"Imagery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sound of the language keeps for us the freshness of the imagery—the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole—which has so long become publica materies. It is not withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Woolman's Journal describing his voyage from Philadelphia to London in 1772. Friend Woolman, like the sturdy Quaker that he was, was horrified (when he went to have a look at the ship Mary and Elizabeth) to find "sundry sorts of carved work and imagery" on that part of the vessel where the cabins were; and in the cabins themselves he observed "some superfluity of workmanship of several sorts." This subjected his mind to "a deep exercise," and he decided that he would have to ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... read them with more complete happiness, and so it was a pleasure to watch him. And Helen's eyes kindled, and her cheeks flushed brightly as she listened, for she found that the verses had taken their imagery from ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... literature of Indian unrest—namely, its insidious appeals to the Hindu Scriptures and the Hindu deities, and its deliberate vilification of everything English. Calumny and abuse, combined with a wealth of sacred imagery, supply the place of any serious process of reasoning such as is displayed in Mr. Pal's programme with all its ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... pointed out to me numberless faults of style, incoherent and fantastic imagery, sentiment alike exaggerated and a thousand leagues removed from nature. He considered, and still considers, Pierre Corneille to be a blind enthusiast of the ancients, whom we deem great since we do not know them. In his eyes, this declamatory poet was a republican ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... Wandsworth, Homer would have found imagery by which to improve his description of the abode of Vulcan; for how feeble must have been the objects of this nature, which a poet could view on the shores of the Mediterranean, compared with the gigantic machinery of an English iron-foundry. The application of the expansive powers of nature, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... sides were mines of lead with silver, and of which there were legends from the time of Queen Elizabeth. The hills looked leaden and blue in the distance, while the glancing sea far beyond recalled silver,—for the alchemy of imagery, at least, is never wanting to supply ideal metals, though the real may show a sad deficit ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... most slight and imperceptible, and words of no similarity of sound almost always taking their place, rendered this a very easy task. A thorough knowledge and mastery of legendary lore, and a little power and concentration of thought and imagery, were the only qualities requisite for a ballad-monger. Some of them bear the marks of superior minds, both by their wonderful vividness of description and by the tone of deep, genuine feeling which ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to the mind. Examples are akin to analogies, and have a reflex influence on thought; they people the vacant mind, and may often originate new directions of enquiry. Plato seems to be conscious of the suggestiveness of imagery; the general analogy of the arts is constantly employed by him as well as the comparison of particular arts—weaving, the refining of gold, the learning to read, music, statuary, painting, medicine, the art of the pilot—all of which occur in this dialogue alone: though ...
— Statesman • Plato
... going to hell rather than worship a bad God, and asks what Mill would say after an experience of a quarter of an hour. Fitzjames, however, did not dwell upon such fancies. They were merely the childish mode of speculation by concrete imagery. He became more sociable, played cricket, improved in health, and came home with the highest of characters as being the best and most promising boy in the school. He rose steadily, and seems to have been thoroughly happy for the next five years and ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the wail of the squaws. Yet Whirlwind does not grieve. He has found another squaw, fleeter than the antelope, more graceful than the fawn, whose voice is like the singing birds, and face fairer than imagery of the spirit land. Let my brother go to his home, but Whirlwind's home is where the antelope is, he will live and die ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... For in spite of the vulgar elements in him there were also elements of genius. The man was a poet and a thinker, though he were at the same time, in some sense, an adventurer. His mind was stored with eloquent and beautiful imagery, the poetry of others, and poetry of his own. He could pursue the meanest personal objects in an unscrupulous way; but he had none the less passed through a wealth of tragic circumstance; he had been ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... interesting contract for its building, which shows how much was left to the craftsman's pride in his work and how little he was trammelled by conditions, save that the work was to be "finished in all points, as well in imagery work, pictures, and finials, according to the due form and proportion ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... Catholic origin, creed was conspicuously subordinated to the needs of the class it aimed to reach. A confession of faith, quite simple, in one God, a Saviour, a Mother of Heaven; a number of Biblical extracts rich in imagery and applicability to the experience of a woods-dweller; a dozen simple prayers of the kind the natural man would oftenest find occasion to express—a prayer for sickness, for bounty, for fair weather, for ease of travel, for the smiling face of Providence; and then ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... among the most interesting portions of Hindoo literature. In form and spirit they resemble both the poems of the Hebrew psalter and the lyrics of Pindar. They deal with the most elemental religious conceptions and are full of the imagery of nature. It would be absurd to deny to very many of them the possession of the truest poetic inspiration. The scenery of the Himalayas, ice and snow, storm and tempest, lend their majesty to the strains of the Vedic poet. He describes the storm sweeping over the white-crested mountains till the ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... nothing that is new in the matter of the Mansions; there is nothing that is not found in a far better shape in some of her other books; and one is continually wearied out by her utter inability to handle the imagery which she will not let alone. At the same time, the persevering reader will come continually on characteristic things that are never to be forgotten as he climbs with Teresa from strength to strength on her way ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... objects of his utmost severities of speech. It was thus that he essayed to breach the iron dungeon in which the national iniquity had shut the national conscience. Saturated was the reformer's mind with the thought of the Bible, its solemn and awful imagery, its fiery and prophetic abhorrence and denunciations of national sins, all of which furnished him an unfailing magazine whence were drawn the bolts which he launched against the giant sin and the giant sinners of his time. And so Clay had ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... partaketh of the eastern imagery of the country of thy fathers, good Hosea, and thou art apt to forget that thou art not yet watching on the steps of the Temple. What of interest hath the ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... touchest this lute, when melancholy renders thought pleasing; here are colors to mock, or to eclipse, the beauties of the fields and the mountain, the flower, and the tree; and from these pages are culled thoughts, pure and rich in imagery, as thy spirit is spotless, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... and there are many Scotticisms in it; yet I do pronounce it the work of a most masculine and comprehensive mind. The arrangement is far more methodical than Mr. Burke's, the sentiments are more patriotic, the reasoning is more profound, and even the imagery in some places is scarcely less splendid. I think Mackintosh a better philosopher, and a better citizen, and I know him to be a far better scholar and a far better man, than Payne; in whose book there are great irradiations of genius, but none of the glowing and generous