"Figment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fantastic past, when he had created her from the studied essays, he had thought of her—censoriously—as gay. Perhaps she danced! He wondered momentarily where the men were Indy had spoken of as present; then he realized that they had been but a precautionary figment of Indy's imagination; the girl, except for the woman with the tender brown hand caressing her shoulder, was ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... melted away immediately among the trees, but the young forest runner pursued at his utmost speed. He did not doubt. It was no figment of fancy. It was the great chief himself spying with incredible daring upon his enemies. If he were permitted to escape, the advance of Clark would be surrounded with numberless dangers. The fertile brain and the invincible spirit of the great Wyandot would plant an ambush at every turn. ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... permanent value of Malthus's writings. He introduced a new method of approaching the great social problems. The value of the method may remain, however inaccurate may be the assumptions of facts. The 'tendency,' if interpreted to mean that people are always multiplying too rapidly, may be a figment. If it is taken as calling attention to one essential factor in the case, it is a most important guide to investigation. This brings out another vital point. The bearing of the doctrine upon the political as well as upon the economical views of the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... dream of woman vexed me—and when I dreamed at all it was but a tinselled figment that I saw—the echo, doubtless, of some tale I read concerning raven hair and rosy lips, and of a vague but wondrous fairness adorned most ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the evidence of the crime is thus dryly set forth, in following up a statement of the transmission of the manuscript, and of its publication: "Yet all this was a mere figment of Surtees's imagination, originating probably in some whim of ascertaining how far he could identify himself with the stirring times, scenes, and poetical compositions which his fancy delighted to dwell on. This is proved by more ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... has often been called the treatise on the art of lying. Never was such cunning exhibited. Never was the father of lies invoked with such skill as by the German leaders. In their sight truth is contemptible, kindness is weakness, honour is a figment. ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... recites a Latin epitaph which he says appeared near the place where lay the body of Columbus in Seville, but pretty Latin epitaphs were Castellanos' weakness, and it is to be feared that this one, like others which he dedicated to American explorers, was nothing more than a figment of his poetic imagination. Two writers, Coleti and Alcedo, who almost two centuries later mentioned the same epitaph as marking the grave in Santo Domingo, must ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... value concerning the true way of salvation. (93) People who lay no claims to reason for themselves, are not able to prove by reason this their assertion; and if they hawk about something superior to reason, it is a mere figment, and far below reason, as their general method of life sufficiently shows. (94) But there is no need to dwell upon such persons. (95) I will merely add that we can only judge of a man by his works. (96) If a man abounds in the fruits of the Spirit , charity, ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... concerning Kado the Striver, but it is most unlikely that he is a mere figment of popular imagination. What history does record, however, is that the wicked Duchess and her host of mercenary Normans were forced to flee, and that her place was taken by a more ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... remain in Bondage!—You now argue on the assumption of a special avidy for each soul. But what about the distinction of souls implied therein? Is that distinction essential to the nature of the soul, or is it the figment of Nescience? The former alternative is excluded, as it is admitted that the soul essentially is pure, non-differenced intelligence; and because on that alternative the assumption of avidy to account for the distinction of souls ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... that bleating, glorified nonsense that the Reverend Bill and Captain Luniac and poor old Ormonde and people talk when they're 'in love'. Love! It's just sentimental idealizing and the worship of what does not exist and therefore cannot last. You love me, don't you, Dammy, not an impossible figment of a heated imagination? This will last, dear.... If you'd idealized me into something unearthly and impossible you'd have tired of me in six months or less. You'd have hated me when you saw the reality, and found yourself tied to it ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... been maliciously reported, and that he wishes to show how well and clearly it was all known beforehand. So he says the dialogue on the Copernican side takes up the question purely as a mathematical hypothesis or speculative figment, and gives it every artificial advantage of ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... most primitive facilities one can imagine. Only on calendars do we see a beauteous Indian maiden draped in velvet, reclining on a mossy bank, and gazing at her own image in a placid pool. That Indian is the figment of a fevered artist brain in a New York studio. Should a real Indian woman try that stunt she'd search a long way for the water. Then she'd likely recline in a cactus bed and gaze at a medley of hoofs and horns of deceased ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... and the ominous intonations from beneath, were those of mingled dread and wonder. At war with all former experience it was so novel, so unnaturally natural, that I feel while now writing and thinking of it, as if my own senses might have deceived me with a mere figment of the imagination. But it is not so. The wonder, than which this continent, teeming with nature's grandest exhibitions, contains nothing more marvelous, still stands amid the solitary fastnesses of the Yellowstone, to excite the astonishment of the thousands ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... comfort, the teachings of science are too often disregarded, if they interfere with our habits. Science, when not practically applied, loses its value; it wants fixedness, stability. Its application is its embodiment; without it, it is a mere figment of the brain. Its business is to inform the mind, and remove erroneous impressions; and its highest aim is usefulness. The popular belief with respect to dress, that a black dress is warmer, both in winter and summer, than a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... not heard that it was a mere figment, and that I could scarce have wedded Lucy safely, even had this matter gone as you wish? This is the luckiest chance that could ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... weltering sorrows by which so many are overwhelmed. It is man, it is woman, who bears the agony; the crushing burden of wrong-doing falls on them. Look no more then, we urge, to a phantom deity, to an idol-god in the skies, a figment of a disordered imagination, but think on your brother man before you dare to set mischief in motion. When you apprehend the nearness of danger, think of the future, think of consequences, think only of the irremissibleness ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... of the pair together, followed by the horrors of flight, to end in the misery of exile without her, the return when the emperor passes again by the fatal spot, home where everything reminds him of her, and finally spirit-land. This last is a figment of the poet's imagination. He pictures the disconsolate emperor sending a magician to discover Yang Kuei-fei's whereabouts in the next world, and to bear to her a message of uninterrupted love. The magician, after a long search, finds her in one ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... its foundation in fact, for Oliver had wronged him more than once, and was ready to wrong him again should a suitable opportunity occur; but the notion that at present occupied his mind, respecting the payment of the two thousand pounds, was largely a figment of his disordered brain. Oliver had certainly questioned within himself whether he should be called upon to pay this sum, and as Francis seemed to have completely disappeared, he began to think that he might evade his promise to do so; but he had not as yet sought ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... children, strive to set up an independent place of worship, or to join any already established body of Christians, anathemas are hurled at their heads, and they are told that they are guilty of the heinous crime of schism—schism, in the sense they give it, a figment of sacerdotalism, priestcraft, and imposture. But does the crime of schism not exist? Ay, it does; but it is schism from the true Church of Christ, the Church of which He is the head corner-stone, the beautified in Heaven, the sanctified on earth; from God's people, who are ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... really make, with the great-grandfather of George III.; but simply because rebellion does more harm than good. The forms of government are abstractions, not names of realities, and their 'mixture' is a pure figment. King, Lords, and Commons are not really incarnations of power, wisdom, and goodness. Their combination forms a system the merits of which must in the last resort be judged by its working. 'It is the principle of utility, accurately apprehended and steadily applied, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... heard a woman's reputation torn to shreds in a club window. A constant reader of lady-novelists, I have always been hoping for this excitement, but somehow it has never come my way. I am beginning to suspect that it never will, and am inclined to regard it as a figment. Such conversation as I have heard in clubs has been always of a very mild, perfunctory kind. A social club (even though it be a club with a definite social character) is a collection of heterogeneous creatures, and its aim is perfect harmony and good-fellowship. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... I died years ago. What you see before you is a figment of the reporter's brain—a monster manufactured out of newspaper paragraphs, with ink in its veins. A keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... and were attached to it by all the associations of blood ties, friendships, and what not, you were therefore entitled to take part in it, and could be called on to give it service? If citizenship is a mere legal figment, by what right do States send their citizens to war? Yet women are theoretically transferred, body and bone, heart, memory, and soul, to whatever country or nation their husbands happen to give allegiance to. Isadora Duncan, born ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... pushed beyond the usual limit, we find famous examples that history has cherished, and that we love to recall. There is Pascal, mastering at the age of twelve years the greater part of Plane Geometry without any instruction, and not a figment of Calculus, drawing on the floor of his chamber all the figures in the first book of Euclid, estimating accurately the mathematical relations of them all—that is, reconstructing for himself a part of descriptive Geometry; the herdsman Mangia Melo, manipulating figures, when five years ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... of the truth of the Gospel. Men ought to say about us, 'There must be something in the religion that has done that for these people.' We ought to be such that our characters shall induce the thought that the Christ who has made men like us cannot be a figment. Do you show, Christian men, that you are grafted upon the true Vine by the abundance of the fruit that you bring forth? Can you venture to say, as Paul said, If you want to know what Jesus Christ's love and power are, look at me? Do not venture adducing yourself as a specimen of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... will never be a poet, however much he reads poetry. If you want virtue, in the ancient sense, the sense of honour, of courage, of self-reliance, of the instinct to command, you must have a class of gentlemen. Otherwise virtue will be at best a mere conception in the head, a figment of the brain, not a character and a force. Why is the teaching of the classics now discredited among you? Not because it is not as valuable as ever it was, but because there is no one left to understand ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... at the piano with the vision of the mind, her soul enrapt, her features transfigured. She was a figment of the emotions. And the Princess and I listened, she with a little dubitating look of perplexity, paying me no heed now, and I singularly moved. I walked down the corridor, past where Princess Alix stood, and as I went by I could have put out my ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... Percy Smith-Oldwick was not only an English gentleman and an officer in name, he was also what these implied—a brave man; but when he realized that the sweet picture he had looked upon was but the figment of a dream, and that in reality he still lay where he had fallen at the foot of the grating with a lion standing over him licking his face, the tears sprang to his eyes and ran down his cheeks. Never, he thought, ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... for the lines that produced the fatal effect on your servant. He visited most of the bookstores in New York city to find them, and nothing but your own word, I am sure, will ever convince him that the 'wretched man' is but a figment of your imagination. I tried to satisfy him by saying you did not dare to publish the lines lest they should produce a similar effect on the typesetters, editors, and the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... their existence. On the other hand, there was this strange, wonderful, realistic world of the Homeric poems, no longer existing, it is true, even at the earliest stage of Greek history, but almost absolutely refusing to be dismissed as a mere figment of the imagination. Was it, then, impossible to believe that in the bosom of the great gulf which separated the Hellas of legend from the Hellas of history there lay a civilization, real, and once living, of which the legends ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... must be a delusion; what can the circle have to do with the numbers alive at the end of a given time?"—"I cannot demonstrate it to you; but it is demonstrated."—"Oh! stuff! I think you can prove anything with your differential calculus: figment, {286} depend upon it." I said no more; but, a few days afterwards, I went to him and very gravely told him that I had discovered the law of human mortality in the Carlisle Table, of which he thought very highly. I told him that the law was involved ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... sir, Cavendish brought back word that it was all an ingenious figment which had deceived your father, mother, and the maid herself—and no wonder, since the Queen of Scots persisted therein to ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... found to this figment of Field's fancy is a casual paragraph in April, 1889, where he speaks of a number of bibliomaniacs having congregated in the Saints' and Sinners' Corner at McClurg's. But the phrase was current among us long before that. It was not until nearly two years ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... before us is not one of education, not even one of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... cheerless enough. During his absence his married sister, the elder one, had taken the other to live with her, relieving Theodore of the charge of contribution to her support. But suddenly, behold the husband, the brother-in-law, dies, leaving a mere figment of property; and the two ladies, with their two little girls, are afloat in the wide world. Theodore finds himself at twenty-six without an income, without a profession, and with a family of four females to support. Well, in his quiet ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... message may scarcely be a thought, or emotion, or even an idea: it may simply be a mood. Words so often become our masters instead of our servants, and we are apt to think that if a thing cannot be reduced to a verbal formula it is an airy nothing, a figment of the imagination. So it may be, but it is none the less real. We have thought of ourselves as material individuals for so long that it is difficult for us to use other than material standards in our estimate of immaterial things: hence ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... which they were seeking a basis were trivial in comparison with those which our author hurtles out after a glance at M. Quetelet. "A continuous average of so many murders a year; then so many must happen; then somebody must commit them; then free-will is a figment, and society is the source of all action ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the only quite sane Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of wisdom; there was nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment of a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and not less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen romantic, tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune's fool." But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare saw him ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... they to do with the censures and reproaches which the Princeton professor deals around? Let those who have leisure and good nature protect the man of straw he is so hot against. The abolitionists have other business. It is not the figment of some sickly brain; but that system of oppression which in theory is corrupting, and in practice destroying both Church and State;—it is this that they feel pledged to do battle upon, till by the just judgment of Almighty God it is ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... was the system of serfdom which prevailed until 1861. It was in theory, though not practically, unlike the institution of American slavery. The people, still living in their communes, still clung to the figment of their freedom, not really understanding that they were slaves, but feeling rather that they were freemen whose sacred rights had been cruelly invaded. That they were giving to hard masters the fruit of their toil on ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... than others. We Jews are the people of God and keep his Law." Even Christians are not wholly free from the pernicious influence of human holiness. They ever seek to bring their own works and merits before God. I know for myself what pains are inflicted by this godless wisdom, this figment of righteousness, and what effort must be made before ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... welcome by a man like Forbes, and admitted to a degree of charming intimacy by a girl like Forbes's daughter, Theydon tried to believe that his meeting with those ill-omened detectives at Waterloo Station was, in some sort, a figment of the imagination. ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... this much truth in the old figment of the Press being "an organ of opinion," that it must in some degree (and that a large degree) present real matter for observation and debate. It can and does select. It can and does garble. But it has to do this ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... too, flutterest an impatient wing, Thou presence yet more fugitive and frail, Thou most unbodied thing, Whose very being is thy going hence, And passage and departure all thy theme; Whose life doth still a splendid dying seem, And thou at height of thy magnificence A figment ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... careful survey of the whole ground, our belief is that no such persons as Professor Teufelsdroeckh or Counsellor Heuschrecke ever existed; that the six Paper-bags, with their China-ink inscriptions and multifarious contents, are a mere figment of the brain; that the 'present Editor' is the only person who has ever written upon the Philosophy of Clothes; and that the Sartor Resartus is the only treatise that has yet appeared upon that ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... think it pure wickedness on my own part, for I esteem, and love, and venerate the good soul with all my heart. I say, Phoebe, were you never in an inward rage when she would say she would not let some fact be true, for the sake of some mythical, romantic figment? You smile. Own that ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... its local habitation; and the use of the term Germanic Confederation in the Treaty of Pressburg sounded the death-knell of an Empire which Voltaire with equal wit and truth had described as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. In the new age of trenchant realities how could that venerable figment survive—where the election of the Emperor was a sham, his coronation a mere parade of tattered robes before a crowd of landless Serenities, and where the Diet was largely concerned with regulating the claims of the envoys of princes to sit on seats of red cloth or on the less ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... tears and smiles; the smart sayings of the jesters, a bride their legitimate prey, her blushes the delight of the facetious nobles; the complacency of the pleasure-loving king—all floated before his eyes like the figment of a dream. How mocking the pomp and glitter! For the princess, what an awakening was to ensue! The free baron must have known the emperor was in Spain, and had met the fool's stratagem with a final masterly ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... glance at her. He had been inclined to regard Dean's suspicion that she was in love with the younger Hoff as the mere figment of jealousy, but where two young persons of the opposite sex are thrown together, there is always the possibility of romance. Jane colored a little under his searching glance, yet what he read in her face seemed to ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... no princess—no child of the exiled Theodomir. The paper stuffed in the candle-stick in a reckless moment had been but the ingenious figment of a man's brain for the entertainment of an hour. The old chief and Sho-caw with their broken tale to Philip had but tangled the net the more. As the blood of the Indian mother had driven Diane ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... There is nothing in the world, he says, except our own sensations and ideas. In order to exist for us, things have to be perceived by the mind; therefore, everything, in order to exist, must exist in the mind of God. But when Berkeley had proved that matter was figment, David Hume, born in 1711, came forward and showed that mind was also an illusion. You know nothing of matter, said Berkeley; you have only perceptions and the ideas based thereon. You know nothing of mind, replied Hume; you have only a succession ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... and steam engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real, like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... immorally," as Norman told her, comforted Nipen with a large share of her sandwiches. Harry armed himself with a stick and Mary with a stone, and marched off to the attack, but saw no signs of the enemy, and had begun to believe him a figment of Tom's imagination, when Mary spied him under a bush, lying at the feet of a boy, with whom he was ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... moment she felt that to flee in secret, and live with Bevis as he proposed, would be no less dishonour than abiding with the man who had a legal claim upon her companionship. Her lover, as she had thought of him for the past two or three months, was only a figment of her imagination; Bevis had proved himself a complete stranger to her mind; she must reshape her knowledge of him. His face was all that she could still dwell upon with the old desire; nay, even ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... her image it arranged itself in awful order—and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari—no figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love, dissipated by heavy sorrow—a boyish resolution, made in a moment of feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say, in Dante's case, laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, gave the idea and suggested the form of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... meet death, there is no more terror, only waiting, weary waiting. I am not superstitious, and unfortunately I am not one of the victims of dementia, whose spectral woes are born of disordered brains. I am sadly sane; and what I am about to tell you is no figment of feverish fancy. I do not know how long I have been sick, but one night great peace and ease came suddenly upon me. I swung in some soft tender arms, close to the gates of Release, and the iron bars melted away, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... living person has ever come into it before. I can't make it out. I suppose it's because I saw your reality this afternoon, looking out of the window at the 'Tete Noire,' and you are just a stray figment of my overtired brain—a very agreeable figment, I admit; but you don't exist here just now—you can't possibly; you are somewhere else, Mr. Ibbetson; dancing at Mabille, perhaps, or fast asleep somewhere, and dreaming of French ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... reverent appointment. Those ways might irk and cramp him sometimes. They did: he might speak of them with sharp impatience and seeming disesteem sometimes. He did that too, now and then,—for he was human like the rest of us! But mark you this, my brothers, for, in an age which, under one figment or another, whether of more ancient or more modern license, is an age of much self-will,—we shall do well to remember it,—his was a life of orderly and consistent obedience to rule. He kept to the Church's plain and stately ways: kept to them and ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... that the student life in London was a substantial reality, and not a mere figment of the imagination, she hummed a few bars of a song, and as she listened to the deep, rich notes of her voice, poised with that sureness which only comes of first-class training, she smiled a little, reflecting that if nothing ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... to precede him from the room. When he was alone he smiled sheepishly, and also disdainfully; he knew that the chasm between himself and the others was a real chasm, and not a figment of his childish diffidence, as he had sometimes suspected it to be. Then he turned the gas out. A beautiful faint silver surged through the window. While the debate was in progress, the sun had been going about its business of ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... testimony in the days of the Reformation. Wide as is the apparent difference, we find in both the same corruption of the doctrine of justification by faith alone without works, the same ignoring of the depths of natural depravity, the same exaltation of human strength and merit, the same figment of human preparation for God's Grace, the same confounding of the fruits of faith with the conditions of faith, the same aversion to the careful study of God's Word, the same indifference to sound doctrine, and the same substitution ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... grace to frame one when it might have covered the shame of a friend! And I—what am I, that I should, in my secret mind, wish that such a gross insult to me and my child had been glossed over? Yet such was my opinion of Henry, that I would have willingly believed the grossest figment the swaggering ass could have invented. Well, it skills not thinking of it. Our honest name must be maintained, though everything ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... Quin queried weakly, fearing that the blessed presence that had hovered over him was but a figment ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... the thing came close to being uncanny. The Black Woman by Dee water; Owen Ruadh himself, and now this Ulysseslike Turlough Wolf—whither was fate driving him? Was he really to meet such persons as the Bird Daughter and Cathbarr of the Ax, or were they only the figment of a crazed ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... quenched in the thought that the turn of the wheel might bring good luck, but it was impossible it could strand him in worse case. For the sentimental side of it—separation, long absence—well, the droop of the cynical corners of the mouth became more emphasized at the recollection of that faded old figment, "home, sweet home," and glowing aspirations after the so-called holy and pure joys of the family circle; whereas the reality, a sort of Punch and Judy show at best. No, there was no sentimental side ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... preceded the birth of 'Pauline'. But even this must have been the result of some protracted travail with himself; because it was only the inward sense of very varied possibilities of existence which could have impelled him towards this kind of creation. No character he ever produced was merely a figment of ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... I wonder if the missing book is a figment of her imagination," he thought; but in this he wronged her, for that little red-edged copy of Keble's Christian Year ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... this household. There is Li Ho, for instance. Well, I'm not certain about Li Ho. He may be Chinese-sane. My nurse says he is. But I have no doubts at all about my host. He is so queer that I sometimes wonder if he is not a figment. Perhaps I imagine him. If so, my imagination is going strong. What I seem to see is a little old man in a frock coat so long that his legs (like those of the Queen of Spain) are negligible. He has a putty colored face (so blurred that I keep expecting him to rub it ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... coward. No one can scorn that cowardice more than I, but there it was. He appealed to my pity, too. He told me that if I did not go with him abroad he would have to go alone, a sick man among strangers. I soon found out, too, that even my belief in my own property was largely a figment of my own imagination. It is true some little money had been left to me, and had been lost in the way I have indicated, but without him I could never have gone to Oxford, without him I should have been practically a waif. Besides, ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... my belief—or rather I dare not withhold my avowal—that both Bull and Waterland are here hunting on the trail of an old blunder or figment, concocted by the gross ignorance of the Gentile Christians and their Fathers in all that respected Hebrew literature and the Palestine Christians. I persist in the belief that, though a refuse of the persecuted and from neglect degenerating Jew-Christians may have sunk into ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of these resounded. There was something rather ghastly to me in the general unconsciousness that Soames had existed, and more than once I caught myself wondering whether Nupton, that babe unborn, were going to be right in thinking him a figment ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... Salle and Hennepin, dreaming a way to the Pacific. Here Lincoln and Douglas, antagonist and protagonist of slavery argument, had contested; here had arisen "Joe" Smith, propagator of that strange American dogma of the Latter-Day Saints. What a state, Cowperwood sometimes thought; what a figment of the brain, and yet how wonderful! He had crossed it often on his way to St. Louis, to Memphis, to Denver, and had been touched by its very simplicity—the small, new wooden towns, so redolent of American tradition, prejudice, force, and illusion. The ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... through the pressure of his hand on hers which he held so closely. Should she be the one to disturb the supreme serenity of his thoughts at this moment by a suggestion of something which perhaps was only the figment of an over-anxious brain? Inside the battle waged, but he could not see her face, so was ignorant of the conflict. If her hand trembled within his own he did not notice it. She looked down at the profile so clearly outlined. What strength, ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... city is full of his memories. Here are many of the places he celebrated in his stories, his haunts for years, and the house where he retired after financial disaster to face a self-chosen battle with a gigantic debt which he might easily have evaded by a mere figment of ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... individual man called a priest, and mysteriously efficacious in his lips, and his alone, you petrify a truth into death and unreality. I have been striving to show that absolution is not a Church figment, invented by priestcraft, but a living, blessed, human power. It is a power delegated to you and to me, and just so far as we exercise it lovingly and wisely, in our lives, and with our lips, we help men away from sin: just so far as we do not exercise it, or exercise it falsely, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... them?" Asher gulped. "And how—how did you get down here? Tell me!" He took a step toward Lee Wong, intending to lay his hand on the Chinaman, to make sure he was live flesh and blood, and not a figment ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... than from dread of actual danger. I was in a fog of uncertainty. Things were happening around me which I could only dimly guess at, and I had no power to take one step in defence. That Wardlaw should have felt the same without any hint from me was the final proof that the mystery was no figment of my nerves. I had written to Colles and got no answer. Now the letter with Japp's resignation in it had gone to Durban. Surely some notice would be taken of that. If I was given the post, Colles was bound to consider what I had said in my earlier letter and give ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... law of Spirit may be more complex than that of electricity, because, as expressed in us, it is the law of conscious individuality; but it is none the less a purely natural law, and follows the universal rule, and therefore we may dismiss from our minds, as a baseless figment, the fear of any Divine power treasuring up anger against us on account of bygones, if we are sincerely seeking to do what is right now. The new causes which we put in motion now will produce their proper effect as surely as the old causes did; and thus by inaugurating a new sequence ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... meeting in the garden to the others. She was ashamed and mortified and she felt indeed that the whole world had turned against her. Mr. Campbell was cold to her. Miss Helen Campbell hardly civil Mary and Elinor looked at her askance. There was not a word of truth in it, of course; it was just a figment of Nancy's morbid imaginings. Miss Campbell was bored to extinction with the continued rain. Mr. Campbell was preoccupied because of business engagements of great importance, and Mary and Elinor, if ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... according to some authorities, La Salle, some time between the years 1669 and 1671, descended the Mississippi, as far as the Arkansas, by the river Ohio. There can be no doubt that the story is a mere figment.] ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... dangerous. Maybe he was a famous gangster. He wasn't sure. Maybe all this about being an FBI agent was just a figment of his imagination. Blows on the head did funny things. "I'll drill everybody full of holes," he said in a harsh, underworld sort of voice, but it didn't sound very convincing. Sam approached him gently and fished out his wallet ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Greek who flew before Nero in the circus; but he, I admit, had a bad fall, as Seutonius recounts. That character of Lucian's, who employed an eagle's wing and a vulture's in his flight, I take to be a mere figment of the satirist's imagination. But what do you make of Simon Magus? He, I cannot doubt, had invented a machine in which, like myself, he made use of steam or naphtha. This may be gathered from Arnobius, our earliest authority. He mentions ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... he has at last found more than his match in irrationality. For he has at least before him a visible tangible block of wood, not the mere memory of one that has long ago rotted, nor the dream of one that is yet to grow, whereas that mental figment, Consecrated Humanity, is not even a real shadow, but only a fancied one, a shadow cast by no substance. And it is to Comtists of all people—intellectual salt of the earth as they are—that this figment is recommended ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... cardinalate, if indeed the offer were not a figment of his own brain, Laud would have been diplomatic enough not to allow his reasons to transpire, and probably the Pope never knew them. The importance of the statement lies for posterity entirely in the anti-Roman tendency which he expressed in his diary. For the archbishop himself, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... that curls - Curls in a flickering skein, That winds and whisks and whirls A figment thin and vain, Into the vast Inane. One end for hut and hall! One end for cell and stall! Burned in one common flame Are wisdoms and insanities. For this alone we came:- ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... wi the report o' it; and Sawmuel Bishopriggs sae weel known that ony stranger has only to ask, and find him. Understand, I beseech ye, that it's no hand o' mine that pets this new feather in my cap. As a gude Calvinist, my saul's clear o' the smallest figment o' belief in Warks. When I look at my ain celeebrity I joost ask, as the Psawmist asked before me, 'Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?' It seems ye've something to say to me," he added, suddenly reverting to ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... time so impossible for her to accept any one less than a gentleman. Yet he remembered that to outsiders such fastidiousness must show in a ridiculous light. What claim to gentility had they, the Peaks? Was it not all a figment of his own self-conceit? Even in education Charlotte could barely assert a superiority to Mr. Cusse, for her formal schooling had ended when she was twelve, and she had never cared to read beyond the ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... hand-clasps. Sympathize with the ambitions of other men, with their hopes and dreams. Remember that each part of every work of man, however substantial and enduring it now may be, was once no more than a figment of the imagination of some one's mind. So do not be altogether "practical" when prospecting. It is a mistake to ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... not murder. Starving children is war, and it is not murder. What treacherous lying is all the heroic poetry of battle! Men will now creep up after dark, ambushed in safety behind the celestial curtains, and drop bombs on sleepers beneath for the greater glory of some fine figment or other. It filled me, not with wrath at the work of Kaisers and Kings, for we know what is possible with them, but with dismay at the discovery that one's fellows are so docile and credulous that they will ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... most valid proof that an abnormal being is actually present was that devised by the ghost of Sir Richard of Coldinghame in the ballad, and by the Beresford ghost, who threw a heavy curtain over the bed-pole. Unluckily, Sir Richard is a poetical figment, and the Beresford ghost is a myth, like William Tell: he may be traced back through various mediaeval authorities almost to the date of the Norman Conquest. We have examined the story in a little book of folklore, Etudes Traditionistes. Always there is a compact to appear, always the ghost ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... read or these or none. And first—the man's own firm conviction rests That he was dead (in fact they buried him) —That he was dead and then restored to life By a Nazarene physician of his tribe: —'Sayeth, the same bade "Rise," and he did rise. "Such cases are diurnal," thou wilt cry. Not so this figment!—not, that such a fume, Instead of giving way to time and health, Should eat itself into the life of life, As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones and all! For see, how he takes up the after-life. The man—it is one Lazarus a Jew, Sanguine, proportioned, ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... to send money to support strikes on the continent, and recalling English workers who had been taken across the North Sea to defeat such strikes; but on its revolutionary socialistic side it was a romantic figment. The suppression of the Paris Commune, one of the most tragic examples in history of the pitilessness with which capable practical administrators and soldiers are forced by the pressure of facts to destroy romantic amateurs and theatrical dreamers, made an end of melodramatic ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... sphinx, secluded in the shade of a 'mild mystery.' His soul, like the Harpocrates he personated, seems to hold one finger on closed lips, in token of eternal silence. One thing, however, is certain. We have before us no figment of the artistic imagination, but a real youth of incomparable beauty, just as nature made him, with all the inscrutableness of undeveloped character, with all the pathos of a most untimely doom, with the almost imperceptible imperfections ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... own confession, it appears you are, then Mr. Lewes must necessarily inform you that he does not deal in the article; probably he will add that therefore it must be non-essential. I should fear he might even stigmatise imagination as a figment, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... their garnet he marvelled, having once projected the idea that this late comer was, himself, the "wolf's head" whom they were to chase down for a rich reward, incongruously hunting amidst his own hue and cry. Or, Seymour again doubted, had he merely constructed a figment of a scheme from his own imaginings and these attenuations of suggestion? For there seemed, after all, scant communication between the two, and this was even less when the moon was unveiled, the ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... prospect that, when Richard descended and pursued his trackless way again along the moor, he half doubted whether that fair vision had not been a mere figment of his brain; the more so, since what view there was about him seemed now to contract rather than to expand; the horizon grew more limited; and presently nor sea, nor land, nor even sky was to be seen. There was no rain, but his hair and ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... unequivocally set forth, that he who runs may read. Why, then, is it overlooked by Dr. Wayland? Why is he pleased to imagine that he is combating Southern principles, when, in reality, he is merely combating the monstrous figment, the distorted conception of his own brain,—namely, the right of one man to sacrifice the happiness of multitudes to his own will and pleasure? Is it because facts do not lie within the province of the moral philosopher? Is it ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... did not seem incongruous; Doris watched the motion as she might a figment loose in the sunlight. It was as much a prayer of thanks as any ever uttered in ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... moment it is that it is no longer pure matter. Aristotle's answer is that it is true that pure matter is never found as an objective existence. Point to any real object and it is composed of matter and form. And yet it is not true that matter is a pure figment of the imagination; it has an existence of its own, a potential existence. And this leads us to another important conception in the ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... organized parties of boys, who forced their way into the houses and laid violent hands on any objects which seemed suitable for the bonfire. As it happened that they were sometimes sent away with a beating, they were afterwards attended, in order to keep up the figment of a pious 'rising generation,' by a ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... loved, he will rise up and glory to himself, although he be in a distant land and short of necessary bread. Does he think he is not loved?—he may have the woman at his beck, and there is not a joy for him in all the world. Indeed, if we are to make any account of this figment of reason, the distinction between material and immaterial, we shall conclude that the life of each man as an individual is immaterial, although the continuation and prospects of mankind as a race turn upon material conditions. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a feeling as if it were false, a large relief-map that I was looking down upon, and which I wanted to smash. It seemed to intervene between me and some reality. I could not believe that that was the real world. It was a figment, a fabrication, like a dull landscape painted on a wall, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... What a figment of the imagination this boasted impregnability of the Bank of England was the sequel will show. And as for those masters of finance, those earthly Joves of the financial world who sat serene above the ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... then and there! How would her friends and courtiers have laughed! How they would have admired the queen in her original costume, which might well have been thought to belong to the realm of dreams and fantasies! A tri-colored cockade—a figment of the brain—a tri- colored sash—a merry dream! The lilies rule over France, and ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... somnambulism. conception, Vorstellung[Ger], excogitation[obs3], "a fine frenzy"; cloudland[obs3], 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[obs3], whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest[obs3], geste[obs3], extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, man in the moon, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... let Zero perish! ran his thoughts. And then again: had he not promised, had he not shaken hands and broken bread? and that with open eyes? and if so how could he take action, and not forfeit honour? But honour? what was honour? A figment, which, in the hot pursuit of crime, he ought to dash aside. Ay, but crime? A figment, too, which his enfranchised intellect discarded. All day, he wandered in the parks, a prey to whirling thoughts; all night, patrolled the city; and ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... woman; fighting—only the One above could know with what desperate valour—against the warm-hearted girl with the gray eyes and the red lips, who laughed in her knowledge that she drew him—fighting her away for a sentimental figment, ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... suggests universe beyond universe; sinking into the infinite abysses of space; we see worlds forming or decaying and raising at every moment problems of a strange fascination. The prosaic truth is really more poetical than the old figment of the childish imagination. The first great discovery of the real nature of the stars did, in fact, logically or not, break up more effectually than perhaps any other cause, the old narrow and ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... amuse himself for days together by pulling to pieces art, science, philosophy, to find their hidden wheels: so he came by a sort of Pyrrhonism, in which everything that was became only a figment of the mind, a castle in the air, which had not even the excuse of the geometric symbols, of being necessary to the mind. Christophe would rage against his pulling ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... said the Major, taking me kindly by the hand, and leading me close up to her ladyship. "Look at her, Lady Chillington," he added; "scan her features thoroughly, and tell me then that the likeness of which I speak is nothing more than a figment of my own brain." ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... exactly where such places as Markland and Vinland were, but it is clear that the coasts visited on these southerly and southwesterly voyages from Brattahlid must have been parts of the coast of North America, unless the whole story is to be dismissed as a figment of somebody's imagination. But for a figment of the imagination, and of European imagination withal, it has far too many points of verisimilitude, ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... disturbed existence—the lull preceding the last ending of this strange mystery that had wrecked two lives. It seemed to her as she sat down among madame's troop of noisy, chattering girls, as though last night and its events were a long way off and a figment of some strange dream. That she had stood face to face with Sir Victor Catheron, spent a night under the same roof, actually spoken to him, actually felt sorry for him, was too unreal to be true. ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... among the foremost and withal the most mischievous of the old theories which will fall, will be that figment of the imagination—the Nebular Hypothesis.[14] How strangely, and how strongly, has that hypothesis maintained its ground, even after nebulous masses have been resolved into clusters of stars. If gravity be the result of retro-acting ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... and presumably effecting it. What I inferred (if so) was that Coleridge had intended the line as in first ed.: "And she is to sleep with Christabel!" as leading up too nearly to what he meant to keep back for the present. But the whole thing was a figment. ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... thereon at all," said Ebbo, gloomily. "It is a figment of the old serpent to hinder us from snatching his ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... charming preacher, but that he could never learn anything from sermons!" She laughed, "Oh, he is incorrigible! But I want you to let him know that for once he is mistaken. Will you? And you shall not have to say even the smallest figment of an untruth,—your news will be quite correct—for ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... don't see Tayoga. You merely see an idle figment of a brain that does not yet fully know my friend, the great young Onondaga. But I see him, and I see him clearly. I behold a tall, strong figure, head slightly bent against the rain, eyes that see in the ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... bodies; of a partless Being acting upon all parts; and of a passionless Being generating and regulating all passions. Universalists consider the general course of nature, though strangely unheeded, does proclaim with 'most miraculous organ,' that dogmatisers about any such 'figment of imagination' would, in a rational community, be viewed with the same feelings of compassion, which, even in these irrational days, are ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... of Northwick's own language and nation to perceive that his gentlemanly decorum and grave repose of manner masked a complete ignorance of the things that interest cultivated people, and that he was merely and purely a business man, a figment of commercial civilization, with only the crudest tastes and ambitions outside of the narrow circle of money-making. He found that he had a pleasure in horses and cattle, and from hints which Northwick let fall, regarding his life at home, that he ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... will have to plead."—Right of Tythes, p. 196. "But the time usually chosen to send young Men abroad, is, I think, of all other, that which renders them least capable of reaping those Advantages."—Locke, on Ed., p. 372. "It is a mere figment of the human imagination, a rhapsody of the transcendent unintelligible."—Jamieson's Rhet., p. 120. "It contains a greater assemblage of sublime ideas, of bold and daring figures, than is perhaps any where to be met with."—Blair's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... nature of this union, the manner in which the antique and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated the modern; but all this explains but little: art is not a metaphysical figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the Renaissance of elements ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... had restored Barber to life—and big clumps of bamboo and scrub. I anticipated that it would be among those clumps of scrub that we should eventually find the treasure hulk, if indeed the craft actually existed and was not the figment of a madman's imagination; and I also foresaw that our search for the hulk might easily be a very much more arduous and protracted affair than I had anticipated, for it appeared to me that every one of those clumps big enough to conceal the hull of a five-hundred-ton hulk ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... lovers' delight, it was no more than a slow clasping and unclasping of the hands; the spirit and flesh, merged, became spiritual; the height of stars was not a figment.... Here, since the conception of domnei has so utterly vanished, the break between the ages impassable, the sympathy born of understanding is interrupted. Hardly a woman, to-day, would value a sigh the passion which turned a ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... instead of taking a figment of the imagination, why not pick out something real and established, about whose insistence there can be no doubt—the most logical and admirable thing on earth—your own self and your scientifically enlightened intellect? If you need a creed of some sort, to take the place of ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... depends on what you mean by it," returned our girl graduate. "LOI- AUTE, steadfastness to principle, is noble, but personal loyalty, to some mere puppet or the bush the crown hangs on, is a pernicious figment." Charley shouted that this was the No. 1 letter A point in Pie's prize essay, and there the discussion ended, Isa only sighing to herself, "Ah, if I had any one to ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to her strange that at a moment when she was for once not thinking of Peregrine, her imagination should conjure him up, and there was a strong feeling within her that it was something external that had flitted across the shadow, not a mere figment of her brain, though the notion was evidently accepted, and she could hear a muttering of Mrs. Labadie that this was the consequence of employing young wenches with ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more, then, as in what preceded we made a sort of waxen figment in the mind, so let us now suppose that in the mind of each man there is an aviary of all sorts of birds—some flocking together apart from the rest, others in small groups, others solitary, flying anywhere ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... morning the girls themselves felt somewhat inclined to laugh at the fright they had had, and yet they knew that what had happened had been no figment of their imaginations. The sound, though weird and eerie, had been real—even Mrs. Gilligan would ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... here at all? Perhaps you're just a figment of the overstrained ear. And if I undertook to look, there wouldn't ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... stockade, Old Fr. pel (pieu), a stake, Lat. Palos. Hence also Peall, Peile. Keep comes from the central tower of the castle, where the baron and his family kept, i.e. lived. A moated Grange is a poetic figment, for the word comes from Fr, grange, a barn (to ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley |
