"Fanciful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them, (as one may express it,) belting them, and overlooking them, from a varying distance of two and three furlongs, so as oftentimes to keep the winds at a distance. But, however caused and supported, the silence of these fanciful lawns and lawny chambers is oftentimes oppressive in the depth of summer to people unfamiliar with solitudes, either mountainous or sylvan; and many would be apt to suppose that the villa, to which these pretty shrubberies form the chief dependencies, must be untenanted. But ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... sufficient testimony to its horrid dominion. The works of the great dramatists, the writings of men of every class, continually suppose the universal power and horror of witchcraft. Internal evidence is abundant. The witches of Macbeth are no fanciful creation, and Shakspeare's representation of La Pucelle's fate is nothing more than a copy from life. What the vulgar superstition must have been may be easily conceived when men of the greatest genius or learning credited the possibility, ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... rather long features, a pointed chin, and a very pure white complexion, with hardly a tinge of colour; and, as she ran forward to kiss her little brown-faced cousins, she was a great contrast to them in every way. Her dress, which was prettily made and fanciful, and her gleaming bronze shoes added to this; for Dennis and his sister seldom wore anything but serge or holland, and their boots were of strong country make, which made their feet ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... UTO'PIAN, ideal, fanciful, chimerical: from "Utopia"—an imaginary island, represented by Sir Thomas More, in a work called "Utopia," as enjoying the greatest perfection in politics ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... white earth, and his body with yellow. Then, down each lower limb, behind, a palm-tree was drawn in red—the roots beginning at his heels, and the branches above spreading out on his calves. Various fanciful devices were drawn on his breast and arms, and some striking circles on his back. Last of all, one-half of his face was painted red, and the other half black, with a stripe of white extending from the root of his hair down to the point of his nose. It is needless to say that during the process ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... the eggs into a well-buttered mould or cup, set upon a trivet in a dish of hot water, and cook until firm, either upon the back of the range or in the oven, and without letting the water boil. Turn from the mould, cut into slices, and then into fanciful shapes; or ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... the day in fanciful projects of beneficence; she determined to wander with her romantic new ally whither-so-ever he would lead her, and to spare neither fortune, time, nor trouble, in seeking and relieving the distressed. Not all her attempted philosophy ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... was conveyed to the British Hotel at Cairo, the Englishman's home in Egypt, conducted by Mr Shepherd, the Englishman's friend in the East. The approach to Grand Cairo is charming and cheering, and altogether as fanciful as if I had been carried with Aladin's lamp in my hand through a fairy region to one of the palaces mentioned in the Arabian Nights of Entertainment. I passed along a broad level path, full of life and fancy, amid groves and gardens, and villas all glittering in grandeur. At ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... enabled to trace the growth of the style that culminated in the massive designs that derived their name from the epoch in which they were in favour. Tudor crewel work, was chiefly done in broad outline of a more or less fanciful nature as regards the stitching, witness the sections of that Tudor piece which is shewn in our ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... "Don't be fanciful, Miss Saunders. You will have to look deeper than that for the spell which has been cast over my wife. Olympia afraid of creaks and groans? Olympia seeing sights? She's much too practical by nature, Miss Saunders, to say nothing of the fact that she would certainly ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... ill-mannered, or vicious, or dull—indeed, he could be remarkably interesting. But I received the impression that there could be no human creature whom he would not sacrifice in the pursuit of his schemes, in his task of imposing himself and his will upon the world. Perhaps that was fanciful, but I think not altogether so. However, the point is that Mabel, I am sorry to say, was very unhappy. I am nearly twice your age, my dear boy, though you always so kindly try to make me feel as if we were contemporaries—I am getting to be an old man, and a great many ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... the want of regular beauty, the essential points of eyes as bright as diamonds, and teeth as white as pearls, did not escape the Duke of Buckingham, a professed connoisseur in female charms. In a word, the fanciful and singular female who thus unexpectedly produced herself before him, had one of those faces which are never seen without making an impression; which, when removed, are long after remembered; and for which, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... growing very fanciful," she said, "which is a sign, if not a bad one. Your metaphors, too, are so farfetched and extravagant as to indicate the earliest stages of the divine madness. Do you mean to suggest that Grace will ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... open in front, with cotton kerchiefs tied sailor-fashion loosely round their swarthy necks. A scarlet worsted belt strapped each man's coat tightly to his body, and Indian moccasins defended their feet. Their head-dresses were as various as fanciful— some wore caps of coarse cloth; others coloured handkerchiefs, twisted turban-fashion round their heads; and one or two, who might be looked upon as voyageur-fops, sported tall black hats, covered so plenteously with bullion tassels and feathers ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... a single graceful curved stem arises each spring, withers after fruiting, and leaves a round scar, whose outlines suggested to the fanciful man who named the genus the seal of Israel's wise king. Thus one may know the age of a root by its seals, as one tells that of a tree by the rings ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... partisans of Helvetius and Holbach. These were the most logical. Beside them came the sentimentalists, the worshipers of Rousseau. They were not a whit less dogmatic than the others, but their dogmatism took more fanciful and less consistent forms. They believed in their ideal republics or their social compacts with a religious faith. Some of them were ready to persecute others and to die themselves for their chimeras, and subsequently ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... be more ready, perhaps, to contemplate becoming colonists, were it not for that dreaded crossing of the sea which must necessarily be their first step. Their terrors may be natural enough, but they are more fanciful than real; and once overcome, the emigrant ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... accompanied the Procuratessa to Venice. Had he been a traveller from beyond the Alps he could hardly have been more unprepared for the spectacle that awaited him. In aspect and customs Venice differed almost as much from other Italian cities as from those of the rest of Europe. From the fanciful stone embroidery of her churches and palaces to a hundred singularities in dress and manners—the full-bottomed wigs and long gowns of the nobles, the black mantles and head-draperies of the ladies, the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... were positively disastrous—injuring her naturally healthy and vigorous mind by leading her to indulge in all manner of dreamy and fanciful interpretations of Scripture, which any but the most narrow literalist would feel at once to be untenable. Thus several times she expressed to us her conviction that my brother and myself were to be the two witnesses mentioned in the eleventh chapter of the Book ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... the statue-room. Yonder is Jouffley's "Jeune Fille confiant son premier secret a Venus." Charming, charming! It is from the exhibition of this year only; and I think the best sculpture in the gallery—pretty, fanciful, naive; admirable in workmanship and imitation of Nature. I have seldom seen flesh better represented in marble. Examine, also, Jaley's "Pudeur," Jacquot's "Nymph," and Rude's "Boy with the Tortoise." These are not very exalted subjects, or what are ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... would only give a forced laugh, and say that his "Wee Wifie was becoming more fanciful than ever, and that he should not know what to do with her if she went on like this;" and then, kissing her hastily, and unloosening the little hands from his neck, he would go out of the ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the hues of the heavens had often changed. In place of the brightness, which had dazzled the eye, a gray and more sober light had succeeded, and as the setting lost its brilliancy, the proportions of the fanciful form became less exaggerated, and finally distinct. Ashamed to hesitate, now that the truth was no longer doubtful, the leader of the party resumed his journey, using the precaution, as he ascended the slight acclivity, to release his own rifle ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the action would have been encumbered or diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-contemplative would have given us too many remarks; the over-lyrical, a style too much carried away; the over-fanciful, conceits and too many similes; the unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not even those. We should have been told nothing of the 'grey chin', of the house hearing them as they moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the old man aside; much less of that ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... marble steps, the broad bow-windows with their transparent plate-glass, look more like a fairy picture than a reality. The trim shrubbery, the airy little statues, and even the white palings, so frail and fanciful in their ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... passions. Life must have been to them a masque rather than a tragi-comedy; and whether they belong to sober history or no, those contests of which the curious may read in the lively pages of Gines Perez de Hita accord excellently with the fanciful environment. In the Alhambra nothing seems more reasonable than those never-ending duels in which, for a lady's favour, gallant knights gave one another such blows that the air rang with them, such wounds that the ground was red with blood; but at sunset ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... that the unknown traveler knew the language sufficiently well to ask a question, but not to understand the answer. We may add, that the way in which they still continue to use the word seems to require no fanciful interpretation. When addressed with any degree of scorn, they reply, "We are Bachuana, or equals—we are not inferior to any of our nation," in exactly the same sense as Irishmen or Scotchmen, in the same ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... no other writings than his account of the journey on the Upper Mississippi, his reputation would be that of a traveler who left a most interesting record of his experiences, embellished with fanciful additions—a not uncommon practice, in those days—but in the main reliable. Unfortunately for his good name, he did something more which justly put such a blot upon his character that many persons refused to believe his story in any of its particulars. We must give ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... then as it is now throughout the world. So skilled were its weavers that the threads were of hair-like fineness. This was known as the invisible muslin, the weaving of which has become a lost art. To this beautiful cloth were given many fanciful and poetic names. It was woven with ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... (cloud) 353; stretch of the imagination &c. (exaggeration) 549; mythogenesis[obs3]. idealist, romanticist, visionary; mopus[obs3]; romancer, dreamer; somnambulist; rhapsodist &c. (fanatic) 504; castle-buildier, fanciful projector. V. imagine, fancy, conceive; idealize, realize; dream, dream of, dream up; "give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name" [Midsummer Night's Dream]. create, originate, devise, invent, coin, fabricate; improvise, strike out something ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the abundance and originality of its old gravestones. Here is one (Fig. 74) which carries more distinctly the fanciful idea suggested at West Ham (page 34, Fig. 63); flowers and foliage, and even fruit, combining with the lowered torch and summoning trumpet to tell of ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... cataracts are peculiarly her own, and when I think of their superiority to all that we have in the Old World, and still more, when I recollect that by a mysterious ordinance of their Creator, these were hid from "learned ken" till modern times, I fell into the fanciful belief that the Western continent was brought forth at a second birth, and intended by Nature as a more perfect specimen of her handiwork. But how in the name of breeding must we account for the degeneracy of the human form in this otherwise mammoth-producing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... with his questions. I told him all I knew of Bokhara, and Samarkand, and Tashkend, and Yarkand. I showed him the passes in the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush. I traced out the rivers, and I calculated distances; we talked over imaginary campaigns, and set up fanciful constitutions. It a was childish game, but I found it interesting enough. He spoke of it all with a curious personal tone which puzzled me, till one day when we were amusing ourselves with a fight ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... by freely accepting more extended invitations and by trying to see whether there was not some opening for her in the field of art. She thought of painting and essayed several canvases which she took to dealers. The work was subtle, remote, fanciful—a snow scene with purple edges; a thinking satyr, iron-like in his heaviness, brooding over a cloudy valley; a lurking devil peering at a praying Marguerite; a Dutch interior inspired by Mrs. Batjer, and various dancing figures. Phlegmatic dealers of somber ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... gone, so that she only saw a yellow whiteness, that, marked by the blue veins of the bared temples, was to her mind death-like. Mary had not been sheltered from taking part in scenes of suffering; she had seen sickness and death in cottages, as well as in her own home, and she had none of the fanciful alarms, either of novelty or imagination, to startle her in the strange watch that had so suddenly been thrust on her but what did fill her with a certain apprehension, was the new and lofty beauty of expression that sat on that sleeping countenance. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nobody ever penetrated. Petitions arrived day by day, yet he held his tongue. Bishops came, great personages, great ladies of his circle watched and drew him on one side, and still he held his tongue. A truceless warfare was being waged around him: on one side the believers and the men of fanciful minds whom the Mysterious strongly interested; on the other the unbelievers and the statesmen who distrusted the disturbances of the imagination;—and still and ever he held his tongue. Then, all at once, with the sudden decision of a naturally timid man, he spoke out. The rumour spread that he ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... chapter to a pretty neighbor who has approved of the preceding portions of the book, whose mind, therefore, I cannot but respect. My neighbor classes this discussion of hieroglyphics as a fanciful flight rather than a sober argument. I submit the verdict, then struggle against it while ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... also a fanciful idea of his that dreams in general imply a subconscious state coexisting constantly with the actual realm of thought, but penetrated by our consciousness only when the will is least active, or during sleep. With ordinary mortals ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... devoted to transforming it into something absolutely opposed to his whole spirit and method; in place of it they developed the Physiologus and the Bestiaries, mingling scriptural statements, legends of the saints, and fanciful inventions with pious intent and childlike simplicity. In place of research came authority—the authority of the Scriptures as interpreted by the Physio Cogus and the Bestiaries—and these remained the principal ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... still! But you're strangely indifferent to time, in your line of business. Oh! Tomorrow! Imagine it! Two days late already, and then tomorrow! Well I hope by tomorrow you mean Wednesday, and not tomorrow's tomorrow, or some other absurd and fanciful date that you've just thought about. But now, do have the thing finished by tomorrow—" here he laid his hand cajoling on Arthur's arm. "You promise me it will all be ready ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... 1096.) In the case of trees, all the recorded varieties, as far as I can find out, have been suddenly produced by one single act of variation. The length of time required to raise many generations, and the little value set on the fanciful varieties, explains how it is that successive modifications have not been accumulated by selection; hence, also, it follows that we do not here meet with sub-varieties subordinate to varieties, and these again ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... qualities—it will always show its original shape. And, so it is with the varying opinions of the Western thought regarding it—the various cults advocating some form of its doctrine—the original doctrine may be learned and understood in spite of the fanciful dressings bestowed upon it. "The Truth is One—Men call ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... are fond of dancing, and display great ingenuity in devising many grotesque and fanciful costumes for wearing upon such occasions. Every beast, bird and fish almost of which they have any knowledge, is represented in some form—the heads of bear, seal and other animals are worn upon their heads, and also hideous masks, with moving eyes and lips The ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... the day his mind seemed to wander slightly, and that he has the usual faculty of sea-faring men for exaggeration; so that at times I had to employ my best discrimination to enable me to separate the real from the fanciful, that I might retain the true and discard the untrue. He seems to have lived for more than a year in proximity to the South Pole, and his experiences were as marvellous as that country is strangely grand, ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... lost himself by following an unfaithful guide. Tho' besides Homer and Virgil he had read Tasso, yet he rather suffered himself to be misled by Ariosto, with whom blindly rambling on marvels and adventures, he makes no conscience of probability; all is fanciful and chimerical, without any uniformity, or without any foundation in truth; in a word his poem is perfect Fairy-Land. Thus far Sir William Temple, and Mr. Rymer; let us now attend to the opinion of a greater name. Mr. Dryden in his dedication of Juvenal, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... novelist stayed long enough in this rural retreat, he would have beautified the interior in accordance with his fanciful tastes. Friends who were invited out there were astonished to see scrawled in chalk ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... is used purely in jest. It is based on the fanciful notion that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only misplaced. This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term 'bit box', about which the same legend was current; old-time hackers ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... (1788-1857), was not of a military temperament. Even he, however, followed the King of Prussia's call to arms but, significantly enough for "the last Knight of Romanticism," as he was called, arrived a day too late on the field of Waterloo. The somewhat fanciful title by no means indicates a jouster at windmills; it implies, rather, that in Eichendorff there were gathered for the last time with all their poetic brilliancy, the declining rays of the Romantic movement. After him, the enthusiasm is in its decline or changes to forms which lie outside the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... that Maitland objected. It was the illustrations that alternately saddened and maddened the young man: the said illustrations comprising blurred half-tone reproductions of photographs taken on the Maitland estate; a diagram of the library, as fanciful as the text it illuminated, and two portraits, side by side, of the heroes, himself and Anisty, excellent likenesses both of the originals and of ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... hearing the noisy clamor of the sailor crowd, sent the Queen with her damsels in a very light barge to stay on a little island distant from us a quarter of a league; himself remaining a very long time, discoursing by signs and gestures of various fanciful ideas, examining all the equipments of the ship, asking especially their purpose, imitating our manners, tasting our foods, then parted from us benignantly. And one time, our people remaining two or three days on a little island near ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... had long since discovered that his chance lay chiefly in her recently acquired and fanciful predilection d'artiste for hoary mediaeval families with ancestors in alabaster and primogenitive renown. Seeing this he dwelt on those topics which brought out that aspect of himself more clearly, talking feudalism and chivalry with a zest that he had never hitherto ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... me fanciful, but I had already established a kind of connection. I had put together two links of a great chain. There was a boat lying upon a seacoast, and not far from the boat was a parchment—not a paper—with a skull depicted upon it. You will, ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... comfortably, I assure you, uncle Oliver," Clarissa replied. "No one was in the least rude or unpleasant. And I am so glad to come home—I can scarcely tell you how glad—though, as I came nearer and nearer, I began to have all kinds of fanciful anxieties. I hope that all is well—that papa ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... noble title from the Greek almyros, from the Latin admirabilis, from the Saxon aenmereeal, and from the French aumer, appear all fanciful. It is extensively received that the Sicilians first adopted it from emir, the sea, of their Saracen masters; but it presents a kind of unusual etymological inversion. The term is most frequent in old Romance; but the style and title was not used by us until 1286; and in 1294, William ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... us with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch and of movement. How we revel in the force and freshness of the wind, in the life of the wave! And such an appeal he always makes. His subject may be fanciful, as in the "Realm of Venus" (the "Spring"); religious, as in the Sixtine Chapel frescoes or in the "Coronation of the Virgin"; political, as in the recently discovered "Pallas Taming a Centaur"; or even crudely allegorical, ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... the spirit of goodness, which made him so remarkable, and was so much a part of Job, that I do believe a lock of his hair worn near one's own heart would help to make it beat more kindly to one's fellow creatures. This idea may be considered too fanciful, too cat-like, but I ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... nearly thirteen years, for obeying God, only solaced with his Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs. Yet he made discoveries relative to the creation, which have been very recently again published by a learned philosopher, who surprised and puzzled the world with his vestiges of creation. Omitting the fanciful theories of the vestige philosopher, his two great facts, proved by ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... grew indignant in a moment. "What nonsense! Just because I ask a question and make a remark! I think your illness must have made you fanciful, Ellinor. Surely nothing I said deserves such an interpretation. On the contrary, have I not shown the sincerity and depth of my affection to you by clinging ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... in all my days, Rose. 'Twas but the fanciful thoughts of a boy towards she, that ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... attended to by the Editor's customers, he makes them once more, for the relief of his conscience. Many tales in this book are translated, or adapted, from those told by mothers and nurses in Hungary; others are familiar to Russian nurseries; the Servians are responsible for some; a rather peculiarly fanciful set of stories are adapted from the Roumanians; others are from the Baltic shores; others from sunny Sicily; a few are from Finland, and Iceland, and Japan, and Tunis, and Portugal. No doubt many children will like ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... Salisbury, and the Charterhouse, in 1687, when he was fifteen years old he went to Queen's College, Oxford, where he speedily began to distinguish himself by the making of Latin verses. The beautiful and fanciful poem of The Pigmies and the Cranes is still read by lovers of that sort of exercise; and verses are extant in honour of King William, by which it appears that it was the loyal youth's custom to toast that sovereign in bumpers of purple Lyaeus; and many more works are in the collection, including ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... nothing might mar the harmony of this fete, the prince and his wife had placed themselves on an equal footing with their guests; the princess had declined any conspicuous role, and was to appear in the simple but charming costume of a wood-nymph, while the prince had selected an ideal and fanciful hunter's costume. Even in the selection of huts the Princess Wilhelmina had refused to make any choice, and had drawn her number as the others did, even refusing a glimpse of it to ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... a chasm of 30 or 40 years separates Mark's written document from the ministry of Jesus—a long enough time to create a plastic body of oral teachings and a highly colored tradition embellished with fanciful stories." ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... another brief laugh, but a cognate matter was less easy to dismiss. The name brought with it a face—a dark and splendid face with tragic eyes that called. He walked a long way thinking about them and wondering. The eyes haunted him. It will have been reasonably evident that Ste. Marie was a fanciful and imaginative soul. He needed but a chance word, the sight of a face in a crowd, the glance of an eye, to begin story-building, and he would go on for hours about it and work himself up to quite a passion with his imaginings. He should have ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... me a print of the lighthouse, which Mr. Winstanley erected upon the rock. It must have been a whimsical-looking thing; more like a fanciful Chinese temple, in my opinion, than an edifice that would have to encounter the boisterous waves of the angry ocean. He began the building in 1696, and it was four years before it was completed. In 1703 it was much damaged, and stood in need of great repair. Mr. Winstanley went himself to Plymouth, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... are fanciful. Come, let us get out of the den. The spectral figures, as you call them, are a little too real for me to fancy a close proximity in the ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... is too fanciful, Though single be his sod, Yet not the less it has around The presence of his God! It may be weakness of the heart, But yet its kindliest, best; Better if in our selfish world It could be ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... change Lady Myrtle so? Could it be that she was really very fanciful and whimsical? It scarcely seemed so, considering that she had written so promptly to Miss Mildmay, not losing even one post! And this thought suggested another explanation. Could their aunt's letter in reply have contained something to annoy the old lady? Jacinth began to be very much afraid it ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... reportable sallies of Sydney Smith have been, of course, often repeated, but the fanciful fun and inexhaustible humorous drollery of his conversation among his intimates can never be adequately rendered or reproduced. He bubbled over with mirth, of which his own enjoyment formed an irresistible element, he shook, and his eyes ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... called by Malays Sungei Laju, not Sungei Malaju. Even if the derivation of Malayu from melaju had the support of the Malays themselves, Malay etymologies are not often safe guides. Not much, for instance, can be said in favour of the fanciful derivation of Sumatra from semut raya, "large ant," which is given by the author of ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... her. She was born to be a man's comrade, observant, unexacting, level-headed. She was the kind of girl you wouldn't mind seeing in a tight place if you were there, of course, to get her out of it. Then he pulled himself up and told himself not to be fanciful. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... languages of earth in their radicals, must therefore include the graphic or manual presentation of thought, and compare the elements of ideography with those of phonics. Etymology now examines the ultimate roots, not the fanciful resemblances between oral forms, in the different tongues; the internal, not the mere external parts of language. A marked peculiarity of sign language consists in its limited number of radicals and the infinite combinations into ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... persons present, all well dressed; the women in the fanciful checkered headdresses so much favored by the negro race, the men in clean collars, nankin trousers, and dark coats. All showed that they were well ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... studied, sang, read, rode, and thought the fanciful thoughts of girlhood alone, but always with impatient longings for the coming of the magic hour that should set her free. And yet she was not wholly alone, for her father would at any time neglect everything else to give her pleasure, while she also ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... complexity of the new path they must follow, misunderstood by and misunderstanding the race with whom they are forced to live. In this brief ceremony of the ghost dance the Indians seek to close their eyes to an unwelcome reality, and to live in the fanciful vision of an ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... say, "can I believe that my indolent, fanciful, pleasure-loving pupil, perseveres in such a course?" I feel the power of industry growing every day, and, besides the all-powerful motive of ambition, and a new stimulus lately given through a friend, I have learned to believe that nothing, no! not perfection, is unattainable. I am determined ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... that the progress of any nation in morals, civilization, and refinement, is in proportion to the elevated or degraded position in which woman is placed in society; and the same instructive volume will enable us to perceive, that the fanciful creations of the needle, have exerted a marked influence over the pursuits and ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... for utility. Since light is the great desideratum, the paint, as a rule, should be light in color, though soft and tinted in tone for restfulness to the eye. Where wallpaper is used, it should have the same characteristics. Fanciful designs should be avoided. Indeed, plain paper forms the best base for artistic color schemes in the decoration of rooms, the variety in which is best obtained by the choice of furniture and pictures ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... said of one who was austere, but the dear, old Commodore was to me, and to us all, the very symbol of warmth. The one thing I criticised in him was his unwillingness that people should discover him for the fanciful, humorous, wise, and exquisitely tender man that he was. He did not leave an enemy, I know, unless that man was a scoundrel. And with all his reticence he impressed himself profoundly on hundreds. I know if ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... boundaries of knowledge further. What was known of the world to Ptolemy in the second century made up the sum of knowledge possessed by the geographers of all the following centuries to the thirteenth. Indeed, the mediaeval tendency to establish symmetrical measurements, to adopt fanciful explanations, and to find analogies in all things, obscured earlier knowledge and made geographers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries less correct in their knowledge of the world than were those of the second or the third. [Footnote: ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... mad fit comes on" and praises poetry written "Wild without art, and yet with pleasure wild" (Gotham [1764], II, 167-169, 172, 212). His satire—with its deliberate, irreverant, "Byronic" run-on lines, fanciful digressions, playful indifference to formal structure, impulsively involuted syntax, long, wandering sentences—seems to move, as does Robert Lloyd's satire (at a somewhat slower pace), toward a genuinely new style. In being chatty, fluid, ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... the silent inhabitants of the walls would seem, in the eyes of our ancestors, something very splendid. As painting rose in fame, tapestry sunk in estimation. The introduction of a lighter and less massive mode of architecture abridged the space for its accommodation, and by degrees the stiff and fanciful creations of the loom vanished from our walls. The art is now neglected. I am sorry for this, because I cannot think meanly of an art which engaged the heads and hands of the ladies of England, and gave to the tapestried hall of elder days fame little ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... conversation the most nonsensical among a visionary acquaintance of my own creating, became the constant amusement of my mind; or if I took a fancy to any new companion, that individual was metamorphosed into something equally unreal, and was soon looked upon in the light, not of sober reality, but of fanciful extravagance. Of course my estimate alike of persons and of things was egregiously false; and with a fair portion of common-sense naturally belonging to me, I became most emphatically a fool. Even when employed at the pencil, which I ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... everywhere grouped round the mighty central triumph of the adventures of Piper Steenie,—who but Scott has done such things? He never put so much again in a single book. There is something in it which it is hardly fanciful to take as a 'note of finishing,' as the last piece of the work, that, gigantic as it was, was not exactly collar work, not sheer hewing of wood and drawing of water for the taskmasters. And it was fitting that the book, so varied, so fresh, so gracious and kindly, so magnificent ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... wanting in dramatic power,—in this respect resembling the Philebus and the Laws,—is very clear and accurate, and has several touches of humour and satire. The language is less fanciful and imaginative than that of the earlier dialogues; and there is more of bitterness, as in the Laws, though traces of a similar temper may also be observed in the description of the 'great brute' in the Republic, and in the contrast of the lawyer and philosopher in the Theaetetus. ...
— Sophist • Plato
... she were thinking, but she was not. Her mind was simply a blank. She was vaguely and idly watching the flickering shadows cast by the firelight on the wall, the gleam of yellow moonlight shimmering through the curtains; listening to the faint sighing of the night wind, the ticking of the little fanciful clock, to the pretty plaintive tunes it played before it struck the hours. Nine, ten, eleven—she heard them all, as she lay there, broad ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... lose. And if in his uncultured youth the great man stooped to prig with his own hand, he was early cured of the weakness: so that Fielding's picture of the hero taking a bottle-screw from the Ordinary's pocket in the very moment of death is entirely fanciful. For 'this Machiavel of Thieves,' as a contemporary styled him, left others to accomplish what his ingenuity had planned. His was the high policy of theft. If he lived on terms of familiar intimacy with the mill-kens, the bridle-culls, the buttock-and-files of London, he was none the less ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... Greeks, and Tsepha (cockatrice) of the Hebrews), a name given by the ancients to a horrid monster of their own imagination, to which they attributed the most malignant powers and an equally fiendish appearance. The term is now applied, owing to a certain fanciful resemblance, to a genus of lizards belonging to the family Iguanidae, the species of which are characterized by the presence, in the males, of an erectile crest on the head, and a still higher, likewise erectile ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... charter of the Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad, which opened in 1836. The line ran from Toledo to Adrian, thirty-three miles, but when it was projected the matter was so far from serious with the legislature which authorized it, that it was granted because it was "merely a fanciful scheme that could do no harm, and would greatly please" certain citizens of Toledo; just as now a balloon line might be laughingly authorized. It was entirely successful, however, as far as the running was concerned, though the road was so hampered by the ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... these the foot of a woman must never tread! They are for men, and symbolical of manly virtues. There are dolls of all sizes, and a play travois leans against the white wall of the miniature lodge. Even the pet pup is called in to complete the fanciful home ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... landscapes he painted were very fresh and pleasing, delicately coloured, with lots of air in them, and a dreamy, suggestive sentiment. His brother sculptors declared that his statuettes were modelled with exceeding dash and directness; they were certainly fanciful and amusing. I remember one that I used to like immensely—Titania driving to a tryst with Bottom, her chariot a lily, daisies for wheels, and for steeds a pair of mettlesome field-mice. I doubt if he ever got a commission ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... through the inner chambers of the temple, until we stood within the central court—a great circular space paved with a transparent marble of exquisite whiteness. Before us rose a golden temple wrought in the most wondrous and fanciful designs, inlaid with diamond, ruby, sapphire, turquoise, emerald, and the thousand nameless gems of Mars, which far transcend in loveliness and purity of ray the most ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... spirit seemed calling me sweetly, Inviting me then to partake Of the fanciful pleasures reflected Far down in the clear, placid lake. O, beautiful scene of reflection! So perfect, so grand, and so pure, In my mind that mirror enchantment To the end of ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... Mountown," a poem; by which, though fanciful readers in the pride of sagacity have given it a poetical interpretation, was meant originally no more than it expressed, as it was dictated only by the author's delight ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... in full prime; and she took such a taste for this solitary rambling that she often contrived to remain out from breakfast till tea; and then the evenings were spent in recounting her fanciful tales. I did not fear her breaking bounds; because the gates were generally locked, and I thought she would scarcely venture forth alone, if they had stood wide open. Unluckily, my confidence proved misplaced. Catherine came to me, one morning, at eight ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... if possessing less of romantic beauty than some other scenes in Scotland, is connected with so many associations of a fanciful nature, in which the imagination takes delight, as might well induce one even less attached to the spot than the author, to accommodate, after a general manner, the imaginary scenes he was framing to the localities to which he was partial. But it would be ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... his letters to members of Congress. Such accounts sadly puzzled that body; and it may be imagined to what a further hopeless degree of bewilderment this gathering of American lawyers and tradesmen, planters and farmers, must have been reduced by the extraordinary letters of the wild and fanciful Beaumarchais. The natural consequence was that the easier course was pursued, and no merchandise was sent to Hortalez. If affairs had not soon taken a new turn in France this error might have had disastrous consequences for the colonies. In fact, it ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... without feeling it to be a deeply imaginative work. But I am often struck, especially in the shorter tales, of which I am now chiefly speaking, with a kind of small ingenuity, a taste for conceits and analogies, which bears more particularly what is called the fanciful stamp. The finer of the shorter tales are ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... basilisk glance, and lost all power of motion. He could not speak. He tried to scream. No cry came. He was dumb with horror. He was like one in a nightmare; but this was a waking night-mare, and not the fanciful terrors ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... track,—that I fear the reader, when I come to mention it to him, if he is the least of a cholerick temper, will immediately throw the book by; if mercurial, he will laugh most heartily at it;—and if he is of a grave and saturnine cast, he will, at first sight, absolutely condemn as fanciful and extravagant; and that was in respect to the choice and imposition of christian names, on which he thought a great deal more depended than what superficial minds were ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... emblazoned sign of the Lion and Unicorn somewhere above his head, would be to mock that noble animal (he referred to the Lion, of course), whose other effigy in Court formed such a striking contrast to the undignified attitude of those who had preferred such fanciful charges against this nobly statured beast, whose presence there among them, as Counsel had observed, was only rendered possible by the separate removal of five pairs of ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... sometimes very convenient for purposes of identification, but they may also prove fruitful sources of difficulty and trouble. As an illustration, Mary Jane Smith is known at home by her family and to her acquaintances as Mary. For some fanciful reason or local circumstance she wearies of that name and becomes Jane. Both are equally hers, but her acquaintances who knew her as Mary might well plead ignorance when asked about Jane Smith; and the acquaintances of the latter might never surmise that ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... as we stood in the sunlight on the thronging kerb, saying good-bye, "here I am, and it's all very well; I'm not perhaps as fanciful as I was. But you are practically the only friend I have on earth—except Alice.... And there—to make a clean breast of it, I'm not sure that my aunt cares much about my getting married. She doesn't say so, of course. You know her well enough for that." ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... end of it, and I could not go back. I made up a fanciful story, with precise details. I had given the custodian of the building a hundred francs to be allowed to go about the building by myself; the shrine was being repaired, but I happened to be there at the breakfast time of the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Harry, with his desperate interest in machinery, by the repellent father who delights to explain the laws of gravity and the parabola described by the stone which Harry throws. What was undervalued in those old, dry, high-principled books was the charm of vivid apprehension, of fanciful imagination, of simple, neighbourly kindliness. The aim was too much to improve everybody and everything, to impart and retain correct information. Nowadays the pendulum has swung a little too far the other way, and children are too much encouraged, if anything, to be childish; but there is a certain ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pressed his wife's hand in token of approbation, and she proceeded.—"You know the little alcove at the bottom of the garden, of which Charlotte is so fond? I have an inclination to deck this out in a fanciful manner, and invite all her little friends to partake of a collation of fruit, sweetmeats, and other things suitable to the general taste of young guests; and to make it more pleasing to Charlotte, she shall be mistress of the ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... aimed at, were intentionally avoided. Even as late as the thirteenth century we find figures with blue legs and red bodies,—the horses in a procession blue, red, and yellow. Any whim of association, or fanciful color-pattern, was preferred to beauty or correctness. Likeness to actual things seemed to be regarded, indeed, as an unavoidable evil, to be restricted as far as possible. The problem was, to show God's omnipresence in the world, especially His appearance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... the light foliage of the shrubs. Now and then, appeared for a moment, among the woods, a cottage light; and, at length, was heard, afar off, the evening bell of a convent, dying on the air. When she withdrew her thoughts from these subjects of fanciful delight, the gloom and silence of the saloon somewhat awed her; and, having sought the door of the gallery, and pursued, for a considerable time, a dark passage, she came to a hall, but one totally different from that she had formerly ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... houses of substantial farmers, &c. in New England; but its internal economy was somewhat nautical, containing numerous "lockers" and "store-rooms." Its front gate-posts were composed of the two jaw-bones of an enormous whale; the fence was of a most fanciful Chinese pattern; and directly in front of the house was erected that never-failing ornament of a sailor's dwelling, a tall flag-staff, with cap, cross-trees, and topmast, complete; the last, always being kept "housed," except upon the 4th of July, 22d of February, ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... relieve me, from these conjunct and confident spirits, cruel Maudge and inexorable Batty," (he prayed,) "and any other punishment due to my crimes I will willingly bear." Exorcisms in abundance he applied to them, and used many fanciful tricks of demon-expelling agency to free him from their tyranny; but all to no purpose. The names still struck his ear in the silence of his cell, and kept alive the superstitious terror ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... turned to show the stranger her beautiful children. The story comes readily to mind as one looks at this portrait of Lady Cockburn and her Children. Indeed, the picture was once engraved[7] under the fanciful title of "Cornelia and her Children." Like the Roman matron of old, the English mother gathers her children about her as the choicest jewels of her possession. Her stately beauty is of the classic sort, and the children are as charming as English children are ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... the mother's smile is to the infant, the sunlight to the skylark, the mountain-breeze to the hunter—an inspiring element, on which he fed unconsciously. Only when he doubted for a moment some especially startling or fanciful assertion, did he become really aware of the great loveliness of her who made it; and then his heart silenced his judgment with the thought—Could any but true words come out of those perfect lips?—any but royal thoughts take shape within that queenly head?.... Poor ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... all very fanciful," I remarked, laughing in the vain endeavor to throw off the superstitious horror his ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... shore which is crowned with the old city of Sorrento: and surely never did rocky wall show to the open sea a face more picturesque and flowery. The deep red cliff was hollowed here and there into fanciful grottos, draped with every varied hue and form of vegetable beauty. Here a crevice high in air was all abloom with purple gillyflower, and depending in festoons above it the golden blossoms of the broom; here a cleft seemed to be a nestling-place for a colony of gladiolus, with its crimson ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... He bought into order and shape the vast amount of knowledge already acquired by Felicite; increased it by study of the masterpieces with which Italy teems; gave her the frankness, freedom, and grace, epigrammatic, and intense, which is the character of his own talent (always rather fanciful as to form) which Camille Maupin modified by delicacy of sentiment and the softer terms of thought that are natural to a woman. He also roused in her a taste for German and English literature and made her learn both ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... good memory, a vivid imagination. The mother sends for one of these, and, having prepared a feast for him, she and her little 'brood,' who are curled up near her, await the fairy stories of the dreamer, who, after his feast and smoke, entertains them for hours. Many of these fanciful sketches or visions are interesting and beautiful in their rich imagery, and have been at times given ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... an article for Dr. Absalom Peter's Magazine, expressing my dissent from the very fanciful explanations of the Dighton Rock characters, as given by Mr. Magrusen in the first volume of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquarians, published at Copenhagen. It appears to me that those characters ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... curled and parted on the forehead; the collar of his shirt was thrown back, so that not only the throat but a considerable portion of his bosom was exposed to view, though partially concealed by some fanciful ornament suspended round the neck. His waistcoat was of costly velvet, and his legs were enveloped in a superb wrapper. It is to be regretted that so great a mind as that of Byron could derive satisfaction from things so trivial and unimportant, but much more that it was liable ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... much as Angela had expected, knowing by hospital reputation what the doctor was supposed to be to old ladies and fanciful mothers, while perhaps he had also heard of her fracas long ago at the hospital. For he was not more courteous to her than could be helped, treating her much as if she were only the nursery maid, and hardly looking at the opinion which she ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... ages and countries. Sancho Panza represents the type of person who does not have imagination or spiritual ideals. Not much less ridiculous, though much more deserving of sympathy, is Don Quixote, who represents the type of person who is controlled by imagination and fanciful ideals, unbalanced by practical judgment. The life of a person of either type must ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... occupier. On this the agreement was concluded, the basketmaker installed. In the immediate neighbourhood there was no custom for basket-work, but Waife's performances were so neat, and some so elegant and fanciful, that he had no difficulty in contracting with a large tradesman (not at Humberston, but a more distant and yet more thriving town about twenty miles off) for as much of such work as he could supply. Each week the carrier took his goods and brought back ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with Mr. Percy about its beauty, arguing that it was less perfect than some others, because he had said it was more so; she remembered how from that very tree she had gathered a blossom for him the first day he came to the Cottage. Then, in her fanciful mood, she reproached herself for letting her unfortunate favourite speak to her only of him, and forgetting that it was Maurice who had obtained it for her, who had planted it, and would be sorry for its destruction. She rose, ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... please me very much by doing it; and certainly not dis please me by refusing to do it. Your broadest 'no' would not sound half so strange to me as my 'little crooked thing' does to you; but you see everybody in the world is fanciful about something, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... never been written but one adequate description of this venerable dwelling, and that by Hawthorne himself in "Mosses from an Old Manse." To most readers the description seems part and parcel of the fanciful tales that follow; no more real than the "House of the Seven Gables." We of the outside world who know our Concord only by hearsay cannot realize that "The Wayside" and the "Old Manse" and "Sleepy Hollow" are verities,—verities which ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... a singular mixture of philosophy and poetry. He was fond of metaphysics and prone to indulge in abstract speculations, though his metaphysics were somewhat fine spun and fanciful, and his speculations were apt to partake of what my father most irreverently termed "humbug." For my part, I delighted in them, and the more especially because they set my father to sleep and completely confounded my sisters. I entered with my accustomed ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... Constantly, amid the din of arms or words, and the sarcasms by which he satirises and contemns old follies and idle strifes, a gentler feeling wells up in his pages like the sound of the Angelus. Such pauses of pathos are the records of real or fanciful situations, as of Teufelsdroeckh "left alone with the night" when Blumine and Herr Towgood ride down the valley; of Oliver recalling the old days at St. Ives; of the Electress Louisa ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... watched it, I perceived that it was quite still. And after that, for some time, I kept a very strict gaze into the valley; yet could nowhere discover aught to prove my suspicions, and, at last, I ceased from watching it; for I feared to grow fanciful, and so wandered to that part of the hill which overlooked ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... met at night, and by the fitful light of the moon they pledged themselves to the rash and fanciful contract, and confirmed and consecrated it the next morning by a religious ceremony. After this they were able to look the approaching separation in the face more manfully, and Edward strove hard to quell the melancholy feeling which had lately arisen in his mind on account of the constant ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... no fanciful estimate can be shown by an appeal to facts. We may take as an example the case of the British post-office. The inefficient transmission of letters some twenty years ago in London provoked an effort to supplement it by a service of private messengers. ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... excellent early Gothic, or when the ceiling is flat, it becomes a difficult question how far their services may receive ornamentation independent of their structure. I have never myself seen a flat ceiling satisfactorily decorated, except by painting: there is much good and fanciful panelling in old English domestic architecture, but it always is in some degree meaningless and mean. The flat ceilings of Venice, as in the Scuola di San Rocco and Ducal Palace, have in their vast panellings some of the noblest paintings (on stretched canvas) which the world possesses: and this ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... strongly emotional type of person, and lived in a kind of permanent borderland of visions and revelations. Her language, like that also of Pordage, is ungrammatical, of involved style, and full of overwrought and fanciful imagination. Christopher Walton, who in many ways respected her, calls her writings "a huge mass of parabolicalism and idiocratic deformity!"[64] In her Message to the Philadelphian Society she reports a curious vision from heaven which assures her ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... plaudits of the people made him aware that Sarasate had finished his programme, and was departing from the scene of his triumphs. The frenzied shouts and encores, however brought him once more before the excited public, to play a set of Spanish dances, fanciful and delicate as the gamboling of a light breeze over rose-gardens and dashing fountains,—and when this wonder-music ceased, Alwyn woke from tranced rapture into enthusiasm, and joined in the thunders of applause with fervent warmth and zeal. Eight several times did the wearied, but ever ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... hall were ornamented all around by designs of trees, birds, and beasts, in fanciful forms, executed in white upon a blue ground. We undressed here, and were led from hence into the inner bath, where all was still free from everything offensive, either to the sight or smell. This inner room was originally an oblong space of about ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... architectural scheme. He should be penned behind the bars of his own mad music. He has no melody. He loves ugly noises. He writes to distracting lengths; and, worst of all, his harmonies are hideous. But he doesn't forget to call his monstrosities fanciful names. If it isn't Don Juan, it is Don Quixote—have you heard the latter? [O shades of Mozart!] This giving his so-called compositions literary titles is the plaster for our broken heads—and ear-drums. So much for your ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... In her fanciful robe of old gold, with her tiny feet shod in ridiculously small, gilt slippers, she stood by the screen watching the stupefied man—an exquisite, fragrantly youthful ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... Plato is so centered, that he can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as the most probable particular explication. Call that fanciful,—it matters not; the connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must be not ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the refractoriness of O., as more than flesh and blood can endure. Mere indulgence in figurative language, again, is a besetting snare. "One of the fathers, in great severity called poesy vinum daemonum," says Bacon: himself too fanciful for a philosopher. Surely, to use a simile for the discovery of truth is like studying beauty in the ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the belief that this destiny was in the hands of Allah gives him a certain dignity especially in the presence of disease and death which is wanting in his rival religionist the Christian. At the same time the fanciful picture of the Turk sitting stolidly under a shower of bullets because Fate will not find him out unless it be so written is a freak i.e. fancy rarely found ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... eyes, and then she looked at him with an indulgent smile. "There, put your kite away," she said. "It's all right now except for that rent in it. I'll mend that to-morrow. And try to be a good boy. You mustn't be fanciful, you know!" ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... the most fanciful of all the mid-19th-century pieces is the silver teakettle and stand (fig. 11) given to General Montgomery C. Meigs by the citizens of Washington for his work on the Washington Aqueduct. The kettle, 18 inches high, is mounted on a base that is 8-1/2 inches square and 3-1/4 inches high. The ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... some of the blessings held out to the savage by civilization, and they are only some of them. The picture is neither fanciful nor overdrawn; there is no trait in it that I have not personally witnessed, or that might not have been enlarged upon; and there are often other circumstances of greater injury and aggression, which, if dwelt upon, would have cast a still darker shade upon the prospects and condition ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... those other years—the maturing, ripening years—when, from the simple, primitive and enduring elements of life, she had gone to live amid complex, cultivated and largely fanciful standards and values. In that land of Kitty's birth a man is measured by the measure of his manhood; a woman is ranked by the quality of her womanhood. Strength and courage, sincerity, honesty, usefulness—these were the prime essentials of ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... casements, Wytham Hall so quaint and old, Remnant of the age of gold, Gabled o'er from roof to basement In most fanciful enlacement, Looking far o'er ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... be fanciful, but the part played by open-air sports in the life of Oxford is a great reality. Yet, in their present organized form, they are a feature of quite, modern times. Fifty years ago, football as a college sport ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... are a kind brother in all but the constructions you put upon my doings. I think it would be better if there were more difference between our ages. You are a young guardian, over anxious, and often morbidly fanciful about me during your illness. I think we shall be happier together when you no longer ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... themselves confess that the names they often assume are not those of real beings, but typical and fanciful. Nothing more, it would seem, is necessary to complete the condemnation of Spiritualism, so far as its own nature is concerned. When in addition to all else, it appears that the spirits cannot be identified; that the whole underlying claim that the spirits ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... Mr. Finn himself, and had since repented of that confession, would Mr. Camperdown and Mr. Wickerby, who were present, and would I, be now debarred from stating that confession in evidence, because, in deference to some fanciful rules of etiquette, Lord Fawn should not have been there?" Mr. Chaffanbrass at last prevailed, and ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... dining-room together and seen me standing leaning against the mantel-shelf. They were both hard-headed Scotchmen engaged in business in Edinburgh, and certainly not the sort of people to conjure up fanciful imaginings, nor is it likely that the same fancy should have occurred to both of them; and therefore I can only suppose that they actually saw what they said they did. Now I myself was in London at the time of this appearance in Edinburgh, ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... me—nothing but peace and consolation. And I thank God for enabling me to discern in death the key to our true blessedness. I never lie down in bed without remembering that, perhaps, young as I am, I may never see another day, and yet no one who knows me can say that I am melancholy or fanciful. For this blessing I thank God daily, and desire nothing more than to share it ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... Dr. Douglas, that one great advantage accruing to the world from our late surveys of the globe, is, that they have confuted fanciful theories, too likely to give birth to impracticable undertakings. The ingenious reveries of speculative philosophers, which have so long amused the learned, and raised the most sanguine expectations, are ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... I omit to mention the great atomic system taught by old Moschus before the siege of Troy; revived by Democritus of laughing memory; improved by Epicurus, that king of good fellows; and modernized by the fanciful Descartes. But I decline inquiring, whether the atoms, of which the earth is said to be composed, are eternal or recent; whether they are animate or inanimate; whether, agreeably, to the opinion of Atheists, they were fortuitously aggregated, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... included among the data of our reasonings agents or circumstances that do not exist or do not affect the phenomenon in question. In the early days of science purely fanciful powers were much relied upon: such as the solid spheres that carried the planets and stars; the influence of the planets upon human destiny; the tendency of everything to seek "its own place," so that fire rises to heaven, and solids fall to the earth; the "plastic virtue" ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... directing their steps toward the East River, Fremont turned about and glanced with varying emotions at the brilliant scene he was leaving. He was parting, under a cloud, from the Great White Way and all that the fanciful title implied. He loved the rush and hum of the big city, and experienced, standing there in the night, a dread of the silent places he was soon to ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... Lily Confidante", delicate and fanciful as it is, the reply of the Lily "is a simple yet sacred melody", ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod |
