"Portrayal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the old epic becomes a remarkable portrayal of daily life. In its picturesque lines we see the galley set sail, foam flying from her prow; we catch the first sight of the southern headlands, approach land, hear the challenge of the "warder of the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... portrayal of the experience of an Eastern author, among the cowboys of the West, in search of "local color" for a new novel. "Bud" Thurston learns many a lesson while following "the lure of the dim trails" but the hardest, and probably the most welcome, ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... management of a cotton mill, convinced that the real path of salvation lies in economic effort. This mere skeleton of a story furnishes an excuse for rehearsing again the ideas that Page had already made familiar in his writings and in his public addresses. This time the lesson is enlivened by the portrayal of certain typical characters of the post-bellum South. They are all there—the several types of Negro, ranging all the way from the faithful and philosophic plantation retainer to the lazy "Publican" office-seeker; the political colonel, to whom the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... that a truly artistic people, who are also somewhat immoral, would have developed much skill in the portrayal of the nude female form. But such an attempt does not seem to have been made until recent times, and in imitation of Western art. At least such attempts have not been recognized as art nor have they been preserved as such. I have never ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... that this maiden of the sixties could have created and left to posterity such an adequate, convincing and psychologically perfect portrayal of a woman of the South in the era that closed with the surrender at Appomattox.... Not a page of the story could be spared. No one can wonder at the intense courage and bravery of the Southern soldiers after reading with what passionate faith and devotion these fiery-hearted ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... or semi-nonsense the fashion of which Sterne borrowed from Rabelais, without Rabelais's excuse for adopting it. To us of this day the real charm and distinction of the book is due to the marvellous combination of vigour and subtlety in its portrayal of character, and in the purity and delicacy of its humour. Those last two apparently paradoxical substantives are chosen advisedly, and employed as the most convenient way of introducing that disagreeable question which no commentator ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... "It is curiously convincing. The characters, too are peculiarly real.... Each and every one stands out with vivid distinction, and is not soon to be forgotten.... The portrayal of local life, particularly that appertaining to operatic circles, is full of freshness and interest.... It is well written, it is nobly felt, it ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... however much tending tardily to do justice to a particular lady, cannot terminate wholesomely. But he became a gallant partisan. His portrayal of Mr. Warwick to his wife and his friends was fine caricature. 'The fellow had his hand up at my first word—stood like a sentinel under inspection. "Understand, Sir Lukin, that I receive you simply as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with a depressed spirit that Whistling Dick passed the old French market on his chosen route down the river. For safety's sake he still presented to the world his portrayal of the part of the worthy artisan on his way to labour. A stall-keeper in the market, undeceived, hailed him by the generic name of his ilk, and "Jack" halted, taken by surprise. The vender, melted by this proof of his own acuteness, bestowed a foot ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... of '98'. For power and blunt realism there was nothing like it, but the character of the hero was torn in the shreds of debate. There was general agreement on two points: that the portrayal of the desolate Alaskan wild had a touch of "home," and that the heroine ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... portrayal of characters in an old New England town. Dr. Lavendar's fine, kindly wisdom is brought to bear upon the lives of all, permeating the whole volume like the pungent odor of pine, healthful and life giving. "Old Chester Tales" will surely be ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... flame,—the fumes which rose from it were no doubt chiefly responsible for the prevailing perfumes. Behind it was a huge bronze figure, more than life size. It was in a sitting posture, and represented a woman. Although it resembled no portrayal of her I have seen either before or since, I came afterwards to understand that it was meant for Isis. On the idol's brow was poised a beetle. That the creature was alive seemed clear, for, as I looked at it, it ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... (Pleasure), appeared in 1889. As the title implies, it was pervaded with a frank, almost complacent sensuality, which its author has since been inclined to deprecate. Nevertheless, the book received merited praise for its subtle portrayal of character and incident, and its exuberance of phraseology; and more than all, for the promise which it suggested. With the publication of 'L'Innocente,' the author for the first time showed a real seriousness of purpose. His views of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... spite of their lift from level to level above the spectator. But what is the use, what is the use? Am I to abandon the young and younger wisdom with which I have refrained in so many books from attempting the portrayal of any Italian, any English church, and fall into the folly, now that I am old, of trying to say again in words what one of the greatest of Spanish churches says in form, in color? Let me rather turn from that vainest endeavor to the trivialities of sight-seeing ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... heard, the persons whom he met and the friends whom he knew, and he treated them as the writers of short stories in France twenty years ago treated their own Parisian environment. He made an incident the means of illustrating a portrayal of character. Later he was to construct elaborate plots for ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... indifferent to all of earth. What an array of them there are, too! The bare catalogue of their names would fill a volume, and it would not be bad reading to the genuine Dickens lover,—recalling, as each name would, so much of vivid portrayal, and starting so many associations in the mind. But there is no need to repeat the names; the big, dull old world long ago learned them by heart. Nor will they soon be relegated to the shades. While the tide ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... the history of Troilus and Cressida. The lively story, first formed, like so many others, by the French genius, and well, if rather impudently, copied by Colonna; Boccaccio's vivid Italian Cressida; Chaucer's inimitable Pandarus, the first pleasing example of the English talent for humorous portrayal in fiction; the wonderful passage, culminating in a more wonderful single line,[69] of that Dunfermline schoolmaster whom some inconceivable person has declared to be only a poet to "Scotch patriotism"; the great gnomic verses ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... immobility, due to the influence of religion, attached itself, at an early period, to Egyptian art. The artist, in the portrayal of the figures of the gods, was not allowed to change a single line in the conventional form. Hence the impossibility of improvement in sacred sculpture. Wilkinson says that Menes would have recognized the statue of Osiris in the Temple of Amasis. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... towards Swift's politics, misanthropy, and religion. The charge indicates Scott's weakness, and perhaps also much of his strength, as a biographer and critic, for he had no prejudice against the conventional as such, and was never anxious to exhibit special "insight" of any kind. Yet I think his portrayal of Swift has seemed to most readers a clear presentation of a real ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... while in this state at an angle of the garden trying to devote his entire mind to the portrayal of a tree-fern, and vainly endeavouring to prevent Hester Sommers from coming between him and the paper, when he was summoned to attend upon Ben-Ahmed. As this was an event of by no means uncommon occurrence, he listlessly ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... is well known by those who have made a study of the remarkable group of men that formed a charmed literary circle in Concord in the middle of the last century, of whom Ralph Waldo Emerson was the distinguished leader; yet each additional proof gives an added warmth of color and a truer portrayal of the character of this quaint and original follower of the Greek philosophers and ...
— Three Unpublished Poems • Louisa M. Alcott
... the writer must search in his memory, his imagination, and his heart, for the fitting accent; for the flexibility of language and the wealth of words which are needful if he would fully succeed in the portrayal of living creatures; if he would tender the living truth, reproduce in all its light and shade the spectacle of the world, arouse the imagination, and faithfully interpret the mysterious spirit which impregnates matter and is reflected ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... justly appreciative, for the book stamps Thackeray as a fine impressionist, as an artist who skilfully mixes the colours of reality and imagination into a composition of striking scenes and the effective portrayal of character. With extraordinary ability and consistency to the type he works out the gradual evolution of a wild Irish boy, hot-headed in love and fighting, full of daring impetuosity and ignorant vanity, into the ruffianly soldier, the intrepid ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Far above rises the tunnel-vault, whose sheer height is grandly dignified; the arches rest on roughly carved capitals, and the outer rectangle of the piers is displaced for half a column. The rehearsal of these most simple details seems but the writing of "the letter which killeth," and not the portrayal of the spirit that seems to live within these walls. Details which seem so poorly few when read, are nobly so when seen. This small old church has a true religious stateliness, and it seemed as if a priest should bring the Sanctuary-light which says, ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... virtue of Royal decrees, until the will of the National Assembly, at once to be convened, should be promulgated on the subject of the penalty of death. The effects of this decree, as it sped on the lightning's wings, like a saving angel, all over France, may be imagined perhaps, but portrayal is impossible! Who can imagine even the joy, the rapture it brought to many a dungeon-prisoner, who was counting the hours that yet remained to him of life and preceded his awful doom, or to those who sorrowed over his untimely—perchance ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... truth of his statements. No one has any stable reason on which to found denial of De Quincey's statements as to the magnitude of the doses he was able to take; and his frankness and truthfulness is equal to that of any of his detractors. William Rosse Cobbe, in a volume entitled "Dr. Judas, or Portrayal of the Opium Habit," gives with great frankness of confession and considerable purity of diction a record of his own experiences with the drug. One entire chapter of Mr. Cobb's book and several portions of other chapters are devoted to showing that De Quincey was wrong ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... training up a large family in the limited accommodations afforded by a common shoe, we cannot but feel a twinge of compassion for the singular Mrs. HUBBARD and her lovely dog, who "had none," only to have those tears chased away by the arch and guileless portrayal ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... which he feigns; and he never, when alone or in company with Horatio alone, exhibits the signs of that madness. Nor is the dramatic use of this melancholy, again, open to the objections which would justly be made to the portrayal of an insanity which brought the hero to a tragic end. The man who suffers as Hamlet suffers—and thousands go about their business suffering thus in greater or less degree—is considered irresponsible ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... performance the most noteworthy was Fielding, who produced what Richardson and his friends regarded as the "lewd and ungenerous engraftment of 'Joseph Andrews.'" The story has many faults, but the portrayal of Pamela herself is accomplished with the success of a master hand. Richardson died ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... puts it, the Greeks looked on Nature with their minds more than with their hearts, nor ever clung to her with outspoken admiration and affection. And Humboldt, asserting (as I would do) that the portrayal of nature, for her own sake and in all her manifold diversity, was foreign to the Greek idea, declares that the landscape is always the mere background of their picture, while their foreground is filled with the affairs and actions and thoughts of ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Grandmother Cruncher, besieged the ticket-office and packed the exhibition-room, where, upon the platform, elsewise deserted, stood that noble old lady in all her pathetic beauty. Mr. Scollop, in a condition of rapture scarcely possible of portrayal, stood all the afternoon in his private office opening wine for the gentlemen of the press and giving them the fullest information. He truly said he had nothing to conceal. He had made an honest ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... in the poem: nature description, plot construction, character, description, or the portrayal of old life ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... nitrates which fertilize so much of Europe are drawn from the fiercest of South American deserts, and the gold which measures American commerce is mined in the arctic wilds of Alaska or in the almost inaccessible scarps of the western highlands. The description of these regions and the portrayal of their relation to the rest of the world is the purpose of Part I of ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... sketched in bold strokes, of a dinner party in a stately neo-classic dining-room, the table laden with flowers and silver, the bare-throated women with jewels. A more critical eye than Lise's, gazing upon this portrayal of the Valhalla of success, might have detected in the young men, immaculate in evening dress, a certain effort to feel at home, to converse naturally, which their square jaws and square shoulders belied. This was no doubt the fault of the artist's models, who had failed to live up to the part. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... it was necessary as a measure of war." The plea of 1864 was the same as the plea of 1914. In a vivid sketch of Sherman's March, Prof. HENRY E. SHEPHERD, whose North Carolina home, Fayetteville, lay in the track of the invaders (Battles and Leaders, 4, 678) winds up by saying that the portrayal of it "baffles all the resources of literary art and the affluence even of our English speech," and those who know Professor SHEPHERD'S resources and affluence will recognize the desperate nature of the task. As for ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... joys and sorrows, that at times his anguish, both of body and spirit, was poignant and heart-breaking, I know. His interest in and love for his characters were intense as his nature, and is shown nowhere more strongly than in his sufferings during his portrayal of the short life of "Little Nell," like a father he mourned for his little girl—the child of his brain—and he writes: "I am, for the time, nearly dead with work and grief for the loss of my child." Again he writes of her: "You can't imagine (gravely I write and speak) how exhausted I am to-day ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... you may, in the drama or the novel, you will still find, I think, that the character of the physician awaits in its interesting varieties competent portrayal. ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... their paucity of female roles, their mixture of comic and tragic, their reliance on disguise and mistaken identity as motives, their use of improbable or absurd stories; they are Elizabethan also in the qualities of their greatness, their variety of subject, their intense interest in the portrayal of character, the flexibility and audacity of their language, their noble and opulent verse, the exquisite idealism of their romantic love, and their profound analysis of the sources of ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... spark of the genuine literary fire. But Shakespeare was the sun in the firmament: when his light shone, the fires of all contemporaries paled in the contemporary playgoer's eye. There is forcible and humorous portrayal of human frailty and eccentricity in plays of Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson was a classical scholar, which Shakespeare was not. Jonson was as well versed in Roman history as a college tutor. But when Shakespeare ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... Vivid in its portrayal of fascinating college life, the fine young men and women do more than win victories in athletics and in the class-room—they win out in the battle for character. Vigorous in its practical idealism, this is a story to influence ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... opened by that favourite device of Selma Lagerloef, the monologue, through which she pries into the very soul of her characters, in this case Ingmar, son of Ingmar, of Ingmar Farm. Ingmar's monologue at the plow is a subtle portrayal of an heroic battle between the forces of conscience and desire. Although this prelude may be too subjective and involved to be readily digested by readers unfamiliar with the Swedish author's method they will soon follow with intent interest into ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... necessary if the story is to take rank above other stories. The true artist will seek to shape this living substance into the most beautiful and satisfying form, by skillful selection and arrangement of his material, and by the most direct and appealing presentation of it in portrayal and characterization. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... miscellany of anecdote, grave and gay; brief bits of biography and impressionistic portrayal of types, charming glimpses into Parisian life and character, and, above all, descriptions of the city's chief, and, to outward view, sole occupation—the art of enjoying oneself. Tourists have learned that Mr. Smith is able to initiate them into many mysteries uncatalogued or only ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... Mr. Crane has made for himself a permanent place in literature.... Zola himself scarcely has surpassed its tremendous portrayal of throbbing, breathing, moving life."—New ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... AT KING ALFRED'S COURT. By LUCY FOSTER MADISON. Illustrated by IDA WAUGH. This is a strong and well told tale of the 9th century. It is a faithful portrayal of the times, and is replete with historical information. The trying experiences through which the little heroine passes, until she finally becomes one of the great Alfred's family, are most entertainingly set forth. Nothing short of a careful study of the history of the period will give so clear ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... exploits were clearly and forcibly recounted in graphic language. Other explorers were mentioned, but these formed the ground-work of the lecture—a lecture replete with historical interest, and crowded with such a vivid portrayal of incidents that from beginning to end one can see as in a panorama the Great River and all the mighty men whose fame is indissolubly connected with the history of ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... borderman," replied Jonathan. There was a certain dignity or sadness in his answer which reminded Helen of Colonel Zane's portrayal of a borderman's life. It struck her keenly. Here was this young giant standing erect and handsome before her, as rugged as one of the ash trees of his beloved forest. Who could tell when his strong life might be ended ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... given us an accurate as well as picturesque portrayal of the social and political conditions which prevailed in the republic in the era made famous by the second ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... moved, and he then proceeded to arraign the offenders in no light terms, and not one ever forgot the scathing words that fell from his lips or the shame which followed his vivid portrayal of their ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... glaze of gentility extending from his varnished boot-tips to his glossy hat, looked like the "flattered" portrait of a common man—just such an idealized presentment as his own brush might have produced. As a rule, however, he devoted himself to the portrayal of the other sex, painting ladies in syrup, as Arran said, with marsh-mallow children leaning against their knees. He was as quick as a dressmaker at catching new ideas, and the style of his pictures changed as rapidly as that ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... wearisome in the extreme, although he wrote about a man who occupied in his time a commanding position. Because Johnson was Johnson the world accepts Boswell, and loves to talk of the minuteness of Boswell's portrayal, yet how many read him, or if they do read him, have the patience to read him ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... the usual subject-matter of poetry, is perhaps only saying that the poet must be sincere. The mathematician is most sincere when he uses his intellect exclusively, but a reasoned portrayal of passion is bound to falsify, for it leads one insensibly either to understate, or to burlesque, or to indulge in a psychopathic analysis of emotion. [Footnote: Of the latter type of poetry a good example is Edgar Lee Masters' Monsieur ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... gained in the trenches. They heard very little of the capacity for heroism, the eagerness for sacrifice, the gallant self-effacement which having honor for a companion taught. And yet, despite this frantic portrayal of terror, America decided for war. Her National Guard and Volunteers rolled up in millions, clamouring to cross the three thousand miles of water that they might place their lives in jeopardy. They were no more urged by motives of self-interest than were the men who enlisted ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... Unwahrscheinlichkeiten" (Introd. Ps., p. 26, N. 25.) "Jeder Leser," says he, " darin beistimmen, dass ... der erste Act eine so gelungene Exposition darbietet, wie sie die dramatische Poesie nur aufweisen kann." Such a statement must fall, by weight of exaggeration. In appreciation of the portrayal of the name-part he continues: "Mit welch' ueberwaeltigender Herrschaft tritt hier gleich die meisterhaft geschilderte Hauptperson hervor! Welche packende Kraft, welche hinreissende verve liegt in dem reichen Dialoge, der wie beseelt von der feurigen Energie des begabten Menschen, ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... in him, or give voice to his belief that some day he would dominate them all. The restlessness and discomfort, and at the same time the sense of unknown and fascinating possibilities which are the birthright of talented youth, and in the portrayal of which Balzac is supreme, must have been well known to him by experience; and his almost Oriental love of beauty and luxury made his life ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... unprecedented and fervid comradeship which is his leading element. It is printed almost verbatim, just as the notes were jotted down at the time and on the spot. It is impossible to read it without the feeling of tears, while there is elsewhere no such portrayal of the common soldier, and such appreciation of him, as is contained in its pages. It is heart's blood, every word of it, and along with "Drum-Taps" is the only literature of the war thus far entirely characteristic and worthy of serious mention. There are in particular two passages in the ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... the Elizabethans by embodying in story and incident his portrayal of character. Because of admiration for the revelation of character in his greatest plays, modern readers forget their moving incidents,—for instance, the almost blood-curdling appearances of a ghost, the actions of a crazed woman, the killing of an eavesdropper on the stage, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of us live longer than about one hundred and sixty years—at about that age most of us decide to pass. When this tapestry wall is finished, it will not be simply form and color, as it is now. It will be a portrayal of the history of Norlamin from the first cooling of the planet. It will, in all probability, require thousands of years for its completion. You see, time is of little importance to us, and workmanship is everything. My companion will continue working upon it until we decide to pass; ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... biographer, claims subsequently to have applied to the life of Carlyle his own rule; and all the world knows that in the portrayal of Carlyle's faults of character the biographer left many a sting in the hearts of those who had loved the great man while he lived and who felt that the failings on which the historian had dwelt ought to have ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... remarkable book in its strength of portrayal and its directness of development. It cannot be read without being remembered."—The ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... portrayal of greed shocked the susceptibilities, but it was the hideous human attributes patent in the brute that disgusted the imagination. With a terrible cunning of mind and brush the artist had laid bare a vice that ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... actualities of Japanese life to awaken a throb of emotion in the Occidental heart. Without such a throb a drama is naught—a sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. The charm of Loti's book lies in its marvellously beautiful portrayal of a country, a people, and a characteristic incident in the social life of that people. Its interest as a story, outside of the charm of its telling, is like that excited by inspection of an exotic curio. In his dedication of the book the author ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Creoles are traditional to all the little aristocracies surviving, in fiction, from some more substantial day. Yet in spite of these conventions his better novels have a texture of genuine vividness and beauty. In their portrayal of the manners of New Orleans they have many points of quiet satire and censure that betray a critical intelligence working seriously behind them. That critical disposition in Mr. Cable led him to disagree ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... arranged in a group on a table before me. I had a great deal of difficulty with the rose; so after struggling for about half an hour I got up and, unobserved, put the rose behind the vase, so that only its stem was visible to me. Then I took a fresh page and began again. The result was a very fair portrayal of the articles as they then appeared. So with my ideal of marriage—when I found its arrangement impossible to portray in my life—I simply slipped out of sight that for which the red rose is sometimes the symbol (I mean ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... broncho, which is docile under the pack saddle, "bucked" as I mounted him this morning; but I kept my seat in the saddle without difficulty. Walter Trumbull, however, on my return to-night, presented me with a sketch which he says is a faithful portrayal of both horse and rider in the acrobatic act. I think the sketch is an exaggeration, and that I hugged the saddle in better form than ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... Love as is well known having nothing to do with reason, being insensible to forebodings and even blind to evidence, the surrender of those two beings to a precarious bliss has nothing very astonishing in itself; and its portrayal, as he attempts it, lacks dramatic interest. The sentimental interest could only have a fascination for readers themselves actually in love. The response of a reader depends on the mood of the moment, so much so that a book may ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... things that cannot be recorded! facts too startling, and at the same time, too delicately intricate, to admit a public portrayal, or meet the public gaze; But the cheek can blush in secret at the true images which memory evokes, and the oppressed mind shrinks back, in horror, from the dark shadows which have saddened and overwhelmed it. ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... any work of art. Each is the portrayal of some generality in concrete form. The concrete is understood by anybody who knows enough to recognize it. The generality can be discovered only by him who has a similar imagination, and hence each one draws a different generalization from the same work of art. This variety ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... a German critic has of late reminded us that the one test which the most authoritative and dramatic portrayal of the Day of Judgment offers, is the social test. The stern questions are not in regard to personal and family relations, but did ye visit the poor, the criminal, the sick, and ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... passion for composition, and chiefly for autobiography, and his head was full of that curious performance, Der Weisse Konig, which occupied many of the leisure moments of his life, being dictated to his former writing-master, Marcus Sauerwein. He had already designed the portrayal of his father as the old white king, and himself as the young white king, in a series of woodcuts illustrating the narrative which culminated in the one romance of his life, his brief happy marriage with Mary of Burgundy; and he continued eagerly to talk ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of parts and a masterly gradation of tones which did not belong, in the same fulness, to "The Scarlet Letter." There is, besides, a larger range of character, in this second work, and a much more nicely detailed and reticulated portrayal of the individuals. Hepzibah is a painting on ivory, yet with all the warmth of a real being. Very noticeable is the delicate veneration and tenderness for her with which the author seems to inspire us, notwithstanding the fact ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... York, as editor of the Anti-Slavery Standard, she found a pleasant home at the residence of the genial philanthropist, Isaac T. Hopper, whose remarkable life she afterwards wrote. Her portrayal of this extraordinary man, so brave, so humorous, so tender and faithful to his convictions of duty, is one of the most readable pieces of biography in English literature. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in a discriminating ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... unsophisticated, and tender character of their heroism are not pure fables invented by the fancy of a poet or the credulity of a monk. If the accuracy of historical narrative must not be looked for in them, their moral truth must be recognized in their portrayal of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... splendid as is its diction, and vigorous though be the portrayal of the miserable creature to whom the poem relates, most certainly lacks 'a gracious somewhat,' whilst no less certainly is it marred by a most unfeeling coarseness. A poem about love it may be—a love-poem it is not. Of ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Staff, who naturally enough regard the personality of Punch with a good deal more than ordinary loyal sentiment and esprit de corps. It is interesting to observe the different views the artists have severally taken of it, for most of them in turn have attempted his portrayal. Brine regarded him as a mere buffoon, devoid of either dignity or breeding; Crowquill, as a grinning, drum-beating Showman; Doyle, Thackeray, and others adhered to the idea of the Merry, but certainly not ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... to-day, both in the forenoon and afternoon, has been a certain personage whose identity you ought to be able to infer when I say that, of all persons now on earth, he is absolutely the one best able, and the only one fully able, to judge how accurate your portrayal of nineteenth-century conditions has been. Lest the knowledge should disturb your equanimity, I have refrained from telling you, until the present moment, that we have present with us this afternoon a no less distinguished visitor ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... hugging and kissing her like this—" Billy went into an ecstasy of portrayal. Suddenly, however, he reeled into sanity, for Jude had struck him across the cheek with the back of a ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... six-year-old spoiled darling of an over-indulgent gentleman of great fortune, and Harry Sandford, wonderfully perfect son of a "plain, honest farmer," are placed under the tuition of a minister-philosopher, named Barlow. This philosopher is evidently Mr. Day's fictitious portrayal of himself. The story given below is one of a number by means of which the "encyclopedic" Barlow educates Tommy and Harry. Another story from this group, "Androcles and the Lion," may be found in the fables (No. 214). Sandford and Merton is still, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... heart. Others still had been captivated by the boyish and unstudied drollery of Walter Scott, only to be swept away by a whirlwind of passionate appeal and terrible invective, or to be melted with the tenderness of his portrayal of the love of Jesus. And all these came to Kansas bearing a great cause in their hearts, and determined to build up here such churches as they had left behind them. But this was not all. Here were not only people among the ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... life was given by Warner in a work which was published about forty years later. It is the volume entitled "Being a Boy." Nowhere has there been drawn a truer or more vivid picture of rural New England. Nowhere else can there be found such a portrayal of the sights and sounds, the pains and pleasures of life on a farm as seen from the point of view of a boy. Here we have them all graphically represented: the daily "chores" that must be looked after; the driving of cows to and from the pasture; the clearing up of fields ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... pagan, pirate, pearl-hunter, is found, are absorbing. Hidden treasure, mutinies, tropic love, all these are here. The book thrills with its incident and arouses admiration for its splendid character portrayal. ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... with its restrictions. Facts and ideas are all within the province of fiction. The intellect of an incisive moralist, like La Bruyere, the power of treating character as Moliere could treat it, the grand machinery of a Shakespeare, together with the portrayal of the most subtle shades of passion (the one treasury left untouched by our predecessors)—for all this the modern novel affords free scope. How far superior is all this to the cut-and-dried logic-chopping, the cold analysis to the ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... usually a novel, and then he would take her upon his lap and call her his "dear little spook, the household ghost that would soon cease to cast a shadow;" and she, with a languid curiosity, would easily beguile from him a portrayal of the scenes through which he had just passed. She cared little for them, but from his stores of vitality and strength he imparted life to her, and without understanding why, she ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... vegetation, its light-hearted, witty populace, and she wrote of them with rare insight and exquisite tenderness. Tasked with having idealized them, she replied:—"Many years of unremitting study, pursued con amore, justify me in assuring those who find fault with my portrayal of popular life that they are less acquainted with them than I am." And in another place she says:—"It is amongst the people that we find the poetry of Spain and of her chronicles. Their faith, their character, their sentiment, all bear the seal of originality and of romance. Their ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... foreseeing that if I should survive this adventure I should write its history, I resolved immediately to note down some details of the state of affairs in Paris at the end of this day, the second of the coup d'etat. I wrote this page, which I reproduce here, because it is a life-like portrayal—a sort ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... without loss to the development of the narrative and the idea, which are always mutually illustrative to a degree not often attained in any species of modern art. . . . His language, though extraordinarily accurate, is always light and free. . . . We know of nothing equal to it, in its way [the portrayal of Dimmesdale], in the whole circle of English literature;' and much more ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... the marvellous ingenuity of plot, the power and subtlety of the portrayal of character, the charm of the romantic environment,—the entire atmosphere, indeed,—rank this novel at once among the great creations."—The ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... which, as the French officer from whom the extract is taken says, "appears now almost grotesque, but which is only an exact portrayal of the sea manners of the day, the whole squadron was lost on a group of rocks known as the Aves Islands. Such were the officers." The flag-captain, in another part of his report, says: "The shipwreck resulted from the general ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... the scene the audience raised a tumultuous roar of appreciation. The portrayal of the type was so exact, so sure and thorough, that the leading characters in the play were forgotten. After repeated calls, Hargraves came before the curtain and bowed, his rather boyish face bright and flushed ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... In the preface and introduction, characterized by an ample command of the resources of the subject, easy discursiveness and lively criticism, he puts the reader in possession of such preliminary information as he will like or need to have. The body of the work begins with a portrayal of America as it appeared to its earliest discoverers and explorers. The second chapter is devoted to the Jesuit missionaries, who, reviving the spirit of the Crusades, plunged into the wilderness to convert the aborigines to Christianity, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... that neither of the two Gentlemen conducted themselves so, as to overcome an ordinary Share of Virtue" (p. 24). Nevertheless the discussion in the Critical Remarks is thrown out of balance by exaggerated talk about the portrayal of licentious scenes. ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... indeed little in epic poetry to surpass the high simplicity of this loving portrayal of a ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... cough, but added, "He is not in the path of safety who bestows that which is not his own but is held in trust. I were foully to blame if I let this grim portrayal so work on you as to lead you to beggar not only yourself, but your brother, with ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... trait which the author seems to take the most pleasure in depicting is the passionate loyalty of a girl to her lover or of a young wife to her husband, and her portrayal of this trait has feeling, and is set off by an unconventional style and brisk movement.—The ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... and this story, which is the content of the idea of country, is in general a narrative assuming a certain artistic form in which facts are treated at least selectively, and usually imaginatively. This work of portrayal of the life of a nation by its story is consciously or unconsciously an appeal to the will; it is given artistic rather than scientific form for this reason. Its purpose is to present a national spirit, or ideal, or principle, and also to persuade the mind ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... attention of the so-called select few, I believe that his finest task is that of giving back to a multitude their own thoughts and conceptions, illuminated, enlarged, and if needful, purged, perfected, transfigured. The making of a play that shall be closely observant in its portrayal of character, moral in purpose, dignified in expression, stirring in its development, yet not beyond our possible experience of life; a drama, the unfolding of whose story shall be watched intently, responsively, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... silence, with, at the end, a slight smile for the exactitude of his: "Perhaps I hope that we never shall be;"—and she paused now as if his portrayal of her own wants required consideration. "Perhaps," she said at length, "perhaps I never cared so much about all ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... understanding of those days that the author has labored to draw from his ancestor's notes a new and striking portrayal of the frontier; one which shall paint the fever of freedom, that powerful impulse which lured so many to unmarked graves; one which shall show his work, his love, the effect of the causes which rendered his life so ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... shades. Turgeneff is most renowned artistically for the landscapes which are scattered through his works, and principally portray the nature of his native locality, central Russia. Equally famous, and executed with no less mastery and art, are his portrayal and analysis of the various vicissitudes of the tender passion, and in this respect, he was regarded as a connoisseur of the feminine heart. A special epithet, "the bard of love," was often applied to him. Along with a series of masculine types, Turgeneff's ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... serve admirably for a portrayal of the Bell telephone, except that it mentions distinctly the use of the make-and-break method (i. e., where the circuit is necessarily opened and closed as in telegraphy, although, of course, at an enormously higher rate), ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Part I of The Road to Damascus is at the same time a free creation of fantasy and a drama of portrayal. The elements of realism are starkly manifest, but they are moulded and hammered into a work of art by a force of combinative imagination rising far above the task of mere descriptive realism. The scenes unroll themselves ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... "Emma Bovary" are studies in the same feminine type; one a finished and complete portrayal, the other a hasty sketch, but the theme is essentially the same. Both women belong to a class, not large, but forever clamoring in our ears, that demands more romance out of life than God put into it. Mr. G. Barnard Shaw would say that they are the victims of ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... the tenth installment of The Hazards of Hortense. He passed before the lively portrayal in colours of Hortense driving a motor car off an open drawbridge. The car was already halfway between the bridge and the water beneath. He sneered openly at the announcement: "Beulah Baxter in the Sensational Surprise Picture of the Century." ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... operation. Here was a message, which every slave, however ignorant and illiterate could read. His instinct would tell him, wherever he saw the pictured horror, that a friend, not an enemy, had drawn it, but for what purpose? What was the secret meaning, which he was to extract from a portrayal of his woes at once so real and terrible. Was it to be a man, to seize the knife, the torch, to slay and burn his way to the rights and estate of a man? Garrison had put no such bloody import into the cut. It was designed not to appeal ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... two further with reference to the poem, its character, and its place in German literature. Its theme is the ancient Teutonic ideal of "Treue" (faithfulness or fidelity), which has found here its most magnificent portrayal; faithfulness unto death, the loyalty of the vassal for his lord, as depicted in Hagen, the fidelity of the wife for her husband, as shown by Kriemhild, carried out with unhesitating consistency to the bitter end. This is not the gallantry of medieval chivalry, which colors so largely the ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... vivid and powerful portrayal of New York life. It is the third in a trilogy, being in a way a sequel to "A Little Journey in the World" and ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... makers is being determined. The trials now in progress in Nurnberg-and those soon to begin in Tokyo—bring before the bar of international justice those individuals who are charged with the responsibility for the sufferings of the past six years. We have high hope that this public portrayal of the guilt of these evildoers will bring wholesale and permanent revulsion on the part of the masses of our former enemies against war, militarism, aggression, and notions of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... Saint Francois presents his order to the Pope, that was his best work.... Then, there is a cardinal, with his fingers on his lips, thus!" another gesture. "Well, I remember it, you see, because there is an anecdote. It is portrayed on a wall—oh, a grand portrayal, but without the subject, flutt!".... and he made a hissing sound with his lips, "while Pier della Francesca, Carnevale, Melozzo,".... he paused to find a word which would express the very complicated thought in his head, and he concluded: "That ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... house of Laius. The tetralogy to which it belonged consisted of the 'Laius,' 'Oedipus,' 'Seven Against Thebes,' and 'Sphinx.' The themes of Greek tragedy were drawn from the national mythology, but the myths were treated with a free hand. In his portrayal of the fortunes of this doomed race, Aeschylus departed in important particulars, with gain in dramatic effect, from the story as it ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... tree of knowledge and speaking to Adam and Eve. This represents the serpent in the act of commending to our first parents the knowl- 92:15 edge of good and evil, a knowledge gained from matter, or evil, instead of from Spirit. The portrayal is still graphically accurate, for the common conception of mor- 92:18 tal man - a burlesque of God's man - is an outgrowth of human knowledge or sensuality, a ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Racine has achieved his most remarkable triumphs; and the fact that so subtle and penetrating a critic as M. Lemaitre has chosen to devote the greater part of a volume to the discussion of his characters shows clearly enough that Racine's portrayal of human nature has lost nothing of its freshness and vitality with the passage of time. On the contrary, his admirers are now tending more and more to lay stress upon the brilliance of his portraits, the combined vigour and intimacy ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... his imagination open up to him just conceptions; so that in the field of both healthy and morbid mental action his 'intuitive' knowledge was unerring. 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is so true to the real in conception, and so consummate in portrayal, that the more one knows about the mind, the more he inclines to wonder whether these compositions might not have been aided by actual personal experience. Yet these delineations are purely imaginative. Take ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... soon learnt how vile such service may be in the studios of any of the canaglia poor Rosina knew, but Camille, that sheep in wolf's clothing, was safe enough. What there was in him of perversity, of brute force, he expended in the portrayal of his subtly beautiful furies. His art was feverishly decadent, and those who judge a man by his work might suppose him to be a monster of iniquity. He was, in fact, an extremely clever and rather worldly-wise boy who ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... alone—thinking of you," he told her. "To me all that is fine beyond words I try to translate into music. Where words—even poetry—fail, notes begin. So at the piano I tried to express something like a portrayal of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... possessed of vast wealth, is seeking to further the happiness of others where riches will assist. Of course the denouement shattered many sumptuous air castles but it left the profession the richer by a faithful portrayal. It is in the development of this tale that Allison, ever seeking an opportunity to draw amusement from his friends, created a fine occasion through a reminiscent conversation between Major Kilgore and Colonel Hamilton to inject a famous Southern quartette, Clarence ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... heaven of any faith but ideal reiteration and prolongation of happy experiences remembered—the dream of dead days resurrected for us, and made eternal? And if you think this Japanese ideal too simple, too naive, if you say there are experiences of the material life more worthy of portrayal in a picture of heaven than any memory of days passed in Japanese gardens and temples and tea- houses, it is perhaps because you do not know Japan, the soft, sweet blue of its sky, the tender colour of its waters, the gentle splendour of its sunny days, the exquisite charm of its interiors, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... The portrayal in the story of city life from the back windows of the hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox; there are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the stable, the spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... original form of the myth, which must have represented the descent as forced and not voluntary, has been modified by the introduction of a new factor,—the search for her dead consort, Tammuz. The character of Ishtar as the goddess of war[1167] may also have influenced this portrayal of her rage. In her violence, she threatens a conflict between the dead and the living. The former will destroy[1168] the latter, as a victorious army butchers the hostile host. The watchman endeavors to ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... direct study of the literature itself. This study in turn should aim first at an understanding of the literature as an expression of the authors' views of life and of their personalities and especially as a portrayal and interpretation of the life of their periods and of all life as they have seen it; it should aim further at an appreciation of each literary work as a product of Fine Art, appealing with peculiar power both to our minds and to our emotions, not least to the sense ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... of Moral Philosophy, who lived to be ninety years old. There was, therefore, a combination of Lux et Veritas in the blood of young Louis Stevenson, which in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde took the form of a luminous portrayal of ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lines retrace one of the thousands of daily dramas which compose modern Russian history. The work of Andreyev brings to us a sad vibrant echo of the sobs which ring out in Russian dungeons. And this faithful portrayal of events, events so frequent that they no longer move us from our indifference, when we find the echo of them in the press, will raise in the conscience of Andreyev's readers a cry of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... The refinement of the four principles, as age steals upon them, adds an element that is somehow lacking from the former books. They now hail from different spheres, which lends richness to their portrayal. Aramis is the man of God, with a scheme always in the works. Athos is the dignified, retired nobleman, whose only concerns are debts left unpaid and the launching of his son into the world. Porthos is a great baron, ever ready to help, ever ...
— Dumas Commentary • John Bursey
... the method of the modern writer of fiction, that Nature has almost become to the novelist what light and shade are to the painter—the one permanent element of style; and if the power of A Village Tragedy be due to its portrayal of human life, no small portion of its charm comes ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... life,—the expected return of her husband. Some of these songs also have been written by poetesses, such as Lady Nairn's exquisite "Land of the Leal;" and really there is such delicacy, such minute accuracy in the portrayal of a woman's feelings in "Are ye sure the news is true?" that one cannot help thinking it must have been written by Jean Adams, or some woman, rather ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... if you will, but not resemblances. Marryat entered the navy earlier than his rival, and followed the sea longer; his experience was in every way wider. Even in my time could be seen justifications of his portrayal; but who ever saw the like of Tom ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... did not come to laugh, they would not come at all. Mockery is the price he must pay for a hearing. Or has he calculated to a nicety the power of reaction? Does he seek to drive us to aspiration by the portrayal of sordidness, to disinterestedness by the picture of selfishness, to illusion by disillusionment? It is impossible to believe that he is unconscious of the humor of his dramatic situations, yet he stoically gives no sign. He even dares the charge, terrible ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... author's fierce indignation against all shams, deceits, and social lies. Therefore he calls a spade a spade, and leaves you to blush if you are so inclined. The young girls whom he introduces are mostly misses in their teens, and his portrayal of them is physiological rather than pictorial. The points which he selects for comment are those which would particularly be noted by their medical advisers; and the progress of their histories, as he follows them, is characterized by this same scientific minuteness of observation. Zola's ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... at King Manuel's Court. When he began to write the classical drama was unknown and it is absurd to judge his work by the Aristotelean theory of the unities of time and place. His idea of drama was not dramatic action nor the development of character but realistic portrayal of types and the contrast between them. His first piece, Auto da Visita[c,]am, has not even dialogue—its alternative title is O Monologo do Vaqueiro—and for comic element it relies on the contrast between ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... attributed to Him by the Synoptics, it presents to us a personage so enwrapped in mystery and dignity as altogether to transcend ordinary human nature. This transcendent Personality is indeed the avowed centre of the whole record, and His portrayal is its avowed purpose. Yet whilst the writer never clearly reveals to us who he himself is, it is equally manifest that his own convictions constitute the matrix in which the discourses and events are imbedded, and that there is nothing ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... Mr. Brumley as he was, I have perhaps a little neglected to show him as Lady Harman saw him. We have employed the inconsiderate verisimilitude of a novelist repudiating romance in his portrayal; towards her he kept a better face. He was at least a very honest lover and there was little disingenuousness in the flow of fine mental attitudes that met her; the thought and presence of her made him fine; as soon ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... The portrayal of the content of a myth in the manner followed here must not be confused with a merely symbolical or even allegorical interpretation of myths. This is not intended. The images forming the contents of a myth are not ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... could get some men to match them I would have some corking characters to begin with. But no kind of pen-and-ink picture of Elizabeth would do her justice. Her sweetness of speech when she is particularly nasty is beyond the power of human portrayal. I got in bed quick when she said she wanted to talk, because I was afraid I might have to hit something, and the pillow was the only thing I could manage without sound. I put it where I could give it a dig when politeness required control, and ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... carried it into favor with the New York audience that nightly crowded the theatre in which it was being presented. The star, a young woman of exceptional talent, almost a great artist, had by her remarkable portrayal of the leading role sprung from obscurity to ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... followed, and in 1873 "A Princess of Thule" attained great popularity. Retiring from journalism the next year he devoted himself entirely to fiction. A score of novels followed, the last in 1898, just before his death on December 10 of that year. No novelist has lavished more tender care on the portrayal of his heroines, or worked up more delicately a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... capital. Some of the ablest work done in literature, in our time, has been produced out of an earnest desire to abolish the more recent types of this white slavery, which has, in one form or another, threatened the masses since the days of old John Ball of early England. Perhaps the strongest portrayal, yet, of many phases of the question, especially those relating to the city, maybe found in Mr. Howells' story, "A Hazard of New Fortunes." For the country, if one really wants to see what is behind the ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... furthest flights of inspired imagination, the prophet never dreamed that God Himself would stoop to become the trodden path to Himself, and that the way of holiness was no other than that Divine Servant who so often stood before Him for portrayal. "I am the way," ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... the fight in depicting the firing of the brig on the approaching row-boats of the enemy. This he has accomplished with consummate skill. He has herein, as in all his other battle scenes on the water, avoided the portrayal of carnage and destruction of human life in lurid colors as is the custom with most painters. He has left these abhorrent scenes to the imagination, and has thereby rendered his pictures, while suggesting all the dreadful accompaniments of warfare, chaste, and free from ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... when I began this chapter, was to say something about desperadoism in the "flush times" of Nevada. To attempt a portrayal of that era and that land, and leave out the blood and carnage, would be like portraying Mormondom and leaving out polygamy. The desperado stalked the streets with a swagger graded according to the number of his homicides, and a nod of recognition from him was sufficient to make ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... their superior self-consciousness when passing through radical social changes, and by virtue also of their power of literary portrayal of experience, have set down for us, for all time, the way by which man attained his unlimited power over woman and ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... Madrid has been the refuge of lo castizo. It has been a theatre of manners and local types and customs, of observation and natural history, where a rather specialized well-trained audience accustomed to satire as the tone of daily conversation was tickled by any portrayal of its quips and cranks. A tradition of character-acting grew up nearer that of the Yiddish theatre than of any other stage we know in America. Benavente and the brothers Quintero have been the playwrights who most typified the school that has been in vogue since the ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... to the portrayal of scenes, incidents, and celebrated people in the highest perfection of the ...
— Wholesale Price List of Newspapers and Periodicals • D. D. Cottrell's Subscription Agency
... that America has something of its own to offer the world,—a style developed within the last, two decades. The prime movement of the times presenting boldness, brilliance and a laxity of detail in portrayal, the art of America, as shown in this exhibition, embodies these characteristics without emphasizing them. Keeping in mind the fact that the Palace contains little American art earlier than 1905, American artists are showing marked individualities, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... foreign travel. {42b} To Italy, it is true, and especially to cities of Northern Italy, like Venice, Padua, Verona, Mantua, and Milan, he makes frequent and familiar reference, and he supplied many a realistic portrayal of Italian life and sentiment. But the fact that he represents Valentine in the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' (I. i. 71) as travelling from Verona to Milan by sea, and Prospero in 'The Tempest' as embarking on a ship at the gates of Milan (I. ii. 129-44), renders it almost impossible ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... truth. In this group are found Egils Saga, known at second hand to Warton, the Eyrbyggja Saga, translated by Walter Scott, and the Laxdaela Saga. It is the Laxdaela Saga that gives the story told by Morris in "The Lovers of Gudrun." Among sagas it is famous for its fine portrayal of character. ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... last time we saw her she wore a smiling and happier countenance. This dreadful experience, however, permanently wrecked her health, so that she could be of but slight service to her new guardians; but they, through wise and loving treatment, through portrayal of Jesus in word as well as in deed, were doing all they could do for this little shorn lamb, doing their best to aid in helping to eliminate her awful past—a task by no means easy. Poor unfortunate, sinned-against little Rosa! Her life forever ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... life particular, the social life of to-day. It is not nice; neither is the social life of to-day nice. One lays the book down sick at heart—sick for life with all its "lyings and its lusts." But it is a healthy book. So fearful is its portrayal of social disease, so ruthless its stripping of the painted charms from vice, that its tendency cannot but be strongly for good. It is a goad, to prick sleeping human consciences awake and drive them into ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... dramatist who declares his end to be mere self-expression stultifies himself in that very phrase. The painter may paint, the sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself,[5] but the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. "The public," it has been well said, "constitutes the theatre." The moment a playwright ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... a character in the piece, a vicious old man, that from the beginning Vane had wanted me to play. I had disliked the part and had refused, choosing instead to act a high-souled countryman, in the portrayal of whose irreproachable emotions I had taken pleasure. Vane now renewed his arguments, and my power of resistance seeming to have departed from me, I accepted the exchange. Certainly the old gentleman's scenes went with more snap, but at a cost of further degradation to myself. Upon ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... Kenny in a painter's smock intent upon a palette, vividly, whimsically, delightfully Kenny. There was tenderness and sympathy in Sid's portrayal. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... now, the charm being counter-charmed) against the wall—the half-frightened, half-curious Court ladies and Court servants thronging in—the apparition of Urraca,—all this gives a picture of extraordinarily dramatic power. It reminds one a little of Spenser's famous portrayal of Britomart disturbed at night, and the comparison of the two brings out all sorts ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Hapgood's portrayal of the American workingman is a 'moving picture' in two senses of this equivocal phrase. It is kinetoscopic, first of all, in its lifelikeness and the convincing reality of the actions it pictures. Then, again, it is emotionally ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... words, you will vacillate from one method to the other and strike crude discords of phrasing. Of course if you switch methods intelligently and of purpose, that is quite another matter. An abstract discussion may be enlivened by a concrete illustration. A concrete narrative or portrayal may be given weight and rationalized by generalization. Moreover many things lie on the borderland between the two domains and may properly be attached to either. Thus the abstraction is legitimate when you say or write: "A man wishes to acquire the comforts and luxuries, as well as the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... understand that you will not interfere with or harm them, and they will go about their own affairs unafraid in your presence. Then you may silently watch their manner of living, their often amusing habits, and their frank portrayal of character. As a guest in the wild, conducting yourself as a courteous guest should, you will be well treated by your wild hosts, some of whom, in time, may even permit you to feed and stroke them. They do not dislike but fear you; they would rather be your friends than your enemies. ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... world of the materialist, moves onward from a predetermined beginning to a helpless and tragic close. And yet few books have been written of deeper and more permanent fascination than these. Their grim veracity; the creative sympathy and steady dispassionateness of their portrayal of mankind; their constancy of motive, and their sombre earnestness, have been surpassed by none. This earnestness is worth dwelling upon for a moment. It bears no likeness to the dogmatism of the bigot or the fanaticism of ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... creatures, before whom heavenly illusions float, surrender themselves to each other, taste all the raptures of confidential conversation, lift veil after veil till every secret is bare, and, hand in hand, with glowing feet, tread the paths of paradise Perhaps a more impassioned portrayal of this kind of union is not to be found in literature than the picture in "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," which Shakespeare makes Helena hold before Hermia, when the death of their love was threatened by the appearance ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... everything in a comedy or a drama is a representation, exact as possible, of the manners and characters of the dramatis persona of the play; and perhaps the conditions under which the play was written do not allow such representation. The exact and studied portrayal of a character demands from the author long preparation, and cannot be accomplished in a few hours. From, the first scene to the last, each tale must be posed in the author's mind exactly as it will be proved to be at the end. It is the author's aim and ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... added for puritanical effect. In Crusoe, Defoe brought the realistic adventure story to a very high stage of its development; but his works hardly deserve, to be classed as true novels, which must subordinate incident to the faithful portrayal of ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long |
