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Imagination   Listen
noun
Imagination  n.  
1.
The imagine-making power of the mind; the power to create or reproduce ideally an object of sense previously perceived; the power to call up mental imagines. "Our simple apprehension of corporeal objects, if present, is sense; if absent, is imagination." "Imagination is of three kinds: joined with belief of that which is to come; joined with memory of that which is past; and of things present, or as if they were present."
2.
The representative power; the power to reconstruct or recombine the materials furnished by direct apprehension; the complex faculty usually termed the plastic or creative power; the fancy. "The imagination of common language the productive imagination of philosophers is nothing but the representative process plus the process to which I would give the name of the "comparative."" "The power of the mind to decompose its conceptions, and to recombine the elements of them at its pleasure, is called its faculty of imagination." "The business of conception is to present us with an exact transcript of what we have felt or perceived. But we have moreover a power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of different ones together, so as to form new wholes of our creation. I shall employ the word imagination to express this power."
3.
The power to recombine the materials furnished by experience or memory, for the accomplishment of an elevated purpose; the power of conceiving and expressing the ideal. "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact... The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name."
4.
A mental image formed by the action of the imagination as a faculty; a conception; a notion.
Synonyms: Conception; idea; conceit; fancy; device; origination; invention; scheme; design; purpose; contrivance. Imagination, Fancy. These words have, to a great extent, been interchanged by our best writers, and considered as strictly synonymous. A distinction, however, is now made between them which more fully exhibits their nature. Properly speaking, they are different exercises of the same general power the plastic or creative faculty. Imagination consists in taking parts of our conceptions and combining them into new forms and images more select, more striking, more delightful, more terrible, etc., than those of ordinary nature. It is the higher exercise of the two. It creates by laws more closely connected with the reason; it has strong emotion as its actuating and formative cause; it aims at results of a definite and weighty character. Milton's fiery lake, the debates of his Pandemonium, the exquisite scenes of his Paradise, are all products of the imagination. Fancy moves on a lighter wing; it is governed by laws of association which are more remote, and sometimes arbitrary or capricious. Hence the term fanciful, which exhibits fancy in its wilder flights. It has for its actuating spirit feelings of a lively, gay, and versatile character; it seeks to please by unexpected combinations of thought, startling contrasts, flashes of brilliant imagery, etc. Pope's Rape of the Lock is an exhibition of fancy which has scarcely its equal in the literature of any country. "This, for instance, Wordsworth did in respect of the words 'imagination' and 'fancy.' Before he wrote, it was, I suppose, obscurely felt by most that in 'imagination' there was more of the earnest, in 'fancy' of the play of the spirit; that the first was a loftier faculty and gift than the second; yet for all this words were continually, and not without loss, confounded. He first, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, rendered it henceforth impossible that any one, who had read and mastered what he has written on the two words, should remain unconscious any longer of the important difference between them." "The same power, which we should call fancy if employed on a production of a light nature, would be dignified with the title of imagination if shown on a grander scale."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Imagination" Quotes from Famous Books



... most of life's rapids, seemed oddly dormant. Sub-consciously she was aware that on past performances Fillmore was decidedly not the man to be allowed control of anybody's little fortune, but somehow the thought did not seem to grip her. He had touched her imagination. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... is hindered from freely confessing Christ's name, by two things—by fear and by shame. Now both these things betray themselves principally on the forehead on account of the proximity of the imagination, and because the (vital) spirits mount directly from the heart to the forehead: hence "those who are ashamed, blush, and those who are afraid, pale" (Ethic. iv). And therefore man is signed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... not be so. He stretched himself idly. A mocking bird uttered a phrase outside. No dregs of drowsiness remained in him, so he dressed and walked out into the freshness of the new morning. Here the rumbling sound, which he had concluded had been an effect of his half-conscious imagination, came clearer to his ears. He listened for a moment, then walked rapidly to the Lone Pine Hill from whose slight elevation he could see abroad over the low mountains to the west. The gray light before sunrise ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... meantime, all he knew was that whereas he was once lame he could now walk. Even the most bigoted and prejudiced now agree that the cures of Christian Science are genuine. People who think they have trouble have it, and it is the same with pain. Imagination is the only sure-enough thing in the world. Mrs. Eddy's doctrines abolish pain and therefore abolish poverty, for poverty, in America at least, is a disease. Mrs. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... Hoping against hope that this would never become necessary, he had put off the evil moment till the postponement had become cruel. But he had lived through it so often in thought, he had so acutely suffered with her in imagination the staggering humiliation of it all, that now, when the time had come, his feelings were benumbed. As he turned into his own grounds that day it seemed to him that his deadness of emotion was such that he could carry the thing through mechanically, ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... struck me—a strange thought—which had no sooner flashed through my mind, than I resolved to act upon its suggestion. 'Twas a glorious plan of revenge, and one which could only have emanated from my fertile imagination. ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson

... among the lively bevies of that literature's graces—ever since the Middle Ages, with some touches of waking—hardly more than motions in a dream—at the Renaissance. The comic Phantasy had been wakeful and active enough; the graver and more serious tragic Imagination had been, though with some limitations, busy at times. But this third sister—Our Lady of Dreams, one might call her in imitation of a famous fancy—had not shown herself much in French merriment or in French sadness: the light of common day there had been too much ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... discover no defect or blemish. With his free and noble attitude, with the bow in his hand, and the quiver at his back, he might seem, but for his face, the Pythian Apollo himself. Such a figure rose before the imagination of West, when on first seeing the Belvidere in the Vatican, he exclaimed, "By God, ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... terrible trouble. She hardly believed the story, which seemed to tell her of a degree of villany greater than ever her imagination had depicted to her;—and yet, if it were true, she would be driven to look for means of excusing it. The story as told was indeed hardly just to Ralph, who in the course of his transactions with Mr. Neefit had almost taught himself to believe that he ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... imagination to see that it meant much for the practical man so to express himself. Love of her drew him out of his character, and, though he could not resist, he resented the effect it had on him. She found nothing to reply, but ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... of the incident is sufficient to prevent its having occurred in reality or to more than one inventive imagination. It must therefore have been brought to Europe from the East and adapted to local conditions at Dort and Swaffham. Prof. Cowell suggests that it was possibly adapted at the latter place to account for the effigy of the pedlar ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various

... it be alleged, that if this managing of matters be so fit for the imagination, then must the historian needs surpass, who brings you images of true matters, such as, indeed, were done, and not such as fantastically or falsely may be suggested to have been done. Truly, Aristotle himself, in his Discourse of Poesy, plainly determineth ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney

... considered beautiful (for, strictly speaking, we may say only this, not that it is beautiful) when its form puts the powers of the human mind in a state of harmony, brings the intuitive and rational faculties into concordant activity, and produces an agreeable proportion between the imagination and the understanding. In giving the occasion for an harmonious play of the cognitive activities (that is, for an easy combination of the manifold into unity) the beautiful object is purposive for us, for our function of apprehension; it is—here ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... not be thought to talk barely of their own imagination, but of things as really they are; therefore they often suppose the WORDS TO STAND ALSO FOR THE REALITY OF THINGS. But this relating more particularly to substances and their names, as perhaps the former ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke

... dancing girls with their father. Those people had been away for some time as the girls had engagements in some Italian summer theatres, but apparently they had secured a re-engagement for the winter and were now back. I let Therese talk because it kept my imagination from going to work on subjects which, I had made up my mind, were no concern of mine. But I went out early to perform an unpleasant task. It was only proper that I should let the Carlist agent ensconced in the ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... spite of the fact that Rabbit had none of the fiery traits of an Arabian steed; nor could he by any stretch of the imagination be accused of being shod with fire, he who planted his hoofs so sedately! Shod with velvet would have come ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower

... Somme we had seen a derelict tank, wrecked, despoiled of her guns, and forsaken in No Man's Land. We had swarmed around and over her, wild with curiosity, much as the Lilliputians must have swarmed around the prostrate Gulliver. Our imagination was fired. ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh

... again as to the fate of the spirit that had informed the body and made it what it was; but his imagination refused to work. After all, he asked himself, what were all the teachings of theology but words gabbled to break the appalling silence? Heaven ... Purgatory ... Hell. What was known of these things? The ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... Street house when the boy had dawned upon him in his overalls and red silk stockings. He had never considered Allen's interest in Marian serious; for Allen had to Dan's knowledge paid similar attentions to half a dozen other girls. Allen's imagination made a goddess of every pretty girl, and Dan had settled down to the belief that his friend saw in Marian only one of the many light-footed Dianas visible in the city thoroughfares, whom he invested with deific charms and apostrophized in glowing phrases. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... disused for many years, had evolved into a sort of lumber-room, and she could see, in her imagination, the pathetic picture of her little brother fiddling away among the piled-up boxes and old furniture, trying to hasten the moment when his beloved master would find him worthy of ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... road, and if you will not be daunted by the unsavoriness of the immediate neighborhood, you will find it quite worth your while. The house presents only a casual side to the street—one fancies it does not take much interest in its upstart neighbors—but imagination makes us believe that it regards with brooding tenderness the lovely tidal river which winds away through the marshes to the sea. Interesting as the house is for its architectural features and for its delightful location—despite the nearness of the ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery

... During a happily prolonged youth (he was now eighteen and a half) he had developed very slowly, but normally. Surrounded by pleasant friendships and home influences he had never really become aware of evil. Now it broke upon him suddenly—probably to a degree exaggerated by his strong imagination and distorted by the fact that he was undergoing physical changes usually belonging ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... the railroad company was magnanimous enough to furnish a velocipede for their use in going to and from the station. How I felt the first night, stuck away out there in that box-car, two miles from the nearest house and twelve miles from the nearest town, I must leave to the imagination. My heart sank and I had many misgivings, in fact, I was scared to death, but I set my teeth hard and determined to do my best, with the hope that I might be promoted to a better office. I did win that promotion but I wouldn't go through my experiences again ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady

... George Sand says very strikingly of Rousseau and Therese Levasseur, "His true fault was in persevering in his attachment for that vulgar woman, who turned to her own profit the weaknesses of his ill starred character and his self torturing imagination. One does not with impunity live in company with a little soul. When one is a Jean Jacques Rousseau, one does not acquire the faults of littleness, does not lose his native grandeur; but he feels his genius troubled, combated, worried, distempered, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... of language finds its base in the very essence of our being. The poet is one gifted to seize upon these hidden analogies, to read these mystic symbols, and, through the force of his own imagination, to reveal them to his brethren ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... for word the whole of this interview, he might have had misgivings of the effect of one thing he had said unawares. It was his reference to Uncle Mo's absence at The Sun during the late afternoon. Manifestly, it left the house in Mr. Wix's imagination untenanted, during some two hours of the day, except by Aunt M'riar, and the children perhaps. And ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... secret stairway in the wall, because I wanted Barrie to miss no thrill this place could give; but it was not the thought of the murder-scene which most caught her imagination. She listened to my dramatic version of the tragedy of the room, and of the dark closet where Rizzio tried to hide, and shuddered a little; but soon she was drawn, as if beckoned by an unseen hand, ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... hesitate a moment. The public owes the count's wife a great debt of gratitude, and not of reproaches, for bravely opposing his fatal desire to live in every detail the life of a peasant laborer. Can any one blessed with the faintest particle of imagination fail to perceive how great a task it has been to withstand him thus for his own good; to rear nine healthy, handsome, well-bred children out of the much larger family which they have had; to bear the entire responsibility of the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... replied, still keeping his eyes fixed upon the burning logs and striving to follow the outlines of a fairy island with palms and tropical plants and ferns as tall as forest trees, which, in his imagination, he saw there. ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul

... animal, the everyday producers of shock are pain, fright and wounds. The adrenal mechanisms oversecrete to encounter the enemy, and then there is a period of rest and recuperation. Man, however, with the growth of his imagination and the increase in number and density of his surrounding herd, has become the subject of continuous stimulation. In the past, this was balanced by the almost universal dominance of some religious belief, as an effective opiate. Concepts like Fate, Predestination, an all-guiding and all-wise ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... forget the ills that have been done us, and to do good to those who have sought to injure us: your conduct towards me is admirable; I confess, that, though my reclamations were just at the first, I have suffered myself to be carried too far by the first impulse of a weak and exalted imagination, which led me to decry my unhappy companion in misfortune, because I fancied, that the account which he had drawn up of our misfortunes might render us odious to all our relations and friends.[52] Such are the reasons which I alledged to you at Rochefort, and you must ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard

... so. He had long wished to marry—wished ardently; he had even got into the way of regarding every woman he met—and he met many—in the light of a possible partner. 'Can it be she? he had asked himself a thousand times, and then answered half sadly, 'No.' Not one woman had touched his imagination, coincided with his dream. It is strange that after seeing Eva Brunt he forgot thus to interrogate himself. For a fortnight, while he went his ways as usual, her image occupied his heart, throwing that once orderly ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... in an attempt to persuade them to accompany him; but all except Taglat and Chulk refused. The latter was young and strong, endowed with a greater intelligence than his fellows, and therefore the possessor of better developed powers of imagination. To him the expedition savored of adventure, and so appealed, strongly. With Taglat there was another incentive—a secret and sinister incentive, which, had Tarzan of the Apes had knowledge of it, would have sent him at the ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... too fat, Mrs. Schump. I always tell her it's her imagination. I know a girl bigger than she is that's keeping company with an expert piano-tuner. Why, I know girls twice her size. Stella's got a right good figure, ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... there a sudden disabling storm of thought—misgiving—argument—swept through her brain. She seemed to hear on all sides voices in the air—the voices of friends and foes, of applause and execration—Delia's voice among them! And at the mere imagination of it, a shiver of anger ran through her. She thought of Delia now, only as of one who had deserted ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... strive to make his voice heard above the roar of wind and waves, in order the better to face the boisterous Assembly. Before long he came to be regarded as the prince of speakers even in the city of orators. Demosthenes was a man cast in the old heroic mold. His patriotic imagination had been fired by the great deeds once accomplished by free Greeks. Athens he loved with passionate devotion. Let her remember her ancient glories, he urged, and, by withstanding Philip, become the leader of Hellas in ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... woman like this, with her hair turned grey. Before him were the ashes of a dead fire that had once burned bright. This was the woman he had loved. This was the woman he had lost. Such had been the constancy of his imagination to her, so had Time spared her under its withholding, that now, seeing how roughly the inexorable hand had struck her, his soul was filled with ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens

... of November[180] was at that time kept with great solemnity at Pembroke College, and exercises upon the subject of the day were required[181]. Johnson neglected to perform his, which is much to be regretted; for his vivacity of imagination, and force of language, would probably have produced something sublime upon the gunpowder plot[182]. To apologise for his neglect, he gave in a short copy of verses, entitled Somnium, containing a common thought; 'that the Muse had come to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... The water, on the other hand, presented a spectacle superbly grand. Let any one fancy himself (says Captain Ross) in the midst of an immense plain, extending further than the eye can penetrate, and filled with masses of ice, which present a greater variety of form than the most fertile imagination can conceive; and as various in size as in shape, from the minutest fragments, to stupendous islands, more than one hundred feet in perpendicular height above ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley

... afforded were served up at their table, the best liquors were broached for them, and music, with its enlivening charms, crowned the banquet; the officers' hearts were quite open and cheerful, as they already enjoyed, in imagination, all the booty they were to seize on the morrow. Thinking they could not do enough for the honest sailor, they inquired if he knew any thing of accounts; promising, if he did, to get him a place in the customs. In the morning, after a good hearty breakfast, they set forward ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown

... closed the door behind him, seeing the line of balled fern which had marked his passage, he heard a faint rustling, a sound as if a wind had swept across the green room within. The imagination which was a Trader's asset (when it was kept within bounds) suggested that the plants inside guessed—With a frown for his own sentimentality, Dane strode down the corridor and climbed to ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton

... conclusions on no other authority than their own ignorant assumption, and to Deify errors on no other authority than their own heated imagination, has in all ages been the practice of Theologians. Of that practice they are proud, as was the mouse of our Fabulist. Clothed in no other panoply than their own conceits they deem themselves invulnerable. While uttering the wildest incoherencies ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell

... reader to be now as fully familiar with the scene as ourselves, let him next, in imagination, people it, as on the occasion we have chosen for his introduction. It was a warm, sunny, day in the early part of July. The town itself was as quiet as if the glaive of war reposed in its sheath, and the inhabitants pursued their wonted avocations with the air of men who had nothing in common ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... their course; or, perhaps, absorbed in his own schemes, it did not occur to him that his daughter, who seemed so devoted to the cause he advocated, could do so weak a thing as fall in love. At all events, Alick lived in an elysium partly created by his imagination, and did not allow the future to interfere with his present happiness. Jack and Adair still thought Stella very charming, but, observing Alick's devotion to her, they would have considered it a gross breach ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston

... shabby old garden. I felt like a mourner, bereaved of a loved one, for in a way—a schoolgirl way, perhaps—I had loved my prince of the arbour. And always since our day together, I'd compared other men with him, to their disadvantage. No one else ever captured my imagination as he captured it in those ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... blurring together into a mighty black wall, and the outlines of the houses becoming shadowy. The Ware family sat awhile that evening by the hearth fire, and John Ware was full of satisfaction. A worthy man, he had neither imagination nor primitive instincts and he valued the wilderness only as a cheap place in which to make homes. He spoke much of clearing the ground, of the great crops that would come, and of the profit and delight afforded by regular work year after year on the farm. Henry ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler

... Sevenoaks, or a hundred towns so much like it, in most particulars, that a description of any one of them would present it to the imagination—a town strung upon a stream, like beads upon a thread, or charms upon a chain. Sevenoaks was richer in chain than charms, for its abundant water-power was only partially used. It plunged, and roared, and played, and sparkled, because it had not half enough to do. It leaped down three or ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland

... times without pleasure, or fished or shot here and there without success. But upon these slender foundations he could not rear the stupendous fabric of his deeds unless he had read much, and listened carefully to the narrations of others. By the aid of a lively and unscrupulous imagination, he gradually transmutes their experiences into his own. What he has read becomes, in the end, what he has done, and thus, in time, the Spurious Sportsman is sent forth into the world equipped in a dazzling armour of sporting mendacity. And yet mendacity is, perhaps, too harsh a word; for it is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various

... holy gloom is now but dirt and darkness. There is no more deception than in a tragedy acted by candlesnuffers. One is sorry to think that an empire of common sense would not be very picturesque; for, as there is nothing but taste that can compensate for the imagination of madness, I doubt there will never be twenty men of taste for twenty thousand madmen. The world will no more see Athens, Rome, and the Medici again, than a succession of five good emperors, like Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, and ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... Imagination is blessed or cursed with a fearful magic whereby he may scale the heights of Heaven or plumb ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... were washed in the bathroom, and dried, without the slightest disguise, in the bedroom. He never hurried in anything. The way he cleaned his teeth, shaved, and made his toilet almost transformed the place, in my imagination, into a ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson

... suppose Jack won! What then? Dade blew a mouthful of smoke towards the camp-fire, deserted except for himself, while his vaqueros disported themselves with their neighbors, and shook his head. He had a little imagination; perhaps he had more than most men of his type. He could see a glorious row, if Jose were beaten. It would, on the whole, be more ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower

... politics, physics, psychology, and almost every department of knowledge that existed in his day, then the uncertainties become rather a help than a discouragement. They give us occasion to think and use our imagination. They make us, to the best of our powers, try really to follow and criticize closely the bold gropings of an extraordinary thinker; and it is in this process, and not in any mere collection of dogmatic results, that we shall find the true value and ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle

... could have so much as conceived the imagination of such loneliness, such utter stagnant abomination of desolation. In an open boat, bereft of comrades, I should have gone mad in ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... surveyed the room, he perceived that the blood had been washed from the floor and sand strewed over it. Had he not known that Smallbones had been on board of the cutter the day before, he would have thought that it had been the smell of the dead body not yet removed. This thought crossing his imagination, immediately made the truth flash upon him, and, as if instinctively, he went up to the bed and pulled down the clothes, when he recoiled back with horror at uncovering the face of his mother, now of a livid blue and in the last ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat

... of a lover's imagination, he only saw her, at the end of the veiled pathway, with love lighting her softly shining eyes, and her beloved hand ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... characteristics and spirit of these colonists, we must consider the special significance of the age that gave them birth. They "were the children of a century in which the human spirit had a new birth in energy of imagination, in faith in its powers to dare greatly and achieve greatly." [Footnote: Hamilton Wright Mabie—American Ideals, ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen

... short months, how tremendously attached to it must be this cheerful Don Mike, who had been born and raised there, who was familiar with every foot of it, and doubtless cherished every tradition connected with it. He had imagination, and in imaginative people wounds drive deep and are hard to heal; he loved this land of his, not with the passive loyalty of the average American citizen, but with the strange, passionate intensity of the native Californian for his state. She had met many ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... powerful man was Old Joe the collier, who flourished and was known in every village in the Salisbury Plain district during the first thirty-five years of the last century. I first heard of this once famous man from Caleb, whose boyish imagination had been affected by his gigantic figure, mighty voice, and his wandering life over all that wide world of Salisbury Plain. Afterwards when I became acquainted with a good many old men, aged from 75 to 90 and upwards, I found that Old Joe's memory ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson

... bit of a fool over this book. It catches me at every tender corner of my nature. It has aroused all the old ardent dreams of youth and springtime puissance. I cannot lay it down, and I cannot shorten it, for story, character, soul and reflection, imagination, observation are dragging me along after them. . . . This novel will make me or break me—prove me human and an artist, or an affected literary bore. If you want it you must take the risk. But, my dear Alden, you ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... this morning, and left it with real regret; for, during the two visits, Raphael's heavenly picture of the Madonna and child had so grown into my love and admiration, that it was painful to think I should never see it again. There are many more which clung so strongly to my imagination, gratifying in the highest degree the love for the Beautiful, that I left them with sadness, and the thought that I would now only have the memory. I can see the inspired eye and god-like brow of the Jesus-child, as if I were still standing before the picture, and the sweet, holy countenance of ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor

... to look at Cornelli over and over again, for he hardly yet realized that this was his child. Was this really Cornelli and not a creature of his imagination? So he held the child's hand and looked again and again into her shining eyes; it really seemed as if he could ...
— Cornelli • Johanna Spyri

... to say. On hearing these stories, the heroes of which always seemed to be saints, kings, priests, or generals, even the inmates of the dosshouse spat and rubbed their eyes in astonishment at the imagination of the Deacon, who told them shameless tales of lewd, fantastic adventures, with blinking eyes and a ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky

... humorous representations, even on sacred edifices. Water-pipes and gutter-spouts were ended with the heads of monsters and curious animals, and even with grotesque faces; in short, the smaller details of the architecture of this period show the vividness of the imagination of the time. For example, the leaf-work which was used in the ornamental portions of sculpture had hitherto copied the antique acanthus leaf; now the flowers and leaves native to France were the models of the sculptors, and a charming variety of ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement

... the courts. An institution which permits evil, creates it in a great measure: in saying that men are things, it necessarily engenders more crimes, more acts of violence, more cowardly deeds, than the imagination of romancers will ever invent. When a class has neither the right to complain, nor to defend itself, nor to testify in law; when it cannot make its voice heard in any manner, we may be excused for not taking in earnest the idyls chanted ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... "Through groves of palm," sung in such a scene and by such a lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built. In Guy Mannering,[31] again, every incident is delightful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan is a model ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... between them, ancient tombs; and by the Bretons being cut off from the rest of France by the nature of the country, and shut in among the uplands, black and misty in November, and blown over by chill Atlantic winds. Under a seeming dull indifference and melancholy the Bretons conceal a lively imagination, and no place has a greater wealth of ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley

... mean? Father Philip's accident has turned your head, I verily believe," replied her sister, as a terrible suspicion of the truth flashed into her imagination. ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday

... alone, while the prince and I remained in the carriage. Some hours passed, and we began to be uneasy; for the life of the Emperor had been so often menaced, that it was very natural to fear some snare or surprise, and imagination takes the reins when beset by such fears. Prince Murat swore and cursed with all his might, sometimes the imprudence of his Majesty, then his gallantry, then the lady and her complaisance. I was not any better satisfied than he, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... answered her with a smile, for it was not worth his while to disabuse her thoughts of any imagination that glorified him to her. "Do you not want to see Rubes' world, little one? To see the gold and the grandeur, and the glitter of it all?—never to toil or get tired?—always to move in a pageant?—always to live like the hawks in the paintings you talk of, with ...
— Bebee • Ouida

... employed by art to produce illusion entirely disappears. If the work is a picture, the figures represented seem to speak and walk; the shade is shadow, the light is day; the flesh lives, eyes move, blood flows in their veins, and stuffs have a changing sheen. Imagination helps the realism of every detail, and only sees the beauties of the work. At that hour illusion reigns despotically; perhaps it wakes at nightfall! Is not illusion a sort of night to the mind, which we people with dreams? Illusion then unfolds its wings, it bears the soul aloft ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac

... upon their knees.—Allgemeine Zeitung, 262. On the 17th of September, the preparation of a new liturgy was announced in a ministerial proclamation, "by which the solemnity of the church service was to be increased, the present one being too little calculated to excite or strike the imagination."] ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... incentive to insure greater improvement—may serve as a situation calling for thinking. The process of apperceiving or of assimilation may involve it. Studying and trying to remember may involve it. Constructive imagination often calls for it. Reasoning, always requires it. In the older psychology reasoning and thinking were often used as synonyms, but more recently it has been accepted by most psychologists that reasoning ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy

... and pictured its delights, and once a crony had even taken him to visit it. After that, to him and his grandchild, the asylum had seemed like a wonderful fairyland where life was one happy holiday. When at their work, they talked of this safe "Harbor" and the little girl's imagination endowed the place with marvelous beauties. In all their dreaming they had still been together, without thought of possible separation, till Colonel Bonnicastle's sentence fell with a shock upon their ears, "They will never ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond

... unfortunate that the professed biographies of Homer are partly forgeries, partly freaks of ingenuity and imagination, in which truth is the requisite most wanting. Before taking a brief review of the Homeric theory in its present conditions, some notice must be taken of the treatise on the Life of Homer which has been ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... beneath the incubus, my temples clasped tight between my burning palms to stay the maddening ring of the hammer in my brain. And suspicion grew into certainty, and with certainty came madness; imagination ran riot: she was a Messalina—a Julia —a Joan of Naples—a veritable Succuba—a thing polluted, degraded, and abominable; and, because of her beauty, I cursed all beautiful things, and because of her womanhood, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... the two last months—all the story which had come to her since her mother's death-kept flitting like a series of pictures before her vivid imagination. She saw Will's face with a tender light in the eyes; she felt his breath on her cheek, and her hand seemed again to be clasped in his. Once more she heard ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade

... preceded them, is successive, the application of them all to the French Revolution is simply preposterous.[12] That event answered not to the symbol either in extent or duration. Nor indeed is there satisfactory evidence in the actual condition of the Christian world, notwithstanding the fond imagination of learned and good men, that the voice of the seventh angel has yet been ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele

... numerous: there were two aunts, the widows of his father's brothers, and a number of old-maid cousins; and he had an uncle in Iowa, a country minister whom he had not seen for years. But he could not cable to any of these for money; nor could he quite conjure his imagination into picturing any of them sending it if he did. And even to cable he would have to pawn his watch, which was an old-fashioned one of silver and might not bring ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington

... them still in walks and drives where in fancy I had placed them before. I would not have to go very far to find types of the children introduced, but the lovers, and the majority of the others, began as shadows in the background of imagination, and took form and substance with time. Dr. Marvin, however, is a reality and a most valued friend, who has assisted me greatly in my work. Any one who has the good-fortune to meet Dr. E. A. Mearns, surgeon in the regular ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... was glorious with those soft, pearly, rainbow hues that adorn the evening and the morning of a low latitude, during the soft weather of the autumnal months. To the eastward, the low line of coast was just discernible by the hillocks of sand, leaving the imagination to portray its solitude and wastes. The sea in all other directions was dark and gloomy, and the entire character of the sunset was that of a grand picture of ocean magnificence and extent, relieved by a sky in which the tints came and went like the well-known ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... trip. Arolla suited us all to a T, and we are all in great force. As for me, I have not known of the existence of my liver, and except for the fact that I found fifteen or sixteen miles with a couple of thousand feet up and down quite enough, I could have deluded myself into the fond imagination that I was ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... children and had been twenty-seven years married, yet afterwards jealous, and so impatient that she became desperate, and would neither eat nor drink in her own house, for fear her husband should poison her. 'Tis a common sign this; for when once the humours are stirred, and the imagination misaffected, it will vary itself in divers forms; and many such absurd symptoms will accompany, even madness itself. Skenkius observat. lib. 4. cap. de Uter. hath an example of a jealous woman that by this means had many fits of the ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... to gather the actual experiences which Miss Rockmetteller wishes reported to her, and to convey these to him in the shape of a careful report, on which it would be possible for him, with the aid of his imagination, ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... vain my poor imagination grapples With these new lines in fancy shades, These purple evening coats with yellow lapels, These vests composed in flowered brocades; Nor can I think that noisy checks Would help me to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various

... rather a hindrance. When he has once arrived at a conclusion, he shuts his eyes and stops his ears to everything else. Osborne, now, is different; while he's a plodding kind of a fellow with very little imagination, he's shrewd enough to accept advantages wherever he finds them." The speaker added another cloud to those already hovering about him. "Miss Cavanaugh was satisfied with what you told her, ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre

... look for delicacy there: in that period you could only have got that from a man who was practically a slave. But now, you see," said he, leading me on a little, "we have learned the trick of handicraft, and have added the utmost refinement of workmanship to the freedom of fancy and imagination." ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris

... situations of force and effect everywhere through the pages, an intensity of action, a certain naturalness of dialogue and 'human nature' in the incidents. But over all is the glamor of the Chambers fancy, the gauzy woof of an artist's imagination which glories in tints, in poesies, in the little whims of the brush and pencil, so that you have just a pleasant reminder of unreality and a glimpse of the author himself here and there to vary the interest."—St. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... impossible to carry on any hunting there. Not a single Polar bear now appeared to be visible in the neighbourhood, although bears' skulls are found at several places on the beach, and this animal appears to play a great part in the imagination of the natives, to judge of the many figures of bears among the bone carvings I purchased from the Chukches. The natives often have a small strip of bear's skin on the seat of their sledges, but I have not seen any whole bear's skin here; perhaps the animal is being ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... to imprint their lessons on the minds of their new subjects, these men became the guides, the priests, the sovereigns, the masters of these infant societies; they formed discourses by which they spoke to the imagination of their willing auditors. POETRY seem best adapted to strike the mind of these rude people, to engrave on their memory those ideas with which they were willing to imbue them: its images, its fictions, its numbers, its rhyme its harmony, all conspired to please their ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dulness in English thought and imagination. All the great literary reputations belonged to the beginning of the century, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, had said their say. The intellectual life of the new generation had not yet found expression. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... not shaved for days, nor washed for years. The stink of them blew off the clean sea towards him. It seemed to his imagination that the water curdled with disgust as the brutes slushed ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant

... of the after-events of his life I retain such mere fragmentary recollections, dissociated from date and locality, as might be most readily seized on by the imagination of a child. At one time, when engaged in one of his Indian voyages, he was stationed during the night, accompanied by but a single comrade, in a small open boat, near one of the minor mouths of the Ganges; and he had just fallen asleep on the beams, when ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... off its load of care; 'Tis only the obscure is terrible; Imagination frames events unknown, In wild, fantastic shapes of hideous ruin, And ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... look silly, if nobody comes!" she had thought every time she woke in the night. But she needn't have worried. There was an argument in that advertisement, "Easier than washing, ironing, scrubbing or sewing," that appealed to many a feminine imagination, and when the fancy, thus awakened, played around the promising phrase "$21 a week—and up," hope presently turned to ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston

... family ought to be understood. But, inasmuch as the Chronicler nevertheless desires to depict the older time and not his own, he by no means adheres closely to contemporary statistics, but gives free play at the same time to his idealising imagination; whence it comes that in spite of the numerous and apparently precise data afforded, the reader still finds himself unable to form any clear picture of the organisation of the clergy,—the ordering of the families and tribes, the distribution ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... we argued earnestly for Browning with a man who said it was fatal to the poetry that it needed an argument, and that he did not want to earn the quickening of his imagination by the sweat of his brow,—he could gather the same thought and beauty in less break-neck places,—all the profit was expended ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... wanted us to see that intelligence might also be a matter of seeing the connection between two things so far apart that most people would think they were always separate. I like that. It made education mean something, because it made it depend on imagination instead of grubbing. And then he told us about the history of our subject—grammar. How it began as poetry, when every word was an original creation; and then became philosophy, as people had to arrange ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley

... reveal Her hidden worlds, unlock her cloud-hung gates, Or snatch the keys of mystery from time, Your souls would madden at the piercing sight Of fortune, wielding high her woe-born arms To crush aspiring genius, seize the wreath Which fond imagination's hand had weav'd, Strip its bright beams, and give ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent

... have read thus far in my story you will have discovered one thing about me, if nothing else. I was impulsive—ridiculously impulsive. My bump of imagination was big, too. Otherwise the idea that my father was roaming about the world instead of being peacefully asleep somewhere at the bottom of the sea off Bolderhead, would never have gained such ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster

... imagination by this false and wicked Indian story, preparations were made for a journey in boats, longer than had yet been attempted. They found the swift current of the Roanoke difficult to ascend, and their small store of provisions was exhausted by the time they had reached where the town ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore

... jumped with joy at this sign of returning appetite, and asked her what she would like and how she would like it. Henrietta thereupon directed her to have prepared a soup of such a complicated character (only the morbid imagination of an invalid could have conceived such a monstrosity), that Clementina felt obliged to descend to the kitchen herself to superintend its concoction herself, for it was certain that any servant would have forgotten half the ingredients before she could ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai

... to serve the Church and the country when he was wanted. When it was written, he sat long over the closed envelope and smoked a couple of pipes. He wondered if men were killing each other, even now, just over the water. He pictured a battle scene, drawing from imagination and what he remembered of field-days at Aldershot. He shuddered a little as he conceived himself crawling through heather to reach a man in the front line who had been hit, while the enemies' guns on the crest opposite were firing as he had seen them ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable

... a very good working knowledge, which, in its details, would have astonished Professor Cairnsley could he have got behind the scenes. Though her knowledge was not based strictly on the text-book, her reputation in the class was good, and, as Patty admitted with a sigh, "It's a great strain on the imagination to keep up a ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster

... of creative intellect and imagination in second century Rome: little noteworthy production in literature after Trajan's death. The greatest energies went into building; especially under Hadrian. The time was mainly static,—though golden. There were huge and opulent cities, and they ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... consumed his own time and that of his ploughmen; and he reserved no leisure for the care of his temporal affairs. His active mind, superior to the low occupations to which he was condemned, preyed upon itself; and he indulged his imagination in visions, illuminations, revelations; the great nourishment of that hypochondriacal temper to which he was ever subject. Urged by his wants and his piety, he had made a party with Hambden, his near kinsman, who was pressed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... harassed by his education, if that brutalization of which we spoke above can be called education, in that exchange of usages and sentiments among different nations, the Filipino, to whom remain only his susceptibility and his poetical imagination, allows himself to be guided by his fancy and his self-love. It is sufficient that the foreigner praise to him the imported merchandise and run down the native product for him to hasten to make the change, without reflecting that everything has its weak side and the most sensible ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal

... exhaustless wealth and the rich taste exhibited in its harmonious manifestation. The Hawley-Crowles home had seemed to her the epitome of material elegance and comfort, far exceeding the most fantastic concepts of her childish imagination, when she had listened enraptured to Padre Jose's compelling stories of the great world beyond Simiti. But the gorgeous web of this social spider made even the Hawley-Crowles mansion suffer ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... analytical study to the writings of such masters of style as Flaubert and Gautier, and he chose his miscellaneous reading with a peculiar care. He wrote again to the same friend: "I never read a book which does not powerfully impress the imagination; but whatever contains novel, curious, potent imagery I always read, no matter what the subject. When the soil of fancy is really well enriched with innumerable fallen leaves, the flowers of language grow spontaneously." ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn

... had a vivid imagination, though it never was cultivated to literary ends. Perhaps, after all, I inherited that idle fancy, those unsatisfied yearnings of my restless heart, from her! Mental peculiarities are said to come ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... schoolfellow and except for the time of a quarrel (the blame of which Horace rather generously took upon himself but in which there were doubtless faults on both sides)[18] life-long friend—is curiously different. Gray was a poet, while Walpole, save for a touch of fantastic imagination, had nothing of poetry in him and could not, as some who are not poets can, even appreciate it. In more than one other intellectual gift he soared above Horace. He was essentially a scholar, while ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury

... garrulousness. Her thoughts were very busy. The first romance of her young life had come, and she still felt on her hands the kisses that had been so warm and sincere, although she knew they were given by one who cherished a hopeless love. After all, it was but her vivid Southern imagination that had been kindled by the swift, strange events of the past twenty-four hours. With the fine sense of the best type of dawning womanhood, she had been deeply moved by Graham's strong nature. She had seen in him a love for another ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... the imagination of a Dante could have equalled the lurid and pyrogriffic grandeur of the scene. Streams of fire rose into the sky, falling in bifurcated crystallations in all directions. Disregarding all personal danger, I opened one eye ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock

... really existed, the incredible edifice of his caprice and of Mr. Alloyd's constructive imagination! It had already reached a height of fifteen feet; and, dozen of yards above that, cranes dominated the sunlit air, swinging loads of bricks in the azure; and scores of workmen crawled about beneath these monsters. And he, ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... translation of an old Greek manuscript, gives no indication of sources. I have sought in special works for the data which the abb must have had as a basis, but I have not been able to find them. I suppose, however, that this description, which is so precise, is not merely a work of the imagination. The author goes so far as to give the dimensions of the grating (30 feet by 8), and, greatly embarrassed to explain how his hero was enabled to traverse it without being burned, is obliged to suppose it to have ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various

... Goneril tried to imagine what a great musician could be like: long hair, of course; her imagination did not get much beyond the hair. He would, of course, be much older now than his portrait. Then she watched Angiolino cutting the corn, and learned how to tie the swathes together. She was occupied in this useful employment ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various

... which brought it into mind. For some time, however, Rachel thought of it a good deal, wondering how it came about that her native name and the strange significance which they appeared to give to it had taken such a hold of the imagination of the Zulus. Ultimately she discovered that the white man, Ishmael, was the chief cause of these things. He had lived so long among savages that he had caught something of their mind and dark superstitions. To him, as to them, it seemed a marvellous thing that she should have acquired the title ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard

... well-known poet, a clergyman, born in Dublin in 1679, has written a few religious verses. The following have a certain touch of imagination and consequent grace, which distinguishes them above the swampy level of ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... devotedness in female love that admits of no rivalry. All the tenderness of the heart, all the powers of the imagination, are enlisted in behalf of the tyrant passion; and where all is given, much is looked for in return. Frances had spent hours of anguish, of torture, on account of Dunwoodie, and he now met her without a smile, and left ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... stress of souls, the welter of cross-purposes which begirt the youthful dreamer, his love for Palma, and his swift death when all the world thrust upon him its joys—here were motives, indeed, for any musician of lofty aim and sympathetic imagination. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... (now recently included in the limits of the colony,) is from the pen of its first discoverer, Mr. Oxley, and other travellers bear witness that it is not overcharged: "A mile and a half brought us into the valley which we had seen on our first descending into the glen: imagination cannot fancy anything more beautifully picturesque than the scene which burst upon us. The breadth of the valley, to the base of the opposite gently-rising hills, was between three and four miles, studded with fine trees, ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... pocket-book, while in vain had he tried to get some sketch or picture that would convey to the little world of his friends and acquaintances some notion of his future bride. They were left to draw on their imagination for some presentiment of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various

... scarcely had I dropt into a sweet sleep. Therefore I dreamed I was feasting at some table luxuriously loaded, where, eating like a glutton, the whole company were astonished to see me, while my imagination was heated by the sensation of famine. Awakened by the pains of hunger, the dishes vanished, and nothing remained but the reality of my distress; the cravings of nature were but inflamed, my tortures prevented sleep, and, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck

... the idol-worship of Fact. Those good friends who are always better acquainted with our faults, failings, and weaknesses than we can pretend to be ourselves, had long since discovered that my nature was superstitious, and my imagination likely to mislead me in the presence of events which encouraged it. Well! I was weak enough to recoil from the purely rational view of all that Eunice had suffered, and heard, and seen, on the fateful night recorded in her Journal. Good and Evil walk the ways of this unintelligible world, ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins

... pictures of the imagination. The realities are at hand. And the influence of cities, in introducing them, must be felt. For "they of the city shall flourish like the grass of the earth." "The name of the city from that day shall be, ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton

... external conditions, or how his action may respond to the impression. One may guess what opinion an augur would form concerning the appearance of a single eagle or raven; but it would be labor lost to attempt to conjecture the manner in which the imagination of the observer would explain a flight of these birds, or what complicated rules augural art might evolve to guide ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various

... and Holofernes; then, irrationally enough, Lucrece and Sextus; Cleopatra and the hostile generals whom she reduced to abject slavery by a surrender of her charms. Next was recounted an extraordinary story, born of the imagination of these ignorant millionaires, which told how the matrons of Rome seduced Hannibal, his lieutenants, and all his mercenaries at Capua. They held up to admiration all those women who from time to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... proportion as we draw near to an object we have long had in view, its interest seems to augment. The uninhabited banks of the Cassiquiare, covered with forests, without memorials of times past, then occupied my imagination, as do now the banks of the Euphrates, or the Oxus, celebrated in the annals of civilized nations. In that interior part of the New Continent one may almost accustom oneself to regard men as not being essential ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... mile to the right, gardens and orchards sunk in a concave, and, as it were, snipped out of the woodland. From this self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke, which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on quiet hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... did not seriously consider it. However, I was not long to remain in uncertainty, for an officer, who was an intimate friend of mine, revealed the secret to me. The enterprise was so grand and so audacious, that it instantly charmed my imagination, and I at once went to Colonel L. A. Harris, of the Second Ohio, and asked, as a favor from him, that if any detail was made for another expedition of the same kind, I should be ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger

... to await the result. Never for a single instant did his eyes turn from the bold swimmer: they followed his every stroke. At one time, he thought he had sunk; at another, the ripple of a wave appeared to his distorted imagination like the fin of a shark. Anxiety for the fate of his companion kept his mind on the stretch until distance rendered the object no longer visible. 'Then, indeed, did he feel that ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly

... have uttered could her great spirit have need to walk the earth again. Was such a thing possible, I wondered? No, it was not possible, yet it was true that her atmosphere seemed to cling about this place and that my imagination, excited by memory and Nombe's suggestions, ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard

... expensive for the small farm, required too much skill to operate, and were much too heavy as compared with the pull they exerted. And anyway, the public was more interested in being carried than in being pulled; the horseless carriage made a greater appeal to the imagination. And so it was that I practically dropped work upon a tractor until the automobile was in production. With the automobile on the farms, the tractor became a necessity. For then the farmers had been introduced ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford

... d'Orleans. Still full of his vexation, he took a glass, and, looking at the company, made an allusion in a toast to the two women, one the captain, the other the lieutenant, who governed France and Spain, and that in so coarse and yet humorous a manner, that it struck at once the imagination of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... worrying him dreadfully. He is not like himself at all. I KNOW something is wrong, and I cannot find out what it is. I want to help him SO much. Oh, please, Roscoe, don't think this is just a foolish girl's imagination, and does not amount to anything. It does. I know it does. You are his best friend. Can't YOU find out what is troubling him and help him, for my sake? I have meant to speak to you about this ever so many times, but I seldom see you alone and I could not speak while he ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... Having seen what the mechanist had already performed, he was willing to fancy that he could do more, yet resolved to inquire further before he suffered hope to afflict him by disappointment. "I am afraid," said he to the artist, "that your imagination prevails over your skill, and that you now tell me rather what you wish than what you know. Every animal has his element assigned him; the birds have the air, and man and beasts the earth." "So," replied the mechanist, "fishes have the water, in which yet beasts can swim by nature and ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson

... finding out what it was for yourself. Miss HOLME puts in her background of mystery with skilful touches and handles her characterisation with a good deal more subtlety than your mere mystery-monger can command. She observes both men and things with affection, writes of them with imagination. Rowly Huddleston, the committee-ridden squire of Thorn, looks like a careful portrait from life, and probably somebody also sat for that faithful soul, Crane, the butler. A book to be commended. Its defects are the defects ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various

... insanity! She must be made on a smaller scale of necessities than herself! How was she able to love the God she said she believed in? God should at least be as beautiful as his creature could imagine him! But Miss Carmichael would say her poor earthly imagination was not to occupy itself with such a high subject! Oh, why would not God tell her something about himself—something direct—straight from himself? Why should she only hear of him ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... earth and seas within the temperate zones and by windes driuen into these stiffe regions, that moysture was no more to bee hoped for that by dissolution it should haue any returne, so that by time the world should be left waterlesse. And therefore how ridiculous this imagination of the seas frysing is, I refer to the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt

... superstition, and so wide-spread is the respect it still obtains in civilized and Christian lands, that it is not worth while to summon witnesses to show that it prevailed universally among the red race also. What imprinted it with redoubled force on their imagination was the common belief that birds were not only divine nuncios, but the visible spirits of their departed friends. The Powhatans held that a certain small wood bird received the souls of their princes at death, and they refrained religiously from doing it harm;[102-2] ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... discipline of party warfare, and were accustomed to stand together in a firm phalanx, acknowledged him as their captain. Pitt, on the other hand, had what Newcastle wanted, an eloquence which stirred the passions and charmed the imagination, a high reputation for purity, and the confidence and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... by me," she said. "You preach the nation to me. Can the nation bring to life those who die for her? Can she even avenge them? But I—I will avenge them!" she cried. The awful images of the catastrophe filled her imagination suddenly, and the graceful creature who held modesty to be the first of women's wiles forgot herself in a moment of madness, and marched ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac

... he looks upon it as a pastime. A superficial reading often gives him knowledge of many of the main facts, and a mistaken idea that he knows the story. It is the task of the teacher to get him to read with careful attention and with imagination keenly alive. When a fair mastery of the facts of the story has been gained, and clear mental images of the scenes portrayed and suggested have been formed, studies of plot, character, interpretation, etc., should follow. These studies, if ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely

... a newspaper paragraph, do not affect the imagination. Five thousand men in the concrete are quite another matter, especially if you suddenly realize that each of them has a wife, probably children, and that the whole are dependent upon the dynasty of which you are a member ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... true countrymen of Henry IV. As to the pretty ladies in gauzy hats, whose swelling and rustling robes graze the horns of the motionless oxen as they pass, you must not look at them; they would carry your imagination back to the Boulevard de Gand, and you would have gone two hundred leagues only to remain in the same place. I am here on purpose to visit the sixteenth century; one makes a journey for the sake of changing, not place, but ideas.... It was eight o'clock in the morning; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various

... story of a young man helping to build this first station. With scientific accuracy and imagination Murray Leinster, one of the world's top science-fiction writers, describes the building and launching of the platform. Here is a fast-paced story of sabotage and murder directed against a project more secret and valuable ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster

... advantage, in a more arduous strain of poetry that it had yet attempted. The perspicuity for which it has always been remarked, and to which it owes its charms in conversation as perhaps also the dificulty with which it is adapted to works of poetical imagination, is strongly exemplified in his translation of Paradise Lost. If he has not always been able to make the french idiom bear him through the aetherial regions in which the daring wing of Milton's muse soars ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire

... they rock them in the cradle hung over the kitchen fire, use words, touch on subjects which we never mention; and that precisely is a noteworthy characteristic. The innocent savage is not found in Aino-land, if indeed he is to be found anywhere. The Aino's imagination is as prurient as that of any Zola, and far more outspoken. Pray, therefore, put the blame on him, if much of the language of the present collection is such as it is not usual to see in print. Aino stories and Aino conversation are the intellectual counterpart of the dirt, the ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain

... by Satyavat. (One should act) as a child full of simplicity and destitute of either merit or sin. As regards all creatures there is in this world neither misery nor happiness. (That which is called misery and that which is called happiness are the results of a distraught imagination.) Even this is the true nature of all living creatures. Of all creatures, their lives are superior who have betaken themselves to renunciation and abstained from acts both meritorious and sinful. I shall now tell thee those acts which are best for a king. By putting ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... visit heralded Winn's marriage. He had not had time to marry before. It would not be true to say that women had played no part in his experiences, but the part they had played was neither exalted nor durable. They figured in his imagination as an inferior type of game, tiresome when captured. His life had been spent mainly in pursuit of larger objects. He had been sent straight from Sandhurst to South Africa, where he had fought with violence and satisfaction for two years, winning the D. S. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome

... of awakening from the hellish nightmare of the Terror, Mr. Verity's facile imagination tended to run to another extreme. With all the seriousness of which he was capable he canvassed the notion of a definite retirement from the world. Public movements, political and social experiments ceased to attract him. His ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... offspring, while it often slumbered, could never be said to become extinct. She liked not the protracted absence of Asa. Too fearless herself to have hesitated an instant on her own account about crossing the dark abyss, into which she now sat looking with longing eyes, her busy imagination, in obedience to this inextinguishable sentiment, began to conjure nameless evils on account of her son. It might be true, as Abiram had hinted, that he had become a captive to some of the tribes who were hunting the buffaloe ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper



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