warmth which virtue inspires; ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... something of its transparency, and at last degenerated into a gross superstition. But traces still remained, even down to the times of Christian ascendency, of the deep, philosophical spirit in which it had been originally conceived; and through its homely imagery there ran a vein of tender humour, such as still characterises the warm-hearted, laughter-loving northern races. Of this mixture of philosophy and fun, the following story is no bad specimen. [Footnote: The story of Thor's ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... arrangement. A great part of this intelligence has been derived to us from the Poets; by which means it has been rendered still more extravagant, and strange. We find the whole, like a grotesque picture, blazoned high, and glaring with colours, and filled with groups of fantastic imagery, such as we see upon an Indian screen; where the eye is painfully amused; but whence little can be obtained, which is satisfactory, and of service. We must, however, make this distinction, that in the allegorical representations of ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... in thought and argument might make it a subject of complaint, perhaps, that the writer, as soon as he reaches a vital part of his argument, should lapse into the imagery of an old music-hall song. But such an objection would be very much misplaced, for the ideas entertained by socialists as to this particular point closely resemble those which make music-hall songs ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... poems of these two volumes, would be a pleasant employment, but their length forbids it. Mr. Taylor's "Romance of the Maize" we have mentioned already; Mr. Stoddard's "Castle in the Air" is its complete antithesis. The latter poem is a magnificent day-dream, abounding in luscious imagery, and unrivalled for its minute descriptions of ideal scenery and its voluptuous music of versification, by any similar creation since ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... balanced with rhetorical skill, and delivered with the emphasis and inflection of a great orator. One critic thought it a revelation to find a man who could be eloquent with studied composure, who could be fervid without wildness, and who could hold imagery and metaphor to the steady place of relentless logic without detracting from their ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... pride, and narrow jealousy, Numbers reject each new expression, won, Perchance, from language richer than our own, O! with glad welcome may the POET see Extension's golden vantage! the decree Each way exclusive, scorn, and re-enthrone The obsolete, if strength, or grace of tone Or imagery await it, with a free, And liberal daring!—For the Critic Train, Whose eyes severe our verbal stores review, Let the firm Bard require that they explain Their cause of censure; then in balance true Weigh it; but smile at the ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... brought up entirely on fact, loses the joys and fine feeling offered to him through the imagery of great minds. To deprive him of fairy tales, myths and legends as given through the medium of story-telling, is to keep from him a knowledge of the fairies, gods and heroes so frequently alluded to by authors and poets of ...
— Stories to Read or Tell from Fairy Tales and Folklore • Laure Claire Foucher
... books, and the unquenchable fire. If, in order to escape from these vexing thoughts, he flies to amusement or to licentious indulgence, the delusive relief only makes his misery darker and more hopeless. At length a turn takes place. He is reconciled to his offended Maker. To borrow the fine imagery of one who had himself been thus tried, he emerges from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, from the dark land of gins and snares, of quagmires and precipices, of evil spirits and ravenous beasts. The sunshine ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... uses often suggests to the mind of the reader trains of thought and imagery which were never present to his own mind. Hence many expressions which are in themselves eminently poetic, will arouse associations, oftentimes, that entirely spoil the passage. On the other hand, an expression low and vulgar may be ennobled ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... their nature and history. An observation which he made, not without a certain flash in his light eyes and a transient uncovering of the teeth, on the Irish type of female beauty suddenly suggested to me a stanza of an ancient Polish ballad, very full of milk-and-blood imagery, of alternating ferocity and voluptuousness. This I quoted to the astounded foreigner in the vernacular, and this it was that metamorphosed his mere perfection of civility into sudden warmth, and, in fact, procured me the invitation ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... shores of waters thenceforth Icarian. Between what we have assumed to be the base of fact, and the legend which has been invested with such poetic grace in Greek story, there is no more than a century or so of re-telling might give to any event among a people so simple and yet so given to imagery. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... understand what the scope of the religion of Dionysus was to the Greeks who lived in it, all it represented to them by way of one clearly conceived yet complex symbol, let him reflect what the loss would be if all the effect and expression drawn from the imagery of the vine and the cup fell out of the whole body of existing poetry; how many fascinating trains of reflexion, what colour and substance would therewith have been deducted from it, filled as it is, apart from the more aweful associations ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... to arrest his attention than the correspondence of the shepherds' encampments, scattered on the face of the less cultivated districts, with the settlements of the same kind whose concerns are so frequently brought forward in the imagery of the Iliad and Odyssey. Accordingly, the passage of Homer to which the existing peculiarity above described,' (viz. of pelting off dogs by large jagged stones,) 'affords the-most appropriate commentary, is the scene where Ulysses, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... spoke dreamily, resting against the stone beside him, seemingly little conscious of the words that fell in oriental imagery from his lips. In other days Unorna had heard him speak like this to her, and she had loved the speech, though not the man, and sometimes for its sake she had wished her heart could find its fellow in his. And even now, the tone and the words had a momentary effect upon her. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... character of the man. They are not open, fervent, eloquent epistles, breathing nothing but the language of affectionate attachment. They are covert, sly, underhanded communications, but, fortunately, far more conclusive than if couched in the most glowing language and the most poetic imagery—letters that must be viewed with a cautious and suspicious eye—letters that were evidently intended at the time, by Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose hands they might fall. Let me read the first: "Garraways, twelve o'clock. Dear Mrs. B.—Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Century; Proceedings of Royal Institution, with plates); Geometric Mean in Vital and Social Statistics (Proceedings of Royal Society); 1880: Visualised Numerals (Nature, Jan. 15 and March 25, and Journal of Anthropological Institute); Mental Imagery (Fortnightly Review; Mind); 1881: Visions of Sane Persons (Fortnightly Review, and Proceedings of Royal Institution); Composite Portraiture (Journal of Photographical Society of Great Britain, June 24); 1882: Physiognomy of Phthisis ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... as natural as their ordinary oratorical references to the star-spangled banner; but the idea is essentially transatlantic, and not even the most poetical European astronomer could have risen to such a height of imagery. ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... is the temple thereof; that the nations of those which were saved should walk in the light of it; and that the river of the water of life should flow from the throne of God; and that the leaves of the trees which grew thereby should be for the healing of the nations. In that magnificent imagery, St. John shows us how the most terrible destruction which the Lord ever brought upon a holy place and holy institutions was really a blessing to all the world. Let us believe that it has been so often since; that it will be so often again. Let us look forward to the future with hope and ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... dwelt upon them afterwards, or have troubled himself to recall their circumstances. Here we trace his human weakness. Yet again we are reminded that it was the weakness of Csar; for the dreams were noble in their imagery, and Csarean (so to speak) in their tone of moral feeling. Thus, for example, the night before he was assassinated, he dreamt at intervals that he was soaring above the clouds on wings, and that he placed his hand within the right hand of Jove. It would seem that perhaps some obscure and half- ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... garden of Eternal Youth had already become clouded in its imagery. The girl-figure who walked in it was still distinctly and unchangingly herself, but her companion was more blurred and undefined, as a picture that has ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... this he traces the story of the human race from the creation through the Scriptural, classical, and feudal periods down to the present century, and closes with foreshadowings of a peaceful and happy future. It is picturesque, full of lofty imagery and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Mackay are the handiwork of a brilliant metrical artist and poet born.... A beautiful and passionate work; its beauty that of construction, language, imagery,—its passion, characteristic of the artistic nature, and, while intensely human, free from any taint of vulgar coarseness.... The poem is quite original, its manner Elizabethan.... Eric Mackay ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... all his friends was his choice of language, the felicity of his turns of expression, his imagery, the terseness of his unadorned English, and his simple directness of manner, which none will ever be able to reproduce, however many notes they may have taken. His dignity and repose of manner, his low musical voice, and the power of his magnetic dark eye kept the attention riveted. His argument ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... the terrible but beautiful imagery in Milton's poem of The Nativity, when he says ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... entrance of his bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the hills of Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the cry of David: 'Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth so shalt thou drive them away!' Even to common minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse, gave a loftiness and ardor of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip-shod vulgarisms ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... violent agitation followed. For a time he seemed completely transformed. The sunny Lincoln, the delight of Clary's Grove, had vanished. In his place was a desolated soul—a brother to dragons, in the terrible imagery of Job—a dweller in the dark places of affliction. It was his mother reborn in him. It was all the shadowiness of his mother's world; all that frantic reveling in the mysteries of woe to which, hitherto, her son had been an alien. To the simple ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... by one of Stanley's black soldiers, on the occasion of reaching Lake Nyanza, possesses more energy of movement, perspicuity of style, and warm, glowing imagery, than any song of its character we have yet met with from the lips of unlettered Negroes. It is certainly a noble song of triumph. It swells as it rises in its mission of praise. It breathes the same victorious air of the song of Miriam: "Sing ye to the Lord, for he ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... in his abomination with which he expects the reader to sympathise. It is the beginning of the epic poem 'Temora.' 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light; the green hills are covered with day; trees shake their dusty heads in the breeze.' And this—this gorgeous, yet simple imagery, where all is alive and panting with immortality—this, William Wordsworth, the author of 'Peter Bell,' has 'selected' for his contempt. We shall see what better he, in his own person, has to ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... more stinging force when the parts affected were pointed out by his illustrative language. To one gentleman he would pleasantly observe, as he tapped him on the chest, "Bellows to mend for you, my buck!" or else, "There's a regular rib-roaster for you!" or else, in the still more elegant imagery of the Ring, "There's a squelcher in the breadbasket, that'll stop your dancing, my kivey!" While to another he would cheerfully remark, "Your head-rails were loosened there, wasn't they?" or, "How about the kissing-trap?" or, "That ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... pecuniary interest; we talk anything that comes uppermost for talking's sake, and without expecting to be believed; we have no nature, no simplicity, no picturesqueness: everything about us is as artificial and as complicated as our steam-machinery: our poetry is a kaleidoscope of false imagery, expressing no real feeling, portraying no real existence. I do not see any compensation for the poetry of the ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... lost had they succeeded in their object, and their verse would have been constrained into the warped and ugly forms of Sternhold and Hopkins, and those with them who composed the first and worst metrical version of the Psalms. When their idea reappeared for its fulfilment phantasy and imagery had temporarily worn themselves out, and the richer language made simplicity possible and adequate ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... round again and again, on a wheel that to her was far more like Ixion's than that of the spheres, she never cleared her perceptions as to where he was, and only was half-maddened by the fantastic whirl of incongruous imagery, while she barely sat out Mercury's lengthy harangue; and when her wheel stood still, and she was released, she could not stand, and was indebted to Charon and one of her fellow-nymphs for supporting her to a ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... they rise from earth, and bloom before us as we read. Writers of such high finish, such delicate perceptions of beauty as T. W. Higginson, are seldom characterized by great originality—his expletives and imagery are as original as tender and beautiful. His illustrations are never morbid, but ever strong and healthful. If he be, as we have been informed he is, the Colonel Higginson now acting in the service of his country, Heaven preserve the life of the patriot, poet, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Nilghai lifted up his voice with a shout that shook the windows, in 'The Men of the Sea,' that begins, as all know, 'The sea is a wicked old woman,' and after rading through eight lines whose imagery is truthful, ends in a refrain, slow as the clacking of a capstan when the boat comes unwillingly up to the bars where the men sweat and ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... turned into words: finally, he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour's discourse, than by a day's meditation. It was well said by Themistocles, to the king of Persia, That speech was like cloth of Arras, opened and put abroad; whereby the imagery doth appear in figure; whereas in thoughts they lie but as in packs. Neither is this second fruit of friendship, in opening the understanding, restrained only to such friends as are able to give a man counsel; (they indeed ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... and the somewhat homely imagery only enhances in my mind the truth of the sentiment. PIERPONT, Sir, is a ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... would be acceptable to the author, left for him an order for that sum. After an interval of twenty-eight years, his rival, Mason, was probably sincere in the opinion he gave,—that Warton had much excelled him both "in poetical imagery, and in the correct ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... Treasury" to notice with surprise how close a family likeness exists between the contributions of Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron. The distinctions of style, of course, are very great; but the general character of the diction, the imagery, even of the rhythm, is more or less identical. The stamp of the same age is upon ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... atmosphere of civilisation, nor reconcile those earlier anticipations with this strangely different experience. The absurd fancies, which had seemed so vivid and so true only three months before, had now faded away into the half-remembered imagery of a dream, and nothing was real but the tranquil river which flowed at my feet, the birch tree which dropped its yellow leaves upon my head, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... than he did. Her copiousness of language, her facility of expression, and the play of her fancy, gave her the command of a very fascinating style; and M. Roland obtained the credit for many passages rich in diction and beautiful in imagery for which he was indebted to the glowing imagination of his wife. Frequent sickness of her husband alarmed her for his life. The tenderness with which she watched over him strengthened the tie which united them. He could not but love a young and beautiful wife so devoted ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... events, and restores an ideal reality to scenes which are gone by for ever. They live again in revived imagery, and we seem to hear and see with renewed emotions what we heard and saw at a former period. Successions of such recollected circumstances often form a series of welcome memorials. In religious meditations, the memory becomes a ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... local; for the pastoral subject could not well admit of it. The description of Asiatic magnificence, and manners, is a subject as yet unattempted amongst us, and I believe, capable of furnishing a great variety of poetical imagery. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... scholar, and a most admirable member of society. He was a poet, also, affecting the style of Cowley, who wrote an elegy upon his uncle, William Hervey, an elegy compared to Milton's 'Lycidas' in imagery, music, and tenderness of thought. The shade of Cowley, whom Charles II. pronounced, at his death, to be 'the best man in England,' haunted this peer, the first Earl of Bristol. He aspired especially to the poet's wit; and the ambition to be a wit flew like ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... the prayer is cast in a familiar mould. It boldly transfers to Him not only the semblance of man's form, but also the likeness of His processes of action. Hearing the cry for help precedes active intervention in the case of men's help, and the strong imagery of the prayer conceives of similar sequence in God. But the figure is transparent, and the 'anthropomorphism' so plain that no mistakes can arise ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... human life lay on his soul. Those domestic affections, too, which in Irishmen are so strong, became excited; his home, his fireside, the faces of his kindred, already impressed with affliction for the death of one brother, were conjured up in the powerful imagery of natural feeling, the fountains of which were opened in his heart, and his agonizing cry for life rose wildly from the mountain desert upon the voice of the tempest. Then, indeed, when the gulf of a twofold death yawned before him, did the struggling spirit send up its shrieking prayer to heaven ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... Learning is clearly evident in Spenser's use of classical mythology. Greek myths are placed side by side with Christian imagery and legends. Like Dante, the poet did not consider the Hellenic doctrine of sensuous beauty to be antagonistic to the truths of religion. There is sometimes an incongruous confusion of classicism and mediaevalism, ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... Various estimates of this long poem have been formed by critics from the favourable analysis of Ginguene to the severe censure of Sismondi. But in spite of its lack of dramatic power, and the monotony of its imagery, the heat of his genius crystallising only a part of the substance of his work, there can be no question that the poem is distinguished by a certain gravity and elevation of sentiment, which places it high ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Chart of Limits of Seas and Oceans, revised January 1958, published by the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center (ACIC), United States Air Force; note - ACIC is now part of the National Imagery ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... Bunyan and Doddridge—theologians and scholars, Broad Churchmen and Nonjurors, preachers and essayists, Churchmen and Nonconformists—expressed themselves far more unreservedly than is at all usual in our age, even among those who, in theory, interpret Scripture in the same sense. The hideous imagery depicted by the graphic pencil of Orcagna on the walls of the Campo Santo was reproduced no less vividly in the prose works of Bunyan, and with equal vigour, if not with equal force of imagination, by almost ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... theatre in Amsterdam, after which it was interdicted by the Protestant clergy. The subject of the drama is the rebellion of Lucifer, and the characters are the good and bad angels. In this as in his other plays there abound fantastic descriptions full of splendid imagery, passages of powerful eloquence, fine choruses, vigorous thought, solemn phrases, rich and sonorous verse, while here and there are gleams and flashes of genius. On the other hand, his work is pervaded by a mysticism ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... in manifest, now in recondite application, he presses it into the service of expression and illustration. At least a third of his myriad metaphors are derived from it. It would indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his dramas, nay, in some of them, a single scene, the diction and imagery of which is not colored by it. Much of his law may have been acquired from three books easily accessible to him, namely Tottell's Precedents (1572), Pulton's Statutes (1578), and Fraunce's Lawier's Logike (1588), works with which he certainly seems to have been familiar; but ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... must be taken into account which will explain this difference. In the first place, the subjects of the two books stand widely apart. The apocalyptic purport of the one book necessarily tinges its diction and imagery with a very strong Hebraic colouring, which we should not expect to find in a historical narrative. Secondly, a wide interval of time separates the two works. The Apocalypse was written, according to the view which our author represents 'as universally accepted by all competent ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... remembered. What has struck their fancy, they communicate to each other: and in their letters, the glittering thought, given with sententious brevity, the poetical allusion that enlivened the discourse, and the dazzling imagery, are sure to be transmitted to their respective colonies and provinces. The ornaments of poetic diction are now required, not, indeed, copied from the rude obsolete style of Accius [e] and Pacuvius, but embellished ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... arts; disadvantage, in bringing their gods too much on a level with human beings, and thence depriving them of their dignity, and gradually giving rise to scepticism and ridicule. But no statue, no artificial emblem, could satisfy the Northman's mind; the dark wild imagery of nature, which surrounded him, and the freedom of his life, gave his mind a tendency to the infinite, so that he found rest in that which presented no end, and derived satisfaction from that which ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... three years after his death under the title of "Country Rhymes for Children," there is no question. The internal evidence confirms the external. The book is thoroughly in Bunyan's vein, and in its homely naturalness of imagery recalls the similitudes of the "Interpreter's House," especially those expounded to Christiana and her boys. As in that "house of imagery" things of the most common sort, the sweeping of a room, the burning of a fire, the drinking ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... a prophecy which belongs, both in substance and form, to the classic period of Hebrew literature, and is written in a style which has been described as being "for grandeur and sublimity of conception, for gorgeousness of imagery, and for melody of language, among the foremost productions of that literature." The spirit of it is one: faith, namely, in the righteous ways of the Lord; but the burden is twofold; to denounce the judgment of God on the land for the violence and wrong that prevailed in it, as about to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... story in Herodotus (VI., 105-106) with Browning's more spirited and poetic version. Observe how the strong patriotism, the Greek love of nature, and the Greek reverence for the gods are brought to the fore. What imagery in the poem is especially effective? What is the claim of Pheidippides—as Browning presents him—to memory as a hero? What ideals are most prominent ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... to "hollow winds and ever-beating waves" and "sea-mew's clang." Milton appears at every turn, not only in single epithets like "Lydian airs," "the level brine," "low-thoughted cares," "the light fantastic dance," but in the entire spirit, imagery, and diction of the poem. A few lines illustrate this ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... later, a very noble monument was placed on the north side of the choir of St. John and Paul, to the Doge Marco Cornaro, chiefly, with respect to our present subject, noticeable for the absence of religious imagery from the sarcophagus, which is decorated with roses only; three very beautiful statues of the Madonna and two saints are, however, set in the canopy above. Opposite this tomb, though about fifteen years later in date, is the richest monument of the Gothic ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... he saw something white and gay gleaming through the boles of the oak-trees, and presently there was clear before him a most goodly house builded of white marble, carved all about with knots and imagery, and the carven folk were all painted of their lively colours, whether it were their raiment or their flesh, and the housings wherein they stood all done with gold and fair hues. Gay were the windows of the house; and there was ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... then this preference for one particular kind of mental imagery, and that the motor, or muscular kind, which gives this type of child his peculiarity in this more psychological period. When we pass from the mere outward and organic description of his peculiarities, attempted above in ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... the canons of criticism laid down by the greatest professors of the art, whether the scheme of a piece be obscured by unnatural complexity or rendered jejune and uninteresting by extreme simplicity, and familiarity of design—whether description be bloated, or overcharged, or imagery misplaced or extravagant; and lastly, whether the performance be on the whole deficient in, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... Playboy of the Western World' ... is a remarkable play ... its imagery is touched with a wild, unruly, sensational beauty, and the 'popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent and tender' is reflected in it with a glow.... There is a great deal of poetry and fire, beside the humour and satire so obviously intended, ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... one corner, with an open book in her hand, Regina looked at her and listened, fascinated by her singular beauty, but astonished at the emphasis with which she recited imagery that tinged the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... contemporaries—shall always rank it amongst the great literary treasures of the language. It was published in 1614. Besides it, Raleigh was the author of various works, all full of sagacious thought and brilliant imagery, such as 'The Advice to a Son on the Choice of a Wife,' 'The Sceptic,' 'Maxims of State,' &c. At last he was released by the advance of a large sum of money to Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, James's favourite; and, to retrieve his fortunes, projected another expedition ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... back against our wall in a sort of silent revelry, Fred alone moving, making his beloved instrument charm wisely, calling to her just enough to keep a link, as it were, through which her imagery might appeal to ours. Some sort of mental bridge between her tameless paganism and our twentieth-century twilight there had to be, or we never could have sensed her meaning. The concertina's wailings, mid-way between her intelligence and ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... show that curiosity and adultery are really the same vice in principle. Hence his imagery here. Jeremy Taylor has very beautifully dealt with this passage, "Holy Living," chap. ii. Sec. v. I cannot pretend to his felicity of language. Thus Plutarch makes adultery mere curiosity, and curiosity a sort of adultery in regard to secrets. A profoundly ethical ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... strangers attending his meetings, that this John the Baptist, mighty preacher though he be, was but the herald of one much greater than he, who should follow—that he was the forerunner of the Master, according to the Oriental imagery which pictured the forerunner of the great dignitaries, running ahead of the chariot of his master, crying aloud to all people gathered on the road that they must make way for the approaching great man, shouting ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... teacher who is well-nigh distracted in her efforts to guide forty restless, disorderly pupils through the program of a day's work might charm half her troubles away by the magic of a simple story or by the music and imagery of a juvenile poem. Her story or poem would do more than remove the cause of disorder by giving the pupils relaxation from nerve-straining work: it would help to establish that first essential ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... is also discernible in the natural imagery of the poem, which reflects a fitful and emotional fancy instead of the direct poetic vision of the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... be prepared for an exceptional nature, only this gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as well as in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of feeling and imagery that takes me by surprise. And then besides, and most of all, I am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy confidence in me. Perhaps I owe it to my ——— Well, no matter! How one must love the editor who first calls him ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... tressure-fleury and counter-fleury" of wit and fancy,—such is a Jerroldian paper of the best class in "Punch." It stands out by itself from all the others,—the sharp, critical knowingness, sparkling with puns, of a Beckett,—the inimitable, wise, easy, playful, worldly, social sketch of Thackeray. In imagery he had no rivals there; for his mind had a very marked tendency to the ornamental and illustrative,—even to the grotesque. In satire, again, he had fewer competitors than in humor;—sarcasms lurk under his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... palaces of the other cities of Italy were lifted into sullen fortitudes of rampart, and fringed with forked battlements for the javelin and the bow, the sands of Venice never sank under the weight of a war tower, and her roof terraces were wreathed with Arabian imagery, of golden globes suspended on the leaves of lilies. [Footnote: The inconsiderable fortifications of the arsenal are no exception to this statement, as far as it regards the city itself. They are little more than a semblance ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... dukes and counts, and these men called themselves Lords of Little Egypt; and from this fact seems originally to have arisen the notion that they were Egyptians. But this seems less like an assertion of their origin than like a piece of Scriptural phraseology. The Hussites used in that way a Biblical imagery, like the Puritans of a later age. Like the Puritans, they called their opponents Moabites, Amalekites, and so on. With the Puritans, Egypt was always "the house of bondage," and that name was the common designation of any ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... this is, is not the imagery of the closing lines a little more deliberate than we are conscious of in the great work of the great singers? One never feels that the leaves and the winds in themselves were sufficiently full of meaning and delight for Rossetti. He loved them as pictorial properties—as ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... intelligible for the Jews by using their own phrase, "Abraham's Bosom," their name for the state of the faithful departed immediately after death. And He says, Lazarus "was carried by the angels." If anybody else but Jesus had said it, we might pass this over as a piece of poetic imagery. But it was Jesus who said it. He says so much about the angels. He says that there are guardian angels of the children. He says that the angels rejoice over one sinner that repenteth. He would not say this about Lazarus carried by the angels ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... earnest; the remarks that one often hears, such as "scarlet is like a trumpet blast"; certain pages of Huysmans, all furnish examples of this curious muddling of the senses and mixing of genres. Naturally, it has invaded criticism, which, limited in imagery, sometimes seeks to transfer the technical terms of one ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... applauded. Thus the poets of the earlier part of the seventeenth century may be divided into one class, who sacrificed both sense and sound to the exercise of extravagant, though ingenious, associations of imagery; and a second, who, aiming to distinguish themselves by melody of versification, were satisfied with light and trivial subjects, and too often contented with attaining smoothness of measure, neglected the more essential qualities of poetry. The intervention of the civil wars greatly interrupted ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... canvas. As a child he was familiar with the Bible, the Old Testament particularly, and, improbable as it seems, was still a diligent student of Holy Writ. His mind was completely saturated with Bible imagery, yet there we were with our pockets full of forged documents walking up and down that platform star-gazing, while he talked with intelligent enthusiasm of those silver flowers in the darkened sky, of stellar space, how in its infinity it proved the presence of Deity. That with him ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... ever asked himself why it is that so much of the poetry of the Negro fails to reach the ultimate standards of art? It certainly is not because of lack of imagination, for God has been generous in the imagery with which he has endowed the race. First of all, last of all, is it not the matter of technique? Many booklets of verse that have been issued show that the writers had not mastered even the ordinary fundamentals of English grammar. For one to think of rivalling ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Celtic Imagery.—A critic rightly says: "The gay wit of the Celt would pour into the song of a few minutes more phrases of ornament than are to be found in the whole poem of Beowulf." In three lines of an old Celtic death song, we ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... he answered, 'only see that the doors are fast. I would fain keep all the cry as well as all the wool to ourselves; but as for giving over work, that can only be when I am in woolen.'"[53] From this time forward the brightness of joy and sincerity of inevitable humor, which perfected the imagery of the earlier novels, are wholly absent, except in the two short intervals of health unaccountably restored, in which he wrote "Redgauntlet" ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Professor Sillig, with the view of urging him to intervene on behalf of my poem. We thereupon went through it together. Its well-constructed and well-rhymed verses, written in stanzas of eight lines, determined him to revise the whole of it carefully. Much of its imagery was bombastic, and far beyond the conception of a boy of my age. I recollect that in one part I had drawn extensively from the monologue in Addison's Cato, spoken by Cato just before his suicide. I had met with this passage in an English grammar, and ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... itself there is a conflict that I can compare only to hearing two tunes played at once. Persons having already good visual imaging power should develop their auditive imaging power by going to the movies and hearing what the actors say; these with deficient visual imagery should read novels and see the scenery. But to say that the movies allow no scope for the imagination is absurd. As I said at the outset, the movie play is just a play seen through the medium of a moving picture. It is like ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... dead reckoning had computed their position so closely that John's announcement had come just as they were about to make a similar statement. Although they could see no "line" stretching along down there in the sea, they fancied they could, with the most pleasant imagery. That great line, the belt of the universe, dividing the Northern and Southern hemispheres, they had already crossed once, in their zigzagging course, at the mouth of the Amazon. Now here in the South ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... imagery bears to that of apocalyptic visions of a later period is interesting, as evidence of the latter's remote ancestry, and of the development in the use of primitive material to suit a completely changed political outlook. But those are points which ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... Under the drapery of "William Wilson," of "Morella," and "Ligeia," she caught tantalizing glimpses of recondite psychological truths and processes, which dimly hovered over her own consciousness, but ever eluded the grasp of analysis. While his unique imagery filled her mind with wondering delight, she shrank appalled from the mutilated fragments which he presented to her as truths, on the point of his glittering scalpel of logic. With the eagerness of a child clutching at its own shadow in a glassy lake, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... mother's love, In rural peace she lived, so fair, so light Of heart, so good and young, that reason scarce The eye could credit, but would doubt, as she Did stoop to pull the lily or the rose From morning's dew, if it reality Of flesh and blood, or holy vision, saw, In imagery of perfect womanhood. But short her bloom—her happiness was short. One saw her loveliness, and with desire Unhallowed, burning, to her ear addressed Dishonest words: 'Her favour was his life, His heaven; ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... review which for eighteen months maintained its existence in spite of provincial indifference. Some knowing persons at Nevers declared that Jan Diaz was making fun of the new school, just then bringing out its eccentric verse, full of vitality and imagery, and of brilliant effects produced by defying the Muse under pretext of adapting German, English, ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... unknown subterranean channel, roaring and thundering with a fearful noise, which rises in hollow echoes through the aptly-named "Devil's Throat." About this hole no grass grew: the rocks rose wild, jagged, and precipitous, all around it. If ever the ghastly imagery of Dante's terrible "Vision" was realized on earth, ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... the gunboats, the mortars, from all the batteries, are flashes, clouds of smoke, and thunderings, which bring to mind the gorgeous imagery of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, descriptive of the scenes of ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... already shining into poetry. Ch'u Yuan, the first great poet, belongs to this same fourth century; it is a long step from the little wistful ballads that Confucius gathered to the "wild irregular meters," * splendid imagery, and be it said, deep soul symbolism of his great poem the Li Sao (Falling into Trouble). The theme of it is this: From earliest childhood Ch'u Yuan had sought the Tao, but in vain. At last, banished by the prince whose minister he had been, he retired into the wilds, and was meditating ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... May by the Giaour, the first of the flood of verse romances which, during the three succeeding years, he poured forth with impetuous fluency, and which were received with almost unrestrained applause. The plots and sentiments and imagery are similar in them all. The Giaour steals the mistress of Hassan, who revenges his honour by drowning her. The Giaour escapes; returns, kills Hassan, and then goes to a monastery. In the Bride of Abydos, published in the December of the same year, Giaffir ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... in great caldrons and fanning themselves with diabolical irony, only to see a painting of a female form over whose writhing body boats were sailing, or a four-headed ram, or birds with human heads flying away with a mummified corpse. On the ceiling, too, there was strange imagery; and when she looked at the floor to rest her bewildered fancy, her eyes fell on a troop of furies pursuing the wicked, or a pool of fire by ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is borrowed from Mr. Wordsworth, a Poet whose versification is occasionally harsh and his diction too frequently obscure; but whom I deem unrivalled among the writers of the present day in manly sentiment, novel imagery, and vivid colouring. Note, 1796, p. 185: Footnote, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in general; and although to prophets specially commissioned in the authorities and privileges of the Holy Priesthood, revelation of the great truth was given,[15] they transmitted it to the people rather in the language of imagery and parable than in words of direct plainness. Nevertheless the testimony of the evangelists and the apostles, the attestation of the Christ Himself while in the flesh, and the revelations given in the present dispensation leave us ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... colder with intolerance and bigotry under their influence; nor can we ever have that joy in heavenly hope that belongs to those whose hearts cleave to all that is pure and true, and whose souls are therefore filled with the imagery of virtue. ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... to draw it up, and a Curtain hanging before it. Gilding for the Pillar and the Cross. 2 Pair of Gallows. 4 Scourges and a Pillar. Scaffold. Fanes to the Pageant. Mending of Imagery occurs 1469. A Standard of red Buckram. Two red Pensiles of Cloth painted, and silk Fringe. Iron to hold ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... ever in our national life, we must be content to "walk by faith and not by sight." This chapter began with imagery, and with imagery it shall end. "I have often stood on some mountain peak, some Cumbrian or Alpine hill, over which the dim mists rolled; and suddenly, through one mighty rent in that cloudy curtain, I have seen the blue heaven in all ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... me that 'so long ago as 1748[148] he had read "The Grave, a Poem[149]," but did not like it much.' I differed from him; for though it is not equal throughout, and is seldom elegantly correct, it abounds in solemn thought, and poetical imagery beyond the common reach. The world has differed from him; for the poem has passed through many editions, and is still much read by people of a serious ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... who had been at the Palace said: "Beware the Inglesi!" This still Quaker, with the white shining face and pontifical hat, with his address of "thee" and "thou," and his forms of speech almost Oriental in their imagery and simplicity, himself an archaism, had impressed them with a sense of power. He had prompted old Diaz Pasha to speak of him as a reincarnation, so separate and withdrawn he seemed at the end of the evening, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to thank them for their help in making it possible to render into English the imagery and poetry used by "My Lady of the ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... unchallenged faith and its tender instincts. His unworldliness was almost legendary in its belief of human nature. I remember he was asked once whether he believed in Santa Claus, and in his own beautiful imagery he said: ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... and prayers with which the poem abounds are largely original, expanded from a mere line or two in the Greek. Many and beautiful are the epithets or kennings which he applies to God, taken in part from the Bible, and in part from the imagery of the not wholly extinct ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... imagination but represent earlier stages of amalgamation in which Hindu and aboriginal ideas are already compounded. When the smallpox goddess is identified with Kali, the procedure is correct, for some popular forms of Kali are little more than an aboriginal deity of pestilence draped with Hindu imagery and philosophy. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... ever I knew. Night before last I was requested to assist in taking their place—I, who am the most unfit of men for the post. I never made a speech. I have addressed learned bodies, but I lack that liberty of speech—the ability to present in finished style, and with that rich imagery which characterize the words of the orator, the thoughts fitting to such an occasion as this. He would limit himself, he continued, to presenting some motives why the community should patronize science, and foster such institutions as this. We scientific men regard this as an occasion of ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... themselves, and till you teach me better I shall continue to think that the passage in your speech of yesterday which began with, 'Our strength lies in this twisted and tangled mass of isolated principles, the hair of the half-sleeping giant of Party,' is both for language and imagery quite ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... your lips. I have questioned whether the enchantments of your voice were more conspicuous in the intricacies of melody, or the emphasis of rhetoric. I have marked the transitions of your discourse, the felicities of your expression, your refined argumentation, and glowing imagery; and been forced to acknowledge, that all delights were meagre and contemptible, compared with those connected with the audience and sight of you. I have contemplated your principles, and been astonished at the solidity of their foundation, and the perfection of their ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... writing his treatise on Instruction, sums him up thus: "Of our lyric poets, Horace is about the only one worth reading; for he sometimes reaches real heights, and he is at the same time full of delightfulness and grace, and both in variety of imagery and in words is most happily daring." To these broad strokes the modern critic has added little except by way ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... mountains; and lo a noble house, And a hall with great craft fashioned, and made full glorious; But night on the earth was falling; so scantly might they see The wealth of its smooth-wrought stonework and its world of imagery: Then Loki bade turn thither since day was at an end, And into that noble dwelling the lords of God-home wend; And the porch was fair and mighty, and so smooth-wrought was its gold, That the mirrored stars of heaven therein might ye behold: But the hall, what words shall ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... commonly represented on the west wall of the nave, or over the chancel arch; and in the contract for the erection of the Lady Chapel, St. Mary's Church, Warwick, A. D. 1454, is a covenant "to paint fine and curiously, to make on the west wall the dome of our Lord God Jesus, and all manner of devises and imagery thereto belonging." The west front of the wall over the chancel arch, Trinity Chapel, Stratford-upon-Avon, was some years back found to be thus covered; but this painting, with others in the same chapel, ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... late! The only art that I ever could achieve was that of giving happiness to Isabel and being worthy of her devotion. Her letters came frequently, always so full of wise observations, striking fancies and imagery; so many with thanks for what I had been to her. She wrote me that Uncle Tom's will, as he had dictated it, had been probated and acquiesced in by ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... specifically the offer made by the man of wealth to the poet. Ridman, in one of his enterprises, found it necessary to procure the aid of such a person as Lingave—a writer of power, a master of elegant diction, of fine taste, in style passionate yet pure, and of the delicate imagery that belongs to the children of song. The youth was absolutely startled at the magnificent and permanent remuneration which was held out to him for a moderate ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... most extraordinary book of the age" is published every week; "genius" springs up like mullein, wherever the soil is thin enough; the yearly catch of "weird imagination," "thrilling pathos," "splendid description," and "sublime imagery" does not fall short of an ordinary mackerel-crop; and "profound originality" is so plenty that one not in the secret would be apt to take it for commonplace. Now Tithonus, whom, as the oldest inhabitant, we have engaged to oversee ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... the book this was the last one would have supposed Dan would like best, and even Mrs Jo was surprised at his perceiving the moral of the tale through the delicate imagery and romantic language by which it was illustrated. But as she looked and listened she remembered the streak of sentiment and refinement which lay concealed in Dan like the gold vein in a rock, making him quick to feel and to enjoy fine colour in ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Yochai, who lived in the second century. The Zohar, it was pretended, had been concealed in a cavern in Galilee for more than a thousand years, and had now been suddenly discovered. The Zohar is, indeed, a work of genius, its spiritual beauty, its fancy, its daring imagery, its depth of devotion, ranking it among the great books of the world. Its literary style, however, is less meritorious; it is difficult and involved. As Chatterton clothed his ideas in a pseudo-archaic English, ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... was too conscientious to make errour permanent and pernicious, by deliberately writing it. He was conscious of his superiority. He loved praise when it was brought to him; but was too proud to seek for it. He was somewhat susceptible of flattery. His mind was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet. It has been often remarked, that in his poetical pieces, which it is to be regretted are so few, because so excellent, his style is easier than in his prose. There is deception in this: it is not easier, but better suited ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... of distinguished men may be incorporated into a story, uniting narrative and dialogue so as to be more attractive to the young. John Bunyan was the first to adopt this style, and his inimitable Pilgrim's Progress charms the young reader, not only by its graphic imagery, but also by its alternation of narrative and dialogue. Since his day, others have adopted a similar style, particularly in works of fiction, with success. Why may not truth appear in such a dress as successfully as fiction? Why may not actual lives be presented in this manner as vividly as ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... coming a long way to listen to Mrs. Billy tete-a-tete; her thoughts were vigorous, and her imagery was picturesque. She spoke of old Dan Waterman, and described him as a wild boar rooting chestnuts. He was all right, she said, if you didn't come under his tree. And Montague asked, "Which is his tree?" and she answered, "Any one he happens to be ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... not seldom with the dead, must have felt both these conditions; how, in certain passive, tranquil states, there comes up into the darkened chamber of the mind, its "chamber of imagery"—uncalled, as if it blossomed out of space, exact, absolute, consummate, vivid, speaking, not darkly as in a glass, but face to face, and "moving delicate"—this "idea of his life;" and then how an effort to prolong and perpetuate and record all ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... The imagery under which Slawkenbergius impresses this upon the reader's fancy, in the beginning of his third Decad, is so ludicrous, that the honour I bear the sex, will not suffer me to quote it—otherwise it ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... Geophysical Union, Bureau of the Census, Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Nuclear Agency, Department of State, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Maritime Administration, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, National Maritime Intelligence Center, National Science Foundation (Antarctic Sciences Section), Office of Insular Affairs, US Board on Geographic Names, US Coast Guard, and other public and ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... as M. Angelo's aim was the "destiny of man, simply considered as the subject of religion, faithful or rebellious," admitting only a "general feature of the passions;" so, in the hands of Raffaelle, the subject would have teemed with a choice of imagery to excite our sympathies; "he would have combined all possible emotions with the utmost variety of probable or real character; all domestic, politic, religious relations—whatever is not local in virtue and in vice; and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... skill, Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... life developed in Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate sensibility to natural sights and sounds—the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of [98] "Resolution and Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve." To read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a day spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... gazed about to see if the high hall and the Avars were but the imagery of a dream. But there in front of him stood the dwarfish tribe, with naked brands and battle-axes. These, when they looked on his face, raised a hoarse cry of terror, for they too had beheld Talisso, how at a blow of the magic sword he had fallen and ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... are at home. You will never hear the builders of Buckfast shouting aloud, "Down with Downside; for it was designed by a careful Gothic architect!" You will never hear them say, "How contemptible are these Catholics who pray in common churches; tawdry with waxwork imagery and Repository Art." Of the great adventurers who advance out of the Christian past, in search of Christian future, you could never say that the pioneers despise ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the Hebrew history, where every moral obliquity is shown out with such naivete, and the Greek history, full of sparkling deeds and brilliant sayings, and their gods and goddesses, the types of beauty and power, with the dazzling veil of flowery language and poetical imagery cast over their vices ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... needs, and the belief that fits one man will not fit another. Religious opinions are never thrown away: they evolve into something else, and we use the old symbols and imagery ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Praxiteles, to speak only of sculptors, treated the types created by Homer and Hesiod. In the case of Chaldaea we have no such opportunity. She has left us neither monuments of sacerdotal theology like those we have inherited in such countless numbers from Egypt, nor the brilliant imagery in which the odes and epics of the Greeks sketched the personalities of the gods. But even in Chaldaea art was closely united with religion, and, in spite of the difficulty of the task, the historian of art must endeavour to pierce the shadows that obscure ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... circumstances:—in fact all the modern authors represented in the present book may be said to have been prolific as writers. Gumundur Frijnsson was equally versatile as a writer of short stories and poems. He has a rich command of imagery and diction, and his style, at times a little pompous, is often powerful though slightly archaic in flavour. The ancient heroic literature doubtless fostered his manly ideas, which, however, sprang from his own experience in life. One must, he felt, be hard on oneself, and on one's guard ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... every century offers fresh variations of old-world stories, until original form is lost beneath a weight of accretion, like the thick moss blurring the chiselled outlines of some carven monument. After careful scrutiny of the miniature temple which suggests so many interpretations of symbolic imagery, we return to the little presbytery to hear of the subsiding river, and the good priest, announcing that the raft can now be safely negotiated, accompanies us to the tottering structure, a straw matting laid over three crazy boats punted across the turbulent stream. A half-hour's stroll beneath the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the town. The imagery and carved work on the front of the cathedral was much injured in 1641. The cross upon the west window is said to have been frequently aimed ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... wherein is painted some babblerie or other, of imagery woork, and these they call My Lord of Misrule's badges: these they give to every one that wil give money for them, to maintaine them in their heathenrie, devilrie, whordome, drunkennes, pride, and what not. And ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton |
