never existed, but was only an allegory of arboriculture, since his name is the Latin for ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton

... identical, and help to carry over into a story a singing quality. Ballad measures are an obvious example. Walter Scott's facile couplets were equally effective for story and for song. Many minor species of narrative poetry, like verse satire and allegory, are often composed in traditional lyric patterns. Even blank verse, admirably suited as it is for story-telling purposes, yields in its varieties of cadence many a bar of music long associated with lyric emotion. Certainly the blank verse of Wordsworth's "Michael" is far ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... a deep moral earnestness. The English nation has an inestimable possession in these works of a moral and religious grandeur, and a simple view of nature, which happily expressed in single stanzas stamp themselves on every man's memory. Spenser has assigned to allegory, as a style, a larger sphere than perhaps belongs to it, and one allegory is always interweaving itself with another; the heroes whom he takes from the old romances become to him representatives of the different virtues, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... be. She shall not suck me, I believe, in vain, nor be destitute of her allowance; there shall her justum both in peck and lippy be furnished to the full eternally. You expound this passage allegorically, and interpret it to theft and larceny. I love the exposition, and the allegory pleaseth me; but not according to the sense whereto you stretch it. It may be that the sincerity of the affection which you bear me moveth you to harbour in your breast those refractory thoughts concerning me, with a suspicion of my adversity to come. We have this ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... The allegory by which Gareth's four opponents are made to form a sort of stumbling succession representing Morn, Noon, Evening, and Night or Death, is hardly worth the introduction, but it is not insisted upon: the last of these knights, besieging Castle Perilous in a skull helmet, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various

... fruits of a soil that had been fattened with human blood. The whole landscape, which, seen by a favoring light, and in a genial temperature, had been found so lovely, appeared now like some pictured allegory of life, in which objects were arrayed in their harshest but truest colors, and without ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper

... imprint their mark on the author of Eros in Eruption; and so he has given us a real epic, whose very title, Ad Astra, is symbolic of the high altitudes in which he so triumphantly and so securely navigates. Outwardly it is a story of the War, but there is little difficulty in probing the allegory; and those who follow the hero's vicissitudes as a private in the Gasoliers, right through to his victorious advancement to the rank of Acting Lance-Corporal, unpaid (and there is a symbolism even in the "unpaid"), ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various

... story: That what happens in life does not matter so much as the way you take it. The Tin Soldier always remained steadfast, no matter what happened. Kipling's Elephant's Child is more charming than ever when looked at from the standpoint of its philosophy. It might be interpreted as an allegory answering the question, "How should one get experience?" a theme which cannot be said to lack universal appeal. The Ugly Duckling is full of sayings of philosophy that contribute to its complete message. The Cat and the Hen to whom the duckling ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... stood out in all the contrast of its new tenderness and delicacy. The situation is indeed a very simple one, and not peculiar to the Middle Ages. Any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin by being an idealization of adultery.' (C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London, ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer

... handle of the fan (in allegory), is occupied by Festival Hall and on either side stretches out the beautiful Collonnade of States with its lovely and heroic female wimmen settin' up there as if sort o' takin' care of the hull concern. I spoke to Blandina about it, how pleased ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley

... follows the rape of his Priest's Daughter, Chryseis. When we consider the dependence of the human constitution upon the temperate, or intemperate influence of the Sun, the avenging bow of Phoebus appears an obvious allegory;—and since it is in the hours of health that the fine Arts are sought and cultivated, the Sun, under the name of Phoebus, Apollo, &c. is with equal propriety of fable, supposed their Patron, as well as the Avenger of crimes by the ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward

... will, I am apprehensive, appear dim and fantastic, but in reading Bartram's Travels I could not help transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of Wordsworth's intellect and genius.—"The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... her nudity with the propriety of her attitudes and the ingenuousness of her expressions she was the incarnation, through mere chance and caprice, of a gem of art, an allegory of Innocence in the style of Allegrain or Clodion. And the great lines of the comedy rang out with delicious purity from this animated figurine. Robert, enthralled in spite of himself, suffered her to go on to the very end. What entertained him above all was that the most public of all things, ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France

... the emotional temperament. Chiron is impressive on the vanity of fruition (Dialogues of the Dead, 26). And the figuring of Truth as 'the shadowy creature with the indefinite complexion' (The Fisher, 16) is only one example of Lucian's felicity in allegory. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... "It's a allegory, you must know," he said, on first introducing it, "which means a story intended to teach some good lesson—a story which says one thing and ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne

... Such is the interpretation given by Lord Bacon. To which of the two gigantic intellects, the poet's or philosophic commentator's, the allegory belongs, I shall not presume to decide. Its extraordinary beauty and appropriateness remains the same ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... of Mr. Hammond, had chosen a certain series of incidents relating to early French-Canadian history, and it began with an allegory of the bringing of the Christian religion to the Indians by the first French priests. This allegory included the landing of the French upon the shore of a rocky island where they were met by the wondering Indians, and Mr. Hooley's assistant had chosen the spot for this scene to be "shot," not far ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson

... that the sign by which his human qualities are denoted is the cross.' Note here, too, the mystic history of Osiris, how he put on death; how he lay in the grave; and how, thus fulfilling a solemn atonement, he rose again from the dead! In these stories we but design to paint an allegory from the operations of nature and the evolutions of the eternal heavens. But the allegory unknown, the types themselves have furnished to credulous nations the materials of many creeds. They have travelled to the vast plains of India; they have mixed ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... visited him. More on this topic may be found in the Koran, chap. xii. The amours of Joseph and Zulieka, as told by the glib tongue of tradition, fitly find their consummation in marriage, and certain Moslems affect to see in all this an allegorical type of Divine love, an allegory which some other divines find in the ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various

... assertion in Pycroft's "Course of English Reading," that he, Landor, failed to appreciate Chaucer, the old man, much vexed, refuted such a falsehood, saying: "On the contrary, I am a great admirer of his. I am extremely fond of the 'Canterbury Tales.' I much prefer Chaucer to Spenser; for allegory, when spun out, is unendurable." It is strange that a man apparently so well read as Mr. Pycroft should have so unjustly interpreted Landor, when it needed but a passing reference to the Conversations to disprove ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... much of the caricature is admirable, especially in the detail of witty and trenchantly satirical dialogue, the central idea of a fountain of self-love is not very well carried out, and the persons revert at times to abstractions, the action to allegory. It adds to our wonder that this difficult drama should have been acted by the Children of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel, among them Nathaniel Field with whom Jonson read Horace and Martial, and whom he taught later how to make plays. Another ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson

... redeemed out of the cold allegoric sisterhood who have generally no merit in chastity, being really without sex. I somewhat question whether it is quite the thing, however, to make a genuine woman out of an allegory we ask, Who is to wed this lovely virgin? and we are not satisfied to banish her into the realm of chilly thought. But I liked the statue, and all the better for what I criticise, and was sorry to see the huge ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... deity easily expelled his avowed enemies from the heart of Jones, he found it more difficult to supplant the garrison which he himself had placed there. To lay aside all allegory, the concern for what must become of poor Molly greatly disturbed and perplexed the mind of the worthy youth. The superior merit of Sophia totally eclipsed, or rather extinguished, all the beauties of the poor girl; but compassion instead ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... all jest and allegory; but it was all true, in the moral of the fable, as you shall hear in its place. We were very merry the rest of the day, but without any noise or clutter; for he brought not one of his acquaintance or friends, either ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe

... Energy is a monumental aquatic composition expressing in exuberant allegory the triumph of Energy, the Lord of the Isthmian Way. It is the central sculptural feature of the South Garden, occupying the great quatrefoil pool in front of the tower. The theme is Energy, the Conqueror - the Over ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James

... as a mere wish-fulfilment, is plainly a successful allegory. While the action of the principal cue or immediate stimulus had served to evoke the apperception-mass or context out of which this wish-phantasy was constructed, at the same moment, there was an ulterior influence at work, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... remembrance of the Creator before that future comes. So much is clear, but the question of the precise meaning of these verses is much too large for discussion here. The older explanation takes them for an allegory representing the decay of bodily and mental powers in old age, whilst others think that in them the advance of death is presented under the image of an approaching storm. Wright, in his valuable commentary, regards the description of the gradual waning away of life in old age, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren



Words linked to "Allegory" :   Paschal Lamb, fasces, maple-leaf, hammer and sickle, parable, red flag, swastika, Star of David, allegorise, cupid, apologue, donkey, Mogen David, expressive style, Hakenkreuz, eagle, symbolic representation, Pilgrim's Progress, fable, symbolization, allegorical, Magen David, dove, medallion, symbol, spread eagle, allegoric, badge, emblem



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com