"Imagination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two centuries after that. There was little knowledge that could not pass from mouth to mouth. Such little vernacular literature as did exist was transmitted orally, and no great issue which appealed to the imagination of the masses had as yet come to the front to create any strong desire for the ability to read. As a result, the education of the masses was in hand labor, the trades, and religion, and not in books, and the need for book education ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... as his life had been, Colin had more imagination than she had and at least he had spent a good deal of time looking at wonderful ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of mind and heart that belong to the rest of mankind. He has intellect with which to think, sensibility with which to feel, and toil which prompts him to vigorous and manly action. Nor is he destitute of the sublime faculty of reason, which is related to eternal and absolute truths. Imagination and fancy, too, he possesses, in a very large degree. But all these faculties, which nature has bestowed upon the slave in common with other men, by a decree of slavery fixed and unalterable like the laws of the Medes and Persians, are undeveloped, ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... not more remarkable for his numerous and varied talents than for his warm and affectionate heart, rich imagination, great love of humour, and deep and earnest piety. He was a facile versifier, an elegant prose writer, an able botanist and physiologist. Possessing a fine ear, rich voice, and great musical taste, he not only took ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... preceding. My time was passed in keeping a regular journal; mapping; and in writing letters to friends in England, although there was no communication. This task afforded the greatest pleasure, as I could thus converse in imagination with those far away. The thought frequently occurred to me that they might no longer exist, and that the separation of years might be the parting forever; nevertheless there was a melancholy satisfaction at ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... of a great man, improbable as are some of the incidents narrated, is no fiction of imagination. Sir Everard Home's statement, read before the Royal Institution, corroborates every particular. The mental constitution of the philosopher, puzzling enough during his life, was shrouded certainly in even greater mystery in ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... across that account of the correspondent who described what he had seen on the stricken field? Did you get at the inwardness of it all? You are a fellow with imagination, Nancarrow; didn't you feel a ghastly terror ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... sheep and horses. I have seen, however, no horses here. It is reported amongst the people of the town, that the Touaricks attacked me and took away all my money. As this continues to spread amongst the oases, I shall soon be murdered by the helping imagination of the people, at any rate, before I arrive at Tripoli. A gardener tells me, many palms grow and bear fruit without being watered, or having any ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... new world to Wolford's imagination. Two and a half per cent. a month, and six per cent. per annum, could hardly be compared together. He sat down and began to figure up the result of the one operation in comparison with the other, and found that while his investment in ground-rents yielded only three hundred dollars a year, ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... kissed her and turned away. Through the open window came the soft roar of the sea. It was very still to-night; the moon shone across it, but that she could not see: she had seen it so often that it was there in her imagination. On Ben Grief the shadows lay inky in the silver light. She looked at the syringe, and then at the tabloids, and sighed a little; the pain was a thing tearing and burning; several times she tried to begin to write and had to lie back with closed eyes floating away ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... physically capable of enduring the terrors of this country. I was now scarcely a hundred miles from the camp, and the horses had plenty of water up to nearly halfway, but now they looked utterly unable to return. What a strange maze of imagination the mind can wander in when recalling the names of those separated features, the only ones at present known to supply water in this latitude—that is to say, the Murchison River, and this new-found Rawlinson Range, named after two ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... Her vivid imagination saw her conduct in its worst light: vacillating, feeble, deserting the man she loved at the moment she had led him to expect triumph; dismissing her faithful servant without his reward. Then, in a flash, came the other ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... nebulae, on the constitution of the Milky-way, on the universe as a whole; ideas which almost by themselves constitute the actual history of the formation of the worlds, and we cannot but have a deep reverence for that powerful genius that has scarcely ever erred, notwithstanding an ardent imagination. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... Beast with ten horns, if you will, but hers are all the heirlooms, hers that vast spiritual estate of tradition, nowhere yet everywhere, whose revenues are none the less fruitful for being levied on the imagination. We may claim that England's history is also ours, but it is a de jure, and not a de facto property that we have in it,—something that may be proved indeed, yet is a merely intellectual satisfaction, and does not savor of the realty. Have we not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... temperament—in nothing more than the exuberance of her untruths which were poured out in so torrential a flood, with such burning conviction at the opulence of detail that persons who knew her well used to stand aghast (Catholics had been known to cross themselves) at the fertility of her constructive imagination, while the most hardened sceptics protested that, even if her facts were wrong, there could be no doubt as to her sincerity, her ingenuousness. Ah, she was a woman in a thousand! Often had Mr. Parker sat at her feet, a respectful disciple, listening spellbound and ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... our second line. It was the first time that these two had come together on the battlefield, and the occasion was not fortunate, for both were unable to make headway and lost severely. The plan of attack showed great lack of imagination, and shook general confidence in the staff of the 5th Army. The lessons of the 16th seemed to have been entirely thrown away. The same impossible advance was expected. The ground was far worse than before. The water lay knee-deep in the valley. As the men struggled forward they ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... In imagination I stood already in the box of the Old Bailey and heard myself sentenced to the treadmill, and was unable to offer the slightest explanation in palliation of my ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... to him by that little pianist who comes here. Again through the same channel he received word that the day of departure was fixed. Can you think what it means, Mrs. Hawthorne? Have you in your experience or imagination the wherewith to form any conception, dear Mrs. Hawthorne, of what it means? The day of departure fixed! The day of parting! Do you realize? No more sight or sound of each other! The end! The sea between! Silence! And it is to ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... father's way of comforting my widowhood," said Bim. "He has made a wonderful beauty mask and often he claps it on me and whistles up a band of sighing lovers. As a work of the imagination I am a ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... the Saint, "time spares neither men nor gods. These last are immortal only in the imagination of the short-lived race of men. In reality they suffer the penalties of age, and verge, as the centuries go by, towards irreparable decay. Nymphs grow old as well as women. No rose but turns into ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... received us with the same demonstrations of friendship which I had experienced before; and the moment we landed, I ordered some of my people to begin their operation of cutting. I had not the least imagination, that the natives could make any objection to our furnishing ourselves with what seemed to be of no use to them, but was necessary for us. However, I was mistaken; for, the moment that our men began to cut, some of the inhabitants interposed, and would ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... absorbed in his own schemes, it did not occur to him that his daughter, who seemed so devoted to the cause he advocated, could do so weak a thing as fall in love. At all events, Alick lived in an elysium partly created by his imagination, and did not allow the future to interfere with his present happiness. Jack and Adair still thought Stella very charming, but, observing Alick's devotion to her, they would have considered it a gross breach of friendship to attempt cutting him out. ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... sacrifice, its vast and eternal issues, was the single fact that filled his mind. It was this that delivered him from that nervous self-consciousness, the preacher's curse, that paralyses the mental activities, chills the passions, and cloggs the imagination, so that his sermon becomes a lifeless repetition of words, previously prepared, correct, even beautiful, it may be in form, logical in argument, sound in philosophy, but dead, dull and impotent, bereft of the fire that kindles the powers of the ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... and a weaker banking-account, that I should dare to think of such things? She was a unit, a factor,—nothing more. If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination. ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all the senses up in arms to subdue the influence of the thoughts: here was vanity, here was passion, here was the spot of all spots in the world, and here were also the life, and the manners and the habits and the pursuits that I delighted in: here was every thing that imagination can conceive, united in a conspiracy against the poor little brunette in England! What, then, did I fall in love at once with this bouquet of lilies and roses? Oh! by no means. I was, however, so enchanted with the place; I so much enjoyed its tranquillity, the shade of the maple ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... their abhorrence of crime in their admiration of its magnificent exhibitions. Ordinary vice is reprobated by them, but extraordinary guilt, exquisite wickedness, the high flights and poetry of crime, seize on the imagination, and lead them to forget the depths of the guilt, in admiration of the excellence of the performance, or the unequalled atrocity of the purpose. There are those in our day who have made great use of this infirmity of our nature, and by means of it done infinite injury to the cause of ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... way. We worked in swamps that smelled like there was a leak in the gas mains, trampin' down a fine assortment of the most expensive hothouse plants and vegetables. The scene was tropical beyond the wildest imagination of the geography man. The trees was all sky-scrapers; the underbrush was full of needles and pins; there was monkeys jumpin' around and crocodiles and pink-tailed mockin'-birds, and ye stood knee-deep in the rotten water and grabbled roots for the liberation of Guatemala. Of nights we would ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... some capricious despot, in his career of ordinary tyranny, were to tax his imagination to produce something more monstrous and unnatural than himself, and were to place a dove amongst vultures, or engraft a thorn on the olive tree, much as we should marvel at the caprice, we should be still more astounded ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and only one of my friends—and not at all a great friend—who had the imagination to understand, as you understand too, Joan, just what that journey would have meant to me, if anything had gone wrong, and the kindness to put himself out to make ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... gray cape-coat of the Confederate cavalry and a battered white gauntlet sticking from the pocket. Involuntarily, trembling foolishly, she looked to see if there might not be an old cob pipe also. There was not, but the other familiar objects made her imagination leap fearfully to what might be. Both hope and dread will always override common sense, and convoy imagination perforce. If he did live here—if they should meet! Could such a coincidence happen, could it, outside the neat ordering of a ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... grinned as he looked around the room. "My dear friends are badly fooled," he chuckled with glee. "They believe the chief is with you, and he is not here. Why, they have already spent, in imagination, the money that they are going to derive from the sale of his plumes. What a shock it will be to them when they learn that the bird has flown. I wish I could see their faces when ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... and some day you shall sit on a bench with peers of France. What would you have been at this moment if I had not amused you by my conversation?—An undiscovered corpse in a deep bed of mud. Well and good, now for an effort of imagination——" ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... had first poisoned and then blown into ten thousand pieces through my folly. I had brain fever. It set in that night. For two weeks I raved deliriously; for two weeks I was doing the things I ought not to have done—in imagination. I took a young lady skating, and slipped down with her on the ice, and broke her Grecian nose. I went to a grand reception, and tore the point lace flounce off of Mrs. Grant's train, put my handkerchief in my saucer, and my coffee-cup in my pocket. I was left to entertain ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... delivered by revolution. Sentiment urged them in the same direction. Proud and sensitive they resented the dominance of an alien race; they held the wrongs of their forefathers in remembrance, and looked back with mournful longing to the age, invested by their poetic imagination with glory and happiness, when Ireland was yet unconquered. The United Irishmen told them that a fresh conquest would be attempted, that the Orangemen, encouraged by government, designed to rob them of their land and destroy them. They looked ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... of well-marked individuality and brilliant imagination. She could never separate fact from fiction in any form of narrative, and narrative was her speciality. She was always recounting something. Beth used to follow her from room to room, as she went about her work, listening with absolute faith and the deepest interest to the stream of narrative which ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excell. It is not an Imagination that teems with Monsters, an Head that is filled with extravagant Conceptions, which is capable of furnishing the World with Diversions of this nature; and yet if we look into the Productions of several Writers, who set up for Men of Humour, what wild irregular Fancies, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... young men of the movement with a fierce spirit of nationality. The clubs read them with ecstasy, and John Mitchell was the idol and hero of all men of extreme opinions. His defiance of government, his incitements to rebellion, were so open and intrepid, that they seized upon the imagination of the people, and much disturbed the government. Pikes and side-arms were manufactured in every part of the country, and John Mitchell wrote various articles on the proper pattern of a pike, on the best way of using that "queen ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Andy said; "but don't let's tell the whole; let's leave something to his imagination;" and so the telegram which went to Governor Markham read simply: "Come home immediately. Don't ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... Our cities are the abiding places of wealth and luxury; our manufactories yield fortunes never dreamed of by the fathers of the Republic; our business men are madly striving in the race for riches, and immense aggregations of capital outrun the imagination in the magnitude of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... up the steep ascent, she found her room without any difficulty. As it was again a clear, starlit night, there was light enough for her to find everything she wanted; and the trouble at her heart kept her imagination from being as active as it would otherwise have been, in recalling the terrible stories of ghosts and dead people with which she was far too familiar. She soon got into bed, and, as a precautionary measure, buried her head under the clothes before she began ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... raises is that if Smith's theory were true, those in whom the power of imagination was strongest would feel the force of the moral duties most sensibly, and vice versa, which, he says, is contradicted by experience. His last objection is that while the theory proposes to explain the origin of the moral sentiments so far as they respect other persons, ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... had a strong imagination. The brickfields, at that date, were a mile away from the town, and the bringing in of their flames was an impossibility. Perhaps, however, the word is a misprint for fumes; yet even then this earliest quotation indicates part of the source of the subsequent ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Then Goya (1746-1828) seems to have made a partial restoration of painting. He was a man of peculiarly Spanish turn of mind, fond of the brutal and the bloody, picturing inquisition scenes, bull-fights, battle pieces, and revelling in caricature, sarcasm, and ridicule. His imagination was grotesque and horrible, but as a painter his art was based on the natural, and was exceedingly strong. In brush-work he followed Velasquez; in a peculiar forcing of contrasts in light and dark he was apparently quite himself, ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... before us, we will recall one by one some of the best-known and most interesting works of W.M. Hunt, a painter who now holds a prominent place among the artists of America. We will try to discover by careful observation if the high gifts of Verity and Imagination, the sign and seal of the true artist, really belong to him: if so, where these qualities are expressed, and what value we should ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... paused. From the distance once more came the merry clamour of the farther drawing-room. A din of young folk, chaffing and teasing each other—a girl's defiant voice above it—outbursts of laughter. Norham, who had in him a touch of dramatic imagination, enjoyed the contrast between the gay crowd in the distance and this quiet room where he sat face to face with a visionary—surely altogether remote from the marrying, money-making, sensuous world. Yet after all the League was a big, ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... difficulty, like a ladybird on a blade of grass, and he would sit and sit upon it, as though pluming his wings and getting ready for a flight, and suddenly he would fall off and begin crawling again.... Don't be surprised at these comparisons; at that time they were always crowding on my imagination. So I struggled on there for two years. The work did not progress much in spite of all my efforts. I began to be tired of it, my friend bored me; I had come to sneer at him, and he stifled me like a featherbed; ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... to the Governor and Junta were to the same effect; for—as before noticed—having only a single ship, it was necessary to impress on their imagination—that a fleet and army were at hand to add the province to Brazil. As this is the only instance within my knowledge of a military force surrendering itself and the province which it defended, to a stratagem of this nature, ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... adverts to the influence of the Imagination on Happiness. On this, he has in view the addition made to our enjoyments or our sufferings by the respective predominance of hope or of fear in the mind. Allowing for constitutional bias, he recognizes, as the two great sources of a desponding ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... many, very many, both of Gaelic and English poets, who have attempted to embody religious sentiments in poetic forms, have, by their weak efforts, exposed themselves, unarmed, to the attacks of those who would exclude religion from the sphere of the imagination. All good poetry, in the highest sense, deals with, and appeals to, what is universal and ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... many shades and gradations there are in misfortune, for everything depends upon the character of the individual, upon the force of the imagination, upon the strength of the nerves. If it is impossible to catch these so variable shades, we may at least point out the most striking colors, and the principal attendant incidents. The author has therefore reserved this ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... nowhere greater than in this able discourse. His comprehensive politics, his beautiful sympathies, his power over language, his poetic imagination, his magnetic and melting earnestness of purpose, are blended with that depth of religious feeling which gives to his character as a patriot the sanctity and unction of the prophet. His moral and intellectual faculties are shown ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... flesh and bones, and the prairie, washed by moonlight, stretching out beyond one's imagination, I wondered that I had ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... have visited the superb queen of cities as she once flourished in our days could not, even in imagination, grasp the contrast between Paris of the present and the Paris of two hundred years ago. With a power more destructive than the petroleum of the Commune, we must, in though, sweep away the Tuileries, the boulevards, the Opera-House and superb buildings that ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... Stephen, as to this boy. You and I have done our best to make him think the world is wrong side up; but I am more to blame because I had the better opportunity to study his development, beneath my own eyes. I taught him that imagination was an essential ingredient of a successful business man, to enable him to grasp each situation as a whole, and to conceive its dangers and its possibilities. Yet, when he exercised that very quality, and came to me frankly with the results ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... absorbing and filled him with so much delight that he feared to talk on the subject so dear to his heart, for fear of a repulse and the shattering of all the beautiful castles which his glowing imagination, with love as the supervising architect, had constructed. Thus matters moved along for some time; Miss Nermal thoroughly in love with Belton, but Belton prizing that love too highly to deem it possible for him to be ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... going back in your imagination to the time and circumstances that brought it forth. Make it not a memorized historical document, but feel the emotions that gave it birth. The speech is only an effect; live over in your own heart the causes that produced ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... reference to its general structure, wrought off at once. A halt or pause, even of a day, would perhaps have injured that continuous flow of poetical language and description which argues the whole scene to have arisen at once upon the author's imagination. It seems possible, more especially in lyrical poetry, to discover where the author has paused for any length of time; for the union of the parts is rarely so perfect as not to show a different strain of thought and feeling. There may be something ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... as to communicate to me, on the antiquities found in the western country. I wish that the persons who go thither, would make very exact descriptions of what they see of that kind, without forming any theories. The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object, only the traits which favor that theory. But it is too early to form theories on those antiquities. We must wait with patience till more facts are collected. I wish your Philosophical Society ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... from the prairie in unsoftened ugliness, and there was nothing to stir the imagination in the great waste of sun-bleached grass. Day by day, while the dust whirled by them, and the gaunt telegraph posts came up out of the far horizon and sank into the east, they raced across the wide levels. The red dawns burned behind them, the sunsets flamed ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... Boston as her home, having once visited in that metropolis for three delicious weeks. She was of an ardent, impressionable nature. Her mind was nurtured upon Eastern conceptions of our common country, her imagination aglow with weird tales of the frontier, and her bright eyes perceived the vivid coloring of romance in each prosaic object west of the tawny Missouri. All appeared so different from that established life to which she had grown accustomed,—the people, ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... your head, dear, over a mere fable? I have already gone very carefully into all the facts that are proved, and have come to the conclusion that the story of the torture of his Eminence is a fairy-tale, and that the supernatural Whispers have only been heard in imagination." ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... classic and romantic interest. During the long, golden, September afternoons, she spent hours, in the Madonna room, questioning her mother anew respecting the scenes and events of her past life, and listening eagerly to her replies. The young examine distant objects as through a prism. Adele's imagination invested these scenes and events with rainbow splendors and revelled in the wealth and beauty, she had herself partially created. The new world thus opened to her was infinitely superior to the one in which she held her commonplace, ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... that he remembered all the places distinctly; and was very loth to confess that he had been mistaken. I suppose, that his imagination had had as much to do with his idea of his native place, as his memory, and when, at last, we went down the glen where your mother used to live, and where he distinctly remembered going to see her with you, not ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... historian. Macaulay, an ardent Whig, with an astonishing familiarity with political and literary facts, wrote in a spirited and brilliant style a History of England from the Accession of James II. to the death of his hero, William III. Carlyle, with a unique force of imagination and a rugged intensity of feeling, original in his thought, yet strongly affected by German literature, especially by Richter and Goethe, wrote in his earlier days a Life of Schiller. He wrote later a history of the French Revolution, in which ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... well-known musician through those fir woods one dark afternoon as the wind was making soft music above us. He was silent, and I was disappointed, for I had fancied that the new country would delight him and excite his imagination. But when we reached home he sat down to the piano in the dark, and played on and on as if he were pouring out his whole soul in the flood of sweet melody; and when, after an hour of marvellous improvisation, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... never since been able to shake off. All his herculean efforts to be sceptical and frivolous, and the twenty years he had spent in Paris mingling with every section of society, had failed to rid him of it. Magister he was, and magister he remained, even in his most strenuous flights of imagination and audacity. From the moment of his arrival he tried to show himself enraptured with Silviane. Naturally enough, he already knew her by sight, and had even criticised her on one occasion in five ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... it, again, that so few of our modern songs are truly songful, and fit to be set to music? Is it not that the writers of them— persons often of much taste and poetic imagination—have gone for their inspiration to the intellect, rather than to the ear? That (as Shelley does by the skylark, and Wordsworth by the cuckoo), instead of trying to sing like the birds, they only think and talk about the birds, and therefore, however beautiful and true the thoughts ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... time. Mrs. Evelyn promised to try to find a virtuous and godly lady who would be willing to receive Mistress Anne Woodford into her family, and Lady Oglethorpe wrote with vaguer promises of high preferment, which excited Anne's imagination during those lonely hours that she had to spend while her strict mourning, after the custom of the time, ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... field. Only in the hospital that serves the division are the events of his bit of war correlated and reduced to a comprehensive whole. Even then the resulting knowledge is usually wrong. For the imagination of officers, and of men in particular, is wonderful, and rumour has its birthplace in the hospital ward. One may take it as an established fact that the ordinary regimental officer or soldier knows little or nothing about events other than his particular bit of country. ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... coming is whence we discern not, Making your nest on the wave, and your bed on the crested billow, Skimming rough waters, and crowding wet sands that the tide shall return to, Cormorants, ducks, and gulls, fill ye my imagination! Let us not talk of growth; we are still in our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... a small part in his life, but he possessed both curiosity and a love for adventure, and his years of lonely wandering had developed in him a wonderfully clear mental vision of things, which in other words might be called a singularly active imagination. He knew that some irresistible force was drawing Baree back into the south—that it was pulling him not only along a given line of the compass, but to an exact point ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... which were started on this Occasion, presented to my Imagination so many new Ideas, that by mixing with those which were already there, they employed my Fancy all the last Night, and composed a ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... death; all this quite stunned and overwhelmed him. Every hope connected with her that he had suffered himself to form, or had entertained unconsciously, seemed to fall at his feet, withered and dead. Every charm with which his memory or imagination had surrounded her, presented itself before him, only to heighten his anguish and add new bitterness to his despair. Every feeling of sympathy for her forlorn condition, and of admiration for her heroism and fortitude, aggravated the indignation which shook ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... marriage from a very noble fellow because I could not love him. He lacked the power to control me: I felt myself the stronger of the two. Not that women like to be ruled, but that they like that power in men which can rule if need be, generously, but never despotically. I had only in my imagination a conception of that love 'which passeth understanding'—which lifts a woman out of herself into a willing sacrifice that looks to calmer eyes as the height of folly. I liked men well, but none had ever stirred more than ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... well study its itemized outlines for help in effort to understand the child that is unlike the average. The "Record" requires attention to the "general condition of the senses and nerves," to "memory and power of learning," to qualities of "imagination," to strength and expression of "emotions," to facility in "language," to "manner of work," to "relation to home and community life," and in respect to "adaptation to new demands." These things are vital not only to know about and understand ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... objects so well calculated to strike the poetic imagination as these mounds, standing alone in the wilderness. The belief that they are the workmanship of human hands, awakens curiosity and leads to a long train of reflections. For if men have thrown up these singular elevations, we feel inquisitive to know by whom, and for what purpose, ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... rejoined all of them. "But without large hills and ravines in one's breast (liberal capacities), how could one attain such imagination!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... down every tree from the valley, and in the end goes to and fro in waste places—gnawing itself in a last hunger. I learned from Lilith that we weave our own enchantment, and bind ourselves with out own imagination. To think of the true as beyond us or to love the symbol of being is to darken the path to wisdom, and to debar us from eternal beauty. From the Wise One I learned that the truest wisdom is to wait, to work, and to will in secret. Those who are voiceless today, tomorrow shall be eloquent, and ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... with the muse when he produced Tam O' Shanter, the crowning glory of all his poems. For this marvellous tale we are indebted to something like accident: Francis Grose, the antiquary, happened to visit Friar's Carse, and as he loved wine and wit, the total want of imagination was no hinderance to his friendly intercourse with the poet: "Alloway's auld haunted kirk" was mentioned, and Grose said he would include it in his illustrations of the antiquities of Scotland, if the bard of the Doon would write a poem to ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Jacques: you are the victim of your own imagination. And who could help it in your place? M. Folgat said so only yesterday. There is no man living, who, after four days' close confinement, can keep his mind cool. Grief and solitude are bad counsellors. Jacques, come to yourself; listen to your dearest friends who speak to ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... are spirits everywhere," Stanton said. "That sort of belief, it seems to me, would grow up in any race that had imagination, and the Nipes must have had plenty of that, or they wouldn't have the technology that we know they do have. Am I on ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... more miseries and horrors than a riotous imagination could conceive; before us could certainly be nothing worse. We would put life and freedom to the hazard of a touch, and ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Bromburg (?Bydgoszcz). We were now in Poland, the poorest and nastiest country in Europe...! After the Oder, no more made roads: we marched on loose gravel or appalling mud. Most of the land was uncultivated and the few inhabitants we came across were dirty to a degree which defies the imagination. The weather which had been magnificent during October and the first part of November became frightful. We no longer saw the sun, it rained or snowed continually; food became short; no more wine, almost never any beer, and what there was atrociously ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... pond of stagnant filthy water could be seen. The pond at Warmal was of unusually ample proportions and extended through the whole length of the village, which was built on both sides of this dirty pond. Numerous canals branched off from this main reservoir, and in fact, had one had a little imagination, one might have named this place the Venice of Sistan. At sunset swarms of mosquitoes rose buzzing from the putrid water, but from a picturesque point of view the effect of the buildings reflected in the yellow-greenish water ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... bent which his creative activity in music took at the outset. To say little, but vaguely hint at much, was the rule which he adopted; to remain sententious in expression, but give the freest and most daring flight to his imagination, and spurn the conventional limitations set by rule and custom, his ambition. Such fanciful and symbolical titles as "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces," "Titan," etc., which Jean Paul adopted for his singular mixtures of tale, rhapsody, philosophy, and satire, were bound to find an imitator ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... he looked like what he was,—le bon pere de famille. As such he would have suited the people of England; but it was un vert galant like Henri IV., or royalty incarnate, like Louis XIV., who would have fired the imagination of the French people. As a good father of a family, Louis Philippe felt that his first duty to his children was to secure them a good education, good marriages, and sufficient wealth to make them important personages in any sudden change ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... and exhilarated by the animated scene and the lively music, he could not believe it. He had thought for the moment that the old American minister was a strong and disinterested philanthropist, but now he saw in him only the victim of a diseased imagination. The habit of seeing society through a haze of feeling as it should be was older than the American's entreaties that he should learn to know it as it is, and he deliberately ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... decided improvement from time to time in his compositions, indicating the industry and wise direction of his studies, in refinement of taste, elegance of finish, and a rapid and vigorous expansion of his imagination. His masterpiece, thus far, is The Castle in the Air, fitly praised by our neighbor of the Albion, as one of the finest productions of the present time. We do not know of any poet at home or ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... trip. Arolla suited us all to a T, and we are all in great force. As for me, I have not known of the existence of my liver, and except for the fact that I found fifteen or sixteen miles with a couple of thousand feet up and down quite enough, I could have deluded myself into the fond imagination that I was twenty ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... was not imagination. Until midnight the partners lay broad awake, rolled in their blankets under the open sky, talking and discussing and making plans. At last Cribbens rolled over on his side and slept. The dentist could ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... laughing matter for poor Master Harry, for it was many a day before his imagination could rid itself of the image of the dead Spaniard's face; and as he walked away down the street with his companions, leaving the crowd behind them, and the dead body where it lay for its friends to look after, his ears humming ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... inherited from both father and mother a lively imagination, and had, besides, talent and inclination for belles lettres. As an officer he was distinguished rather for his learning and culture than because of fondness for military life. He was well read in French ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... last plank of the wrecked order, and wade through seas of slaughter to restore it; the prospect of untried political innovation, under such circumstances, did not present itself to this Poet's imagination in a form so absolutely alluring, as it might have done to a philosopher of a less rigidly inductive, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the canoe, the joints bent, and a sort of noise was emitted from the mouth, which was exceedingly horrible. Had the dead face been visible, the effect would not have been so powerful, but its being covered tended to set the imagination free to ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... Indignation at the brutality of the Prussian was strong within him, and he held his head erect, and answered look for look the hostile glances of those about him. The hot blood still coursed through his veins, and the sacrifice he had made did not loom over large in his imagination. ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... waited with no little speculation as to what act of Ruth her cousin disapproved of so obviously. She like Jennie; every one who knew her recognized her sterling good heart; but almost every one who knew her agreed that a grain of flour was a whole cake, baked and iced, to Mrs. Lewis's imagination, and these airy comfits were passed around promiscuously to whoever was on hand. Not a sound broke the portentous silence but the decided snap with which Mrs. Lewis pulled her needle through, and the hurricane she raised with ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... He used to beat her at the end: and although she paid him back, of which I have authentic documentary evidence, to this day she speaks of him with tears and she throws him up to me; and I am glad, I am glad that, though only in imagination, she should think of herself as having once been happy.... And she was left at his death with three children in a wild and remote district where I happened to be at the time; and she was left in such hopeless ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... been great as an orthodox theologian of the Kirk; the cocksureness of theology would have suited you like your own coat. You are not at home in science, for you have no imagination." ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... said the young artist, bending his head still lower over his work. "Whom dost thou know who could bear a likeness to this creation of my own imagination?" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... suffering without a fault. The creditor, it is never doubted, thrives without a merit. He has no wife and children to pity. No one ever thinks it desirable that he should have the means of living. He is a brute for insisting that he must receive, in order to pay. It is not in the imagination of man to conceive that his creditor has demands upon him which must be satisfied, and that he must do to others as others must do to him. A creditor is a personification of exaction. He is supposed to be always taking in, and ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... thing? and fondly embracing the shoulders of her father with her arms, she begs, even by her own safety (and against it too), that she may visit her sister. Tereus views her, and, while viewing her, is embracing her beforehand in imagination; and, as he beholds her kisses, and her arms around {her father's} neck, he receives them all as incentives, and fuel, and the food of his furious passion; and, as often as she embraces her father, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... and he writes of this, not "as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown," but as one who, in words burning with indestructible life, lays open to us the sombre record of what was experience before it was song; who makes us the ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... its coldness, and learn to feel; and, in such a case, the charms of these two figures would produce an effect quite opposite to that of the Gorgon's head, which turned flesh into stone. Did I pretend to describe to you the Venus, it would only set your imagination at work to form ideas of her figure; and your ideas would no more resemble that figure, than the Portuguese face of Miss ——, who has enchanted our knights, resembles the sweet and graceful countenance ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... first came here, Aydelot, there wasn't nothing but imagination to make this a farming community. And it looked lots more impossible then than this looks to me now. What's to prevent a metropolis risin' right here where a decade and a half ago there ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... etymological meaning of the word is wider than that which it bears in actual use. An allegory is distinguished from a metaphor by being longer sustained and more fully carried out in its details, and from an analogy by the fact that the one appeals to the imagination and the other to the reason. The fable or parable is a short allegory with one definite moral. The allegory has been a favourite form in the literature of nearly every nation. The Hebrew scriptures present frequent instances of it, one of the most beautiful being the comparison of the history ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... day of the annual festival, hastened to adore the Apollo of Daphne, his devotion was raised to the highest pitch of eagerness and impatience. His lively imagination anticipated the grateful pomp of victims, of libations and of incense; a long procession of youths and virgins, clothed in white robes, the symbol of their innocence; and the tumultuous concourse of an innumerable people. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... very vivid imagination, and during the drive back he had amused himself by visualising the scene when he would place Josephine and her kittens in their own delightful, roomy basket in the scullery. It would be such fun, too, introducing Flick to the two kittens! At Betty's ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... A poet's imagination and a prophet's clear vision of the goal to which God will lead humanity are both at their highest in this great song of the future, whose winged words make music even in a translation. No doubt it starts from the comparatively small fact of the restoration ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... drew near with that reverence which is due to a superior nature: and as my heart was entirely subdued by the captivating strains I had heard, I fell down at his feet and wept. The genius smiled upon me with a look of compassion and affability that familiarized him to my imagination, and at once dispelled all the fears and apprehensions with which I approached him. He lifted me from the ground, and taking me by the hand, Mirzah, said he, I have heard thee in ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... formation. Will a new Europe, a new society, a new humanity, take form from the prodigious shock by which our imagination is confounded? ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... what they believe," said Roden; "nor do you or I. Men talk of belief as though it were a settled thing. It is so but with few; and that only with those who lack imagination. What sort of a time did you have down at ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... in diameter, with a proportionate stem of about five feet from the earth. The hum of insects, and sudden disturbance of rich-coloured parrots, screaming and fluttering through the branches, and the strong, short, rapid flight of the dove, with its melancholy cooing, transported us in imagination a long way inland, whereas we were not three hundred yards from the beach. We now wended our way towards a small eminence, through long grass, in most places interwoven with creepers, compelling us to tear our way through them in ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... announce the breaking-off of the engagement. Aunt Marcia also took the trouble to explain, quite confidentially, to some seven hundred and ninety-three people, just why the engagement had been broken off: and these explanations were more creditable to Mrs. Dumby's imagination than to me. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... any unpleasant mistakes. The hard palm of Labor may cross the gloved hand of Leisure, and nobody will suspect that the select is too familiar with the vulgar. Consequently, there is a good deal of affability and prime manliness, besides those associations of sentiment and imagination which, if there must be an aristocracy, lend it an artistic consistency. But here, where everybody says that all men are equal, and everybody is afraid they will be; where there are no adamantine barriers of birth and caste; people are anxiously exclusive. And ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... and down; he wanted to get away. He knew, to be sure, that the old man had been drawing heavily on his imagination, but all the same ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... threshold of this ancient pile, where the "proud porter" had in former days "rear'd himself,"[I-2] a stranger had a complete and commanding view of the decayed village, the houses of which, to a fanciful imagination, might seem as if they had been suddenly arrested in hurrying down the precipitous hill, and fixed as if by magic in the whimsical arrangement which they now presented. It was like a sudden pause in one of Amphion's country-dances, when the huts which were to form the future ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... inclined plane, telling Forester that they could have the boat. But Forester, who began to find the evening air too cold and chilly, said that he did not think it was worth while for them to set out on a voyage at so late an hour. But Marco's imagination was so much taken with the idea of a voyage in a boat by moonlight, that he was very urgent to have Forester go. So Forester consented, and they ...
— Forests of Maine - Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge • Jacob S. Abbott
... said, equably. "Maybe. You can't tell. As a young one I had a powerful imagination. I might have ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... the life of a person, and in which they see themselves in relation to the rest of the world clearly. It would not be true to say that Nelly loved Donnegan. Certainly not as yet, for the familiar figure of Lord Nick filled her imagination. But the little man was different. Lord Nick commanded respect, admiration, obedience; but there was about Donnegan something which touched her in an intimate and disturbing manner. She had felt the will-o'-the-wisp flame which burned in him in his great moments. It was possible ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... to the later dialogues and to the Laws: 2. The more complete account of the nature of good and pleasure: 3. The distinction between perception, memory, recollection, and opinion which indicates a great progress in psychology; also between understanding and imagination, which is described under the figure of the scribe and the painter. A superficial notion may arise that Plato probably wrote shorter dialogues, such as the Philebus, the Sophist, and the Statesman, as studies or preparations for longer ones. This view may be natural; ...
— Philebus • Plato
... probably he will tread upon their toes—an art in which I never knew his equal. However, I always loved Bastin, perhaps because no one else did, a fact of which he remained totally unconscious, or perhaps because of his brutal way of telling one what he conceived to be the truth, which, as he had less imagination than a dormouse, generally it was not. For if the truth is a jewel, it is one coloured and veiled by ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... seems so to you," said Goethe. "There are, however, few men who have imagination for the truth of reality; most prefer strange countries and circumstances, of which they know nothing, and by which their imagination may ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... buying a piece of land in Yalta and am going to build so as to have a place in which to spend the winters. The prospect of continual wandering with hotel rooms, hotel porters, chance cooking, and so on, and so on, alarms my imagination. Mother will spend the winter with me. There is no winter here; it's the end of October, but the roses and other flowers are blooming freely, the trees are ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... communion with all which they contain of beautiful or majestic, some intercourse with the Universal God. Whosoever has maintained with his own heart the strictest correspondence of confidence, who dares to examine and to estimate every imagination which suggests itself to his mind—whosoever is that which he designs to become, and only aspires to that which the divinity of his own nature shall consider and approve—he has already ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... arms; and at the same time employed his gifts, his riches, and his friends above all things, to increase his power in the city. And now Cato's old admonitions began to rouse Pompey out of the negligent security in which he lay, into a sort of imagination of danger at hand; but seeing him slow and unwilling, and timorous to undertake any measures of prevention against Caesar, Cato resolved himself to stand for the consulship, and presently force Caesar either to lay down his arms or discover his ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... be actually before my eyes; and she was not there, nor had been, for it was a dream, an illusion, and no such being existed, or could exist, in this gross world; and at the same time I knew that she had been there—that imagination was powerless to conjure up ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... (whose nostrils were delicately expanding and contracting in the fumes of the oil-stove), and he was at once reassured. He knew that he would have to face neither rudeness, nor bluntness, nor lack of imagination, nor lack of quick sympathy. Besides, the visitor, with practical assurance, set the tone of ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... Francis! It is Philippa!" Again the breathless silence. Then, intent only on the task of gaining a response, she slipped her arm under the pillow, and leaning her face closer and closer, she called again and again. Did an eyelid flicker? Was it imagination, or was the deathly pallor changing slightly? Were the shadows round the drawn mouth ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... sleep last night till past two, and was waked before three by a noise of people endeavouring to break open my window. For a while I would not stir, thinking it might be my imagination; but hearing the noise continued, I rose and went to the window, and then it ceased. I went to bed again, and heard it repeated more violently; then I rose and called up the house, and got a candle: the rogues had lifted up the sash a yard; there are great sheds before ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... Peter Parley is a pleasant greeting for all boys and girls, wherever the English language is spoken and read. He has a happy method of conveying information, while seeming to address himself to the imagination."—The Critic. ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... pseudonym. The pseudonym shows imagination. Let us be thankful for that. Gastronomy is bankrupt. Formerly it was worshipped. Formerly gastronomy was a goddess. To-day the sole tributes consist in bills-of-fare that are just like the Sahara ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... say, that Love passeth knowledge. How could man's imagination and invention ever have produced such a loving Person as our Lord, revealing the perfection of ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... the night when sleep would not come, and when my imagination rehearsed over and over again sights I had seen and tales I had heard, I made an almost cast-iron resolution to escape to the estate of Stewart of Ards and have one letter filled up with the good deeds of a landlord. Alas for me! another storm, a rain ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... each human mind to unfold according to its genius. Nothing stirs the central wheel of the soul like the Breath of God. The whole man is quickened, his senses are new senses, his emotions new emotions; his reason, his affections, his imagination, are all new-born. The change is greater than he knows; he marvels at the powers in himself which the Breath is opening and calling forth. He finds his nature to be an unutterable thing; he is sure therefore that the future must have inconceivable ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... as has been said, was too far removed from John to make him more than an occasional companion. And so, for several terms, John, for the most part, walked alone. By the time Desmond joined him, he had gleaned a knowledge which fascinated a friend of like sensibility and imagination. Together they revisited the old and explored the new. One never-to-be-forgotten day the boys discovered a deserted house of some pretensions about a mile from the Hill. Its grounds, covering several acres, were enclosed ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... general of brigade protecting the heads of the government! I don't know; but sometimes this ridiculous self-reliance leads me to the point of believing everything possible which this strange man would have me do; and with his imagination, who can reckon what he would undertake?" This letter, though often quoted, is so remarkable that, as some think, it may be a later invention. If written later, it was probably the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... seemed like a dream city, a creation of some morbid imagination, presented to her mind's eye as the city of ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... vessel had no wheel, being steered by a tiller on deck, in the 'long-shore fashion. In stationing Biddy, the widow told her that she was to play "tricks at the wheel," leaving it to the astounded Irish woman's imagination to discover what those tricks were. Failing in ascertaining what might be the nature of her "tricks at the wheel," Biddy was content to do nothing, and nothing, under the circumstances, was perhaps the very best thing ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... aspect of luxury and elegance; with a strange new atmosphere of feminine habitation, that went a little to Anthony's head, that called up clearer than ever the dark-haired, strenuous-faced woman of the dog-cart, and turned his imagination to visions and divinings of intimate feminine things. One thought of chiffons, and faint, elusive perfumes, and the gleam and rustle of silken garments; one heard soft voices, trills of feminine laughter, the whispering of feminine secrets; one saw ladies in low chairs, reading ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... midst of a cultivated plain washed by the waters of the Guadalquivir, made it very early the favorite residence of the Arabs, who loved to surround their houses, even in the cities, with groves and refreshing fountains, so delightful to the imagination of a wanderer of the desert. [13] The public squares and private court-yards sparkled with jets d'eau, fed by copious streams from the Sierra Morena, which, besides supplying nine hundred public baths, were conducted ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... however perfect, which human wisdom can devise. Such subjects of political agitation as occupy the public mind consist to a great extent of exaggeration of inevitable evils, or overzeal in social improvement, or mere imagination of grievance, having but remote connection with any of the constitutional functions or duties of the Federal Government. To whatever extent these questions exhibit a tendency menacing to the stability of the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... imagination you have, Nell, dear," she scoffed. Then she changed the subject arbitrarily: "Is mother quite comfortable? Did you have the porter put a screen in her window?—you know she always insists ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... sure tact and swiftly working imagination. "I had just come to an end of them. It's a silly story of losses and what-not—I needn't bother you with it. I thought I would walk to London, with the traditional half-crown in my pocket"—he flashed a wistful smile—"and seek my fortune. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... step, however, of resigning a pension, and of throwing himself entirely upon the public for fame and support, was a more important one than his sanguine imagination and excitement of feeling permitted him at the time to contemplate. How far his being an unappointed composer may have hastened the production of his immortal works, is open to question; but that his life was sacrificed in struggling against the difficulties ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... image ever floated round him, and has contributed some traits to each of his heroines. This heavenly surrender of a simple, good, and tender heart contrasts wonderfully with the sensual and gloomy passion of the lover, who, in the midst of his love-dreams, is persecuted by the phantoms of his imagination and by the nightmares of thought, with those sorrows of a soul, which is crushed, but not extinguished, which is tormented by the invincible want of happiness and the bitter feeling, how hard a thing it is ...
— Faust • Goethe
... fallen into disuse, but are still admirably preserved. Beneath the former, and extending far below the surface of the water, is the old Bastile of the Inquisition, occasionally pressed into requisition now to house recalcitrant politicians, and where no great effort of the imagination is required still to hear the groans of the tortured and the sighs of the condemned, awaiting in chains and san benitos the approaching ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking |
