"Imaginary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out something about capillary attraction, suppose that you should go to the imaginary switchboard again and tamper with some other law of nature. An innocent-looking switch, right above the capillary attraction switch, would be labeled ADHESION. Suppose you have ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... the well-known Prima and Secunda Pastorum, the two Shepherds' Plays with which the history of English comedy begins. The humours of the two shepherds who meet on the moor and come to blows over the grazing of an imaginary flock of sheep are good; the humours of the Secunda Pastorum, of Mak the sheep-stealer, his clever wife Gyll, the sheep that was passed off as a baby, and Mak's well-deserved blanketing,—these surely are not only good, but as good, of their kind, as they well can be. That I have ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... twist of memory, her hands brushed imaginary raindrops from her face and strayed uncertainly to where the wet had lain ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... crook-handled umbrella; the other carried over his right arm a greatcoat, in case the June-like weather should turn cold, and over his left a mackintosh, in case rain should fall from the cloudless, azure heavens. The gentleman himself was swinging a wooden club, with pudgy vehemence, at an imaginary ball. Upon his countenance was that expression of fortitude which wins battles and championships. Old Major Jennings approached timidly. He was very shy. In the distance he saw two of his intimate friends finishing out the first hole. Except ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... reveal himself, Ellsworth told some first-class romances. He made Morgan's force out about four thousand, and did it with a skill that carried conviction. He would speak, in dispatches to various well-known Federals, of certain imaginary commands, under men whom they well knew. He telegraphed Prentice that Wash. Morgan was at Gallatin, with four hundred Indians, raised especially to seek for ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... which I consider an improper use to be made in this Essay, is "Nature." I find this imaginary being introduced on all occasions, and invested with attributes of personality, which may be extremely apt to make a false impression on young or thoughtless minds. At one time, "the life of Nature" is spoken of; then we are informed that "Nature has succeeded. ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... proper Thought, and every Thought its proper Expression. And these Correspondences are not imaginary, but have a real Foundation in Nature: For when any one of these is wanting, the whole is lame and defective, but when they all meet and conspire together, the Character is then genuine and compleat, the Thing or Person design'd is drawn to the Life, and the ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... would sometimes repeat after dinner, with his brother Horace, an imaginary dialogue, stuffed full of incongruities, that made us roll with laughter. His ordinary verse and prose were too full of the ridicule of city pretensions. To be superior to any thing, it should not always be running ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... these passages are taken is a real or imaginary disputation with Trypho, a learned Jew at Ephesus, respecting the principles of Christianity, and contains an elaborate demonstration that Christ is the Messiah of the Old Testament. The controversy is carried on with courtesy on both sides, and each disputant is equally earnest ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... charge her with unmaidenly conduct? The most modest of women are daily doing, unaware, what Bertha did somewhat more consciously. Shakespeare, who read the hearts of women with the penetrating eyes of a seer, and who never painted a heroine who was not the type of a class, pictured no rare or imaginary order of ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... a cook who is a credit to his native province; but if you stay in the house, make sure that you have a room to the front, otherwise you may only look into the well-like covered court of the house. At Tarascon, if you feel inclined to hunt for the imaginary home of the imaginary hero, a great man whom the town repudiates as having been invented in order that the world should be amused at its expense, take your meal at the Hotel des Empereurs and ask for M. Andrieu. At Avignon the Hotel de l'Europe ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... herself and Albert, and which she could never thoroughly understand, was now beyond measure painful to her. Even the prudent and the good have before now hesitated to explain their mutual differences, and have dwelt in silence upon their imaginary grievances, until circumstances have become so entangled, that in that critical juncture, when a calm explanation would have saved all parties, an understanding was impossible. And thus if domestic confidence ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... my shoulders, for I saw that he was, at least, so far in the right, that troops swarmed everywhere; and, without encouraging him to brood over his own misfortunes, whether real or imaginary, I was content to thank heaven that I had myself been born in a land where such grounds of ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... are to go on the watch. The abuse of strong drink makes shameful ravages in our ranks, and is productive of serious disorder. Few nights pass without false alarms, without shots foolishly fired upon imaginary enemies, and without lamentable accidents. Every night there are disputes, which often degenerate into fights, and then in the morning, when explanations take place, these very explanations are an excuse for recommencing drinking. Rules, indeed, are not wanting to abate ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... her at times: she tried hard to do her duty; and her kindness and charity were unfailing, for she was herself still, although so unhappy. Her journals are pathetic in their humility and self-reproaches for imaginary omissions. She is lonely; out of heart, out of hope. 'I am so dissatisfied with myself that I hardly dare ask or expect a blessing upon my labours,' she says; and long lists of kind and fatiguing offices, of visits to sick people and poor people, ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... year saw one or more caravels sent from Lagos southward to follow the coast of the main-land; but they skirted no shores that were not desert, and turned back baffled by their own fears. Cape Boyador long remained a barrier whose imaginary dangers of reef and shoal served as an excuse for the still more unreal horrors of the "Sea ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... legends in Brittany is that relating to an imaginary town called Is, which is supposed to have been swallowed up by the sea at some unknown time. There are several places along the coast which are pointed out as the site of this imaginary city, and the fishermen have many strange tales to tell of it. According to them, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... has suffered seriously from age and conditions. Titian's was painted in 1540; this afterwards, and the painter cheerfully accepted the standard set by the earlier work. Were I in the position of that imaginary millionaire whom I have seen in the mind's eye busy in the loving task of tenderly restoring Venice's most neglected masterpieces, it is this "Presentation" with which ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... of the sea, running northward and eastward, and communicating with the Gulf of St. Lawrence, thus making New England, with adjacent districts, an island. His proposed fort on the Chesapeake, giving access, by this imaginary passage, to the seas of Newfoundland, would enable the Spaniards to command the fisheries, on which both the French and the English had long encroached, to the great prejudice of Spanish rights. Doubtless, too, these inland waters gave access to the South Sea, and their occupation was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... hand in force, and a surprise was proposed as well as feared. A tired and sleepy youngster, almost dropping with the heavy somnolence of wearied adolescence, he stumbled on through the trials of an undiscernible and unfamiliar footing, lifting his heavy riding-boots sluggishly over imaginary obstacles, and fearing the while lest his toil were labor misspent. It was a dry camp, he felt dolefully certain, or there would have been more noise in it. He fell over a sleeping sergeant, and said to him hastily, ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... became more enraged; and, writing too often without Aristotle or Locke by his side, he gave the town pure Dennis, and almost ceased to be read. "The oppression" of which he complains might not be less imaginary than his alarm, while a treaty was pending with France, that he should be delivered up to the Grand Monarque for having written a tragedy, which no one could ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... rid of an imaginary speck of rust that had troubled his soul, replaced the bolt, and was putting away the oil rag, when there was a sharp stifled gasp, followed by a slithering fall, and Captain Dashwood lay in a heap among the white wet mud at the bottom of the trench. His cap had ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... at the slim figure of the monk, and then at these burly giants ready to be pitted against him, I knew that but one result could issue from that unequal combat; and a sudden dizziness came upon me, and for a moment all around me was dark. Nor was this momentary darkness wholly imaginary; for just then—with a low growl of distant thunder—a fragment broke away from the great mass of black cloud that hung upon the crest of the cliff above us and drifted sluggishly across ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... of the biography of an imaginary 'Lorenzo Benoni,' we have here, in fact, the memoir of a man whose name could not be pronounced in certain parts of northern Italy without calling up tragic yet noble historical recollections.... Its merits, simply as a work of literary art, are of a very high order. The style is ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... physician, a divine, a scholar, and a gentleman, live only in the memory of those few who knew and survive him, liked to tell how Mr. Fuller used to say, that when he was in the pulpit, and saw a buirdly man come along the passage, he would instinctively draw himself up, measure his imaginary antagonist, and forecast how he would deal with him, his hands meanwhile condensing into fists, and tending to "square." He must have been a hard hitter if he boxed as he preached—what "The Fancy" would call ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... he proceeds to test the claims of the French stage by that standard. Its characters, he finds, are wanting in variety and nature. Its range of passion and humour is lamentably narrow. [Footnote: Ib. 542-4.] Its declamations "tire us with their length; so that, instead of grieving for their imaginary heroes, we are concerned for our own trouble, as we are in the tedious visits of bad company; we are in pain till they are gone". [Footnote: English Garner, iil 542.] The best tragedies of the French—Cinna ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... hear from him soon, and altogether they came home so much gratified that the mother began to lose her sense of being forestalled. She was hard at work in her own way on a set of models for dinner-table ornaments which had been ordered. "Pot-boilers" had unfortunately much more success than the imaginary groups ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... painful work of the recovery of their national individuality was rendered easier by the attitude of the peoples, who eliminated them from among themselves as a foreign element, and put stress, without consideration or courtesy, on the real and imaginary contrasts, or at least differences, between ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... round the world; there was the Lake, lying still and silent, ringed by its woods, where the solitary student of Nature loved to sit and watch and meditate. Hundreds of things, too many to mention, were acted on that boy's imaginary stage and lived in his brain as much as if he had himself played a ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... are indebted for the outline of the geographical system now universally adopted. With a vigorous conception, but imperfect execution, they traced out the scheme of denoting localities by longitude and latitude: according to their teaching, the imaginary equatorial line, encompassing the earth, was divided into ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... together. His whole time was now employed. The Abbe de Veze instructed him in the mornings; he was two hours a day with the book-keeper; and he spent the rest of his time between breakfast and dinner in doing imaginary commercial accounts which his master required him to write ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... stone was erected By the Author of Waverley To the memory of Helen Walker Who died in the year of God 1791. This humble individual practised in real life the virtues with which fiction has invested the imaginary character of Jeanie Deans. Refusing the slightest departure from veracity even to save the life of a sister, she neverthless showed her kindness and fortitude by rescuing her from the severity of the law; at the expense of personal exertions ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... question. Allerdyke plunged his hands in his pockets and stared at Fullaway; Mrs. Marlow began to trace imaginary patterns on the surface of the table; Van Koon produced a penknife and began to scrape the edges of his filbert ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... use the center of the earth. Suppose we do use the center of the earth as the place from which to observe these celestial bodies and, in imagination, transfer our eye there. Then we will find projected on the celestial sphere not only the heavenly bodies but the imaginary points and circles of the earth's surface. Parallels of latitude, meridians of longitude, the equator, etc., will have the same imaginary position on the celestial sphere that they have on the earth. Your actual position on the earth will be projected in a point called ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... any particular doctor," went on the shipping clerk, unabashed. "I'm agin all doctors. They're a bunch of crooks, I tell you. It's you women with your imaginary ailments who keep 'em going. If doctors had to depend on men for a living, they'd have to ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... great stock is ill purchased, when half your stock is laid out to make the world believe it; that is, in short, reducing yourself to a small stock to have the world believe you have a great one; in which you do no less than barter the real stock for the imaginary, and give away your stock to keep ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... at all like Caliban, because you're sophisticated, and Caliban was not. But I'm not talking about imaginary characters; I'm talking about Isabel. Isabel's intensely real. What I wish to tell you is that ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... tempt those whose minds are not solidly grounded by nature, by holding before their vision, on great and lofty hopes, that which is counted splendid among men. At any rate the marvel-mongers were always predicting to this John many such imaginary things, and especially that he was bound to be clothed in the garment of Augustus. Now there was a certain priest in Byzantium, Augustus by name, who guarded the treasures of the temple of Sophia. So when John had been shorn and declared worthy of the priestly ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... betterment. Those who contend that the negro is standing still, or "relapsing into barbarism," are the falsest of false prophets. They resolutely shut their eyes to facts all around them, and devote columns upon columns of newspaper, magazine and book argument—imaginary pictures—to the immorality, mental sterility and innate improvidence of this people; and they do this for various reasons, none of them honorable, many of them really disreputable. In dealing with this negro problem they always start off upon a ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... "historical novel." HUGH WYNNE exactly fits it. But SILAS LAPHAM is a novel as perfectly historical as is Hugh Wynne, for it pictures an era and personifies a type. It matters not that in the one we find George Washington and in the other none save imaginary figures; else THE SCARLET LETTER were not historical. Nor does it matter that Dr. Mitchell did not live in the time of which he wrote, while Mr. Howells saw many Silas Laphams with his own eyes; else UNCLE ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... less humorous or plentiful. That debate did me good in one way, for I was so angry with this man of distinction that I wished I could have told him what I thought, and for three consecutive mornings I addressed an imaginary audience while I was having my bath. But if my remarks had been made at the Union I am afraid they would have caused a tumult, they were more suited to the House of Commons, where, if the worst happens, you have the consolation of being led out by ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... a decided negative, by shaking his head and frowning portentously. At the same time he stooped and held his hand about two feet from the ground, as if to indicate something that stood pretty nearly that height. Then he tenderly patted the top of the imaginary thing, whatever it was, and took it up in his arms, kissed it, and laid it on his breast. After that he indicated another thing somewhat higher, which he also patted on the top. Thereafter he pressed his arms close to his side and struggled as if to get ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... of New York. But I got them, in the second place, from the employers themselves. By going to them, pencil in hand, and desiring the cheerful little particulars for publication? Hardly! I sent my office-boy out in search of work for an imaginary 'sister,' and to inquire what would be paid her. Having inquired, and got his answer, it is needless to say that James concluded his sister could live without ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... legend is true and how much imaginary is uncertain; but it is quite probable that in the course of this survey Holyoke's name was given to the mountain, of which Holyoke ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... decided Austrian leanings: Britannic George, Austria being now in the opposite scale, finds him an unhandy Kur-Mainz, and what profit it was to introduce false weights into the Reich's balance that time! Not for long generations before, had the poor old semi-imaginary Reich's-Diet risen into such paroxysms; nor did it ever again after. Never again, in its terrestrial History, was there such agonistic parliamentary struggle, and terrific noise of parliamentary palaver, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... look out of the window. Winner of Anvhar. His name was already slated for the history books, one of the handful of planetary heroes. School children would be studying him now, just as he had read of the Winners of the past. Weaving daydreams and imaginary adventures around Brion's victories, hoping and fighting to equal them someday. To be a Winner was the greatest honor in ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... appeal could equal this? A culprit at any time has his claim upon their sympathy; but let him be caught in the very act of cheating the authorities and evading the law, and his popularity knows no bounds. Webber knew this well, and as the mob thickened around him sustained an imaginary conversation that Savage Landor might have envied, imparting now and then such hints concerning the runaway as raised their interest to the highest pitch, and fifty different versions were related on all sides,—of the crime he was guilty of, the sentence that was passed on him, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... reprimanded him for his pranks he would look at us steadily, but sorrowfully, and, immediately afterward, we would hear him dancing down the corridor singing, "Safe in the Arms of Jesus." If he had given heed to one-half we said to him, he would have been safer in our hands than in those of his imaginary protector. He turned out a thief, an unmitigated liar, a dancing dervish, and, through all our experiences of six weeks with him, his chief reading was his Bible and Sunday-school books. The experience, however, was not lost on Theodore—he has never ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... in—without slamming the door behind him, you may be sure—and drew his small notebook from his inside pocket. With that to consult frequently, he sat down by the window where the failing light was strongest, and proceeded to jot down imaginary figures on the paper he pulled from his coat pocket and unfolded as if it were of no value whatever to him. The piano playing ordered ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... times now, but, of course, I do not figure sufficiently in her consciousness that she should mention me specially to you. One thing I am grateful to you for, that you are respecting my wish that she should not know we have ever been friends. After all, I am only a sort of imaginary figure to whom you come and talk, and I haven't really counted in your life. You know I have a weakness for mysticism, and I like to think of myself as a sort of phantom that just accompanied you on your way a little and perhaps helped you a little at a critical moment ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... the work of his hands brought to naught, and a boring abandoned just short of the oil because a cross-eyed man, attracted by curiosity, had come and looked at the work. He had seen his wells go up in smoke for some imaginary act of witchcraft on the part of his foreman, and, though he laughed, he ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... the right and that of the left, and that the image is reversed on the retina, so that it is the rods of the right which are impressed by objects on our left, and the rods of the upper part by objects below our eyes. These are, it has been very justly said, factitious problems, imaginary difficulties which do not exist. There is no need to explain, for instance, direct vision by a reversed image, because our consciousness is not aware that the image on the retina is reversed. In order to take account of this, we should require ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... to be a judge, cannot be put off so easily. And besides, there was at the time nothing to attract his eyes. And you cannot keep up for ever the pretence of an imaginary bird. ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... disliked their movement, or as they certainly do when patriots are telling how short a time the prayers took to the killing of him. I have seen a crowd, when certain Dublin papers had wrought themselves into an imaginary loyalty, so possessed by what seemed the very genius of satiric fantasy, that one all but looked to find some feathered heel among the cobble stones. Part of the delight of crowd or individual is always that somebody will be angry, ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... helped to throw the door still wider. Discovering that the child possessed the right to be amused, the imagination of poets and artists addressed itself at last to the most appreciative of all audiences, a world of newcomers, with insatiable appetites for wonders real and imaginary. ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... bay the "Chelsea" signaled to the submarine boats to slow up. Then the gunboat moved over to temporary anchorage. A line between the gunboat's bow and the lighthouse on Groton Point, to the northward, was to furnish the imaginary starting line. This line the five competing submarine torpedo boats must, at second gunfire, cross as nearly together as possible. There were penalties, of course, for any one boat trying to steal a lead over ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... became his star, and ruled his destiny. The Chaldaeans, like the Egyptians, fancied they discerned in the points of light which illuminate the nightly sky, the outline of a great number of various figures—men, animals, monsters, real and imaginary objects, a lance, a bow, a fish, a scorpion, ears of wheat, a bull, and a lion. The majority of these were spread out above their heads on the surface of the celestial vault; but twelve of these figures, distinguishable by their brilliancy, were arranged along the celestial horizon in the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... concluded his examination, seemed a little puzzled. No doubt I had, in my ignorance, described some imaginary symptom which was not in accordance with what he expected to find. He, however, gave me another prescription, and as he wrote it I wondered how he would act if he knew that my object in becoming his patient was to probe the mystery of ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... accept this cheerful view, I flourished an imaginary autograph upon the air with the end of my cane, and laughingly dismissed ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... who is unable to kindle fire or who possesses a mind as yet insufficiently developed to realize its possibilities, is quite at the mercy of nature's whims. He lives merely by animal prowess and differs little in deeds and needs from the beasts of the jungle. In this imaginary journey to the remote regions beyond the outskirts of civilization it soon becomes evident that the development of artificial light may be a fair measure ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... Divine Incarnation down to a chance meeting of lovers, is more important than any other event or idea. Now we have seen that it is Browning's way invariably to represent an abstract thought by a concrete illustration. Therefore in this great and daring lyric we find the imaginary lover calling the kiss of the woman he loves ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... fire and the wood will lie down in peace together and no harm done. This makes miracles possible and easy. Maimonides would not think of going so far; he has no names harsh enough to describe this unscientific, unphilosophic, illogical, irrational, purely imaginary procedure. But we find that he is himself guilty of the same lack of scientific insight when he rejects a method because it is not completely successful, and substitutes something else which will always be successful because it will never tell us anything ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... effrontery. Reputed by the citizens to carry to the Queen Regent their positive refusal to grant the subsidy, he had, on the contrary, given an answer, in their name, in the affirmative. For these delinquencies, the imaginary and the real, he was inhumanly tortured and afterwards beheaded. "I know, my children," said he upon the scaffold, "that you will be grieved when you have seen my blood flow, and that you will regret me when it is too late." It does not appear, however, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... study of geography is more interesting or helpful to pupils than the taking of imaginary journeys. It makes geography ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... to believe that such verses as these had no deeper inspiration than the imaginary loves of an opera. They bear, burnt into every line, the marks of personal feeling, and must have been thrown off in one of those passionate moods of the heart, with which the poet's own youthful love had made him acquainted, and under the impression or vivid recollection ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... the beautiful small swords again, and fenced vigorously with an imaginary antagonist. Jim Hart took a captured needle and thread and began to mend a rent in his attire. Henry lifted the folded tent from the locker and looked ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... among readers and critics a tendency to discern satire where none is intended, I should like to say that this book is simply a straightforward mystery story, devoid of irony, moral or meaning. It has for its setting an imaginary session of the League of Nations Assembly, but it is in no sense a study of, still less a skit on, actual conditions at Geneva, of which indeed I know little, the only connection I have ever had with the League being membership of ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... and obstinately maintained, wherever the consequences are not too monstrous for human bigotry. But when they become so horrible that even Christ Church shrinks, that even Oriel stands aghast, the rule is evaded by means of a fictitious contract. One imaginary obligation is set up against another. Mr. Gladstone first preaches to Governments the duty of undertaking an enterprise just as rational as the Crusades, and then dispenses them from it on the ground of a treaty which is just as authentic as the donation of Constantine to Pope Sylvester. His ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The crossing, it was urged, was absolutely safe, being commanded on all sides by our guns, and the enemy could make no opposition except with artillery. Moreover, the army would get on its line of railway and could 'advance along the railroad.' This last was a purely imaginary advantage, to be sure, because the railway had no rolling-stock, and was disconnected from the rest of the line by the destruction of the Tugela bridge. But what weighed with the Commander-in-Chief much more ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... Do you think then—of course I am only putting an imaginary instance—do you think that in the case of a young married couple, say about two years married, if the husband suddenly becomes the intimate friend of a woman of—well, more than doubtful character—is always calling upon her, lunching with ...
— Lady Windermere's Fan • Oscar Wilde
... the face of every letter. As he designed it, it was, however, very elaborate, embracing 'several sorts of seals, some showing by screws, others by gauges, fastening or unfastening all the marks at once: others by additional points and imaginary places, proportionable to ordinary escutcheons and seals at arms, each way palpably and punctually setting down (yet private from all others but the owner, and by his assent) the day of the month, the day of the week, the month of the year, the year of our Lord, the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... proper, as it is perceived that the adversaries of the new Constitution are availing themselves of the prevailing prejudice with regard to the practicable sphere of republican administration, in order to supply, by imaginary difficulties, the want of those solid objections which they endeavor ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... Turkish kawwas in attendance on him, I observed to shrug up his shoulders when he heard nothing but Arabic being spoken among us. They arrived here in the company of Shaikh Yusuf, whose son is nominally a Turkish military officer, commanding three hundred imaginary Bashi-Bozuk, or irregular cavalry. By means of such titles they tickle the vanity of the Arab leaders, and claim an annual tribute of 218 purses, (about 1000 pounds,) and are thus enabled to swell out the published army list, ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... second apartment. There the officiating dignitaries assumed the vestments of Catholic priests. They produced a wax figure, designed to represent a missionary, amused themselves with a mock trial, inflicted imaginary tortures, and returned the dummy to a cupboard, after which they proceeded to the crucifixion of a living pig. The third act was an agonising experience for the doctor, being nothing less than the sacrifice of one of the brethren, the selection being determined by lot. The doctor, ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... reasonable soul, and that soul adorned with faculties and capacities adapted both to honour his Maker and be honoured by him; I say, to see it sunk and degenerated to a degree so more than stupid, as to prostrate itself to a frightful nothing, a mere imaginary object dressed up by themselves, and made terrible to themselves by their own contrivance, adorned only with clouts and rags; and that this should be the effect of mere ignorance, wrought up into hellish devotion ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... by European law and usage the property of their respective owners. In fact, as the country is occupied chiefly for pastoral purposes, the difference between the Aboriginal and the European ideas of property in the soil is more imaginary than real, the native grass affording subsistence to the kangaroos of the natives, as well as to the wild cattle of the Europeans, and the only difference indeed being, that the former are not branded with a particular ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... "British" bird from a "foreign" bird? Lastly, every one should know that every bird found in Leicestershire is a "British" bird, and that every "British" bird is a "foreign" one; and that each of these imaginary divisions is being constantly recruited from the division immediately above it. [Footnote: There are but two birds belonging to the Paridae (Titmice), which are claimed as being peculiar to Britain; and these merely on the ground of being ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... enormous brutalities have fled before the benign enlightening influence of the gospel. To suffocate a man, in order to drive out an imaginary evil spirit, was like the popular trial for witchcraft. The poor woman, if cross, and old, and ugly, her hands and legs being tied together, was thrown into deep water; if she floated, it was a proof of guilt to hang her, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... consideration that predatory patriotism deforms its own idol and makes it hateful in the eyes of the world, subsequent history has fully confirmed the moral instinct of the ancient Greeks, that national insolence or injustice (hybrist) brings its own severe punishment. The imaginary dialogue which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Athenian and Melian envoys, and the debate in the Athenian Assembly about the punishment of revolted Mitylene, are intended to prepare the reader for the tragic fate of the Sicilian expedition. The same writer describes the break-up ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... he found himself exceedingly anxious to say a great deal to her, without knowing where to begin. She had surprised him too much—as usual. She was so different from what he had been dreaming about. Here was no one of the imaginary creatures that had risen before his mind during the stillness of the night. Even the pale dreamer in black and blue beads was gone. He found before him (as far as he could make out) a quiet, bright-faced, self-possessed girl, clad in a light and ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... "For much imaginary work was there; Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles' image stood his spear Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind Was left unseen, save ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the same task had been undertaken by a noble poet,[1] whose playful and happy jeu d'esprit on the subject has since been published. It was but lately, that, on finding the fragments of my own sketch among my papers, I thought of founding on them such a description of an imaginary Fete as might furnish me with situations for the introduction ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... eye it was more than a jewel. It suggested rather a shooting star, emitting a shower of scintillations from the facets of a hundred jewels. When the coruscations of this Masonic emblem caught the eye of Dr. Lord, he became uneasy, and began to finger an imaginary token of rank upon his own breast. "I ought to have a jewel to wear to-night," he said musingly, and muttered of the splendid jewel that he had forgotten to bring, given to him years before by the Grand Lodge. By this time the hour of service had ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... moving with deliberate steps, the imaginary winding-sheet dragging slowly after him. There was an automatic precision in ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... perhaps imaginary, symbols have given birth to various fables and conjectures. It seems probable, that the Palladium was a small statue (three cubits and a half high) of Minerva, with a lance and distaff; that it was usually enclosed in a seria, or barrel; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... of a form embodying the most general propositions that can be affirmed respecting the Cephalous Mollusca, standing in the same relation to them as the diagram to a geometrical theorem, and like it, at once, imaginary and true.") (in your sense, for I detest the word as used by Owen, Agassiz & Co.) of each great class, I cannot doubt, is one of the very highest ends of Natural History; and certainly most interesting to the worker-out. Several ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... window, penetrated still with the afflatus of last night's thoughts and reveries, wouldn't you be cheerful? Wouldn't the unity of all things come to you, and wouldn't you chirrup like a bird, and buzz like a bee, and turn imaginary somersaults and dance and sing, and feel like cutting up "didoes," and talk a little high strung, and be chipper with the lowliest and level with the highest? Wouldn't your heart flow over with ever ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... experiment; that all the locks in the proposed canal are duplicated, thereby minimizing such dangers as are inherent in any canal project, and he adds that experience shows that with proper plans and regulations the dangers are much more imaginary than real. He goes into the facts of the proposed great dam to be constructed at Gatun and points out that such construction is not experimental, but sustained by large American experience, which is larger, perhaps, than that of any other country in the world. He ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden
... one man, while two others ran in front to clear the way of imaginary obstacles, since there were no real ones, sat a magnificent person clad in full Japanese regalia. He wore a robe of dark rich colors, but the girls could not see his face, which was hidden by ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... shaping them. A different and very buoyant timber, according to him, was used for the out-rigger. This boy had travelled. He had seen the canoes further north as well as those of New Guinea, and it was found on investigation that his description of the local craft was quite imaginary. Captain Philip P. King, who came hither from Sydney in 1818, anchoring at Goold Island, thus describes the canoe of the period—"Their canoes were not more than five feet long, and generally too small for two people; two small strips of bark five or six inches ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... scruples tortured him; "the fact is," he said, "I might have employed my afternoon more wholesomely than that;" to believe that he had spent it ill was but a step, and he made it. He pelted himself for an hour, sweating with agony, heaping on himself imaginary sins, and entering so far on that road that he ended by suddenly realizing his position and understanding he was ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... fringe of stunted cedars, like an abatis, partly concealing the old barricade where, in the golden days of their youth, he had played with Shirley at storming the fort; and Shirley, in these fierce assaults, had usually tumbled over upon the imaginary enemy ahead of him! ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... defiance at side, and party bantered party. Here the blue and white of Company "A" flaunted audaciously on the breeze beside the very seats over which the crimson and gray of "B" were flying, and these in their turn nodded defiance over the imaginary barrier between themselves and ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... waiting just outside in the passage, watching with his eye at the keyhole for either of us to make a blunder and let the truth slip out. I hardly ever left his side except now and again to go into that next room, and poke an imaginary fire, and say a few chaffing words to an imaginary living woman on the bed where the dead one lay; and Jeanie sat close to the corpse, and called out saucy messages to him, or reassuring answers ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... Sinan Reis on this occasion was not altogether an imaginary one: the idea of a disembarkation had, in point of fact, been seriously discussed that very morning by Andrea Doria and his council of war, at which Hernando de Gonzaga, Generalissimo of the troops embarked, had advised a landing. His argument, ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... of course, for such a young girl to live with an old spinster and go to a village school. Her books bore testimony to this; for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a sense of weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of blessedness or other, which began to be painful. She might have gone through this flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided into a sober, human berry, but for the intervention of friendly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... extraordinary works of any kind; and it is strange indeed that Christians, with victory in their hands, should have so mismanaged their cause as to establish an objection where none existed, and in their haste to extricate themselves from an imaginary difficulty, to overturn one of the ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... vessels, navigated according to the Act. "Our country," wrote Sheffield, in concluding his work, "does not entirely depend upon the monopoly of the commerce of the thirteen American states, and it is by no means necessary to sacrifice any part of our carrying trade for imaginary advantages never ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... the square-root becomes imaginary. From this we conclude that in the theory of relativity the velocity c plays the part of a limiting velocity, which can neither be reached nor exceeded ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... survey the whole world in idea, and him that stands in the open air, and takes a less deluding prospect of the universe? If the beggar in Lucian, that dreamt he was a prince, had never waked, his imaginary kingdom had been as great as a real one. Between him therefore that truly is happy, and him that thinks himself so, there is no perceivable distinction; or if any, the fool has the better of it: first, because his happiness ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... do with himself, and how he should earn a living. The same considerations, in varying measure, applied to others of the anti-slavery reformers. Some, unable to escape the reforming habit, turned their attention to different social evils, real or imaginary. Others, sufficiently supplied with this worlds goods for their moderate wants, withdrew from public life. Douglass was thinking of buying a farm and retiring to rural solitudes, when a new career opened up for him in the lyceum lecture field. The North ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... about sulkily). Oh come! I like to hear you military people talking of cowardice. Why, you spend your lives in an ecstasy of terror of imaginary invasions. I dont believe you ever go to bed without looking under it for ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... the heaps of snow were a terrible hindrance to his erratic progression. The cold air and the shock of a fall lessened his inebriety, but the imperative impulse of his imaginary mission still hypnotized him. It was past one before he reached the tall house. He did not think it at all curious that the great outer portals should be open; nor, though he saw the milk-cart at the door, and noted Cohen's ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was turned full on; one of the windows was open—a fresh breeze from the river came in. George was seated on a horse-hair sofa at the farthest end of the room. He held a small walking-stick in his hand, and was making imaginary patterns with it on the carpet. His shoulders were hitched up to his ears, his eyes were fixed on the ground. Effie looked ...
— A Girl in Ten Thousand • L. T. Meade
... often ancient, and most picturesquely time-stained, the plaster dropping in spots from the old brickwork; others were tinted of pleasant and cheerful lines; some were frescoed with designs in arabesques, or with imaginary windows; some had escutcheons of arms painted on the front. Wherever there was a pigeon-house, a flight of doves were represented as flying into the holes, doubtless for the invitation and encouragement ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dean, instead of leaving a large fortune, had nothing to leave. All he had laid out at the deanery was sunk and gone; his real property all sold; his imaginary wealth, his pictures, statues—his whole collection, even his books, his immense library, shrunk so much in value when estimated after his death, that the demands of the creditors could not be nearly answered: as to any provision for Miss Stanley, that ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... Saturdays, when Lawrence came down, and ended on the Mondays, when he went away. If, in the meantime, she sat down to work, she went off into a trance; if she was sent out for fresh air, she walked quarter-deck on the esplanade, neither seeing nor hearing anything, we averred, but some imaginary Lawrence Frith. ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pretense behind his aunt's upright back of throwing a ball while the other child held up two fat little hands to receive it. Again he laughed aloud as Jimmy spat on his hands and ground the imaginary ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... but present objects and passing events. In his ignorance of me and my affairs, I in a manner forget myself. But a friend reminds one of other things, rips up old grievances, and destroys the abstraction of the scene. He comes in ungraciously between us and our imaginary character. Something is dropped in the course of conversation that gives a hint of your profession and pursuits; or from having some one with you that knows the less sublime portions of your history, it seems that other people do. You are no longer a citizen of ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... poet conducts us along the strange excursive windings of the life and passion of humanity. The same hand which draws such noble figures as Gauvain—and the real Lanjuinais of history was fully as heroic and as noble as the imaginary Gauvain of fiction—is equally skilful in drawing the wild Breton beggar who dwells underground among the branching tree-roots; and the monstrous Imanus, the barbarous retainer of the Lord of the Seven Forests; and Radoub, the serjeant from Paris, a man of hearty ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Gern commander was no longer of any value to them. His unwillingness to believe that savages had wrested his ship from him had increased until his compartment became his control room to him and he spent the hours laughing and giggling before an imaginary viewscreen whereon the cruiser's blasters were destroying, over and over, the Ragnarok town and all the ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... Was she playing with fire? Ah, no, she told herself, it was very different in her case. This was no imaginary case of "neglect" or "incompatibility." There was the living trouble,—Mamma. And even if tonight she conceded this point to George, and Mamma was banished, sooner or later resentment, bitter and uncontrollable, would rise again, she knew, ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... indeed did him no sort of justice. But her reception of it made her seem a very unreasonable person. He had some violent fluctuations. At times he was bitterly angry with her for her failure to see things as he did. He would wander about the museum conducting imaginary discussions with her and making even scathing remarks. At other times he had to summon all his powers of acrid discipline and all his memories of her resentful retorts, to keep himself from a headlong rush ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... class insists that he has his foot upon the neck of the poor Hindu and is grinding his brown face into the dust. In both England and India are organizations of good people who have conceived it to be their mission to defend and protect the natives from real or imaginary wrongs they are suffering, while there are numerous societies and associations whose business is to see that the Englishman gets ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... are subject to many that are only imaginary, for which the physicians have invented imaginary cures; these have their several names, and so have the drugs that are proper for them; and with these our female Yahoos are ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... hurled as a solid body in any given direction. For these reasons it is more dangerous than other churches; but the doctrines are no more dangerous than those of the Protestant churches. The man who would sacrifice the well- being of man to please an imaginary phantom that he calls God, is also dangerous. The only safe standard is the well-being of man in this world. Whenever this world is sacrificed for the sake of another, a mistake has been made. The only God that man can know is the aggregate of all beings capable ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... with at his discretion. My view is, you understand, that I am not entitled to suppress it on the strength of a mere possibility that presents itself to my imagination. But if I gather from you—and I can gather it from no other person—that there is substance in that imaginary possibility I speak of, then I have only one thing to do as a gentleman and as one who"—he hesitated for a phrase—"wishes you well. I shall suppress that despatch of mine. In some directions I decline to assist the police. Have you followed me so far?" he asked with ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... How Mars could impart three times the speed to a body flying off its surface that it has itself, has caused several defenders of the hypothesis to rush forward with explanations, but none with anything more than mere imaginary collisions with some comet. It is to be noticed that accounting for three times the speed is not enough; for as Mars shrunk away from the [Page 187] ring that formed that satellite, it ought itself to attain more speed, as the sun revolves ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... the Indian, making a sweep of his dagger blade at an imaginary foe. "No wolverine! ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... him, or shoved him to the earth, using at the same time language that left no doubt of the nature of the assault. There are strange rumours connected with the affair. The assailant was a Marquis de ——, and it is reported that his wrongs, real or imaginary, are connected with a plot to rob one of the dethroned family of her jewels, or of some crown jewels, I cannot say which, at the epoch of the restoration. The journals said a good deal about it at the time, but events occur so fast ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... have I repeated this story? The reader may, perhaps, suppose it introductory to some tale of boyish romantic passion for some female idol clothed with imaginary perfections. But in that case he will be mistaken. Nothing of the kind was possible to me. I was preoccupied by other passions. Under the disease—for disease it was—which at that time mastered me, one ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... presents, but it was like entertaining a rainbow, an elusive, shadowy thing of beauty. She could not be said to denote the Woman in the House. Christopher, as he wandered about the big silent rooms and long corridors, was perforce obliged to take with him for company a more shadowy presence, an imaginary vision of another woman, also tall and dark, but without Constantia Wyatt's irresponsible gaiety and dazzling smile. He would escort this phantom Woman through his favourite rooms, pointing out the treasures to her. He even apportioned ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... concern. Now came a great struggle. Tom stroked him backward and forward, and although he was a proud boy, he sobbed aloud. Tiger whined, licked his face, rushed off into dark corners, and barked savagely at some imaginary enemy, and then came back, and putting his paws on Tom's knees, wagged his tail in anxious sympathy. At last Tom took his hands from his pale, tear-stained face, and looking into the dog's great honest eyes, he cried with a queer shake ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... position at fine leg and merged myself with the slips, who, together with point and cover, were bearing a course towards the labyrinthine ways of the kitchen-garden. After vainly searching for an imaginary ball and finding that we were not actually attacked from the rear, we ventured at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... of England in twelve-syllabled verse, full of antiquarian and historical details, so accurate as to make the work an authority on such matters. The rushing verse is full of vigour and gusto. Other poems of D. are The Wars of the Barons (1603), England's Heroical Epistles (1598) (being imaginary letters between Royal lovers such as Henry II. and Rosamund), Poems, Lyric and Heroic (1606) (including the fine ballad of "Agincourt"), Nymphidia, his most graceful work, Muses Elizium, and Idea's Mirrour, a collection of sonnets, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... people ask, with some reason, "should there be this determined search for the North Pole. What good will come to the world with its discovery? Is it worth while to go on year after year, pouring out treasure and risking human lives, merely that any hardy explorer may stand at an imaginary point on the earth's surface which is ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... fattest soil to weeds; And he, the noble image of my youth, Is overspread with them: therefore my grief Stretches itself beyond the hour of death: The blood weeps from my heart when I do shape In forms imaginary the unguided days And rotten times that you shall look upon When I am sleeping with my ancestors. For when his headstrong riot hath no curb, When rage and hot blood are his counsellors, When means and lavish manners meet together, O, with what wings ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... was necessary to getup a pretext for revenge, and accordingly recourse was had to a bulletin, which proclaimed to France and Europe that Hamburg had been taken by main force, with a loss of some hundred men. But for this imaginary resistance, officially announced, how would it have been possible to justify the spoliations and ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... speech was reached Garry had begun to follow. When Joe drew down one corner of his mouth and puffed aloft an imaginary cloud of smoke by way of added vividness, his own laughter mingled with Steve's quieter appreciation. But his contribution to the conversation was not as complacent as Fat ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... stretched-out tail, from which most of the red paint had been worn away. It was evidently a long time since any little boy had mounted there, chirruped to the horse, and ridden gloriously away, pursuing a fairy fox through imaginary fields. The eye of the wooden horse was glazed and dim. Life had lost its interest to the poor animal, turned out, as it were, to pasture as best he might ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... of men of genius are increased by their own reflection on them, and in addition to real woes they thus inflict on themselves thousands of imaginary ones. A loss in trade may be repaired by the profits of the succeeding day, and all be set right, where gain is the sole idol; but when fame is mixed up in the pursuit, there is a suffering beyond the hour, the day, or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... replied the future premier comic of Shanghai, shaking an imaginary frill with the graceful ease of ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... now very beautiful and intensely pathetic, but it owes less to her art than her personality. She does not interpret Bruennhilde—rather she uses the part as a vehicle for her private emotions; to an inordinate degree she reads into it her real or imaginary experience; and she has not learnt the trick of turning her feelings into the proper channels provided, so to say, by the part—of so directing them that Gulbranson disappears behind Bruennhilde. Still, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... the battlefield where the French had gained so glorious a victory, blocking up the roads to Parma and Bercetto. But Marechal de Gie and de Guise and de la Trimouille, who had done quite enough to save them from the suspicion of quailing before imaginary dangers, put a stop to this enthusiasm, by pointing out that it would only be risking the loss of their present advantage if they tried to push it farther with men and horses so worn out. This view was adopted in spite of the opinion of Trivulce, Camillo Vitelli, and Francesco Secco, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... life with such a healthy, rosy visage. But every one has some pet weakness. Mrs. Kitson's was always fancying herself ill and nervous. Now, Flora had no very benignant feelings towards the old lady's long catalogue of imaginary ailments; so she changed the dreaded subject, by inquiring after the health of the old Captain, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... the slave: when beaten and bruised with blows, he requests and implores as a favour to be allowed to depart with some few of his teeth.' This will always be the event of such an imaginary resistance, when men may not strike again. He, therefore, who may resist must be allowed to strike. And then let our author, or anybody else, join a knock on the head, or a cut on the face, with as much reverence and respect as he thinks fit. He that can reconcile blows ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the Department The Imaginary Mistress The Middle Classes Cousin Betty The Country Parson In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following: Another Study of Woman ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... himself and tormenting others: it had become a mania with him. And the tragedy of it was, that, while he aped the ravages of disease, the disease did make real inroads upon him, and death peeped forth. Then the expected happened: Grazia, having been tortured by her son for years with his imaginary illness, ceased to believe in it when the illness really came. The heart has its limitations. She had exhausted her store of pity over his lies. She thought Lionello was still a comedian when he spoke the truth. And ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... some of whom are of a warlike spirit and frequently give the others trouble. However, Chingatok says we shall have no difficulty in reaching this Nothing—as he will insist on styling the Pole, ever since I explained to him that it was not a real but an imaginary point." ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... have 'the strong tower' and 'the strong city'; the man lifted up above danger on the battlements of the one, and the man fancying himself to be high above it (and only fancying himself) in the imaginary safety of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... day after day, of glowing pictures of herself and Farnham in tete-a-tete; she would seek in a thousand ways to tell her love—but she could never quite arrange her avowal in a satisfactory manner. Long before she came to the decisive words which were to kindle his heart to flame in the imaginary dialogue, he would himself take fire by spontaneous combustion, and, falling on his knees, would offer his hand, his heart, and his fortune to her in words taken from "The Earl's Daughter" or ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... ludicrous may be added to the game by each player pretending that he has a destination or stopping-place, where he would wish to alight. It now becomes the aim of the two players who are "it" to carry him past his point. A player who is thus carried beyond his imaginary stopping-place must feign a violent passion, and imitate angry gesticulations. He may, in addition, feign a great age or a painful infirmity, which will be found to occasion the most convulsive fun for the other players ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... thousand shares at two dollars a share, all based upon a few acres of mining land which I bought for a song. With the ten thousand dollars, I hired an office, printed circulars, distributed glowing accounts of imaginary wealth, etc. It cost considerable for advertising, but I sold seventy thousand shares, and when I had gathered in the money I let the bottom fall out. There was a great fuss, of course, but I figured as the largest loser, being the owner of thirty ...
— Luke Walton • Horatio Alger
... things. They seemed positively devilish in their ferocity, and were proportionately gratifying. These he called his "war arrows," and would send one into a tree and watch it shiver, then grunt "Ugh, heap good," and rejoice in the squirming of the imaginary foe he had pierced. ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... afterwards declares to all who question him, that he 'tried with all his might' to strike the hand. A. has certainly no theatrical talents; but his looks and gestures, when he is made to believe that he is exposed to a terrific storm, convey a very natural expression of terror. He regards the imaginary flashes of lightning with an aspect of dismay, which, if simulated, would be a very good specimen of acting. In many other experiments performed upon him, the effects seem to be such as are quite beyond the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... column where real and imaginary subscribers exchange notes about cookery receipts, and housekeeping tips, and hair lotions, and that ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... debt. The people of Maine had been greatly divided upon these measures. The Greenback party was opposed to the effort to advance the United States note to the value of coin which it represented, but wished to make it depend upon some imaginary value given to it by law. I said the people of Maine would have to choose between those who strictly sought to preserve the national faith, and to maintain the greenback at par with coin, and those who, with utter ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... be effected by natural selection, which, as Darwin well remarks, "acts on every internal organ, on every shade of constitututional difference, on the whole machinery of life." The difficulty as to co-adaptation of parts by variation and natural selection appears to me, therefore, to be a wholly imaginary difficulty which has no place whatever in the ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of the parties, their prevailing electric condition. Temporarily they may seem to be in harmony, and may deceive themselves into the belief that they are at opposite poles equidistant from the equator, and certain to meet on that imaginary line in matrimonial bliss. Dreadful will be the awakening to an insipid life, if they find they both have the same sort of currents. It is said that women change their minds and their dispositions, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Imaginary terrors scare A timorous soul with real fear! Nay, e'en the wise and brave are cowed By apprehensions from ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... happiness than I did joy when I had acquired it; for my brother had taken it from me, as he had given it. He had given it without reason; he had taken it away without cause. He had praised me for discretion and prudence when I did not merit it, and he suspected my fidelity on grounds wholly imaginary and fictitious. I concluded with assuring her that I should never forget my brother's behaviour on ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... to rest by a general confession of his sins, but, unfortunately, his brother Augustinians in Rome and those with whom he came most in contact seemed to have been more anxious to regale him with stories about the real or imaginary scandals of the city than to give him spiritual consolation or advice. Yet in later life, when he had definitely separated from the Church and when he was most anxious to blacken the character of Rome and ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey |
