"Imaginable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... invited by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of Punch, to the funeral, which took place at Kensal Green. It was the most touching sight imaginable. The grave was near Thackeray's, who had died the year before. There were crowds of people, Charles Dickens among them; Canon Hole, a great friend of Leech's, and who has written most affectionately about him, read the service; and when the coffin ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... from the west, through some land adjoining the House of Correction; and it was a great convenience to those living on that side of the town; but for some reason it was closed; and one of the most roundabout ways imaginable has been substituted for it. St. Mary's is one of those churches which can be felt rather than seen. Until you get quite to it you hardly know you are at it. Approaching it from the west the first glimmering of it you have is over one end of ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... who believed in one God Whose Prophet had come to knock down all graven images in the temples, were still allowed the protection and comfort of their personal amulets, which were powerful enough to protect them from every evil imaginable, or to bring them all the blessings their simple souls desired. Arab workmen, who believe that Allah wills all things, that whatsoever happens, it is his purpose, will flock round any soothsayer who professes to see into the future and do the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... safety. If a boat was stove on the rocks in a surf, or was run down by a vessel, the fact of being in the water did not frighten them out of their wits, for they had been trained to feel quite at home, as in their native element. They were actually drilled to confront danger in every imaginable form. But a gentle and timid boy was not pitched into the water, even after he had learned to swim. His constitutional shrinking was slowly and skilfully overcome, so that even the most delicate—though ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... stranger should leave him, say, five thousand a year; he had often walked about the street, with his hands in his empty pockets, building delicious castles in the air, and doing the most munificent actions imaginable with his newly-acquired wealth, as all men in such circumstances do; relieving distress, rewarding virtue, and making handsome presents to all his friends, and especially to Mrs. Woodward. So far Charley was not guiltless of ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... provided a fair copy of his father's will, engrossed in form upon a large skin of parchment, and resolving to act the part of a most dutiful son, he became the fondest creature of it imaginable. For although, as I have often told the reader, it consisted wholly in certain plain, easy directions about the management and wearing of their coats, with legacies and penalties in case of obedience or ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... under the alternate flicker and gloom of the windy rooms of pines, in gray rock shelters, and by the ooze of blind springs, and their juxtapositions are the best imaginable. Lilies come up out of fern beds, columbine swings over meadowsweet, white rein-orchids quake in the leaning grass. Open swales, where in wet years may be running water, are plantations of false hellebore (Veratrum Californicum), tall, branched candelabra of greenish bloom above the ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... ready; some bread, without butter, was placed upon the little table; and the meal was the most cheerful and happy imaginable. "Oh, my dear Mr. Blocque!" I could not help saying to myself, "keep your champagne, and canvass-backs, and every luxury, and welcome! I like dry bread and tea, ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... nearly a week in a slight fever; shivering and hot. I was attended by a doctor of the country, who seems the most harmless creature imaginable. Every day he felt my pulse, and gave me some little innocent mixture. But what he especially gave me was a lesson in polite conversation. Every day we had the following dialogue, as ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... Boonesborough. Aware that he should be pursued by enemies as keen on the scent as bloodhounds, he put forth his whole amount of backwoods skill, in doubling in his track, walking in the water, and availing himself of every imaginable expedient to throw them off his trail. His unfinished fragment of his breakfast was his only food, except roots and berries, during this escape for his life, through unknown forests and pathless swamps, and across numerous rivers, spreading in an extent of more than two hundred miles. ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... Caius? This fellow, by industry and agility, has thrust himself into the important situations (no sinecures, believe me) of cook to Trinity Hall and Caius College: and the generous creature has contrived with the greatest delicacy imaginable, to send me a present of Cambridge brawn. What makes it the more extraordinary is, that the man never saw me in his life that I know of. I suppose he has heard of me. I did not immediately recognise the donor; but one of Richard's cards, which had accidentally fallen into the straw, detected ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... conversation, but still more by her exemplary attention to all the services and rites of the Church. The Dauphin at first feared the injury that might be done to his cause if he laid himself open to the charge of having leagued himself with a sorceress. Every imaginable test, therefore, was resorted to in order to set Jeanne's orthodoxy and purity beyond suspicion. At last Charles and his advisers felt safe in accepting her services as those of a true and virtuous Christian daughter of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Emperors, whose history is preserved entire,—with them we feel acquainted, we know the controlling principles, as well as the leading events of their lives, and we feel sure that we could predict how they would act, under almost any imaginable circumstances. ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... facts about our friend Magnus must suffice. Old Ombos had a splendid edition of his works, lately published in Paris under the direction of a certain August Borguet; twenty large folios on all imaginable subjects. They included chapters on hawks and adhering to God, on meteors and the mystery of the Mass, on the healing of the leper ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... the oddest thing imaginable. No one but Nick could have conceived the whole business, or found the smallest interest in it. But he did find an interest, and that was enough for me. He is lonely now, I grant. But before this—this invention, he was ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... whenever the skies were overcast. Also, the windows were fixed and set against the outer air—impregnable to any form of assault less impulsive than a stone cast by an irresponsible hand. A door, set craftily in the most inconvenient spot imaginable, afforded both ventilation and access to an aisle which led tortuously between bales of hides to doors opening upon a waist-high stage, where trucks backed up to receive and ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... to keep him in absinthe and tobacco, which are apparently his sole sustenance. In the meanwhile he is painting a masterpiece; at least, so he will tell you. He is a virulent fanatic, whose art is the most monstrous thing imaginable. He is—but ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... instrument: sometimes it rumbled like the thunder; sometimes it warbled like the sweetest music. It was the blast of war—the song of peace; and it seemed to have a heart in it, when there was no such matter. In good truth, he was a wondrous man; and when his tongue had acquired him all other imaginable success—when it had been heard in halls of state, and in the courts of princes and potentates—after it had made him known all over the world, even as a voice crying from shore to shore—it finally persuaded his ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... [i.e., DRYDEN, see pp. 503, 566] have written in this kind, come short of that perfection which is required. Yet since you are pleased I should undertake this province, I will do it: though, with all imaginable respect and deference both to that Person [i.e., SIR ROBERT HOWARD, see p. 494] from whom you have borrowed your strongest arguments; and to whose judgement, when I have said all, I ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... "Can any imaginable pretext serve to palliate so atrocious a crime, or excuse the woman who first committed it, and the man who joined in the rebellion? Would they indeed have been less criminal, if a seraph of glory had proposed to them the impious deed? Was not the faculty ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... service at the Point at that time was about the worst imaginable. The hotel had none, and a few old negroes with disreputable "foh de wah" vehicles and horses that could only get over the poor roads by constant urging, picked up a few dollars by driving guests of the hotel ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... read a vast amount about love. The classics are full of its every imaginable version or perversion; but Litton had seen it expressed only in the polished phrases of Anacreon, Bion, Propertius, and the others. He had not guessed that, however these men polished their verses, they doubtless addressed their sweethearts with all ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... from her hands as she stared petrified at her vis-a-vis, who kept his eyes on his book with the most innocent expression imaginable, one that even a Chinaman could not have equaled. Where could he have heard those words, once so familiar? A moment's thought gave her the ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... when they heard the sound of a horse galloping after them at so rapid a pace that he gained upon them every moment. Our traveller turned round and saw a man, or rather a Centaur, for the most perfect harmony imaginable existed between horse and rider. The latter was of a robust and plethoric constitution, with large fiery eyes, rugged features, and a black mustache. He was of middle age and had a general air of rudeness and aggressiveness, ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... the mountain, wheat, apples, melons, berries, all the best production of farm and garden growing and ripening there at the foot of the great white cone, which seems at times during changing storms ready to fall upon them—the most sublime farm scenery imaginable. ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... out, and we sat on the lawn laughing and talking till the gentlemen's carriage was announced, and our rival heroes took their departure for town, cheek by jowl, in a pretty equipage of Mr. Craven's, in the most amicable mood imaginable. As soon as they were off we mounted and rode out, past our old cottage, down by Brooklands, through the second wood, and by the Fairies' Oak. O Lord King, Lord King (we were riding through the property of ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... all that therein is, stands on the edge of a precipice, and that at any moment a landslip might topple it over into everlasting ruin. And yet you behave as though your house was planted in the midst of a vast and secure plain, sheltered from every imaginable havoc. I speak metaphorically, of course. It is not a material precipice that your house stands on the edge of; it is a metaphorical precipice. But the perils symbolized by that ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... to me clear that the mathematical faculty—assuming always, let it be understood, that it may give rise to more or less conscious phenomena in the biological subject—may be amongst the most natural of imaginable causes, and that even the smallest amount of consciousness may help this existing capacity in the animal to express itself. That we are concerned with an expression by raps or not, does not seem to me as important as a proper estimation ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... "Competence—I loathe the word! It's used now to cover all imaginable sins, as folks used to excuse all manner of rascality in a good swordsman. We're beyond the frontier period now when competence was a matter of life and death. We ought to begin to have some glimmering realization that ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... was another long pause, during which, as I afterwards learned, the Francesca's crew were rummaging the ship—a homeward-bound Indiaman, named the Bangalore—and loading her decks with booty of every imaginable description, preparatory to its transfer to the brigantine. Mendouca, I must mention, had already compelled the Bangalore's surgeon to dress his wound for him; and now, having given his orders to one of the men whom he considered the most reliable and trustworthy of his crew, he ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... old-fashioned place, which was full of nooks and surprises. At every turn you might stumble on some clump or tangle of sweetness, showering elusive fragrance on the air, that you would never have suspected. Nothing in the garden was planted quite where it should be, yet withal it was the most delightful spot imaginable. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of friends. A thousand hands of old neighbors were stretched out to grasp his as he moved along with great difficulty, piloted by the reception committee, through the vast and surging crowd. Cheer after cheer went up on every imaginable pretext, and many times calls for 'Three cheers for John Sherman, our next President,' were honored with a power and enthusiasm that left no room for doubt as to the intensity of the devotion felt for him ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... it mingled with the general gratification. There was a feeling of ease among them, too, of the indefeasibly won, which the event is apt to bring even when the surgeon-lieutenant-colonelcy is most strikingly deserved. With no strain imaginable one ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... tassels of the curtains and bells were taken out of those brown linen bags, in which, for reasons hitherto undiscovered, they are habitually concealed in some households. In the remoter apartments every imaginable operation was going on at once,—roasting, boiling, baking, beating, rolling, pounding in mortars, frying, freezing; for there was to be ice-cream to-night of domestic manufacture;—and in the midst of all these labors, Mrs. Sprowle and Miss Matilda were moving about, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... chanc'd that in the midst of it there was a viscous Substance with a very little bubble in it, which was divided into two with a thin partition, full of Spirituous and Aerial Substance, and of the most exact Temperature imaginable. That the Matter being thus dispos'd, there was, by the Command of God, a Spirit infus'd into it; which was join'd so closely to it, that it can scarce be separated from it even so much as in thought; which did as constantly influence this ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... I saw you. I went out to try to discover what was the matter with my old world. For some time I had had the queerest sensations imaginable. I was accustomed to being out of doors a great deal, and I first began to notice that I could walk and run more easily than before. I was becoming rather sprightly for one who was so soon to pass off this deserted stage. Then everything I took up seemed to be growing marvelously ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... on the path amongst the trees at the end of the garden seemed to have gone asleep. We turned the car in the drive, and, in case things should happen, pointed its nose homewards. That is always a wise precaution, for turning a car under fire in a narrow road is one of the most trying experiences imaginable. The coolest hand may fumble with the gears at such a moment, and it is surprising how difficult it is to work them neatly when every second may be a matter of life or death, when a stopped engine may settle the fate of everyone in the car. It ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... river, and other men—most of whom volunteered for the service- -were examining the banks. All the livelong day the search went on; upon the river, with barge and pole, and drag and net; upon the muddy and rushy shore, with jack-boots, hatchet, spade, rope, dogs, and all imaginable appliances. Even at night, the river was specked with lanterns, and lurid with fires; far-off creeks, into which the tide washed as it changed, had their knots of watchers, listening to the lapping of the stream, and looking out for ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... all imaginable exercises, is the most slight and insignificant, if you allude to the motion of a carriage suspended on springs. By observing the degree of heat obtained by different kinds of motion we may form an estimate of the quantity of exercise given by ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... regal caress of Henriette's fingers in the handclasp. Most patronizing (or was it odious familiarity?) his dainty touch of her bare arms; the jeweled hand that toyed with her ringlets; the dexterous move as if to encircle her waist; the playing—in the airiest, most fluttering manner imaginable—with the lace that draped her adorable ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... "Have any of you chaps got a cigarette?" he asked; and I noticed that his hand, usually the steadiest hand imaginable, trembled ever so slightly. "Well," he began again, "there you are! I had tumbled into about as rotten a little, pitiful a little tragedy as you can imagine, there in a God-forsaken desert of Arizona, with not a soul about but a Chinaman, a couple ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... folded round his knees his Joseph's coat, as he called it, an old dressing-gown with one plaid sleeve, and one blue one, red shawl-skirts, and a black broadcloth back, not to mention, innumerable patches of every imaginable stuff and colour, filled his pipe, and buried his nose in "Harrington's Oceana." He read at least twelve hours every day of his life, and that exclusively old history and politics, though his favourite books ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... it commenced at two o'clock and finished at the break of day. The favors were of every nationality, imported from all over the world, and tied up with every imaginable national color. I danced with the Count Voguee, who is by far the best dancer in Paris. He got masses of favors and gave them all to me, and I also received a great quantity; so that when I went to the carriage I almost needed a dray ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... seized Jane's unwilling hands. She gathered those poor, stiff, knotted fingers into two crackling bundles within her own plump and warm palms, squeezed them forcibly, and looked into Jane's face with all imaginable kindness. "I had just that temper once myself," ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... viols and the clanging of tambourines. It is needless to say that Passepartout watched these curious ceremonies with staring eyes and gaping mouth, and that his countenance was that of the greenest booby imaginable. ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... Atkins" enjoyed at that period. For when the work of the day was over, bathing parade was the great feature of the evening, and the margin of the strand was crowded with soldiers, swimming, wading, diving, splashing, playing every imaginable game in the water, for, however tired they might be, the refreshing plunge gave them fresh ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... of the country with the magnificence of a city view, unclouded by the dense fumes which forever envelop our metropolis. It is in truth a glorious situation. Walking along its wide and well-cultivated terraces, you obtain the finest view imaginable of the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... would have fancied him to be such a child, and so ignorant of what is proper and not proper to do? He saw well enough that his sister was not well; and what's more all these matters shouldn't have been recounted to her; for even supposing he had received the gravest offences imaginable, it behoved him anyhow not to have broached the subject to her! Yesterday, one would scarcely believe it, a fight occurred in the school-room, and some pupil or other who attends that class, somehow insulted him; besides, in this business, there were a good many indecent ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... five or six thousand francs a year would hardly suffice for the comfortable support of that family, in which there were two children, and it at once occurred to her to add to it her share in the inheritance. She suggested this contribution in the most natural and simple way imaginable. Her brother accepted it, and she went with him to live in a pretty little apartment at the upper end of Rue de Clichy, on the fourth floor of one of the first houses built in that neighborhood, then ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... stepped daintily over the mat, and Rosalind stood before them in all the glory of a new Parisian dress. Three separate gasps of admiration greeted her appearance, and she stood smiling and dimpling while the girls took in the fascinating details—the satin frock of palest imaginable pink, the white chiffon over-dress which fell from shoulder to hem in graceful freedom, sprinkled over with exquisite rose—leaves—it was all wonderful—fantastic—as far removed from Peggy's muslin as from the homely crepon of ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... had been accustomed to hold, would be cruel; while the places held by the nobility were, for the greater part such as none but natives could perform the duties of. By any innovation we should affront the higher classes and alienate the affections of all, not only without any imaginable advantage but with the certainty of great loss. Were Englishmen to be employed, the salaries must be increased fourfold, and would yet be scarcely worth acceptance; and in higher offices, such as those of the civil and criminal judges, the salaries ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... summoned to the important business of dinner. Harry could not help sighing when he reflected on what he had to undergo; however, he determined to bear it with all imaginable fortitude, for the sake of his friend Tommy. The dinner indeed was, if possible, more dreadful than anything he had before undergone—so many fine gentlemen and fine ladies; so many powdered servants to stand behind their chairs; such an apparatus ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... disasterous battle than a work shop. The majority of the bodies are nude, their clothing having been torn off. All along the river bits of clothing—a tiny shoe, a baby dress, a mother's evening wrapper, a father's coat, and in fact every article of wearing apparel imaginable may be seen hanging to stumps of trees and ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... opprobrium I heap upon you—you, the most pointless things imaginable, saucy apes, brewers of odious contrasts, haunting birds of ill omen, mocking echoes, unseasonable reminders, oft-returning vexations, skeletons in my morris-chair, jesters in the tomb, death's-heads at the wedding feast, outlaws ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... myself, with all the fervor imaginable, to refine and enlighten this rude, yet promising people, so that shortly I came to be regarded among them as a saint; their trust in my wisdom was so great, that they thought nothing impossible with me. Therefore, when overtaken by misfortune, they would hasten to my hut and pray for my assistance. ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... the bridge into Bristol, he continues: "From thence you come to a key along the old wall, with houses on both sides, and in the middle of the street, as far as you can see, hundreds of ships, their masts as thick as they can stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable. This street is fuller of them than the Thames from London Bridge to Deptford, and at certain times only the water rises to carry them out; so that at other times a long street full of ships in the middle and houses on both sides looks like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... of the disturbances, and the massacres consequent on them, to adopt towards the Senate the tone of an offended conqueror. He published a declaration that the Venetian Government was the most treacherous imaginable. The weakness and cruel hypocrisy of the Senate facilitated the plan he had conceived of making a peace for France at the expense of the Venetian Republic. On returning from Leoben, a conqueror and pacificator, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... he went out of the hearing of the cries of his family; and pursuing his journey, arrived on the day appointed at the place where he had promised to meet the genie. He alighted, and seating himself down by the fountain, waited the coming of the genie, with all the sorrow imaginable. Whilst he languished under this painful expectation, an old man leading a hind appeared and drew near him. After they had saluted one another, the old man said to him, "Brother, may I ask why you are come into this desert place, which is possessed solely by evil spirits, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... way. Frau von Sigmundskron liked to fancy that she could still control every impulse Hilda showed, as well as formerly, but she could not help being proud of her daughter's strength, for Hilda was like her father, a man who, with the sweetest temper imaginable, had dared anything that ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... his duties. Two lackeys stand by awaiting his orders. The first secretary enters for the purpose of giving an account of the letters received by him and which he has to open; but he is interrupted two hundred times in this business by all sorts of people imaginable. Now it is a horse-jockey with the finest horses to sell. . . . Again some saucy girl who calls to bawl out a piece of music, and on whose behalf some influence has been exerted to get her into the opera, after giving her a few lessons in good ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... even sent to London for ornaments for his walls. Books were bought by the square yard, pictures by the wholesale, mirrors by the dozen, with bronzes and brackets and sconces and tapestry and banners and screens and clocks and cabinets and statuary, with every kind of furniture imaginable, from the costliest rugs and carpets to the most exquisite inlaid tables to be found in Florence or Venice. For Peterkin sent there for them by a ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... whose life hung on a button, was that great personage whose name has been spelled almost every way imaginable between Hendtler and Handel—the later form being preferred by the English, who, as somebody said, love to speak learnedly of "Handel and Glueck." It is not needful here to tell the story of his brilliant life and the big events it crowded into the four and seventy years between 1685 and 1759. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... of the Negritos is the most primitive imaginable. It consists of scraping the surface of the earth—without clearance of forest—and throwing the seed. They never "take up" a piece of land, but sow in the manner described wherever they may happen ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... almost finished No. 3, in which I have relieved my indignant soul with a scarifier. Sticking at it day after day, I am the incompletest letter-writer imaginable—seem to have no idea of holding a pen for any other purpose but that book. My fair Laura has not yet reported concerning Paris, but I should think will have done so before I see you. And now to that point. I ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... out with the first appearance of light, and penetrated into the most inaccessible jungles, crying aloud words of taunt-laden challenge to all the beasts therein, and accusing the ancestors of their race of every imaginable variety of evil behaviour. Yet so great had become the renown of the one who stood forth, and so widely had the warning voice been passed from tree to tree, preparing all who dwelt in the forest against his anger, that not even ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... gold of which its hair and collar are composed must have been stirred, while the metal was yet molten, crystals, topazes, sapphires, rubies, onyxes, amethysts, and diamonds,—the stones crude, or rudely cut, and blended in such proportions as might enhance to the utmost imaginable limit the beauty and the cost of the adored effigy. The combination is as harmonious as it is splendid. No wonder it is commonly believed that Buddha himself alighted on the spot in the form of a great emerald, and by a flash of lightning conjured the glittering edifice and altar in an instant ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... fall to the ground; if they had done more, they would probably have done worse.'[838] For ecclesiastical architecture was then, as is well known, at its lowest ebb. 'Public taste,' wrote Warburton to Hurd in 1749, 'is the most wretched imaginable.'[839] He was speaking, at the time, of poetry. But poetry and art are closely connected; and it is next to impossible that depth of feeling and grandeur of conception should be found in the one, at a date when there is a marked deficiency of them in the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... I have been for some time past the greatest rake imaginable, and really wonder how such a meagre creature as I am can support so much fatigue, of which the history of one day will give you some idea, for I only stood from two to four in the drawing-room and of course loaded ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... there was anything like it in all the world. Money, and, in a certain measure, the things that money could buy, were imaginable in Pymantoning; but joys so fine, so simple as these, were what she could not have forecast from any ground of experience or knowledge. She tried to give her mother a notion of what they said and did; but she told her frankly ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... of vultures hovered overhead, and, watching their opportunity, dived down every now and again and tore a piece of flesh from the carcass with their powerful beaks, and then hurried off, making unearthly noises which, joined to the howls of the jackals, made the most awful discord imaginable. ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... they would be back again in their old positions, to all appearances sound asleep. As the eye became accustomed to the foetid duskiness of the prison, a strange picture presented itself. Groups of men, in all imaginable attitudes, were lying, standing, sitting, or pacing up and down. It was the scene on the poop-deck over again; only, here being no fear of restraining keepers, the wild beasts were a little more free in their movements. It is ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... imprisonment, &c. So no man is obliged to accuse himself, or generally to give testimony where from the nature of the case it may be presumed to be corrupted. Accusation upon torture is not to be reputed as testimony. At the close he remarks upon oaths. He finds in human nature two imaginable helps to strengthen the force of words, otherwise too weak to insure the performance of covenants. One of these—pride in appearing not to need to break one's word, he supposes too rare to be presumed upon. The other, fear, has reference either to power of spirits invisible, or of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... like all the finny tribe, supposed to be incapable of hearing, in consequence of the density of the element in which they exist. Water has long ago been proved to be a non-conductor of sound, and if fish are possessed of any faculty of the kind, it must be the dullest imaginable. From the horny construction of the palate, their taste cannot be acute, and their sense of smelling (judging from the medium by which all odours are conveyed to them,) must be peculiarly defective. Taking the above ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... under complete control, early in youth. This work cannot be commenced too soon. The earlier the effort, the easier it can be accomplished. To straighten the tender twig, when it grows awry from the ground, is the easiest thing imaginable. A child can do it at the touch of its finger. But let the twig become a matured tree before the attempt is made, and it will baffle all the art of man to bring it to a symmetrical position. It must be uprooted from the very soil before this can be accomplished. It is not difficult to correct ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... the party of AEneas spent many months in weary voyages from island to island, and from shore to shore, along the Mediterranean sea, encountering every imaginable difficulty and danger, and meeting continually with the strangest and most romantic adventures. At one time they were misled by a mistaken interpretation of prophecy to attempt a settlement in Crete—a green and beautiful island lying south of the ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... what he got out of the mail, but the passengers yielded about nine hundred revenue to him, while there was three times that amount on top the coach in my grip, wrapped in a dirty flannel shirt. When he disappeared we were the cheapest lot of men imaginable. It was amusing to hear the excuses, threats, and the like; but the fact remained the same, that a dozen of us had been robbed by a lone highwayman. I felt good over it, as the money in ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... too; lined with the laziest of divans, seen just now through a fog of smoke, and tenanted by nearly a score of men in every imaginable loose velvet costume, and with faces as well known in the Park at six o'clock in May, and on the Heath in October; in Paris in January, and on the Solent in August; in Pratt's of a summer's night, and on the Moors in an autumn morning, as though they were features that came round as ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... handsome yards, out-buildings to break the summer's sun, with high walls inclosing a square for hounds, besides many other things. Then inside the dwelling itself were the costliest and most beautiful decorations imaginable. The richest Turkey carpet covered the floor; the finest sofas, chairs, tables, and other decorations filled the rooms, and a large and extensive library was invariably to be found. But these gay ornaments vanished before the "vandal Yanks," as the dew-drops ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... the troop's headquarters on Otter Hill was the strangest place imaginable. Passers by were surprised to find groups of real Indians in war paint, Colonial soldiers, British troopers and Green Mountain Boys in buckskin garments walking up and down in front of the building or sitting in the sun waiting for their turn to "go on" in the studio room upstairs. ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... all having learned to read and write and profess the Christian religion—although with an indifference to the consequences of original sin, the mysteries of redemption, and the punishments of hell, which all imaginable missionary zeal has not succeeded in overcoming. Their innocent natural state has not been altered in any considerable degree by being subjected to these conditions of culture. It is certain besides, that the blood which flows in the veins of the Greenlander is not pure Eskimo ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... that we possess. Scarcely has the vision of Atossa raised our expectation in the commencement, when the whole catastrophe immediately opens on us with the arrival of the first messenger, and no further progress is even imaginable. But although not a legitimate drama, we may still consider it as a proud triumphal hymn of liberty, clothed in soft and unceasing lamentations of kindred and subjects over the fallen majesty of the ambitious despot. With great judgment, both here ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... being (as I have formerly noted) too weak to hold men to the performance of their Covenants; there are in mans nature, but two imaginable helps to strengthen it. And those are either a Feare of the consequence of breaking their word; or a Glory, or Pride in appearing not to need to breake it. This later is a Generosity too rarely found to be presumed on, especially in ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... and take up our rest beyond the fixed stars. We proceed without impediment from country to country, and from century to century, through all the ages of the past, and through the vast creation of the imaginable future. We spurn at the bounds of time and space; nor would the thought be less futile that imagines to imprison the mind within the limits of the body, than the attempt of the booby clown who is said within a thick hedge ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... was inevitable. The question was simply whether the oil traffic was sufficient in volume to make the investment profitable. When pipe-lines had been built to oil fields where the wells had ceased to yield, as often happened, they were about the most useless property imaginable. ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... however, could hardly have been better selected for such a situation; Mr. Reid being a person possessed of the strictest notions of duty and habits of regularity from long service on board of a man-of-war, while Mr. Fortune had one of the most happy and contented dispositions imaginable. ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which she exercised over every one that came in contact with her invariably deepened into profound esteem and confidence in those who had the good fortune to share her intimacy. Her manner, which was the most gentle and winning imaginable, had in it a touch of demure playfulness that was very charming, at the same time that it habitually conveyed the idea of extreme self-control, and a great reserve of moral force and determination ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... foundation than that of the liberty of its component parts. If, in one case, their own experience proves them wrong, they will go to the strangest lengths of perversity in misreading their own experience, and they will seek every imaginable pretext for distinguishing the case from its predecessor. Underlying all is a nervous terror of the abuse of freedom founded on the assumption that men will continue to act when free exactly as they acted under ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... bumped his head severely against the trunk of a tree. Loud cries of pain at once arose, but his little brother took him by the arm and pushed him with all his might towards his mother, saying in the most reassuring tone imaginable, 'Run to mama, Ned, run to mama, she'll kiss it and make it well. Please run to her quick.' 'Perfect love casteth out all fear.' Surely the wise mother can devise a thousand ways by which to kindle the flame of love in her child ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... at Lexington or King's Mountain. A government which could not collect the taxes for its yearly budget without firing upon citizens or blockading two or three harbours would have been the absurdest political anomaly imaginable. No such idea could have entered the mind of a statesman save from the hope that if one state should prove refractory, all the others would immediately frown upon it and uphold Congress in overawing it. In such case the knowledge that Congress had the power would doubtless have been enough to ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... have ever possessed. It was this grand character that, with his clear intelligence and unflagging industry, enabled him to lead the nation triumphantly through the perils of the Revolutionary War. He had almost every imaginable hardship to contend with,—envious rivals, treachery and mutiny in the camp, interference on the part of Congress, jealousies between the states, want of men and money; yet all these difficulties he vanquished. Whether ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... evening I went to the theatre, which has the most inconvenient form imaginable, being a rectangle. As anti-Gallicanism is the order of the day, only German dramas are allowed to be performed and this night it was the tragedy of Faust, or Dr Faustus as we term him in England, not the Faust of Goethe, which is not meant for nor at all adapted to the ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... call it a 'fishing lodge,' and it's down in the Florida Keys. They're putting a railroad through there, but meantime you can only get to it by a launch. From the pictures, it's the most heavenly spot imaginable. Fancy running about those wonderful green ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... the maid brought back was the worst imaginable. The look-out at the northern corner of the wall (Yasmini kept watch on her captors as rigorously as they spied on her) had run with the word to the gateman that Gungadhura himself was coming with three ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... Spears—some pointed with iron, some with stone, and others shaped simply by being burned to a point in the fire; bows and arrows, of every variety of material and form, swords, daggers, slings, clubs, darts, javelins, and every other imaginable species of weapon which human ingenuity, savage or civilized, had then conceived. Even the lasso—the weapon of the American aborigines of modern times—was there. It is described by the ancient historian as a long thong of leather wound into a coil, and finished ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... of that precious quarter of an hour, when the veil that has divided two faithful friends is suddenly dashed aside, and they rush one to the other, calling themselves every imaginable bad name in the dictionary, insisting to the verge of quarrelling that it was all their fault, and no fault at all of the other, far too rapturous to talk ordinary common sense, and far too forgetful of everything to remember that ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... balanced scales of Justice, and that in the administration of the Courts of Law they (the Jews) shall occupy a position of perfect equality with all other people; so that not even a fractional portion of the smallest imaginable particle of injustice shall reach any of them, nor shall they be subjected to anything of an objectionable nature. Neither they (the Authorities) nor any one else shall do them (the Jews) wrong, whether to their ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... night after night they would go hopping around a seven-by-nine room to the music of a crazy fiddle and a two-stringed guitar, stepping on one another's toes and bumping their heads against the ceiling with the most cheerful equanimity imaginable. At these dancing parties the Americans always received a hearty welcome, and were fed with berries, black-bread, and tea, until they could eat and dance no more. Occasionally, however, Siberian hospitality took a form which, to say the least, was not ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... side of the hill where we had to prepare to make a charge. It was a wicked place to charge. The nature of the ground was such it was impossible to form in battle line, so to make the attack in three columns over felled trees which were cris-crossed in every shape imaginable. We waited here for a few moments with beating hearts, waiting for the forward charge. The word came and with a terrifying yell we rose to our feet and rushed forward. It was a terrible time, when bounding over the last tree and crashing through some brush we came out ...
— The Twenty-fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion • George P. Bissell
... soul," he remarked, "for a man about to take his own life, our friend seems to have been the coolest customer imaginable. Look at it! Written in a firm hand and almost without an erasure. Very remarkable! ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... have an expression which, if this system be true, is the most senseless imaginable: I have heard it often said, Such a Horse has speed enough if his heart do but lie in the right place. In answer to this, let us consider a Horse as a piece of animated machinery (for it is in ...
— A Dissertation on Horses • William Osmer
... of external felicity, wherein to exercise their own virtue, and to reward and encourage it in others. In short there is nothing that comes nearer the divine perfection, than when the monarch, as with us, enjoys a capacity of doing all the good imaginable to mankind, under a disability ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... symbolised. Forces work; they are not, like mathematical concepts, exhausted in description. From that matter which might be describable in mechanical formulae there issue notwithstanding all manner of forms and harmonies, visible, audible, imaginable, and passionately prized. Every phase of the ideal world emanates from the natural and loudly proclaims its origin by the interest it takes in natural existences, of which it gives a rational interpretation. Sense, art, religion, society, express nature exuberantly ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... was to shorten discourse by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out verbs and participles; because, in reality, all things imaginable are but nouns. The other was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health as well as brevity; for, it is plain that every word we speak is in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... was there, too, and strapped to the saddle on each side were his uniform boots, toes in stirrups—all reversed! This riderless horse, with its pall of black, yellow helmet, and footless boots, was the saddest sight imaginable. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... until there was no knowledge more—where the teaching capacity was all there was remaining. That is to say, in the day of the last Byzantine Emperor, centuries ago, humanity in India was, as now, a clock stopped, but stopped in the act of striking, leaving a glory in the air imaginable like the continuing ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... contrite desire to atone for the first reluctance by any sort of service. The contributor professes to have observed these changing phases in the visages of those whom he that night called from their dreams, or arrested in the act of going to bed; and he drew the conclusion—very proper for his imaginable connection with the garroting and other adventurous brotherhoods—that the most flattering moment for knocking on the head people who answer a late ring at night is either in their first selfish bewilderment, or their final self-abandonment to their ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... was not of the practical necessities of life, but of that fond desire of the soul which has ever haunted mankind with intimations of immortality. Towers thus became the boldest imaginable symbols of energy and power. And when, in the course of time, they became exigencies of society, and familiarized by the idea of usefulness, even then they could not but be recognized as expressions of the more heroic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... provide one's self with a plentiful supply of cockles, or "pippies," as they are called locally. These can only be obtained on the northern ocean beach, and not the least enjoyable part of a day's sport consists in getting them. They are triangular in shape, with smooth shells of every imaginable colour, though a rich purple is commonest. As the back wash leaves the sands bare these bivalves may be seen in thick but irregular patches protruding from the sand. Sometimes, if the tide is not ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... and melted from brown to purpleblack. The upper sky swam with violet; and in a moment each stray cloud-feather was edged with rose, and then suffused. It seemed that the heights fronted East to eye the interflooding of colours, and it was imaginable that all turned to the giant whose forehead first kindled to the sun: a greeting of god ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to lose you, dear. Of course, I'm happy over your marriage. It would be very selfish in me to want to stand in the way of your happiness. I'm sure I wish you and Wilbur every joy imaginable. But I shall certainly feel very ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... larva or nymph occupies an inverted position, that is to say, the head is turned towards the anal extremity of the shell. In vain we watch these reversed bodies for any indications of movement; in vain we place the shells in every imaginable position, to see if the creature will turn round; in vain, once more, we ask ourselves where the free space is which this turning would demand. The illusion is complete: I have been taken in by it myself; and for ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... name of any imaginable logic, human or devilish, should he, a stranger, be singled out for this experience? What could it mean to him, how was he related to it, what bearing had it on his case?... Unless, indeed, it was just because he was a stranger—a stranger everywhere—because he had no personal life, no warm ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... Fetzara at sunrise; on its banks are a thousand plants and flowers of every colour and hue, and on its waters repose birds of every description and plumage. As yet it is dusk; everything animal and vegetable is in repose; but with the first ray of the sun come sounds and cries of every imaginable description, and thousands, aye, myriads, of birds are everywhere on the wing. In the impetuosity of their flight, they shake, as it were, the plants and flowers on the border of the lake, who thus pay their ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... a round table by a cheerful fire; an arm-chair high- backed and old-fashioned, wherein sat the neatest imaginable little elderly lady, in widow's cap, black silk gown, and snowy muslin apron; exactly like what I had fancied Mrs. Fairfax, only less stately and milder looking. She was occupied in knitting; a large cat sat demurely at her feet; nothing in short was wanting to ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... vituperation nor their remains from moltestation. Accordingly, through many days in June the effigy of Cromwell, which had been crowned with a royal diadem, draped with a purple mantle, in Somerset House, and afterwards borne with all imaginable pomp to Westminster Abbey, was now exposed at one of the windows at Whitehall with a rope fixed round its neck, by way of hinting at the death which the original deserved. But this mark of execration was not sufficient to satisfy the public mind, and seven months later, on the 30th of ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... astonished to see how much tea the Indian arrieros drank, I learned from sad experience that it was far better than cold water, which often brings on mountain-sickness. This particular evening, one swallow of the hot tea caused consternation. It was the most horrible stuff imaginable. Examination showed small, oily particles floating on the surface. Further investigation led to the discovery that one of our arrieros had that day placed our can of kerosene on top of one of the loads. The tin became leaky and the kerosene had dripped down into ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... sounds Archie swung his ax. He was not conscious of the bitter cold for his work kept him warm, but his brain was full of racking thoughts. He had toiled like a slave for nigh six months and had accomplished little, with every imaginable deprivation he had saved nothing, and for the next six months he foresaw cold and hunger, which he doubted he could survive. Here was an offer that meant comfort, and relief from a penniless condition. Should he not accept it? Was it ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... intangible tear, yet for most of those who strove to obey their consciences, purgatory, when essential, though occasionally giving us a bitter twinge, is a joy-producing state. Not all the glories imaginable or unimaginable could make us happy, were our consciences ill at ease. I have advanced slowly, yet some things are given us at once. After I realized I had irrevocably lost your love, though for a time I had hoped ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... academicians of Montauban and Toulouse. His style was thought very bad; and very bad, if a foreigner may venture to judge, it continued to the last. It would, however, be unjust to deny that he had some talents for speaking and writing. His rhetoric, though deformed by every imaginable fault of taste, from bombast down to buffoonery, was not wholly without force and vivacity. He had also one quality which, in active life, often gives fourth-rate men an advantage over first-rate men. Whatever he could do he could do without effort, at any moment, in any abundance, and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and liberty, that soil and that sun of mankind, no reform is possible, no measure can give the result desired. This does not mean that we should ask first for the native the instruction of a sage and all imaginable liberties, in order then to put a hoe in his hand or place him in a workshop; such a pretension would be an absurdity and vain folly. What we wish is that obstacles be not put in his way, that the many his climate and the situation of the islands afford be not augmented, that instruction be not ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... from me, cast his eye upon it; and seeing it to be Grumkow's hand, said to me with all the anger imaginable [fancy the thunder-burst!], 'Messieurs, j'ai eu assez de ces choses la;' threw the Letter upon the ground, and immediately turning his back went out of the room, and shut ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... things in the country, and nothing could be more preposterous than to judge of the rural population by Kingston. The Kingstonians themselves are laughably ignorant of the country parts. One of them assured a clergyman of my acquaintance, with all the gravity imaginable, that the country negroes lived principally upon fruits! No doubt he has had the chance of telling some American touching at the port the same story, who has been able to attest it at home on the authority of a 'Jamaica gentleman of great intelligence.' The Kingston ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... leisure to read. He referred to it, as soon as politeness permitted, with a shrewd inquiry as to whether the book did not give rather a rose-colored view of practical Catholicism. Mrs. X—— turned to her daughters and said with all imaginable sweetness: "Just hear him,— the poor child!" Then she went off into a long, eloquent, and really interesting discourse on the true, sole, and original Christian Church. She admitted, however, that during the sixteenth ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... children giggled as Tennyson, Jr., took a bite at the turtle instead of the half-eaten cake, and then, to prevent further mistakes, crammed the unhappy creature into a diminutive pocket in the most business-like way imaginable. ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... very pretty one, although it was quite rude and very simple. It was built of logs and had a thatched roof, which projected far out over the walls. But it was all overrun with the loveliest flowering vines imaginable, and, inside, nothing could have been more exquisitely neat and homelike; although there was only one room and a little garret over it. All around the house were the flower-beds and the vine-trellises and the blooming shrubs, and they were always in the most beautiful order. Now, ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... the reputation of the Nabob demanded; there was everything procurable for man's enjoyment, from the native products of Hungarian cookery to the masterly creations of French gastronomic art, and of wines every sort imaginable. The dinner lasted far into the night, and towards the end of it the company began to grow uproarious. The great patriot, as usual, related his lubricous, equivocal anecdotes without troubling himself very much ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... in any other place, Jim," she said. "You know I'm not afraid of you. Now get, you wolf!" Her voice snapped like a whip-lash at the close; she had made sudden movement of hand—it was extended and I saw almost under my nose the smallest pistol imaginable; nickeled, of two barrels, and not above three inches long; projecting from her palm, the twin hammers cocked; and it was as steady ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... better to their Republican faith. But it was actually the border slave States which, in these dark and desperate days, came gallantly to the rescue of the President's party. If the voters of these States had seen in him a radical of the stripe of the anti-slavery agitators, it is not imaginable that they would have helped him as they now did. Thus was his much maligned "border-state policy" at last handsomely vindicated; and thanks to it the frightened Republicans saw, with relief, that they could command a majority of about twenty votes in the House. Mr. Lincoln ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... the critical circumstances of the times. Every one, both at home and abroad, knew well that if WAR was at hand, here was a Government to conduct it on the part of Great Britain, even under the most adverse circumstances imaginable, with all our accustomed splendour and success. But all knew, at the same time, that imminent as was the danger, if a profound statesmanship could avert it, consistently with the preservation of the national honour, that danger would promptly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... follows: "If, as you have guessed rightly, respecting my misfortune, friend Mahmoud," (that was the Turk's name,) "so also you could hit upon the remedy for it, I should think my liberty well lost, and would not exchange my mischance for the greatest imaginable good fortune. But I know that it is such, that though all the world should know the cause whence it proceeds, no one ever would make bold to find for it a remedy, or even an alleviation. That you may be satisfied of this truth, I will relate my story to you, as briefly ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the oaks. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts and no one without could say their work, for their industry was not in knots and excrescences embayed. Yet I find it difficult to remember them. ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... anecdotes of its members, mingled with the bitterest abuse: and the worthy knight was not the man to spare his adjectives when a sufficient seasoning of them would add zest to a dish of nouns. At other times Sir William dipped his tongue in honey, and used the sweetest language imaginable. It is manifest from the manner in which Garnet mentions him, that the smallest of his trials was ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... though I had taken kindly to my pillow, as I found by my having an arm round my companion's neck, and her fingers intertwisted with mine. For awhile I lay looking at her eyes, which had every imaginable light and signification in them; they advised me to lie quiet, they laughed at my wonder, they said, 'Dear little fellow!' they flashed as from under a cloud, darkened, flashed out of it, seemed to dip in water and shine, and were sometimes like ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Mr. Peterson, my grandfather. "Why, bless my soul, Gordon," said he, after a long pause, "why, why,—whose dirty cloak is that you have on?" "Sir!" I replied, assuming, as well as I could, in the exigency of the moment, an air of offended surprise, and talking in the gruffest of all imaginable tones—"sir! you are a sum'mat mistaken—my name, in the first place, bee'nt nothing at all like Goddin, and I'd want you for to know better, you blackguard, than to call my new obercoat a darty one." For my life I could hardly refrain from screaming with laughter at the odd ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cease to care for the true welfare and felicity of their children, it becomes our positive duty to care for them ourselves. Mr. Hamilton has given you no reason for his command to withdraw yourself from the attentions of Lord Alphingham; and surely that is the clearest imaginable proof that he really has none to give, and that it is merely to gratify his own unjust displeasure at your rejection of St. Eval, as if in such matters you had not an undoubted right to decide for yourself. He cannot suppose that you will now be contented with that which completely ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... overlands at night, for speed, and in the day-time riding in box-cars and getting my sleep. It was early in the year, and it was cold in those upland pastures. Snow lay here and there on the level, all the mountains were shrouded in white, and at night the most miserable wind imaginable blew off from them. It was not a land in which to linger. And remember, gentle reader, the hobo goes through such a land, without shelter, without money, begging his way and sleeping at night without blankets. This last is something that can ...
— The Road • Jack London
... kindness from my Lady, who looks upon me like one of her own family and interest. So thence, my wife and people by the highway, and I walked over the park with Mr. Shepley, and through the grove, which is mighty pretty, as is imaginable, and so over their drawbridge to Nun's Bridge, and so to my father's, and there sat and drank, and talked a little, and then parted. And he being gone, and what company there was, my father and I, with a dark lantern; it being now night, into the garden with ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... inheritance of Watteau or Tiepolo. His backgrounds are dark and heavy, and he makes too free a use of body colour; but his attitude is one of close observation—he enjoys depicting the life around him, and we suspect that he sees in it the most perfect form of social intercourse imaginable. Longhi is sometimes called the Goldoni of painting, and he certainly more nearly resembles the genial, humorous playwright than he does Hogarth, to whom he has also been compared. Yet his execution and ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... slightest thought to the fact that a whole woman is there, and that within the cranial cavity of the woman lies a brain, and that the idiosyncrasies of that brain are of vastly more importance than all imaginable physical stigmata combined. Those idiosyncrasies may make for amicable relations in the complex and difficult bondage called marriage; they may, on the contrary, make for joustings of a downright impossible character. But not many men, laced in the emotional ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Yetton. In the same breath, you may be sure, a fat fowl was put to the fire, and the whitest napery prepared for the back parlour. A little after, the gauger, having had his fill of music for the moment, came strolling down with the most innocent air imaginable, and found the good people at Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares by his arrival, but none the less glad to see him. The distiller's liquor and the gauger's flute would combine to speed the moments of digestion; and when both were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a jingle. The old warrior was on his return. "Here he comes now! Fall in with his humor, and success to you at Calcutta," whispered Johnstone. There was the very jolliest breakfast imaginable at the marble house that day, and that same afternoon Major. Alan Hawke rode all over Delhi as ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... knees, and Mrs. Falconer sat down by her fire, with her feet on her little wooden stool, and began, as was her wont in that household twilight, ere the lamp was lighted, to review her past life, and follow her lost son through all conditions and circumstances to her imaginable. And when the world to come arose before her, clad in all the glories which her fancy, chilled by education and years, could supply, it was but to vanish in the gloom of the remembrance of him with whom she dared not hope to share its blessedness. This at ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... kinds of trees—oaks, maples, apple-trees, elms—but her favorite is the elm. She chooses the end of one of the long drooping branches where a group of small swaying twigs affords her suitable support. It is the most unlikely place imaginable for any but a pendent nest, woven to half a dozen or more slender, vertical twigs, and swaying freely in the wind. Few nests are so secure, so hidden, and so completely sheltered from the rains by the drooping leaves above and around it. It is rarely discoverable ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... souls. Many of the Indians near Fort Snelling say they have lived before on earth. The jugglers remember many incidents that occurred during some former residence on earth, and they will tell them to you with all the gravity imaginable.] His friends believe that he may hold communion with Unk-ta-he,—that from that God he will learn the mysteries of the Earth and Water; and when he lives again in another form, he will instruct the Dahcotahs in their religion, and be a ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... are of large dimensions, all prostrate, lying in no particular order, and all broken up into large or smaller sections. Many carloads have been removed and shipped to Eastern factories, where the sections are sawn through and polished, and the most lovely table tops, etc., imaginable produced. One must beware of rattlesnakes ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... Anisty's escape to the police, the entire affair was like to come out in the papers,—all of it, that is, that he could not suppress. But even figuring that he could silence Higgins and O'Hagan,—no difficult task: though he might be somewhat late with Higgins,—the most discreet imaginable explanation of his extraordinary conduct would make him the laughing stock of his circle of friends, to say nothing of a city that had been accustomed to speak of him as "Mad Maitland," for many a ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... cold. In winter it is often necessary to help them out of the machine and attend to the chilled parts of the body to avoid frost-bite. Their faces are drawn with the continual strain. They are deaf from the roar of the engine. Their eyes are bloodshot, and their whole bodies are racked with every imaginable ache. For the next few hours they are good for nothing but rest, though sleep is generally hard to get. But before turning in the observer must make his report and hand it in ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has recently been described, is a new age or there never was one. Hence, just as Spinoza saw everything sub specie aeternitatis, we may very well have a tendency to see many things sub specie novi. New things, astonishingly new things, in every imaginable department of life have been witnessed by men who saw the opening years of the century, and fin-de-siecle as we are, the capacities of man are apparently ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... time, didn't it develop in the parents the utmost callous selfishness; didn't the latter, as their needs were exclusively consulted, grow more exacting, unreasonable? Was not love itself the most unreasonable and exacting thing imaginable? ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... follows the sinuous windings of the shore for upwards of a mile and a half, under an arcade of cocoa palms, which forms one of the finest promenades imaginable. Under this quivering canopy the fierce rays of the outside sun filter through—a soft, sheeny, mellow light—making his tropic rays deliciously cool, at the same time imparting to them a mystic coloring of gold and emerald green in all their wonderful combinations and capabilities ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... is the simplest imaginable, and the most easily acknowledged," he answered, still bearing with her. "I am tired of ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... to Waterloo. We went by carriage all the way, first through the Bois de la Cambre and then on through the most perfect woods imaginable. We went to a sort of little mound in the middle of the battlefield with a huge lion on top as the emblem of victory. One thing, although of no importance, I like so much, that was three little birds ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff |
