"Imagery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to it, and I can feel the steam of it in my face," Eva said, with unconscious imagery. Then she lit a lamp, and went up-stairs to change her dress before ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... still, And heighten all its beauteous mystery. Thro' the sweet-coloured plains of Poesy Thou flowest like a sweetly-sounding stream, Here, rushing furious o'er the rocky crags Of wild, original thought, and there, 'neath bowers Of imagery, winding on thy way Peaceful and still towards the fadeless sea Of all enduring immortality. Like lightning flash for which no thunder-roar Makes preparation, from th' astonished mind On an astonished and admiring world Thou dartest ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... there any theology or creed. There were indefinite views respecting the Father, the Son, and the Spirit,[2] from which, afterward, were drawn the Trinity and the Incarnation, but they were then only in a state of indeterminate imagery. The later books of the Jewish canon recognized the Holy Spirit, a sort of divine hypostasis, sometimes identified with Wisdom or the Word.[3] Jesus insisted upon this point,[4] and announced to his disciples a baptism by fire and ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... spacious, assuming almost the appearance of a subterranean church. The columns of the nave, no longer isolated, are clustered so as to form compound piers, massive and heavy—their capitals either a rude imitation of the Corinthian, or, especially in the earlier structures, sculptured with grotesque imagery. Triforia, or galleries for women, frequently line the nave and transepts. The roof is of stone, and vaulted. The narthex, or portico, for excluded penitents, common alike to the Greek and Roman churches, and in them continued along the whole facade of entrance, is dispensed ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... summer summits, or with premature snow tinging their autumnal tops, he never once alludes to them, so far as we remember, either in his poetry or prose; and that although he spent a part of his youth on the wild smuggling coast of Carrick, he has borrowed little of his imagery from the sea—none, we think, except the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... faculty of admiration, but a very weak one of criticism . . . I am pleased that you cannot quite decide whether I am an attorney's clerk or a novel- reading dress-maker. I will not help you at all in the discovery; and as to my handwriting, or the ladylike touches in my style and imagery, you must not draw any conclusion from that—I may employ an amanuensis. Seriously, sir, I am very much obliged to you for your kind and candid letter. I almost wonder you took the trouble to read and notice the novelette of an anonymous scribe, who had not even the manners ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... culture of the Roman world in the clumsy graffito of the Crucifixion,—emerges in the Middle Ages in a turbulent growth of grotesque, wherein those grim figures of Death or Devil move through a maze of imagery often quaint and fantastic, sometimes obscene or terrible—takes a fresh start in the Passionals of Lucas Cranach, and can be traced in England through her Rebellion and Restoration up to the very confines of the eighteenth century. Why, we have ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... possibility of all imagery, of all our pictorial modes of expression, is contained ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... Saxon contrasted with Celtic Imagery.—A critic rightly says: "The gay wit of the Celt would pour into the song of a few minutes more phrases of ornament than are to be found in the whole poem of Beowulf." In three lines of an old Celtic death ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of delineation and conception in Enoch Arden. The characters stand out real and palpable in their statuesque simplicity. There is agony enough, but neither impatience nor sin. The epithets are well chosen; but the usual wildering sensuousness of Tennyson's glowing imagery is subdued and tender throughout the progress of this ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... held the garment secure. [Page 51] While the girls are making their simple toilet and donning their unique, but scanty, costume, the kumu, aided by others, soothes the impatience of the audience and stimulates their imagination by cantillating a mele that sets forth in grandiloquent imagery ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... righteous from the wicked (Matt. 25:31, 32; 2 Thess. 1:7, 8). Executing God's wrath upon the wicked (Matt. 13:39-42, R. V. How this is done, no human pen can describe. The most fearful imagery of the Bible is connected with the judgment work of angels (cf. Revelation; fire, hail, blood, plague of locusts, poison of scorpions, etc.)—whether actual or symbolic, it ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... communicated to Manbodom. These ceremonial chants are performed not only during religious celebrations but more commonly at night. The greater part of the night is often worn away with a protracted diffuse narration in which is described, with grandiloquent circumlocution and copious imagery, the doings ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... This information is presented in [5]Appendix G: Cross-Reference List of Hydrographic Data Codes which includes the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) codes, Aeronautical Chart and Information Center (ACIC; now a part of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency or NIMA) codes, and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) codes for hydrographic entities. The US Government has not yet approved a standard for hydrographic data codes similar to the FIPS 10-4 standard for country ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of your life. It will be filled with magnificent words, many of them, eight or ten syllables long. It will be mellow like the call of a trumpet. It will be armed with force, and it will be beautiful with imagery; it will be suffused and charged with color, it will be the very essence of poetry and power, and as the aged Dagaeoga draws his very last breath so he will speak his very last word, and thus, in a golden cloud, his soul will go away into infinite ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... escape from these vexing thoughts, he flies to amusement or to licentious indulgence, the delusive relief only makes his misery darker and more hopeless. At length a turn takes place. He is reconciled to his offended Maker. To borrow the fine imagery of one who had himself been thus tried, he emerges from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, from the dark land of gins and snares, of quagmires and precipices, of evil spirits and ravenous beasts. The sunshine is on his path. He ascends the Delectable Mountains, and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... art of persuasion, requires in a writer, the union of good sense, and a lively and chaste imagination. It is, then, her province to teach him to embellish his thoughts with elegant and appropriate language, vivid imagery, and an agreeable variety of expression. It ought to be ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... all these passages the meaning is unmistakable, if they possess definite meaning at all. We are too apt to take them merely for sublime and vague imagery, and therefore gradually to lose the apprehension of their life and power. The expression, "He bowed the Heavens," for instance, is, I suppose, received by most readers as a magnificent hyperbole, having