"Legendary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like," I said blankly. Little Fyne had never interested me so much since the beginning of the de Barral-Anthony affair when I first perceived possibilities in him. The possibilities of dull men are exciting because when they happen they suggest legendary cases of "possession," not exactly by the devil but, ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... parents found, Induced the girl, whose heart by LOVE was bound; To celebrate the Hymeneal scene, As in the statutes of Cythera's queen. Our legendary writers this define A present contract, where they nothing sign; The thing is common;—marriage made in haste: LOVE'S perparation: Hymen's bit ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... walk, a delightful refuge alike from sun and rain. Almost the entire length of the inner walls (for it has columns only on the side of the Agora) is covered with vivid frescoes. Here Polygnotus and other master painters have spread out the whole legendary story of the capture of Troy and of the defeat of the Amazons; likewise the more historical tale of the battle of Marathon. Yet another promenade, the "Stoa of Zeus," is sacred to Zeus, Giver of Freedom. The walls are not frescoed, but ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... the jousts or tilting matches after the Moresco fashion. Ojeda himself could not surpass him in feats of horsemanship, and particular mention is made of a favourite mare, which he could make caper and carricol in strict cadence to the sound of a viol; beside all this, he was versed in the legendary ballads or romances of his country, and was renowned as a capital performer on the guitar! Such were the qualifications of this candidate for a command in the wilderness, as enumerated by the reverend Bishop Las Casas. It is ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... the test of longevity which exhibits the greatest triumph for civilization, because here the life-insurance tables furnish ample, though comparatively recent statistics. Of course, in legendary ages all lives were of enormous length; and the Hindoos in their sacred books attribute to their progenitors a career of forty million years or thereabouts,—what may safely be termed a ripe old age; for if a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... antediluvian creatures who have occasionally been released by a stroke of the pickax from their stony prison. Nell became a fashionable wonder without knowing it. Superstitious folks made her story a new subject for legendary marvels, and were inclined to think, as Jack Ryan told Harry, that Nell was the ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... ladies just on the point of going into hysterics. Leaping up with the idea of seeing a score of Happar warriors about to perform anew the Sabine atrocity, [Footnote: Sabine atrocity: referring to the carrying off of the Sabine women by the Romans in the legendary history of early Rome.] I found myself confronted by the company of girls, who, having dropped their work, stood before me with staring eyes, swelling bosoms, and fingers ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... only one who has kept in my memory the aspect of continued life. Antonia the Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of the People are the artisans of the New Era, the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is: the only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the heart ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... opinion; for BRUCE there was a simoon more dreadful than the Arabian, and from which genius cannot hide its head. Yet BRUCE only met with the fate which MARCO POLO had before encountered; whose faithful narrative had been contemned by his contemporaries, and who was long thrown aside among legendary writers.[A] ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... peculiarity in the personal habits of these recluses is their frequent communion with birds and the gentler kind of beasts. Their legendary histories speak of these animals as apt mediums of vaticination and miraculous intervention; but we must be content, in the present age, to suppose that their frequent appearance, their familiar intercourse with the saints, and the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... But the legendary romance of Schubert's life occurred when he was twenty-one, and a music teacher to Carolina Esterhazy. He first fell in love with her maid, it is said, and based his "Divertissement a l'Hongroise" on Hungarian melodies he heard her singing at ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... was that the names of certain legendary saints were given to the ancient God of Lampsacus,[32] the said names having some relation either to the act over which that deity presided, or to ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... legendary hunter who made a compact with the devil whereby of seven balls six should infallibly hit the mark, and the seventh be under the direction of the devil, a legend which was rife among the troopers in the 13th and 14th centuries, and has given name ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... single copy of the work of Celsus is now to be found, and what we know of that work is from Origen, his opponent. The venerable fathers, who employed themselves in erasing the best works of the most eminent Greek or Latin authors, in order to transcribe the lives of saints or legendary tales upon the obliterated vellum, possible mistook these lamentable depredations for works of piety. The ancient fragment of the 91st book of Livy, discovered by Mr. Bruns, in the Vatican, in 1772, was much defaced by the pious labours of some well-intentioned ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... though the youngest of the nations aped the legendary traditions of the oldest. After the potent and vigorous King Cotton was killed by starvation, Confederate finance treated him as Jewish myth declares dead King Solomon was treated. In his million-acred temple, ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... a person that Alexander Hamilton himself—called to discuss the terms of this last document. By the bye, Hamilton's part in the affair is traditional and legendary rather than a matter of official record;—certainly his name does not appear in connection with the will. But Hamilton was the lawyer of Randall's sister, and a close family friend, so the story may more easily be true ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... Christian form which Rome propagated without wishing it, yet with such mighty energy that from a certain epoch Romanism and Christianity became synonymous words"; it was Jewish monotheism, the religion the Roman hated and despised, swallowing up by its contrast all that was local, legendary, and past belief, and presenting one religious law to the countless nationalities of the Empire, which like itself was one, and ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... representation of unartificial, true, and glowing feelings belongs to its most beautiful adornments; if the faithful direction of the heart to the invisible and eternal is the ground on which at all times the most lovely flowers of poetry have sprouted forth, these legendary poems of early Germany, in their lovely heartiness, in their unambitious limitation, and their pious sense, deserve a friendly acknowledgment. What man has considered the pious images in the prayer-books of the Middle Ages, the unadorned innocence, the piety and purity, the patience ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... means "he makes rivers") was a legendary chief, about 1450, of the Onondaga Tribe of Indians. The formation of the League of Five Nations, known as the Iroquois, is attributed to him by Indian tradition. He was regarded as a sort of divinity—the incarnation of human progress and civilization. Longfellow's poem "Hiawatha" embodies ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... C.! That two-edged blade is big, Sir! That Dragon's so spiky, he well might be "Some Egyptian porcupig," Sir, (As the singer of Wantley's Dragon says, In his quaint and curious story.) If this Dragon he slays, he shall win men's praise, And legendary glory. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... with the metric system. The "shekel of the sanctuary," often mentioned in the Priestly Code, and there only, cannot possibly have borne this name until the most natural objects of the old Israelite regime had begun to appear surrounded by a legendary nimbus, because themselves no longer in actual existence. Over against it we have the "king's weight" mentioned in a gloss in 2Samuel xiv. 26, the king being none other than the great king of Babylon. It is an interesting ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the sunny end of the low wooden stoop. It is the one rural spot on earth where a call for fresh eggs evokes remonstrative and chronic denial; where chickens for dinner are sternly discredited as mere freaks of legendary romance, and an order for a glass of new milk is incredulously answered by a tumblerful of water which tastes of whitewash-brush. Whosoever sleeps there of a night shall be crowded by walls which rub off into a faint feather-bed of the flavor and consistency of geese used ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... flowers, in which real wool flowers grew out of a wool basket which you held by an over-arching wool handle, the whole worked with undeniable but how forlorn ingenuity,—a prehistoric relic of Mrs. Talbot's legendary school-days: survivals from a period which is best summed up in the one wonderful word "antimacassar," a period when for some unrecorded reason men and women had to protect their furniture against their oleaginous selves, ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... infallible, for if he predicts contrary to the event it is said that he is sometimes punished with death for his want of skill. Exclusively however of these books of necromancy there are others containing legendary and mythological tales, of which latter a sample will be given under ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... the development of the "Roland Saga" in French literature; for, even setting aside much legendary lore and accumulated tradition, the Roland of the old epic is a perfect hero of the early days of feudalism, when chivalry was in its very beginnings, before the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary added the grace of courtesy to its ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... with Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, through the flat medium of Mr. Hoole's translation. But above all, I then first became acquainted with Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry. As I had been from infancy devoted to legendary lore of this nature, and only reluctantly withdrew my attention, from the {p.032} scarcity of materials and the rudeness of those which I possessed, it may be imagined, but cannot be described, with what delight I saw pieces of the same kind which had amused my childhood, and still continued ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... climbing the hill-side, speaking of hearth and home and of rest after the day's labour, and beyond, the still, calm moon and tranquil bay, and the yacht, with its whiteness and sharp-cut shadows, lying motionless like some legendary vessel carved ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... that one used to be able to walk from one end of North Africa to the other in the shade. Allowing for some exaggeration, this means that either the legendary African forest of the Romans continued to subsist, or that certain bare tracts covered themselves with timber in post-Roman periods of abandonment, before the Arabs and their goats had time—for it ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... heirlooms to which I have alluded, and many more besides, hospitably asked me if there was anything else that I would care to see, he meant the pieces of plate that they had in the cupboards, the curiously graven swords of other princes, historic jewels, legendary seals, but I who had had a glimpse of their marvelous staircase, whose balustrade I believed to be solid gold and wondering why in such a stately house they chose to dine in the basement, mentioned the word "upstairs." ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... single file, covering the locks of their guns with the lappets of their coats, and holding down their heads on account of the driving snow storm, until they reached the point of their attack in Sault-au-Matelot street. This is one of the legendary streets of Quebec. It lies directly under the Cape, and is supposed to derive its name from a sailor who leaped into it from above. Creuxius has a prosier explanation: "Ad confluentem promontorium assurgit quod saltum nautae vulgo vocant ab cane ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... may quote from Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art (ed. 1857, p. 159): "He (St. John) bears in his hand the sacramental cup, from which a serpent is seen to issue. St. Isidore relates that at Rome an attempt was made to poison St. John in the cup of the sacrament; he drank of the same, and administered it to the ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... he dwelt little; and, while he never obtruded opinions that might shock any person, and was far removed from scoffing or irreverence, he did not hesitate to discriminate between parts of our Sacred Books which he considered as simply legendary and parts which were to him pregnant ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... often, that America is not old enough to have developed a legendary era, for such an era grows backward as a nation grows forward. No little of the charm of European travel is ascribed to the glamour that history and fable have flung around old churches, castles, and the favored haunts of tourists, and the Rhine and Hudson are frequently compared, to ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... road through Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise how that swarming of black dots appeared to one of those concerned. Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede—a stampede gigantic and terrible—without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... whereupon the king liberated the Jews, prepared for them a sumptuous feast, and gave them permission to take vengeance on their apostate countrymen. The narrative probably has a groundwork of truth with legendary embellishments, after the manner of the later Jews. Its author is believed to have been an Alexandrine Jew, but his age cannot be determined. It was never admitted into the ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... certain lines and was going to pieces along others. The power and extortions of the freedmen were breeding discontent on every hand. Both through what she really did, and what the populace said she had done, Messalina was being transformed by the people into a legendary personage whose infamous deeds aroused general indignation; but all ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... because he will cease to live by the carnage and destruction of living creatures.... The earth will be covered with grass, flowers and woods and in it the human race will dwell in the abundance and joy of the legendary age of gold—provided that a spiritual chemistry has been discovered that changes the nature of man as profoundly as our chemistry ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... 1852, was worked through by George Smith, who identified many of the historical inscriptions of Shalmaneser II, Tiglath-Pileser III, Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and other kings mentioned in the Bible, and several literary compositions of a legendary character, fables, etc. In the course of this work he discovered fragments of various versions of the Babylonian Legend of the Deluge, and portions of several texts belonging to a work which treated of the beginning of things, and of the Creation. In 1870, Rawlinson and Smith noted allusions to ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... about that, if you will." He sought to lead the talk away from himself, since he did not intend to be fully drawn. "You said something about the theory that the Earth is alive, a living being, and that the early legendary forms of life may have been emanations—projections of herself—detached portions of her consciousness—or something of the sort. Tell me about that theory. Can there be really men who are thus children ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... shows where the one county ends and the other begins. "Certain lands are held in this place," says Lewis in his "Topographical Dictionary," "by the owner presenting on the bridge, at the coming of every new Bishop of Durham, an old sword, pronouncing a legendary address, and delivering the sword to the Bishop, who returns it immediately." The Tees is subject to extraordinary floods, and though Croft Church stands many feet above the ordinary level of the river, and is separated from it ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... on the air, the hardier guests at "Idle Times" still clung to those outdoor sports which properly belonged to the summer. That afternoon a canoeing expedition was made up river to explore a cave which tradition had endowed with some legendary tale of pioneer days and ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... Congo earth (he was killed by an elephant whilst on a hunting trip) his executors had been singularly fortunate in finding an immediate purchaser. Rumour had it that Kara, who was no lover of wine, had bricked up the cellars, and their very existence passed into domestic legendary. ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... was a legendary king of Phythia in Thessaly. According to the legend, a deluge having been sent by Zeus, Deucalion, by advice of his father, built a wooden chest in which he and his wife were saved, landing after nine days on Mt. Parnassus. By them the human race, destroyed ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... one moved to obey her imperious command. The men stared as if she were an apparition, so sudden and unexpected was her arrival. And in fact, she did seem like a leader of the legendary Valkyries, with her flashing eyes and wind-swept hair, mounted upon that prancing horse as black as night itself. It was little wonder that the men trembled as they watched her, while several crossed themselves as if to ward off some ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... course possible that some of the pictures now at Vizeu were the work of a man called Vasco, and one of those at Coimbra, in the sacristy of Santa Cruz, is signed Velascus—which is only the Spanish form of Vasco—so that the legendary personage may have been evolved from either or both of these, for it is scarcely possible that they can have ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... lands lying betwixt the Cross of MacDuff, at Newburgh, and the west end of Balquhidder, in length, and the Ochil Hills and the hills called Montes Grampii, or the Grampians, in breadth." Even though we make some reduction as to all this, and regard as somewhat legendary what Fordun tells us—viz., that Gilbert divided all his huge territory into three equal parts, giving two to the Church, and keeping only one to himself, still there cannot be a doubt but that he was one of the ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... preserved, if not in use, at least in memory. I should also be especially glad of references of any other allusion to the "white Paternoster" or "seynte Petres soster," or for any information as to sources for ascertaining the history, whether authentic or legendary, of the personage supposed to be alluded to in the closing ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... the score and three legendary towns were recited, first those of the Wolf, next of the Tortoise, then of the Bear; and I saw my Wolf-brethren of the four classes of the Mohawks and Cayugas staring at me as I rose when they did and seated ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... with one hand only. In the other he held a harp of a pattern which I had hitherto only seen in pictures. The strings were few in number, and the instrument was so small that I could have held it easily on my lap. It was the ancient harp of the pictured Muses and the legendary Welsh bards. ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... it is said, that a Chinaman, having fallen into the Pasig River, was in danger of being eaten by an alligator, and saved himself by praying to that saint, who caused the monster to turn into stone. The legendary stone is still to be seen near the left ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Him powers above those of other men—powers given Him by His Father in heaven—and never discouraged it. Nay, He demanded it. Take the lowest ground, and admit for argument's sake that the New Testament contains a legendary element, and still you cannot cut the miracles out of the Gospels and Epistles without altering them beyond recognition. The Jesus Christ presented to us in the New Testament would become a different person if the miracles were removed. And ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... the Servian heroic poems is immense. The oldest legendary cycle is formed by their great Tzar Dushan Nemanyitch and his heroes; by the pious prince Lazar, their last independent chief, who was executed by the Turks after having been made prisoner in battle; and by the death of his faithful knights on the field of Kossovo. ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... scene is generally a wild rocky solitude; St. Jerome, half-naked, emaciated, with matted hair and beard, is seen on his knees before a crucifix, beating his breast with a stone." (Mrs. Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art, i, 308.) ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... Masonic archaeologist Ragon, so that there can be no doubt of its existence. At the same time, so far as I am aware, there are few materials forthcoming for its history. In some way which remains wholly untraceable this order is inferred to have been connected by more than its name with the legendary Palladium of the Knights Templars, well known under the title of Baphomet. In any case it failed to spread, and it is uncertain whether the New and Reformed Palladium, also an androgyne order, with which we shall presently be ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... legendary story, a time when history fades into fable, it is said there was a Hamlet in Northern Denmark, but it was long before the birth of Christ. His father was not a king, but a famous pirate chief who governed Jutland in conjunction with his brother. Hamlet's father married the daughter of a Danish ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... the incorporation of England, Scotland, and Ireland, into one united kingdom,—an event peculiar to the coronation of George IV, to have recognised,—has connected the history of the Imperial Regalia with some tales of legendary lore, the truth of which, if this circumstance does not demonstrate, be assured, gentle reader, nothing will. Irish records are said to add at least another thousand years of substantial history to the honours of ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... chosen friends were certainly not wanting to me, we were always a minority against those who found pleasure in assailing us with wanton rudeness, and who indeed often awoke us in no gentle fashion from that legendary and self-complacent dreaming in which we—I by inventing, and my companions by sympathizing- -were too readily absorbed. Thus we learned once more, that, instead of sinking into effeminacy and fantastic delights, there was reason rather ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... issues a certain amount of cash was obtained, but the country lived from hand to mouth and everybody was unhappy. Added to this by March the formidable insurrection of the "White Wolf" bandits in Central China—under the legendary leadership of a man who was said to be invulnerable—necessitated the mobilization of a fresh army which ran into scores of battalions and which was vainly engaged for nearly half a year in rounding-up this replica of ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... "Handbook of Legendary and Mythological Art," "Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, Architects and Their Works," "Artists of the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... religious (sectarian) purport, the Pur[a]nas for sections together do not differ much in content from legal Smritis, out of which some may have been evolved, though, probably, they were from their inception legendary rather than didactic. It is more probable, therefore, that they appropriated Smriti material just as they did epic material; and though it is now received opinion that legal Smritis are evolved out of S[u]tras, this yet can be the case only with the oldest, even if the statement then can be accepted ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... legendary hero of the American Air Force—who had shot down, so latest rumors said, fifty Slav planes—was far above him. "I'll never reach Hay's record, Wells. I'll be doing pretty well if I bag half as many!" Then, seeing Ranth, the orderly, followed by Praed, ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... pathways along which she was to send her sons. Bold, fearless, untiring, cruel often, at other times kind and firm, they went into new seas and lands, seeking a Northwest Passage, or to "singe the beard of the King of Spain," or to find the legendary treasures of the New Indies—yet all of them were serving unconsciously the genius of their race in laying the foundations of new worlds. Perhaps of them all Smith saw most clearly the value of the settlement in Virginia, and just as clearly was he aware that the jealousies and avarice ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... has been handed down from the ancients and from the most primitive times, and left to later ages in the form of myth, that these substances (i.e. sky and heavenly bodies) are gods and that the divine embraces all nature. The rest consists in legendary additions intended to impress the multitude and serve the purposes of legislation and the common weal; for these gods are said to have human shape or resemble certain other beings (animals), and they say other things which follow from this and are of a similar ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... its large size. Noah and his sons were therefore obliged to fasten the animal by a rope to the Ark, and to tow it behind. And in order to prevent its being strangled, they attached the rope to its horn, instead of around its neck. . . . It was formerly thought that the legendary unicorn was in reality the one-horned rhinoceros, but this seems improbable. The fabulous creature mentioned by classic writers as a native of India was described as having the size and form of a horse, with one straight horn projecting from its forehead. ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... in supposing, Mr. Meynell," said the Dean, slowly, "that in those sentences you meant to convey that the Resurrection narratives of the New Testament were not to be taken as historical fact, but merely as mythical—or legendary?" ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... air of long summer afternoons—occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, yet beginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of accessible garden peaches in a liberal backward territory that was still almost part of a country town; tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strange legendary domestics, inveterately but archaically Irish, and whose familiar remarks and "criticism of life" were handed down, as well as of dim family ramifications and local allusions—mystifications always—that flowered into anecdote as into small hard plums; ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... with which he would have best liked to be remembered, as he best deserved it, he had unconsciously been undergoing a course of preparation even when a boy. He himself has told us with what eagerness he devoured, at that period of life, the legendary histories of Wallace and Bruce; and the occupation had its use. It gave him a capacity for admiring what was great though perilous in exploit, and for truly and largely sympathizing with what was patriotic ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... which erst did poor Arachne meet; While he, the much-lov'd Object of my choice (My bosom thrilling with enthusiast heat), Pour'd on mine ear with deep impressive voice, How the great Prophet of the Desart stood 55 And preach'd of Penitence by Jordan's Flood; On War; or else the legendary lays In simplest measures hymn'd to Alla's praise; Or what the Bard from his heart's inmost stores O'er his Friend's grave in loftier numbers pours: 60 Yes, Bard polite! you but obey'd the laws Of Justice, when the thimble you had sent; What wounds your thought-bewildering Muse might cause 'Tis ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Trygvason may be found in Od the Monk's legendary saga, in parts of "Agrip", "Historia Norvegiae", and in Thjodrek. Icelandic ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... the more successful, do we find anything of what the poet has so well characterised in one of his early reviews as the 'spurious style of tawdry and affected simplicity which trickles through the legendary ditties' of the eighteenth century. 'The hunt is up' in earnest; and we are chasing the tall deer in the open hills, not coursing rabbits with ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... meeting, mounting, right of way and various other points which are carefully observed and give the desired air of fashionable righteousness, without which, for many people, the pleasure of meeting in a social way on one's wheel would be but legendary. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... edition of his mythological and legendary lore "The Age of Fable," "The Age of Chivalry," and "Legends of Charlemagne" are included. Scrupulous care has been taken to follow the original text of Bulfinch, but attention should be called to some additional sections which have been inserted to add to ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... and was listening to the oriels answering one another upon their Pan-pipes, when I saw coming towards me a figure which might have disturbed me very much had I been living in those days when—if there is any truth in legendary lore—the devil only needed half a pretext for forcing his society upon lonely travellers. This man—for man it was—had a face so overgrown with coal-black hair that very little could be seen of it excepting the eyes and nose. Beard, whiskers, and ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... legendary cavaliers whom nothing appals, passed with fearful rapidity over hillocks, ravines, and fallen trunks of trees. Pepe was not wrong; in spite of the start that the pursued had of him, Fabian would soon have overtaken them, could he have guided his horse; but luckily, or unluckily ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... various ways, some of which were simply rude and others mysteriously sardonic. Young officers were warned kindly by their more experienced comrades not to stare openly at the colonel's scar. But indeed an officer need have been very young in his profession not to have heard the legendary tale of that duel originating in a mysterious, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... us his little picture of the past, that Dierdre O'Farrell gazed at him, as if at some legendary knight in whose reality she did not believe. It was the first time I had seen any change in the sullen face, but it was a change to interest rather than sympathy. She had the air of saying in her mind: "You look more like a St. George, stepped down from a stained-glass window, ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the Bible, especially the Old Testament, are no exception to this rule. The reference, "The sons of God and daughters of men," while it admits of many interpolations, legendary or mythical as it may be, portrays the real animus of the Scriptures. To what extent the sentiment of the Hebrews favored sons rather than daughters, and the injustice of this distinction is fully exemplified by the stories of Abraham and Isaac, and of Jephthah and his daughter. Abraham was commanded ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... widespread throughout Europe, though he was only identified as a "Jew" in the 17th century—students at Geneva College (now Hobart College) applied the name to a supposedly unsinkable floating log in Lake Seneca, identified as the legendary "Chief Agayentha"; Jefferson I have been unable to locate any "Jefferson" on ...
— The Lake Gun • James Fenimore Cooper
... John when he could get an hour or two from the everlasting "chores." Making his way out to it over the rocks at low water with his fish-pole, there he was content to sit and observe the world; and there he saw a great deal of life. He always expected to catch the legendary trout which weighed two pounds and was believed to inhabit that pool. He always did catch horned dace and shiners, which he despised, and sometimes he snared a monstrous sucker a foot and a half long. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... where you are!—a world where you are just as welcome, though you carry no more earth of your lost acres with you than covers the sole of your shoe. Then, for hypochondria and satiety, what is better than a brisk alterative course of travels,—especially early, out-of-the-way, marvellous, legendary travels! How they freshen up the spirits! How they take you out of the humdrum yawning state you are in. See, with Herodotus, young Greece spring up into life, or note with him how already the wondrous old Orient world is crumbling into giant decay; ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... or Manet, he prophesied not merely the new artist or the new man of science, but the new man who is to free himself from his inheritance and to see, feel, think, and act in all things with the spontaneity of God. That is why he is a legendary hero to us, with a legend that is not in the past but in the future. For his prophecy is still far from fulfilment; and the very science that he initiated tells us how hard it is for man to free himself from his inheritance. It seems strange to us that Leonardo ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... only been enabled to do this by the courtesy of those who owned the copyright of these stories. Lady Wilde has kindly granted me the use of her effective version of "The Horned Women;" and I have specially to thank Messrs. Macmillan for right to use Kennedy's "Legendary Fictions," and Messrs. Sampson Low & Co., for the use of Mr. ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... contributed articles in prose and verse to the Ayr Advertiser, a weekly newspaper published in that town. His death took place at Ayr on the 6th January 1843, in his 58th year. Much esteemed for his hearty, social nature, with a ready and pungent wit, and much dramatic power as a relater of legendary narrative, he was possessed of strong intellectual capacities, and considerable taste as a poet. His second son, Mr William Crawford, has attained distinction ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... appearance was to "try," and not to attack him; and when they saw him resolute, they "drooped their heads, put down their tails, and prostrated themselves before him." This of course is not an historical account, but a legendary tribute to his ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... the Turkish Straits (Bosporus, Sea of Marmara, Dardanelles) that link Black and Aegean Seas; Mount Ararat, the legendary landing place of Noah's Ark, is in the far eastern ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... been reading and admiring.' I was here brought up with a reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel shows, I failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton, and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and legendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the very title-page; and this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any chance I could hit upon some similar belief to be the centre-piece of my own meditated fiction. In the course of this vain search there cropped up in my memory ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and not even, perhaps, in Shakespeare, such novelty and variety of milieu. There is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern world which he has not touched, always with the same vital and instinctive sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge. Passing by the legendary and remote ages and civilisations of East and West, he has painted the first dawn of the modern spirit in the Athens of Socrates and Euripides, revealed the whole temper and tendency of the twilight age between Paganism and Christianity, and recorded the last utterance of ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... the most noted examples of the use of embossed and decorative leather work is the ancient case of stamped leather intricately foliated, a highly decorative work of art in which is enclosed that remarkable goblet of legendary fame known as "The Luck of ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... Almost amusing! He was one of those sons who bring sorrow and shame into a family. Again, how strange! What a coincidence that he—just he and not the man in the next bed—should be one of those rare, legendary good-for-nothings who go recklessly to ruin. And yet, he was sure that he was not such a bad fellow after all. Only somehow he had been careless. Yes, careless; that was the word ... nothing worse.... As to death, he was indifferent. Remembering his father's death, he reflected that ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... church in Europe, certainly no other English one, that has such a clear record of its history as Salisbury. Whereas in almost every other instance we have only vague legendary accounts of the original foundation of the building, in this case there is a trustworthy chronicle of its first inception and each successive stage ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... Cesarean Section.—Although the legendary history of Cesarean section is quite copious, it is very seldom that we find authentic records in the writings of the older medical observers. The works of Hippocrates, Aretxeus, Galen, Celsus, and Aetius contain nothing relative ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... hail-fellow-well-met; but, I do not know why, I felt that he was cunning and shifty. He talked a great deal in a raucous voice, and he and Chaplin capped one another's stories of beanos which had become legendary, stories of "wet" nights at the English Club, of shooting expeditions where an incredible amount of whisky had been consumed, and of jaunts to Sydney of which their pride was that they could remember nothing from the time they landed till ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... oftener than her sister's upon the legendary and supernatural; she told her stories with the sympathy, the colour, and the mysterious air which contribute so powerfully to effect, and never wearied of answering questions about the old castle, and amusing her young audience with fascinating little glimpses of old ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... of a handful of these auxiliaries, three boatloads; but he is so vague and ill-instructed on the whole of this early period—a hundred years before his time—that one must treat his account of the transaction as half legendary. He tells us that "more numerous companies followed," and we know what that means in the case of the Roman auxiliaries throughout the Empire, a ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... "Honoura", and "Ahupu". Legendary persons of Tahiti, all natives of Taiarapu. Of the first two I have collected singular although imperfect legends, which I hope soon to lay before the public in another place. Of Ahupu, except in snatches of song, little memory ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... legendary stories crowded into his mind as that light came and went, and seemed to play here and there for what must have been half an hour, when it disappeared. But as it passed away he saw another away to his left, and he was watching ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... as his inspiration. She was irked, too, by his hopelessly unpractical attitude toward affairs. She would have enjoyed the friendly status of a partner as a wholesome complement to the ardors of marriage. She knew that her husband differed from the legendary bohemian in having a strictly upright code in money matters, but she wished it could be less visionary. He mentally oscillated between pauperism and riches. Let him fail to sell a picture and he offered to pawn his coat; but the picture sold, he ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... received ample attention from native scholars and collectors, they have not as yet been presented in a popular manner to English-speaking readers. The probable reasons for what would appear to be an otherwise incomprehensible omission on the part of those British writers who make a popular use of legendary material are that many Breton folk-tales strikingly resemble those of other countries, that from a variety of considerations some of them are unsuitable for presentation in an English dress, and that most ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... me as a painful yet necessary duty to topple from its pedestal one of the most popular idols of legendary lore. I refer, I regret to say, to the widely famous ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... a sheet of copper recording the circumstance, is the great circumnavigator's monument. A few miles beyond, is the enclosure of Haunaunau, the City of Refuge for western Hawaii. In this district there is a lava road ascribed to Umi, a legendary king, who is said to have lived 500 years ago. It is very perfect, well defined on both sides with kerb-stones, and greatly resembles the chariot ways in Pompeii. Near it are several structures formed of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... faith readily took the place of sight with their customers—so far at least as quality was concerned; and seldom, except in a question of color or shade, was an article carried to the door to be confronted with the day. It had been just such a shop, untouched of even legendary change, as far back as the memory of the sexton reached; and he, because of his age and his occupation, was the chief authority in the local history of ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... of the appearance of Jesus Christ is told with that strange mixture of the natural and impossible, that distinguishes legendary tale from fact. He is represented as suddenly coming in and going out when the doors are shut, and of vanishing out of sight, and appearing again, as one would conceive of an unsubstantial vision; then again he is hungry, sits down ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... back in his chair, remembering the legendary gallantry of his race, and wearing an ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... Sussex. His father, named Timothy, was the eldest son of Bysshe Shelley, Esquire, of Goring Castle, in the same county. The Shelley family could boast of great antiquity and considerable wealth. Without reckoning earlier and semi-legendary honours, it may here be recorded that it is distinguished in the elder branch by one baronetcy dating from 1611, and by a second in the younger dating from 1806. In the latter year the poet's grandfather received this honour through the influence of his friend the Duke of Norfolk. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... to a condition of barbarism; but the degraded descendants of a civilized people usually retain traditional recollections of their ancestors, or some traces of the lost civilization, perceptible in their customs and their legendary lore. The barbarism of the wild Indians of North America had nothing of this kind. It was original barbarism. There was nothing to indicate that either the Indians inhabiting our part of the continent, or their ancestors near or remote, had ever ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... refer to the legendary stories related of Democritus, as that he put out his eyes with a burning-glass that he might no longer be deluded with their false indications, and more tranquilly exercise his reason—a fiction bearing upon its face the contemptuous ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... particulars, yet differing from the negroes in others, and specially marked by their dwarfish stature, which is indicated in the name of Pygmies, usually given them. These diminutive beings were known as long ago as the days of Homer, and their legendary combats with the cranes are spoken of by him in his poems. He was not aware of what is known now, that these forest dwarfs would disdain the cranes as antagonists, and are quite capable of overcoming the lordly elephant. In truth, they know no equals ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... liking, though he was among the earliest and steadiest, if also among the more discriminating, admirers of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Prince Otto had a place with his favourite books. Another subject which attracted his pen was the local and legendary history of his beloved Provence. His intimate acquaintance with the beliefs and fancies of that region could be gathered from his slightest notice of an ephemeral book on the country, as readily as his store of political knowledge and familiarity ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... lordship, glad to turn at right angles from the path of the conversation; "you don't surely believe in that legendary personage?" ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... to Roman legendary history, the Tarquins, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus and Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, were among the early kings of Rome. The reign of the former was glorious, but that of the latter was most unjust and tyrannical. Finally the unscrupulousness of the king ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... was the illegitimate son of Robert the Devil, as he is commonly called, because he has been, though improperly, "identified with a certain imaginary or legendary hero," but who was a much better man than his diabolic sobriquet implies. William's mother was Arletta, or Herleva, daughter of a tanner of Falaise. The Conqueror never escaped the reproach of his birth, into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Discovery by Fremont, Legendary Lore, Various Namings, Physical Characteristics, Glacial Phenomena, Geology, Single Outlet, Automobile Routes, Historic Towns, Early Mining Excitements, Steamer Ride, Mineral Springs, Mountain and Lake Resorts, Trail and Camping Out ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... bath-stone. To its waters this famous resort owes its importance, but from an insignificant place Bath has risen to the highest point of popularity as a fashionable watering-place and in architectural magnificence through the genius of Architect Wood and Master-of-Ceremonies Beau Nash. The legendary king Bladud is said to have first discovered the Bath waters twenty-seven hundred years ago, and to have built a town there and dedicated the medicinal springs to Minerva, so that "Bladud's Well" ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... that church, till mystical Babylon shall be destroyed, in the awful manner foretold in the Revelation; but infidelity hath long since, tipped the foundation of catholic religion, being grafted on the ruins of superstition. The absurd doctrines, and legendary tales of popery, may have been credited in the dark ages, when many of the clergy were unable to write their names, or so much as read their alphabet; but the belief of them is utterly inconsistent with the light everywhere diffused since the ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... it calls and calls again, And Ovid, could he but have heard, Had hung a legendary pain About the memory of ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... Honest, affable, adored, he presented the singular spectacle of a physician who scorned medicine, and yet who, it was said, had fewer deaths and more recoveries to his credit than any other practitioner of his generation. This belief arose probably in the legendary glamour which resulted from his boundless, though mysterious, charities; for despite the fact that he had until his death a large and devoted following, he lived all his life in a condition of genteel poverty. His single weakness was, I believe, an utter inability to appreciate the exchange ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... when a rude play was acted by the peasants of Vissoye. It set forth the conversion of the Huns to Christianity through the medium of a miracle vouchsafed to Zacheo, the legendary apostle of Anniviers. The little stage was erected on a pleasant hillside, the procession bearing the cross wound down from the village church, the priests from all the neighbouring towns were present, and the pious Valaisans—as overjoyed as if the Huns were ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... head that the air is filled with a swarm of malignant little devils, who are always watching their chance to do us an ill turn. We don't in the least know the conditions under which they can bring it off; but it's legendary that if we wear opals, or sit thirteen at table, or start an enterprise on Friday, or what not, we somehow give them their opportunity. And one naturally wishes to be on the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... undertake to write the early history of any people whatever. With the exception of Dr Arnold's History of Rome, we know of no work where there is the same true appreciation shown of the real value, and proper use, of legendary traditions. Certainly amongst the great scholars of Germany, whatever their undoubted merits in other respects, there is very little of this wise reticence, this philosophical forbearance; and if the two English historians, whom we have named together, be surpassed in critical knowledge by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... know the books which were of most use to me in my apprenticeship. There is no pleasanter instructress than Mrs. Jameson, although she is superficial and sentimental, a little lackadaisical indeed: her Early Italian Painters, Sacred and Legendary Art, and the supplementary volumes on the Legends of the Madonna and of the Monastic Orders, and on those relating to the life of our Lord, have all been republished in this country. There is a finer book of the same order, Lord Lindsay's Christian Art, now out ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... which they lived—tiresome people for whom everything had gone to the dogs—or was rapidly going—uncomfortable critics who could never make themselves at home in their own century, and whose weary shibboleth was that of some legendary perfect past. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius's enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... use the pencil to greater ends under cover of the motley, and encase bitter truths with the gilt of a printed jest. Like Giotto and his legendary feat, he can draw you a perfect circle with his pen—and perhaps he is the only man in the country who can do it. His is the rare gift that in him sense of fun, of dignity, and of art is equal. He will brook nothing more serious in his sallies ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... process manifest. The best of these sources are autobiographies, and of these only few are full of the details of this stage. Just as in the mythic prehistoric stage of many nations there is a body of legendary matter, which often reappears in somewhat different form, so there is a floating plankton-like mass of tradition and storiology that seems to attach to eminence wherever it emerges and is repeated over and over again, concerning the youth of men who later achieve distinction, which ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... great names I have already enumerated, but by some equally high which I have omitted. On this subject it would be impossible to overlook the names of Lever, Maxwell, or Otway, or to forget the mellow hearth-light and chimney-corner tone, the happy dialogue and legendary truth which characterize the exquisite fairy legends of Crofton Croker. Much of the difficulty of the task, I say, has been removed by these writers, but there remains enough still behind to justify me in giving a short dissertation upon the habits ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... in the noisome Treasure-chamber of the Sanoms, the early history of which was lost in the mist of legendary lore, then after careful and minute examination of the rifled chests, worked our way to the base of the shaft, and, having ascended, let down the tiny concealed lever, thereby allowing the pressure to increase, and place in position the ingenious ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... also, Zeus grown to maturity, was united to Europa, the daughter of man, in the sacred marriage from which sprang Minos, the great legendary figure of Crete. And to Crete the island god returned to close his divine life. Primitive legend asserted that his tomb was on Mount Juktas, the conical hill which overlooks the ruins of the city of Minos, his son, his friend, and his priest. It was this ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... The legendary belief that before the Fall there reigned on the Earth a perpetual spring, is introduced by Milton in his poem when he describes the pleasant surroundings associated with the happy conditions of life ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... a miserable determination returning, I fixed my eyes again on the square, black bottle of rum. 'Twas a thing that fairly fascinated my attention. The cure of despair was legendary, the palatable quality a thing of mere surmise: I had never experienced either; but in my childhood I had watched my uncle's fearsome moods vanish, as he downed his drams, one by one, giving way to a grateful geniality, which sent my own bogies scurrying off, and I had fancied, from the smack of ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... lies in the attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a legend, prolonging itself from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist, which the reader may either disregard or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the characters and events for the sake of a picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be, is woven of so humble a texture, as to require this advantage and at the same time ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... restorer of order and civil government, AE. has earned the title of the father of English prose writing. The earlier part of his life was filled with war and action, most of the details regarding which are more or less legendary. But no sooner had he become King of Wessex, in 871, than he began to prepare for the work of re-introducing learning into his country. Gathering round him the few scholars whom the Danes had left, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... conventual life found favour in Madelon's eyes in these days; and indeed her whole faith in saints and legends was rudely shaken one day by a broad and somewhat reckless assertion on the part of Soeur Lucie, that all the female saints had been nuns—an assertion certainly unsupported by the facts, whether legendary or ascertained, but which had somehow become a fixed idea in Soeur Lucie's mind, and was dear to the heart ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... martyrdom of Saint Dodekamus, patron of Nepenthe, we possess hardly any information of a trustworthy nature. It is with his career as with that of other saints: they become overlaid—encrusted, as it were—with extraneous legendary material in the course of ages, even as a downward-rolling avalanche gathers snow. The nucleus is hard to find. What is incontestably true may be summed up almost in ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Sunday-school lessons; certainly he did not fail to review them exhaustively on that journey. His note-books fairly overflow with Bible references; the Syrian chapters in The Innocents Abroad are permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of the Bible story. The little Bible he carried on that trip, bought in Constantinople, was well worn by the time they reached the ship again at Jaffa. He must have read it with a large and persistent interest; also with a double benefit. For, besides the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and embraces about four hundred folio pages in manuscript. The introductory portion of the work is occupied with the traditionary tales of the origin and early period of the Incas; teeming, as usual, in the antiquities of a barbarous people, with legendary fables of the most wild and monstrous character. Yet these puerile conceptions afford an inexhaustible mine for the labors of the antiquarian, who endeavors to unravel the allegorical web which a cunning priesthood had devised as symbolical of those mysteries ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... words are sufficient to cover the expedition in quest of the legendary treasures of the long dead Barons. Mr. Bangs accompanied us. Britton carried a lantern and the three Schmicks went along as guides. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... that, a long time ago, when he first saw it. He had been just a kid then; twelve years old, and all excited about seeing Earth for the first time—Earth, the legendary home of mankind before the Age of Space, the planet of Bart's far-back ancestors. And the first thing he'd seen on Earth, when he got off the starship, ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... Johnston, p. 352. I have not seen the Chinese text of this edict. In Laufer and Francke's Epigraphische Denkmaler aus China is a long inscription of Kang Hsi's giving the history both legendary and recent of the celebrated ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... to a class of women that derive less from immediate ancestors than from a legendary race of sirens—not so merely legendary, perhaps, as we think. Convention is only a flexible harness for such women and plays no part ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... at is always the brightest," said the farmer. "However, I think the clams is the best thing at table—or near the best," with a slight glance towards Squire Deacon and the dish at the 'well end.'"I've a legendary attachment to beauty, sir; my father married the three ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... void, were screening a strange and undreamed-of part for him to play. The Spaniards, a vague, almost legendary people, as remote from Raymond's life as the Assamese or the cliff-dwellers of New Mexico, began to take on a concrete character, and were suddenly discovered to be the enemies of the human race. ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... knights. The very pedestal upon which we once stood in your regard has been overturned by realities. We have ceased to be your ideals dearly cherished. It is not our fault nor yours. No one is to blame. This movement of women is as natural as any other growth. We are migrating out of the legendary into the real; we are passing from sentiment and romance into history. And we have arrived! Nothing can stop us. You only shame yourselves, your manhood, and your honour if you oppose us. We must succeed because we ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... changed, and the naturalist of yesterday makes upon us the impression of a legendary being. I refer to the person described in George Sand's romances, marching vigorously over hills and valleys in search of a rare insect, which he pricked with delight, or of a plant difficult to reach, which he triumphantly dried ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... began. The curtain rose, and the first act, little more than a prelude, was soon over. It was an introduction to the spectators, of that weird, fantastic, legendary world into which they were to enter, with Arivana, the sacred place of offering, the holy of holies, ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... know the Brattle House, with its gambrel roof, its tall trees, its perennial spring, its legendary fame of good fare and hospitable board in the days of the kindly old bon vivant, Major Brattle. In this house the two young students, Appleton and Motley, lived during a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Eschenbach, the only real personality in his poem. And he narrates, in a mooning, digressive, good-natured, drowsy tone, with only a rare awaking of interest, a story which he has heard from some one else, and that some one else from a series of other some one elses (Chrestien de Troyes, a legendary Provencal Chiot or Guyot, perhaps even the original Welsh bard); all muddled, monotonous, and droning; events and persons ill-defined, without any sense of the relative importance of anything, without clear perception of what it is all about, or at least ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... clay in which one seemed to make out, despite the corrosion of the salt water, human features worn by the passing centuries. They were curious relics of days of storm; suggestions of the great secret of the sea, which had come to light after being hidden thousands of years; confused and legendary history returned by the restless waves to the shores of these islands, which had been the refuge in ancient times of Phoenicians and Carthaginians, of Arabs and Normans. Tio Ventolera told of silver ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... poetic essence of the saga as handed down by Tschudi. And he succeeded admirably. So far as the Swiss people are concerned, he well deserves the memorial they have placed in his honor upon the Mythenstein, near the legendary ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Dante, is an experience that sends a poetic thrill through the blood. For it is on classic ground only that the Spirit of Antiquity walks. And it went on to ask the question, "If even England, with all her riches of historic and legendary associations, is not so rich in this kind of poetic material as some parts of the European Continent, what shall be said of the new English worlds—Canada, the United States, the Australias, the South African Settlements, etc.?" Histories they ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... My faith in legendary lore is confirmed, when I call to mind the Gothic fortress, with its strong defences against the enemy, its rude suggestions of centuries of hospitality, its tower-lattices, whence generation after generation of high-born ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... to separate the strata of material in the New Testament, according to their relative historical and ethical value, under the laws which he would himself apply to any other literature in the world—invite him to exclude this as legendary and that as accretion, to distinguish between the original kernel and that which the fancy or the theology of the earliest hearers inevitably added—and you will feel that a complete change has come over the mind. However subtle and precise his arguments ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... readers of this modern age are far more exact and exacting. When they hear such an opening to a story, they are at once critical and suspicious. They apply the searchlight of science to its legendary haze ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... a fashion as this does not seem quite satisfactory to modern ideas. It is not fair to the other side. Yet it was in this way that the Greeks won victory on the plains of Troy, and that many other legendary victories were obtained. One cannot help wishing that the event of battle had been left to the decision of brave hearts and strong hands, instead of depending upon the interposition of the gods. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... falling into disuse or being enslaved; and when no place was safe from persecution and warfare, the guild of the Architects should fly for safety to almost the only free spot in Italy; and here, though they could no longer practice their craft, they preserved the legendary knowledge and precepts which, as history implies, came down to them through Vitruvius from older sources, some ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... period, Nurse Jamieson, amongst the variety of legendary lore which she instilled into her foster-son, had not forgotten what she called the awful season of his coming into the world—the personable appearance of his father, a grand gentleman, who looked as if the whole world lay at his feet—the beauty of his mother, and the terrible blackness ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... justice, that it is surprising how few are the sources, and how scanty the parent stock, from whence all the varieties of European legend are derived. Indeed, the foundation of a great part of these legendary stories seems to have been the heathen mythology of the different countries, and the various tales of superstition being handed down from one generation to another, have gradually assumed the shape they now bear; from whence may be traced ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... family, and brought to light hidden resources. It also aroused energy, and, being a success, was rejoiced over as a brilliant success. Respectability might complacently retire to its well-furnished chamber, and choose serenely from its unlimited supply of figurative purple and legendary fine linen, without finding a situation either dramatic or amusing; but in Vagabondia this was not the case. Having contrived to conjure up, as it were, from the secret places of the earth an evening dress, are not gloves still necessary? and, being ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... found until the close of the Mesozoic, and do not figure in its characteristic reptile population. We will consider them later. But there was a large group of reptiles in the later Mesozoic seas which more or less correspond to the legendary idea of a sea-serpent. These Dolichosaurs ("long reptiles") appear at the beginning of the Chalk period, and develop into a group, the Mososaurians, which must have added considerably to the terrors of the shore-waters. ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... followed by many; printing presses multiplied, and with most of them fiction kept its ground. A new life was infused into old legendary heroes, and they began again, impelled not by the genius of new writers, but simply by the printer's skill, their never ending journeys over the world. Their stories were published in England in small handy volumes, often of a very good appearance, and embellished with ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... never built fairy castles in the air nor seen fairy palaces in the fire; all save those whose minds, steeped in money-making, are both sordid and stunted. That mermaids did exist, and more or less in legendary form, I think quite probable, for I feel sure there was a time in the earth's history when man was in much closer touch with the superphysical than he is at present. They may, I think, be classified with pixies, nymphs, and sylphs, and other pleasant types ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... spot where it was found dead, together with the stag which it had pursued from Carnarvon," which is thirteen miles distant. The cairn was thus a monument of a "record" run of a greyhound: the englyn quoted by Jones is suitable enough for this, while quite inadequate to record the later legendary exploits of Gelert. Jones found an englyn devoted to an exploit of a dog named Cylart, and chose to interpret it in his second edition, 1794, as the exploit of a greyhound with which all the world (in Wales) were acquainted. Mr. Spencer took the legend ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... the Wolf, the obstinacy of the Mule, and other fancifully descriptive tales of the ways and doings of the inhabitants of the Animal Kingdom. These stories, as the title of the volume indicates, are collected from the legendary lore of many lands. The pictures are in the artist's most spirited and powerful style. Printed on rough art paper. 12 full-page colour plates. 144 pp. letterpress, ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... been a drawing-room. It still is partially a drawing-room. The silk panels on the walls have remained, and in one corner a grand piano lingers. In the middle is a plain table bearing a map on a huge scale. There he is, the legendary figure. You at last have proof that he exists. He comes towards the door to meet you. A thick-set man, not tall, with small hands and feet, and finger-nails full of character. He has a short white moustache, and very light-coloured eyes set in ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... called by them Hermes, because of his skill in interpreting ([Greek: Hermaeneia]) the holy documents. Fiction fostered fiction, and the inventions of pagan foes stimulated the exaggerations of Jewish apologists. The fictitious was mixed with the true, and the legendary material which Artapanus added to his history passed into the ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... very spirit of everything that goes to make Dalmatia delightful. Story, anecdote—ancient or legendary—beautiful cities, old churches, countless architectural and other ancient treasures, etc., etc., pervade ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... private Members got their own back when the first amendment to the Address was moved by Mr. JOYNSON-HICKS. The Member for Brentford, who knows the alphabet of aviation from Aeroplane to Zeppelin, complained that the air-service, like his own constituency in legendary times, was under Dual Control, and urged that it should be placed under a single ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... no doubt were songs to the Virgin Mary or legendary hymns, two types of songs which were then very common and popular throughout the church. Of the few real hymns in use, some were composed with alternating lines of Danish and Latin, indicating that they may have been sung responsively. Among these ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... sunshine and the carolling of birds, the legendary rural romance of the Yankee shore, we turn the page, and find, with real sorrow, that the last tale is told in the Wayside Inn. The finale is brief. The guests arose and said good night. The drowsy squire remains to rake the embers of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various |
