"Personification" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have," Sheldon said quickly. "You were telling me a lie of that order only the other day. You remember when you were going up the lantern-halyards hand over hand? Your face was the personification of duplicity." ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... or artificial things "creatures of God" is the personification of all sorts of things, animate and inanimate; thus, a rat is "an old man," a dipper is "a boy." Not infrequently the object or idea thus personified is given a title of respect; thus, "Corporal Black" is the night. Akin to personification is bold metaphor and association. ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... speaking she had become possessed with a sorrowful passion—fervent, not violent. Holding her little hands tightly clasped and looking at Mrs. Meyrick with beseeching, she seemed to Deronda a personification of that spirit which impelled men after a long inheritance of professed Catholicism to leave wealth and high place and risk their lives in flight, that they might join their own people and ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... under government, high or low, he would not have been suffered to hold it a single hour, unless he could show that he had strictly complied with the party statutes, and had put a well-marked party collar round his own neck. Look, Sir, to the case of the late venerable Major Melville. He was a personification of the spirit of 1776, one of the earliest to venture in the cause of liberty. He was of the Tea Party; one of the very first to expose himself to British power. And his whole life was consonant with this, its beginning. Always ardent in the cause of liberty, always a zealous friend ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... inexpressibly sad, to see the grand and good man—the image of himself, yet not himself, with bowed head and bent form, the very personification of humility—wandering forth on that lonely island of ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... there is any sight in all the Great Tahquamenon Swamp much funnier than a porky in a hurry—a porky who has really made up his mind that he is in danger and must hustle for dear life. He is the very personification of haste and a desire to go somewhere quick, and he picks his feet up and puts them down again as fast as ever he can; and yet, no matter how hard he works, his legs are so short and his body so fat that he can't begin to travel as fast ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... white swan with her long arched neck, "winning her easy way" through the waters, is beautiful; so is that of the nightingale singing upon her lone bush by moon-light. Poetic descriptions of real objects, are well suited to children; apostrophe and personification they understand; but all allegoric poetry is difficult to manage for them, because they mistake the poetic attributes for reality, and they acquire false and confused ideas. With regret children close Mrs. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... her child. The harness and trappings were magnificently decorated with beautiful designs in mother-of-pearl and gold, and the men, when astride their horses and garbed in their long flowing white burnouses, looked the very personification of dignity. The Chief never handles a rifle, it would be beneath his position to do so. He is the Head, and lives up to it ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... I am!" he exclaimed, resuming his walk; "this is the result of the horrible profession I once gloried in following! Suspect Noel, my boy, my sole heir, the personification of virtue and honour! Noel, whom ten years of constant intercourse have taught me to esteem and admire to such a degree that I would speak for him as I would for myself! Men of his class must indeed be moved by terrible passions to cause them to shed blood; and I ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... baseness, by falling in love with nature beneath him. By the creation of matter God has out of pity preserved the world, which was corrupted by the fall, from the descent into hell, and at the same time has given man occasion for moral endeavor. The appearance of Christ, the personification of the moral law, is the beginning of reconciliation, which man appropriates through the sacrament. Nature participates in the redemption, as in ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... lurked within the liquid depths of those clear, calm, steadfast eyes, or was hidden behind that smooth and placid brow, then I thought must the very angels be false! If falsehood could shroud itself behind a mask of such surpassing loveliness, such an aspect and personification of all that is pure, and innocent, and faithful, and true, "where," I asked myself, "oh! where is truth to be found?" That my mother had, all unwittingly, and in some inexplicable manner aroused my father's suspicions, I could not doubt; but, after all, the matter was ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... prosperity had been the very personification of hardness and insolence, was transformed into a grovelling, cringing supplicant, ready to lie face downward in the dust beneath the feet of that brother whose patronage, or charity, ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Prometheus Bound of AEschylus, the binding of Prometheus by pitiless Strength, who mocks at compassion in the god Hephaistos, charged to serve him in this office, opens the sublimest of the ancient dramas. Addison is wrong in saying that there is a personification here of Strength and Necessity; Hephaistos does indeed say that he obeys Necessity, but his personified companions are Strength and Force, and of these Force appears only as the dumb attendant of Strength. Addisons ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Gallery a year or two ago. It was a suffusion of golden light. The Goddess wore her saffron-coloured robes, and appeared just risen from the gloomy bed of old Tithonus. Her very steeds, milk-white, were tinged with the yellow dawn. It was a personification of the morning. Poussin succeeded better in classic than in sacred subjects. The latter are comparatively heavy, forced, full of violent contrasts of colour, of red, blue, and black, and without the true prophetic inspiration of the characters. But in his pagan allegories and fables ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... was enduring their tortures in one apartment, the queen was suffering indignities and outrages equally atrocious in another. Maria Antoinette was, in the eyes of the populace, the personification of every thing to be hated. They believed her to be infamous as a wife; proud, tyrannical, and treacherous; that, as an Austrian, she hated France; that she was doing all in her power to induce foreign armies to invade the French empire ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... once remarked to Slavin: "That beggar's mug fairly haunts me sometimes. . . . He's a good fellow, Gully,—but, you know—when he gets that brooding look on his face . . . he's the living personification ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... is the personification of a selfish girl, and "Master Fritz" of an equally selfish boy; but his sister Katerina is delicious by contrast, as she gives ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... sisters, the Roses of Montelanico, numerous contadini friends, and the wine bottles going round in a very lively and exhilarating manner. The rain ceasing, Caper walked out to see the town, when his arm was suddenly seized, and, turning round, who should it be but Pepe the rash, Pepe the personification of Figaro: a character impossible for northern people to place outside of a madhouse, yet daily to be found in southern Europe. Rash, headstrong, full of deviltry, splendid appetite, and not much conscience—volatile, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... characteristic sincerity, she is careful to remind him that the party to which she belonged could never acknowledge any sovereign but the people; that this they considered to be incompatible with the sovereignty of one man; that no miracle, no personification of popular genius in a single individual, could prove to them the right of ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... to cheer a desolation far worse, and she feared far more abiding than snows could make or melt away. She thought of Hugh, alone in his mill-work that rough chilly day, when the wind stalked through the woods and over the country as if it had been the personification of March just come of age and taking possession of his domains. She thought of her uncle, doing what? in Michigan leaving them to fight with difficulties as they might why? why? and her gentle aunt at home sad and alone, pining ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... have but borrowed attributes and ambiguous characters? It is a deference—perhaps unintentionally, unconsciously—paid to the sex, that in every language the soul itself, and all its noblest virtues, and the personification of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... "He is the leader of a band of sightless mendicants and in this position he has frequently passed your open door, though—probably being warned by the benevolent—he has never yet entered. Now this Yuen Yan, save for one or two unimportant details, is the reflected personification of your own exalted image, nor would those most intimate with your form and outline be able to pronounce definitely unless you stood side by side before them. Furthermore, he is by nature unable to hear any remark addressed to him, and is incapable ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... of Israel, by laying the foundation that determined the form and size of the later structure. He taught his simple people to recognize Jehovah as their tribal God. What this name meant in the conception of the people before his time is by no means clear to us now. It appears to have stood for the personification of some one of the forms of nature's forces, that arrest upon themselves the nomad's vague sense of the Infinite and Divine in the world about him. Around the Power felt in Saturn or the Sun, Moses threw the spell of an awe which is deeper far than that ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... foliage, generally of laurel, olive, myrtle, ivy, or oak, appear upon coins; sometimes encircling the symbolical figures, and sometimes as chaplets on their heads. According to Strabo, each of these is sacred to some particular personification of the Deity, and "significant of some particular attribute, and in general, all evergreens were Dionysiac plants, that is, symbols of the generative power, signifying perpetuity of youth and vigor." The crowns of laurel, olive, etc., with which the victors in the Roman triumphs and Grecian ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... could cling. Well! well! it is so everywhere. All over the world, change, improvement, progress are the words. The venerable minister, for his locks were grey, and time had ploughed deep furrows down his cheeks, and draws palpable lines across his brow, was, as my memory paints him, the personification of earnestness, sincerity and truth. The text and the drift of the sermon I have forgotten, save the little fragment that fixed itself in my memory by the singularity of the figure by which he illustrated his meaning. He was speaking of the operation of the Holy Spirit upon the human ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... explored to their roots in man, and through him in the Cause: each is what it is in kindness to him, has its soul in his breast, grows out of him as truly as his hair, and the out-world is only a larger body shaped by his needs. Each thing is a passive man, and personification does no more than justice to the joint-stool and the fence or whatever creature talks and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... figures of speech, one must be struck at once with the delicacy and the vigor of Lanier's imagination. The poet's fancy personifies what at first blush seems to us incapable of personification. Thus at one time*1* he likens men to clover-leaves and the Course-of-things to the browsing ox, which makes way with the clover-heads; while at another he addresses an old red hill of Georgia as "Thou gashed and hairy Lear Whom the divine Cordelia of the year, E'en ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... said both little boys in a breath, then doubled up in noisy mirth. Laura was constantly doing something to set their young blood in amazement: they looked upon her as the personification of all that was startling and unexpected. But Pin, returning with the reel of thread, opened her eyes ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... next morning. While I was expostulating with him as to the reasons for my detention, a boat rowed alongside, from out of which came two personages dressed in black. I knew them to be familiars of the Inquisition; and it immediately occurred to me that my personification of the lady abbess had been discovered, and that my doom was sealed. The captain pointed me out; they collared and handed me into the boat, and pulled for ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... common gender is applied to animate beings, the sex of which for the time being is indeterminable, such as fish, mouse, bird, etc. Sometimes things which are without life as we conceive it and which, properly speaking, belong to the neuter gender, are, by a figure of speech called Personification, changed into either the masculine or feminine gender, as, for instance, we say of the sun, He is rising; of the moon, She ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... religion. But seeing in the same no practical or moral bearing, I confined it to the schools of philosophy. The admission of the Logos, as hypostasized (that is, neither a mere attribute, nor a personification) in no respect removed my doubts concerning the Incarnation and the Redemption by the cross; which I could neither reconcile in reason with the impassiveness of the Divine Being, nor in my moral feelings with the sacred distinction between things ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... foot of the hill is a curious shrine cave, containing several rude idols, a trough with tame goldfish, and one of the crudest Buddhas I ever saw. The aim of the ambitious sculptor of Buddhas is to produce a personification of "great tranquillity." The figure in the Valley of Yasose-gawa is certainly something of a masterpiece in this direction; nothing could well be more tranquil than an oblong bowlder with the faintest chiselling of a mouth and nose, poised ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... a phase of Scottish life and character new to most novel-readers. John Gourlay, the chief personage in the drama, inhabitant of the "House With the Green Shutters" and master of the village destinies, looms up as the personification of the brute force that dominates. He stands apart from all characters in fiction. In the broad treatment and the relentless sweep of its tragedy, the book suggests ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... nose operated upon him like the head of Medusa, and almost turned him to stone. And Mr. Hookey was fascinated too. Merton also had become Medusafied, and exercised a petrifactive influence upon the barber. He was nailed fast to the threshold of his own door, and gazed upon his fancied personification of Lara and Manfred with an indomitable and resistless perseverance, which utterly confounded himself; while Merton, nailed alike fast to the opposite footpath, stood staring at his antagonist, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... rendered 'tellest good tidings' is a feminine form, and falls in with the usual personification of a city as a woman. She, long laid in ruins, the Niobe of nations, the sad and desolate widow, is bid to bear to her daughter cities the glad tidings, that God is in her of a truth. It is exactly the same thought as 'Cry out and shout, thou inhabitant of Zion: for great ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... The justiciary was the personification of impartiality and justice, and endeavored to impress on the jury that which they already knew and could not help knowing. Again they took recesses and smoked cigarettes, and again the usher shouted "Hear ye!" and the two gendarmes sat trying to ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... is inserted in the margin of the Latin. In p. 11. "Ratio naturalis" is personified, and governs the verb vidit, which is repeated several times. This is changed by the corrector into vidimus; but in the English passage, though varying much from the Latin, the personification is retained. In p. 58., "Dion Cassius" is corrected to "Xiphilinus;" but the mistake is preserved ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... Arabs left in charge of the station, headed by my old friends Abdulla and Mohinna, came to pay their respects again, recognising in me, as they said, a "personification of their sultan," and therefore considering what they were doing only due to my rank. They regretted with myself that Snay was so hot-headed; for they themselves thought a treaty of peace would have ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... connections with the First Consul, it might be said that the one represented the Constituent Assembly, with a slight perfume of the old regime, and the other the Convention in all its brutality. Bonaparte regarded Fouche as a complete personification of the Revolution. With him, therefore, Fouche's influence was merely the influence of the Revolution. That great event was one of those which had made the most forcible impression on Bonaparte's ardent mind, and he imagined he still beheld it in a visible form as long as Fouche ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... and spirit; possibly another part was the procuration of fresh victims for that long-drawn-out holocaust. That this latter object explained the disappearance of Miss Lindon I felt persuaded. That she was designed by the personification of evil who was her captor, to suffer all the horrors at which the stories pointed, and then to be burned alive, amidst the triumphant yells of the attendant demons, I was certain. That the wretch, aware that the pursuit was in full cry, was ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... person of the Hindu triad, and the most celebrated and popular of all the Indian deities. He is the personification of the preserving power, and became incarnate in nine different forms, for the preservation of mankind in various emergencies. Before the creation of the universe, and after its temporary annihilation, he is supposed to sleep on the waters, floating ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... it seemed to his half-blinded sight, was at about the point where the cottage had stood which his general had used as his headquarters, the spot where the night before that general had raised his glass of bubbling wine and toasted "Thanatos," the personification of death, and called his officers to witness that this was the greatest moment in the history of warfare, a moment that they would all remember to their ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... on the other hand, sad to think how many of our greatest benefactors are unknown even by name. Who discovered the art of procuring fire? Prometheus is merely the personification of forethought. Who invented letters? Cadmus ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... in effecting their escape to England—where, failing news of them, I do myself a frequent pleasure to picture them at rest upon the quiet waters of domestic felicity. But I address myself rather to you, whom (albeit on the briefest acquaintance) I shall ever regard as the personification of stability and mild repose. Heracleitus and his followers may prate of a world of flux; but there are men to whom the recollections of their fellows ever turn confidently, secure of finding them in the same place; and of such, sir, you are the palmary ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... aspect of such a power is brought into the foreground, Ishtar becomes the mother of mankind, the fertile earth, the goddess of sexual love, and the creative force among animals, while at times she appears in hymns and myths as the general personification ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... a big, burly, rough-and-ready Yorkshireman—stout, somewhat pompous, about forty, with hair wearing bald on the forehead: the personification of the successful business man. "My dear Emmie," he said, in a loud voice, with a North Country accent, "the cooks have got to live. They've got to live like the rest of us. I can never persuade you that the hands must always ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... words with Mr. Lamotte, and that gentleman, after some hesitation and no little concern as to the nature of their business at such a time, presented himself before them, looking the personification of subdued sorrow and ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... the morning, was the youngest daughter of Hyperion and Theia, or, according to some, of Titan and Terra. Orpheus calls her the harbinger of Titan, for she is the personification of that light which precedes the appearance of the sun. The poets describe this goddess as rising out of the ocean in a saffron robe, seated in a flame-colored car, drawn by two or four horses, expanding with her rosy fingers the gates of light, and scattering the ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... and accomplished, the very personification of refinement, natural and acquired, and the antipodes of all which Ernest, ere he saw her, had begun to dread in the untaught Meeta of his memory. I am not surprised at all at his loving Sophie, but I cannot at all understand how the simple and single-hearted Meeta can ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... Saxe-Gotha is the humorous soliloquy of an imaginary organist over a fugue in F minor by an imaginary composer, named in the title. It is a mingling of music and moralising. The famous description of a fugue, and the personification of its five voices, is a brilliantly ingenious tour de force; and the rough humour is quite in keeping with the dramatis persona. In complete contrast to Master Hugues is A Toccata of Galuppi's,[31] ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... and situations of the drama, and introduces the motives which Wagner ever after used so freely,—among them the curse resting upon the Dutchman, the restless motion of the sea, the message of the Angel of Mercy personified in Senta, the personification of the Dutchman, and the song of Daland's crew. The first act opens with an introduction representing a storm, and a characteristic sailors' chorus, followed by an exquisite love-song for tenor ("Mit Gewitter und Sturm"), and a grand scena of the Dutchman ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... without getting demoralized, to preserve unshaken the certainty of the final outcome—in these things lies a virtue which we did not know we possessed: the virtue of patience. It won us our victory of the Marne. One man is its personification today, that great chief, wise and prudent, who spares his men, who makes up his mind not to give battle except in his own time on his own ground, that chief toward whom at this moment the calm and confident eyes of the entire ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... of this order had brought him once again to the memory of the time when some one had spoken to him of Odette as of a 'kept' woman, and when, once again, he had amused himself with contrasting that strange personification, the 'kept' woman—an iridescent mixture of unknown and demoniacal qualities, embroidered, as in some fantasy of Gustave Moreau, with poison-dripping flowers, interwoven with precious jewels—with that Odette upon whose face he had watched ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Provence. The philosopher Diderot has very aptly claimed that a man's bearing is the clue to his character, and this stocky little man was certainly a living proof of this claim. You could sense that his everyday conversation must have been packed with such vivid figures of speech as personification, symbolism, and misplaced modifiers. But I was never in a position to verify this because, around me, he used only an odd ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... the time when I first began to notice and comprehend, I also began to bitterly feel our condition, and Gabrielle felt it far more than I did. We knew that we were half-starved, half-clad, neglected, unloved creatures, and that our parent was a personification of Selfishness. We saw other children prettily dressed, walking past with their mothers or nurses—or trotting to school, healthful and happy; and our hearts yearned to be like them—yearned for a mother's kiss! Gabrielle was habitually ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... this explanation, and one of the favourite sandbanks in which this particular kind of human ostrich plunges its head is "Nature." "Nature does this," and "Nature does that," forgetting entirely the fact that "Nature" is a mere personification and means either chance-medley or a Creator, according to the old dilemma. There is a very curious example of this inability or unwillingness to admit—perhaps even to understand—the force of this argument exhibited by those to whom one would suppose that it would come home with overpowering ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... and personification only that acts and qualities are ascribed to agents and objects that are incompatible with their nature; or do not properly belong to them."—Ib. Theo. & Lit. Jour., vol. 1, ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... fought his way manfully to the end. He was not quite so talented as some of his great associates in the Confederate army, but he was a tremendous fighter when occasion offered. During that last period of our cadet life, Colonel Robert E. Lee was superintendent of the academy; he was the personification of dignity, justice, and kindness, and he was respected and admired as the ideal of a commanding officer. Colonel Robert S. Garnett was commandant of cadets; he was a thorough soldier who meted out impartial justice with ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... darkness—utter illimitable darkness. But above him the clouds were torn asunder, and through a transparent veil of light golden mist, a face of surpassing beauty was seen—a face on which youth, health, hope, love, and ecstatic joy all shone with ineffable radiance. It was the personification of Life—not life as we know it, brief and full of care—but Life Immortal and Love Triumphant. Often and often I found myself standing before this masterpiece of Cellini's genius, gazing at it, not only with admiration, but with a sense of actual comfort. One afternoon, while ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... "De Wardes is there, who is determination itself, while Manicamp is the very personification of the ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... conscious of a sudden chill. The bare room, with its stone-flagged floor, its plain deal furniture, depressed me no less than the cold, forbidding appearance of the woman who stood now motionless before me. She was paler than any woman whom I had ever seen in my life. A living person, she seemed the personification of lifelessness. Her black hair was streaked with grey; her dress, which suggested a uniform in its severity, knew no adornment save the plain ivory cross which hung from an almost invisible chain about her neck. Her expression indicated neither curiosity ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a ground-ash cane, and looking at her in a lordly, patronising way, the very personification no doubt of boyish beauty. I became troubled to see him look so handsome. The contrast between him and a cripple was not fair, I thought, as I observed an expression of passing admiration on little Winifred's face. Yet I thought there was not the pleased smile with which she ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... institution he had served so long, and his safety in his position, lay in the possession of negative qualities. His silence was interpreted as an indication of wisdom, and the firmly cut features of his inscrutable face would have served an artist as a personification of discipline. As he exchanged the conventional greetings the occasion demanded, he might even then have been standing for the portrait of himself that was one day to be added to those of his predecessors on the library wall; or he might have been one of the portraits already there ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... be here," he mentally said, "and I should really like to mark the contrast between her and the brilliant Miss Fenton. Oh! there she is, as I live, leaning on the arm of her father, the very personification of innocence and beauty. But her face is too calm by half. I fear she ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... may perceive, by the twelve tasks, that the astronomical theory was applied to the mythus of the hero, and that he was regarded as a personification of the Sun, which passes through the twelve signs of the Zodiac. This, probably, took place during the Alexandrian period. Some resemblance between his attributes and those of the Deity, with whom the Egyptian ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... as in the later (and, I think, less consummate) companion and sequel Thyrsis. With hardly an exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main dangers which so constantly beset him—too great stiffness and too great simplicity. His "Graian" personification is not overdone; his landscape is exquisite; the stately stanza not merely sweeps, but sways and swings, with as much grace as state. And therefore the Arnoldian "note"—the special form of the maladie du ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... of nature are the work of an artist; you are a real landscape painter. Only the frequent personification (anthropomorphism) when the sea breathes, the sky gazes, the steppe barks, nature whispers, speaks, mourns, and so on—such metaphors make your descriptions somewhat monotonous, sometimes sweetish, sometimes not clear; beauty and expressiveness in nature are attained only by simplicity, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... respect whatever for HINDENBURG or anything which is his. He says that HINDENBURG and his crew have all along taken the line which any man could, but no gentleman would. In HINDENBURG he sees the personification of Prussian militarism, and for the Prussians and their militarism he has no use whatsoever. I forget what exactly is the Highland phrase for "no use whatsoever," but its meaning is even worse than its sound, and the sound ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... Modern Satanism is not intended to signify the development of some new aspect of old doctrine concerning demonology, or some new argument for the personification of the evil principle in universal nature. It is intended to signify the alleged revival, or, at least, the reappearance to some extent in public, of a cultus diabolicus, or formal religion of the devil, the existence of which, in the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... own subjectivity that we are able to verify the fact of its ejectivity. Thus, for aught that we can tell to the contrary, Comte may have been even more justified than his followers suppose, in teaching the personification ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... AMA'VIA, the personification of Intemperance in grief. Hearing that her husband, sir Mordant, had been enticed to the Bower of Bliss by the enchantress Acra'sia, she went in quest of him, and found him so changed in mind and body she could scarcely recognize him; however, she managed by ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... love, and sing to me as you could imagine yourself doing were you desirous of impressing her with your earnestness and affection." Poor Mr. Wilson hesitated, blushed, and, under doubt how far such a personification even in his case was allowable, at last remonstrated, "Ay, Mr. Dun, ye forget I'm a married man!" A case has been reported of a country girl, however, who thought it possible there might be an ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... leapt at once to the personification of these people as all that had puzzled and baffled her in her son since his flight from London. They were the enemy, they ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... question, and Ben concluded that it was about time to proceed with the business for which they had come. After he had explained just what it was they needed for the completion of their theatre, during which time Dickey sat rubbing his chin, the personification of wisdom, the two waited for Master Spry to give them the ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... grace, her courtesy; she has received him with gentleness, but when he declares his love she grows alarmed. He gains at last the kiss which tells of her affection; but her parents intervening, throw obstacles between the lovers. Such, divested of ornament, allegory, and personification, is the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the courtier, the ambassador, and finally the minister of state. But he had already done enough to earn himself a lasting name amongst the improvers of poetry in England. In tragedy he gave the first regular model; in personification he advanced far beyond all his predecessors, and furnished a prototype to that master of allegory, Spenser. A greater than Spenser has also been indebted to him; as will be evident, I think, to all who compare the description of the figures on ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... rhetorical figure of personification consisting in representing inanimate objects as endowed with life and action, an idiom not infrequently employed, mainly as a substitute for the passive voice which is less used in German than in English—was put ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... which Wagner set his actors and singers will provoke rivalry between them for ages to come, in the personification of each of his heroes with the greatest possible amount of clearness, perfection, and fidelity, according to that perfect incorporation already typified by the music of drama. Following this leader, the eye of the plastic artist will ultimately behold ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Temple, the gods made obeisance to him, and took up their positions on each side of him, and informed him that they awaited his words. Addressing Nu, the personification of the World- ocean, Ra bade them to take notice of the fact that the men and women whom his Eye had created were murmuring against him. He then asked them to consider the matter and to devise a plan of action for him, for he was unwilling to slay the rebels without ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... has heard a native attempt the Lowland tongue for the first time, is familiar with the personification that turns every inanimate object into he or she. The forest is here happily personified as ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... of the same force in politics as in art; it was that of seeing aright. He saw his country as it was, with clearer eyes than any man before or since. If Tolstoi is a purer native expression of Russia's force, Turgenev is the personification of Russian aspiration working with the instruments of wide cosmopolitan culture. As a critic of his countrymen nothing escaped Turgenev's eye, as a politician he foretold nearly all that actually came to pass in his life, and as a consummate artist, led first and foremost by his love ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... for which offence the barber himself was beaten by the king's officers, and died.—In the Panchatantra, in place of a soldier, a banker who had lost all his wealth determines to put an end to his life, when he dreams that the personification of Kuvera, the god of riches, appears before him in the form of a Jaina mendicant—a conclusive proof of the Buddhistic origin of the story.—A trunkless head performs the same part in the Russian folk-tale of the Stepmother's ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... sighed deeply, and for a while kept silence. His face might have served as the living personification of intense ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... waiting, and Maude handed the child a shilling as she went out. She was so happy herself that she wanted every one else to be happy also. The people turned to look at her as she passed. With the slight flush upon her cheeks and the light in her eyes, she seemed the personification of youth, and life, and love. One tall old gentleman started as he looked, and watched her with a rapt face until she disappeared. Some cheek had flushed and some eye had brightened at his words once, and sweet old days had for an ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... substituted for True Name, 201-l. Adonai, Son, Kabalah ascribes redemption to, 104-m. Adonai, the most potent of the names of Deity; moves the Universe, 787-l. Adonai, one of the seven Reflections of the Ophites, 563-m. Adonai of the Phoenicians is a personification of the Sun, 594-u. Adonai or Adon, the Phoenician name for the Sun God, 587-u. Adoniram, Joabert, Satolkin, the three Masters, represent, 210-u. Adonis and Apollo of the Greeks are personifications of the Sun, 594-u. Adonis and Proserpine in wanderings represent—, 404-m. Adonis or Thammuz, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... which keeps it erect, and gives it the appearance of a cock's comb." The same writer adds, that, "but for the want of that peculiar expression which emanates from a cultivated intellect," Nasinewiskuk, the eldest son of Black Hawk, could have "been looked upon as the very personification, of the beau ideal of manly beauty." Among their many visitors while at this place, was the distinguished author of the "Sketch Book," who in a letter, under date of 18th of Dec. 1832, says, "From St. Louis, I went to Fort Jefferson, ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... presuppose, however, an Aryan notion of a torture-hell, of which the Rig Veda has no conception. The Aryan identity of the two myths is thereby made uncertain, if not implausible. The special development in India of the fire-priest that brings down fire from heaven, when compared with the personification of the 'twirler' (Promantheus) in Greece, shows that no detailed myth was current in primitive times.[22] The name of the fire-priest, brahman fla(g)men(?), is an indication of the primitive fire-cult in antithesis to the soma-cult, which ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... grandeur and earthly decay ... to conduct him and us at last to the borders of 'the Great Deep.' ... The image of the wanderer may well be associated, for a time, with the rock of Calpe, the shattered temples of Athens, or the gigantic fragments of Rome; but when we wish to think of this dark personification as of a thing which is, where can we so well imagine him to have his daily haunt as by the roaring of the waves? It was thus that Homer represented Achilles in his moments of ungovernable and inconsolable grief for the loss of Patroclus. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... that time the idea of the chief of the Olympian gods was not of a rollicking despot, angry and jovial by turns, a delighter in thunderbolts, a cloud-compeller, a reckless adulterer: he was the awful personification of the majesty of law, mighty to impose its decrees and mighty to avenge its disregarded sanctions—who, brought near to the city, was worshiped as Jupiter Capitolinus, majestic as the conservator ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... Paganism and Gallic Druidism were fused together in the same temples and at the same altars, as if to fuse them in the same common indifference; Roman and Gallic names became applied to the same religious personification of such and such a fact or such and such an idea; Mars and Camul were equally the god of war; Belen and Apollo the god of light and healing; Diana and Arduinna the goddess of the chase. Everywhere, whether it was a ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the influence of his models. He used especially the meter of the common evangelical hymns, and cultivated the vague personification of the poets of the eighteenth century. He himself, however, was essentially a romantic poet, as was evinced by his fondness for Byron and Marlowe. His common style is represented by the following lines from his poem entitled ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... of the Jews, than the scenes of love, affection, and benevolence, depicted in the gospels. But his mind was not formed merely on the events recorded in antiquity: it is no world doubtful of the immortality of the soul which he depicts. He is rather the personification in painting of the soul of Dante. His imagination was evidently fraught with the conceptions of the Inferno. The expression of mind beams forth in all his works. Vehement passion, stern resolve, undaunted valour, sainted devotion, infant innocence, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... master low passions. He would rather have muscular strength and endurance and energy and will power and courage and chivalry than any amount of money. He shudders at the thought of causing suffering to an innocent woman or child. He would sacrifice his life for the girl whom he regards as the personification of loveliness and purity. If we will but deal with him fairly and honestly, he will see in birth an ever-recurring miracle; he will regard his body as a sacred temple; he will see in sex power a source of richer ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... good-nature. I never met a more thorough-born sailor. He divined what weather was coming, foretold it long before the barometer did, and took all the necessary precautions in advance. He was the very personification of the seafaring instinct. Besides this, he had a long record of bravery behind him. At Navarino, where he commanded the Armide, he came up and lay with true fraternal chivalry between the Turkish ships and a British frigate that was suffering ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... while elder-wood, in a room, or used for a cradle, is apt to work evil for children. In some parts of England, it is believed that boys beaten with an elder stick will be retarded in their growth; in Sweden, women who are about to become mothers kiss the elder. In Germany, a somewhat similar personification of the juniper, "Frau Wachholder," exists. And here we come into touch with the dryads and forest-sprites of all ages, familiar to us in the myths of classic antiquity and the tales of the nursery ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... hair and blew it about his face till he became an equestrian personification of the frenzied muse. I had become acquainted with his trick of setting words to the music of quaint rhymes; but Father Holland ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... he said, "I may have none to compare with me, yet in my personification of the 'superior man' I have not as yet ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... found to their surprise Elspeth alone, sitting "ghastly on the hearth," like the personification of Old Age in the Hunter's song of the Owl,* "wrinkled, tattered, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... destroyer, was a son of Ra, the ancient sun-god, in the sense, perhaps, that the comets, and all other planetary bodies, were originally thrown out from the mass of the sun. Seb, or Typho, was "the personification of all evil." He was the ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... (30b) of the female figure or from the mouth (32b). The woman thus represented in connection with the water is god I, the water goddess of Schellhas. She is, as he notes (1904, p. 31) usually the figure of an old woman. "Evidently, we have here the personification of water in its quality of destroyer, a goddess of floods and cloud-bursts." We are not at all sure that we have here a distinct god as similar female figures with serpent head-dresses occur frequently in the Dresden Codex with no suggestion of water. The failure to find any distinct glyph ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... was to be held in the little court-room presided over by Judge Garford, who had been a figure at Vigilante trials in early days and who was a unique personification of kindliness and firmness. Both prisoners had refused counsel, nor had any confession materialized, as Tom Redmond had prophesied. McFann had spent most of his time cursing all who had been concerned in his arrest. Talpers ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... whose thunder could be heard rumbling in the dressing-room, supported her claim, and Venus was on the point of carrying it off,—that is to say, without allegory, of marrying monsieur the dauphin, when a young child clad in white damask, and holding in her hand a daisy (a transparent personification of Mademoiselle Marguerite of Flanders) came to contest it ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... thought of the prisoner whom he had taken the night before. He was unable to imagine how a woman of her manner and presence had ever ventured upon such an enterprise, and he contrasted her—with poor results for the unknown—with Helen Harley, who was to him the personification of all that was delicate ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... alive or an animate object is assumed to be raised to a higher plane of existence it is said to be by personification. Examples of the latter figure are "death's menace," "laugh of morn." In the line "Lucidity of soul unlocks the lips" are both metonymy and personification. The following is the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... may ask, what has given to Catholic France, Catholic Belgium, Catholic England, these eminent leaders who in public and social life, are by their fearless courage and ceaseless action, the very personification of Catholicism? It is without doubt their Catholic Congresses. There, the contact with the great problems of the day gave them the vision of things before unseen, made them emerge from the common mass, and marked ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... little creatures who were thus warned to be good. Even Dan McCoy, who was considered out and out the worst of them, might have sat to Rubens for a cherub; and as for the others, they were, we might almost say, appallingly good. Thursday October, in particular, was the very personification of innocence. It would have been much more appropriate to have named him Sunday July, because in his meek countenance goodness ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... description in each chapter was not of a man, but of a quality. The method of Theophrastus, as Casaubon said, was between the philosophical and the poetical. He described a quality, but he described it by personification, and his aim was the amending of men's manners. The twenty-eight chapters that have come down to us are probably no more than a fragment of a larger work. They describe vices, and not all of them. Another part, now lost, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... at St Andrews College under the late Dr Jackson, who was an eminent philosopher and friendly man; also under Mr Duncan, of the Mathematical Chair, whom I regarded as a personification of unworldly simplicity, clothed in high and pure thought; and I regularly attended, though not enrolled as a regular student, the Moral Philosophy Class of Dr Chalmers. Returning to Edinburgh and its university, I became acquainted, through my friend and countryman, Robert Hogg, with R. A. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... supplied the place of those fine qualities," replied the young man, "and that was fanaticism. Napoleon is the Mahomet of the West, and is worshipped by his commonplace but ambitions followers, not only as a leader and lawgiver, but also as the personification of equality." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Marguerite Blakeney and these Comtesse de Tournay had remained seemingly unmoved. The latter, rigid, erect and defiant, with one hand still upon her daughter's arm, seemed the very personification of unbending pride. For the moment Marguerite's sweet face had become as white as the soft fichu which swathed her throat, and a very keen observer might have noted that the hand which held the tall, beribboned stick ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... now convinced beyond all doubt that the so-called Sprouse had made off with the priceless treasure and that only a miracle could bring about its recovery. O'Dowd's estimate of the man's cleverness was amply supported by what Barnes knew of him. He knew him to be the personification of craftiness, and of daring. It was not surprising that he had been tricked by this devil's own genius. He recalled his admiration, his wonder over the man's artfulness; he groaned as he thought of the pride he had felt ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... pinched the top cushion into a different position, with what was energy for her. There was silence for a minute. Rachel sat looking grimly into the fire, the personification of determined immobility. Sir Thomas was shading his eyes with his hand. He was drinking just then a very bitter cup: and it was none the sweeter for the recollection that he had mixed it himself. ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... with his intellect, and tries to penetrate the illusion in order to lay bare its cause. Heedless of its power and beauty, he remains uninfluenced by sentiment, and mistrusting the part played by his own mind, he tends to destroy the habit of personification. ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... consequently, the public avouchment of God as a God in Covenant before others; and in entering into Covenant with him, the favoured creature man, to all these and the other statutes of that law, from his holy nature, gave his adherence. In his nature, as a living personification of finite excellence, designed to transact with God, and rendered fit to adhere to his engagements, and true to the constitutional character of his existence, in the presence of his glorious Lord he stood a being ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... suddenly and stared fixedly up over my head into the air. The lamp beat upon his face, and so intent was it and so still that it might have been that of a clear-cut classical statue, a personification ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... out of the question your thinking of marrying her, Frank," said she. "You must know that nobody feels it more strongly than poor Mary herself;" and Beatrice looked the very personification of domestic prudence. ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... these words at the will of one's fancies. By "darkness" these wicked men do not understand what is meant in reality—air not illumined, the shadow produced by the interposition of a body, or finally a place for some reason deprived of light. For them "darkness" is an evil power, or rather the personification of evil, having his origin in himself in opposition to, and in perpetual struggle with, the goodness of God. If God is light, they say, without any doubt the power which struggles against Him must be darkness, "darkness" not owing its existence to a foreign origin, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... and esteemed his brown-eyed fair-haired fiancee, considered her the personification of feminine refinement and delicacy; and congratulated himself warmly on his great good fortune in winning her affection; but tender emotions found little scope for exercise in his intensely practical, busy life, which ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... me your arm," interrupted Foedora carelessly, "we are already very late. But then, it is all your own fault; how is it that you, the personification of exactitude, did not proclaim the hour of ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... as insisted upon on an earlier page, that there is not one natural selection and one survival of the fittest, but two, inasmuch as there are two classes of variations from which nature (supposing no exception taken to her personification) can select. The bottles have the same labels, and they are of the same colour, but the one holds brandy, and the other toast and water. Nature can, by a figure of speech, be said to select from variations that are ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... at that moment! She seemed the embodiment of vengeance—of righteous retribution; the personification of the cause she so splendidly advocated. I looked upon her almost with awe, at the same time realizing that I was thrilled almost into active acquiescence ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... word of enlightenment which the damsel, the personification of wisdom, whispered into the ear of the seeker," continued the persuasive voice of the Persian. "It is the heart-truth of all religion. It is the word which initiates man into the divine mysteries. 'Thou wilt accomplish thy journey if thou listen to my discourse.' Life is affected ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... legendary Bodhisattva, who became an object of worship of some Mahayanists. He is treated as a personification of transcendental wisdom. ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... of figurative language is also an aid to clearness and to force. Simile, metaphor, personification, antithesis, balance, climax, rhetorical question, and repetition are all effective aids in the presentation of argument. The speeches of great orators are replete with expressions of this sort. Burke, in his Speech on Conciliation, says, "Despotism itself ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... include panthelism or animatism, the doctrine that a great part, if not the whole, of the inanimate kingdom, as well as all animated beings, are endowed with reason, intelligence and volition, identical with that of man. This latter theory, which in many cases is equivalent to personification, though it may be, like animism, a feature of the philosophy of peoples of low culture, should not be confused with it. But it is difficult in practice to distinguish the two phases of thought and no clear account of animatism ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... of Mr. FECHTER is only a new proof of the potency of yellow hair. It is the yellow hair of the British blonde, joined to that kindliness of disposition with which—like a personification of Charity—she "bareth all things," that makes her a thing of beauty in the eyes of R.G.W., and a joy for as many seasons as her hair will keep its color. It is because Mr. FECHTER decided that the hair presumptive ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870 • Various
... the Greeks, the building-up of the monarchy, and of Nineveh its capital, as well as of Babylon, is referred to the legendary heroes, Ninus and his queen Semiramis. The name of Ninus is not recorded on the monuments, and is, perhaps, a kind of mythical personification of Assyrian conquests and grandeur; and the name of Semiramis does not appear until the ninth century B.C. She may have been a princess or even queen. Assyrian independence began before 2300 B.C. Between 1500 and 1400 B.C., Assyria was a weak state. It gained a brief mastery over Babylon through ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... bridal costume, or a ball gown; a pair of small satin slippers, once white; a rusty crepe, a "topper of a manifestly early vintage, or what not, all may be found here. One might almost fancy that Pride, in some material personification, might indeed be found buried beneath the mass of dross, or having shuffled off its last vestiges of respectability, its corse might at least be found to have left its shroud behind; and such these tattered habiliments really ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... on the subject of faith, once took a railroad journey for an illustration. As he pointed out, with much eloquence and force, there could be no more realistic personification of faith than the man who peacefully lay down to sleep at night in his berth of a Pullman car, relying implicitly upon the railroad men to avert the thousands of dangers which had to be encountered during the still ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... on her, I thought she looked like a personification of her lovely namesake, the glorious creation of Byron's muse. Her beautiful chestnut hair was unfortunately (in compliance with the custom of the country) tinged with a reddish dye. It was combed to the nape of the neck, and a red ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... when there is no person distinct on account of the multitude, becomes without a motive. Psyche blushed under a lamp because the hand of a single god passed over her, but when the sun gazed at her with his thousand rays from the height of Olympus, that personification of the modest soul did not blush before the whole heaven. Here is the exact image of the modesty of a writer before a single auditor, and of the freedom of his utterance before all the world. Do you accuse me of violating mysteries before you? You have not the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Albert, "it is not easy to bear out a personification of the King, when women are in the case. But there is only a very little light below, and ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... seemed to Muriel to come over his demeanor at that moment. While he spoke with the chief she noticed he looked all cruelty, lust, and hateful self-indulgence. Now that he paced up and down warily in front of that sacred floor, peering around him with keen suspicion, he seemed rather the personification of watchfulness, fear, and a certain slavish bodily terror. Especially, she observed, he cast upon Felix, as he went, a glance of angry hate; and yet he did not attempt to hurt or molest him in any way, defenceless as they both were before ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... stretched full length on a bunk, his face, to the roof, a wreath of smoke from his cigar traveling slowly toward the ceiling into a filmy blue cloud which hung above him. He looked the personification of vigorous full-blooded manhood at ease. Experience had taught him to take the exigencies of his turbulent life as they came, nonchalantly, to the eye of an observer indifferently, getting all the comfort ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... MERCY God's darling attribute. They clothe her in a white robe down to the feet; they fill her eyes with the milk of human kindness and her mouth with the tender words of forgiveness. But JUSTICE is a very different personification in their eye. He is not only masculine as to gender, but all his looks and ways have an air of condemnation in them. He is a dark-faced, frowning judge, forever watching with keenest eye not only the outward life of every man, but his mind and heart within; ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... by reason, or conscience, are but examples, in an eminent degree, of the character, and personifications of the worst vices (if not of the best virtues) of their time. Considered in this view, Mary I. will but appear the example and personification of the religious intolerance of Catholicism and of the age, just as Cromwell was of the patriotic and Puritanic sentiment of the first half, or Charles II. of the unblushing licentiousness of the last ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... his new acquaintance, Dolokhov, sat almost at the middle of the table. Facing them sat Pierre, beside Prince Nesvitski. Count Ilya Rostov with the other members of the committee sat facing Bagration and, as the very personification of Moscow hospitality, did the honors ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... is personification. To the child's fancy the doll is as much alive as the cat, the broom as the bird, and even the letters in the copy-book can stretch themselves. On this foundation he builds myths that tease by a certain semblance ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... political treatise we meet the expression—"a State governed by laws," the only way to translate it is—"a State governed by a very ancient and immutable legislation." This gives the true meaning to the famous personification of laws in the Phaedo, which would be quite meaningless if the Greeks had understood what we do by the term. Are laws the expression of the general will of the people? If so why should Socrates have respected them, he who despised the ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... moralists defended her; but gentler hearts throughout all the world regarded her as a marble-hearted monster of correctness and morality, a personification of the law unmitigated ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in childbirth will appeal to Iuno Lucina, the general praying for victory to Iuppiter Victor, the man who is taking an oath to Iuppiter as the deus Fidius. As a still later development the cult-title will, as it were, break off and set up for itself, usually in the form of an abstract personification: Iuppiter, in the two special capacities just noted, gives birth to Victoria ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... language by those who use it carelessly, he will not treat coloured glass as if it were clear; and while half the world is using figure unconsciously, will be fully aware not only of all that latent figurative texture in speech, but of the vague, lazy, half-formed personification—a rhetoric, depressing, and worse than nothing, [21] because it has no really rhetorical motive—which plays so large a part there, and, as in the case of more ostentatious ornament, scrupulously exact of it, from syllable to syllable, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... been written about him—more will follow in the years to come. He is the personification of the old ante bellum Democratic party of the Northern States—a party that believed in the aggrandizement of the country, at home and abroad; which placed the rights of an American citizen before the gains of commerce; ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... monosyllabic sententiousness that had characterized him in the loose-box at Royallieu had been dissipated under the ardor of success; and Ben Davis, with his legs on the table, a pipe between his teeth, and his bloated face purple with a brutal contentment, might have furnished to a Teniers the personification of culminated cunning and of ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... before him was an effigy sacred to the goddess of the Phoenicians, who in different countries passed by the various names of Astarte, or Ashtoreth, or Baaltis, and who in their coarse worship was at once the personification of the moon and the emblem ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... 1874 I shot one in the spine, and watched his furious movements for some time before I put him out of his misery. I threw him a pad from one of the elephants, and the way he tore and gnawed it gave me some faint idea of his fury and ferocity. He looked the very personification of impotent viciousness; the ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... all-powerful Minister of Austria, Alexander was little better than a Jacobin. The Austrian State, though its frontiers had been five times changed since 1792, had continued in a remarkable degree free from the impulse to internal change. The Emperor Francis was the personification of resistance to progress; the Minister owed his unrivalled position not more to his own skilful statesmanship in the great crisis of 1813 than to a genuine accord with the feelings of his master. If Francis was not a man of intellect, Metternich was certainly a man ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... literary labour were much taken up in ways which were wasteful of his rare powers. He came by literary intuition to an idea of Scripture which others had built up from the point of view of a theory of knowledge and by investigation of the facts. He is the helpless personification of a view of the relation of science and religion which has absolutely passed away. Yet Arnold died only in 1888. How much a distinguished inheritance may mean is gathered from the fact that a grand-daughter ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... interesting. It's quite a long time since I've been a personification.—I suppose you've never been one before?" said Clariss, turning to ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... represent the trees and the winds to be? Persons—the trees having the ability to sleep, and the winds to move or keep still. This is called personification. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Morals or Moral Plays. In them we see the losing victory of invention over the imagination that works with given facts. No doubt in the Moral Plays there is more exercise of intellect as well as of ingenuity; for they consist of metaphysical facts turned into individual existences by personification, and their relations then dramatized by allegory. But their poetry is greatly inferior both in character and execution to that of the Miracles. They have a religious tendency, as everything moral must have, and sometimes they go even farther, as in one, for instance, ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... put the word Vede in place of Rende, giving a variation which for its poetic worth well deserves to be marked, if not to be introduced into the received text. "Until the branch sees all its spoils upon the earth" is a personification quite in Dante's manner. A confirmation of the value of this reading is given by the fact that Tasso preferred it to the more common one, and in his treatise on the "Art of Poetry" praises ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... country. {7} No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem to have slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old heresies of personification, always poetically orthodox, and attribute a sort of free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband of road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the land before ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to think of this strong personality as being overcome with soft emotions. We have regarded him as the personification of strength, and yet with all his gigantic power over men and himself, he had a real womanly supply of human tenderness. Once he was seen weeping before the portrait of his much beloved son, whom he called ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... of the Carmelites whom I was about to see was the personification of this restless impotence. Bound to his great arm-chair by the gout, he offered a strange contrast to the venerable chevalier, pale and unable to move like himself, but noble and patriarchal in his affliction. The prior was short, stout, and ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... to make a hurried dinner, and to dress for the ball. This, with some of our party, was a serious business. Willingham and Dawson were going in fancy dresses. The former was an admirable personification of Dick Turpin, standing upwards of six feet, and broadly built, and becoming his picturesque costume as if it were his everyday suit, he strutted before Mrs Jenkins's best glass, which Hanmer charitably ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... promptly stood up, awaiting no second invitation to that look of Blenham's. Were one staging a morality play and in search of the personification of impertinence, he need look no farther than this cocksure youth. He was just at that age when one is determined that there shall be no mistake about his status in the matters of age and worldly experience; in short, something over twenty-one, ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... himself, and to all appearance fully as strong of limb. A mass of black hair covered his head and chin; a skin hunting-shirt his body, and a hairy boar-skin was thrown across his broad shoulders. Altogether, he seemed to his visitor the very personification of ferocity. A huge bow, ready strung, leaned against his hut. As Bladud advanced with his own bow unstrung, the man apparently scorned to take it up, but he grasped and leaned upon a staff proportioned to ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... vale of Tempe. This legend expressed the attachment of the Laurel (Daphne) to the Sun, under whose heat the tree both fades and flourishes. It has been thought worth while to explain these allusions, because they illustrate the character of the Grecian Mythology, which arose in the Personification of natural phenomena, and was totally free from those debasing and ludicrous ideas with which, through Roman and later misunderstanding or ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various |