reference to some peculiar and fearful manifestation of God's power to the writer of ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... which is produced by what is usually called poetic diction, arbitrary and subject to infinite caprices upon which no calculation whatever can be made. In the one case the Reader is utterly at the mercy of the Poet respecting what imagery or diction he may choose to connect with the passion, whereas in the other the metre obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both willingly submit because they are certain, and because no interference is made by them with the passion but such as the concurring testimony of ages has shewn ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... supernatural was not made out. And this he did not after the first-class fashion in the study or in octavo volumes, but in the street. His audiences were not Mr. Mudie's subscribers, but men and women earning weekly wages. The coarseness of his language, the offensiveness of his imagery, have been greatly exaggerated. It is now a good many years since I heard him lecture in a northern town on the Bible to an audience almost wholly composed of artisans. He was bitter and aggressive, but the treatment he was then experiencing accounted ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... primal charities, are placed high above us—legible to every eye, and shining like the stars, with a splendour that is read in every clime, and translates itself into every language at once. Such is the imagery of Wordsworth. But this is otherwise estimated in the policy of papal Rome: and casuistry usurps a place in her spiritual economy, to which our Protestant feelings demur. So far, however, the question between us and Rome is a question of degrees. They push casuistry into ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Politian, &c., who have written in Latin, with as much taste as genius; and all unite in their verses the utmost beauty of colouring and harmony; all, with more or less talent, adorn the wonders of nature and art with the imagery of speech. Without doubt our poets cannot pretend to that profound melancholy, that knowledge of the human heart which characterise yours; but does not this kind of superiority belong more properly to philosophical writers ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... would have found imagery by which to improve his description of the abode of Vulcan; for how feeble must have been the objects of this nature, which a poet could view on the shores of the Mediterranean, compared with the gigantic machinery of an English iron-foundry. The application of the expansive powers ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... loveliness they rise from earth, and bloom before us as we read. Writers of such high finish, such delicate perceptions of beauty as T. W. Higginson, are seldom characterized by great originality—his expletives and imagery are as original as tender and beautiful. His illustrations are never morbid, but ever strong and healthful. If he be, as we have been informed he is, the Colonel Higginson now acting in the service of his country, Heaven preserve the life of the patriot, poet, and scholar—for such men ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... vague associations of an impressive nature with which it has been habitually connected; the imagination is prepared to clothe with high attributes whatever follows; and when the words, "Diana of the Ephesians," are heard, all the appropriate imagery which can, on the instant, be summoned, is used in the formation of the picture: the mind being thus led directly, and without error, to the intended impression. When, on the contrary, the reverse order is ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... of unhappy end in imagery Of gold or jewelled bands he saw exprest; Then eagles' talons, the authority With which great lords their delegates invest: Bellows filled every nook, the fume and fee Wherein the favourites of kings are blest: Given to ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... he, Cecil, had been sent to warn them to forsake their sins and live better lives. Long familiarity with the Indians had imparted to him somewhat of their manner of thinking and speaking; his language had become picturesque with Indian imagery, and his style of oratory had acquired a tinge of Indian gravity. But the intense and vivid spirituality that had ever been the charm of his eloquence was in it still. There was something in his words that for the moment, and unconsciously to them, lifted his ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... deal of innocent cheer in the passages in John Woolman's Journal describing his voyage from Philadelphia to London in 1772. Friend Woolman, like the sturdy Quaker that he was, was horrified (when he went to have a look at the ship Mary and Elizabeth) to find "sundry sorts of carved work and imagery" on that part of the vessel where the cabins were; and in the cabins themselves he observed "some superfluity of workmanship of several sorts." This subjected his mind to "a deep exercise," and he decided that he would have to take ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... principally in two things—imagery and composition. The composition of poetry differs from that of prose in the manner of mixing long and short syllables together. Take a long syllable out of a line of poetry, and put a short one in the room of it, or put a long syllable ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... speaks to men, Only to mankind,—Art may tell a truth Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought, Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word. So may you paint your picture, twice show truth, Beyond mere imagery on the wall,— So, note by note, bring music from your mind, Deeper than ever the Adante dived,— So write a book shall mean, beyond the facts, Suffice the eye, and ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... published in 1784. Some writers have censured this production as inflated and bombastic. To us it seems simple and natural; and we have no doubt that the very words of Boone are given for the most part. The use of glowing imagery and strong figures is by no means confined to highly-educated persons. Those who are illiterate, as Boone certainly was, often indulge in this style. Even the Indians are remarkably fond of bold metaphors and other rhetorical figures, as is abundantly ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... forward a passage, in his abomination with which he expects the reader to sympathize. It is the beginning of the epic poem 'Temora.' 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light; the green hills are covered with day; trees shake their dusty heads in the breeze.' And this this gorgeous, yet simple imagery, where all is alive and panting with immortality-this, William Wordsworth, the author of 'Peter Bell,' has selected for his contempt. We shall see what better he, in his own ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... enough of the racial feeling to influence her decision in reference to Dr. Gresham's offer. Iola, like other girls, had had her beautiful day-dreams before she was rudely awakened by the fate which had dragged her into the depths of slavery. In the chambers of her imagery were pictures of noble deeds; of high, heroic men, knightly, tender, true, and brave. In Dr. Gresham she saw the ideal of her soul exemplified. But in her lonely condition, with all its background of terrible sorrow and deep ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... story to the reflection that Nature has given the dead man a more stately funeral than the Church could have given, a comparison seemingly dragged in for the sake of a stanzaful of his favourite Gothic imagery. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Gunnlaugs sang of battle with the sleet of lances hurtling around them, a great calm has settled down upon Parnassus. Generation after generation pipes the same tune of love and Nature, of the liberal arts and the illiberal philosophies; the same imagery, the same metres, meander within the same polite margins of conventional subject. Ever and anon some one attempts to break out of the groove. In the eighteenth century they made a valiant effort to sing of The ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... of a distant hymn rose on the air, and shortly after there appeared, advancing towards the square, a long and pompous retinue of mitred priests, with banners and crucifixes and gorgeous imagery, conducting a procession in which figures representing scenes concerning the death of our Saviour, were carried by on platforms, as they were the preceding evening. There was the Virgin in mourning at the foot of the cross—the Virgin in glory—and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... of Autumn, and the horror of Winter, take in their turns possession of the mind. The poet leads us through the appearances of things as they are successively varied by the vicissitudes of the year, and imparts to us so much of his own enthusiasm that our thoughts expand with his imagery and kindle with his sentiments. Nor is the naturalist without his part in the entertainment, for he is assisted to recollect and to combine, to arrange his discoveries, and to amplify the sphere of his contemplation. The great defect of the "Seasons" is want of method; but for this I know not ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... glittered. The steamboat hands had begun lifting the hawsers from the wharf piles and her time was short. She was not going to be pitied by the opulent persons on the excursion. Getting as it were into her stride, she took a bolder line of imagery. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was green, and pink wild roses fringed every plot of wheat. The grass was wet with dew. The city glittered in the plain beneath, clean and fresh in the dazzling air; it seemed a part of the pageant of summer, an unreal piece of imagery, distinct and clear-cut, yet miraculous, like a mirage seen in mid-ocean. "Truly," he thought, "this is the city of the flower, and the lily is ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... Scotticisms in it; yet I do pronounce it the work of a most masculine and comprehensive mind. The arrangement is far more methodical than Mr. Burke's, the sentiments are more patriotic, the reasoning is more profound, and even the imagery in some places is scarcely less splendid. I think Mackintosh a better philosopher, and a better citizen, and I know him to be a far better scholar and a far better man, than Payne; in whose book there are great ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... have received any preliminary training for the ministry, or any orthodox qualification to practise it. "We're all working in the claim of the Lord," he remarked one day, "and it don't matter a cent whether we're hired for the job or whether we waltzes in on our own account," a piece of rough imagery which appealed directly to the instincts of Jackman's Gulch. It is quite certain that during the first few months his presence had a marked effect in diminishing the excessive use both of strong drinks and of stronger adjectives which had ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thrill to some glowing page of Eastern imagery, when we listen enraptured to some sacred song, some impassioned speech of one filled with religious fervour; when we read of suffering borne patiently, of fortitude unequalled amid awful tribulation, of quiet perseverance conquering difficulty—we ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... at the date historically assigned to King Arthur. Thus it would not be in any way surprising if a tradition of the survival of these semi-Christian rites at this period also existed.[15] In my opinion it is the tradition of such a survival which lies at the root, and explains the confused imagery, of the text we know as the Elucidation. I have already, in my short study of the subject, set forth my views; as I have since found further reasons for maintaining the correctness of the solution proposed, I will ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... with a body. It requires a form of worship, a legend, and ceremonies in order to address the people, women, children, the credulous, every one absorbed by daily cares, any understanding in which ideas involuntarily translate themselves through imagery. Owing to this palpable form it is able to give its weighty support to the conscience, to counterbalance natural egoism, to curb the mad onset of brutal passions, to lead the will to abnegation and devotion, to tear Man away from himself and place him ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a strange, weird dance amongst the imagery of the rings, over which my earth planet was beginning to throw a haze of light. At first it was hardly more than a walk, a slow procession round the twin circumferences of the centred tripod. But soon it increased ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... Hindoos as by Muhammadans; and from boyhood to old age he continues the idol of the imaginations of both. The boy of ten, and the old man of seventy, alike delight to read and quote him for the music of his verses, and the beauty of his sentiments, precepts, and imagery.[31] ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... extraordinary degree, an innate sensibility to natural sights and sounds—the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of [98] "Resolution and Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve." To read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a day spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... Playboy of the Western World' ... is a remarkable play ... its imagery is touched with a wild, unruly, sensational beauty, and the 'popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent and tender' is reflected in it with a glow.... There is a great deal of poetry and fire, beside the humour and satire so obviously ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... eyes sparkled, and flashed with that wildness which her tongue with such rapid imagery pictured forth. Had it continued, the tumult might have been dangerous; perhaps fatal; but fortunately the firmness and intrepidity of my mind were equal to the scene. With a cool and collected benevolence of ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... again invaded Howat; suddenly an unfamiliar imagery attached to the commonplace phrase uttered by his father—the Endless Mountains! It brought back his doubt, his questioning, of life. It was the inconceivable term endless, without any finality of ultimate rest, without even the arbitrary peace of death, that appalled him. He thought ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... harmonies of those Lucchese churches; but it could express itself in their rude and thoroughly original sculpture. Hence, while there is in them no indication of the symbolism of the coming ogival Gothic, there is no trace either of the symbolism belonging to Byzantine buildings. None of the Gothic imagery testifying faith and joy in God and His creatures; no effigies of saints; at most only of the particular building's patron; no Madonnas, infant Christs, burning cherubim, singing and playing angels, armed romantic St. Michael or St. George; none of those goodly rows of kings and queens guarding the ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... stated. Pope may have had from Bolingbroke the philosophick stamina of his Essay; and admitting this to be true, Lord Bathurst did not intentionally falsify. But the thing is not true in the latitude that Blair seems to imagine; we are sure that the poetical imagery, which makes a great part of the poem, was Pope's own[1222]. It is amazing, Sir, what deviations there are from precise truth, in the account which is given of almost every thing[1223]. I told Mrs. Thrale, "You have so little anxiety about truth, that you ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... the utter strangeness of the position that was created by this meeting of old Maisie and old Phoebe, each of whom for nearly half a century had thought the other dead. It is forced to appeal to its reader to make an effort to help its feeble presentations by its own powers of imagery. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... and the romance of adventure. The brilliancy of harmony, the eccentricity and gaiety of rhythm seem symbolic and, in a subtle way, descriptive. As in the subject, the stories themselves, there is a luxuriant imagery, but no sign of the element of reflection ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... fishing for trout In the clear waters of the Colorado streams; but, strange as it may seem, it was not a memory of any of these which come into consciousness. Instead, there came up memories of three different instances, each accompanied with definite visual imagery, and in such rapid succession that I could ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... specially resembles in the way in which the ordinary turns into the extraordinary. It falls short of Scott in vividness, character, manners, and impressiveness, but surpasses him in beauty[90] of style and imagery. In particular, Nodier has here, in a manner which I hardly remember elsewhere, achieved the blending of two kinds of "terror"—the ordinary kind which, as it is trivially called, "frightens" one, and the other[91] terror which accompanies the intenser ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... English, with all their original fire? Yes, I was confident I had; and I had no doubt that the public would say so. And then, with respect to Ab Gwilym, had I not done as much justice to him as to the Danish Ballads; not only rendering faithfully his thoughts, imagery and phraseology, but even preserving in my translation the alliterative euphony which constitutes one of the most remarkable features of Welsh prosody? Yes, I had accomplished all this; and I doubted not that the public would ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... squeezing himself under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is an exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal visual imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positive that his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it—in other ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... fast. I would fain keep all the cry as well as all the wool to ourselves; but as for giving over work, that can only be when I am in woolen.'"[53] From this time forward the brightness of joy and sincerity of inevitable humor, which perfected the imagery of the earlier novels, are wholly absent, except in the two short intervals of health unaccountably restored, in which he wrote ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... general admission of the Gentiles into the Christian Church, had also virtually to be explained in words; they were both visions of the dark class; and revelation abounds in such. But there were also visions greatly clearer than words. Such, for instance, was the vision of the secret chamber of imagery, with its seventy men of the ancients of Israel given over to idolatry, which was seen by the prophet as he sat in his own house; and the vision of the worshippers of the sun in the inner court of the temple, witnessed from what was ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... I went through passages. I found myself in a nondescript room where a courteous official seated at a desk held me on the rack for half an hour. I had to describe Carlotta: not in the imagery wherein only one could create an impression of her sweetness, but in the objective terms of the police report. What was she wearing? A hat, and jacket, a skirt, shoes; of course she wore gloves; ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... "Tale of Troy divine": we begin to miss that high and equable sublimity which never flags or sinks, that continuous current of moving incidents, those rapid transitions, that force of eloquence, that opulence of imagery which is ever true to Nature. Like the sea when it retires upon itself and leaves its shores waste and bare, henceforth the tide of sublimity begins to ebb, and draws us away into the dim region of myth ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... Imagery is confined to actual figures; and it is this measure and this form which give power to the creations of the mind. The imaginative writer should possess a rich store of perceptive observations, and the more accurate and perfect these are, the more vigorous will ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... Labor!"—the student cries, As he gazes around him with joyful eyes,— "Honor to Labor!—the teeming press Pours forth its treasures the world to bless! From the pictured pages where childhood's eye Findeth a world of bright imagery, To the massive tome 'mid whose treasures vast, Lie the time-dimmed records of ages past, We may wander, and revel, yet ever find Supplies exhaustless for heart and mind We may turn to the Past—to the ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... have culminated in it. And the story itself is so touching that it would be poetical even if narrated in the plainest prose. How surpassingly beautiful is it, then, worked out with all the richness of that sweetest poet, who, in intricate verbal music and dreamy imagery, ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... seeing some of those beautiful quiet basins hollowed in the living rock, and stocked with elegant plants and animals, having all the charm of novelty to his eye, they should have moved his poetic fancy, and found more than one place in the gorgeous imagery of his Oriental romances. ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... are not very local; for the pastoral subject could not well admit of it. The description of Asiatic magnificence, and manners, is a subject as yet unattempted amongst us, and I believe, capable of furnishing a great variety of poetical imagery. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... Browning;" she wrote, "that my mind refused to bring forward argument, turned recreant, and sided with the enemy." Something of this period of Browning's Sturm und Drang can be divined through the ideas and imagery of Pauline.[10] ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... entertained himself with the many marvellous sights which are hidden away beneath the waters of the great ocean and which have a life and imagery of their own, stranger and more mysterious perhaps than those on which men are accustomed to look. But in time he became restless and dissatisfied with himself. The unpleasant thought crept slowly ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... the symbol had borne for all men skilled in her traditions: to the schools of craftsmen the sign meant further their craft's noblesse, and pure descent from the divinely-terrestrial skill of Daedalus, the labyrinth-builder, and the first sculptor of imagery pathetic[48] with ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... learned and ornate epic of King Arthur, the dire severity of the Etruscan doctrine of a future life is well indicated, with the local imagery of some parts of it, and the impenetrable obscurity which enwraps ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... (in Prooem.) and the uniform imagery of Ossian's Poems, which, according to every hypothesis, were composed by a ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... use of a bason and a laver in civility which a minister maketh of them in the action of baptising. All our question is about sacred mystical signs. Every sign of this kind which is not ordained of God we refer to the imagery forbidden in the second commandment; so that in the tossing of this argument Paybody is twice naught, neither hath he said aught for evincing the lawfulness of sacred significant ceremonies ordained of men, ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... knowledge of life, extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by which he attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse communion with certain orders of society and classes of human creatures. The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he was congenitally melodramatic; and before very long his habit of attributing special catch-words, gestures, and the like ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... classic times, and is chiefly valuable as showing the estimation in which the classic writers were held in that day. This is also in octosyllabic verses, and is further remarkable for the opulence of its imagery and its variety of description. The poet is carried in the claws of a great eagle into this house, and sees its distinguished occupants standing upon columns of different kinds of metal, according to their merits. The poem ends with the third book, very abruptly, as Chaucer ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... was tightening his girths, and telling his horse, with quite an Oriental flow of imagery, exactly what he thought of him, and his relations, and his conduct on the present occasion; so the Boy made his way down to the Saint's end of the line, and held his spear ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... earth for clever and striking things to say. Instead of learning from the folk-song, Schiller had learned originally from Klopstock; and what he had learned was to pose and philosophize and invest fictitious sentiment with a maze of bewildering and far-fetched imagery. Then he had lost sympathy with Klopstock's religiosity, had acquired a better opinion of the things of sense, and had had his introduction to doubt and disgust and rebellion. When now these moods sought expression in verse, the verse took the form of impassioned rhetoric. He sang not as the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... our comprehension; and we did not obtain a clue to their sublime obscurity, till an address to Mr. Wordsworth explained in what school the author had formed his taste. We perceive, through the "darkness visible" in which Mr. Shelley veils his subject, some beautiful imagery and poetical expressions: but he appears to be a poet "whose eye, in a fine phrenzy rolling," seeks only such objects as are "above this visible diurnal sphere;" and therefore we entreat him, for ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... also, certain papers, wherein is painted some babblerie or other, of imagery woork, and these they call My Lord of Misrule's badges: these they give to every one that wil give money for them, to maintaine them in their heathenrie, devilrie, whordome, drunkennes, pride, and what not. And who will not be buxom to them, and give them money for these their ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... mythology lost with each succeeding generation something of its transparency, and at last degenerated into a gross superstition. But traces still remained, even down to the times of Christian ascendency, of the deep, philosophical spirit in which it had been originally conceived; and through its homely imagery there ran a vein of tender humour, such as still characterises the warm-hearted, laughter-loving northern races. Of this mixture of philosophy and fun, the following story is no bad specimen. [Footnote: The ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... seasoned with proverbial sayings, the wisdom of centuries condensed in a few nervous words. When emotion fires their brain, they break into spontaneous eloquence, or suggest the motive of a poem by phrases pregnant with imagery. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... might doubtless be made more attractive and entertaining were their Author to supply the deficiencies of authentic records by the inventions of his fancy, and adorn the result of careful inquiry into matters of fact by the descriptive imagery and colourings of fiction. To a writer, also, who could at once handle the pen of the biographer and of the poet, few names would offer a more ample field for the excursive range of historical romance than ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... original form is lost beneath a weight of accretion, like the thick moss blurring the chiselled outlines of some carven monument. After careful scrutiny of the miniature temple which suggests so many interpretations of symbolic imagery, we return to the little presbytery to hear of the subsiding river, and the good priest, announcing that the raft can now be safely negotiated, accompanies us to the tottering structure, a straw matting laid over three crazy boats punted across the turbulent stream. A half-hour's ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the stories in the book this was the last one would have supposed Dan would like best, and even Mrs Jo was surprised at his perceiving the moral of the tale through the delicate imagery and romantic language by which it was illustrated. But as she looked and listened she remembered the streak of sentiment and refinement which lay concealed in Dan like the gold vein in a rock, making him ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... hoping that they would issue in his Buddhaship. They were not aware that that issue had come; which may show us that all the accounts in the thirty-first chapter are merely descriptions, by means of external imagery, of what had taken place internally. The kingdom of nirvana had come without observation. These friends knew it not; and they were offended by what they considered Sakyamuni's failure, and the course he was now pursuing. See the account of their conversion ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... an open book in her hand, Regina looked at her and listened, fascinated by her singular beauty, but astonished at the emphasis with which she recited imagery that tinged the girl's ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... deserves to be remembered. What has struck their fancy, they communicate to each other: and in their letters, the glittering thought, given with sententious brevity, the poetical allusion that enlivened the discourse, and the dazzling imagery, are sure to be transmitted to their respective colonies and provinces. The ornaments of poetic diction are now required, not, indeed, copied from the rude obsolete style of Accius [e] and Pacuvius, but embellished with the graces of Horace, Virgil, and [f] Lucan. The public judgement has raised ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... squander so much that is beautiful on such an orgy of blood and violence. Romeo and Juliet is full of beautiful poetry; but even here occasional lapses show the undeveloped taste of the young writer. Notice the flowery and fantastic imagery in the following passage, where Lady Capulet is praising Paris, her ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... nature, and not much of life. He formed a peculiar idea of comic excellence, which he supposed to consist in gay remarks and unexpected answers; but that which he endeavoured, he seldom failed of performing. His scenes exhibit not much of humour, imagery, or passion: his personages are a kind of intellectual gladiators; every sentence is to ward or strike; the contest of smartness is never intermitted; his wit is a meteor playing to and fro with alternate coruscations. His comedies have, therefore, ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... what a loathsome agony Is that when selfishness mocks love's delight, Foul as in dreams' most fearful imagery To dally with the mowing dead;—that night All torture, fear, or horror made seem light Which the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... of Shelley is also discernible in the natural imagery of the poem, which reflects a fitful and emotional fancy instead of the direct poetic vision of the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... we afterwards heard, but did not venture to molest us. The sight and roar of the flames, and the rolling clouds of smoke, brought home to the impressible minds of the black soldiers all their favorite imagery of the Judgment-Day; and those who were not too much depressed by disappointment were excited by the spectacle, and ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... agitation followed. For a time he seemed completely transformed. The sunny Lincoln, the delight of Clary's Grove, had vanished. In his place was a desolated soul—a brother to dragons, in the terrible imagery of Job—a dweller in the dark places of affliction. It was his mother reborn in him. It was all the shadowiness of his mother's world; all that frantic reveling in the mysteries of woe to which, hitherto, her son ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... last made up his mind to ask me to tell him the wrong that Madame de Salvi had done me, I rather checked his curiosity. I told him that if he was bent upon knowing I would satisfy him, but that it seemed a pity, just now, to indulge in painful imagery. ...
— The Diary of a Man of Fifty • Henry James
... in the imagery of romance. He sought 'a treasure—a treasure that would destroy a Kingdom.' And his indicatory data seemed to be the dried blossom of our ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... funeral service, without any allegorical imagery, expresses the sentiment of the dirge in ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... poets, although they hardly divided the popular favour with the others, were also noticed and applauded. Thus the poets of the earlier part of the seventeenth century may be divided into one class, who sacrificed both sense and sound to the exercise of extravagant, though ingenious, associations of imagery; and a second, who, aiming to distinguish themselves by melody of versification, were satisfied with light and trivial subjects, and too often contented with attaining smoothness of measure, neglected ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... in the abstract is hardly won, and only by use familiarized to the mind. Examples are akin to analogies, and have a reflex influence on thought; they people the vacant mind, and may often originate new directions of enquiry. Plato seems to be conscious of the suggestiveness of imagery; the general analogy of the arts is constantly employed by him as well as the comparison of particular arts—weaving, the refining of gold, the learning to read, music, statuary, painting, medicine, the art of the pilot—all of which ...
— Statesman • Plato
... wishes and his own. He had given her his word that he would be a preacher; keep his given word he must and would. Nevertheless, preaching, he must choose for himself a gentler sort of gospel than the lurid, flaming fires delighted in and set forth with all the cunning of word imagery, by every Parson Wheeler of his line. His God should be an honest gentleman, and not an all-pursuing ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the true vine." My father used to tell us that the Greek word [Greek: alethine], rendered true, is usually employed of the genuine in distinction from the counterfeit, the reality in distinction from the shadow and image. Is not this perhaps the clew to our Lord's use of natural imagery? Nature was always the presentation to his senses of the divine thought and purpose. He studied the words of the ancient Scripture, he found the same words and teachings clearly and concretely embodied in the ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... and naturally became, in consequence, with Orientals, a representative of the highest human good. All the more joyous emotions of the mind, all the pleasing sensations of the frame, all the happy hours of domestic intercourse, were described under imagery derived from light. The transition was natural—from earthly to heavenly, from corporeal to spiritual things; and so light came to typify true religion and the felicity which it imparts. But as light not only came from God, but ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... days, those improvisations which gave one form of dance its name, bl (from the French bel air), were often remarkable rhymeless poems, uttered with natural simple emotion, and full of picturesque imagery. I cite part of one, taken down from the dictation of a common field-hand near Fort-de-France. I offer a few lines of the creole first, to indicate the form of the improvisation. There is a dancing pause at the end of each ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... of boots outside, the croaking of old beldames from attic to attic, the dull murmur of morning, unnerved him, and, dozing, he slumped in his chair, his brain, overladen with sound and color, working intolerably over the imagery that stacked it. In this restless dream of his he was one of a thousand groaning bodies crushed near the sun, a helpless bridge for the strong-eyed Apollo. The dream tore at him, scraped along his mind like a ragged knife. When a hot hand touched his shoulder, he awoke with what ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of imagery. It constantly delighted him. "Yes, that's good," she declared. "Up like a diver, Harry. Not with goggles and a helmet and all that, but shot up like a flash, all shining and glistening and triumphant with the jewel aloft. What a shout there'd ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... personage, and every shade of character in each, tends to the development of the sentiment which is the subject of the drama. The poetry, too, the richest that can possibly be conceived, is interfused through all the characters; the splendid imagery lavished upon all with the careless prodigality of genius, and the whole is lighted up into such a sunny brilliance of effect, as though Shakspeare had really transported himself into Italy, and had drunk to intoxication of her genial atmosphere. How truly it has been said, that ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... hymns and prayers with which the poem abounds are largely original, expanded from a mere line or two in the Greek. Many and beautiful are the epithets or kennings which he applies to God, taken in part from the Bible, and in part from the imagery of the not ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... painted and gilt, which rose up as high almost as the roof of the church in a row of three lofty spires, with other lesser spires, growing out of each of them, as it is represented in the annexed draught.[15] This had now no Imagery-work upon it, or anything else that might justly give offence, and yet because it bore the name of the High Altar, was pulled all down with ropes, lay'd low and level with the ground." All the tombs were mutilated or hacked down. The hearse over ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... emotional, these stunted men. They cursed the war with the foulest curses of Scottish and Northern dialects. There was one fellow—the jester of them all—whose language would have made the poppies blush. With ironical laughter, outrageous blasphemy, grotesque imagery, he described the suffering of himself and his mates under barrage fire, which smashed many of them into bleeding pulp. He had no use for this war. He cursed the name of "glory." He advocated a trade—unionism among soldiers to down ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... another Celtic trait that his affections and emotions, passionate as these were, and liable to passionate ups and downs, found the most eloquent expression both in words and gestures. Love, anger, and indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what we read of Southern races. For all these emotional extremes, and in spite of the melancholy ground of his character, he had upon the whole a happy life; nor was he less fortunate in his death, which at the last ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... irresponsible and unsuspecting of moments something whizzed into her consciousness like a bullet—something shot by her vision pierced the lazy, hazy, carelessly woven web of imagery—bullet-swift, bullet-true, bullet-terrible—striking the center clean and strong. The suddenness and completeness with which she sat up almost sent her from her place. For from the very instant that her eye rested upon the figure ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... temple, that the rays of a holy ruby might make her quick; surely their children had met and bred the stock that had at last, in the wise age of the world, made this thing of rubies and ivory that lay in his arms. He liked making fantasies about her that were stiff as brocade with fantastic imagery, that were more worshipful of her loveliness than anything he yet dared say to her. Absent-mindedly he went on reassuring her. "You know, I've got quite enough money. Fortunately the branch of chemistry I'm interested in is of great commercial ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... cannot picture it even in imagination; but to one who knows how sincere was the enthusiasm of the Renaissance for Greek ideals as well as for modes of expression, how classicism had come to be understood as a synonym for perfection in form whether in literature or the plastic arts,—all the pretty imagery of the Golden Age and its demigods becomes as natural a poetic rendering of sincere feeling as the equally formal restrictions of the measure of the sonnet or the rules which govern the composition of a concerto. Having ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... afternoon, as we rode easily across the land of the Philistines in a few hours, that we had never really read the Old Testament as it ought to be read,—as a book written in an Oriental atmosphere, filled with the glamour, the imagery, the magniloquence of the East. Unconsciously we had been reading it as if it were a collection of documents produced in Heidelberg, Germany, or in Boston, Massachusetts: precise, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... chapters of the synoptic Gospels are intensely colored with this anticipation of a divine judgment close at hand. The promise, the threat, the tremendous imagery, were dear to the heart of the early church. They fed the imagination of the mediaeval church. But that modern Christianity which finds in Christ the source and embodiment of all its own refined and exalted conceptions is inclined to look away from all this millennial prophecy; to weaken ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... adopt it, Coleridge? there would be room for imagination. Or the description (from a Vision or Dream, suppose) of an Utopia in one of the planets (the Moon, for instance). Or a Five Days' Dream, which shall illustrate, in sensible imagery, Hartley's 5 motives to conduct:—sensation (1), imagination (2), ambition (3), sympathy (4), Theopathy (5). 1st banquets, music, etc., effeminacy,—and their insufficiency. 2d "beds of hyacinth ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... put up with the shame as best he could. It was of his own making, and he ought to bear it. But first he resolved to register an oath, a greater oath than he had ever sworn before: and to do it properly he required a fit place and imagery; for there was something ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... agricultural rites. Corn deities were weeping deities, they shed fertilizing tears; and the sowers simulated the sorrow of divine mourners when they cast seed in the soil "to die", so that it might spring up as corn. This ancient custom, like many others, contributed to the poetic imagery of the Bible. "They that sow in tears", David sang, "shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him."[106] In Egypt the priestesses who acted the parts of ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... deeper and deeper sleep, into that eternal region where he no longer thought, but knew... Immense processions of shifting imagery absorbed him into themselves, spontaneous, unfamiliar, self-multiplying, and as exquisitely baffling as God and all ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... be able to feel them, would be the one argument to destroy our belief in the genuineness of the poet's vision. For if so, can the vision have come from Nature's self? Has it not rather been evoked by the magic rod of the poet's will from his own chambers of imagery? ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... life of man. He was always more or less severe in his judgments— he has been called "The Censor of the Age,"— because of the high ideal which he set up for his own conduct and the conduct of others. —He shows in his historic writings a splendour of imagery and a power of dramatic grouping second only to Shakespeare's. In command of words he is second to no modern English writer. His style has been highly praised and also energetically blamed. It is rugged, gnarled, disjointed, full of irregular force— ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... truly says of the Dialogue, "that it will not be easy to find, in all the opulence of our language, a treatise so artfully variegated with successive representations of opposite probabilities, so enlivened with imagery, and heightened with illustration." But we have some difficulty in going along with him when he adds—"The account of Shakspeare may stand as a perpetual model of encomiastic criticism, exact without minuteness, and lofty without exaggeration. The praise lavished ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... remarks fertile in the imagery of love, the two pretty cousins amused themselves until supper ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... More and his companions ever had—they stretched themselves and yawned, and felt very thirsty, for they had all been blind drunk the night before, be it remembered; and Shan More, to use his own expressive and poetic imagery, swore that his tongue was "as rough as a rat's back," while his companions went no further than saying theirs were as "dry as a lime-burner's wig." We should not be so particular in those minute details ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... grandfather's place in Connecticut. This in his opinion was not the way to greet the knight who had come to the rescue of his lady. He had not expected it so to happen. In fact from Athens to this place he had engaged himself with imagery of possible meetings. He was vexed, certainly, but, far beyond that, he knew a deeper adminiration for this girl. To him she represented the sex, and so the sex as embodied in her seemed a mystery to be ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... grandest phenomena of nature, and tinctured with the wild traditions of the old Norsemen, it is not surprising that they should implicitly believe in wandering spirits of fire and flood, and clothe the desolate wastes of lava with a poetic imagery peculiarly their own. Every rock, and river, and bog is invested with a legend or story, to the truth of which they can bear personal witness. Here a ghost was overtaken by the light of the moon and turned to stone; there ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... pigmies who had offended Him? Tortures that were never to do them any good, but just to keep them in misery for ever and ever? It is unthinkable—it's almost ludicrous. What is the good of suffering except to purify? That we can understand and thank God for. But the other—oh, the other is sheer imagery, more mythical than Jonah and the whale. It just doesn't go." Again she paused, then very frankly held out her hand to him. "But I like your picture of the Open Heaven, Piers," she said. "Show it me again some day—when I'm ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... Palace," one of the finest of his poems, is an unequaled allegory of the wreck and ruin of sovereign reason, which to be fully appreciated should be read in its somber setting, "The Fall of the House of Usher." Less attractive is "The Conqueror Worm," with its repulsive imagery, but this "tragedy 'Man,'" with the universe as a theater, moving to the "music of the spheres," and "horror the soul of the plot," is ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... one of the features which gives a peculiar character to this cathedral. In the wealth of imagery on the projecting screen which forms the lowest stage of the front it is second only to Wells amongst English cathedrals. The actual west wall of the church is the work of Bishop Grandisson, who formed on the south side of the central ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... acknowledge that man was born a poet, his mind a chamber of imagery, his world a gallery of art. Despite his utmost efforts, he can in nowise strip his thought of the flowers and fruits that cling to it, withered though they often are. As a fact, he has ever been a citizen of two worlds, using the scenery of the visible ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... one plate. The grotesques, so often a stumbling-block to painters who forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly present an image to the mind, must be lowered in key when translated into form, make one regret that he has not rather chosen for illustration the more subdued imagery of the Purgatorio. Yet in the scene of those who go down quick into hell there is an invention about the fire taking hold on the up-turned soles of the feet, which proves that the design is no mere ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... his mind were coming back from a distance. "I," he said, "dreamed a poem in India. It has never been written down, but I still can remember every line of it. Listen." The poem, which was full of vague Oriental imagery, was perfectly intelligible, and throbbed with a certain sonority like that of distant gongs; but no sane man would have written it in his waking moments. In that fact lay its charm. The author's voice, naturally low and ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... faint and hushed through the serener air. The verse, like the story, rolls on as by its own natural power, without haste or effort or delay. The gorgeous colouring, the profuse and often complex imagery which Spenser's imagination lavishes, leave no sense of confusion in the reader's mind. Every figure, strange as it may be, is seen clearly and distinctly as it passes by. It is in this calmness, this serenity, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... Optic nerve perfectly sensible in sleep. Eyes less dazzled after dreaming of visible objects. 6. Reverie, belief. 7. How we distinguish ideas from perceptions. 8. Variety of scenery in dreams, excellence of the sense of vision. 9. Novelty of combination in dreams. 10. Distinctness of imagery in dreams. 11. Rapidity of transaction in dreams. 12. Of measuring time. Of dramatic time and place. Why a dull play induces sleep, and an interesting one reverie. 13. Consciousness of our existence and identity in dreams. 14. How we awake ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... is true," he said. "In truth that was a most gorgeous and rounded speech you made about your friend. I don't recall finer and more flowing periods! What vividness! What imagery! I'm ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Yochai, who lived in the second century. The Zohar, it was pretended, had been concealed in a cavern in Galilee for more than a thousand years, and had now been suddenly discovered. The Zohar is, indeed, a work of genius, its spiritual beauty, its fancy, its daring imagery, its depth of devotion, ranking it among the great books of the world. Its literary style, however, is less meritorious; it is difficult and involved. As Chatterton clothed his ideas in a pseudo-archaic English, so Moses of Leon used an Aramaic idiom, which ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... and then fully believed it, that she had no shame. It was long since she had felt shame. She felt it now, when it struck her that during all her long reveries about her escape and her restoration to the world, not one thought of her children had entered into the imagery of her dream. Like all people of strong passions, she had taken for granted that there was something grand and fine in the intensity of her feelings. Now, for a moment, the clear mirror of Annie's mind was held ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... made by the man of wealth to the poet. Ridman, in one of his enterprises, found it necessary to procure the aid of such a person as Lingave—a writer of power, a master of elegant diction, of fine taste, in style passionate yet pure, and of the delicate imagery that belongs to the children of song. The youth was absolutely startled at the magnificent and permanent remuneration which was held out to him for a moderate ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of Matthew, where the Judgement Day is depicted for us in the imagery of One seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep from the goats, the test of a man then is not, "How have I believed?" but "How have I loved?" The test of religion, the final test of religion, is not religiousness, ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... frame, "but you'm growed into a reg'lar strapper, and no mistake; a reg'lar young Goliath of Gath a be, no less. And you've been a slayin' of a Philistine or two, here and there, so I do hear" (Mr Radlett was a little mixed in the matter of his Bible imagery, you will perceive, but he meant well). "Ay, ay; I've been havin' a crack wi' old Cap'n Burroughs, since mun comed whoam, and he've a been tellin' me all about ye. Garge, I'm proud of 'e, boy—and so be madam here, too, I'll be boun'—for 'twas I that made a sailor of 'e by givin' ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood |
