"Narrator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had something to do with the picture, still the subject lives, and is not a mere bundle of contradictory or even of superficially compatible characteristics. Secondly, Clarendon is at his best an incomparable narrator. Many of his battles, though related with apparent coolness, and without the slightest attempt to be picturesque, may rank as works of art with his portraits, just as the portraits and battle pieces of a great ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... every fact and event is stated,—if they appear to be proved by witnesses,—if they are in accordance with the opinions and authority of men, with law, with custom, and with religion,—if the honesty of the narrator is established, his candour, his memory, the uniform truth of his conversation, and the integrity of his life. Again, a narration is agreeable which contains subjects calculated to excite admiration, expectation, unlooked-for results, ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... Ken smiled sympathetically. The ladies also smiled as an interested audience will. Then the narrator continued: ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... John's knowledge of the rule Philip began the story, and again he was so prolix in it that Joseph, wishing John to decide on the strict matter of it, and not to be lost in details, some of which were true and some of which were false and all confused in Philip's telling, interrupted the narrator, saying that he would give all the money that was strictly his, but his father's he couldn't give nor his partner's. We've many camels, he said, in common, and how are these to be divided? Nor is it right, it seems to me, that my partner should be left ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... down David's cheeks. He had snatched up and was kissing the precious bits of metal the narrator had dropped ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... merit. Lanier showed originality and a true poetic gift, but his talents were little effectual. From the West humorous poetry was produced by Francis Bret Harte (1839-1902), born in Albany, in The Heathen Chinee (1870) and similar verse, but he is better remembered as the artistic narrator of western mining life in his numerous stories and novels. Verse of a similar kind also first brought into literary notice John Hay (1838-1905), in Pike County Ballads (1871), who also wrote in prose; but his reputation was rather won as a statesman in the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... not easy to collect legends from the Bororos, as only few of them were inclined to speak. The same legend I found had many variations, according to the more or less imaginative mind of the narrator. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... a full and minute description of events previous to Christian Vellacott's disappearance, omitting nothing. The relation was somewhat disjointed, somewhat vague in parts, and occasionally incoherent. The narrator repeated himself—hesitated—blurted out some totally irrelevant fact, and finished up with a vague supposition (possessing a solid basis of truth) expressed in doubtful English. It suited Mr. Bodery admirably. In telling all about Vellacott, ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... and told the story. Mr Toogood was actually true to his promise and let the narrator go on with his narrative without interruption. When Mr Crawley came to his own statement that the cheque had been paid to him by Mr Soames, and went on to say that that statement had been false,—"I told him that, ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... surprising; on the contrary, his conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped in human feeling and passion. Above all, his way of telling a story, for its eager liveliness, and the perpetual running commentary of the narrator happily blended with the ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... appeared. He was in complete armour, and attended by two soldiers, one of whom carried his long spear, and the other his cap or helmet, which was adorned with a figure of the moon. 'It is scarcely possible,' says the narrator, 'to conceive anything more ludicrous than the manner in which the governor walked. His eyes were cast down and fixed on the earth, and his hands pressed closely against his sides, whilst he proceeded at so slow a pace, that he scarcely moved one foot beyond the other, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... would try our prowess, Captain Maxwell and this narrator rode to the creek, at a point some distance below the position of the herd, where we tied our horses, then crept along, under cover of the creek bank, till we had gone as near as possible, without being ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... best equipped historian the world has ever seen. Save the highest quality of thought and emotion that is the prerogative of poetic genius, Leopold von Ranke lacked nothing of industry, of learning, of method and of talent to make him the perfect narrator of the past. It was his idea to pursue history for no purpose but its own; to tell "exactly what happened" without regard to the moral, or theological, or political lesson. Thinking the most colorless presentation the best, he seldom allowed ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... to the forge, Boatfield saw petty-constable Pyot in close converse with Master Hymn-of-Praise Busy, butler to Sir Marmaduke. The man was talking with great volubility, and obvious excitement, and Pyot was apparently torn between his scorn for the narrator's garrulousness, and his fear of losing something of what the ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... discover their origin. It is evident that the narratives of the no-compromise party of the right or the left can have but slender value where controverted points are concerned; whence the conclusion that the authority of a narrator may vary from page to page, or even from line ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... been reported, on reliable authority, that the original Mr. Black, whose Christian name was Andrew, was a famous teller of stories and narrator of facts regarding the persecution of the Covenanters, especially of the awful killing-time, when the powers of darkness were let loose on the land to do their worst, and when the blood of Scotland's martyrs ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... event was endued 'with sense and soul' by the narrator. The 'hardships and dangers' thrilled one's young nerves. Their two salient features were ice perils, and the no less imminent one of being captured and shot as a spy. The crossing of the rivers stands out prominently in my recollection. All the ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... in connecting this sort of imagination with that which one witnesses in fanatics of religious faith? With such a faculty Balzac could not be, like Edgar Poe, merely a narrator of nightmares. He was preserved from the fantastic by another gift which seems contradictory to the first. This visionary was in reality a philosopher, that is to say, an experimenter and a manipulator of general ideas. Proof of this may be found in his biography, which shows him to us, during his ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... are either absolute inventions of the author, or facts which took place within his personal observation or that of his friends. The poem of the Thorn, as the reader will soon discover, is not supposed to be spoken in the author's own person: the character of the loquacious narrator will sufficiently shew itself in the course of the story. The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere was professedly written in imitation of the style, as well as of the spirit of the elder poets; but with a few ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... up some book near at hand and began to read until dinner was announced." The same unbounded thirst for knowledge, the same history of various attempts and various failures, the same ambition, not yet fixed in its aim, but showing itself in restless effort, belong to the hero of the story and its narrator. ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... hooks served them instead of beds; how the chapel was in a closet opened only on Sundays. He described the gymnastic feats in the rigging, the practice in gunnery, and many other things which, had they been well described, would have been interesting; but Fred was only a poor narrator. The conclusion the young ladies seemed to reach unanimously after hearing his descriptions, was discouraging. They cried ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... drag their doings before the day; and it is with happy consciousness an Irishman may assert, that there is plenty of subject afforded by Irish character and Irish life honourable to the land, pleasing to the narrator, and sufficiently attractive to the reader, without the unwholesome exaggerations of crime which too often disfigure the fictions which pass under the title of "Irish," alike offensive to truth as to taste—alike injurious both for private and ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... believe that Kamehameha I. fought his first battle here. On this point, I have heard a story, which may have been taken from one of the numerous books which have been written concerning these islands—I do not know where the narrator got it. He said that when Kamehameha (who was at first merely a subordinate chief on the island of Hawaii), landed here, he brought a large army with him, and encamped at Waikiki. The Oahuans marched against him, and so confident were they of success ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... asked Billy about the box, the dying man pointed to the parson, and tried to speak. Though some of the more sensible scoffed at such stories as ridiculous, it made little difference, for they passed from mouth to mouth, increasing in interest and importance according to the imagination of the narrator. ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... "But," continued my clear narrator, "I promised to remedy all that, by running to meet the carriage, which was what I ran for when you saw me, my ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... the Embassy that he was put on Mr. Newell's track. The secretary's father, it appeared, had known the Newells some twenty years earlier. He had had business relations with Mr. Newell, who was then a man of property, with factories or something of the kind, the narrator thought, somewhere in Western New York. There had been at this period, for Mrs. Newell, a phase of large hospitality and showy carriages in Washington and at Narragansett. Then her husband had had reverses, had lost heavily in Wall Street, and ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... change. Luke tells us that Saul was on his way to Damascus, seeking victims for his persecuting zeal, when Jesus suddenly appeared to him and Saul was changed from a persecutor to a believer in Christ (Acts 9:3-7). The account is very brief. For an event which has had such tremendous results, the narrator is very reticent; a light from heaven, a voice speaking, and a person declaring that He is Jesus. Paul gives us two accounts of his conversion and how it took place (Acts 22:6-15; 26:12-18). The men who were with Paul saw a light and heard a voice, but not what was said. It is ...
— Bible Studies in the Life of Paul - Historical and Constructive • Henry T. Sell
... achievements. Or you may take it as a novel of love, and languish with the hero in a misdirected amour, and burn with him in a glorious, futile, and tragic affection. Or you may take it as a novel of England, of the many currents of English life joining in one vast stream on which the barque of the narrator floats. "'This,' it came to me, 'is England. This is what I wanted to give in my book. This!'" And this, the vision which comes to Mr. Wells through a kind of instinct about the life he has experienced and sought to convey—the vague dream that haunts and baffles ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... the entire relation, from which I have here given extracts only, Montgeron's work, Tom. III. pp. 24-26. Montgeron, though he vouches for the narrator as a gentleman worthy of all credit, does not give his name, nor that, of the physician, except as Dr. M——. The occurrence took place ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... I suppose you expect the time-worn trick of the weary novelist, anxious to put his pen down and go to his tea: "Then she seemed swallowed up in a cloud of blackness and knew no more"—till it was convenient to the narrator to begin a fresh chapter. But with me it must be the relentless truth and nothing but the truth, in all its aspects. Vivie was deafened, nearly stunned by the frightful noise of the volley in a confined space. Next, she was ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... thought it right to follow Wade's narrative, which appears to me by far the most authentic, if not the only authentic account of this important transaction. It is imperfect, but its imperfection arises from the narrator's omitting all those circumstances of which he was not an eye-witness, and the greater credit is on that very account due to him for those which he relates. With respect to Monmouth's quitting the field, it is not mentioned by him, nor is it possible to ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... the present palace of Dolma-Batchi he told of Euphrosyne, the daughter of the Empress Irene; and seeing how the sorrowful fortune of the beautiful child engaged Lael's sympathies, he became interested as a narrator, and failed to notice the unusual warmth tempering the air about Tchiragan. Neither did he observe that the northern sky, before so clear and blue, was ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... compelled to admit within myself that such a statement from the lips of any man would be received with incredulity. Indeed, had such a thing been related to me, I should have put the narrator down as either a liar ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... terrible paroxysms and ravings, frequently requiring six men to hold him on his bed. He was ill the same length of time that they falsely represented a few years before in the Toledo hotel. Said the narrator, "Thomas K. Chester's death was the most awful I ever witnessed. He cursed and swore to his last breath, saying he saw his father standing by his bed, with damned spirits waiting to take him away to ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... burlesque memory," who, when all provisions were out, took his fiddle and, calling the men of his fort before the door of his empty larder, played to them a Scottish reel. That was their dinner for the day,—instead of meat they had sound. The narrator adds, "In America they would have lynched the too-jovial Scotchman. In the Northwest the good half-breeds laughed ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... talk; tittle tattle; canard, topic of the day, idea afloat. bulletin, fresh news, stirring news; glad tidings; flash, news just in; on-the-spot coverage; live coverage. old story, old news, stale news, stale story; chestnut*. narrator &c (describe) 594; newsmonger, scandalmonger; talebearer, telltale, gossip, tattler. [study of news reporting] journalism. [methods of conveying news] media, news media, the press, the information industry; newspaper, magazine, tract, journal, gazette, publication ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... determined to make Gaston talk. To deepen a man's love for a thing, get him to talk of it to the eager listener—he passes from the narrator to the advocate unconsciously. Gaston was not to talk of England, but of the North, of Canada, of Mexico, the Lotos Isles. He did so picturesquely, yet simply too, in imperfect but sufficient French. But as he told of one striking incident in the Rockies, he heard Jacques make a quick expression ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that very afternoon. Some of Demetrio's men lay in the quarry, glancing at the sunset that turned the clouds into huge clots of congealed blood and listening to Venancio's amusing stories culled from The Wandering Jew. Some of them, lulled by the narrator's mellifluous voice, began to snore. But Luis Cervantes listened avidly and as soon as Venancio topped off his talk with a storm of anticlerical denunciations he said emphatically: "Wonderful, wonderful! What intelligence! You're a most ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... compelled considerably to abridge this story to suit our limits.—The mystical portion of it, or "the story of the Demon," as the narrator, a Pole, calls it, is thus told to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... chronicles of Strasburg, which only take notice of boils and glandular swellings in the axillae and groins, are opposed by another account, according to which the mortal spitting of blood was met with in Germany; but this again is rendered suspicious, as the narrator postpones the death of those who were thus affected, to the sixth, and (even the) eighth day, whereas, no other author sanctions so long a course of the disease; and even in Strasburg, where a mitigation of the plague may, with most probability, be ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... to his explanations and went with him to his brother who told them how he had bought the animal in good faith from a stranger. Whereat they seized the narrator, bound him, and hanged him to the nearest live-oak tree; then stripped the monte-dealer to the waist, tied him to the same tree, and flogged him until the blood ran down his bare back. After which they departed, satisfied that they ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... The narrator of this story, and the chief actor in the simple drama was George Edmonds. I mention this little event because it shows that the spirit of hostility to tyranny, and the scorn of oppression, cruelty, and persecution, which he manifested ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... the narrator, "was much impressed by the value of another timber tract, although where he got his information concerning it I have been unable to discover. This piece of property, called the Bogue tract, was purchased by Wegg ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... Ciaran's birth away from his ancestral home as the result of a taxation, are specially emphasised because they offer obvious parallels with the Gospel story. The character of Darerca is, however, by no means idealised, as we might have expected it to be, had this been the chief purpose of the narrator. ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... the stile she ran up the steps—and on the top one she stood still, for there—" She made a dramatic pause and reached for another tray of tomatoes. Arnold stopped stirring the pot and stood motionless, his eyes fixed on the narrator, the spatula dripping tomato-juice all along his white trousers. "There on the other side, looking up at her, was a bear—a ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... room. Traps were laid to catch unwary jesters; the door, or the surrounding floor, I forget which, was covered with flour, and wires were stretched across the door; and if I had the proper mind of a ghost-story narrator, I should say that the bangings were as bad as ever, and the flour and the ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... of Middlemas listened to the noble Captain's marvels with different feelings, as their temperaments were saturnine or sanguine. But none could deny that such things had been; and, as the narrator was known to be a bold dashing fellow, possessed of some abilities, and according to the general opinion, not likely to be withheld by any peculiar scruples of conscience, there was no giving any good reason why Hillary should not have been as successful as others in the field, which India, agitated ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... the birthplace of Anaxagoras, a citizen of no mean city in the history of philosophy, who is the narrator of the dialogue, describes himself as meeting Adeimantus and Glaucon in the Agora at Athens. 'Welcome, Cephalus: can we do anything for you in Athens?' 'Why, yes: I came to ask a favour of you. First, tell me your ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... thread—though, as some one says in a like emergency, it be only packthread—on which his tales may be strung—something to fill up the pauses, and prevent the utter solution of continuity between tale and tale—something that gives the narrator a reasonable plea for going on again, and makes the telling another story an indispensable duty upon his part, and the listening to it a corresponding obligation upon ours; and ever since the time when that young lady of unpronounceable and unrememberable name told the One Thousand ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... spot where he captured her. The Bee got away from him in this closet and flew out through the window. Duhamel made straight for the nest. The Mason arrived almost as soon as he did and renewed her work. She only seemed a little wilder, says the narrator, in conclusion. ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... she wish to search. But she never touched the drawer. The key which locked it she placed in an envelope, and put it apart under another lock and key. Though she listened, though she could not but listen, to the old woman's narrative, yet she rebuked the narrator. "There should be no talking about such things," she said. "It had been," she said, "her uncle's intention to make his nephew the owner of Llanfeare, and she believed that he had done so. It was better that there should be no conversation on ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... accounted for by the revival of subconscious memory in sleep. Neither asleep nor awake can a man remember what it is impossible for him to have known. The dream contained no prediction for the results were now fixed; but (granting the good faith of the narrator) the dream did contain information not ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... conclusion of our correspondent leads us to suspect that he may perchance never have been in Poland—perhaps never even in Paris—since this non-sending forth of seven thousand Parisians was better understood by every gamin du faubourg than apparently by the sincere narrator of 'Tardy Truths.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... The narrator of this old story was a tall spare man, with light eyes and brown hair, and the author thought he saw in him a vague resemblance to the demon who had before this tormented him; but the stranger did not show the cloven foot. Suddenly the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... November, as winter was already making itself felt, James decided to withdraw to Dublin; as our narrator says, "the young commanders were in some haste to return to the capital, where the ladies expected them with great impatience; so that King James, being once more persuaded to disband the new levies and raising his ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... citation of instances of neglected compound fractures whose crippled owners became athletes after their bones had been scientifically reset, having previously been rebroken in the largest number of places the narrator thought he could get credence for. Hope told her flattering tale very quickly, for when Dave's uncle and Jerry Alibone reappeared on their way to find the truth at the Hospital, her hearers were ready with encouragement, whether they knew anything ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... from an old Welshman who says he knew Gwilym, and heard the story from his lips. The narrator may ...
— Welsh Fairy-Tales And Other Stories • Edited by P. H. Emerson
... "Look here," said the narrator, "don't get it into your precious noddles that this Territory's the only flat country under the sun. There are other spots upon this green earth where you can see hundreds of miles in ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... encouraging. Hagen joins his invitation to the half-brother's. The listeners place themselves at ease on the ground about the narrator, seated in their midst on a mossy stump. Then Siegfried, with his beautiful, bottomless zest in life, recounts in vivid running sketches the story we know. One after the other the familiar motifs pass in review. From ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... versions of what he has read and heard. Much of what he tells us has been already printed in the numerous tours and guide-books, which, in conjunction with steam-boats and railways, have familiarized most Englishmen with the Rhine and its legends. It acquires a fresh charm, however, from the present narrator's agreeable and pointed style, and from his calling in the aid of his imagination to supply any little deficiencies; rounding and filling up stories that would otherwise be angular and incomplete. He also gives some agreeable caricatures, if caricatures they may be called, of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... is mentioned. Thorfinn and his men saw from their vessel a glittering speck upon the shore at an opening in the woods. They hailed it, whereupon the creature proceeded to perform the quite human act of shooting an arrow, which killed the man at the helm. The narrator calls it a "uniped," or some sort of one-footed goblin,[232] but that is hardly reasonable, for after the shooting it went on to perform the further quite human and eminently Indian-like act of running away.[233] Evidently this discreet ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... Lady Foljambe told the story, with a good deal of angry comment. The Countess was much amused, a fact which did not help to calm the narrator. ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... unexplained point in the action as to how Na.nefer.ka.ptah, with the book upon him, comes up from the water, after he is drowned, into the cabin of the royal boat. The narrator had a difficulty to account for the recovery of the body without the use of the magic book, and so that stage is left unnoticed. The successive stages of embalming and mourning are detailed. The sixteen days in the Good House is probably ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... were then spending the night at our house. He was started by two or three of Komag-Nils' stories, and wanted to show us that where he came from, down at Doenoe near Ranen, in Helgeland, there were as many and as wonderful stories and boats, as with us in Nordland. The narrator was a little, quick-speaking fellow, who sat the whole time rocking backwards and forwards, and fidgetting upon the bench, while he talked. With his sharp nose, and round, reddish little eyes, he resembled a restless ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... narrator sought to illustrate and emphasise was that not only is heredity responsible for the transmission and persistence of certain peculiarities of face, form, and character, but also that in a few isolated cases it has actually been known to ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... attention and regard of his countrymen. The debate, before his place in literature is settled, must rather turn on other points: as whether the genial essayist and egoist or the romantic inventor and narrator was the stronger in him—whether the Montaigne and Pepys elements prevailed in his literary composition or the Scott and Dumas elements—a question indeed which among those who care for him most has always been at issue. Or again, what degree of true inspiring and illuminating power ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Feidlimid,[FN39] the son of Dall, even he who was the narrator of stories to Conor the king, the men of Ulster sat at their ale; and before the men, in order to attend upon them, stood the wife of Feidlimid, and she was great with child. Round about the board went drinking-horns, and portions of food; and the revellers shouted in their drunken mirth. And ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... when he says that A. says that B. says something, it is, after all, merely the anonymous 'he' who is speaking. In giving us his authority for 'Moll Flanders,' he ventures upon the more refined art of throwing a little discredit upon the narrator's veracity. She professes to have abandoned her evil ways, but, as he tells us with a kind of aside, and as it were cautioning us against over-incredulity, 'it seems' (a phrase itself suggesting the impartial looker-on) that in her old age 'she was not so extraordinary a penitent as she was at first; ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies,[322] there is an account of the battle of Lutzen,[323] which deserves to be read. And Simon Ockley's[324] History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual valor with admiration, all the more evident on the part of the narrator, that he seems to think that his place in Christian Oxford[325] requires of him some proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to Plutarch,[326] who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... these are drawn from some Hebrew source. They are saturated with Old Testament phraseology and constructions, and are evidently translated by Luke. It is impossible to say whence they came, but no one is more likely to have been their original narrator than Mary herself. Elisabeth or Zacharias must have communicated the facts in this chapter, for there is no indication that those contained in this passage, at all events, were known to any but ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a spice of revenge about her unwillingness to give her hand to my lord," resumed the narrator, unmindful of the interruption. "This Puritan father said nothing but marriage with her would save Hamerton from the sulphurous flames and so my lady refused to sanctify their relations and rescue her ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... would have said that Densie Densmore had heard less of that strange story than any one else, but her hearing faculties had been sharpened, and not a word was missed by her—not a link lost in the entire narrative, and when the narrator expressed his love for his daughter, she darted upon ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... to this story, cross-examined the narrator upon several points, and then dismissed him to get food and rest. That same afternoon the captain, accompanied, as before, by Lieutenant Hoskins, again visited the place of ambush, and presumably ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... instruction of Edward an account of the demise and funeral of the late Mr. Sergeant Higsley. That official having been promoted, was ambitious of being designated, in the newspapers, "active and intelligent," and gave information against a gang of coiners; "Wot wos the consequence?" continued the narrator. "Somehow or another, that p'leseman was never more heered on. One fine night he went on his beat; he didn't show at the next muster; and it was s'posed he'd bolted. Every inquiry was made, and the 'mysterious disappearance of a p'leseman,' got into the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... glide over the roof with the silent swiftness of a cat "on the rampage;" the same animal, shod with walnut-shells, suggests itself as an apt, though irreverent comparison for the priestly fugitive. To use the narrator's own ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... and silently to Viner's account of all that had happened. He was one of those never-to-be-sufficiently-praised individuals who never interrupt and always understand, and at the close of Viner's story he said exactly what the narrator was thinking. "The real truth of all this, Mr. Viner," he said, "is that this is probably one of the last chapters in the history of the Lonsdale Passage murder. For if you find this woman and the men ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... at the narrator for a moment, then solemnly reached out his hand to Sam, for him to shake over the last astounding statement, which was altogether too much for ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... each of which was invariably told by my lady to every new visitor,—a sort of giving them the freedom of the old family-seat, by describing the kind and nature of the great progenitors who had lived there before the narrator,—I heard the steps approaching my lady's room, where I lay. I think I was in such a state of nervous expectation, that if I could have moved easily, I should have got up and run away. And yet I need not have been, for Miss ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... deeply interested in one of those strange and varied experiences which occasionally occur in real life, and which he had learned through his mission class. The tale was so full of lights and shadows that now it provoked to laughter, and again almost moved the listeners to tears. While the narrator made as little reference to himself as possible, he unconsciously and of necessity revealed how practically and vitally useful he was to the class among whom he was working. Partly to draw him out, and partly to learn more about certain characters in whom she had become interested, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... rock-masses. One of them, it is said, has never been climbed; unless a myth which hangs about it is true. Certain English sailors, probably of Rodney's men—and numbering, according to the pleasure of the narrator, three hundred, thirty, or three—are said to have warped themselves up it by lianes and scrub; but they found the rock-ledges garrisoned by an enemy more terrible than any French. Beneath the bites of the Fer-de- lances, and it may be beneath the blaze of the sun, man after ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... doon, and he lost his bonnet and his matches and yer sevenpence, and baith his legs are broken, and the doctor says he'll dee; and that's a'.' And then, putting down the fourpence on the table, the poor child burst into great sobs. 'So I fed the little man,' said the narrator; 'and I went with him to see Sandy. The two little things were living almost alone; their father and mother were dead. Poor Sandy was lying on a bundle of shavings. He knew me as soon as I came in, and said, 'I got the change, sir, and was coming back, and ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... form of poetry is the epic, the essence of which may be stated as the successive in events and characters. This must be distinguished from narration, in which there must always be a narrator, from whom the objects represented receive a coloring and a manner;—whereas in the epic, as in the so called poems of Homer, the whole is completely objective, and the representation is a pure reflection. The next form into which poetry passed ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... history, difficult at all times, is more difficult now. Recent history trenches alike upon the epic and the dramatic, and the narrator must be half a poet and half a player. It is, therefore, a subject of gratulation that Mr. Tazewell did not undertake a work which, if done at home, would have been badly done, and which, if done at all, must have called into exercise a peculiar class of talents which neither the bar nor the ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... leading character. She furnishes all the brains employed in the story. The narrator praises her "courage" twice, but she had more than courage. Fidelity, initiative, and resourcefulness must also be put among her assets. We can hardly imagine her as acting from Esther's high motive, but she lived up to the best standards of conduct that she knew. Whoever ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... representation of the ideas of sorcery and magic which for centuries were entertained in this part of the world. They have indeed one obvious defect, which it is proper the reader should keep constantly in mind. The mythology and groundwork of the whole is Persian: but the narrator is for the most part a Mahometan. Of consequence the ancient Fire-worshippers, though they contribute the entire materials, and are therefore solely entitled to our gratitude and deference for the abundant supply they have ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... With the narrator of this sad tale of passion and despair, I dropped a tear to their memory, thinking how truly the poet of all ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... interlude, "The Seven Vagabonds." The story is placed not far from Stamford, and the conjurer in it says, "I am taking a trip northward, this warm weather, across the Connecticut first, and then up through Vermont, and may be into Canada before the fall." The narrator himself queries by what right he came among these wanderers, and furnishes himself an answer which suggests that side of his nature most apt to appear in these journeys: "The free mind that preferred ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Pickwick-loving Captain Brown. The Captain—as is well-known—met his death by a railway accident, just after he had been studying the last monthly "green covers" of Dickens. Years later, the assumed narrator of Cranford visits Miss Jenkyns, then faliing into senility. She still vaunts The Rambler; still maunders vaguely of the "strange old book, with the queer name, poor Captain Brown was killed for reading-that book by Mr. Boz, you know—Old Poz; when I was a girl—but ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... And what, after all, do these rumours, when sifted, amount to? They have no origin but this,—a silly old man of eighty-six, quite in his dotage, solemnly avers that he saw this same Zanoni seventy years ago (he himself, the narrator, then a mere boy) at Milan; when this very Zanoni, as you all see, is at least as young as you ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... conversation of their elders, and demand a tale, it matters not what, of giants, or goblins, or witches—nay, even of ghosts. They are soon gratified; and if an old man, as frequently happens, be the narrator, he is fortified and rewarded for the toil by a mug of cider constantly replenished. One such depositary of tradition is described as a blind beggar, a veritable Homer in wooden shoon, with an inexhaustible memory of songs and tales of every kind. He was welcome everywhere, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... charms really tempted the friend to endeavour to supplant George, or whether he considered the latter's attentions to the young Greek to be without definite object, and undertaken in a spirit of indifference, the narrator could not explain; but it was not long before Delancey considered himself as a principal in the transaction. Acme, whose knowledge of the world was slight, and whose previous seclusion from society, had rendered her timidity ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... however, must be mentioned by name. Their itineraries were wholly dedicated to the interests of their co-religionists. The first of the line is Eldad, the narrator of a sort of Hebrew Odyssey. Benjamin of Tudela and Petachya of Ratisbon are deserving of more confidence as veracious chroniclers, and their descriptions, together with Charisi's, complete the Jewish library of travels of those ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... ran, all the people, including the narrator and her baby, when 'ole mas'r' died were 'leveled' on by the Sheriff's man. She did not quite understand the meaning of it all, but it was doubtless a case ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... know the destroyer of thy family, his actions, and his motives. Shall I call him to thy presence, and permit him to confess before thee? Shall I make him the narrator of his ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... form was his device of the dramatic lyric. What interested him in life was men and women, and in them, not their actions, but the motives which governed their actions. To lay bare fully the working of motive in a narrative form with himself as narrator was obviously impossible; the strict dramatic form, though he attained some success in it, does not seem to have attracted him, probably because in it the ultimate stress must be on the thing done rather than the thing thought; there remained, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... much to the inspired disregard of all technique. Den Siste Gloede is a diary of wearisome days, spent for the most part among unattractive, insignificant people at a holiday resort; the only "action" in it is an altogether pitiful love affair, in which the narrator is involved to the slightest possible degree. The writer is throughout despondent; he feels himself out of the race; his day is past. Solitude and quiet, Nature, and his own foolish feelings—these are the "last joys" left ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... story here, it would leave me in the possession and enjoyment of virtues which I cannot conscientiously claim as my own, and would deprive the tale of its best and only amusing point; so as a faithful narrator, I feel in duty bound to tell the other ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... sentences, the ordinary reader would instantly feel such a style to be stilted and unreal. This reader would not analyse it, but would in some dim but sufficiently critical manner be aware that his author was not providing him with a naturally spoken dialogue. To produce the desired effect the narrator must go between the two. He must mount somewhat above the ordinary conversational powers of such persons as are to be represented,—lest he disgust. But he must by no means soar into correct phraseology,—lest he offend. The realistic,—by which we mean that which ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... and metaphor, was fain to wind up his tale with a most lame and impotent conclusion. I now give it to the reader, not from a wish to punish him as I was punished, but because from the prolixity of the narrator he necessarily most minutely described scenes and customs, which, though they had nothing on earth to do with the "Dragon's Mouth," may prove interesting to the reader, as illustrating the peculiarities of the people amongst ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... "Thank God!" added the narrator, "we have now the boat and the assistance of Bachicha, who is as brave as Rafael: with his 'Baltimore clipper,' we shall conduct our affairs on a grander scale than heretofore. Sacre-bleu! we may now cruise under the Columbian flag, and rob ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... his entrain, sincerity, and sympathy with his subject. As a composer he is less satisfactory; it is the first impression or nothing in his art. Apart from his luscious, tropical colour, he is a sober narrator of facts. Ay, but he is a big chap, this amiable little Valencian with a big heart and a hand that reaches out and grabs down clouds, skies, scoops up the sea, and sets running, wriggling, screaming a joyful band of naked boys and girls over the golden ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... district of country. With this power of practical foresight, he was often better able even than some of the generals to foresee and appraise results. This topographical knowledge also gave him that power of wonderful clearness in description which is the first and best quality necessary to the narrator of a series of complex movements. A battle fought in the open, like that at Gettysburg, or one of those which took place during the previous campaigns, on a plain, along the river, and in the Peninsula, is comparatively easy to describe, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... the historic mise-en-scene in which James Morier penned his famous satire. I next turn to the work itself. The idea of criticising, and still more of satirising, a country or a people under the guise of a fictitious narrator is familiar in the literature of many lands. More commonly the device adopted is that of introducing upon the scene the denizen of some other country or clime. Here, as in the case of the immortal Gil Blas of Santillane, with whom Hajji Baba has been not inaptly compared, the infinitely more ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... sake of making clear the logical relation of events; and whenever juggling with chronology tends to obscure instead of clarify that logical relation, it is evidence of an error of judgment on the part of the narrator. Turgenieff is often guilty of this error of judgment. He has a disconcerting habit of bringing a new character into the scene which stands for the moment before the eye of the reader, and then turning ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... had lamented Forbes paid The tribute to his Minstrel's shade; The tale of friendship scarce was told, Ere the narrator's heart was cold— Far may we search before we find A heart so manly and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... she rides in a mortar, which she urges on with a pestle, while she sweeps away the traces of her flight with a broom. She is closely connected with the Snake in different forms; in many stories, indeed, the leading part has been ascribed by one narrator to a Snake and by another to a Baba Yaga. She possesses the usual magic apparatus by which enchantresses work their wonders; the Day and the Night (according to the following story) are among her servants, the entire animal world lies at her disposal. On the whole she is the most prominent ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... Tonnay-Charente for himself, was not all this, truly, more than enough to turn the head of any courtier? Besides, Saint-Aignan was the model of courtiers, past, present, and to come; and, moreover, showed himself such an excellent narrator, and so discerningly appreciative that the king listened to him with an appearance of great interest, particularly when he described the excited manner with which Madame had sought for him to converse about the affair of Mademoiselle de la Valliere. While the king no longer experienced for Madame ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... became auditor rather than narrator. It was Iris who told of his wild fight against wind and waves, Iris who showed them where he fought with the devil-fish, Iris who expatiated on the long days of ceaseless toil, his dauntless courage in the face of every difficulty, the way in which he rescued her from ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... man paused to take breath. His young companion neither looked up nor made a sound. The narrator proceeded: "I took charge of the case for your father. I called upon the celebrated Filipino lawyer, young A——a, but he refused to undertake the defense. 'I would lose the case,' he said, 'my defense would cause new accusations against him, and perhaps bring them upon ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... the hypocritical grandiloquence and affected piety of the narrative, it was easy to see that, save some warping of facts to make for himself a better case, and to extol the courage of the gaolers who had him at their mercy, the narrator had not attempted to better his tale by the invention of perils. The history of the desperate project that had been planned and carried out five years before was related with grim simplicity which (because it at once bears the stamp of truth, and ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... shreds and rags, having the appearance of twisted snakes. When they moved they dragged themselves along the ground by their arms. (From this description and from native carvings, I am inclined to believe that a large cuttle-fish or octopus must have suggested this idea to the original narrator of this tradition.) Little by little, the body was brought into more compact form, and, in a later generation, legs appeared, but it was a long time before they became accustomed to legs and able to use them in moving about. A survival of this awkwardness, so say the ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... her all the particulars which had yet transpired. Her aunt was no very methodical narrator, but with the help of some letters to and from Sir Thomas, and what she already knew herself, and could reasonably combine, she was soon able to understand quite as much as she wished of ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... to lying, relating a story to another, which made him stare, "Did you never hear that before?" said the narrator. "No," says the ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... in all conscience, but they are told in a hearty sort of fashion, which, while relieving them of some of their weirdness, is calculated to impress the reader with an idea of the honesty and bona fides of the narrator. Thus far, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... bet and paid it immediately, and was so smitten with the generous behaviour of Mr. C. that he told him how deeply he regretted that the trifling affair which had happened between them did not permit them to drink together. The narrator of this anecdote was quite proud that England was the birthplace ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... traveller has also a great charm; we seem to participate in his dangers, excitements, and pleasures; we add to our knowledge in his company; and the truth and sincerity which pervade the narrative, make us feel a personal interest in the narrator. It is intended to reprint some of the narratives of our old English Navigators, especially those of Discoveries, which have had most influence on the progress of Geographical Knowledge. It will not be an objection that these eminent men lived at a period ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... first Dauphin,[2317] whilst the people in the room place themselves before the king to prevent him from entering it, the queen falls at his knees, and he says to her, weeping, "Ah, my wife, our dear child is dead, since they do not wish me to see him." And the narrator adds with admiration; "I always seem to see a good farmer and his excellent wife a prey to the deepest despair at the loss of their beloved child." Tears are no longer concealed, as it is a point of honor to be a human being. One becomes human and familiar with one's inferiors. A prince, on a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of which was afterwards lost in unlucky investments. The Rangitata district supplied the setting for his romance of Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872), satirizing the Darwinian theory and conventional religion. Erewhon had a sequel thirty years later (1901) in Erewhon Revisited, in which the narrator of the earlier romance, who had escaped from Erewhon in a balloon, finds himself, on revisiting the country after a considerable interval, the object of a topsy-turvy cult, to which he gave the name of "Sunchildism." In 1873 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... hill?" said my narrator, pointing in the direction of a hill skirting some corn-fields before us; "there, close to that clump of elm-trees, stood Eric Rensel's cottage. Descending that hill, I met Thora, returning homewards, laden with a little basket full of fruit ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... description of each of them must not, in any way, lead you to prejudge my opinion respecting the rank which they hold among the French themselves. In this respect, I shall abstain from every sort of reflection, and, confining myself to the simple character of a faithful narrator, shall leave to your sagacity to decide ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... chronicling what passed before his senses or for explaining what he saw? How does his account of the Indians (p. 18 of this text) compare with modern accounts? Is he apparently a novice, or somewhat skilled in writing prose? Does he seem to you to be a romancer or a narrator of ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... preliminary to a tradition current among the tribes of that region, Walk in the Water, a Roanoke chief of great celebrity, commenced his tale. Undoubtedly most of the Indians present were as well acquainted with the story as the narrator, but that circumstance seemed to abate nothing of the interest with which it was listened to; it certainly did not diminish the attention of the audience. In this respect, these wild foresters deserve to become a pattern for careful imitation. They never interrupt a speaker. However incongruous ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... distinguished guest out, also failed. When the dinner was over, however, and we had reached the cigars, Mark Twain started in telling a story in his most captivating way. His peculiar drawl, his habit in emphasizing the points by shaking his bushy hair, made him a dramatic narrator. He never had greater success. Even the veteran Mark himself was astonished at the uproarious laughter which greeted almost every sentence and was overwhelming when ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... the same question occurred to me, on my journey home in the early morning—the morning of the first of March. As the event proved, but one person in my house knew what really happened at the stables on Francis Raven's birthday. Let Joseph Rigobert take my place as narrator, and tell the story of the end to You—as he told it, in times past, to his lawyer and ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... his own ground, and it was first published by Coleridge in The Friend of September 21, 1809, on the advice of Wordsworth and Southey. "The language," we are told in an introductory note, "was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore presented as the fragment, not of a poem, but of a common Ballad-tale. Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style, in any metrical ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... said Agathemer, "in the autumn, before Andivius died; in fact, before we had any reason to dread that the end of his life was near. Entedius saw it, perhaps he would be a more suitable narrator than I." ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... quarrelled over money matters about eight years before the murder of the fifth baronet. The youngest, Charles, had entangled himself in a disastrous speculation in the city, and bitterly reproached Alan and David (the narrator) because they would not come ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... quip and jest and paradox, aimed now at him, now at the officer who had remained to keep him company in his cups, now at the servants who ministered to him, now at the guards standing at attention, I passed on later to play the part of narrator, and I delighted his foul and prurient mind with the story of Andreuccio da Perugia and another of the more licentious tales of Messer Giovanni Boccacci. I crimson now with shame at the manner in which I set myself to pander to his mood that with my wit I ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... the fruit of his misfortunes. His place at table was laid in all the most distinguished houses in Alencon, and he was bidden to all soirees. His talents as a card-player, a narrator, an amiable man of the highest breeding, were so well known and appreciated that parties would have seemed a failure if the dainty connoisseur was absent. Masters of houses and their wives felt the need of his approving ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... every word she related, for old Sally was veracious. But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly is—marvels, fabulae, what our ancestors called winter's tales—which gathered details from every narrator, and dilated in the act of narration. Still it was not quite for nothing that the house was held to be haunted. Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of truth—an authenticated mystery, for the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... is formed by passing a report from one to another, generation by generation; and it is generally true that such a tradition loses credit at every step, because every narrator has some weakness. However, the value of tradition depends upon the motives people have to report correctly, and on the form of the communication, and on whether monuments survive in connection with the story. Amongst the things best remembered are religious and magic ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... persons living in solitude who are afflicted with an ever present and ever renewed grief, he related to the marquis at length the following narrative, which is here condensed, and relieved of the many digressions made by both the narrator and the listener. ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... runs through even the narrator; his whole being is strained and tense, he must force his mouth ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... he was a species of savage animal," replied the narrator, "but to continue my story. 'Once wounded on the lips,' said the buccaneer, 'a bull falls. At the end of five minutes, blinded by the loss of blood (for my bullets had done their work), the bull fell on his knees and rolled over; my dogs sprang upon him, seized him by the ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... she made sure of the result. From one subject to another she moved by insidious transitions, fearing the least silence, fearing almost to give him time for an answer lest it should slip into a hint of separation. Like so many people of her class, she was a brave narrator; her place was on the hearth-rug and she made it a rostrum, mimeing her stories as she told them, fitting them with vital detail, spinning them out with endless "quo' he's" and "quo' she's," her voice sinking into a whisper over the supernatural or the horrific; until she would suddenly spring up ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was sealed," stated the narrator. "But the wise men of the desert sent men to tell the Te-hua people of the magic of the woman. And the years and the work of her son made good the ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... was described by a Charleston bookseller, who saw him in his store in 1796, carelessly turning over books. "At length," continues this narrator, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... the Isle of Avalon to be cured of his wounds. Geoffrey's work apparently gave birth to a multitude of fictions, which came to be considered as quasi-historical traditions. From these, exaggerated by each succeeding age, and recast by each narrator, sprung the famous metrical romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, first in French and afterward in English, from which modern notions of Arthur are derived. In these his habitual residence is at Caerlon, on the Usk, in Wales, where, with his beautiful wife, Guinevere, he lives in splendid ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... drum fellow; a dull tedious narrator, a bore; also a set of gentlemen, who (Bailey says) used to meet near the Charter House, or at the King's Head in St. John's-street, who had more of pleasantry, and less of mystery, ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... much of, but had never seen, (for she was the self-same sister that had been locked in the great old fashioned sleigh-box, when she was taken away, never to behold her mother's face again this side the spirit-land, and Michael, the narrator, was the brother who had shared her fate,) Isabella thought, 'D-h! here she was; we met; and was I not, at the time, struck with the peculiar feeling of her hand-the bony hardness so just like mine? and yet I could not know she was my sister; and now ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... The narrator says: "The men are straight and well built, having long black hair, and are of a dark brown complexion. They live by hunting and fishing. They use bows and arrows and are excellent marksmen. The women, whose features ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... profoundly. The story of that adventure in the Pontine Marshses had an interest for him which was greater than any that might be created by the magnificent prowess and indomitable pluck that had been exhibited on that occasion by the modest narrator. Beneath the careless and offhand recital of Obed Lord Chetwynde was able to perceive the full extent of the danger to which he had been exposed, and from which his own cool courage had saved him. An ordinary man, under ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... spirit, I seized the tree nearest me in my mouth, and bit it so hard that I broke out the tooth," and here the narrator exhibited his teeth, one of the front ones being gone. "You see the tooth is missing. A week later I went to the Ames Meeting House and found the tooth ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... his sturdy frame half in shadow, had slouched far down into himself. Only the regard of his keen eyes fixed upon Slade's face, unwaveringly and a bit anxiously, showed that he was thinking of the narrator as well as of the narrative. The others had fallen completely under the spell of the tale. They sat, as children in a theatre, absorbed, forgetful of the world around them, wrapped in a more vivid element. At the close, they ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... series of biographic sketches of American naval officers, and the novel "Jack Tier; or The Florida Reef" (1846-1848). Though hardly one of Cooper's greatest works, "Autobiography" remains significant because of: (1) its unusual narrator—an embroidered pocket-handkerchief—that is surely the first of its kind; (2) its critique of economic exploitation in France and of the crass commercial climate of ante-bellum America; and, (3) its constant exploration of American social, moral, and cultural issues. ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... up a flash which threw into relief the narrator's gnarled red face under its grey-black stubble. Pressed into the hollow of the dark leather armchair, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the eyes; then the fire sank and in the shaded lamp-light ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... my governess was allowed to box my ears. But yet I do myself and your unfortunate enchanted palace some injustice. Here is the last—O positively!" And she told him the story from behind her fan, with many glances, many cunning strokes of the narrator's art. The others had drawn away, for it was understood that Madame von Rosen was in favour with the Prince. None the less, however, did the Countess lower her voice at times to within a semitone of whispering; and the pair leaned ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... come to observe it, Bat's recital contained nothing that might not have been posted in eminent respectability on a church warden's door. Like fresh fruit passed through a mouldy cellar, the facts came from the medium of the narrator with the unclean contagion of cellar mould. The next narrator would not pass on the facts. He would pass ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... necessary words were clearly dropped by accident.) An editor might have corrected "Wickliffe's 'Epigoniad'" to "Wilkie's 'Epigoniad'," but is unlikely to have added "Tuckerman's 'Sicily'" to the list of books read by the narrator. Griswold was not above forgery (in Poe's letters) when it suited his purpose, but would have too little to gain by such ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... however, was too keenly interested in the incident itself to take any note of the narrator's confusion. Baldly though it was told, there was the square, strong tower with its door six feet from the ground, its machicoulis, its narrow portholes over against him, to give life and vividness to the story. Here that brave deed had been done and daily repeated. Shere ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... window and getting to the safe without interruption, they leaped right over the counter and scared Heywood at the very start. As to the rest of the affair inside the bank I take the account of a Northfield narrator: ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... years afterwards that the narrator, now a man of letters in Paris, writes to his old friend, with tidings of Justin ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... they call it," Monsieur Gravier explained in a superior tone, "a word which describes the swing which women contrive to give a certain part of their dress that shall be nameless.—'The waiting-woman'—it is the surgeon-major who is speaking," the narrator went on—"'led me along the gravel walks of a large garden, till at a certain spot she stopped. From the louder sound of our footsteps, I concluded that we were close to the house. "Now silence!" said she in a whisper, "and mind what you are about. Do not overlook any of my signals; ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... in the county paper, I had the story, in all its eloquent detail, from the lips of the principal actor. I cannot hope to catch the varying emphasis and peculiar coloring of feminine delineation, for my narrator was a woman; but I'll try to give at least ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... regiments than to the history of the army." The historian has, in this case, the evident right to sum up the whole. He cannot do more than seize the principal outlines of the struggle, and it is not given to any one narrator, however conscientious he may be, to fix, absolutely, the form of that horrible cloud which is ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... first words referring to this event, the two young men listened with unmistakable interest. It had taken place on the same road which they had just followed, and the narrator, the wine merchant of Bordeaux, had been one of the principal actors in the scene on the highroad. Those who seemed the most curious to hear the details were the travellers in the diligence which had just ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... endeavor was to enlist his own nation in the cause. He summoned a meeting of the chiefs and people of the Onondaga towns. The summons, proceeding from a chief of his rank and reputation, attracted a large concourse. "They came together," said the narrator, "along the creeks, from all parts, to the general council-fire." [Footnote: The narrator here referred to was the Onondaga chief, Philip Jones, known in the council as Hanesehen (in Canienga, Enneserarenh), who, in October, 1875, with two other chiefs of high rank, and the interpreter, ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... Etrurians furnished him with an opportunity to increase his glory. His victories over them obtained for him the honours of a second triumph, and restored peace to his kingdom. Now, Emily, I again resign the office of narrator to you. ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... to leave my position as narrator, and speak from my individual standpoint, I would say Brook Farm and what it stood for was to world-benighted travellers, seeking for sustenance, like a city set on a hill. It was a small, glimmering light of social truth, shining amid universal darkness. It was a dim foregleam of the great ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... to the events themselves. It is a mere strumming of chords of the harp, with a vague line, lacking rhythm, as of musical prose. For rhythm is the type of event, of happenings, of the adventure itself. So the formless phrase is the introduction, the narrator, Maerchen in an ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... artist, and by that of fortune and of education to a worldly man and a traveller. The abstract speculations of the metaphysician would not have sufficed for him, nor would the continuous and simple creation of the narrator who narrates to amuse himself, nor would the ardor of the semi-animal of the man-of-pleasure who abandons himself to the frenzy of vice. He invented for himself, partly from instinct, partly from method, a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet |
