"Metaphor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... laughed a little at Louisa's mixed metaphor and the laughter cleared away the last trace of the tears. As they washed and dried the mountains of dishes, Louisa explained that what was really troubling her, ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... been and still is Rhetoric, with the modern form it has assumed, as style. The rhetorical categories are still mentioned in treatises and often referred to, as having definite existence among the parts of speech. Side by side with such phrases goes that of the double form, or metaphor, which implies that there are two ways of saying the same thing, the one simple, the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... The metaphor is of an anthem or madrigal, say in four parts. We will suppose the Hostess of the 'Garter' is taking the Cantus, a tapster the Altus, mine Host the Tenor, and Nym the Bassus. The three former are all hard at work on their respective 'parts,' one in the kitchen, another ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... your pardon," said the Professor, urging up Laura Matilda (for so he called the nervous mare, who fretted herself into a fever in the stony path), "I was quite able to get the woman out of that position without the aid of a metaphor. It is a large and Greek idea, that of standing in two mighty States, superior to the law, looking east and looking west, ready to transfer her agile body to either State on the approach of messengers of the court; and I'll be hanged if I didn't think that her ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in the ancients; who, living under a popular government, wrote with the same freedom as they acted." [111] This diminutive stature of mankind, if we pursue the metaphor, was daily sinking below the old standard, and the Roman world was indeed peopled by a race of pygmies; when the fierce giants of the north broke in, and mended the puny breed. They restored a manly spirit of freedom; and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... is all I find for metaphor; All else were contrast,—save that contrast's wall Is down, and all opposed things flow together Into a vast monotony, where night And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life, Are synonyms. What now—what now to me Are all the jabbering birds and ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... are like certain English women in the hunting field. You are inclined to rush your fences," said the Marchesa with a deprecatory gesture. "And just look at the people gathered here in this room. Wouldn't they—to continue the horsey metaphor—be rather an ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... reverence in the painter: his figures, where the subject gives him scope, are noble almost beyond imagination, his attitudes the most strictly appropriated to the sensations that inspire them, and his colouring, to borrow a metaphor from the sister art to express an excellence for which the other has yet no word of its own, is the greatest that we ever did or ever must expect to see. With all the sweetness and delicacy of his imagery, there is a glow ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... attacking "the Refuse of the Town" centers in the stanza beginning on p. 24 but can be found elsewhere as well. Literary "Refuse," he realized, could not safely be ignored, for he at least came close to understanding that it was "the metaphor by which bigger deteriorations," social and moral, "are revealed" (Williams, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... yield to the obsession of military metaphor. It is not what the enemy thinks or what Mr. Wells or I think that matters—it is what the men of the future ought to think, as being consonant with their own nature and with the nature of things. Ideas, like organisms, must abide the struggle for existence, and if the Invisible ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... he was especially happy, and it was a great privilege to share his table-talk and hospitality, for he had a great fund of kindly humor and his speech was bright with homely metaphor and apt allusions. Not only was he a great preacher, he was a leader, an inspirer, ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... mind was rigid and of a close fibre: it was a mind (to repeat the metaphor) out of which a strong graying-tool could be forged. Its blade would not be blunted: it could deal with its material. Of this character, which I take to be the first essential in his achievement, the few essays before us preserve ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... that Frank should be disappointed. He was always brought up for it, as everybody knows; and to disappoint him, who is so good and so nice, for a fat young man, buttered all over like—like—a pudding-basin," cried poor Miss Dora, severely adhering to the unity of her desperate metaphor. "I don't know what Julia Trench can be thinking of; I—I ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... return to the original savage condition. In the light of history, there is always progress or improvement, but in individual cases there is often the reverse, and so far as the individual is concerned evil is no imaginary metaphor, but as real and absolute as what we call good. The Bulgarian massacres of 1877 were a historical necessity, and we console ourselves in thinking of them by the fact that they may have assisted the Bulgarians in obtaining their independence; but this was no consolation to the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... violent reaction from the sentimentality of her mother and Jane she had become suspicious of any language that sounded "flowery" to her sensitive ears. With her clear-sighted judgment, she knew perfectly well that by no stretch of mind or metaphor could she be supposed to resemble a star—that she was not shining, not remote, not even "ideal" in Arthur's delicate sense of the word. She had known the horrors of poverty, of that bitter genteel poverty ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... metaphor-cloyed thing ... much like the bulk of our free verse of to-day ... but it was superior to all ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... we might render [Greek: phraxai], dam, in order to keep up the metaphor of the ship. Cf. Hom. Od. V. 346, [Greek: phraxe de min rhipessi diamperes oisyinesi]. The closing the ports of a vessel to keep out the water will best convey ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... land, have been even more prolific; but their progeny were ill-formed at their birth, and could never walk alone; whereas the mental offspring of our illustrious countryman came healthy and vigorous into the world, and promise long to continue. To vary the metaphor—the tree of some other men's fancy bears fruit at the rate of a pint of apples to a peck of crabs; whereas the tree of the great magician bears the sweetest fruit—large and red-cheeked—fair to look upon, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... Bill, speaking figuratively, but Christine instinctively shrank nearer Dennis. In talking with men, Bill used the off-hand vernacular of his calling, but when addressing ladies, he evidently thought that a certain style of metaphor bordering on sentiment was the proper thing. But Christine said, "As a friend of Mr. Fleet's you shall join our party at once"; and she led them to the further end of the room, where at a table sat Dr. Arten, Professor and Mrs. Leonard, Ernst, and the little Bruders, who at the prospect of more eating ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... power of coalescing. But among the four Powers there was far more of disunion than union. In fact, England was the sole link between these wrangling confederates, and that, too, solely by means of what Carlyle called the cash nexus. Grenville, using a more homely metaphor, averred that the German princes turned towards England as an inexhaustible milch-cow. The animal in this case could dictate her terms; and thus the relations of the three Powers resembled those ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... from the bren: Examine the matter thoroughly; a metaphor taken from the sifting of meal, to divide the fine flour from ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... to have said, what I would have said if I had realised at the moment that I was talking to you, is this. We are living the kind of life comparable to that of the people whose cottages are built round the edge of the crater of an active volcano, liable to erupt at any moment; or, to change the metaphor, our position bears a certain resemblance to that of the careless workman who smokes a pipe on the top of a barrel of blasting powder, and if we're not extremely careful we'll find ourselves scattered about in little bits, like the boy who ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... that investigation belonging neither to pastoral nor to literary history properly speaking. By far the cleverest as well as the most pleasing scene in the play is that introducing a game of bowls,[296] during which Lisander courts Violetta in long-drawn metaphor. Part at least of this brilliant double-edged word-play must be quoted, even though the verse-capping may at times pass the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... impress Jimmie. As he walked up-town the only part of the interview he carried with him was that there must be no scandal. Not on his account. If Jeanne wished it, he assured himself, in spite of the lawyer, he was willing, in the metaphor of that gentleman, to "roll in the dirt and play dead." "Play dead!" The words struck him full in the face. Were he dead and out of the way, Jeanne, without a touch of scandal, could marry the man she loved. Jimmie halted in his tracks. He believed ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it to some six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Webster, himself a son of a seafaring State, sought to awaken his countrymen to the peril into which the nation was drifting through sectional dissensions and avowed antagonism to the national authority, he chose as the opening metaphor of his reply to Hayne the description of a ship, drifting rudderless and helpless on the trackless ocean, exposed to perils both known and unknown. The orator knew his audience. To all New England the picture had the vivacity of life. The metaphors of the sea were on every tongue. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... form; a constant term amongst pressmen. Over the reporters' table in the old 'Daily Telegraph' office (Melbourne) there was a big placard with the words-"Boil it down." The phrase is in use in England. 'O.E.D.' quotes 'Saturday Review,' 1880. The metaphor is from the numerous boiling-down establishments for rendering fat sheep into tallow. ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... forces of the world. In the long run, genius and wit side with the right cause. And the man fighting against wrong to-day is assisted, in a greater degree than perhaps he is himself aware, by the sarcasm of this writer, the metaphor of that, the song of the other, although the writers themselves professed indifference, or were even counted as belonging to ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... are such a powerful engine of knowledge, it is a sign of great intelligence in a writer if his similes are unusual and, at the same time, to the point. Aristotle also observes that by far the most important thing to a writer is to have this power of metaphor; for it is a gift which cannot be acquired, and it is ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... by provincial laws or by the statutes of the Golden Fleece, had left Madrid to embark for Carthagena, at the very moment when Egmont was reading the royal letter. "The Spanish honey," to use once more old Landgrave Philip's homely metaphor, had done its work, and the unfortunate victim ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... PEEL, in the celebrated medicinal metaphor with which he lately favoured his constituents at Tamworth, concludes by stating, "that he really believes he does more than any political physician ever did by referring to the prescriptions which he offered ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... is most significant that the metaphor of this soliloquy reappears in Hamlet's adjuration to his mother (III. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the characters of their masters and mistresses; nay, sometimes, which is still more absurd, introduced with more wit than the poet has to bestow upon their principals.—Mere flints and steels to strike fire with—or, to vary the metaphor, to serve for whetstones to wit, which, otherwise, could not be made apparent; or, for engines to be made use of like the machinery of the antient poets, (or the still more unnatural soliloquy,) to help on a sorry plot, or to bring about a necessary eclaircissement, to save the poet ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... once, when, having been prevailed upon to abstain altogether from wine and spirits, he resented the vow thus forced upon him by imbibing an extraordinary quantity of the "spurious" liquid. When he says, "The waters have gone over me," he speaks in metaphor, not historically. He was never vanquished by water, and seldom by wine. His energy, or mental power, was indeed subject to fluctuation; no excessive merriment, perhaps, but much depression. "My waking life," he writes, "has much of the confusion, the trouble, and obscure perplexity of an ill dream. ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... that, Dull is opposed to sharp: and a thing is said to be sharp because it can pierce; so that a thing is called dull through being obtuse and unable to pierce. Now a bodily sense, by a kind of metaphor, is said to pierce the medium, in so far as it perceives its object from a distance or is able by penetration as it were to perceive the smallest details or the inmost parts of a thing. Hence in corporeal things ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the professional politicians are still made to "fill the stage." That metaphor is false, because upon a stage the audience knows that it is all play-acting, ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... germ-plasm serves as a foundation from which the germ-cells of the new organism are produced. There is, therefore, continuity of the germ- plasm from one generation to another. One might represent the germ-plasm by the metaphor of a long creeping root-stock from which plants arise at intervals, these latter representing the individuals ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... most understanding human being. The only way to read these "Letters" is to dip into them here and there, as the only way to make a good salad is to pour the vinegar on drop by drop. To use an oriental metaphor, the oil of appreciation is stimulated by the acid of wit, the salt of wisdom, and the pepper of humour. Frankly, since I discovered William James as a human being I have begun to read him for the same reason that I ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... up his college as a "ladder" by which, "with one side of it virtue and the other knowledge," men might, while they "are strangers and pilgrims in this unhappy and dying world," "mount more easily to heaven." Changing his metaphor he goes on, "We have founded and raised up in the University of Oxford a hive wherein scholars, like intelligent bees, may, night and day, build up wax to the glory of God, and gather honeyed sweets ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... Wells as Michelangelo's Moses from Michelangelo. Paradoxically enough, he has put on "individuation" that his worshippers may escape from it. Mr. Wells's book teems with expressions—I have given many examples of them—which are wholly inapplicable to any metaphor, however galvanized into a semblance of life by ecstatic contemplation in the devotional mind. For example, when we are told that it is doubtful whether "God knows all, or much more than we do, about the ultimate Being," the mere assertion ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... slow degrees such machinery has been provided, and how the want of it has restricted the sphere of alienation. It is a great mistake to assume that it is a mere matter of common sense that the buyer steps into the shoes of the seller, according to our significant metaphor. Suppose that sales and other civil transfers had kept the form of warlike capture which it seems that they had in the infancy of Roman law, /1/ and which was at least [355] partially retained in one instance, the acquisition of wives, ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... The metaphor had seemed to him a most ingenious and satisfactory vehicle for his purpose, and it had broken down under him amid evidences of confusion which he could not account for. All at once his sense of physical ascendancy had melted away—disappeared. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... and a furious blast—a weighty argument, and a gentle stream—without being at all aware that we are speaking in the language of poetry, and transferring qualities from one extremity of the sphere of being to another. In these cases, accordingly, the metaphor, by ceasing to be felt, in reality ceases to exist, and the analogy being no longer intimated, of course can produce no effect. But whenever it is intimated, it does produce an effect; and that effect ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... The metaphor was not exactly happy, for at that instant the unlucky man received full in his face a broadside of gravel thrown by the hoofs of a horse which had been frightened by the flourishing stick, and which had responded to the menace by ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... over the things that might have been if the good Osiris had come up to the scratch—I will still be content, because your friendship, Ruth, is better than another woman's love. So you see, I have taken my gruel and come up to time smiling—if you will pardon the pugilistic metaphor—and I promise you loyally to do your bidding and never again to ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... This marine metaphor, as we afterward learned, meant only that she would sail some time in the course of the summer; but we, in our trustful inexperience, supposed that the brig must be all ready to cast off her moorings, and the announcement threw us into all the excitement and confusion ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... being entangled with it. But it was Scott's soldiers that I was talking of, and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical, no posing, no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero abominates), but just the short bluff word and the simple manly ways, with every expression and metaphor drawn from within his natural range of thought. What a pity it is that he, with his keen appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little of those soldiers who were his own contemporaries—the finest, perhaps, that the world has ever seen! It is ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sensitive to impressions. It was to that quick receptivity that the success of "The Great Fortinbras" had been chiefly due. She had a gift of rapid comprehension. It was not that she argued, or deducted, or inferred. But she felt. To take a metaphor from the work of the man she loved, she was a natural receiver. So now, although no word was spoken, she was aware that Mme. Dauvray was greatly excited—greatly disturbed; and she dreaded the reason of that excitement ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... have used a slang phrase, unless it had become well established by long usage. 'Pluck', in the sense of causing to fail, is not unfrequently found in English eighteenth century literature, without any relation to a university; the metaphor from 'plucking' a bird is an obvious one, and may be compared to the German ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... I'm conservative, doctor, but I'm glad you're consistent. She did send another valentine. I am afraid she strained this figure of speech about the boat. But when everything in the world depends on one metaphor, it will not do to be fastidious. Jennie drew again the little boat with misspelt name. And this time she added five words: 'The ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... it that thing which in its own bosom receives forms and ideas; by which metaphor he denotes matter, being (as it were) a nurse or receptacle of beings. Aristotle, that it is the ultimate superficies of the circumambient body, contiguous to that which ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... in this musical introduction. The poem is like an improvisation, and was indeed composed much as a musician improvises, with swift grasp of the subtle suggestions of musical tones. It is a dream, an elaborate and somewhat tangled metaphor, full of hidden meaning for the accordant mind, and the poet appropriately gives it a setting of music, the most symbolic of all the arts. It is an allegory, like any one of the adventures in the Fairie Queen, and from the very beginning the reader must be alive to the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... conclude concerning its true character, inasmuch as one, as it were, completes in accordance with their original tendency the lines of increasing distinctness in the different examples, and thus—to continue the geometric metaphor—one obtains in their prolongations a point of intersection in which can be recognized the goal of the process toward which the dream strives, a goal, however, that is not found in the dream itself ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... vibrations are of two distinct kinds; so also when we have three or more bands we are to figure as many distinct sets of springs, each capable of vibrating in its own particular time and at a different rate from the others. If we seize this idea definitely, we shall have no difficulty in dropping the metaphor of springs, and substituting for it mentally the forces by which the atoms act upon each other. Having thus far cleared our way, let us make ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... understood in a popular sense all those strong terms of self-condemnation which he employed in a theological sense. They have, therefore, represented him as an abandoned wretch, reclaimed by means almost miraculous, or, to use their favourite metaphor, "as a brand plucked from the burning." Mr. Ivimey calls him the depraved Bunyan and the wicked tinker of Elstow. Surely Mr. Ivimey ought to have been too familiar with the bitter accusations which the most pious people are in the habit of bringing against themselves, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... poem on the South Sea mania. That which was written in 1721, and is called "South Sea," is a wonder of wit and wisdom. It shows the hollowness of the scheme in some new, odd, and striking light in every metaphor and every verse. "A guinea," Swift reminds his readers, "will not pass at market for a farthing more, shown through a multiplying glass, than what ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... threescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade-away again into air and Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Greeley fairly in the field, the country entered upon a remarkable canvass. At the beginning of the picturesque and emotional "log cabin canvass of 1840," Mr. Van Buren, with his keen insight into popular movements, had said, in somewhat mixed metaphor, that it would be "either a farce or a tornado." The present canvass gave promise on different grounds of similar alternatives. General Grant had been tried, and with him the country knew what to expect. Mr. Greeley had not been tried, and though ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... used throughout the play, as to whether they are drawn from nature or from other sources; for example, the first speech of the Duke bristles with metaphor. Note that he speaks of music as the food of love, and bids the musicians play on that the appetite may have a surfeit, images drawn from physical nature; then that the music came o'er his ear ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... was beyond her to express it. All things of nature had voices and parables for her, because her fancy was vivid, and her mind was still too dark, and too profoundly ignorant, for her to be able to shape her thoughts into metaphor or deduction. The bird had spoken to her; by his silence as by his song; but what he had uttered she could not well utter again. Save indeed that song was not gladness, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... (at least for the last three years of our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words [3]. Lute, harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... many times did Ernest Hyde and I Argue about the freedom of the will. My favorite metaphor was Prickett's cow Roped out to grass, and free you know as far As the length of the rope. One day while arguing so, watching the cow Pull at the rope to get beyond the circle Which she had eaten bare, Out came the stake, and tossing up her head, She ran for us. "What's that, ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... god that hath no earthly metaphor, A blinding word that hath no earthly rhyme, Love! we can only call and no name more; As the great lonely thunder rolls sublime, As the great sun doth solitary climb, And we have but themselves to know them by, Just so Love stands a ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... descendants of the ancient Britons in the character of a prophet or something more. The poems which he produced procured for him the title of "Bardic King;" they display much that is vigorous and original, but are disfigured by mysticism and extravagant metaphor; one of the most spirited of them is the following, which the Author calls ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... sphere; but I have a strong fancy that in some future eccentric planet, the comet of happier systems than any with which astronomy is yet acquainted, you and I, among the harum scarum sons of imagination and whim, with a hearty shake of a hand, a metaphor and a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... morals, which should neither shelter the sinner under the cloak of speculative faith or of peculiarity of opinion, nor leave him loose to the waves of unbelief and schism. Something there was of an antiquated turn of argument and metaphor, but it only served to give zest and peculiarity to the style of elocution. The sermon was not read: a scrap of paper containing the heads of the discourse was occasionally referred to, and the enunciation, which at first seemed imperfect and ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Greek statues that refined effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history. The rules laid down for historical composition are those relating to the aesthetic value of digressions, the legality of employing more than one metaphor in the same sentence, and the like; and historians are ranked not by their power of estimating evidence but by the goodness of the ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... hardly any of the superficial good qualities of modern versifiers.... He has not the current melancholy or resignation or unwillingness to live; nor the kind of feeling for nature which runs to minute description and decorative metaphor. He cannot be usefully compared with any living writers;... full of personality and with such power to express it, that from the first to the last lines of most of his poems he holds us steadily in his own pure grave, passionate world.... The beauty of it (In Praise of Ysolt) is the beauty of passion, ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... absurd metaphor was no protection against her. She remembered all Cousin Jane's implications, all the bald revelations of ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... affords but rarely to our longings. And this is what, thanks to this strange process of Empathy, a few inches of painted canvas, will sometimes allow us to realise completely and uninterruptedly. And it is no poetical metaphor or metaphysical figment, but mere psychological fact, to say that if the interlacing circles and pentacles of a Byzantine floor-pattern absorb us in satisfied contemplation, this is because the modes of being which we are obliged to invest them with are such as we vainly seek, ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... This ridiculous story can only be understood as an eastern metaphor, expressive of the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... that are not repeated. They are but phantoms, after all. They come at their own choice, when they do come; and they stay but the measure of a breath or two. You cannot summon them!' Leonard fell into the current of the metaphor and answered: ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... travelled upon it. Beyond this the capital of the kingdom, the eye of the monarch was arrested by another bright brass funnel, which was the chimney of the galley-fire, and indicated the exact position of the abode of the crew, or—to continue our metaphor—the populace, who, however, required no such indicator to tell of their existence or locality, for the chorus of a "nigger" melody burst from them, ever and anon, through every opening in the decks, with jovial violence, as they sat, busily engaged on various pieces of work ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... other dogs, he is a jealous lover. A crow had alighted and examined the blood-stains, and now, if he will look a little farther along, upon a flat rock he will find the flesh he was looking for. Our hound's nose was so blunted now, speaking without metaphor, that he would not look at another trail, but hurried home ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... Sanderson's masts still stood, and might have wondered at themselves. "I haven't the heart to tap them," Captain Wicks used to observe, as he squinted up their height or patted their rotundity; and "as rotten as our foremast" was an accepted metaphor in the ship's company. The sequel rather suggests it may have been sounder than was thought; but no one knew for certain, just as no one except the captain appreciated the dangers of the cruise. The captain, indeed, saw with clear eyes and spoke his mind aloud; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is dark And silent as the moon, &c The same metaphor will recur, Canto V. v. 29. Into a place I came Where ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... little rouge and burnt cork, and haggard hair, gives him a truly awful aspect, remarked that the soil of the South was clotted with blood by fiends in human shape, (sensation in the diplomatic gallery.) The metaphor might be meaningless; but it struck him it was strong. These fiends were doubly protected by midnight and the mask. In his own State the Ku-Klux ranged together with the fierce whang-doodle. His ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 3, April 16, 1870 • Various
... examinatoribus." Unquestionably, in his case, the examiners must have had the rare virtue of being very easily satisfied. In fact, Mr Savile's discharge of his educational engagements was rather a sort of "whitewashing" than a payment in full. His passing was what is technically called a "shave," a metaphor alluding to that intellectual density which finds it difficult to squeeze through the narrow portal which admits to the privileges of a Bachelor of Arts. As Mr S. himself, being a sporting man, described it, it was "a very close run indeed;" not that he considered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... superior to the rival prose fashions. Euphues is a model of form beside the tedious prolixity of the Arcadia, or the chaotic effusions of Nash. The weariness, which the modern reader feels for the romance of Lyly, is due rather to the excessive quantity of its metaphor, which was the fault of the age, than to its ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... "Without further metaphor, I will entreat your Grace to call him a person in whom I am specially interested," ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Dr. Johnson, (whom I take to be almost as good authority as the gentle apostle of intolerance, Dr. Duigenan,) that he who could entertain serious apprehensions of danger to the church in these times, would have "cried fire in the deluge." This is more than a metaphor; for a remnant of these antediluvians appear actually to have come down to us, with fire in their mouths and water in their brains, to disturb and perplex mankind with their whimsical outcries. And as it is an infallible symptom of that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the people of Dry Bottom he had announced in a quiet, unostentatious paragraph that while he had not come to Dry Bottom for a free fight, he would permit no one to tread on his toes. His readers' comprehension of the metaphor was complete—as was evidenced by the warm hand-clasps which he received from citizens who were not in sympathy with the Dunlavey regime. It surprised him to find how many such there were in town. He was convinced that all this element needed was a leader ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... trouble yourself to make out the sentence in parenthesis, unless you like, but do not think it is mere metaphor. It states a fact which I could not have stated so shortly, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the Mishna, no one may ride on the king's horse, nor sit upon his throne, nor use his sceptre. The school of the rabbins, however, allowed these things in time of danger. On this Abishai vaults on David's horse, and (with an Oriental metaphor) the land of the Philistines leaped to him instantly! Arrived at Ishbi's house, he beholds his mother Orpa spinning. Perceiving the Israelite, she snatched up her spinning-wheel and threw it at him, to kill him; but not hitting him, she ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Buonaparte) by dismembering Mr. B.'s kingdom, and erecting part of it into a principality for field-marshal Fletcher! I hope you govern my little empire and its sad load of national debt with a wary hand. To drop my metaphor, I ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... bosom of her mother, among the standing crops, on the fruitful plough-land, or she should lie beneath the elm that weds the vine, on the very lap of mother earth, among the springing herbage, the trailing vine-shoots and the budding trees. I may add that the metaphor in the line so well ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... third it may likewise be objected that it is drawn from mythology, though such as may be more easily assimilated to real life. Idalia's 'velvet-green' has something of cant. An epithet or metaphor drawn from Nature ennobles Art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from Art degrades Nature. Gray is too fond of words arbitrarily compounded. 'Many-twinkling' was formerly censured as not analogical; we may say 'many-spotted,' but scarcely ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... I saw in my dream that that man did when he found these Christians enforcing, as a necessary article of practice, as well as of faith, a baseless and bombastic metaphor, borrowed from that very Neo-Platonism out of which he had just fled for his life? He cursed the day he was born, and the hour in which his father was told, "Thou hast gotten a man-child," and said, "Philosophers, Jews, and Christians, farewell ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... March, at close of the lecture on the fourth presented their teacher with an elegant album costing fifty dollars, [20] and containing beautiful hand-painted flowers on each page, with their autographs. The presentation was made in a brief address by Mr. D.A. Easton, who in appro- priate language and metaphor expressed his fellow-students' thanks to ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... languages, are necessarily the images of sensations. Men have never been able to express anything but what they felt. Thus everything has become metaphor; everywhere the soul is enlightened, the heart burns, the mind wanders. Among all peoples the infinite has been the negation of the finite; immensity the negation of measure. It is evident that our five senses have produced all languages, ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... to comfort her and straining metaphor to the utmost, said that if the finger of Providence had not made her oversleep herself she would undoubtedly ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at 'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your climb from ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... a man's down never hit 'im. 'Tisn't necessary. Give him a hand up. That's a metaphor I recommend to you in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Unchanging, He acts not nor thinks as men do. But through the illimitable resources of His perfect character He has dealt with them as if He were possessed of the faculties not merely of an infinite, but of a perfect material, being. And what in the language of metaphor He has taught, or what He has presented before the bodily organs and minds of all, they are called to receive as bearing the character of truth. When His people, in vowing or swearing to Him, take hold on Him, He covenants with them. Receiving their various ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... mystery. And this is the preparation which will prove, with God's grace, the surest preventive of, or antidote against, the freezing poison, the lethargising hemlock, of the doctrine of the Sacramentaries, according to whom the Eucharist is a mere practical metaphor, in which things are employed instead of articulated sounds for the exclusive purpose of recalling to our minds the historical fact of our Lord's crucifixion; in short—(the profaneness is with them, not with me)—just the same as when Protestants drink a glass of wine to the glorious memory ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... tender-hearted, self-restrained, gentle, sensitive, beauty-loving. He loved beauty as much as any man who ever lived—beautiful conduct, beautiful life—and then his gift of expression! There's a marvellous thing. It's pure poetry, most of the Apologia: look at the way he flashes into metaphor, at his exquisite pictures of persons, at his irony, his courtesy, his humour, his pathos. He and Ruskin knew exactly how to confide in the world, how to humiliate themselves gracefully in public, how to laugh at themselves, how to be gay—it's all so well-bred, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in native doric from the wagon at a camp meeting, has taken them "doon the pit," or "in bye." We have watched the faces of sea-going men gleam with a new interest as the preacher drew a simile, or caught a metaphor from the mighty deep. Only, in using such illustrations as these, let the user be quite certain that he is accurate. One mistake about the farm, the mine, the sea, and all is over! With accuracy as a quality constantly present, those illustrations are most effective whose material is ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... world," replied the Russian, "and their piety cannot give them brains. These literal folk are the sort who imagine that the Temple expanded miraculously, because the Talmud says howsoever great a multitude flocked to worship therein, there was always room for them. Do you not see what a fine metaphor that is! Even so the Third Temple will be of the Spirit, not of Fire, as these literal materialists translate the prophecy. As the prophet Joel says, 'I will pour out my Spirit. Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,' And this Spirit ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... here. No Allies are going to tickle our skins. The storm which roots—Dost know what a metaphor is, comrade? I brim with ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... this language is a bold metaphor, ingenious or horrible. A man's breeches are his kicks or trucks (montante, a word that need not be explained). In this language you do not sleep, you snooze, or doze (pioncer—and note how vigorously expressive the word is of the sleep of the hunted, weary, ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... gift, endowment or faculty; some peculiar ability, power, or accomplishment, natural or acquired. (A metaphor borrowed from the parable in Matt. ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... sin was self-ennobled. Did Julius deflower Rome? Then, by that consummation, he caused her to fulfill the functions of her nature; he compelled her to exchange the imperfect and inchoate condition of a mere fmina for the perfections of a mulier. And, metaphor apart, we maintain that Rome lost no liberties by the mighty Julius. That which in tendency, and by the spirit of her institutions—that which, by her very corruptions and abuses co-operating with her laws, Rome promised and involved in the germ—even that, and nothing less or different, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... and labors of leading evolutionists of the past and present. Especially serviceable is the account of Mr. Herbert Spencer and his share in rediscovering evolution, and illustrating its relations to the whole field of human knowledge. His forcible style and wealth of metaphor make all that Mr. Clodd writes arrestive and interesting."—London ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... more than climbed to a position where it could peer over the low yellow ridge of Fire Island and see what the Adventure Club was up to, the two cruisers were chug-chugging out of the harbour with all flags flying. First went the Adventurer, as flag-ship of the fleet, to use Neil's metaphor, and, a little way behind came the Follow Me, her black hull and battleship-grey deck reminding the occupants of the other boat of one of the "puffing pigs" of yesterday. The bay was almost as smooth as the proverbial mill-pond this morning, and the slanting shafts of sunlight cast strange and ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Dante can not approximate. He is unusual, which is a merit; for thus is mind kept on the alert, like a sentinel fearing surprise. Of this an essay might be filled with illustrations. He does not try to use figures, but can not keep from using them. As stars flash into light, so he flashes into metaphor, metonymy, trope, personification, or simile. Because he sees everything, is he fertile in suggestion, and his comparisons are numerous as his thoughts. See how his figures multiply as you have seen foam-caps multiply on waves when the wind rises on ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... were gracefully alluded to by General Belch, was proud to say that he came—or, rather, he might say—yes, he would say, hailed from the hills of Ethan Allen; and, in closing, treated the company to the tale of Ticonderoga. The glittering mouth of the Father of Waters was a beautiful metaphor which brought Colonol le Fay, of Louisiana, to his feet; and the Colonel said that really he did not know what to say. "Say that the Mississippi has more water in its mouth than ever you had!" roared Major Scuppernong, with great hilarity. The company laughed, ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... plays, this legal knowledge and learning had therefore a special character which places it on a wholly different footing from the rest of the multifarious knowledge which is exhibited in page after page of the plays. At every turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile, or illustration, his mind ever turned first to the law. He seems almost to have thought in legal phrases, the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen in description or illustration. That he should have descanted in lawyer language when he had a forensic subject ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall he found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody." Zion is a metaphor signifying the church of God. It is, therefore, the church which the Lord will comfort and whose wilderness will be made an Eden. But what is the church of God? This is a very important question; one which all people should fully ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... again felt his arm and was satisfied that it WAS longer—"but we must do our dooty, even with difficulty to ourselves, and, perhaps, to others. Our young friend, John Bunyan, stands on a giddy height—on slippery places, and," continued Mr. Staples, with a lofty disregard to consecutive metaphor, "his feet are taking fast hold of destruction." Here the child drew a breath of relief, possibly at the prospect of being on firm ground of any kind at last; but Sister Medliker, to whom the Staples style of exordium had only ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... quite possible that some of the chief civil conquests of the last decade might have been lost, had not the First Consul, to use his own expressive phrase, "thrown in some blocks of granite." We may intensify his metaphor and assert that out of the shifting shingle of French life he constructed a concrete breakwater, in which his own will acted as the binding cement, defying the storms of revolutionary or royalist passion which had swept the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... breath long represt is hot, and bursts out so violently, that it resembles fire and smoke. The horse suppresses not his breath by any means so long, neither is he so fierce and animated; yet the most correct of poets ventures to use the same metaphor concerning him: ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... sentient being, the more I think on the subject, the less I can see proof of design. Asa Gray and some others look at each variation, or at least at each beneficial variation (which A. Gray would compare with the rain drops (Dr. Gray's rain-drop metaphor occurs in the Essay 'Darwin and his Reviewers' ('Darwiniana,' page 157): "The whole animate life of a country depends absolutely upon the vegetation, the vegetation upon the rain. The moisture is furnished by the ocean, is raised by the sun's heat from the ocean's ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the smoking room. The warrior just back from the front had enquired after George Vanderpoop, and we, who knew that George's gentle spirit had, to use a metaphor after his own heart, long since been withdrawn from circulation, were feeling uncomfortable and wondering how to ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... 156.] Nevertheless, in about a week she again yields to intense conjuring, and the ever-tightening pressure of events;—King George, except it be for counselling, is become stock-still, with Maillebois's sword at his throat; and is, without metaphor, sinking towards absolute neutrality: 'Cannot help you, Madam, any farther; must not try it, or I perish, my Hanover and I!'—So that Maria Theresa again mends her offers: 'Give him all Lower Silesia, and he to join with me!' and Robinson post-haste despatches ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... sang and fell, no addition being made, no new element appears. The vowel, indeed, is changed, but nothing is added. Verbs, then, of the first sort, may be said to form their praeterites out of themselves; whilst verbs of the second sort require something from without. To speak in a metaphor, words like sang and fell are comparatively independent. Be this as it may, the German grammarians call the tenses formed by a change of vowel the strong tenses, the strong verbs, the strong conjugation, or the strong order; and those formed by the addition of ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... by way of metaphor, so that Christ's Passion is understood by the chalice by way of comparison, because, like a cup, it inebriates, according to Lam. 3:15: "He hath filled me with bitterness, he hath inebriated me with wormwood": ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... rather than literal, our language becomes figurative, and usually takes the form of a simile or metaphor. Similes and metaphors are of great value in rendering thought clear. They make language forceful and effective, and they may add much to the beauty ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the handles of a bellows are separated, in order to fill the bellows with air; and, in like manner, it involves that expenditure of energy which we call exertion, or work, or labour. It is, therefore, no mere metaphor to say that man is destined to a life of toil: the work of respiration which began with his first breath ends only with his last; nor does one born in the purple get off with a lighter task than the child who first sees ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... circumstance much as grimly gigantic Windsor Castle dominates the puny town beneath its walls. The mere tying of the matrimonial knot had not troubled him. He was heart whole and fancy free then—or, not to strain the metaphor, he could have boasted those attributes a little earlier in the evening—and he recked nothing of the really serious legal disabilities incurred by the adventure. But, like every other young man, his thoughts ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... Scripture are called Strangers and Sojourners upon Earth, and Life a Pilgrimage. Several Heathen, as well as Christian Authors, under the same kind of Metaphor, have represented the World as an Inn, which was only designed to furnish us with Accommodations in this our Passage. It is therefore very absurd to think of setting up our Rest before we come to our Journeys End, and not rather to take care ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... edition I had substituted 'cable' instead of 'camel'. The alteration would not be worth noticing were it not for the circumstance which occasioned it. 'Facilius elephas per foramen acus', is among the Hebrew adages collected by Drusius; the same metaphor is found in two other Jewish proverbs, and this appears to determine the signification of [Greek ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... satisfaction to me to tell the old man that we can get along without any of his ill-gotten gains. He made the bulk of his fortune during the war, you know. The old sea-serpent," continued Mr. Slocum, with hopeless confusion of metaphor, "had a hand in fitting out more than one blockade-runner. They used to talk of a ship that got away from Charleston with a cargo of cotton that netted the share-holders upwards of two hundred thousand dollars. He denies it now, but everybody ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... is what metaphor is in speech. It is the representation to the eye of an object which suggests ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Mr. Hornblower's heavy features indicated that he had grasped Persis' metaphor. He broke out eagerly. "Now, that's just what I was saying to my wife. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... should I overtake but my landlady in a dress of gorgeous severity, and dragging a prize in her wake: no less than Rowley, with the cockade in his hat, and a smart pair of tops to his boots! When I said he was in the lady's wake I spoke but in metaphor. As a matter of fact he was squiring her, with the utmost dignity, on his arm; and I followed them up the stairs, smiling ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as to declare that the only ideal left her was duty. In a way, she grew sadder as she grew older. By intellect she was a positivist who has given up any definite hope of personal immortality—save that which by a metaphor is applied to one's influence upon the life of the world here upon earth. And in her own career, by her unconventional union with Lewes, she made a questionable choice of action, though from the highest motives; a choice which I believe rasped her sensitive soul because of the way it was ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Canadian "Soo" by the Great Lakes, in some years, reaching a total five times as large as the traffic expected through Panama. One can not contemplate this constant interchange of traffic without recalling the metaphor of the warp and the woof, of the shuttle weaving a fabric of international commerce that ignores dead reciprocity pacts and an invisible boundary. Yet England does three-fourths of the carrying trade for the United States across the Atlantic. Spite of high tariff on one side of the ocean and ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... his shaggy head. "You mix a hirsute metaphor, Charlemagne, but my li'l friends tell me that that's the sort of chatter that the idiot voters will lap up like a ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... parties, and be, of course, wedded for better or for worse, according to the reasonable practice of Scotland, to its dogmata, or opinions, and bound, as it were, by the tie matrimonial, or, to speak without metaphor, ex jure sanguinis, to maintain them ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Don't misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you. It is merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring our rate of movement by those with whom we have long been in the habit of comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary, we can get our reckoning ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... leaves. There's Jack Bludyer, goes to work like a butcher, and mangles a subject. Mr. Warrington finishes a man, and lays his cuts neat and regular, straight down the back, and drawing blood every line;" at which dreadful metaphor, Mrs. Shandon said, "Law, Charles, how can you talk so! I always thought Mr. Warrington very high, but a kind gentleman; and I'm sure he was most kind to the children." Upon which Shandon said, "Yes; he's kind to the children; but he's savage to the men; and to be sure, my dear, you don't understand ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... escaped from your bosom, Angelique?" asked the Intendant, who had, however, a shrewd guess of the meaning of her metaphor. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... day that young person, whom I had treated as a common "masher," heaped a whole shovelful of hot, hot coals upon my guilty head by writing me a letter less carefully dotted and crossed, somewhat more confused in metaphor than before, but beginning with: "I am afraid you are cruel. I think you must have betrayed me to your mates, for I do not remember that they did such things before last night with ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... representation of the clear stream; upon this is sketched the image of Siegfried, in the notes of his proper motif, to which is added a bar of the heroism-of-the-Waelsungen motif, indicating his resemblance to the father before him. At his mention of the toad, his metaphor for Mime, we hear the hammer of the Nibelung; and at his mention of the gleaming fish, the swimming phrase that accompanies the watery evolutions of the Rhine-maidens. The ingeniousness of all this ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... had already recovered his breath, and was about to rush once again into Rodin's arms, the latter stepped back hastily, and held out his arm to keep him off, saying, in allusion to the illogical metaphor employed by Father Caboccini, "First of all, father, one does not embrace a light—and then I am not a light—I am a humble and obscure laborer ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... metaphor, while he was searching for the origins of the deities a few centuries before the Christian era began, I was finding their more or less larval forms flourishing more than twenty centuries before the commencement of his story. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... recent roguery of this kind. They say that while all hands were below deck mending sails, splicing ropes, and every one at his own business, and the captain in his cabin attending to his log-book and chart, a rogue of a pilot has run them into an enemy's port. But metaphor apart, there is much dissatisfaction with Mr. Jay and his treaty. For my part, I consider myself now but as a passenger, leaving the world and its government to those who are likely to live longer ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... In a well-worn metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; but the comparison may be more just as well as more novel, if for its former term we take ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... Ihres refers to Geschlechter. To make it refer to Goetter (and adopting the variant reading sie [i.e., Goetter] instead of sich) makes an impossible metaphor, since the picture of a chain with its links cannot describe the eternal and changeless life of the gods, but only human life, generation following generation as link on link in a chain. Compare 31, where Goethe has used Wellen with the ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... we learn still more of God's tender care. "As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings: so the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him." This metaphor beautifully expresses the care and the tenderness of God toward his children. The eagle is noted for her great attachment to her young. Her care is extraordinary. When the little eaglets have attained age and strength to leave the nest and learn to ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... farther metaphor, I am afraid this new production, in which your generosity seems willing to give me some concern, will stand much in need of apology, since you think proper to begin your defence before the case is on trial.-The story is hastily huddled up, I will ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... in a cloudless sky no one has failed to remark this brilliant point of the southern hemisphere. Michel Ardan used every metaphor that his imagination could supply to designate it by. To him this Tycho was a focus of light, a center of irradiation, a crater vomiting rays. It was the tire of a brilliant wheel, an asteria enclosing the disc with its silver tentacles, an enormous eye ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... as might have been expected from the circumstances of the nation, it appears in point of fact on the whole face of the Scriptures, that as the institutes of the commonwealth were symbolical, the language of the people was figurative. They were at home in metaphor. It was their vernacular. The sudden and bold adoption of physical forms in order to convey spiritual conceptions, did not surprise—did not puzzle them. "Ye are the salt of the earth," "Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together," ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Halifax, describe the wreck of a carriage which had been dashed to pieces. He said there was not "a smell of it left." Poor fellow, he must have landed at Chesencook, and removed one of those oloriferous heaps, as Sorrow called them, and borrowed the metaphor from it, that there was not "a smell of it left." On the beach between the "flakes" and the water, were smaller heaps of the garbage of the cod-fish and mackarel, on which the grey and white gulls fought, screamed, and gorged themselves, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... every time we could because each of us wanted to pump the other for whatever straws we could to find which way the wind blew from the heart of May Martha Mangum—rather a mixed metaphor; Goodloe Banks would never have been guilty of that. That is the ...
— Options • O. Henry
... which invites the eye to gaze longer and longer into its infinite depths.[46-2] Its color brings thoughts of serenity, peace, sunshine, and warmth. Even the rudest hunting tribes felt these sentiments, and as a metaphor in their speeches, and as a paint expressive of friendly design, blue was ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... They became "land poor," and, in order to meet the instalments of purchase and the high interest on their mortgages, they invented a system of farming unprecedented in its wastefulness. The farm was treated as a mine, or, to use Mr. James J. Hill's metaphor, as a bank where the depositors are always taking out more than they put in. A corn crop, year after year, without rotation or fertilisers, satisfied the new conception of husbandry—the easiest and least costly extraction of the wealth in the soil. Land, labour, capital, and ability I had been ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... come round one in England, "He is drawing it down." The fundamental idea is, of course, that the draughtsman drags the object which he is drawing away from its position, and "transfers" it, as we say by the same metaphor, to his paper, as St. Cecilia "drew an angel down" in ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... swift stiletto, and Barrett, with his brutal bludgeon—to use a metaphor of "terror"—had each delivered an attack; and in 1818, if we may judge by Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, there is a change of fashion in fiction. How far this change is due to the satirists it is impossible to determine. Mr. Flosky, "who has seen too many ghosts himself to believe in their ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... picturesque metaphor is of course a striking feature of American conversation. Many of these expressions have taken firm root in England, such as "to have no use for" a man, or "to take no stock in" a theory. But fresh inventions ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... a stud-horse," and "Put the kybosh on 'em," and many more that have escaped my memory. But the Boy Orator's peroration I am glad to remember, for his fervid convictions lifted him into the domain of metaphor and cadence; and though to be sure I made due allowance for enthusiasm, his picture of Arizona remained vivid with me, and I should have voted to make the Territory a State that ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... Paragot, on our return journey in the close, ill-lighted, wooden-seated third-class compartment, "we have had a glorious day. One of those sun-kissed, snow-capped peaks that rise here and there in the monotonous range of life. It fills the soul with poetry and makes one talk in metaphor. In such moments as these we are all metaphors, my son. We are illuminated expressions of the divine standing for the commonplace things of yesterday and tomorrow. We have accomplished what millions and millions are striving and struggling and failing to do at this very hour. We have achieved ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... made her push Mr. Rosedale into his OUBLIETTE without a trial. He had left behind only the ripple of amusement which his speedy despatch had caused among her friends; and though later (to shift the metaphor) he reappeared lower down the stream, it was only in fleeting glimpses, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... type, in figure, in symbol, in analogue, in parable, in hyperbole and metaphor, in exalted song, in noblest poetry and in rarest rhetoric. It is set before us in dramatic and dynamic statement, in high prophetic forecast, in simple narrative, close linked logic, expanded doctrine, divine exhortation and ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... our dream. In reality, of course, Shakespeare never pierced to Rome nor to Egypt; his elaborations of his data are drawn from his own feelings and circumstances, not from those of Cleopatra. This transporting oneself into the heart of a subject is a loose metaphor: the best one can do is to transplant the subject into one's own heart and draw from oneself impulses as profound as possible with which to vivify tradition and make it over in one's own image. Yet I fear that to speak ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Florentine, of the Micceri, a far better family than his Cellini." The scoundrel who reported this poisonous gossip spoke it with such good effect that I felt a fever in the instant swoop upon me; and when I say fever, I mean fever, and no mere metaphor. The insane passion which took possession of me might have been my death, had I not resolved to give it vent as the occasion offered. I ordered the Ferrarese workman, Chioccia, to come with me, and made a servant follow with my horse. When we reached the house where ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... could hardly have employed a more effective metaphor in which to embody the idea of mental swerving. The several monologues all going over the same ground, are artistically justified in their exhibiting, each of them, a quite distinct form of this swerving. For the ultimate purpose of the poet, it needed to be strongly ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... of our problem we should clearly distinguish between the various forms of imagination. It reveals itself not merely in art and literature, in fantastic conception, in personification and metaphor, but in every important department of human life. It is the tap-root of progress, as Mr. Lowell well points out. It pictures an ideal life in advance of the actual, which ideal becomes the object of effort. The forms of imagination may, therefore, be classified according to the sphere ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... beasts scorns to redden his fangs, or flesh his claws, in the quivering body of his own offspring. Your metaphor is ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson |
