"Fantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inaccessible situation chosen by this strange fraternity for their convent—their rigid separation from human intercourse—the infringible taciturnity imposed upon themselves—and the terrible severity of their penances, are certainly circumstances more resembling the visionary indulgence of fantasy and fiction, than actual realities to be met with among living men, ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... appeared once or twice in the "pro mags," as fans designate journals like this one. The other was Randall Garrett, who had previously sold a respectable number of stories to various magazines in the science fiction and fantasy field. ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to wreathe thy tomb, One tear: so far, so far am I From what to me and thee was home, And where in all men's fantasy, Butchered, O God! ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... with a sudden flash of amusement, or fantasy—'I agree, Monsieur! on a condition. To prove your penitence, you shall ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... Peter the Great—who imagined that all the nations were delivered into the hand of Tsardom—can do nothing. It can do nothing because it does not exist. It has vanished for ever at last, and as yet there is no new Russia to take the place of that ill- omened creation, which, being a fantasy of a madman's brain, could in reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... any rate, on the night after the reading of it, just as he went to sleep, or on the following morning just as he awoke, he cannot tell which, there came to him the title and the outlines of this fantasy, including the command with which it ends. With a particular clearness did he seem to see the picture of the Great White Road, "straight as the way of the Spirit, and broad as the breast of Death," and of the little Hare travelling towards the ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... the FBI—the Fantasy Bureau of Investigation! Learning of a monster meeting of science fiction "fen" in New York, I teleported myself 3,000 miles from the Pacificoast to check the facts on the monsters. And it was true—the 14th World SciFi Con ...
— Out of This World Convention • Forrest James Ackerman
... been snowed in. Snow drifted the road in hills and hollows, and hung in little eddying wreaths, where the wind took it, on the pasture slopes. It made solid banks in the dooryards, and buried the stone walls out of sight. The lacework of its fantasy became daintily apparent in the conceits with which it broidered over all the common objects familiar in homely lives. The pump, in yards where that had supplanted the old-fashioned curb, wore a heavy mob-cap. The vane on the barn was delicately sifted over, and the top ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... gentlewomen in [4811]Balthazar Castilio fall in love with a young man whom they never knew, but only heard him commended: or by reading of a letter; for there is a grace cometh from hearing, [4812] as a moral philosopher informeth us, "as well from sight; and the species of love are received into the fantasy by relation alone:" [4813]ut cupere ab aspectu, sic velle ab auditu, both senses affect. Interdum et absentes amamus, sometimes we love those that are absent, saith Philostratus, and gives instance in his friend Athenodorus, that loved a maid at Corinth whom he never saw; ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... window, and seated herself, in her impulsive way, at the organ. Her fingers touched the keys timidly at first as she began a trembling prelude of her own fantasy. In music her pent-up feelings found congenial expression. The fire kindled, and she presently burst out with the voice of a seraph in that glorious psalm, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... sometimes sitting in the shade like a goddess, sometimes singing like an angel, sometimes playing like Orpheus; behold the sorrow of this world! once amiss hath bereaved me of all. O glory, that only sdineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars but that of fantasy: all affections their relenting but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship but adversity, only when is grace witnessed but in offences? There were no divinity but by reason of compassion; for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times past, the loves, the sighs, the sorrows, the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... accidentally destroyed in manuscript he proceeded with fine courage to rewrite it, and he published the whole book in 1837. It brought him the recognition which he sought. Like 'Sartor Resartus' it has much subjective coloring, which here results in exaggeration of characters and situations, and much fantasy and grotesqueness of expression; but as a dramatic and pictorial vilification of a great historic movement it was and remains unique, and on the whole no history is more brilliantly enlightening and profoundly instructive. Here, as in most of his later works, Carlyle throws the emphasis ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... of the kind that rises to the top of the mountains and sinks again to the lowest vales. She had been on the tip-top of the hills of her own fantasy all that evening. When she ran quickly home under the stars she began to realize what she had done She had done something of which her mother would have been ashamed. Not for a moment had Kathleen thought of ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... as he came in again, remarked: "I don't mind telling you that I enjoyed very much writing my Tambourin Chinois.[A] The idea for it came to me after a visit to the Chinese theater in San Francisco—not that the music there suggested any theme, but it gave me the impulse to write a free fantasy in the ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... somnambulism. conception, Vorstellung [G.], excogitation^, a fine frenzy; cloudland^, dreamland; flight of fancy, fumes of fancy; thick coming fancies [Macbeth]; creation of the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey^, whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest^, geste^, extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, man in the moon, castle in the air, pipe ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... voice or part, recurrence of the subject in another part which, in turn, is again answered, and so on according to the number of voices or parts. After the exposition the fugue consists of a kind of free contrapuntal fantasy on the subject and its answer. By throwing aside the restraint of form Bach often gave his fugues an emotional significance in spite of the complexity of the material he ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... ashamed, she begins to "pretend." She snatches off the red table cover and drapes it about herself for a train, casts the crude furniture for the roles of moat and drawbridge and castle wall, and herself for a captive princess, held by a robber chief, flinging herself into her fantasy with such abandon that she does not hear the approaching hoof beats. At the pinnacle of her big speech the door is wrenched open and THE MAN stands there, a gun in each ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... through whose windows, looking westwards, you may see the fields of men, and looking eastwards see glittering elfin mountains, tipped with snow, going range on range into the region of Myth, and beyond it into the kingdom of Fantasy, which pertain to ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... have sheltered us from their sight, even if they had been a little more vigilant—as I should have expected Sure-shot to have been. They were trusting all to the thicket in which they had pitched their camp; and, being hungry and wearied no doubt, were for the moment off their guard. Some fantasy decided me not to disturb them for a moment—a sort of curiosity to hear what they would say, and, if possible, discover their whence and whither. We were perfectly within earshot; and could have heard even a whisper passing from their lips—as we could also note the expression ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... of a choice, I say, divested of the aim of wisdom and goodness, is regarded by many as the great privilege of God and of intelligent substances, and as the source of their freedom, their satisfaction, their morality and their good or evil. The fantasy of a power to declare one's independence, not only of inclination, but of reason itself within and of good and evil without, is sometimes painted in such fine colours that one might take it to be the most excellent thing in the world. Nevertheless it is only ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... second part of the concert came the wonderful new march and the fantasy, "A Hunt in a Storm," and both came in for prolonged applause. Then came a medley of national airs, ending with the "Star Spangled Banner," at which the audience arose; and the performance came to ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... me, under any circumstances, in a personal contest with his master. I made no doubt that the latter had been infected with some of the innumerable Southern superstitions about money buried, and that his fantasy had received confirmation by the finding of the scarabaeus, or, perhaps, by Jupiter's obstinacy in maintaining it to be "a bug of real gold." A mind disposed to lunacy would readily be led away by such suggestions—especially ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... with a dozen English words picked up on the voyage, will Americanise himself more in one year on an Illinois prairie than an intelligent, middle-class Englishman will do in ten, in the best society of Massachusetts. Now, I am not dallying with a facetious fantasy when I express the opinion, that the life and song of the English lark in America, superadded to the other institutions and influences indicated, would go a great way in fusing this hitherto insoluble element, and blending it harmoniously with the best vitalities of the nation. And this consummation ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... ashamed of his bird. "All that I say," he thought, "appears to them foolish, even the Princess's gift is, in their eyes, a common chirping chaffinch. What if indeed I have been dreaming; what if this, after all, should be the real world, and the other a mere fantasy?" The bird sang, "Away! away! or you will never see the Princess more! The real world lies beyond the gates of the sunset!" But when the traveler asked the youths what the bird sang, they answered that they had only heard "Tweet-tweet," and "Chirp-chirp." ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... it included the anarchism of Fifine at the Fair and the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all the passions of the earth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness of Time's Revenges to the despotic fantasy of Instans Tyrannus; but he remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. The moment that he came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than any opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... will be seen in the Third Part, about to follow, wherein we will treat of the excellence and perfection of art, and show to craftsmen that he who labours and studies continuously, and not in the way of fantasy or caprice, leaves true works behind him and ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... the threshold of another chamber. At the end of it stood something like a little altar of hard, black stone, and on this altar lay a mass of substance of the size of a child's head, but fashioned, I suppose from fantasy, to the oblong shape ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... bodies will straighten; the intellect free itself as might the bound Prometheus rid himself of his fetters and leave the rock to which he is chained, but we shall look back on the institutions of force, the state, the hangman, et al, as ghosts of an anxious fantasy. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... loveliness of form and tint. Now, before their incredulous eyes there appeared rising from the cloud bank the illusion of graciously rounded domes, spires, minarets, and the next instant they were gazing on a city of enchantment softly reflected in a pearly sea—a silvery city of fantasy like an exquisite shadowy drawing of some foreign land. . . . They sat silent, entranced. How long the vision lingered neither of them knew. . . . Then a breeze fanned their faces and in a twinkling the city ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... Painted by an artist of wondrous power, and terrible acquaintance with the secret soul, they embodied the ghosts of all the never perpetrated sins that had glided through the lifetime of Mr. Smith. And could such beings of cloudy fantasy, so near akin to nothingness, give valid evidence against him, at the day of judgment? Be that the case or not, there is reason to believe that one truly penitential tear would have washed away each hateful picture, and left the canvas ...
— Fancy's Show-Box (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... allegorical fantasy. All the most interesting Days, grandchildren of Mother Year, came to Mrs. November's dinner party, to honour the ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... "mirth is none," says Chaucer's host, "to ride on by the way dumb as a stone "; and the Trouveur aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker of his day. His romances, his rimes of Sir Tristram, his Romance of the Rose, are full of colour and fantasy, endless in detail, but with a sort of gorgeous idleness about their very length, the minuteness of their description of outer things, the vagueness of their touch when it passes to the subtler ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... slipping bulk, under the soaring, dead planet. Gleams of light shot like quick-silver about their feet, quivered in the clear gloom like trails of pale fire igniting lakes of argent flame. It was magnificent and cruel, a superb fantasy rippling over treacherous ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... in some of the other stories both fantasy and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering and unblessed. But Hawthorne's splendor of ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... spread of fantasy infernal. Out of it, after an hour or two, a steady sift of every manner of wreckage was drifting down upon the Moon. The scene began to blur. A haze like glowing star-dust, or the radiance from a comet's tail, was spreading a weirdly luminous mist, blurring, obscuring ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... gazing forth and numbly marvelling at the splendour. As of old, it struck her like a weird fantasy—this Indian enchantment—poignant, passionate, holding more of anguish than of ecstasy, yet deeply magnetic, deeply alluring, as a magic potion which, once tasted, must ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... expressions or symbols on account of the concrete way in which the human mind knows birth to take place. The tendency for concrete expression of abstract notions causes the desire for another existence to appear, first as a rebirth fantasy and then as a return to the mother's body. One thinks of Job's cry, "Naked came I from my mother's womb and naked shall I return thither," as an example of the literal comparison of death with birth. We need only refer to the myths of Moses and the ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... family? Both Mr. Beaufort and Arthur saw you in childhood, and their suspicion once aroused, they may recognise you at once; your features are developed, but not altogether changed. Come, come!—my adopted, my dear son, shake off this fantasy betimes: let us change the scene: I will travel ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... no forgetting that compassion, its tearful concern and wistfulness. I was bewildered. More wishful beseeching must surely have softened a Deity with a sunburned nose and a double chin! Indeed, I was bewildered by this fantasy of weeping and nonsense. For the little break in her voice and the veil of tears upon her eyes I cannot account. 'Twas the way she had as a maid: and concerning this I have found it folly to speculate. Of the boundaries of sincerity ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... unflagging care of Huatama, he returned to his apartments in the palace and flung himself into a chair to endeavour to convince himself that what he had seen in those rock-hewn chambers below was all prosaically real and not the fantasy of a disordered imagination. ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... certain that all his star-imagination about the Net, the Starlight Express, and the Cave of Lost Starlight came first into him from this hidden 'some one else' who brought the Milky Way down into his boy's world of fantasy. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Arunta and northern tribes (if these be really without religion) is the result of their form of speculation, wholly occupied by the idea of reincarnation, while the Arunta form of totemism is the consequence of an isolated fantasy about their peculiar sacred stones. Meanwhile the Euahlayi, as Mrs. Parker proves, entertain, in a limited way, not elsewhere recorded in Australia, the belief in the reincarnation of the souls of ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... would ever be able to carry out her plan to leave the farm. Who would understand him as she did, and protect him? Even the father who loved him had not known of the secret, fantastic danger of the dam. And the woman who should have destroyed the fantasy had encouraged it! But God knew what was in the heart of that strange woman; Christine Chaine did not—nor wished to. All she wished was that she might never see her again. As for Saltire, her proud resolve was to blot him from her memory, to forget that he had ever occupied her heart ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... passages in the sonatas of Haydn. Music had now found the missing half of its dual nature. For we must know that in the same manner as the thematic or fugal element in music represents the play of musical fantasy, turning over musical ideas intellectually or seriously; so there is a spontaneous melody, into which no thought of developing an idea enters. The melody flows or soars like the song of a bird, because it is the ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... the little Child-heart must be glad— Being so young, nor knowing, as we know. The fact from fantasy, the good from bad, The joy from woe, the—all that hurts us so! What wonder then that thus It hides away from us?— So weak a little thing is ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... oft have deemed, in sunny hours, When life with love was fraught, The nearness of the dead to us A fantasy of thought. ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... himself—he and she and everyone else were going to be different. His mind fluttered irascibly to escape from this thought, but still came back to it, like a tethered bird. Then he became calmer, and wandered out for a time into fantasy. ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... of course, permanently and constantly in debt to the new psychology, not only because when rightly applied it so greatly helps people to stand on their own feet, come what may, but because the study of dreams, fantasy and rationalization has thrown light on how the pseudo-environment is put together. But he cannot assume as his criterion either what is called a "normal biological career" [Footnote: Edward J. Kempf, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... pecuniary loss, if such there were, of its immediate abolition, yet we repudiate the right to demand compensation for human flesh and blood, as (to employ the emphatic words of Lord Brougham) we repudiate and abhor 'the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man.' And we do not hesitate to express our conviction, strengthened by the experience of emancipation in our own colonies, that on the mere ground of social or political expediency, the immediate termination of slavery ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... First. All wealth is intrinsic, and is not constituted by the judgment of men. This is easily seen in the case of things affecting the body; we know, that no force of fantasy will make stones nourishing, or poison innocent; but it is less apparent in things affecting the mind. We are easily—perhaps willingly—misled by the appearance of beneficial results obtained by industries addressed wholly to the gratification ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... governmental machine known as the Roman Empire? Not so, however, with the Iron Heel. In the orderly procedure of social evolution there was no place for it. It was not necessary, and it was not inevitable. It must always remain the great curiosity of history—a whim, a fantasy, an apparition, a thing unexpected and undreamed; and it should serve as a warning to those rash political theorists of to-day who speak with certitude ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... had fashioned his ideal, though slender, not so tall, and she owned a wealth of brown hair, hair that shone and glistened in every changing light, while her eyes were either blue or violet, just as one happened to catch the glint of them. And she had fascinating ways, too, which the lady of his fantasy could never have displayed, or he would not have abandoned the vision so readily. When she smiled, it was with lips and eyes in unison. When she spoke he heard harmonies not framed in mere words, whereas the other fair dame was ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... remained on the porch and finished his breakfast. You and I, and even Mr. Burroughs, perform acts of reasoning precisely similar to this every day in our lives. How Mr. Burroughs will explain Glen's action by the instinctive theory is beyond me. In wildest fantasy, even, my brain refuses to follow Mr. Burroughs into the primeval forest where Glen's dim ancestors, to the tooting of automobile horns, were fixing into the heredity of the breed the particular instinct that would enable Glen, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... all appearances, still slept soundly, and I was glad that this was so. Provided my experiences were not corroborated, I could find strength somehow to deny them, perhaps. With the daylight I could persuade myself that it was all a subjective hallucination, a fantasy of the night, a projection ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... strangled by the underbrush; at other slabs, cracked and brown, which lay prone, half covered by creeping vines. The tones of the clergyman were no longer revolting in his ears. He scarcely heard them. He imagined a fantasy. He pictured the inhabitants of these forgotten, narrow houses straying to the great dwelling where they had lived, punishing this one, bringing him to suffer with them the degradation of their neglect. So Robinson became less important ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... other—complete, confirm, correct, illuminate each other. Sometimes they are not satiric: satire is not pure charm, and the artist has allowed himself to "go in" for pure charm. Sometimes he has allowed himself to go in for pure fantasy, so that satire (which should hold on to the mane of the real) slides off the other side of the runaway horse. But he remains, on the whole, pencil in hand, a wonderfully copious and veracious historian of ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... Divine calls for Divinity: The civil student for Philosophy: The courtier craves some rare sound history: The baser sort, for knacks of pleasantry. So every sort desireth specially, What thing may best content his fantasy. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings in this play are tame indeed compared with the fancies one may hear at any little hillside cottage of Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay.' It is the strangest, the most beautiful expression in drama of that Irish fantasy, which overflowing through all Irish Literature that has come out of Ireland itself (compare the fantastic Irish account of the Battle of Clontarf with the sober Norse account) is the unbroken character ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... time. Some one has called attention to the illuminating discourse between Micromegas, gigantic dweller on one of the planets revolving about Sirius, and a company of our philosophers, as reported in the seventh chapter of the amusing fantasy bearing the name of the above-mentioned Sirian visitor. A free translation of a part of this conversation is here offered. After congratulating his terrestrial hearers on being so small and adding that, with so manifest a subordination of matter to mind, they must pass their lives in the pleasures ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... body and soul. For a great Doctor says: "They are GOD'S throne who dwell still in one place, and are not running about, but in sweetness of Christ's love are fixed." And I have loved for to sit: for no penance, nor fantasy, nor that I wished men to talk of me, nor for no such thing: but only because I knew that I loved GOD more, and longer lasted within the comfort of love: than going, or standing, or kneeling. For sitting ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... close of the season was seriously ill, and it was late in autumn before she could be taken abroad to Monaco. Here, under the associations of the place, Dilke wrote his very successful political fantasy, Prince Florestan. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... some distortion of the story heard only from the lips of the circuit rider, some fantasy of tradition invested with the urgency of fact, but Roger Purdee could not remember the time when he did not believe that these were the stone tables of the Law that Moses flung down from the mountain-top in his wrath. ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... and where you find a maid That, ere she sleep, has thrice her prayers said, Raise up the organs of her fantasy; Sleep she as sound as careless infancy: 50 But those as sleep and think not on their sins, Pinch them, arms, legs, backs, shoulders, ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... She seemed to have taken a leaf out of Paradise and bound it among the dingy pages of her dull and monotonous life. Every thing about her was so quaint and rare, the clothes she wore so rich and fantastic, that she could not control her fancy. Every musical fantasy that had ever crept into her brain seemed to be trooping along its galleries in a mad gallop as her fair fingers flew over the time-stained keys. The little boy stood clinging to her skirt in silent wonder, his fair, sensitive face working, and ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... danger," said that chamberlain to the silversmith, pulling him on one side. "Dismiss this fantasy. You can meet anywhere, even at Court, with women of wealth, young and pretty, who would willingly marry you. For this, if need be, the king would assist you by giving you some title, which in course of time would enable you to found ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... man being extremely active in its nature, and in continual motion, which produces always some fantasy; above all, melancholy persons, like you, Brutus, are more apt to form to themselves in the imagination ideal images, which sometimes ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... birds are painted on the ceilings and the shutters, where Chinese monsters laugh with open jaws on the mantle-shelf, and dragons, green and gold, twist their tails in curious convolutions around rich vases, and Japanese fantasy embroiders its designs of many colors; where sofas and reclining-chairs and consoles and what-nots invite to that contemplative idleness which ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... work of Mr. O'Lochlainn, who is responsible for the three-act ballet, Brian Boruma; a fantasy on the Brehon laws, entitled The Gardens of Goll; Poulaphuca, and the Roaring of O'Rafferty; but the repertory also includes notable and impassioned compositions by Ossian MacGillycuddy, Aghla Malachy, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... a slight stretch of the imagination to have beheld in her a priestess of the sun, awaiting in reverent adoration the appearance of her fire-god. Her complexion and features, too, would have helped to strengthen the fantasy, for the one was singularly fair, pale, and transparent, and the other characterized by delicacy, refinement, and a sort of earnest yet still enthusiasm. Her hair, of the softest and palest brown, was arranged in simple yet massive plaits around her finely-shaped ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... suddenly switching the conversation away from the Italian's fantasy, "you are well acquainted with all the circumstances connected with Sir Alan's murder. Have you formed any theory about the crime, its ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... December, 1811. The day before her death, Sunday, she sat up in bed, worn and thin, her eye gleaming as with the light of a coming world, and with a tremulous, old voice repeated the following lines by Burns,—heavy with the shadow of death, and lit with the fantasy of the ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... gain and nothing to lose by accommodating her. But even when Bosnia and Dalmatia have been united to Serbia and Montenegro, the Southern Slav problem will still be far from solution. Dalmatia is alike in constitutional theory and in political fantasy, though not in sober fact, an integral portion of the Triune Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia-Dalmatia, and it is unthinkable that Serbo-Croat opinion could ever consent to the liberation of the one without the other. No solution ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... this book is a work of genius and, as always with works of genius, it is difficult to analyze the elements that have gone to make it. There is poetry here and fantasy and humor, a little pathos but, above all, a number of creations in whose existence everybody must believe whether they be children of four or old men of ninety or prosperous bankers of forty-five. I don't know how Mr. Lofting has done it; I don't suppose that he knows himself. There it is—the ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... herbs beside, for aught I know. It's right unthankful of her not to mend; but childre is that thoughtless! And Roger, he spoils the maid—never stands up to her a bit—gives in to every whim and fantasy she takes in her head. If she cried for the moon, he'd borrow every ladder in the parish and lash 'em together to ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... is again either pure or applied. In the former, we abstract all the empirical conditions under which the understanding is exercised; for example, the influence of the senses, the play of the fantasy or imagination, the laws of the memory, the force of habit, of inclination, etc., consequently also, the sources of prejudice—in a word, we abstract all causes from which particular cognitions arise, because these causes regard the understanding under certain circumstances of its ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... one long week, and so for seven endless days Bles watched it with leaden heart. He knew the Silver Fleece—his and Zora's—must be ruined. It was the first great sorrow of his life; it was not so much the loss of the cotton itself—but the fantasy, the hopes, the dreams built around it. If it failed, would not they fail? Was not this angry beating rain, this dull spiritless drizzle, this wild war of air and earth, but foretaste and prophecy of ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Browning library is large. Some of the criticism is good; much of it, regarding the author as philosopher and symbolist, is totally askew. Reams have been written in interpretation of Childe Roland, an imaginative fantasy composed in one day. Abstruse ideas have been wrested from the simple story of My Last Duchess. His poetry has been the stamping-ground of theologians and the centre of prattling literary circles. In this tortuous maze of futile ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... upon the old sea wall, And watch the shimmering sea, Where soft and white the moonbeams fall, Till, in a fantasy, Some pure white maiden's funeral pall The strange light ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... luminous. How this light arises we cannot explain; but, as a matter of fact, it does arise. Let me remark here, that this kind of pondering is a process with which the ancients could have been but imperfectly acquainted. They, for the most part, found the exercise of fantasy more pleasant than careful observation, and subsequent brooding over facts. Hence it is, that when those whose education has been derived from the ancients speak of 'the reason of man,' they are apt to omit from their conception of reason one of its ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... yet all fascinate us with elements wrested from the shadow of the Supernatural. Now the highest imagination is concerned about the soul of things; it may or may not inspire the Fantasy that peoples with images the interlunar vague. Still, one of these lyrics, in its smaller way, affects us with a sense of uniqueness, as surely as the sublimer works of a supernatural cast,—Marlowe's "Faustus," the "Faust" of Goethe, "Manfred," ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... forehead with the lily, which seemed dewy and icy cool; and with the contact it seemed to her that a delicious tranquillity, a calm ecstasy, possessed her soul, and the words were impressed in her mind, as if spoken in her ear, "The Lord hath sealed thee for his own!"—and then, with the wild fantasy of dreams, she saw the cavalier in his wonted form and garments, just as he had kneeled to her the night before, and he said, "Oh, Agnes! Agnes! little lamb of Christ, love me and lead me!"