"Fantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sometimes singing like an angel, sometimes playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once a miss has bereaved me of all. Oh! glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars but that of fantasy: all affections their relentings but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship but adversity? or when is grace witnessed but in offences? There was no divinity but by reason of compassion; for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... be said that this fantasy of language is not very serious. So be it. But then what remains of the dualism of mind and matter? It is at least singularly compromised. We may continue to suppose that matter exists, and even that it is matter which provokes in our mind those ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... desert with his fervent beams until the uplifts cringed low and in the horizons the mountain peaks floated languidly upon the waves of heat. And in all this dispassionate land, from horizon to horizon, there were only My Lady and I, and the beleaguering Sioux. It seemed unreal, a fantasy; but the rocks began to smell scorched, a sudden thirst nagged and my wounded arm pained with weariness as if to remind that I was here, in the body. Yes, and here she was, also, in the flesh, as much as I, for she stirred, glanced at me, and smiled. I heard her, saw her, felt ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... tasteful lines, opening a full side to the south to catch the soft sunlight and warm breezes. Ravdin strode across the deep carpeting of the terrace. There was other music here, different music, a wilder, more intimate fantasy of whirling sound. An oval door opened for him, and he stopped short, staggered for a moment by the overpowering beauty ...
— The Link • Alan Edward Nourse
... of a man who prayed and wrestled with God in prayer for her, and ultimately wrung her salvation by self-sacrifice from Divine Justice. Here and there are passages that we could have wished modified, but surely such a terrific fantasy was never before penned! It is as harrowing as The Ancient Mariner, and appeals to one more forcibly than Coleridge's "Rime," because it seems actual truth. Other volumes, containing impassioned ballads, lyrics, narrative poems and sonnets, came from Mr. Payne's pen. His poems have ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... marry him, but I knew he would, and there wasn't any hurry, because everything was so perfect, anyway. Then one of the company's clients decided to sponsor a series of fantasy shows on TV and wanted us to tie in the ads for next year with the fantasy theme. Paul was assigned to the account, and G.G. let him borrow me to work on it, because it was such a rush project. I'd always liked fairy stories when I was little and when I discovered there were grown-up ones, too, ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... enjoyed very much writing my Tambourin Chinois.[A] The idea for it came to me after a visit to the Chinese theater in San Francisco—not that the music there suggested any theme, but it gave me the impulse to write a free fantasy in the Chinese manner." ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... Commission set uppon in the Chapter Howse. July 7th, this morning, as I lay in my bed, it cam into my fantasy to write a boke, "De differentiis quibusdam corporum et spirituum." July 8th, I writ to the Lord Bishop of Chester by Mr. Withenstalls. July 10th, Mr. Nicols and Barthilmew Hickman cam. July 14th, Francys Nicols and Barthilmew ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... tales die hard, it is sometimes no easy task to discriminate between what is solid historical fact, what is fact, moss-grown and flower-covered, like an old, old tomb, and what is mere fantasy, the innocent fancy of a nation in its childhood, turned at last into stone—a lasting stalactite—from the countless droppings of belief bestowed ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... quite the ton now in England. Corri the composer has published "The Feast of Erin, a fantasy for the piano-forte," in which the original Irish airs of 'Flanerty Drury,' 'The Summer is Coming,' 'Erin go Bragh,' and 'Fly not Yet' are introduced. Mr. C. (says the reviewer) has displayed some judgment in the selection of these airs, particularly in ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... M. Duplessis and a number of others. I had been amply avenged, and I must confess, to my shame, that I had difficulty in hiding my satisfaction at seeing those who had scoffed at my report and treated as fantasy what I had said about the enemy presence,taking to their heels under a hail of shot and scrambling over ditches as best they could to seek shelter behind the great pine trees! The worthy General Lorencez, whom I had warned to stay in the forest, laughed heartily ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... reach out to envelop all humanity, and find a suitable activity in social service. It may be transformed into the love of God, and find an outlet in the religious life of the individual. Or it may be expressed only in language, in which case it may stop at the stage of erotic fantasy and day-dream, or may result in some really great piece of poetry or prose. This last outlet is so common that our language is full of symbolic words and phrases which have a hidden ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... he thought, "appears to them foolish, even the Princess's gift is, in their eyes, a common chirping chaffinch. What if indeed I have been dreaming; what if this, after all, should be the real world, and the other a mere fantasy?" The bird sang, "Away! away! or you will never see the Princess more! The real world lies beyond the gates of the sunset!" But when the traveler asked the youths what the bird sang, they answered that they had only heard ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... faculty of imagination and the force of example are important considerations in the development of the spiritual feelings and the formation of fine ideals. The world of make-believe, of purest fantasy, is just as interesting and just as significant as the every day actualities of life. It makes not the slightest difference to a little boy, or girl, whether the stories you read them, or the acts of hero and heroine, ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... that Dante meant theology By Beatrice, and not a mistress—I, Although my opinion may require apology, Deem this a commentator's fantasy, Unless indeed it was from his own knowledge he Decided thus, and show'd good reason why; I think that Dante's more abstruse ecstatics Meant to ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... feeling took hold of him, and a flood of light chased away the gloom, for a moment, from his soul. He took a ticket to Pavlofsk, and determined to get there as fast as he could, but something stopped him; a reality, and not a fantasy, as he was inclined to think it. He was about to take his place in a carriage, when he suddenly threw away his ticket and came out again, disturbed and thoughtful. A few moments later, in the street, he recalled something that had bothered him all the afternoon. He caught himself ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... with the great "problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rank you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases as the latter two writers, however, we have an otherwise competent artist handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever he may nominally write about, the result is, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... ever really fight Big Ben Brain or Bryan in Hyde Park, or is it all a fantasy of the artist's imagining? We shall never know. Borrow called his Lavengro 'An Autobiography' at one stage of its inception, although he wished to repudiate the autobiographical nature of his story at another. Dr. Knapp in ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... and there contrasting episodes of realism or of absurdity; he has woven into his story a succession of vivid dialogues, and by means of an acute sense of observation he has succeeded in keeping his airy fantasy in touch with actual things. The description of Nicolette, escaping from her prison, and stepping out over the grass in her naked feet, with the daisies, as she treads on them, showing black against her whiteness, is a wonderful ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... sit upon the old sea wall, And watch the shimmering sea, Where soft and white the moonbeams fall, Till, in a fantasy, Some pure white maiden's funeral pall The strange ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... passion, although the world, according to its custom, conspires against his instinct by interrupting him with love and war and business, and in the end hustles him away before he has had time to make anything more lovely or lasting than a reputation as a hero. In the amazing fantasy The Cream of the Jest Mr. Cabell has embodied the visions of the romancer Felix Kennaston so substantially that Kennaston's diurnal walks in Lichfield seem hardly as real as those nightly ventures which under the guise of Horvendile he makes into the glowing ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... past; Dick he had known and loved at college; Dick was even now showing himself a friend; and all these other folk were but the ghosts of things to come. Then he laughed lightly at himself for his own fantasy, and returned to the ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... false standard it sets up socially is intolerable. It sounds fantastic to say that whole bodies of women place their chief reliance for social advancement on dress, but it is true. They are, or are not, as they are gowned! The worst of this fantasy is not only that it forces too much attention from useful women, but that it gives such poise and assurance to the ignorant and useless! If you look like the women of a set, you are as "good" as they, is the democratic standard of many a young woman. If for any reason she is not able ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... Persian and the conquering Mohammedan. By using veiled language, by taking all the every-day things of life as mere symbols of the highest transcendentalism, it was possible to be an observing Mohammedan in the flesh, whilst the mind wandered in the realms of pure fantasy and speculation. While enjoying Hafiz, then, and bathing in his wealth of picture, one is at a loss to tell whether the bodies he describes are of flesh and blood, or incorporeal ones with a mystic background; whether the wine of which he sings really runs red, and the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... the scene fascinated man and beast. The streaming lines of people raced on, and the horse snorted and plunged into the mass. Now the crackling as of paper burning in a brisk wind could be heard. There was a shout from the crowd. The flames had gained the Peristyle—that noble fantasy plucked from another, distant life and planted here above the barbaric glow of the lake in the lustrous atmosphere of Chicago. The horseman holding his restive steeds drove in a sea of flame. Through the empty arches the dark waters ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... even repellent; yet our children have read of a prince who falls in love with a White Cat; in the story of "The Runaways" we come upon the old, old ruse of magic barriers interposed between pursuer and pursued; and Andersen's charming fantasy of "The Woodcutter's Child" who disobeyed her Guardian Angel has scarcely a more delicate pathos than the ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... be everywhere in one day, or in one journey:—so, gravely balancing the ruins of still life against the attractions of animated society, I was unchivalrous enough to prefer the former—and working myself up into a sort of fantasy, of witnessing the spectered forms of DAGOBERT and CLOVIS, (the fabled founders of the Abbey) I resolutely turned my back upon La Mailleraye, and as steadily looked forwards to JUMIEGES. We ascended very sensibly—then ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... life. We can easily realize the chaos and ferment of an over-stimulated brain, steeped in romantic literature, and given over to the wayward leadings of the imagination. Who can tell what is true, what is false, in a world where fantasy is as real as fact? Emerson's word fell like truth itself, "a shaft of light shot from the zenith," a golden rule of thought and action. His books were bread and wine to her, and she absorbed them into her very being. She felt herself invincibly drawn to the master, "that fount of wisdom ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... window, and seated herself, in her impulsive way, at the organ. Her fingers touched the keys timidly at first as she began a trembling prelude of her own fantasy. In music her pent-up feelings found congenial expression. The fire kindled, and she presently burst out with the voice of a seraph in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... book of horror, of fantasy. A collection of weird, terrifying, supernatural tales with grotesque illustrations in funereal black and white. And the very line I had turned to, the line which had probably struck terror to that unlucky devil's ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... peasantry will know that the wildest sayings in this play are tame indeed compared with the fancies one may hear at any little hillside cottage of Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay.' It is the strangest, the most beautiful expression in drama of that Irish fantasy, which overflowing through all Irish Literature that has come out of Ireland itself (compare the fantastic Irish account of the Battle of Clontarf with the sober Norse account) is the unbroken character of Irish genius. In modern days this genius has delighted ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... began seriously to doubt the evidence of his senses. Had she, his fairy princess, ever really been in the house at all or had he dreamed her—her and her butterflies? Was she, after all, some fantasy born of the music and his dreaming imagination? And would it ever be possible to dream her again; or, if she were real, where, where could he find her? To discover a fairy princess and to lose her, lose her, as he ruefully confessed, like a needle in a haystack, ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... the wet roof above him. Looking fearfully down, Aristides beheld between the interstices of the rafters, which formed a temporary flooring, that there was another opening below, and in that opening a man was working. In the queer fantasy of Aristides's dream, it took the aspect of a second pocket ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... doctorate degrees and who worshipped furtively through prism spectacles; business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt afar from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses. They all entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as the hues of fantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath when he stepped upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same dull pain of shouldering the ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... continues, "walked up and down the room, humming as usual, instead of singing—and opened the piano. My wife had often asked him in vain to play; but now, putting the text before him, he began a wonderful improvisation, which, unfortunately, there were no magic means of recording. From this fantasy he seemed to conjure the theme of the aria. Hours passed but Beethoven continued to improvise. Supper, which he intended to share with us, was served, but he would not be disturbed. Late in the evening he embraced me and, without having eaten anything, hurried home. The following day the ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... brilliant of that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—certainly it was the most opulent. The manners of the time were better than the morals, and if good taste in art and architecture had somewhat fallen there is no doubt but that a charming fantasy often made up for a ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... in this lies the triumph of the gypsy music; it is like that of Orpheus, which moved the rocks and trees. The soul of the Hungarian plunges, with a refinement of sensation that we can understand, but cannot follow, into this music, which, like the unrestrained indulgence of the imagination in fantasy and caprice, gives to the initiated all the intoxicating sensations ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... rumours are often false, and a lady may go to Prague on a gentleman's behalf without intending to marry him. All the women in London were at present more or less in love with the man who had been accused of murder, and the fantasy of Madame Goesler might be only as the fantasy of others. And then, rumour also said that Phineas Finn intended to marry Lady Laura Kennedy. At any rate a man cannot have his head broken for asking a lady to marry him,—unless he is very awkward in the doing of it. ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... were so few, and the sins of this beloved and erring brother had so large a share in determining the bent of her genius, that to have passed them by would have been to ignore the shock which turned the fantasy of the 'Poems' into the tragedy of 'Wuthering Heights.' It would have been to leave untold the patience, the courage, the unselfishness which perfected Emily Bronte's heroic character; and to have left her burdened with the ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... can nor knows how to imagine, nor does he even desire to do good painting, his work mostly differs but little from his imagination, which is generally somewhat worse; for if he knew how to imagine well or in a masterly manner in his fantasy, he could not have a hand so corrupt as not to show some part or indication of his good will. But no one has ever known how to aspire well in this science, except the mind which understands what good work is, and what he can make of it. It is a serious thing, this distance and ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... are boldly asserted by him concerning fantasies or imaginations are very opposite to Fate. For desiring to show that fantasy is not of itself a perfect cause of consent, he says, that the Sages will prejudice us by imprinting false imaginations in our minds, if fantasies do of themselves absolutely cause consent; for wise men ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... where he rather unexpectedly recognizes the dignity of literary art as art, and states very finely its range of power. "To look at literature,—how many fine thoughts has every man had! how few fine thoughts are expressed! Yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and ethereal, but that talent merely, with more resolution and faithful persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... comparatively slight interest in whatever posthumous fortunes might await individual souls. Other civilised peoples, say the Greeks, extended the second, or animistic theory, into forms of beautiful fantasy, the material of art. Yet both in Greece and Rome, as we learn from the 'Republic' (Books i. iii.) of Plato, and from the whole scope of the poem of Lucretius, and from the Painted Porch at Delphi, answering to the frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo, there ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... libraries and do a few errands. The sum total of these expenses amounted to only eighteen cents, which left me two cents over for emergencies." Balzac somewhat exaggerates his poverty and reduces his expenses to suit the pleasure of his poetic fantasy, but undoubtedly it was a brusque transition from the bourgeois comfort of family life to the ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... for anything of that kind in a state of material hardship. To-day I have sent S—- a cheque for fifty pounds; it will come as a very boon of heaven, and assuredly blesseth him that gives as much as him that takes. A poor fifty pounds, which the wealthy fool throws away upon some idle or base fantasy, and never thinks of it; yet to S—- it will mean life and light. And I, to whom this power of benefaction is such a new thing, sign the cheque with a hand trembling, so glad and proud I am. In the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... barbarism is not humanity but inhumanity; hence the unfitness to the case, of such illogical reasoning as is adopted by the advocates of Negro equality. Human equality, as applied to the Negro, is an idle fantasy, without even the shadow or semblance of plausibility. White men are equals in few things; certainly not in physical nor mental capacity, nor power. The equality declared by our Revolutionary Sires was the political equality of white men. Let us arise from ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... I pushed in the ends of the burning logs and sat down to watch the blaze as it took on new life. Gradually, as I gazed into its depths, fantasy brought before my eyes the picture of another camp fire. Hubbard was sitting by it. It was one of those nights in the hated Susan Valley. We had been toiling up the trail for days, and were ill and ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... I listened suddenly, And soon I heard the bell to matins ring, And up I rose, no longer would I lie. But now, how trow ye? such a fantasy Fell me to mind, that aye methought the bell Said to me, 'Tell on man ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... had been soothed by the serene influence of her friend; and she too was silent for awhile. But the giddy images that had of late been reeling their wild dance through her brain, soon came back in glittering fantasy. ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... some deplorably mean ones. For "service is no inheritance" either in the kitchen or the House of Lords; and the case presented by Mr. Barrie in his play of The Admirable Crichton, where the butler is the man of quality, and his master, the Earl, the man of rank, is no fantasy, but a quite common occurrence, and indeed to some extent an inevitable one, because the English are extremely particular in selecting their butlers, whilst they do not select their barons at all, taking them as the accident of birth sends them. The consequences include much ironic ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... of this fantasy is an island, hitherto inhabited by Lutherans, in a remote but temperate province of Northern Europe. The persons are the Gods of Ancient Greece. The time is early ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... which we have everything to gain and nothing to lose by accommodating her. But even when Bosnia and Dalmatia have been united to Serbia and Montenegro, the Southern Slav problem will still be far from solution. Dalmatia is alike in constitutional theory and in political fantasy, though not in sober fact, an integral portion of the Triune Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia-Dalmatia, and it is unthinkable that Serbo-Croat opinion could ever consent to the liberation of the one without the other. No solution has any chance ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... big boy in bed. There is Betsinda dancing with her plum-bun in "The Rose and the Ring." The burlesque drawings of that delightful child's book are not its least attraction. Not arriving at the prettiness of Mr. Tenniel, and the elegance of Mr. Du Maurier, and falling far short of their ingenious fantasy, they are yet manly delineations of great adventures. The count kicking the two black men into space is a powerful design, full of action; and it would be hard to beat the picture of the fate of Gruffanuf's husband. These and the rest are old friends, and there are hosts of quaint scribblings, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... wind-swept mountain and its roaring fires, the thing is undeniably impressive. But in other less expert hands it would become ludicrous. There is one tale of finer texture than the others. It is called Wayfarers, and is a quite beautiful little fantasy on the old theme that love is longer than life. This is what Mr. BLACKWOOD can do to perfection. It redeems a volume that, for all its originality, does not otherwise display his art quite at ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... I perceived the contents of this glass case a sense of fantasy claimed me, and I ceased to know where reality ended ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... in his mind, would swear the famous trees of Fontainebleau had neither size nor age to speak of. But at night they laid their avenging spell upon him. They stood so finely on the broken ground, each of them with a kingly space about him; there was so wild a fantasy in their gnarled and broken limbs; and under the night their scanty crowns of leaf, from which the sap was yearly ebbing, had so ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... been my life; yea, with it I have kept My heart drugg'd in a long delicious night Colour'd with candles of imagined sense, And musical with dreamt desire. I said, The day will surely come upon the world, To scatter this sweet night of fantasy With morning, pour'd on my dream-feasted heart Out of thine eyes, Judith. And yet I still Feared for my dream, even as a maiden fears The body of her lover. But, in the midst Of all this charm'd delaying,—behold Death Leapt into our world, lording it, standing ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... life of the old Greeks until I looked on that statue.]—Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,—spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... word 'again' has its 'credibilizing' effect. Then Horatio, the representative of the ignorance of the audience, not himself, but by Marcellus to Bernardo, anticipates the common solution—''tis but our fantasy!' ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... wholly unsuited for psychical research; free from guile himself, he was too inclined to judge others to be of this nature also. But his common sense and critical attitude towards enthusiasm saved him, no doubt, from many falls into the mire of fantasy. ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... this life of fantasy and frivolity, on which so much cleverness was thrown away, the unfortunate Beau finished his career miserably. On his application to the Foreign Office, representing his wish to be removed to any other consulate where he might ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... turned in mute admiration towards the dawning day, it would have required but a slight stretch of the imagination to have beheld in her a priestess of the sun, awaiting in reverent adoration the appearance of her fire-god. Her complexion and features, too, would have helped to strengthen the fantasy, for the one was singularly fair, pale, and transparent, and the other characterized by delicacy, refinement, and a sort of earnest yet still enthusiasm. Her hair, of the softest and palest brown, was arranged in simple yet massive plaits around her finely-shaped head, and crowned ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... fight with the senses; Nature to them must needs be less a work of God for man's delight, than a dangerous means of seduction. 'They wandered through Nature with timid misgiving, and their anxious fantasy depicted forms of terror or marvellous rescues.[3] The idyllic pleasure in the simple charms of Nature, especially in the monastery garden of the Carlovingian time, contrasts strikingly with the tone of these very mundane vagantes ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... cannot do better than get the book. It is, in its way, a little masterpiece, and its grace and fancy, and beauty of line and colour, cannot be over-estimated. The Greeks gave human form to wood and stream, and saw Nature best in Naiad or in Dryad. Mr. Crane, with something of Gothic fantasy, has caught the Greek feeling, the love of personification, the passion for representing things under the conditions of the human form. The flowers are to him so many knights and ladies, page-boys or shepherd- boys, divine nymphs or simple girls, and in their fair bodies ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... figure-sculpture to Bourges. It has nothing like the artful pointing and moulding of the arcades of Salisbury—nothing of the might of Durham;—no Daedalian inlaying like Florence, no glow of mythic fantasy like Verona. And yet, in all, and more than these, ways, outshone or overpowered, the cathedral of Amiens deserves the name given it by M. Viollet ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... Thomas; "yet both he and Glaston walk rather A-STRADDLE, methinks. They might have stepped up to thee more straightforwardly, and told thee the trade ill suiteth thee, having little fire, little fantasy, and little learning. Furthermore, that one poet, as one bull, sufficeth for two parishes, and that where they are stuck too close together they are apt to fire, like haystacks. I have known it myself; I have ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... poorly paid. But Dr. Inge is not old-fashioned; he considers himself highly progressive and advanced. He is a New Theologian; that is, he is liberal in theology—and nothing else. He is apparently in sober fact, and not as in any fantasy, in sympathy with those who would soften the superior claim of our creed by urging the rival creeds of the East; with those who would absorb the virtues of Buddhism or of Islam. He holds a high seat in that modern Parliament of Religions where all ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... became entirely luminous. How this light arises we cannot explain; but, as a matter of fact, it does arise. Let me remark here, that this kind of pondering is a process with which the ancients could have been but imperfectly acquainted. They, for the most part, found the exercise of fantasy more pleasant than careful observation, and subsequent brooding over facts. Hence it is, that when those whose education has been derived from the ancients speak of 'the reason of man,' they are apt to omit from their conception of reason one ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... dwelt a mysterious unspeakable Fear and half-mad panic Awe; as for mortals there well might! And is not man a microcosm, or epitomized mirror of that same Universe; or, rather, is not that Universe even Himself, the reflex of his own fearful and wonderful being, "the waste fantasy of his own dream?" No wonder that man, that each man, and James Boswell like the others, should resemble it! The peculiarity in his case was the unusual defect of amalgamation and subordination: the highest lay side by side with the lowest; not morally combined with it and spiritually ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... a crystalline glittering substance, like molten glass sprayed on and allowed to harden. Behind this glasseous protective surface, paintings and carvings spread a fantasy of strange form and color, but the light was too dim to make much of it, except that it was alien to my experience, and exceedingly well done, speaking of ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... portrait dimly shone, the flowers on the table seemed to give out their beauty and their scent with conscious desire to please, to add their offerings, and for Henrietta the grotesqueness of the elder aunts, their gay attire, their rouge and wrinkles, gave a touch of fantasy to what would otherwise have been too orderly and too respectable ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... and tint. Now, before their incredulous eyes there appeared rising from the cloud bank the illusion of graciously rounded domes, spires, minarets, and the next instant they were gazing on a city of enchantment softly reflected in a pearly sea—a silvery city of fantasy like an exquisite shadowy drawing of some foreign land. . . . They sat silent, entranced. How long the vision lingered neither of them knew. . . . Then a breeze fanned their faces and in a twinkling the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... fantasy, for my love lay still In my arms, with her tender eyes aglow, And she wondered why my lips were chill, Why I was silent and kissed her so. A year has gone and the moon is bright, A gibbous moon, like a ghost of woe; I sit by a new-made grave ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... last fortnight I have been rather indisposed with a rebellion of stomach, which would retain nothing, (liver, I suppose,) and an inability, or fantasy, not to be able to eat of any thing with relish but a kind of Adriatic fish called 'scampi,' which happens to be the most indigestible of marine viands. However, within these last two days, I am better, and very ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... motion, both of forms and seeds, derive and have being; He that gave flesh the original beauty, strength, propagation, form and shape, health and symmetry; He that gave the unreasonable soul, sense, memory, and appetite; the reasonable, besides these, fantasy, understanding, and will; He, I say, having left neither heaven, nor earth, nor angel, nor man, no, nor the most base and contemptible creature, neither the bird's feather, nor the herb's flower, nor the tree's leaf, without the true harmony of their parts, ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... With its coming, fantasy vanished; and I knew that the dead dacoit, his great curved knife yet clutched in his hand, the Yellow menace hanging over London, over England, over the civilized world, the absence, the heart-breaking absence, ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... forest; and (2) to the rustling of wind among the trees. The former image may be understood to apply principally to the revolutionary audacity and fervour of the ideas expressed; the latter, to those qualities of imagination, fantasy, beauty, and melody, which characterise the verse. Of course all this would be more genuinely appropriate to Shelley himself than to Moore: still it would admit of some application to Moore, of whom our poet spoke highly more than once elsewhere. The image of a forest on fire is more ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... tasted crisp and delicious. Bart relaxed, answering questions. How old? Only seventeen? And you came all alone on a Lhari ship, working your way as Astrogator? I must say you've got guts, kid! It was dangerously like the fantasy he had invented. But Montano ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... house upon the island; it mattered not that Captain Jabe had said nothing of his neighbor; in truth, nothing mattered. One sister of the House of Martha had come to this place; why not another? What I had seen in the woods had been no fantasy. Sylvia was here. ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... It might rather seem as if the sleepy river (being Shakespeare's Avon, and often, no doubt, the mirror of his gorgeous visions) were dreaming now of a lordly residence that stood here many centuries ago; and this fantasy is strengthened, when you observe that the image in the tranquil water has all the distinctness of the actual structure. Either might be the reflection of the other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said that chamberlain to the silversmith, pulling him on one side. "Dismiss this fantasy. You can meet anywhere, even at Court, with women of wealth, young and pretty, who would willingly marry you. For this, if need be, the king would assist you by giving you some title, which in course of time would enable you to found a good family. Are you sufficiently well ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... anxiety of fame, and the last we shall ever hear of them will be the funeral bell, that tolls them to their early graves! Unhappy men, and unsuccessful! because their purpose is, not to accomplish well their task, but to clutch the 'trick and fantasy of fame'; and they go to their graveswith purposes unaccomplished and wishes unfulfilled. Better for them, and for the world in their example, had they known how to wait! Believe me, the talent of success is nothing more than ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... fantasy to the guiltless? Am I in dreamland? Was it best to wander Through the long waves, or better far to ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... hope that she would some day let me be more than that?" the glow of joy on that stricken face, the cry of rapture, the hand held to him, stirred him so deeply that his old love-longing seemed a boyish fantasy. "Oh, you have made me happy! You have blotted out all my follies and sufferings!" Then the ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... grew so pale and emaciated, from want of rest, and continual brooding over my insane love and its cruel conditions, that I determined to make some effort to wean myself from it. "Come," I said, "this is at best but a fantasy. Your imagination has bestowed on Animula charms which in reality she does not possess. Seclusion from female society has produced this morbid condition of mind. Compare her with the beautiful women of your own world, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... fain hear thy thought hereon, Jack," said his wife, "for methinks I do see in Robin his manner that this is no lad's fantasy only, as Dr Thorpe did suppose, but a set purpose, that must be fairly faced, and said yea ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... very doleful experiences in a certain stable. God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the sublime caballero. His was a very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise the envy of baser mortals. But there is more than one aspect to the charm of that exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his frailties. After reading so many romances he desired ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... he was gray at the curling hair which turned up at his broad temples—smiled as if he held it to be a pleasant fantasy, too nebulous and far-away to be realized upon, when any asked him of his intentions concerning Number One. He put off his questioners with a pleasantry when they pressed him, but there was such a tenderness ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and .. with their trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good 150 pounds from the precious oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... and so it was! On the table stood pure water in a silver cup, and by it cakes of bread upon a golden platter. She stretched out her hand, for surely this fantasy was pleasant, and took that ghost of a silver cup, her own cup that Pharaoh had given her as a child, and brought it to her lips and drank, and lo! water pure and cold flowed down her throat, until at length even her raging thirst was satisfied. Then she ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... love 's the gift which God has given To man alone beneath the heaven: It is not fantasy's hot fire, Whose wishes soon as granted fly; It liveth not in fierce desire, With dead desire it doth not die; It is the secret sympathy, The silver link, the silken tie, Which heart to heart and mind to mind In body ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... been snowed in. Snow drifted the road in hills and hollows, and hung in little eddying wreaths, where the wind took it, on the pasture slopes. It made solid banks in the dooryards, and buried the stone walls out of sight. The lacework of its fantasy became daintily apparent in the conceits with which it broidered over all the common objects familiar in homely lives. The pump, in yards where that had supplanted the old-fashioned curb, wore a heavy mob-cap. The vane on the barn ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... passages in the sonatas of Haydn. Music had now found the missing half of its dual nature. For we must know that in the same manner as the thematic or fugal element in music represents the play of musical fantasy, turning over musical ideas intellectually or seriously; so there is a spontaneous melody, into which no thought of developing an idea enters. The melody flows or soars like the song of a bird, because ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... quarter of an hour later the man, who had gone on lacing his furmity more and more heavily, though he was either so strong-minded or such an intrepid toper that he still appeared fairly sober, recurred to the old strain, as in a musical fantasy the instrument fetches up the original theme. "Here—I am waiting to know about this offer of mine. The woman is no good ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... tell him?" said he who was more ready of speech than the others. "Sorrow be his whoever speak of it or whoever tell him! 'Tis fantasy that you say, since there is not so costly a beast in this forest, neither stag nor lion nor wild boar, one of whose limbs were worth more than two pence, or three at the most; and you speak of so great wealth! Foul sorrow be his who believe you, or whoever tell him! You are a fay, ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... unlike.[80] Not only is there a primordial animal and a primordial plant, schematic forms to which all separate species are referable, but the parts of each are themselves units, which "der Idee nach," are identical inter se. This fantasy can hardly be taken seriously as a scientific theory; it seems, however, to have been what guided Goethe in his "discovery" of the vertebral nature of the skull. Just as the fore limb can be homologised with the hind limb, so, reasoning ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... rare sweet, gent, and tender, beyond other men, he shall sure as daydawn go and wed with woman that could hold castle or govern army if need were? 'Tis passing strange, but I have oft noted the same. And if he be rough and fierce, then shall he take fantasy to some soft, nesh [Note 10], bashful creature that scarce dare say nay to save her life. Right as men of high stature do commonly wed with small women, and the great women with little men. Such be the ways ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... gallery sits Dutch, the world's leading tattooer. Sample tattoo designs cover the two walls. Dragons, scorpions, bulbous nymphs, crossed flags, wreathed anchors, cupids, butterflies, daggers and quaint decorations that seem the grotesque survivals of the mid-Victorian schools of fantasy. Photographs of famous men also cover the walls—Capt. Constantinus tattooed from head to foot, every inch of him; Barnum's favorites, ancient and forgotten kooch dancers, fire eaters, sword swallowers, magicians and museum freaks. And a two column article from the Chicago Chronicle of ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... that aroused our childish fantasy, when Balint Orzo and I were boys, but none so much as the old tower that stands a few feet from the castle, shadowy and mysterious. It is an old, curious, square tower, and at the brink of its notched edge there is a shingled helmet which was ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... disturbed by what can have been only a dream?" At the same time the sultaness called the princess's women, and after she had seen her get up, and begin dressing, went to the sultan's apartment, told him that her daughter had got some odd notions in her, but that there was nothing in them but idle fantasy. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... Sir Henry Wotton. It will be seen that I have arranged my singers with reference to their birth, not to the point of time at which this or that poem was written or published. The poetic influences which work on the shaping fantasy are chiefly felt in youth, and hence the predominant mode of a poet's utterance will be determined by what and where and amongst whom he was during that season. The kinds of the various poems will ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... be called conceptual, I ask, What in nature is it the conception of? For example, when we speak of a point in the timeless space of physical science, I suppose that we are speaking of something in nature. If we are not so speaking, our scientists are exercising their wits in the realms of pure fantasy, and this is palpably not the case. This demand for a definite Habeas Corpus Act for the production of the relevant entities in nature applies whether space be relative or absolute. On the theory of relative space, it may perhaps be argued that there is no timeless ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... arose to absolute mutiny. They gathered together in the retired parts of the ships, at first in little knots of two and three, which gradually increased and became formidable, joining in murmurs and menaces against the admiral. They exclaimed against him as an ambitious desperado who, in a mad fantasy, had determined to do something extravagant to render himself notorious. What obligation bound them to persist, or when were the terms of their agreement to be considered as fulfilled? They had already penetrated into ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... voyage, will Americanise himself more in one year on an Illinois prairie than an intelligent, middle-class Englishman will do in ten, in the best society of Massachusetts. Now, I am not dallying with a facetious fantasy when I express the opinion, that the life and song of the English lark in America, superadded to the other institutions and influences indicated, would go a great way in fusing this hitherto insoluble element, and blending it harmoniously with the best vitalities of the nation. And this ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... from her, his dreams certainly should have been heavenly. Yet he began the night by sinking into so profound a sleep that he had no dreams whatever. When at last he did rouse to the dream-state of consciousness, it was not to enjoy any pleasant fantasy of music ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... exists. To realize them, one must imagine the most transcendent notions of Swedenborg mingled with the rant of a superior kind of Mucklewrath. Such poems as 'The Book of Thel,' in spite of beautiful allegoric passages; 'The Gates of Paradise'; 'Tiriel,' an extended narrative-fantasy in irregular unrhymed verses; even the striking 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell,'—may be reckoned as mere prologues to such productions as 'Jerusalem,' 'The Emanation of the Giant Albion.' 'Milton,' and the "prophecies" embodied in the completed 'Urizen,' the 'Europe,' 'Ahania,' and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... he would be in town, for he found a subtle sense of companionship in this solitude, as if the dusky woods and those grim, aloof peaks accepted him for what he was, discounting all that misfortune which had visited him in the train of war. He knew that was sheer fantasy, but a fantasy ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... point out the bird feeding its three young ones on the seventh pillar on the Piazzetta side; but there is no end to the fantasy of these sculptures; and the traveller ought to observe them all carefully, until he comes to the great Pilaster or complicated pier which sustains the party wall of the Sala del Consiglio; that is to say, the forty-seventh capital of the whole ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... inside it I laboriously hide it, And a rather pretty sermon you might preach Upon Fantasy, selecting For your "instance" the affecting Tale of me and ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... That Alice should have been brought to think of her engagement with him in a spirit of doubt and with a mind so troubled, that she had been inclined to attempt an escape from it, had been very grievous to him; but it had been in his mind a fantasy, a morbid fear of himself, which might be cured by time. He, at any rate, would give all his energies towards achieving such a cure. There had been one thing, however, which he most feared;—which he had chiefly feared, though he had forbidden himself ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... had handed down—might seem ready to join on. He felt as if they were the two points of an electric chain, which being joined, an instantaneous effect must follow. Earnestly, as he would have looked forward to this moment (had he in sober reason ever put any real weight on the fantasy in pursuit of which he had wandered so far) he now, that it actually appeared to be realizing itself, paused with a vague sensation of alarm. The mystery was evidently one of sorrow, if not of crime, and he felt as if that sorrow and crime might not have been annihilated even by being ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... northern tribes (if these be really without religion) is the result of their form of speculation, wholly occupied by the idea of reincarnation, while the Arunta form of totemism is the consequence of an isolated fantasy about their peculiar sacred stones. Meanwhile the Euahlayi, as Mrs. Parker proves, entertain, in a limited way, not elsewhere recorded in Australia, the belief in the reincarnation of the souls of uninitiated young people. They also, like the Arunta, recognise ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... stagnant inertia, tempered with bitter joy, is characteristic of debauchery. It is the sequence of a life of caprice, where nothing is regulated according to the needs of the body, but everything according to the fantasy of the mind and one must be always ready to obey the behests of the other. Youth and will can resist excess; but nature silently avenges herself, and the day when she decides to repair her forces, the will struggles to retard her work and abuses ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... its environing scenes disappeared behind Mousehole and St Clement's Isle, Baptista's ephemeral, meteor-like husband impressed her yet more as a fantasy. She was still in such a trance-like state that she had been an hour on the little packet-boat before she became aware of the agitating fact that Mr Heddegan was on board with her. Involuntarily she slipped from her left hand ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... she answered, humoring his fantasy, "but I can remember." She paused a long while. "I don't know," she said at last, "whether I can make you understand just how I feel. But it seems to me as if I had died, and this long voyage was ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... be it remarked. A work of art may stand very far from Nature, provided its own parts are consistent. Heaven forbid that a critic should decry an author for being fantastic, so long as he is true to his fantasy. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... suddenly switching the conversation away from the Italian's fantasy, "you are well acquainted with all the circumstances connected with Sir Alan's murder. Have you formed any theory about the crime, its motive, or its ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... his deepest wit, He thereon feeds his hungrie fantasy, Still full, yet never satisfyde with it; Like Tantale, that in store doth sterved ly, 200 So doth he pine in most satiety; For nought may quench his infinite desyre, Once kindled through ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... seemed they must crash into fragments. A little later he suddenly stiffened out. The hands clenched and the face set with the savage resolution of the dream. The eyelids trembled from the shock of the fantasy, seemed about to open, but did not. Instead, ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... maidens of a later day must surely be in paradise. They keep, in the words of our poet, "much that we resigned"—much, too, that we prized. No girl, in our day, but dreamed of the lordly lover, and I hazard a guess that the fantasy persists. It is slower to be realised than even in our own dream-period, for now it must come through the horn-gate of the maiden's own judgment. Man has fallen from the self-erected pedestal of "superiority." He had placed ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... his voice got brisk. "Well, all fantasy aside, how'd you like to work in this company?" He asked, lightly slapping my ankle. "On the stage, I mean. Sid thinks you're ready for some of the smaller parts. In fact, he asked me to put it to you. He thinks ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... guilt of slavery, should share the pecuniary loss, if such there were, of its immediate abolition, yet we repudiate the right to demand compensation for human flesh and blood, as (to employ the emphatic words of Lord Brougham) we repudiate and abhor 'the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man.' And we do not hesitate to express our conviction, strengthened by the experience of emancipation in our own colonies, that on the mere ground of social or political expediency, the ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... which the Eternal will is wrought, Whose impulse fills anew with breath The frozen solitude of Death, To mortal mind were sometimes lent, To mortal musings sometimes sent, To whisper-even when it seems But Memory's fantasy of dreams— Through the mind's waste of woe and sin, Of an ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... forehead with the lily, which seemed dewy and icy cool; and with the contact it seemed to her that a delicious tranquillity, a calm ecstasy, possessed her soul, and the words were impressed in her mind, as if spoken in her ear, "The Lord hath sealed thee for his own!"—and then, with the wild fantasy of dreams, she saw the cavalier in his wonted form and garments, just as he had kneeled to her the night before, and he said, "Oh, Agnes! Agnes! little lamb of Christ, love me and lead me!"—and in her sleep it seemed to her that her heart ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... close my eyes. I avow that that lonesome room—gloomy in its lunar bath of soft perfumed light—shrouded in the sullen voluptuousness of plushy, narcotic-breathing draperies—pervaded by the mysterious spirit of its brooding occupant—grew more and more on my fantasy, till the remembrance had for me all the cool refreshment shed by a midsummer-night's dream in the dewy deeps of some Perrhoebian grove of cornel and lotos and ruby stars of the asphodel. It was, therefore, in all haste that I set out to share for ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... fraternity for their convent—their rigid separation from human intercourse—the infringible taciturnity imposed upon themselves—and the terrible severity of their penances, are certainly circumstances more resembling the visionary indulgence of fantasy and fiction, than actual realities to be met with among living men, ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... Romanticists; then the bonds were snapped, even in this respect. Schubert, on the one hand, could compose the most moderate songs, on the other, the most immoderate. It often seems (and this is also the case with Beethoven) that his fantasy rebelled against the fact that a curb was placed upon it by the natural ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... shame I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That for a fantasy and trick of fame Go ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... and indicative of a high order of talent is a new opera by Franz Schreker, Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin (1913). Schreker's earlier opera, Der ferne Klang, I missed, but I enjoyed the later composition, charged as it is with fantasy, atmosphere, bold climaxes, and framing a legendary libretto. The ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... a day's march ahead, and he was having a pleasant chat with the "chief," no one else nigh, and they were dawdling away its closing hour with pipes, metaphysics, psychology, and like trifles, which Claude, of course, knew all about,—Claude told him of this singular and amusing case of haunting fantasy in his own experience. His hearer had shown even more amusement than he, and had gone on smiling every now and then afterward, with a significance that at length drove Claude to bed disgusted with him and still more with ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... head (though not his heart) to be in love with Jane. But never, even by way of fantasy, had it entered it to be in love with Nina; though it was to Nina that he looked when he wanted the highest excitement in his intellectual seraglio. He could not conceive any man being in love with her, to the extent, that is to say, of trying to marry ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... that she said, "This all came to me as a child, just as though it was something half remembered." There was the further suggestion that he himself was not unknown to her; that they, too, had met before. But this, compared to the grave certainty of the rest, was merest fantasy that did not hold his attention. He answered, hardly knowing what he said. His preoccupation with other thoughts deep down was so intense, that he was probably barely polite, uttering empty phrases, with his mind ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... again at the letter on the table before him, then folded it and put it in his pocket. It was well, he thought. His latest book of fairy tales and fantasy had enjoyed good acceptance. And the check in the letter had been of satisfactory size. He smiled to himself. There were compensations in this job of his. It seemed to be profitable to have a purpose other than the obvious and ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... like a vapor, constantly falling back to its corpse, or is something vital without sight, hearing or speech, and so is blind, deaf and dumb, soaring about and cogitating. Self-love entertains many other insanities with which nature, in itself dead, inspires its fantasy. Such is the effect of self-love, which regarded in itself is love of the proprium. Man's proprium, in respect of its affections which are all natural, is not unlike the life of a beast, and in respect of its perceptions, inasmuch as they spring ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... observed this wee feathered fantasy, the tantalizing sprite of the rushes, and where I soon ceased to see, hear, or think about him, calls for a fuller description. On one side the wooded hill sloped downward to the stream; on the other side spread the meadows where the rooks came every day to feed, or ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... fantasy. He has a kindly word for all who please his eye. It may be one today and another tomorrow. He is a ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... teaches us to distinguish between those things that we must be careful to avoid and those which are part and parcel of the domain of exaggeration and fantasy. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... perpetual background of the woods. There was something crude and clean about everything; something fresh and strange about those far-off houses, to which I could not then have put a name. Indeed, many things become clear in this wilderness of wood, which could only be expressed in symbol and even in fantasy. I will not go so far as to say that it shortened the transition from Log Cabin to White House; as if the White House were itself made of white wood (as Oliver Wendell Holmes said), 'that cuts like cheese, but ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... crater, but the whole surface of the volcanic cone besides consists of small loose pieces of lava, without any trace of vegetation. Only at one place the brim of the old crater is covered with an open pine wood. The volcano has also small side craters, from which gases escape. The same coarse fantasy, which still prevails in the form of the hell-dogma among several of the world's most cultured peoples, has placed the home of those of the followers of Buddha who are doomed to eternal punishment in the glowing hearths in the interior ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... slowly rising road on which testimony appears progressively less true, and more impossible. No man can say where the quality of foolishness begins—nervousness, excitement, hysteria, over-strain, illusion, fantasy, and pathoformic lies, are the shadings which may be distinguished, and the quantity of untruth in such testimonies may be demonstrated, from one to one hundred per cent., without needing to skip a single degree. We must not, however, ignore and simply set aside even the testimony of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... she and everyone else were going to be different. His mind fluttered irascibly to escape from this thought, but still came back to it, like a tethered bird. Then he became calmer, and wandered out for a time into fantasy. ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... let me see that Mind of yours doing something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.' ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... not but that it is all a fantasy of the imagination, Frank. You had better take a composing draught, and to-morrow will find you more cheerful," said ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... had yet to have first-hand experience with the plague. But now nothing seemed quite real to Doc, even when they locked him into the big Northport jail. The whole ritual of the Lobbies seemed like a fantasy after the villages. ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... high fantasy here power failed; but now my desire and my will, like a wheel which evenly is moved, the Love was turning which moves the Sun and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... this fantasy of the subconscious mind, when the steward's rap at the door wakened him half an hour before the ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... his cell fantastic: in front of his head in his cell of fantasy. "The division of the brain into cells, according to the different sensitive faculties," says Mr Wright, "is very ancient, and is found depicted in mediaeval manuscripts." In a manuscript in the Harleian Library, it is stated, "Certum est in prora cerebri esse fantasiam, in medio rationem discretionis, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... of which the ancients were so fond; some of the bacchanalian divinities, celebrating the festival of the mills, are crowning with flowers the patient ass who is turning the wheel. Flowers on all sides—that was the fantasy of antique times. Flowers at their wild banquets, at their august ceremonies, at their sacrifices, and at their festivals; flowers on the necks of their victims and their guests, and on the brows of their ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... Raoul de Cambrai, were not mere creatures of the fancy. Even when the narrative records no historical series of events, it may express their general significance, and condense into itself something of the spirit of an epoch. In the course of time, however, fantasy made a conquest of the historical domain; a way for the triumph of fantasy had been opened by the incorporation of legend into the narrative, with all its wild exaggerations, its reckless departures from truth, its conventional types of character, its endlessly-repeated incidents of romance—the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... of television drama," Rick declared, "is to provide an escape from the real world into the world of fantasy. So no crime drama for us because that's the real world. We will watch a ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... of that great centralized governmental machine known as the Roman Empire? Not so, however, with the Iron Heel. In the orderly procedure of social evolution there was no place for it. It was not necessary, and it was not inevitable. It must always remain the great curiosity of history—a whim, a fantasy, an apparition, a thing unexpected and undreamed; and it should serve as a warning to those rash political theorists of to-day who speak with certitude of ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... your brow, and the flush on your cheek, told me beyond a doubt that you are a poet. And you are so, young man. I care not whether you have penned as yet an elegy, or no—nevertheless, you are in soul, in temperament, in fantasy, a poet. Do ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... that the series will be continued. Then he will not perceive if the series is broken. In the Renaissance period no degree of illumination sufficed to resist the delusion of astrology, because it was supported by a passionate fantasy and a vehement desire to know the future, and because it was confirmed by antiquity, the authority of whose opinions was overwhelmingly suggested by all the faiths and prejudices ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... slender, not so tall, and she owned a wealth of brown hair, hair that shone and glistened in every changing light, while her eyes were either blue or violet, just as one happened to catch the glint of them. And she had fascinating ways, too, which the lady of his fantasy could never have displayed, or he would not have abandoned the vision so readily. When she smiled, it was with lips and eyes in unison. When she spoke he heard harmonies not framed in mere words, whereas the other fair dame ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... relations, where his spirit can as it were see face to face the truth beyond the seeming. This is the poetry of the spirit, and ought to come as a revelation to the searcher. He may first find it in some pure lyric such as Shelley's "Skylark," or in some mystical fantasy such as Moore's "Lallah Rookh" or Coleridge's "Christabel," or in some story of human abnegation such as Tennyson's "Enoch Arden," or some wail of a soul in pain, as in Shelley's "Adonais," or in some outburst ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... the singers of Saturn find tongue, Where the Galaxy's lovers embrace, Our world and its beauty are sung! They lean from their casements to trace If our planet still spins in its place; Faith fables the thing that we are, And Fantasy laughs and gives chase: This earth, it is ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... poet leaves the realms of poetic fantasy to record a simple fact of everyday life—one which is appreciated by every man and woman irrespective of nationality or temperament. As in all other matters pertaining to the comfort of the European in the tropics, the Dutch, in the matter of food, seem to us ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... Russia, she hopes to bring us under the old yoke. But she shall not succeed. She has made an alliance with England, Russia, and Saxony. I have united with France and Bavaria, for the protection of Charles the Seventh. This, you see, Fredersdorf, is war. Our life of fantasy and dreaming is over. I have given you a little dish of politics," said the king, after a pause. "I wish to show you that I have need of you, and that we have much to do. We must arrange my private accounts, we have many letters to write; and then we must select and prepare the rich ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... my lofty fantasy One crucified, disdainful and ferocious In countenance, and even ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... mind and body, is flung upon the world, and his helplessness, his pride, and his other vices are displayed, we begin to lament the wretchedness and perversity of mankind. We are wrong; this is the creature of our fantasy; the natural man is cast ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... what is profoundly called a 'surprise.'" The child of today chooses his Christmas present in advance and decides between Peter Pan and the Pantomime (when he does not get both). The Chesterton children saw their first glimpses of fantasy through the framework of a toy-theatre of which their father was carpenter, scene-painter and scene-shifter, author and creator of actors and actresses a few inches high. Gilbert's earliest recollection is of one of these figures in a golden crown carrying ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... so much of the freedom of nature mingled with the fascinating pleasures of the chase and of the woods, were not to be dispossessed so readily. When Faith artfully led him back to those animal enjoyments of which he had been so fond in boyhood, the fantasy of her brother seemed most to waver; but whenever it became apparent that the dignity of a warrior, and all the more recent and far more alluring delights of his later life, were to be abandoned ere his being could return into its former existence, his dull faculties ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... blood, and his blood ran bright for her. His dreams were the flowers of his blood. Hers were more detached and inhuman. For centuries a certain type of woman has been rejecting the 'animal' in humanity, till now her dreams are abstract, and full of fantasy, and her blood runs in bondage, and her kindness is ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... fog...Therefore—I'm thinking right now—therefore, that which, I meditated; my dream to infect them all; to infect their fathers, mothers, sisters, brides—even all the world—therefore, all this was folly, an empty fantasy, since I have stopped? ... Once again, I don't understand anything ...Sergei Ivanovich, you are so wise, you have seen so much of life—help me, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... sound? I could swear I heard the measured tramp of men And ring of mail, yet is it but illusion. Last night I thought I heard it as I lay Awake at dead of night. Mere fantasy Born of long solitude, for here there are No soldiers nor ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... of the legend, Hy—the Dew. The nursery, where Zeus places it to be brought up, is a cave in Mount Nysa, sought by a misdirected ingenuity in many lands, but really, like the place of the carrying away of Persephone, a place of fantasy, the oozy place of springs in the hollow of the hillside, nowhere and everywhere, where the vine was "invented." The nymphs of the trees overshadow it from above; the nymphs of the springs sustain it from below—the Hyades, those first leaping maenads, who, as the springs become rain-clouds, go up ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... you, and where you find a maid That, ere she sleep, has thrice her prayers said, Raise up the organs of her fantasy; Sleep she as sound as careless infancy: 50 But those as sleep and think not on their sins, Pinch them, arms, legs, backs, ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... to wear the dress, and take the iron pole, and slip from the old cellar into the tide when it rose high enough, and from thence bring back the girl with the soft curls and the golden ring. It was one of those moments in which laughter and tears meet, but there was a glamour of such strange fantasy over the scene that Caius felt, not so much its humour or its pathos, as its fairy-like unreality, and that which gave him the sense of unreality was that to his companion it was ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... love. Bright amber, fragrant wood, enamelled clay, Help me to burn the incense worthily! Thou fire, assist! Promethean fire, unbound, The azure clouds go wreathing round and round, Float slowly up, then gently melt away; And in their circling wreaths I dimly spy Full many a fleeting vision's fantasy. Alas! alas! How bright soe'er before my view they pass, Whether it be that Memory, pointing back, Doth show each flower along the devious track By which I came forth from the fields of youth,— Or bright-robed Hope doth deck the sober truth With many-colored ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various |
