"Metamorphosis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hands, fulfilling the prediction of the soothsayers. Vixnu married two wives, but, neither of them pleasing him, he divorced them and espoused sixteen thousand shepherdesses. The people imagined that he would appear some time or another in the form of a horse, but thought that until that metamorphosis took place he would wallow in a sea of milk, with his head supported by a ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... to the proposal, and the chief was so kind as to assist my friend and his family in effecting that very day the desired metamorphosis. My hair was cut off, and my head shaved, with the exception of a spot on the crown, of about twice the diameter of a crown piece. My face was painted with three or four different colours; some parts of it red, and others black. A shirt was provided for me, painted ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... half-past five. It was the slack time of the day in such a region, as he well knew, yet he was curious to see. In all his score of years of wandering and studying social conditions over the world, he had carried with him the memory of his old town as a sweet and wholesome place. The metamorphosis he now beheld was startling. He certainly must continue his stroll and glimpse the infamy to which his ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... point nowhere to anything final but tendency; but tendency appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming something else; is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars." "In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on us is this, that it does not exist to any one, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had; but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden and complete metamorphosis ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... to us in the brain is the molecular vibrations. But we are not conscious of them. Where, then, is that of which we are conscious? (2) It should next be explained to us by what elaboration, transmutation, or metamorphosis a molecular disturbance, which is material, can transform itself into the objects which ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... supported by the tradition of his association with Kartavirya Arjuna, who, in spite of all the mythical tales that are related of him, really seems to have been a king of flesh and blood. Thus we may venture to see in him yet another example of the metamorphosis so common in India from a saint to an incarnation of the god ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... a movement with his hand, and, directly he did so, it happened as on the previous evening, that a metamorphosis took place in the very abysses of my being. I woke from my torpor, as he put it, I came out of death, and was alive again. I was far, yet, from being my own man; I realised that he exercised on me a degree of ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... exclusiveness which is like the atmosphere of a great painting. One feels by instinct that the master hand has been here. Although aware that good fortune had wrought a marked change in Anne, Monsignor was utterly taken aback by a transformation as remarkable in its way as the metamorphosis of ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... struck with their diminutiveness, compared to the time when they turned the two grist mills two hundred years back: the clearing of the adjoining forests, whence they take their source, may account for the metamorphosis." ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the attention of the company. And it well might, for the year was 1830, and the mode of performing the cotillion of the period was undergoing the metamorphosis of which the perfect development has been familiar to ourselves. In its next stage the male celebrant is represented to us as "hopping about with a face expressive of intense solemnity, dancing as if a quadrille"—mark the newer ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... passing from one abode to another, and leaving its first body for a new one, ever changing its appearance and its dwelling, guided by the Creator's beams, from transmigration to transmigration, from metamorphosis to metamorphosis, pursues the palingenesic course of its ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... to Uncle Ezra. "Uncle, what strange metamorphosis has happened to this picture? The spiritual light from that color must shine as brightly as ever; the intrinsic value remains forever fixed in Maud's soul; it is desecration to reject such a precious message. Why, it's like sending back the girl you ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... opium-poppies. Now this size of the head can easily be measured, either by its height or circumference, or by its weight. Moreover we can arrange them into a series according to their size. If we do this with the polycephalous variety, the relation between individual strength and degree of metamorphosis at once becomes manifest. The largest heads have the brightest crowns, and the number of supernumerary carpels diminishes in nearly exact proportion to the size of the fruits. Fruits with less than 50 altered stamens weighed on an ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... a countenance handsome and striking, but yet more prepossessing from its expression of frankness than from the regularity of its features,—he stopped short, held out his hand, and said, with a gay laugh, as he glanced over the parson's threadbare and slovenly costume, "My poor Caleb!—what a metamorphosis!—I should not have known ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Koran declares that no True Believer might take Jew or Christian to be his friend, that the Veracious Book also assures the Faithful that Jews will be turned to pigs or monkeys for their unbelief, and that the metamorphosis will be painful. "Moreover," said the True Believer, who did not know that I was of the despised race, "do you not know that one of these cursed people tried to seize the throne in the time ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... The metamorphosis of a Prime Minister into an insurgent chief, though a remarkable phenomenon, is no matter for surprise. M. Venizelos sprang from people among whom insurrection formed the traditional method of asserting political opinions. ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... July, 1876, contains a valuable article by the late Mr. Dannreuther which will be useful as an introduction, and ought to be familiar to all who are interested in modern developments of music. Mr. Dannreuther there treats of the type of variation peculiar to Beethoven, which he compares to the metamorphosis of insects or of the organs of plants: "It is not so much the alteration of a given thought, a change of dress or of decoration, it is an actual creation of something new and distinct from out of a given germ." He then proceeds to trace ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... religion. It will serve," he said shortly. Then he shrugged again as if throwing aside the troubles that perplexed him and looked down on Craven with a quick laugh. "And you, my poor friend, who had so much better have taken the burnous I offered you, you will stay and watch the metamorphosis of ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... A curious metamorphosis of Sesamum is of common occurrence: the calyx being unchanged, while the corolla preserves somewhat its shape, but is foliaceous, the other organs are much transformed, the ovary less so than the stamina, but generally much enlarged; ovules in leaves inside. This ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... attentive, allowed himself to be adored by Micheline, who was never weary of listening to and looking at him whom she loved. It was a sort of delirium that had taken possession of the young girl. Madame Desvarennes looked on the metamorphosis in her child with amazement. The old Micheline, naturally indolent and cold, just living with the indolence of an odalisque stretched on silk cushions, had changed into a lively, loving sweetheart, with sparkling eyes and cheerful lips. Like ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Ultima Thule of his emotions had yet to come. There was a slight stir behind the canvas, a thud, a hollow groan that echoed and re-echoed throughout the room like the muffled clap of distant thunder, and the eyes suddenly underwent a metamorphosis—they grew glazed and glassy like the eyes of a dead person. A cold shudder ran through the Dean, his hair stood on end, his blood turned to ice. Again he essayed to move, to summon help; again he failed. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... after birth, the several stages of progress succeeding each other in a constant order, and affecting the individual only, not the race. A young monkey is no more likely to be transmuted into a man than an old one; nor is such a metamorphosis at all more probable in the course of its ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... jumped up without saying a word, rushed to the wardrobe, dressed himself in modest attire in a few moments, and presented himself to Goethe, who rose from the carpet quite astounded at the sudden metamorphosis. Then he seized his three-cornered hat to go out, when Goethe held ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... half an hour a wonderful metamorphosis. A tinted fringe of cloud appears on the mists high up, and gives the impression of a beam of sunlight amidst the shadows. But no sun has broken the eastern sky-line, nor will it for another half-hour. Yet the light increases, and the swirling mists become a rosy cloudland, deep, ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... that the parasites are sucked up with the blood of the victim. Once inside the stomach they soon free themselves from the inclosing sheath and make their way through the walls of the stomach and enter the muscular tissue, particularly the thoracic muscles. Here they undergo a metamorphosis and increase enormously in size, some attaining one-sixteenth of an ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... connecting Jackson Park on the east and Washington Park on the west, it was styled by the seekers of plaisir "Midway Plaisance" signifying "Pleasure-Way." This name has been retained by the Administration of the World's Fair, whereas the country-lane of former times had undergone a complete metamorphosis. We were unable to realize the radical character of the transformation as we contemplated the enormous variety of attractions here presented, more numerous and unlike any others ever brought together. Therefore, it is a very difficult task ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... received another strange but unmistakable impression which replied: "I can understand your thoughts but not your babble." "Are you able," she continued telepathically, "to give an explanation of this extraordinary metamorphosis?" "The only information I can offer," answered I, "will be cheerfully given. My name is John Convert, late seaman aboard the schooner Brawl, bound from Sydney to London. Last night I was thrown overboard by ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... An intuition, growing till it all but became an idea, and then remaining short of expressibility, unable to perceive even its own indefiniteness—a film for impressions where there is no light—such was the vagueness of my guess concerning the metamorphosis that was taking place. Yet I began to understand that Auber Hurn, the real man, was not there, not on the bed, not in my house at all. It was as if the Person were being gradually deducted, leaving only the prime flesh to vouch for the man's existence. Even as I sat in ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... signification statua, simulacrum idoli, and, besides the passages under consideration, refers to Jud. viii. 27, xvii. 5, xviii. 14, 17. But one requires only to examine these passages a little more minutely, to be convinced that the metamorphosis of Jehovah into an idol is as little justified as the changing of the mantle into a statue. From the personal character of Gideon, who was so zealous for the Lord against the idols, we cannot at all think of idolatry in Jud. viii. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... above all by the creation of woman's character, by introducing into mediaeval poetry, hitherto hard and austere, the nuances of love, that the Breton romances brought about this curious metamorphosis. It was like an electric spark; in a few years European taste was changed. Nearly all the types of womankind known to the Middle Ages, Guinevere, Iseult, Enid, are derived from Arthur's court. In the Carlovingian poems woman is a nonentity without character ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... and English are agreed, And Saunders hastes to cross the Tweed, Where, such the splendours that attend him, His very mother scarce had kend him. His metamorphosis behold, From Glasgow frieze to cloth of gold; His back-sword, with the iron hilt, To rapier, fairly hatch'd and gilt; Was ever seen a gallant braver! His very bonnet's grown a ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... I have made half a million by a good book? What if I have kept a gambling-house? From the back parlour of an oyster-shop my hazard table has been removed to this palace. Had the play been foul, this metamorphosis would never have occurred. It is true I am an usurer. My dear sir, if all the usurers in this great metropolis could only pass in procession before you at this moment, how you would start! You might find some Right Honourables among them; many a great functionary, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... adopt these High-German names, I cannot say: all I wished to point out was that there was a very intelligible reason why Kingsley should have preferred the popular and poetical name of Dietrich, even though it was High-German, either to his real Gothic name, Theodereik, or to its classical metamorphosis, Theodoricus or Theodorus. ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... of the philosophy of his day. If it should be objected to by some of the most highly developed Negro thought of the present day, the increasing tendency towards retaliation should be attributed partly to the American Negro's metamorphosis since the colossal struggle for ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... are more significant—indeed, they are pregnant to bursting—and more fully charged with energy and colour; also they are not stated and restated in their elementary form as in Lohengrin, but continually subjected to a process of metamorphosis. This last mode of developing a theme he probably learnt from Liszt, and without it both Tristan and the Ring would be very different. But while these are the most striking characteristics of Wagner's later leading themes and mode of using ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... stage boldly faces situations, the exigencies of which call for the greatest adaptation and facility on the part of actor and stage manager. The "Yotsuya Kwaidan" in the stage representation presents a number of critical scenes in which both qualities are severely strained. Rapid metamorphosis is a sine qua non. And ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... awkward and angular girl of fourteen into the trim and graceful maiden of sweet sixteen. Wonderful metamorphosis! The magic wand of the fairy has touched her, and she comes forth a new being, a vision of beauty to ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... end of the six months of probation approached, Madam became more and more anxious. Ever since Eleanor's high-handed departure she had been undergoing a metamorphosis. Like most autocrats, the only things of which she took notice were the ones that impeded her progress. When they proved sufficiently formidable to withstand annihilation, she awarded them the respect that was their due. Eleanor's childish ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... Basse, a retainer of the Wenman family near Thame, the author, probably or certainly, of a quaint defence of retainership, Sword and Buckler (1602), and of other poems—Pastoral Elegies, Urania, Polyhymnia, etc.—together with an exceedingly odd piece, The Metamorphosis of the Walnut-Tree of Boarstall, which is not quite like anything else of the time. Basse, who seems also to have spelt his name "Bas," and perhaps lived and wrote through the first forty or fifty years of the seventeenth century, is but a moderate poet. Still he is not ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... II we have briefly described phylogeny in general or metamorphosis, and in the first part of Chapter IV we have specially considered the phylogeny of the sexual appetite in the phenomenon of cell division and conjugation of nuclei in unicellular organisms, which we have described in Chapter I. In order for animals to reproduce themselves without ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the people susceptible to alien influences, to notions more closely akin to its understanding. Residence in Canaan, among related Semitic tribes that had long before separated from the Israelites, and adopted altogether different views and customs, produced a far greater metamorphosis in the character of the Israelites than the sojourn in Egypt. After the first flush of victory, when the unity of the Israelitish people had been weakened by the particularistic efforts of several ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... too near to, or too far from us; neither the inhabitants of a star nor of a drop of water ... with our ears that deceive us, for they transmit to us the vibrations of the air in sonorous notes. They are fairies who work the miracle of changing that movement into noise, and by that metamorphosis give birth to music, which makes the mute agitation of nature musical ... with our sense of smell which is smaller than that of a dog ... with our sense of taste which can scarcely distinguish the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... hypothesis by describing the notochord of the amphioxus as a cartilaginous vertebral column. The specialists of the day jeered at him, of course, as the specialists in Goethe's time jeered at the plant-metamorphosis. As far as I can make out, the anatomists and zoologists were down on Dr. Anson to a man; that was why his cowardly publishers went back on their bargain. But the pamphlet must be here somewhere—he ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... matter with which his mind was struggling as he lay there, his head cradled on one elbow, watching the thin blue spirals from his cigarette mount straight to the ceiling, and that was the metamorphosis of ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... and the men—fierce enough and warlike in their aspect at all times—had now rendered themselves doubly so, by putting on broad belts with pistols therein, and tucking up their sleeves to the shoulders, thereby displaying their brawny arms as if they had dirty work before them. This strange metamorphosis was finally completed when Manton, with his own hands, ran up to the peak of the mainsail a bright scarlet flag with the single word "AVENGER" on it in large ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... people—not a well-ordered democracy like ours, of course—imagining a vain thing. Again and again he quixotically charged the bole of the tree, no doubt thinking it to be myself in a new shape. A fine classical boar he must have been, with his poetic faith in instantaneous metamorphosis. His classicality, however, what with his unmannerly savageness and my own suspension between heaven and earth, I did not feel bound to respect. So, without the slightest emotion of sentimentality, I put a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... the rest, if you can work mysterious and romantic heroes out of old cross-grained fishermen, why, I for one will reap some amusement by the metamorphosis. Yet hold! even there, there is some need of caution. This same female chaplain—thou sayest so little of her, and so much of every one else, that it excites some doubt in my mind. VERY PRETTY she is, it seems—and ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... now recognised the features of that individual, the absence of whose brown locks had produced such a metamorphosis as, I believe, was never effected ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... the play over, and well over, than the choleric and arbitrary M. Paul underwent a metamorphosis. His hour of managerial responsibility past, he at once laid aside his magisterial austerity; in a moment he stood amongst us, vivacious, kind, and social, shook hands with us all round, thanked us separately, and announced his determination that each of us should in turn be ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... of the companion planets could be seen; there in the field of view of his telescope was the golden-tinted disc of the planet as smoothly rounded as the disc of Mars or Jupiter. 'What,' he wrote, 'is to be said concerning so strange a metamorphosis? Are the two lesser stars consumed after the manner of the solar spots? Have they vanished or suddenly fled? Has Saturn, perhaps, devoured his children? Or were the appearances, indeed, illusion ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... and insular groups elevated above the level of the sea (the study of the geographical form and outlines of the different parts of the earth. Classification of rocks according to the scale of the phenomena of structure and metamorphosis, which are still passing before our eyes. Rocks of eruption, sedimentary rocks, changed (metamorphosed) rocks, conglomerates — compound rocks are definite associations of cryctognostically simple fossils. There are four phases in the formative ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Nitschke ('Bot. Zeitung,' 1861, p. 224) the purple fluid results from the metamorphosis of chlorophyll. Mr. Sorby examined the colouring matter with the spectroscope, and informs me that it consists of the commonest species of erythrophyll, "which is often met with in leaves with low vitality, ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... superficialities of surface culture and clothes, the thin veneer of education which in his case, as in the cases of the great majority of young men who have been graduated from this or that university, had imparted only a sort of finish, a neat, gleaming polish, and no great metamorphosis of the inner and true being, was he a better man? If there was any one particular, no matter how small, in which Greek Conniston was a better man than the men among whom he had moved with careless contempt, he wanted to know what ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... of this, her metamorphosis, that Peter Hope one evening received a note from her announcing her intention of visiting him the next morning at the editorial office of Good Humour. She added in a postscript that she would prefer ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... late in the season, of course, for much new growth in the vegetable beds; but the half-hearted attention of John-Ed, junior, had never brought about this metamorphosis, Tunis well knew. He went on to the Latham house, feeling well pleased. Aside from all other considerations, he was glad to know that his Machiavellian plan had brought about these ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... into a bird, however fabulous, would be scarcely more astonishing than the metamorphosis which it actually undergoes—the young of the little animal having no feature to identify it with its final development. In its early stage (I quote from Carpenter's Physiology, vol. i. p. 52.) it has a form not ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... variations perform no function in the life of the individual, have no relation to external conditions, either in the sense of being caused by special conditions or fitting the individual to live in special conditions. A still more important fact is that they do not explain the origin of metamorphosis. They do not arise by a metamorphosis: in the case of the rose comb of fowls the chick is not hatched with a single comb which gradually changes into a rose comb, but the rose comb develops directly from the beginning. Mutationists and Mendelians do not seem in the least to ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... ample internal evidence shows, is borrowed from the East. The groundwork of the tale is the metamorphosis of Lucius of Corinth into an ass, and the strange accidents which precede his recovering ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... larvae with the changing skins, the ugly caterpillars of a society that is slowly, very slowly, wending its way to the triumph of right over might. When will this sublime metamorphosis be accomplished? To free ourselves from those wild-beast brutalities, must we wait for the ocean-plains of the southern hemisphere to flow to our side, changing the face of continents and renewing the glacial period of the Reindeer and the ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... if Miss Blake and the rest—were demanding of her just such a metamorphosis and she had been trying—she really had—to recast herself in the mold she thought they exacted. And now here came John Gardiner, surely the nicest and most mannerly young fellow she knew, and the one whom even Miss Blake was pleased to call "a perfect gentleman"—here ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... In six weeks' time the metamorphosis in the woman had been as complete as it was in the ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... this all. If digestion were a thing to be trifled with, I might sup upon lobster, and the matter of life of the crustacean would undergo the same wonderful metamorphosis into humanity. And were I to return to my own place by sea, and undergo shipwreck, the crustacean might, and probably would, return the compliment, and demonstrate our common nature by turning my protoplasm into living ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... efficient as an imaginative training can make it, and with a model organization for warfare of the State behind it, and then the experience of the confused modern social organism as it is impelled, in an uncongenial metamorphosis, towards this imperative and finally unavoidable efficient state, will come most easily within the scope of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... first undoubted remains of true Reptiles. These are distinguished, as a class, from the Amphibians, by the fact that they are air-breathers throughout the whole of their life, and therefore are at no time provided with gills; whilst they are exempt from that metamorphosis which all the Amphibia undergo in early life, consequent upon their transition from an aquatic to a more or less purely aerial mode of respiration. Their skeleton is well ossified; they usually have horny or bony plates, singly or in combination, developed in the skin; ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... that followed, a certain metamorphosis seemed to have taken place in Susan. She was still the same modest, self-effacing, helpful roommate, but in Honora's eyes she had changed —Honora could no longer separate her image from the vision of Silverdale. And, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... who shall decide?" It is contended by one group of scientists that the water lily, which shows the plainest metamorphosis of some sort, has developed its stamens from petals - just the reverse of Nature's method, other botanists claim. A perfect flower, we know, may consist of only a stamen and a pistil, the essential organs, all other parts ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Beauties. They converse on ordinary Occasions as they are Beauties. Ask Belinda what it is a Clock, and she is at a stand whether so great a Beauty should answer you. In a Word, I think, instead of offering to administer Consolation to Parthenissa, I should congratulate her Metamorphosis; and however she thinks she was not in the least insolent in the Prosperity of her Charms, she was enough so to find she may make her self a much more agreeable Creature in her present Adversity. The Endeavour to please is highly promoted ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... carried along by a love of sport, and by the set of fashion's tide, not stopping to ask themselves whither they are floating. They do not realize all the importance of their acts nor the true meaning of their metamorphosis. ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... shine, if only in isolated sparks. It was a spark of this kind which, first at Padua on the sight of a fanpalm-tree, then again, on the eve of his departure from Palermo, during a walk in the public garden amid the Southern vegetation, revealed to him the law of the metamorphosis of plants. He found an analogy between the different parts of the same plant which seemed to repeat themselves: unity and evolution were revealed to him ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... of cordage, which, in my opinion, produces a very beggarly effect. In every other circumstance of dress, male and female, the contrast between the two nations, appears equally glaring. What is the consequence? when an Englishman comes to Paris, he cannot appear until he has undergone a total metamorphosis. At his first arrival he finds it necessary to send for the taylor, perruquier, hatter, shoemaker, and every other tradesman concerned in the equipment of the human body. He must even change his buckles, and the form of his ruffles; and, though ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... France? To answer this question we must know how this France is formed, or, what is still better, to act as spectator at its formation. At the end of the last century (in 1789), like a molting insect, it underwent a metamorphosis. Its ancient organization is dissolved; it tears away its most precious tissues and falls into convulsions, which seem mortal. Then, after multiplied throes and a painful lethargy, it re-establishes itself. But its organization ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... village. I looked back at Isabel's mansion, at the roof dark between the dark trees. Under that roof the most priceless heart I had found in life was beating—but was it in sleep or in wakefulness? I was numbed, stunned, hopeless. I could never return here, never see Isabel again. The Orphic metamorphosis meant a complete disappearance from her life. She had not turned me away or dismissed me; she had done no cruel thing, said no word that wounded or would grow poignant in memory. She had been in every way an angel of light—and for these reasons I could not see her again. Whatever ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... of David was a wonderful spectacle, the most impressive incident the journalist had ever witnessed, did he but know its genesis. The metamorphosis was physical as well as mental. Verity burgeoned before ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... the head of the tyrant himself. It was soon reduced to a shapeless mass. Small portions were carried away and preserved for generations in families as heirlooms of hatred. The bulk was melted again and reconverted, by a most natural metamorphosis, into the cannon from which it ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the while without Exponent; yet does it continue indestructible, unweariedly active, and work blindly in the great chaotic deep: thus Sect after Sect, and Church after Church, bodies itself forth, and melts again into new metamorphosis. ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... my great-grandmothers, listening to the ticking of the old-fashioned clock which belonged to another of them, and conscious that the eyes of my most distinguished ancestor are looking down at me from the wall, I feel bewildered, as it were, by this latter-day metamorphosis, bristling with new and formidable problems. Whither is civilization tending? What is one to think of it all? And by the shades of my forefathers, purified by pie, how shall we best help our sons and daughters to hitch their wagons to stars? ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... the metamorphosis of that periodical into a newspaper. With youthful ambition, Mr. Dowdell is resolved to furnish the United with the latest items of interest concerning amateurs. While the general style of the paper is fluent and pleasing, we believe that "Bruno" ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... effected, her literal age was verging on sixty? If she were not an old woman she had been one. That beautiful body had withered, undesired of all men, that perfect face had been the battered mirror of an aged ego. He did not ask himself if the metamorphosis would last, if the shell might not wither again tomorrow. He was abreast of the important scientific discoveries of his day and was not at all astonished that the problem of senescence should be solved. It was no more remarkable than wireless, the Roentgen ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to be abruptly challenged by the sentries I was surprised to see them change their demeanour when I showed my "pass." They shook hands heartily and warmly congratulated me upon my good fortune. It was a strange metamorphosis and it ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... horns were those which adorned the head of him who, according to the story, dared gaze through the foliage, and was rewarded for his too curious interest by—that then common form of punishment—metamorphosis. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... easily to be effaced! On examining her, she proved, with the exception of four barrels of quicksilver, to have no cargo of any value. I really was so disappointed that I was ashamed to return on board, and when I did, and made my report, there was a complete metamorphosis of faces. Those that were naturally short became a fathom in length, and those that were long frightful to behold. The order was given to burn her and take out the seven Spaniards who composed her crew. On interrogating the patroon, or master, of her, he informed us that the vessel with ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... painted, but they were painted all too thickly by smoke and filth; whose benches and doors were covered with carved work, but they were the gross and obscene carvings of impure hands; whose vestibule, after the Oriental fashion, was converted into a veranda, but the metamorphosis which changed its architectural style consisted in laying it bare of its outer covering. The modesty and chastity of the sexes, at their tenderest age, were to be cultivated and cherished in places which oftentimes ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... thought that directly you were married, you felt quite different, but no wonderful metamorphosis had come about so far. She felt just herself, save for a dull sort of ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... would try to rouse herself, try to form some manly resolution; but she was kept in leading strings by the need for money. And so, slowly and in spite of the ambitious protests and grievous recriminations of her own mind, she underwent the provincial metamorphosis here described. Each day took with it a fragment of her spirited determination. She had laid down a rule for the care of her person, which she gradually departed from. Though at first she kept up with the fashions and the little novelties of elegant life, she was obliged to limit her purchases ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... sake of euphony. Should this conjecture, for it is nothing else, be well founded, one of the most poetical ideas in the whole range of mythology would, in this plodding, practical, spilling-jenny age of ours, have thus undergone a most singular metamorphosis." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... Orthoptera, metamorphosis of; stridulating apparatus of; colours of; rudimentary stridulating organs in female; stridulation ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... remarkable metamorphosis which the German Democrats have undergone, is shown in their changed attitude to England. This country gave a home to Marx and Engels; the former is buried in Highgate cemetery. For many decades the party professed enthusiastic admiration of British institutions and our ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Laurent, on the Jura mountains, by the vivid reflection, (so it seemed), of the image of the sun from a particular point of a cloud in the west, after the sun itself was beneath the horizon: but in this image there were no prismatic colors, neither is the constantly seen metamorphosis of pine forests into silver filigree on ridges behind which the sun is rising or setting, accompanied with any prismatic hue; the trees become luminous, but not iridescent: on the other hand, in his great ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... The action of caffein on tissue metamorphosis and heat phenomena. New York Medical Journal, 1890, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... mycelium, it seems to me probable that the reproduction has taken place through the union, which happens in the following manner: Two filaments of mycelium become juxtaposed; after which the filaments of mycelium disappear in the sporangia newly formed, which by this same metamorphosis are deprived of the faculty of reproducing themselves through the filaments of myclium of which they are deprived. The smallest portion of a filament of mycelium evidently possesses the faculty ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... to her, he continued to remain the same familiar baby she had always known—the same and utterly vital part of her soul and body. No sudden fulfilment of an apocalypse had yet wrought any occult metamorphosis in this ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... desired to know the cause of a metamorphosis so singular and so absolute, Wayland only answered by singing a stave from a comedy, which was then new, and was supposed, among the more favourable judges, to augur some genius on the part of the author. We are happy to preserve the couplet, which ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... ruffian, "Jim Robinson," "a little man, stockish, oily, and red in the face, a jaunty fellow, too, with a certain shabby air of coxcombry even in his travel-stained attire,"—and how accurately does he describe the metamorphosis of this nauseous grub into a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... us that he saw, in Malebolge, a strange encounter between a human form and a serpent. The enemies, after cruel wounds inflicted, stood for a time glaring on each other. A great cloud surrounded them, and then a wonderful metamorphosis began. Each creature was transfigured into the likeness of its antagonist. The serpent's tail divided itself into two legs; the man's legs intertwined themselves into a tail. The body of the serpent put forth arms; the arms of the man shrank into his body. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... illustration of the author's controversial methods, take his observations on my alleged attempt to account for the metamorphosis of Daphne into a laurel tree. When I read these remarks (i. p. 4) I said, 'Mr. Max Muller vanquishes me there,' for he gave no reference to my statement. I had forgotten all about the matter, I was not easily able to ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... if they were over-run with the itch. Their delicate limbs, adorned with the finest silk stockings, are now bare, and very dirty; but to describe all the transformations would take up more paper than Lady B—— from whom I had this, would choose to give me. My own metamorphosis is indeed so extraordinary, that I must make you acquainted with it. You know I am really very thick and short, prodigiously talkative and wonderfully impudent. Now I am thin and tall, strangely silent, and very bashful. If these things continue, who is safe? Even you, Boswell, may feel a ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... surrounded with the incumbrances of his trade, was decked out for the occasion in a full-dress suit, with a wig of majestic and voluminous structure. Clarke was, as it appears, so much struck with the whimsical nature of this unexpected metamorphosis, and the extraordinary solemnity of his kinsman's demeanour, as to have felt impelled, almost immediately upon entering the room, to snatch the wig from the alderman's head, and throw it against ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... generally had succumbed to the rage for improvement, as they called it. There was a general remodelling and modernizing of houses, and, where nothing more expensive could be afforded, the paint-brush wrought its cheap metamorphosis. "You wouldn't know Hilton was the same place," was the complacent verdict of her neighbours, to which Miss Ludington ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... shows what conditions must prevail in any given place in order that fossils shall be formed, how unusual such conditions are, and how probable it is that fossils once imbedded in sediment of a sea-bed will be destroyed by metamorphosis of the rocks, or by denudation when the strata are raised above the water-level. Add to this the fact that only small territories of the earth have been explored geologically, he says, and it becomes clear that the paleontological ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... person was amazingly improved. The ladies, too, began to be so excessively fond of him, that the little fellow was obliged to caution them at last—for the good, as he said, of society; he recommended them to draw lots, for he could not gratify them all; but promised when his metamorphosis was complete, that the one chosen should become the happy Mrs. Poinsinet; or, to ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... one who will candidly review the claims put forth for alcohol, in that it delays in any of these hypothetical ways, tissue-change, will conclude that it has no such power in a salutary sense, and that it is unwarrantably assumed that to retard tissue metamorphosis (change) ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... the experience of our own instincts that this causal connection does not lie within our consciousness; {102a} therefore, if it is to be a mechanism of any kind, it can only be either an unconscious mechanical induction and metamorphosis of the vibrations of the conceived motive into the vibrations of the conscious action in the brain, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... of the Cardinal, and awaited his pleasure as humbly as that of the sovereign himself, now swarmed in the gilded galleries and stately halls of the Luxembourg; feathers waved and jewels flashed on every side; the wand of an enchanter had passed over the Court, and the metamorphosis was complete. In the centre of this brilliant throng stood Marie de Medicis, radiant with joy, and holding the young Queen by the hand; while Monsieur took up his station a few paces from them, laughing and jesting ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... a wand that leaned against the wall of his grot, and with it touched the maiden and the flower. O strange metamorphosis! Where the latter had been pining in its vase, a lovely girl, the image of Iridion, lay along the ground with dishevelled hair, clammy brow, and features slightly distorted by the last struggles of death. On the ferny couch stood an earthen ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... sign that she was coming alive at last. And the Spring he went out to meet, met him. For, first, at the foot of a tree, he spied a tiny primrose, peeping out of its rough, careful leaves; and he wondered how, by any metamorphosis, such leaves could pass into such a flower. Had he seen the mother of the next spring-messenger he was about to meet, the same thought would have returned in another form. For, next, as he passed on with the primrose in his hand, thinking ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... be that they underwent some classic metamorphosis, translated to a rainless paradise, where they dreamed of battalions for ever inspected and the general salute ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... a man of white marble, but the removal of his cap, coat, and leggings produced a speedy and entire metamorphosis. ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... "po Bhon"[2] illustrates the belief in the metamorphosis of these demons. po Bhon was a Manbo of the Kasilaan River. One day, in the olden time, he went forth to hunt but had no luck, though three times he had offered his tributes to the Lord of the Agibwa marshland. Wearied with this hunt, he lay down to rest toward evening ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... skin, white pulp, white juice, and makes a white wine. Other varieties have dark purple skins and yield a reddish juice which makes a red wine. The dark varieties are said to be seedlings from the original white variety, and tradition explains the metamorphosis in this way. ...
— The White Doe - The Fate of Virginia Dare • Sallie Southall Cotten
... Hipparion, and the modern horses, constitute a series in which the modifications of structure coincide with the order of chronological occurrence, in the manner in which they must coincide, if the modern horses really are the result of the gradual metamorphosis, in the course of the Tertiary epoch, of a less specialized ancestral form. And I found by correspondence with the late eminent French anatomist and palaeontologist, M. Lartet, that he had arrived at the same conclusion from ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... Witham, which the visitor to Woodhall Spa sees skirting the railway, has passed through more than one metamorphosis. Now confined by banks, which have been alternately renewed and broken down at different periods, before the drainage of the Fens, it spread over all that level tract of country, meandering by its many islands and through its oozy channels and meres, the ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... his friend. Whatever now was his name? Oh dear, what a fool was Rosalind! said she to herself, to have half let slip that it was he that was Fenwick, and not Gerry at all. All this compares itself with Sally's experience of Bradshaw's metamorphosis, and ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... and eloquent. In former days I was frequently with him, but not for many years. Latterly, I am told, he had lost not the power of thinking, but the power of expressing his thoughts by speech. This is like the Metamorphosis of Ovid, the bark binding in and hardening the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... poor man! his eyes are sunk, and his hands shrivelled; his legs dwindled, and his back bow'd. Pray, pray, for a metamorphosis—change thy shape, and shake off age; get the Medea's kettle and be boiled anew; come forth with lab'ring callous hands, and chine of steel, and Atlas' shoulders. Let Taliacotius trim the calves of twenty chairmen, and make the pedestals to stand erect upon, and look matrimony in the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... written rather at length on this period for I consider the metamorphosis of a Territorial Battalion into as fine a fighting Battalion as ever took the field, is well worth the study of all those who have joined since those days or will ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... to find metamorphosis; for Betty and John, egged on by nurse, had taken advantage of his day from home to turn out the study. This study had not been properly cleaned for years. It had never had what servants are fond of calling a spring cleaning. ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... built. I was here before the old Merriwell house was remodeled and turned into Merry Home. This field was an uneven, rocky strip of land, and the lake down yonder was half drained, the dam having fallen into disuse. The metamorphosis seems almost as surprising as the magic changes worked by Aladdin's lamp. Frank is the modern Aladdin. He has the lamp hidden somewhere—I'm ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... of my two white shirts, and with the change of raiment which had been tight squeezed in my portmanteau. The old overcoat was the best part of it, as in a finite world it often is. I sold my felt hat to Zekiel, and appeared with a light travelling-cap. I do not know how Fausta liked my metamorphosis. I only know that, like butterflies, for a day or two after they go through ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... sacred tree? That, too, might undergo a metamorphosis in the minds of men. The conquerors would see their aboriginal slaves of the old race still haunting the tree, making stealthy offerings to it by night: and they would ask the reason. But they would not be told. The secret would be guarded; ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... these few days, I found it solitary, without the assistance of its accustomed stars, and in short perfectly round and defined, like Jupiter, and such it still remains. Now what can be said of so strange a metamorphosis? Are perhaps the two smaller stars consumed like spots on the sun? Have they suddenly vanished and fled? Or has Saturn devoured his own children? Or was the appearance indeed fraud and illusion, with which the glasses have so long time mocked me and ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... fallen into a mistake in calling the convent by the name of saint Catherine. It is dedicated to the transfiguration, or as the Greeks call it, the metamorphosis, and not to saint Catherine, whose relics only are preserved here. M. Seetzen visited the convent a second time, previous to his going to Arabia. He came then from Tor, ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... essential character of the literature of Germany is, that it is philosophical. The philosophers there are poets, and the poets are philosophers. Goethe is to be found no more, or no less, in his 'Theory of Colors' or in his 'Metamorphosis of Plants,' than in his 'Divan' or his 'Faust'; and lyrism, if I may use this trite expression, "is overflowing" in Schleiermacher's theology and in Schelling's philosophy. Is this not perhaps at least one of the reasons of the inferiority of the German drama? ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the fine intuition of an imaginative child she understood the reason for the metamorphosis. It was the quickening of the senses that rallied themselves to meet and solve a problem that brought a high glow; stimulated, and uplifted. She herself was no stranger to ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... case of the myths, the need was to explain certain phenomena—the material (so to speak) was an early state of the human mind, to which all objects seemed equally endowed with human personality, and to which no metamorphosis ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... there came to his nostrils from within a scent that stripped from him temporarily any remnant of civilization that might have remained and left him a fierce and terrible bull of the jungles of Kerchak. So sudden and complete was the metamorphosis that there almost broke from the savage lips the hideous challenge of his kind, but the cunning brute-mind saved him ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the day arrived when he realized that he must develop wings, so he wrapped himself up in a cocoon; and while the metamorphosis was in process of development he had ample time to study Hamlet's soliloquy. It would mean a divorce from everything he held dear; a parting with his very soul. It would mean the most sorrowful widowhood that could be imposed on man. ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... door, and could scarcely believe his eyes. The matron was unusually self-conscious as she received the parting instructions from her chief, and the nurses all turned their heads in Lord Henry's direction as they sped hither and thither, unable to understand the meaning or the object of the strange metamorphosis. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... quite different,—a cottage by a palace, and a windmill by a fortress. But the history of Rome changes as a good diorama changes; while you look, you hardly see it alter; each moment is hardly different from the last moment; yet at the close the metamorphosis is complete, and scarcely anything is as it began. Just so in the history of the great prevailing city: you begin with a town and you end with an empire, and this by unmarked stages?—So shrouded, ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... rushing metamorphosis Dissolving all that fixture is, Melts things that be to things that seem And solid Nature to ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... not advance me further than pathological anatomy, which informs us that the original cause of disease is a change in the form of the cellular elements of different digestive organs,—in explanation of which the customary technical terms are used, such as "atrophy," "degeneration," "metamorphosis," etc. But, I reasoned with myself, this surely cannot be seriously regarded as the ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... once a year to deposit their spawn in its native surroundings. Once more, crabs pass their earlier larval stages as free-swimming crustaceans, somewhat shrimp-like in appearance, and as agile as fleas: it is only by gradual metamorphosis that they acquire their legs and claws and heavy pedestrian habits. Now there are certain kinds of crab, like the West Indian land-crabs (those dainty morsels whose image every epicure who has visited the Antilles still enshrines with regret in a warm corner of his heart), which ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... wish to threaten you, young lady,' he resumed, 'and I think, besides, that I can trust your kind face. Will you promise me not to reveal this metamorphosis until your ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various |