—and in her sleep it seemed to her that her heart ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... great thing to find the most obscure and broken indications of the things which really are. There is the true enchantment of true romance in the Don Quixote—for those who can understand—but it is delivered in the mode of parody and burlesque; and so it is with the extraordinary fantasy, "The Ghost-Ship," which gives its name to this collection of tales. Take this story to bits, as it were; analyse it; you will be astonished at its frantic absurdity: the ghostly galleon blown in by a great tempest to a turnip-patch in Fairfield, a little ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... both these squares. It seemed quite as old and permanent. And it was much more striking in situation, with the bay offering an immense, flat blue extension at one side and the city hills, pricked with lights, slanting up and away from the other. By day, the joyous, whimsical fantasy of the colossal Tower of Jewels, which caught the light in millions of rainbow sparkles, must, for children at least, have made of its entrance the door to fairyland. At night, there was the tragedy of old history about those faintly fiery ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... lie invented for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. So, striving to divert her thoughts, Emma determined now to see in this reproduction of her sorrows only a plastic fantasy, well enough to please the eye, and she even smiled internally with disdainful pity when at the back of the stage under the velvet hangings a man appeared in a ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... it is to-day, and although we have no records, it probably was in use for ages previously. Noah, possibly, had one as dinghy to the Ark. The goufa is made like a basket and then coated with bitumen. This type of boat gives a touch of fantasy to the scenery of the Tigris and Euphrates, especially when filled with watermelons and paddled by a man whose appearance suggests Abraham attempting the role of Sinbad the Sailor ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... sphere of truth, in which the passions have no deceiving power. I have already published in the "Manual of Psychometry" the prediction of universal peace at the end of five years from the prophecy, and I now repeat the statement that great Franco-German war is but the fantasy of passion and fear. The last psychometric expression, March 11, confirms the uniform statements heretofore. Upon the question "What of the war in Europe?" this was ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... on the matter it should soon emerge that a spirit, kindred in some way, but informed with literature and anxious "to be different," starting too with Dickens's example before him, might, and probably would, half follow, half revolt into another vein of not anti- but extra-natural fantasy, such as that which the author of The Ordeal of ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... And he recalled afterwards that she said, "This all came to me as a child, just as though it was something half remembered." There was the further suggestion that he himself was not unknown to her; that they, too, had met before. But this, compared to the grave certainty of the rest, was merest fantasy that did not hold his attention. He answered, hardly knowing what he said. His preoccupation with other thoughts deep down was so intense, that he was probably barely polite, uttering empty phrases, with his mind elsewhere. His one desire was to escape and be alone, and it was with genuine relief ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... delightful things but the delightful thing which so reached my soul was a question. The writer had been reading "The Secret Garden" and her question was this: "Did you own the original of the robin? He could not have been a mere creature of fantasy. I feel sure you owned him." I was thrilled to the centre of my being. Here was some one who plainly had been intimate with robins— English robins. I wrote and explained as far as one could in a letter what I am now going to relate ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... quarter of an hour later the man, who had gone on lacing his furmity more and more heavily, though he was either so strong-minded or such an intrepid toper that he still appeared fairly sober, recurred to the old strain, as in a musical fantasy the instrument fetches up the original theme. "Here—I am waiting to know about this offer of mine. The woman is no good to me. Who'll ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... happier efforts concerned himself at all with the great "problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rank you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases as the latter two writers, however, we have an otherwise competent artist handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever he may nominally write about, the result is, above all else, an exposure of the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... of taste is idle; but it is not idle to observe that when Lamb is read, as he surely deserves to be, as a whole—letters and poems no less than essays—these notes of fantasy and artificiality no longer dominate. The man Charles Lamb was far more real, far more serious, despite his jesting, more self-contained and self- restrained, than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit of the veriest will-o'-the-wisps that ever danced over the most miasmatic of swamps, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... masterpiece, and one masterpiece means an immortality. I suppose it is generally agreed that "The Scarlet Letter" is his chef-d'oeuvre. Certainly it is his most intensely conceived work, the most thoroughly fused and logically developed; and is free from those elements of fantasy, mystery, and unreality which enter into his other romances. But its unrelieved gloom, and the author's unrelaxing grasp upon his theme, make it less characteristic than some of his inferior works; and I think he was ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... shone, the flowers on the table seemed to give out their beauty and their scent with conscious desire to please, to add their offerings, and for Henrietta the grotesqueness of the elder aunts, their gay attire, their rouge and wrinkles, gave a touch of fantasy to what would otherwise have been too orderly and too respectable ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... they had yet to have first-hand experience with the plague. But now nothing seemed quite real to Doc, even when they locked him into the big Northport jail. The whole ritual of the Lobbies seemed like a fantasy after the villages. ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that statue.]—Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,—spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the forehand, light ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... foreign fears, outward accidents, yet their bodies are out of tune, they suspect some part or other to be amiss, now their head aches, heart, stomach, spleen, &c. is misaffected, they shall surely have this or that disease; still troubled in body, mind, or both, and through wind, corrupt fantasy, some accidental distemper, continually molested. Yet for all this, as [2496]Jacchinus notes, "in all other things they are wise, staid, discreet, and do nothing unbeseeming their dignity, person, or place, this foolish, ridiculous, and childish ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... agony. So terribly did the teeth crunch and grind together that it seemed they must crash into fragments. A little later he suddenly stiffened out. The hands clenched and the face set with the savage resolution of the dream. The eyelids trembled from the shock of the fantasy, seemed about to open, but did ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... had stolen ... that he could not give back: not that ardent, whole-souled, enthusiastic love; not the romantic idealism, the hero-worship, that veil of fantasy behind which first love is wont to hide its ephemerality. But she would not now judge the dead. Her romantic love lay buried in the lonely church at Dover, and she was striving not to think ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... talk of dreams; Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy, Which is as thin of substance as the air; And more inconstant than the wind, who woos Even now the frozen bosom of the north, And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence, Turning his ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... daughter of another far more important, her argument that her daughter merely labored to make the German woman a still more powerful factor in upholding the might of German Kultur—that being the secret hidden in what was after all but a fantasy—caused the powers to shrug their shoulders and ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... horseshoe beards making them look like brothers. Side by side against the faded paper on the sunny wall they stood, surveying us contentedly. The violinist, who turned out to be a Norman, played a solo—some music-hall fantasy, I imagine. The next number was the ever popular "Tipperaree," which every single poilu in the French army has learned to sing in a kind of English. Our piano-violin duet hit off this piece even better than the "Merry Widow." I thanked ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... To my high fantasy here power failed; but now my desire and my will, like a wheel which evenly is moved, the Love was turning which moves the Sun and the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... after the manner of prophets and seers. 'Cogita et visa,'—this title of one of his books might be the title of all. His process is that of the creators; it is intuition, not reasoning. . . . There is nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy, than this mode of thought when it is not checked by natural and good strong common sense. This common sense, which is a kind of natural divination, the stable equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating to the true, like the needle to the north pole, Bacon possesses in the highest degree. ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... 'that glided into the Orchard Cottage when the Sun was in Libra, and then, as on spirit's wings, glided out again, might be? An inexpressible desire, full of love and of sadness, has often since struggled within me to shape an answer. Ever, in my distresses and my loneliness, has Fantasy turned, full of longing (sehnsuchtsvoll), to that unknown Father, who perhaps far from me, perhaps near, either way invisible, might have taken me to his paternal bosom, there to lie screened from many a woe. Thou beloved Father, dost thou still, shut out from me only by thin penetrable curtains ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... it last, this life in manacles? Do you remember Job? Job? Aye, doubtless Jehovah was sitting at some jovial feast when he conceived that fantasy of a drunken brain, to let Satan loose upon a happy man. Job? His seven sons and daughters, and his cattle, and his calves were restored unto him, but we read nothing of any compensation made him for the jest itself. He was made to ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... whizzed past; something that buzzed like a thousand hornets and slithered over the rocks in a series of metallic clanks. Then it was gone—or so it seemed in the confusion of Eddie's mind; but he had seen nothing. Probably a fantasy of his overworked brain, or only the surf breaking against the sea wall. He turned his ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... death a flock of inoffensive sheep, and went through very doleful experiences in a certain stable. God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the sublime caballero. His was a very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise the envy of baser mortals. But there is more than one aspect to the charm of that exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his frailties. After reading so many romances he desired naively to escape with his very body from the intolerable ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... like a story from Suetonius or like Bluebeard. But there is no communicable passion in it such as we find in Agamemnon or Othello. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure of the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive by sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to the humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature as the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God forgive ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... hear of them will be the funeral bell, that tolls them to their early graves! Unhappy men, and unsuccessful! because their purpose is, not to accomplish well their task, but to clutch the 'trick and fantasy of fame'; and they go to their graveswith purposes unaccomplished and wishes unfulfilled. Better for them, and for the world in their example, had they known how to wait! Believe me, the talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... had been asked to propose any kind of a plan for the future, her answer would have been, when denuded of side issues and fantasy, simply that she could see nothing better than simple drifting. As yet she could not anticipate, and it roused in her a kind of jealousy that Joyselle had so soon begun to think of Theo. His love for her should have dimmed ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... that hers was the only house upon the island; it mattered not that Captain Jabe had said nothing of his neighbor; in truth, nothing mattered. One sister of the House of Martha had come to this place; why not another? What I had seen in the woods had been no fantasy. Sylvia ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... that information was all a fantasy, why did you never make any use of it? When I began to realize that I had been wrong about you, I explained your silence to myself by saying that you could not bring yourself to do a thing that would ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... that I perceived the contents of this glass case a sense of fantasy claimed me, and I ceased to know where reality ended and ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the fantasy of tales filled him with at least as much enthusiasm as the supernatural. At Madaura he lived in a miraculous world, where everything charmed his senses and his mind, and everything stimulated his precocious instinct ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... huge scholarship, he loves to depend for his richest, most human effects, upon his own peasant-people of Touraine! The proverbs of the country-side, the wisdom of tavern-wit, the shrewdness and fantasy of old wives tales, the sly earthly humors of farmers and vine-tenders and goat-herds and goose-girls—these are things out of which he distils his vision, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Redemption—the story of a woman who erred and of a man who prayed and wrestled with God in prayer for her, and ultimately wrung her salvation by self-sacrifice from Divine Justice. Here and there are passages that we could have wished modified, but surely such a terrific fantasy was never before penned! It is as harrowing as The Ancient Mariner, and appeals to one more forcibly than Coleridge's "Rime," because it seems actual truth. Other volumes, containing impassioned ballads, lyrics, narrative poems and sonnets, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the School divines (said Luther) with their speculations in the Holy Scriptures, are merely vain and human cogitations, spun out of their own natural wit and understanding. They talk much of the union of the will and understanding, but all is mere fantasy and fondness. The right and true speculation (said Luther) is this, Believe in Christ; do what thou oughtest to do in thy vocation, &c. This is the only practice in divinity. Also, 'Mystica Theologia Dionysii' is a mere fable, and a lie, like to ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... through prism spectacles; business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt afar from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses. They all entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as the hues of fantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath when he stepped upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same dull pain of shouldering ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... If the author wouldn't let his favourites off so easily and would give their enemies a better sporting chance, he would more readily sustain the illusion which is of the essence of real enjoyment in this kind of fantasy. But I imagine the normal human boy will find nothing whatever to complain of, and to him ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... remembered Gaga. She had been laughing so much in herself at this long evening of freedom, that the recollection was like ice to her heart. It was all a mockery, a fantasy; and Toby was no more hers. She was separated from him for ever, and the more closely she was embraced by him the less she felt herself free to belong to him. A revulsion of feeling shook her. With an instinctive movement almost savage, she escaped from his arm and walked onward, her face ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... gave a movement of delight at the sight of the brocaded bed where the sweet form was about to repose. This glance, full of amorous intelligence, awoke the lady's fantasy, who, half laughing and half smitten, repeated "To-morrow," and dismissed him with a gesture which the Pope Jehan himself would have obeyed, especially as he was like a snail without a shell, since the Council had just deprived ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... bitterness of her death. It was to this tapestry of the past that he added now his vivid mental pictures of present events; the revelations concerning the character of his new friends; of Irina, her treachery and her remorse; and finally, incongruity that made the fantasy perfect, over all, through all, there wound, caressingly, the notes of the little melody that had that afternoon flowed from his fingers on to Sergius' battered piano:—the melody which now forms the principal theme of the weirdest of his tone poems; the "Saturnalia ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... besides consists of small loose pieces of lava, without any trace of vegetation. Only at one place the brim of the old crater is covered with an open pine wood. The volcano has also small side craters, from which gases escape. The same coarse fantasy, which still prevails in the form of the hell-dogma among several of the world's most cultured peoples, has placed the home of those of the followers of Buddha who are doomed to eternal punishment in the glowing hearths in the interior of the mountain, to which ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... the vision had brought it to her wrapped up in that terror she had felt for him. In a moment the fantasy of Juliet became as nothing beside the reality. If it were a thousand times true that she had once been Juliet what did it matter? She had loved Richard Pinckney always, so it seemed to her, and nothing at all mattered beside the ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... different to that under which we were lately presented to her. The fact is, that Miss Amory, called Missy at home, had really at the first been christened Betsy—but assumed the name of Blanche of her own will and fantasy, and crowned herself with it; and the weapon which the Baronet, her stepfather, held in terror over her, was the threat to call her publicly by her name of Betsy, by which menace he sometimes managed to keep the ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the moment of his finest achievement, that fantastic element which was Ibsen's resource against the prose of fact is so sternly repressed that it seems to have left no trace behind. With The Wild Duck fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is more disinterested than even in Ghosts, for it turns back on the reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... tyrant to obtain. (42) I say it truly, I—the love I bear Dailochus is of this high sort. All that the constitution of our souls and bodies possibly compels a man to ask for at the hands of beauty, that my fantasy desires of him; but what my fantasy demands, I do most earnestly desire to obtain from willing hands and under seal of true affection. To clutch it forcibly were as far from my desire as to ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... thee each night a maidenhead. The damask'd meadows and the pebbly streams Sweeten and make soft your dreams: The purling springs, groves, birds, and well-weav'd bowers, With fields enamelled with flowers, Present their shapes; while fantasy discloses Millions of lilies mix'd with roses. Then dream ye hear the lamb by many a bleat Woo'd to come suck the milky teat: While Faunus in the vision comes to keep From rav'ning wolves the fleecy sheep. With thousand such enchanting dreams, that meet ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... piano with his violin. He made blunders, and her playing was out of heart. They stopped as by consent, and a moment's silence followed. All at once she broke out with something Robert had never heard before. He soon found that it was a fantasy upon Ericson's poem. Ever through a troubled harmony ran a silver thread of melody from far away. It was the caverns drinking from the tempest overhead, the grasses growing under the snow, the stars making music with the dark, the streams filling ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald |
