"Legend" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anything for the least of the miracles they denied. For well-nigh fifty years they worked away, embellishing with fables and anecdotes their Legend of the Sacred Heart, the story of Mary Alacoque. For twenty-five or thirty years they had been trying to convince the world that their helpmate, James II. of England, not content with healing the king's evil (in his character ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... we find Aristo, aged seventeen, tall and straight and bronzed, starting off for Athens, his worldly goods rolled up in a bearskin, tied about with thongs. There is a legend to the effect that Philip went with Aristo, and that for a time they were together at Plato's school. But, anyway, Philip did not remain long. Aristo—or Aristotle, we had better call him—remained ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... while she walked the earth, to love that of the Saxon," said Eveline, "unless her legend speaks false in that matter; and unless, as I well suspect, your house is haunted, not by the soul of the dead who suffered within its walls, but by evil spirits, such as the descendants of Hengist and Horsa are said still in ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... connected wi' it than the Conan. Ane can hardly saunter ower half-a-mile in its course, frae where it leaves Coutin till where it enters the sea, without passing ower the scene o' some frightful auld legend o' the kelpie or the waterwraith. And ane o' the most frightful looking o' these places is to be found among the woods of Conan House. Ye enter a swampy meadow that waves wi' flags an' rushes like a corn-field in harvest, an' see a hillock covered wi' willows rising like an island ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... republican, in the debate on this question, confessed, that if they desired a king, the last was as proper as any gentleman in England.[*] The commons ordered a new great seal to be engraved, on which that assembly was represented, with this legend, "On the first year of freedom, by God's blessing, restored, 1648." The forms of all public business were changed, from the king's name, to that of the keepers of the liberties of England.[**] And it was declared high treason to proclaim, or any otherwise ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... von Boobenstein, blowing a big puff of smoke. "In fact, it is these cigars that have given rise to the legend (a pure fiction, I need hardly say) that our armies are using asphyxiating gas. The truth is they are merely smoking German-made tobacco in ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... a vague recollection," he said, "of some room in the house having an old story or legend connected with it. I must find out. I daresay Mrs Courthope knows. Meantime you hold your tongue. We may get ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... cream-colored satin embroidered with small bunches of heartsease, and which was aromatic with otto of roses. Awkwardly, and somewhat slowly he drew out of this a small locket, in the center of which was some unreadable legend in cabalistic looking character, and which blazed with the finest diamonds. Heaven alone knows the secret of that gem, or the struggle with which the Priest yielded it. He put it into Antoine's ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... points of similarity between Israel's faith and that of other races. This ought not to surprise us, since its God is the God of all men. But the more resemblances we detect, the greater the difference appears. The same legend in Babylonia and in Israel has such unlike spiritual content; the identical rite among the Hebrews and among their neighbors developed such different religious meaning. This particular stream of religious life has a unity and a character of its own. ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... haunted spot. A legend killed it for a kindly home,— A grim estate, which every heir in turn Left to the orgies of the wind and rain, The newt, the toad, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... the people. Farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans, whose life had once been bounded by the daily routine of labor, found in the Scriptures not only an inspiration to religious conduct, but also a book of romance, travel, and history. "Legend and annal," says John Richard Green, "war-song and psalm, state-roll and biography, the mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories of mission journeys, of perils by sea and among the heathen, philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... expression had been discovered, that was all. The themes of their pictures were taken from the Bible, if you will, but the scenes they represented with so much pomp of colour were seen by them through the mystery of legend, and the vision was again sublimated by ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... society, nor even to an animal? It is evidently a vestige of religious mysticism, something like punishment for sinning against the Holy Ghost. The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, they say, caused the wrath of God, who destroyed these towns for this reason. According to the legend, sodomy was a vice of the inhabitants; is this why it is punished at the present day? But the masturbation of Onan, according to the Bible, also caused the wrath of God; why then do not our present laws institute punishment for those who ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... 11. 385 ff.—Leto, beloved of Zeus, was the mother of Artemis and Apollo, who were born in the holy island of Delos.— One legend, already rejected by Pindar, said that the crime of Tantalus was that he had given his child Pelops to ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... in relation to legend and history. They are, on the whole, with exceptions, absolutely popular in origin, composed by men of the people for the people, and then diffused among and altered by popular reciters. In England they soon won their way into printed stall copies, and were grievously handled ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... Foss A Conservative Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman Similar Cases Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman Man and the Ascidian Andrew Lang The Calf-Path Sam Walter Foss Wedded Bliss Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman Paradise: A Hindoo Legend George Birdseye Ad Chloen, M. A. Mortimer Collins "As Like the Woman as You Can" William Ernest Henley "No Fault in Women" Robert Herrick "Are Women Fair" Francis Davison (?) A Strong Hand Aaron Hill Women's Longing John Fletcher ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... brilliantly decorated and illuminated for a ball. The building had deep cellars and the old floors were elastic. Madame Wolff had in vain endeavored to avoid using the great hall at all, for the foolish old legend of the sealed chamber aroused a certain superstitious dread in her heart, and she rarely if ever entered the hall herself. But merry Miss Elizabeth, her pretty young daughter, was passionately fond of dancing, and her mother had promised that she should have a ball on her wedding day. Her betrothed, ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... Charta of Switzerland." The formation of this confederacy may be regarded as the first combined preparation of the Swiss for that great struggle in defence of their liberties, in the history of which fact and legend, as shown in Baker's discriminating narrative, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... impending, and what could be more important than the birth of a great man? But where was this one to appear? The sign Pisces was the most significant one for the Jews, for according to astrological legend, in the year 2865 A.M. a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in this sign had heralded the birth of Moses; the proximity to Aries indicated that the hero foretold was of kingly lineage; the Jewish expectation of a great king had become a well-known story in Chaldea during ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... old woman visits a lady of the family of G. of R., at the time of her confinement, when the nurse is absent, and strokes down the clothes, the patient (says Mrs. Crowe), "never does any good, and dies." Another legend is, that a single swan is always seen on a particular lake close to the mansion of another family before a death. Then, Lord Littleton's dove is a well-known incident. And the lady above quoted speaks of many curious ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... fell softly but clearly on the dim and faded canvas from which looked the saintly features of the martyred woman, whose continued presence with her descendants was the old family legend. But underneath it Myrtle was surprised to see a small table with some closely covered object upon it. It was a mysterious arrangement, made without any knowledge ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... old account of fact, or legend, that led the author and illustrator of this book to a full realization of the wealth of historic and romantic incidents connected with the French royal parks and palaces, incidents which the makers of guidebooks have passed over in favour of the, presumably, more important, well authenticated ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... say. A nickname, a genealogy, a tune may well be transmitted by tradition. So may charms, formulae, proverbs, and poems; yet when we come to proverbs and poems we are on the domain of unwritten literature, a domain which can scarcely be identified with that of tradition. A local legend, when it is not too suspiciously adapted to the features of the place to which it applies, may also be admitted as traditional. These and but little beyond. Men rarely think about transmitting narratives until it is too ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... a fanciful oriental legend which teaches that when Allah was engaged in the work of creation, he tempered the lightning with the south wind, and thus created the horse. Whimsical as is this idea, it yet suggests the swiftness, the fire, the mettlesome, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... he found other villages none can tell, but the men of a great Order framed before the building of the Egyptian pyramids, do know that the traces of a like Order is to-day in one of the villages of that province of New Spain, and that there is legend of a white priest who lived in their terraces of the mesa, and taught them certain things of the strange outside world so long as they let him live. But his name is not remembered ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Irving gives the lie to my keen friend unless you admit, as I do, that Irving was not a writer of books so much as a painter of landscapes. He painted the scenes that were dear to his heart, and in his still blue skies he hung the soft mists of fable, of legend, and of the pageant of a passing race. Hawthorne was his antithesis—a painter of portraits of the souls of men and women. That's the highest achievement known to any branch of art." Leighton paused. "Do you know why those two ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... winter when the pine boughs were heavy with snow and a spectral moon stared at the panthers shuffling through the white wastes beneath. Of these two Rup Singh's ancestor was one. And in his thirty fifth year the Maharao died and his beauty and strength passed into legend and his kingdom was taken by another and the jungle crept silently over his Hall of Pleasure ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... philosopher, poet, and historian, who lived et Agrigentum in Sicily, about 490-430 B.C., and wrote a poem on the doctrines of Pythagoras. A legend has survived that he jumped into the crater of Etna, in order that people might conclude, from his complete disappearance, that he was a god. Matthew Arnold's poem on this incident is ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... days the gods were thought to have little to do besides busying themselves with the affairs of men,—and the cause of the defeat was sought by means of sacred ceremonies and invocations. It proved to be an odd one. The legend states they had offended the Sun goddess by presuming to travel to the east, instead of following the path of the sun from east to west. This insult to the gods could be atoned for only by a voyage to the west. Taking to their ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... their love scenes, spites, hatreds, murders, and general cremations. From such material and such opportunities it was comparatively easy for Wagner to construct the thrilling and interesting incidents that compose his opera on the legend of ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... shoulder-cloth his yellow robe, Nearest in all the world to him whose words The Three Worlds waited for. I cannot tell A small part of the splendid lore which broke From Buddha's lips: I am a late-come scribe Who love the Master and his love of men, And tell this legend, knowing he was wise, But have not wit to speak beyond the books; And time hath blurred their script and ancient sense, Which once was new and mighty, moving all. A little of that large discourse I know Which Buddha spake on the soft Indian eve. ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... particular worship to this chaste goddess. The Egyptians called her Isis, the Phoenicians Astarte, the Greeks Phoebe, daughter of Jupiter and Latona, and they explained her eclipses by the mysterious visits of Diana and the handsome Endymion. The mythological legend relates that the Nemean lion traversed the country of the moon before its apparition upon earth, and the poet Agesianax, quoted by Plutarch, celebrated in his sweet lines its soft eyes, charming nose, and admirable mouth, formed by the luminous ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... the history books, the legend tellers of the country. They fan the fire of patriotism and loyalty by songs of the deeds and accomplishments of their Prince, of dead heroes and past glorious battles, and form another link with the mediaeval ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... great lack, this great vacuum, in our character, must by some method be filled up with solid, and everlasting excellencies, or the same finger that wrote, in letters of fire, upon the wall of the Babylonian monarch, the awful legend: "Thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting," will write it in letters of fire upon our own ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... distant resemblance to the following Epic Poem. I beg to quote the emphatic language of my estimable friend (if he will allow me to call him so), the Black Bear in Piccadilly, and to assure all to whom these presents may come, that "I am the original." This affecting legend is given in the following pages precisely as I have frequently heard it sung on Saturday nights, outside a house of general refreshment (familiarly termed a wine vaults) at Battle-bridge. The singer is a young gentleman who can scarcely have numbered nineteen summers, and ...
— The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman • Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
... or city lulled by night Well-pleased the wanderer, wakeful on his bed, Hears from far Alps on fitful breeze the sound Of torrents murmuring down their rocky glens, Strange voice from distant regions, alien climes:— Should these far echoes from thy legend-roll Delight of loftier years, these echoes faint, Thus waken, thus make calm, one restless heart In our distempered day, to thee the praise, Voice of past times, O ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... their possible relations are presented in the light in which they are seen by Mommsen or Gibbon or Macaulay or Froude. Meanwhile the student of literature sees incidentally, but, so far as he goes, more vividly, into the actual life of breathing men through the legend of Beowulf or the Vision of Piers Plowman, through Chaucer or the Spectator, through Ben Jonson's Humours or Horace Walpole's Letters, through Clarissa ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Leonardo the more finished artist of the two. Michelangelo's heroic strength and sweep of power failed to win him. The frescos of Masaccio in the Church of Santa Carmine in Florence he considered better than any performance of Michelangelo: and as a Roland to this Oliver, we have a legend to the effect that Raphael once called upon Michelangelo and the master sent down word from the scaffold, where he was at work, that he was too busy to see visitors, and anyway, he had all the apprentices that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... four hundred millions of people, like a prayer that, once learned, is forever remembered. The Chinese writer makes no mention of any city nor of any province, although even in the relation of the most ancient traditions such an omission is rare; we are only told that the name of the hero of the legend was Tong-yong, and that he lived in the years of the great dynasty of Han, some twenty ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... executioner, firm in the hope of gaining fresh strength to the doctrine for which they sacrificed their lives—Saint Eugenio, Melancio, Pelagio, Patruno and other names that shone in the past scarcely breaking through the mists of legend. Then came the archbishops of the Gothic era; those kingly prelates who exercised that superiority over the conquering kings by which the spiritual power succeeded in dominating the barbarian conquerors. Miracles accompanied ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... emporium of commerce", extant {380} in 1072, and now surviving only in tradition, and in "records" of ships wrecked on its "submerged ruins," does not sink into the ocean without exciting wonder and pity. I knew of the tradition, and presumed there was some probability of the existence of a legend (legendum, something to be read) describing a catastrophe that must have been widely heard ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... convenience or pleasure. My home is in the north of Palestine, on the other side of, Jordan, beyond the Sea of Galilee. My family has dwelt there from time immemorial; but they always loved this city, and have a legend that they dwelt occasionally within its walls, even in the days when Titus from that hill looked ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... understanding of Italian morality, and a true insight into Italian social feeling as expressed in literature, are alike impossible. Nor will the historian of this epoch shrink from his task, even though the transactions he has to record seem to savor of legend rather than of simple fact. No fiction contains matter more fantastic, no myth or allegory is more adapted to express a truth in figures of the fancy, than the authentic well-attested annals of this period of seventy years, from 1464 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... European biography, in the dreary and foolish pedant who overshadows Middlemarch. But the fact that Mark Pattison was an elderly scholar with a young wife, and that George Eliot knew him, led later on to a legend which was, I am sure, unwelcome to the writer of Middlemarch, while her supposed victim passed ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of Cloisterham stands the Nuns' House: a venerable brick edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend of its conventual uses. On the trim gate enclosing its old courtyard is a resplendent brass plate flashing forth the legend: 'Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.' The house- front is so old ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... great new palaces which the age reared at such elaborate cost. It was full of beautiful things—the art of Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Van Dyke, rare manuscripts, books, and tapestries. So magnificent was Coke that a legend long ran that his horses were shod with gold and that the wheels of his chariots were of solid silver. In the country he drove six horses. In town only the King did this. Coke despised George III, chiefly on account of his American policy, ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... themselves. We had no sooner gotten rid of the Spain distress than the Gibraltar guides started another—a tiresome repetition of a legend that had nothing very astonishing about it, even in the first place: "That high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair; it is because one of the queens of Spain placed her chair there when the French and Spanish troops were besieging Gibraltar, and said she would never move ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and the success of his compositions for that nobleman at once gave him a distinction among the musicians and dilettanti of Vienna. He now felt justified in increasing his fees, and charged from 2 to 5 florins for a month's lessons. Remembering the legend of his unboylike fastidiousness, and the undoubted nattiness of his later years, it is curious to come upon an incident of directly opposite tendency. A certain Countess von Thun, whose name is associated ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... in the land of "Do Without" have for the most part never heard of Christmas trees or the giving of gifts, but they know the old legend which says that at the hour when the Saviour was born in a manger the bare and frozen elder bushes come to momentary bloom again in the thickets and the "critters and beasties" kneel down in their stalls, answering to some dumb mandate of reverence. This, however, is myth, and the fact is ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... noise of the passage of a bullet. A second time!—and then, familiar as I am with the legend of the clip of ball cartridges, I instantly knew it to be true. And again—Crack-snap! I heard the old colonel crying ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... more than complete it. He completes it in two fashions—first, by the insertion of those long discourses which gave their chief value to the Hebrew Gospels; then by adding traditions of a more modern formation, results of successive developments of the legend, and to which the Christian consciousness already ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to this day, the link between the remoter villages and the world; and the peasants carried home with them a picture, for the first time, to hang on their walls. Thus the Prince President fostered the Napoleonic legend. ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... floral fire-badge as the proper thing, and thus it was that when the company of mourners was assembled, and the funeral service in progress, there arrived and was set upon the coffin, in the view of all, that triumph of the florist's art, a shield of white roses, with this legend written across it in red immortelles: "Admit within fire lines only." It was shocking, but irresistible. It brought down ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... inscribed over 2000 years ago his edicts prohibiting the taking of life. At the very foot of the Kutub Minar the famous Iron Pillar commemorates the victories of the "Sun of Power," the Hindu Emperor of the Gupta dynasty with whose name, under the more popular form of Raja Bikram, Indian legend associates the vague memories of a golden age of Hindu civilisation in the fifth and sixth centuries. The Pillar was brought there by one of the Rajput princes who founded in the middle of the eleventh century the first city really known to history as Delhi. There Prithvi Raja reigned, who still ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... firstborn son of Temu. According to one legend he sprang direct from the god, and according to another the goddess Hathor was his mother; yet a third legend makes him the son of Temu by the goddess Ius[a]set. He it was who made his way between the gods Seb and Nut ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... Mass-priests here, And many a dapper chorister, Their ush'ring vergers, here likewise Their canons and their chanteries. Of cloister-monks they have enow, Aye, and their abbey-lubbers too; And, if their legend do not lie, They much affect the papacy. And since the last is dead, there's hope Elf Boniface shall next be pope. They have their cups and chalices; Their pardons and indulgences; Their beads of nits, bells, books, and wax Candles, forsooth, and other knacks; Their holy oil, their fasting ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... protest and with an apology!)—"to observe the zeal with which our critic vindicates the personality of Jonah, and the originality of his hymn, (the latter being generally thought doubtful), while he proceeds to explain that the narrative of our book in which the hymn is imbedded, contains a late legend founded on misconception. One can imagine the cheers which the opening of such an essay might evoke in some of our circles, changing into indignation (!) as the distinguished foreigner developed his ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... intending to make caves to dwell in among the sandhills twenty miles away on the coast, but were recognised on the road, deceitfully detained by a benevolent gentleman and within a few days brought back, Borrow himself being horsed on the back of James Martineau, according to the picturesque legend, for such a thrashing that he had to lie in bed a fortnight and must bear the marks of it while he was flesh and blood. Borrow celebrated this escapade by a ballad in dialogue called "The Wandering Children and the Benevolent Gentleman. An Idyll ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... archdeacon was away, they could all trifle. Mr Harding began by telling them in the most innocent manner imaginable an old legend about Mr Arabin's new parish. There was, he said, in days of yore, an illustrious priestess of St Ewold, famed through the whole country for curing all manner of diseases. She had a well, as all priestesses have ever had, which well was extant to this day, and shared in the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... came again upon Viola and Harold till we overtook them at the foot of the last hill, and they never could satisfy Miss Sandford where they had been, nor what they had seen, nor how they had missed us; and Dermot invented for the nonce a legend about a fairy in the hill, who made people gyrate round it in utter oblivion of all things; thus successfully diverting the attention of Miss Sandford, who took it all seriously. Yes, she certainly was ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Biographical Notice The Two Sisters The Siwash Rock The Recluse The Lost Salmon Run The Deep Waters The Sea-Serpent The Lost Island Point Grey The Tulameen Trail The Grey Archway Deadman's Island A Squamish Legend of Napoleon The Lure in Stanley Park Deer Lake A ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... after all. The beavers have vanished from their old habitation, but their work remains in the broad meadows cleared of timber by their teeth, and covered with rich black soil by the inundations from their dam. There is an Indian legend which says that after the Creator separated the land from the water He employed gigantic beavers to smooth it down and prepare it for the abode of men. However that may be, the farmers of generations to come will have reason to ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... states in his prefatory letter, the legends of Holiness, of Temperance, and of Chastity. Those published in 1596, contain the legends of Friendship, of Justice, and of Courtesy. The posthumous cantos are entitled, Of Mutability, and are said to be apparently parcel of a legend of Constancy. The poem which was to treat of the "politic" virtues was never approached. Thus we have but a fourth part of the whole of the projected work. It is very doubtful whether the remaining six books were completed. But it is probable ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... massy gold chest inlaid with precious stones of all sorts and of great value, containing the bones of the identical three Kings (it is said) who came from the East to worship the infant Jesus at Bethlehem. The Scriptures say it was three wise men or Magi. The legend however calls them Kings and gives them Gothic names. Let schoolmen and theologians reconcile this difference: ce n'est point notre affaire. To me it appears that when the German tribes embraced Christianity and enrolled ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... a legend among the villagers, that some one had been drowned by this current; but that was an occurrence of long ago, and had almost ceased to be talked about. There were also one or two more modern instances of bathers being carried out to sea, but finally saved by boats ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... down by the sea, There came in the twilight a message to me; Its quaint Saxon legend deeply engraven, Hath, as it seems to me, teaching from heaven; And all through the hours the quiet words ring, Like a low ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... cakes and fly to the rescue of her cookery. Fil was quite a good little actress, and produced what she considered her piece de resistance. She had spent her summer holidays in Somerset, and had there picked up a local ballad which dealt with the legend in dialect. She brought out a verse of it now with ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... snow. Many nations have a tradition of a former world destroyed by a deluge of water, from the East to the West, from Greece to Mexico, where the tail of a comet was said to have caused the flood; but in the strange characters of the Zend is the legend of an ark (as it were) prepared against the snow. It may be that it is the dim memory of a glacial epoch. In this deep coombe, amid the dark oaks and snow, was the fable of Zoroaster. For the coming of Ormuzd, the Light and Life Bringer, the leaf slept folded, the butterfly was hidden, the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... ver. 19.—"And the king rose up to meet his mother, and bowed himself unto her, and sat down on his throne, and caused a seat to be set for the "king's mother, and she sat on his right hand." The application of this text to the legend of the Assumption is obvious, and occupied the first division of the discourse. The second part consisted in an application of the history of the early part of Solomon's reign to the present circumstances of Brazil; the restoration of the kingdom, ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... exist. Some of the churches say the contract is a sacrament, though the shepherd kings, whose story is our Bible, had no such thought, nor was it taught by the lowly Nazarene; but the law supports the legend, within certain limits. What are we ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... felt more or less clearly that they were not like him. The resulting sense of isolation was a school for self-mastery, lest isolation foster any such pride or unloveliness as that with which later legend dared to stain the picture of the Lord's youth. Four brothers of Jesus are named by Mark (vi. 3),—James, and Joses, and Judas, and Simon,—the gospel adds also that he had sisters living at a later time in Nazareth. They were all subject with him to the ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... here. I've got a good one for you. This is a brand-new one." They walked down the boardwalk to the place where most of the offices were and there read on a newly placed signboard the legend: ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... that had passed there between him and me. It saddened her, but I thought she must be very secure in her faith, for there was no angry disturbance in her anxious eyes, no bitterness of jealousy about her soft sweet lips. I read her behaviour all through like a printed legend; her faithful kindness, her tender care, her thoughtful regret. She was feeling in her woman's heart the inevitable wrong she was about to do me, measuring my love by the strength and endurance of her own, and pitying me with a pity which was great in proportion to the happiness which was ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... streams: Phoebus loved the Nymph Daphne whom he met by the river Peneus in the vale of Tempe. This legend expressed the attachment of the Laurel (Daphne) to the Sun, under whose heat the tree both fades and flourishes. It has been thought worth while to explain these allusions, because they illustrate the character of the Grecian Mythology, which arose in the Personification of natural ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... either side. And sometime later, when he looked again, the tilting of the planet back had made the rings edge on, and so they disappeared. He never looked again, nor told of what he'd seen; for legend had it that the god Saturn periodically devoured his own children, and this phenomenon he'd seen, if it became widely known, would be interpreted as the proof the legend was correct—and do incalculable damage to scientific ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... delicate child, his grandmother took him at the age of ten to the Caucas,—which he deeply loved ever after. In 1827 he was placed in the Adelige Pension at Moscow, having been previously much influenced by a German nurse who inspired him with a love of German legend and poetry, and also by his tutor, an officer in the Napoleonic guard, who had taught him French. Up to 1831 he was under the German unfluence [Transcriber's note: sic] in literature, but then he came under the influence of Byron, and from this time he was never free of the impression ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... seemeth cunning to be, And, as far as I see, in a good uniformity. Yea, he is well read in that Golden Legend. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... appeal was irresistible, and they vowed themselves to the cause body and soul. They asked Ben-Hur his authority for the sayings, and he quoted the prophets, and told them of Balthasar in waiting over in Antioch; and they were satisfied, for it was the old much-loved legend of the Messiah, familiar to them almost as the name of the Lord; the long-cherished dream with a time fixed for its realization. The King was not merely coming now; he was ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... representing the legend of the slaying of Osiris (the sun) by Typhon (the god of night and crime), served to open and clean the body of the pharaoh, and in this way prepare it ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... get some other girl to be Queen, so of course they let me.... There is an old half-forgotten roadway walled in on both sides that runs through the town from this horrible palace to the woods upon the mountain. There is some sort of foolish legend that in the old days the Kings used to go by this protected road to a high point called Look-out Rock, and stand there where they could see pretty much all of this miserable little Kingdom and a great ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... unblessed suffering which plagues the soul, and that which we welcome as a process of purgation. The first terzet makes heaven and hell respectively consist of a clean and a burdened conscience. The second, referring to a legend of S. Peter's controversy with Simon Magus, finds a proof of immortality ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... legend of Sandalphon be grounded in some solemn vision granted to the saints of eld, who walked in Syria, then peradventure on this night, the angel must have been puzzled indeed concerning the petitions that floated up, and demanded admission to the ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... dream of a world-righteousness that shall give peace, when nations "shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks,"[4] and the Angel-song of Peace and Goodwill in the legend of the Nativity, mean no more than the word "Socialism" in its best usage means. Plato, spiritual son of the Socrates who for truth's sake drained the hemlock cup to its dregs, dreamed of such social peace and unity, and the line of those who have seen the same vision of a love-welded world ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... afterward the valet. But the story runs—tradition it must still be called—that the former was robbed, brutally beaten, and finally walled up in some recess by his desperate retainer. So immured he died of actual starvation; but according to the legend, much of the miser's wealth continued hidden about the mansion which the Italian's fears prevented his carrying off, and which still remains, snug and safe, in some dusty repository, ready to reward "a fortunate speculator." I only wish,' continued he merrily, 'I could light upon the hoard! ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... him as a wand, and this he waved three times slowly and majestically, while he repeated in solemn tones this singular legend— ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... to bring back out of the jacket the legend that was carved on the oar. At first I could bring but little. Later, it grew easier, a matter of piecing portions together. And at last I had the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... In the legend of the Wild Huntsman, who under the name of Samiel purchases the souls of men with his magic bullets, the folklorist and student of the evolution of religions sees one of many evidences of ancient mythology perverted to bring it into the ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... There is a legend that shortly before he died he saw a vision of St. Peter, who told him that he should gain a victory over ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... many a legend of Charlemagne. But that which was historically interesting for us began with Rudolph of Hapsburg, who by his courage put an end to such violent commotions. Charles the Fourth also attracted our notice. We had already heard of the Golden Bull, and of the statutes for the administration of criminal ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Eton (where we used, when I first went into the society, to speak from three to ten minutes) I thought it must be one of the finest things in the world to speak for three-quarters of an hour, and there was a legend circulated about an old member of the society's having done so, which used to make us all gape and stare. However, I fear it does not necessarily imply much more than length. Doyle spoke remarkably well, and made a violent attack on Mr. Canning's friends, which Gaskell ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... I was sorry to finish "Die Harzreise," so full of happy witticisms and charming descriptions of vine-clad hills, streams that sing and ripple in the sunshine, and wild regions, sacred to tradition and legend, the gray sisters of a long-vanished, imaginative age—descriptions such as can be given only by those to whom nature is "a feeling, a love and ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... out of the tyrants' hands, And those usurping Ismaelites deprive Of woful Thrace, which now captived stands, You must from realms and seas the Turks forth drive, As Godfrey chased them from Juda's lands, And in this legend, all that glorious deed, Read, whilst you arm you; ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... truck-wagon. The vehicle was just passing a long stretch of ornate black iron fence in the center of which was a still more ornate gate with an iron arch above it. In the curve of the arch swung a black sign, its edges gilded, and with this legend printed upon it in ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... true legend of Dom Balaguere as they tell it in the land of olives. To-day the chateau of Trinquelague is no more, but the chapel still stands erect on the summit of Mont Ventoux, in a grove of green oaks. The wind beats its disjointed portal; ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... Burns's Alloway Kirk we paid for, and we find we have bought a share in the griefs of James Russell, seedsman; for is not the stone that tells this blinding sorrow of real life the true centre of the picture, and not the roofless pile which reminds us of an idle legend? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... composed," remunerated themselves for the pious office by abstracting the gold sleeve-links from the dead man's wrists. One may hope, indeed, that this last circumstance is to be rejected as sensational legend, but even without it the story of Sterne's death seems sad enough, no doubt. Yet it is, after all, only by contrast with the excited gaiety of his daily life in London that his end appears so forlorn. From many a "set of residential chambers," from many of the old and silent ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... diction, sentence, and figure, the pieces assigned should be studied with the view of answering such questions as the following: To what division of the epic or drama does the work belong? What is its source? Is it legend or history? What is the story? Has it a beginning, middle, and end? Is it symmetrical in structure? What episodes are introduced? Is the treatment in keeping with the subject? Is it true to fact and character? ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... serviceable to the air of dignity and grandeur, and the removing of all meanness of idea, were conceded to them at the very outset. Everything, down to the very errors and weaknesses of that departed race of heroes who claimed their descent from the gods, was ennobled by the sanctity of legend. Those heroes were painted as beings endowed with more than human strength; but, so far from possessing unerring virtue and wisdom, they were even depicted as under the dominion of furious and ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... a great big nigger! A filthy passion this, which had left her wallowing without a chemise to her back in the crapulous debauchery of Cairo. A fortnight later much astonishment was produced when someone swore to having met her in Russia. A legend began to be formed: she was the mistress of a prince, and her diamonds were mentioned. All the women were soon acquainted with them from the current descriptions, but nobody could cite the precise source of all this information. There were finger rings, earrings, bracelets, a REVIERE ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... interest in the Lewis and Clark expedition. He went to Washington to see Lewis, and questioned him at great length about the Northwest. Legend says that he gave the hardy discoverer a thousand dollars, which was a big amount ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... of thirty lines diameter, with a loop on the edge to receive the chain. On one side, must be the arms of the United States, of which I send you a written description, and several impressions in wax to render that more intelligible; round them, as a legend, must be 'The United States of America.' The device of the other side we do not decide on. One suggestion has been a Columbia (a fine female figure), delivering the emblems of peace and commerce to a ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... rich stores to work on, these exceeding many flocks and herds of Northern legend and glamour, Lady Blanche should surely have been content, and not have descended into the South of England, upon a quiet country-house in Berkshire, to seize its one ewe lamb and claim that the heroine of the story which I hope to tell before I get to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... and at once, amid a tumult of applause, Lincoln was lifted over the heads of the crowd to the platform. John Hanks then theatrically entered, bearing a couple of fence rails, and a flag with the legend that they were from a "lot made by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon Bottom, in the year 1830." The sympathetic roar rose again. Then Lincoln made a "speech," appropriate to the occasion. At last, attention was given to business, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Greek legend, along with his brother Agamedes, the architect of the temple of Apollo at Delphi; had a famous oracle in a cave in Boeotia, which could only ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... scrubber out of her hands, threw away the soiled sheet, sealed up the pad in a clean stamped envelope, which bore across the end the legend, "If not delivered within ten days, return to"—"Robert Henry Thane," he wrote, with his address, and gave her back her property. It was all very childish, yet his hand trembled as he wrote; and Daphne looked on with the solemnity of a child ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... ears, whenever she could "the house affairs with haste despatch." And when these failed, there was still boundless store of wonders open to her in old romances which were then to be found in every English house of the better class. The Legend of King Arthur, Florice and Blancheflour, Sir Ysumbras, Sir Guy of Warwick, Palamon and Arcite, and the Romaunt of the Rose, were with her text-books and canonical authorities. And lucky it was, perhaps, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the site with the Upper Nile whose tribes, between Assouan (Syene) and Wady al-Subu'a are called the "Kunuz"lit. meaning "treasures" or "hoards." Philae is still known as the "Islet of Anas (for Uns) al-Wujud;" and the learned and accurate Burckhardt (Travels in Nubia p. 5) records the local legend that a mighty King called Al-Wujud built the Osirian temples. I can give no information concerning Jabal al-Sakla (Thakla), the Mount of the woman bereft of children, beyond the legend contained in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... I repeat this legend to Aunt Lizzy, it would be impossible to convince her that it proceeded from the Padre's lips. Yet even prelates of Rome scruple not to narrate as miracles tales equally absurd, where their auditory is sufficiently ignorant ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... a nation's legends Love the ballads of a people, 80 That like voices from afar off Call to us to pause and listen, Speak in tones so plain and childlike, Scarcely can the ear distinguish Whether they are sung or spoken;— 85 Listen to this Indian Legend, To this Song of Hiawatha! Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, Who have faith in God and Nature, Who believe that in all ages 90 Every human heart is human, That in even savage bosoms There are longings, yearnings, ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... look at ... but they's times when it seems like He does...." On his way back to the store after dinner, Scattergood stopped at the bank corner, hesitated a moment, and then mounted the stairs to the offices above. A door bearing the legend, "Robert Allen, Attorney at Law," admitted him to a large, bare office, such as one finds in ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... monster that long frequented the Rhone, and devoured many of the inhabitants of the surrounding country, but was at length vanquished by St. Martha; who, having secured it round the neck by her veil, delivered it to the just vengeance of the Tarascons. This legend is received as truth by common people, and our guide informed us that they warmly resent any ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... on the shores of this lagoon that I received a very extraordinary commission from a neighbouring tribe. Not long after my arrival I heard a curious legend, to the effect that away on the other side of the lagoon there was an "evil spirit" infesting the waters, which terrified the women when they went down to fill their skins. Well, naturally enough, the fame of the white ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... his birth. His father, a clerk in the Bank of England, possessed ample means for the education of his children. He had artistic and literary tastes, a mind richly stored with philosophy, history, literature, and legend, some repute as a maker of verses, and a liberality that led him to assist his gifted son in following his bent. From his father Robert inherited his literary tastes and his vigorous health; in his father he found a critic and companion. His mother was described by Carlyle as a type of the true ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... little legend yet remains cut deep into the wood, though he returns no more, and though, since ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... is strange! There is an old story among the Indians! My mother told many tales of the place and sang of it, as I sang to you. The legend was this:—In the hills of the North which no white man, nor no Injin of this time hath seen, the forefathers of the red men sleep; but some day they will wake again and go forth and possess all the land; and the buffalo are for them when that time shall come, that they ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the popular belief that the tomb of Sir John Beauchamp, in old St. Paul's, was that of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester. Hence, to walk about the aisles dinnerless was termed dining with Duke Humphrey; and a poem by Speed, termed "The Legend of his Grace," &c., published 1674, details the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... only thing which all are agreed in saying is, that there never has been such a storm before, for the Maories are strong in weather traditions, and though they prophesied this one, it is said they have no legend of anything like ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... I am living over again the lovely legend of Sarpedon; and that exquisite flower of Greek poetry really gives me comfort. If you will read this passage of the Iliad in my beautiful translation by Lecomte de l'Isle, you will see that Zeus utters in regard to destiny certain words in which the divine and the eternal shine out as nobly ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... follows with luggage on a barrow.) It carries on its floor a quantity of fresh straw, in the manner of the stage coaches, in which the problematic passenger, should he ever appear, will no doubt bury his feet. On its side, just below the window that is not made to open, it carries the legend that shows that it belongs to the Comber Arms, a hostelry so self-effacing that it is discoverable only by the sharpest-eyed of pilgrims. Narrow roadways, flanked by proportionately narrower pavements, lie ribbon-like between huddled shops ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... XIII.," have ever been found. After the direct contradiction by Catharine de' Medici, no other testimony is necessary. The Jesuits, however, impudently continued to speak of Conde's treason as an undoubted truth, and even gave the legend of the supposed coin as "Ludovicus XIII., Dei gratia, Francorum Rex primus Christianus." See "Plaidoye de Maistre Antoine Arnauld, Advocat en Parlement, pour l'Universite de Paris ... contre les Jesuites, des 12 et 13 Juillet, 1594." ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... rough," said Nyoda, watching Sahwah out in a canoe, which was nearly standing on end. Her hair stood out straight behind her in the wind and she reminded Nyoda of the picture of the girl going over the falls in the "Legend of Niagara." "There! I knew she would tip! For goodness sake, what is she doing now?" For Sahwah had climbed on top of the overturned canoe and was trying to paddle it ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... preparing to rise to a branch. The PHEASANT-HEN aside.] He does not know that when the Nightingale sings one listens, supposing it to be a minute, and lo! the whole night has been spent listening, even as happens in the enchanted forest of a German legend. ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... I have seen before me a multitude of openings, all leading, through ways of self-sacrifice, to the sure finding of one's self. The more love you give, the more you have; it is, in a way, like the old legend of the man who found he could take to Heaven with him only those things which ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... beans, exorcisms, pictures, curious crosses, fables, and baubles. Had he read the Golden Legend, the Turks' Alcoran, or Jews' Talmud, the Rabbins' Comments, what would he have thought? How dost thou think he might have been affected? Had he more particularly examined a Jesuit's life amongst the rest, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the very mistiness and dreaminess of their surroundings, the almost unearthly silences, the fantasy of story and of legend that lie about them, that the people of Aran and the Galway coast almost shrink from idealism in their fireside songs, and choose rather to dwell upon the slight incidents of daily life. It is in the songs ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... debt, and she had to sell her things. Oh, it was capital! I wish you could have seen her acting as her own auctioneer. Some of us were greedy and wanted her best things. I was one of those. She sold a sealskin jacket, an expensive one, quite new. There is a legend in the college that eighty guineas were expended on it. Well, I bid for the sealskin and it was knocked down to me for ten. It is a little too big for me, of course, but when it is cut to my figure, it will make ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... riverman was the fundamental factor. Only by means of his brawn and his genius for navigation could these innumerable tons of flour, tobacco, and bacon have been kept from rotting on the shores. Yet the man himself remains a legend grotesque and mysterious, one of the shadowy figures of a time when history was being made too rapidly to be written. If we ask how he loaded his flatboat or barge, we are told that "one squint of his eye would blister a bull's heel." When we inquire ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... flour—A. and G. W. Green—and by a charming coincidence A. and G. W. Green happened to be the two young men who were calling on my sisters! On the back of the bags, directly in the rear of the wearer, was the simple legend, "96 pounds"; and the striking effect of the young man's costume was completed by a bright yellow sash which ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... his pew in St. Paul's Church to that of his arrest by United States soldiers. The story was most vivid, and Mr. Harrison, as an eye witness, told it simply and admirably. There had already grown out of this flight of Mr. Davis a most luxuriant tangle of myth and legend, and it had come to be generally believed that the Confederate president had at last endeavored to shield himself behind the women of his household; that when arrested he was trying to escape in the attire of his wife, including a hooped ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... already seen, is held to be regulated by the degree of ceremonial purity or impurity attaching to them. The Hindus have retained, in form at any rate, the religious constitution which is common or universal in primitive societies. The majority of castes are provided with a legend devised by the Brahmans to show that their first ancestor was especially created by a god to follow their caste calling, or at least that this was assigned to him by a god. The ancestors of the bearer-caste of Kahars were created by Siva ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... gentle mannered, pure-minded women among whom she had grown up, thought less of this world, even as they knew it, than of the next as they imagined it to be; and they received and treasured with perfect faith every legend, hint, and shadow of a communication which they believed to have come to them from thence. They neglected the good they might have done here in order to enjoy their bright and tranquil dreams of the hereafter. Their ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... legend when I was a boy, that there was a secret way into the castle, but it made no impression, and I never recalled it till I heard that the place was taken. Don't tell me that the enemy ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... education for women will tend to arrest the recklessness by which life is linked with life at the marriage altar. There is a legend among the Jews that man and woman were once one being; an angel was sent down from Heaven to cleave them into two. Ever since, each half has been running around looking for the other, and the misfits have been many ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... admires it, and because he desires to follow it. To the former the whole detail of every portion of the life of the Buddha, every word of his teaching, every act of his ministry, is sought out and compared and considered. Legend is compared with legend, and tradition with tradition, that out of many authorities some clue to the actual fact may be found. But to the Buddhist the important parts in the great teacher's life are those acts, those words, that appeal directly ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... reconciliation with Serbia; and even now the Serbs will be told by many encouraging people that in their efforts to win the regard of Albanians they have an impossible task, that if some of them take a step towards you one day they will rush back a dozen on the day after. These people will repeat the legend that the Albanians have an invincible hatred for the Slavs; but the Albanians have not forgotten how, in the course of the Middle Ages, they were willingly open to Slav penetration—the Serbian language reached to beyond Alessio, the small Albanian dynasties intermarried with Slav ruling families, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... went down with their rifles and shot-guns, so the story went, fired upon the sailors and even the invalids, while they were attempting to land, and drove them back to their ship. Townsend's leader on this legend, no doubt purely apocryphal, was full of wise things, but ended up with the general reflection that people are apt to forget that "mankind in general are tigers in trousers" and that the majority of them "would cheerfully ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... down to her from some higher path along the fell? distant voices in the farm enclosures beneath her feet? or simply the eerie sounds of the mountain, those weird earth-whispers which haunt the lonely places of nature? Who can tell? Nerves and brain were strained to their uttermost. The legend of the ghost—of the girl who had thrown her baby and herself into the tarn under the frowning precipitous cliffs which marked the western end of High Fell, and who had since then walked the lonely road to Shanmoor every Midsummer Night, with her moaning ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his Studies on the Sources of Malory, refers to him as mentioned in that romance; in the Tristan, on the contrary, he is a leading figure. The Morien story, as I have remarked in the preface, has obviously been modified by the influence of the later Lancelot legend, hence, probably, the ...
— The Romance of Morien • Jessie L. Weston
... times regularly and slowly pass from view, and in their places the unsubstantial worthies of dreamy tradition start up. The transition is so gradual, however, that it is at times impossible to draw the line between history and legend. Fortunately for the purposes of this volume it is not always necessary to make the effort. The early traditions of the Eternal City have so long been recounted as truth that the world is slow to give up even the least jot or ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... cold surface, and read the intense feelings of love, hatred, jealousy, or revenge that smouldered below, stifled and kept down by the iron will, the stubborn, indomitable pride? There is a deep meaning in the legend of that Spartan boy who suffered the stolen fox to gnaw his very vitals, the while he covered him with his tunic and preserved on his brave face a smile of unconcern. Most of us have a stolen fox somewhere; but the weak nature writhes and moans, ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... stars. I descended into the valley, directing myself toward the Djeloum, which has broken its way through a narrow gorge in the mountains, to unite itself with the waters of the river Ind. According to the legend, the valley was once an inland sea; a passage opened through the rocks environing it, and drained the waters away, leaving nothing more of its former character than the lake, the Djeloum and minor water-courses. The banks of the river are now lined with ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... put the unfortunate pitcher together for me. And in its mended condition it will appear more ancient than ever. I cannot say that George Washington broke it with his little hatchet; but I can have a legend about you connected with it, and tell it to your grandchildren when I show it to them fifty years hence. Unto them I will discover—not a swan's nest among the reeds, as Mrs. Browning has it, but an old yellow pitcher that their ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... legend that in days of old one of the abbots of the neighbouring monastery of Aberbrothoc erected a bell on the Inchcape Rock, which was tolled in rough weather by the action of the waves on a float attached to the tongue, and thus mariners were warned at night and in foggy weather of their approach ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... three hundred was selected to place a crown of laurels upon the white head of the American philosopher, and two kisses upon his cheeks. Even in the palace of Versailles Franklin's medallion was sold under the King's eyes, in the exhibition of Sevres porcelain. The legend of this ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... crisis, came news of the failure of an American, Colonel Tate, with some 1,400 French gaol-birds, to make a raid at Fishguard in Pembrokeshire. A later legend sought to embellish this very tame affair by ascribing his failure to the apparition on the hills of Welsh women in high hats and scarlet cloaks, whom the invaders took for regulars. Unfortunately for lovers of the picturesque, the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Sunday, and in the long evenings of winter, she read a good deal; read a few things over a great many times. She knew long portions of the "Frithjof Saga" by heart, and, like most Swedes who read at all, she was fond of Longfellow's verse,—the ballads and the "Golden Legend" and "The Spanish Student." To-day she sat in the wooden rocking-chair with the Swedish Bible open on her knees, but she was not reading. She was looking thoughtfully away at the point where the upland road disappeared over the rim of the prairie. ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... burying them. Lady Sinclair stooped to taste the water, but the young woman said, with a strong expression of horror, "You would not drink it?" Such an impression had the tale, probably two centuries old, made upon the present inhabitants of this melancholy spot. The whole legend is curious; I will try ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... did not crush his victims between two boards, like Christiern II; if he did not bury people alive, like Ludovic the Moor; if he did not build his palace walls with living men and stones, like Timour-Beg, who was born, says the legend, with his hands closed and full of blood; if he did not rip open pregnant women, like Caesar Borgia, Duke of Valentinois; if he did not scourge women on the breasts, testibusque viros, like Ferdinand of Toledo; if he did not break on the wheel alive, burn ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... and not the chemical one, generation, corruption, &c.' In this spirit, she soon surrounded herself with a little mythology of her own. She had a series of anniversaries, which she kept. Her seal-ring of the flying Mercury had its legend. She chose the Sistrum for her emblem, and had it carefully drawn with a view to its being engraved on a gem. And I know not how many verses and legends came recommended to her by this symbolism. Her dreams, of course, partook of this symmetry. The same dream returns ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... solemnly promised to be at home by one o'clock. Another surprise was in store for them. In the bow of their boat Eleanor had hung up a flag. On a background of white broadcloth, stitched in bands of blue, was the legend "Merry Maid." This was Eleanor Butler's chosen name for the houseboat, and had been voted the best possible selection, while Madge had been unanimously voted captain of their little ship. Eleanor had sent to the town for the flag, and ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... the following verses is the subject of an old German legend, intended, perhaps somewhat painfully, to represent a repining and diseased spirit awed by a fearful vision of eventual futurity into a becoming resignation for the early loss of those who might have proved unequal to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... conception of God, given pure, was presently entangled, by the popular fancy of Europe, in new Marchen about the Deity, the Madonna, her Son, and the Apostles. Here, beyond possibility of denial, pure belief came first, fanciful legend was attached after. I am inclined to surmise that this has always been the case, and, in the pages on the legend of Zeus, I show the processes of degeneration, of mythical accretions on a faith in a Heaven-God, in action. That "the feeling of religious devotion" attests ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang |
