"Lifelike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... belief was consumed. But though it perished, its ashes preserved its form, an unsubstantial presentment of the past, to crumble in a twinkling at the touch of science, but keeping yet to the poet's eye the lifelike semblance of what once had been. The dead gods still live in our language and our art. Even to-day the earth about us seems semiconscious to the soul, for the ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... awe the Aztec chief of the place—the friendly cacique Teuhtile—bade his picture-writers depict it all; and upon the native paper these terrible gachupines[14] and their great "water-houses," and thundering engines, and singular musical instruments, were drawn in lifelike form by these native "newspaper artists," to be despatched by the native postmen over the rocky fastnesses of the Cordilleras to the great Montezuma. Then Cortes announced his mission. He was the ambassador ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... we read we become conscious of the novelist's characters, whom he introduces with a veil of mystery around them. They are interesting, as dreams and other mysterious things always are, but they are seldom real or natural or lifelike. At times we seem to be watching a pantomime of shadows, rather than a drama of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... which, held close to the ear, still sang a song of the sea; the marble-topped centre-table, and on it the interesting "album" of family photographs, and the mysterious contrivance which made so lifelike the double "views" you placed in the holder; and the lamp with its shade dripping crystal bangles, like huge raindrops off an umbrella; and the crocheted "tidies" on all the rocking-chairs, and the carpet-covered footstools sitting demurely round on the floor, and the fringed lambrequin ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... of the desertion of Theseus. A ballet-girl, as Ariadne the second, climbed the rocks of the Island of Naxos, reaching the highest peak to catch the last glimpse of the vanishing vessel. The third Ariadne was a most lifelike lay figure, which, on a given signal, was hurled from the cliff, and seen to fall ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... must have been in a similar situation before, or you couldn't give such a lifelike picture of it. Do you know that Adolphe is just that kind of a third person who cannot enjoy his mistress without having ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... his armchair. Beside him was a dog, in the attitude of an animal seated on its haunches, but lying on its side, one fore leg sticking straight out. Darrow touched the man and stooped over to peer in his face. The attitude was most lifelike; the color was good. A deadly chill ran from Darrow's finger ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... long into which his shattered body had fallen. The metal identification tags, one of which every soldier wears, had not been collected. These are removed by the burying squad, and sent home as announcers of the decease. This group had all been so recently killed that their faces were very lifelike. One found oneself repeating "How natural they look!" and one could pretty well judge what sort of men they had been in life. Here was a slight smooth-faced blond-haired boy, who must have been dearly beloved by the women of his family. Here again a serious, kindly, middle-aged man ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... supposed that the scene at the opening of the sepulchre must have been a very impressive one. There, in that solemn chapel of white and black marble which the genius of Michael Angelo prepared for the repose of his sovereigns and patrons, with his lifelike and immortal presentations of the forms of the dead who have filled all story with their names, looking down on the deed with sad and solemn faces, who would not, while thus forcing the prison-house of the tomb to render up its terrible and long-concealed secrets, have been deeply sensible ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... effort gone so far? Is my handiwork now mimicked in a fragile globe?" An old man of Syracuse had imitated on earth the laws of the heavens, the order of nature, and the ordinances of the gods. Some hidden influence within the sphere directs the various courses of the stars and actuates the lifelike mass with definite motions. A false zodiac runs through a year of its own and a toy moon waxes and wanes month by month. Now bold invention rejoices to make its own heaven revolve and sets the stars [planets?] ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... of life in a girl's college that has ever been written. It is bright, whimsical and entertaining, lifelike, laughable ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... the outer door—a white figure with a face as colourless as her dress—stood Dorothy Chase; nothing about her was lifelike except the familiar deep-brown eyes that gazed ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... wonderful grapes depending here and there to excite the cupidity of both bird and child. There was no cruelty in the nature of Patience, and she made prisoners of neither birds nor squirrels, but cunning cages here and there held most lifelike counterfeits of their willing captives. There was nothing in the room that was alive, except the dainty owner, but it seemed to be a museum of natural history. The rugs on the floor were of her own devising and sewing together, and rivaled in color ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the place"—the account continued—"has recently been admirably embodied in literary form by an American writer, Mr. Washington Irving (not to be confounded with George Washington). His creation of Father Knickerbocker is so lifelike that it may be said to embody the very spirit of New York. The accompanying woodcut—which was drawn on wood especially for this periodical—recalls at once the delightful figure of Father Knickerbocker. The New Yorkers ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... think the time has come when the fame of Fenimore Cooper demands a world-given memorial in Cooperstown. A lifelike statue from an artist's chisel should show the "'prose poet of the silent woods and stormy seas' seated, pen in hand, gazing dreamily for inspiration over the Glimmerglass, where the phantom creatures of his genius brood." Let it stand, a new-world literary shrine, ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... apostles seated around it, figures of marble, as large as life. The expression of each face is admirably given, especially those of John, who leans upon Jesus' bosom, and of Judas, seated the last in the group, and grasping the bag in his hand. It was so real and lifelike, that I could with difficulty understand that the genius of man had fashioned it out of cold and ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... the shoulder; the militia were on foot, and the light horse of the counties were in military dress. Conspicuous about the field, "haughty and pompous," as Gallatin described him in the legislature, was David Bradford, who had assumed the office of major-general. Brackenridge draws a lifelike picture of him as, mounted on a superb horse in splendid trappings, arrayed in full uniform, with plume floating in the air and sword drawn, he rode over the ground, gave orders to the military, and harangued the multitude. On ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... sentence of the well-intentioned and undoubtedly moderately-framed notice this person will take two phrases," remarked Tung Fel, folding the written paper and placing it among his garments, "which shall serve him as the title of the lifelike and accurately-represented play which it is his self-conceited intention now to disclose to this select and unprejudiced gathering. The scene represents an enlightened and well-merited justice overtaking an arrogant and intolerable being ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... this period lack the technical skill, the delicacy and imagination of Sumerian and Akkadian art, but they are full of energy, dignified and massive, and strong and lifelike. They reflect the spirit of Assyria's greatness, which, however, had a materialistic basis. Assyrian art found expression in delineating the outward form rather than in striving to create a "thing of beauty" which ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... Phaedrus, 'O Socrates, you can easily invent Egyptians or anything,' are recalled to our mind as we read this lifelike fiction. Yet the greater merit of the work is not the admirable art, but the originality of thought. More is as free as Plato from the prejudices of his age, and far more tolerant. The Utopians do not allow him who believes not in the immortality ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Frankish way has merits, all must allow; but ours, I do maintain, is more devotional. Let it be one thing or the other; that is all I ask. And I would have thee purge thy style, once and for all, of just those lifelike ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... sleep fast, and slept for some hours heavily. I woke with a start. I had been dreaming very hard. And my dream was peculiarly clear and lifelike. Never since the first night of my new life—the night of the murder—had I dreamed such a dream, or seen dead objects so vividly. It came out in clear colours, like the terrible Picture that had haunted me so long. And it affected me strangely. It was a scene, rather than a dream—a scene, as at ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... widely separated in genius and execution, but there is a logical connection between the two found in the slowly evolving human activities. The rude figure of a god moulded roughly from clay and the lifelike model by an Angelo have the same relations to man in his different states. The same comparison may be made between the low, monotonous moaning of the savage and the rapturous music of a Patti, or between ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Dr. Johnson and other eminent critics, one cannot help believing in the genuineness of some of the poems attributed to Ossian. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating"; and those wonderful old songs are too wild and lifelike to have had their origin in the eighteenth century. Macpherson doubtless enlarged upon the originals, but he must have had a good foundation ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... who cannot yet eat his bread and jam without smearing his face all over, takes a delight in fashioning clay into little figures that are astonishingly lifelike for all their artless awkwardness. He takes a knife and makes the briar root grin into all sorts of entertaining masks; he carves boxwood in the semblance of a horse or sheep; he engraves the effigy of his dog on sandstone. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... brings to bear on the historical representation of the three worlds is that which most interests and stirs us. The Divine Comedy is not only the most lifelike drama of the thoughts and feelings that moved men at that time, but it is also the most spontaneous and clear reflection of the individual feelings of the poet, who remakes history after his own passions, and who is the real chastiser of the sins and rewarder ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... show it was that ensued! Mr. Fletcher, drawing on his fertile imagination, invented a new set of domestic quarrels for the unhappy couple, brought in a doctor and a clown, (two lifelike dolls which supplemented the original, limited performers), and kept John shrieking with laughter until the ruddy-faced little devil brought the performance to a close in the time-honored way. Subdued laughter in ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... interesting. A faithful portrait of a shopkeeper, a workman, or a workgirl is artistically of far more value than all the imaginary sketches of impossible dukes and good and wicked baronets in which so many English novels abound. Several of M. Zola's personages seem to me extremely lifelike—Gavard, indeed, is a chef-d'oeuvre of portraiture: I have known many men like him; and no one who lived in Paris under the Empire can deny the accuracy with which the author has delineated his hero Florent, the dreamy and hapless revolutionary caught in the toils of others. In those days, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... feverishly, shaping a lifelike figure from the huge cakes of snow that the others brought to her. As she stood back to view her handiwork a naughty ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... to see Uncle Tony's portraiture hanging in the art gallery. She says it's so lifelike it made her cry. And she's awful happy about Peter. Peter's been posing for a picture for Bernard Rollins and while he was in the studio he got to fooling with the paints and brushes, and lo and behold, if he didn't daub up something that looked like his mother's face when ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... blue-gray silk. A brilliant ray of light beat down on it. Glancing up, Simpkins saw that it shone from a crescent moon in the arched ceiling above the altar. Then his eyes came back to the statue. There was something so lifelike in the pose of the figure, something so winning in the smile of the face, something so alluring in the outstretched arms, ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... feet, bring the scene nearer home to us than the letter of Pliny, and deepen the tragedy by their trifling contrast, like the grave-diggers' unseemly gabble in Hamlet. Perhaps our judgment of history is made sounder, and our view of it more lifelike, when we are so constantly reminded how the little things of life assert their place alongside the great ones, and how healthy the constitution of the race is, how sound its digestion, how gay its humor, that can take the world so easily while our continent is racked with fever and struggling ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... after the cock-fight one droll fellow brought around a miniature marionette theater, of which he was the proud proprietor. While his assistant blew a bamboo flute behind the scenes, the puppets danced fandangoes and played football in a very lifelike manner. Seated on an empty cracker-box in front, surrounded by the ragged picaninnies, sat Dolores, with her sparkling eyes, lips parted, and her black hair hanging loose,—oblivious to everything except ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... only the air. Cephalus was about to use his javelin, when suddenly he saw both dog and game stop instantly. The heavenly powers who had given both, were not willing that either should conquer. In the very attitude of life and action they were turned into stone. So lifelike and natural did they look, you would have thought, as you looked at them, that one was going to bark, the other ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... one upon another and hardly separable in their succession. There would be the figure of Marcus Aurelius, commanding us with outstretched arm from the back of the bronze charger which would not obey Michelangelo when he bade it "Go," not because it was not lifelike, but because it was too fat to move. Against the afternoon sky, looking down into the piazza with dreamy unconcern from their vantage would be the statues on the balustrated roof of the museum. There would be the sense, rather ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... historian, Balzac requires a shadow of the belief which Dr. Pusey gives to the Bible. This still remains distinctly below any genuine assent; for Balzac never wishes us really to forget, though he occasionally forgets himself, that his most lifelike characters are imaginary. But in certain subordinate topics he seems to make a higher demand on our faith. He is full of more or less fanciful heresies, and labours hard to convince us either that they are true or that he seriously holds ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... sight. The small figures of the Holy Family, of the Kings, of the shepherds and their flocks, were modelled and coloured with wonderful skill, and in the high, bright air, with the little landscape as cleverly made up as the figures, it all stood out clearly and strangely lifelike. There were many of these Presepi, as they were called, in Rome at that season, but none so pretty as that in the gloomy old tower, of which every step ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... between the heroine's love and her determination to visit the sin upon the son of the supposed murderer of her father forms the basis of the story. All of the characters are vividly drawn, and the action of the story is wonderfully dramatic and lifelike. ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... in London—I attended the representation of a little comedy. As the characters were lifelike (and consequently not improving), and as they went upon their several ways and designs without personally addressing themselves to me, I felt rather confident of coming through it without being regarded as Tommy, the more so, as we were clearly getting close to the end. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... forms they sculptured, 105 Lifelike in the marble pale— One, the Duke in helm and armour; One, the Duchess ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... his bursts of temper. Foolish Bardolaters make a virtue of this after their fashion: they declare that the play is the tragedy of irresolution; but all Shakespear's projections of the deepest humanity he knew have the same defect: their characters and manners are lifelike; but their actions are forced on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the case of Henry V. Falstaff is more vivid than any of these serious reflective characters, because he is self-acting: his motives are his own ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... the sperm and the ovum takes place usually in the upper end of one of the fallopian tubes. It is a wonderful occasion. The wide-awake, vibrating lifelike sperm plunges head first and bodily into the ovum. The tail, which has propelled this bundle of life through the many wanderings of its long and perilous journey, now no longer needed, drops off and is lost and forgotten. ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... as in this city of Siena (as purely mediaeval as the suits of rusted armour which its townsfolk patch up and bury themselves in during their August pageants), we are subjected to receive impressions of the past so startlingly lifelike as to get quite interwoven with our impressions of the present; and from that moment the past must share, in a measure, some of the everyday thoughts which we give to the present. In such a city as this, the sudden withdrawal, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... painted the picture of a dog under a tree so lifelike that it was impossible to distinguish the bark of the tree from that of ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... leading out on the Embankment opposite that. Between the two gates a grimy statue rose upon a granite pedestal, a meditative figure clad to the heels in some nondescript garment, and gazing across the river as he sat with a number of discarded volumes under his chair. It was a peculiarly lifelike monument, which Pocket would have been just the boy to appreciate at any other time; even now it struck him for an instant, before his attention was attracted to the group of commonplace living people on the Embankment beyond the narrow garden. They ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... conception of the conquest of the human soul by the irresistible operation of divine force is so foreign to modern thought and faith that Bunyan's similitude no longer seems a verisimilitude. The pages abound with quaint, humorous, and lifelike touches;—as where Diabolus stations at Ear-Gate a guard of deaf men under old Mr. Prejudice, and Unbelief is described as "a nimble jack whom they could never lay hold of";—but as compared with the 'Pilgrim's Progress' the allegory is artificial, its elaboration of analogies is ponderous ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Henri Leys, Chenavard, and Troyon; to Corot, the lover of nature who saw her through a veil of poetry; to Jules Dupre and Rousseau, who saw the poetry innate in her. He introduces us to the caricaturists Grandville and Gavarni; to Barye's lifelike animals. On reading the lives of these men, one is struck by the fact that they produced their masterpieces at about the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... up was a very impressive sketch, in which the artist had jotted down her rough ideas for a picture of Jael driving the nail through the temples of Sisera. It was dashed off with remarkable power, and showed a touch or two that were actually lifelike and deathlike, as if Miriam had been standing by when Jael gave the first stroke of her murderous hammer, or as if she herself were Jael, and felt irresistibly impelled to make her ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... person in the play possessed of a scruple of honesty is discomfited, and that the greatest scoundrel of all is approved in the end and rewarded. The comedy is so admirably written and contrived, the personages stand out with such lifelike distinctness in their several kinds, and the whole is animated with such verve and resourcefulness that "The Alchemist" is a new marvel every time it is read. Lastly of this group comes the tremendous comedy, "Bartholomew Fair," less clear ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... Province. This point of the pass is called Lung-men, or Dragon's Mouth, and the hill the Husband-expecting Hill. The figure itself, which is called the Expectant Wife, resembles that of a woman. Her bent head and figure down to the waist are very lifelike. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... life becomes important. The other people are also full of real blood, while the background is skillfully arranged to heighten the effect of the characters. A Hazard of New Fortunes would be decidedly improved if many pages were omitted, but it is full of lifelike characters, and it sometimes approaches the dramatic, in a way ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... certain shiftiness about it, also the lips were thick and slightly sensuous. Sir Robert knew this, and therefore he grew a moustache to veil them somewhat. To a careful observer the general impression given by this face was such as is left by the sudden sight of a waxen mask. "How strong! How lifelike!" he would have said, "but of course it isn't real. There may be a man behind, or there may be wood, but that's only a mask." Many people of perception had felt like this about Sir Robert Aylward, namely, that under the mask of ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... remembered as the inventor or discoverer of a wholly original, interesting, and natural type of character, as essentially inimitable as it is undeniably unimitated: the savage humor and cynic passion of De Flores, the genial passion and tender humor of Orlando Friscobaldo, are equally lifelike in the truthfulness and completeness of their distinct and vivid presentation. The merit of the play in which the character last named is a leading figure consists mainly or almost wholly in the presentation of the three ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of all was that in which Jem Tospot and the three Doll Wangos appeared. Though given in the broadest vernacular of the county, and scarcely intelligible to the whole of the company, the dialogue of this part of the piece was so lifelike and natural, that every one recognised its truth; while the situations, arranged with the slightest effort, and on the spur of the moment, were extremely ludicrous. The scene was supposed to take place in a small Lancashire alehouse, where a jovial pedlar ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... writers have ever been able to draw as distinct, lifelike a picture of a child as we have of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. This is to be in part accounted for by the fact that it is herself as a child that George ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... in which he delighted above all, and in which he was truly excellent, was the making of dies for medals, wherein he was the rarest master of his day, as may be seen in some that he made with a most lifelike head of Pope Julius II, which bear comparison with those of Caradosso; not to mention that he made medals of Signor Giovanni Bentivogli, in which he appears alive, and of an infinite number of princes, who would stop in Bologna on their way through the city, whereupon he ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... it will not be quite so lifelike, will it?' suggested Mabel; 'and in "Illusion" you made ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... however well painted—and I have seen many good pictures. It would be absurd to suppose that the one bears any resemblance whatever to the other, for they differ as a living person differs from his portrait, which, however well drawn, cannot be lifelike, for it is plain that it is a dead thing. But let this pass, though to ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... understand and share in some degree my own enthusiasm, but instead he only busied himself in trying to steal near enough to pounce upon one of the many little birds flitting from spray to spray with happy songs. Approaching the beautiful monument where the statues are so lifelike as to appear real companions, sentient and cognizant of one's presence, I chose always a seat where I could gaze upon the face of Patrick Henry, recalling his stirring words, trying to imagine what he would have thought and said now, and almost daring ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... I was standing beside her. She was lying on the long couch under the sycamore tree whither we used to carry her. At first, everything was wholly lifelike and familiar. Sandy was somewhere near. She had the grey camel's hair shawl over her shoulders, which I remember so well, and the white frilled cap drawn loosely together under her chin, over bandages and dressings, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... She rules her places, times, characters, and marshals them with unerring precision. In her special gift for organisation she seems almost unequalled. Her picnics are models for all future and past picnics; her combinations of feelings, of conversation, of gentlemen and ladies, are so natural and lifelike that reading to criticise is impossible to some of us—the scene carries us away, and we forget to look for the art by which it is recorded. Her machinery is simple but complete; events group themselves so vividly and naturally in ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... Tales, which appear in the Arabic as "The Thousand and One Nights," is unknown. The Caliph Haroon al Rusheed, who, figures in so lifelike a manner in many of the stories, was a contemporary of the Emperor Charlemagne, and there is internal evidence that the collection was made in the Arabic language about the end ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... etchings were excellent portraits, wonderfully lifelike heads of the painter's friends and of himself; but when one has looked at the little picture of his mother, he is compelled to shut the portfolio for a moment, because the unbidden tears rise to ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... at the common, so-called Elzevirian, volume of thirteenth-century nouvelles to see the Frenchman as he saw himself. The story of "La Comtesse de Ponthieu" is the more Shakespearean, but "La Belle Jehanne" is the more natural and lifelike. The plot is the common masculine intrigue against the woman, which was used over and over again before Shakespeare appropriated it in "Much Ado"; but its French development is rather in the line of "All's Well." ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... glittered as if lighted with blue flame, and tinkled like the chiming of church bells. In one moment he saw what would require many words to describe. Young hunters, and young maidens—men and women who had sunk in the deep chasms of the glaciers—stood before him here in lifelike forms, with eyes open and smiles on their lips; and far beneath them could be heard the chiming of the church bells of buried villages, where the villagers knelt beneath the vaulted arches of churches in which ice-blocks formed the organ pipes, and the mountain stream ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... lifelike motion all around him. Behind, as in a dream, Ootah heard the whip of Koolotah, and the barking of Koolotah's dogs. For hours his feet moved swiftly and mechanically under him. Once his foot slipped. He swerved to the right. A vast black mouth yawned ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... known as Mme de Villedieu, hastened to supply the popular demand for romantic stories. In drawing their subjects from the histories of more modern courts than those of Rome, Greece, or Egypt they endeavored to make their "historical" romances of passion more lifelike than the heroic romances, and while they avoided the extravagances, they also shunned the voluminousness of the romans a longue haleine. So the stories related in "La Belle Assemblee" by Mme de Gomez, translated by Mrs. Haywood in 1725 and ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... the vessel came, the more Theseus wondered what this immense giant could be, and whether it actually had life or no. For, though it walked, and made other lifelike motions, there yet was a kind of jerk in its gait, which, together with its brazen aspect, caused the young prince to suspect that it was no true giant, but only a wonderful piece of machinery. The figure ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in a window-seat with a paint-box beside her and a drawing of a water-ouzel upon her knee. It was a lifelike sketch, but she had a great capacity for painstaking and she was not altogether pleased with the drawing. The bird stood on a stone an inch or two above a stream, its white breast harmonizing with the flecks of snowy froth, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... symbols on the wall. Behind rises the mighty sepulchre, on the building of which repose to the dead the lives of thousands had been consumed. There sit in a semicircle the solemn judges. Black and sluggish flows the lake. There lies the mummied and royal dead. Dost thou quail at the frown on his lifelike brow? Ha!—bravely done, O artist!—up rise the haggard forms!—pale speak the ghastly faces! Shall not Humanity after death avenge itself on Power? Thy conception, Clarence Glyndon, is a sublime truth; thy design promises renown to genius. Better this magic than the charms ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... enjoy the keenest delight which literature can give,—who cannot employ their minds on fiction unless it be conveyed in poetry. With Thackeray it was essential that the representations made by him should be, to his own thinking, lifelike. A Dobbin seemed to him to be such a one as might probably be met with in the world, whereas to his thinking a Ravenswood was simply a creature of the imagination. He would have said of such, as we would say of female faces by Raffaelle, that ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... stories are universally read. Her admirers are numberless. She is in many respects without a rival in the world of fiction. Her characters are always lifelike, and she makes them talk and act like human beings, subject to the same emotions, swayed by the same passions, and actuated by the same motives which are common among men and women of ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... high, or rescued them from a house seven stories high, bearing them down a ladder seventy-five odd feet long. The fact was, Bobby was a boy of thirteen and there was no chance for much sentiment; so the young lady's regard was real, earnest, and lifelike. ...
— Now or Never - The Adventures of Bobby Bright • Oliver Optic
... unpretending, its ideas simple, its tone unassuming, its sentiments unexaggerated, and its every sentence expressive of the most complete and entire submission to the Church. Yet, at the same time, it would have been difficult anywhere to meet with a more touching and lifelike paraphrase of the Gospel narrative. He thought that a book possessing such qualities deserved to be known on this side the Rhine, and that there could be no reason why it should not be valued for its own sake, ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... and courtiers. Apprentices and citizens thronged the benches in the yard below. The rough mob of the pit inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid transitions, the passionate energy, the reality, the lifelike medley and confusion, the racy dialogue, the chat, the wit, the pathos, the sublimity, the rant and buffoonery, the coarse horrors and vulgar bloodshedding, the immense range over all classes of society, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... very small boy I went to visit my uncle, who, in his young days, had been quite a hunter. Before the fireplace in his library was a huge tiger skin with a particularly lifelike head. The first time I saw it I screamed, and ran and hid. I refused then even to go into the room again. My cousins urged, scolded, pleaded, and laughed at me by turns, but I was obdurate. I would not go where I could see the fearsome thing again, even though ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... the common course of his life. I want to know what he is saying and doing; I want him to turn out the inside of his heart to me, without disguise, without appearing better than he is." We can therefore obtain a more lifelike portraiture by making extracts from her correspondence than by attempting the ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... type of biography. It was felt at once, and has been increasingly felt ever since, that Boswell is so direct and personal that beside him all other biographers seem impersonal and vague, that he is so intimate that he makes all others appear cold and distant, so lifelike that they seem shadowy, so true that they seem false. Now this has commonly been attributed to his habit of noting down on the spot and at the moment anything that struck him in Johnson's talk or ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... all, Dot will be an artist. He has taken a lifelike portrait of my Harold that has delighted Giles, and he vows that he shall have all the advantages he can give him; for Giles is very rich—so rich that I almost tremble at the thought of our responsibilities; only I know my husband is a faithful steward, and makes a good ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... affairs. She never ceased to long for her father, although her life was much brighter and happier than it used to be. Night and morning she prayed that he might be given to her. She would lie awake picturing their happy meeting, and sometimes the visions that she conjured up in the night were so lifelike that she would wake in the morning almost expecting them to prove realities. But the days and weeks went by, and nothing happened to bring any nearer that longed-for day when ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... is the image of what the history it symbolises has more and more become for the world, paler and paler as it recedes into the distance. Criticism came with its appeal from mystical unrealities to originals, and restored no lifelike reality but these transparent shadows, spirits which have ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... lifelike that the boys might well have imagined they were in a zoological garden. Lions, tigers, bears, elephants, snakes, moose, and other specimens of the animal and the reptile tribes were imitated with ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... him. Silently Warwick opened it, showing not Sylvia's face but that of an old woman, rudely drawn in sepia; the brown tints bringing out the marked features as no softer hue could have done, and giving to each line a depth of expression that made the serious countenance singularly lifelike and attractive. ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... us in succession lifelike portraits of the Queen, of her august spouse, of my children, of M. de Montespan, and of myself. Upon some he lavished praise; others he vehemently rebuked; while to others he gave tender pity. Anon he caused the lips of his hearers to curl in irony, and again, roused their ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... though Van Rycke's bulk and the wide shoulders of the Captain were between him and the object they were so intent upon. In each division of the tray, easily seen through the transparent lids, was a carved figure. The weird denizens of the Venusian polar swamps were there, along with lifelike effigies of Terran animals, a Martian sand-mouse in all its monstrous ferocity, and the native animal and reptile life of half a hundred different worlds. Weeks put down a second tray beside the first, again displaying a menagerie ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... chateau on the Koenigsneumarkt, by crossing the inner court of which one reaches his studio. My most delightful moments in Copenhagen were passed there, looking on whilst he worked at the statues of deities and heroes—he himself more illustrious than them all. There they stand, those lifelike and immortal groups, displaying the most wonderful variety of form and attitude, and yet, strange to say, Thorwaldsen scarcely ever makes use of a model. His most recently commenced works were two gigantic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... was only a painting. But the lifelike, somber eyes of the man were focused directly on him. Broom decided he didn't like the effect at all, and hurried into ...
— Viewpoint • Gordon Randall Garrett
... epidermis in Greek statuary. The sculptor's work is apt to be at once finikin and lax; it wants breadth, and it wants decision. Moreover, the material, having little power of resistance, retains but ill what the chisel once impressed; the more delicate markings and the more lifelike touches that it once received, it loses easily through friction or exposure to rough weather. A certain number of the sculptured figures found by M. Di Cesnola at Athienau were discovered under conditions that were quite peculiar, having passed ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... showing that the point of view from which the Zuccone was visible made this coarse treatment imperative, if the spectator below was to see something forcible and impressive. "The eyes," he says, "are made as if they were dug out with a shovel: eyes which would appear lifelike on the ground level would look blind high up on the Campanile, for distance consumes diligence—la lontananza si mangia la diligenzia." The doctrine could not be better stated, and it governs the career of Donatello. There is nothing ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... what he believed to be the romance which Angelica was weaving about his interesting personality. He suggested that she should write it just as she told it. "I have not seen anything like it anywhere," he said; "nothing half so lifelike." ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... and troubled by various thoughts. I could not sleep. I left off plunging into the depths of pessimism, and instead of that began to think of Aniela and call her image before my eyes. This always soothes me. My imagination strained to the utmost point brings her before me so lifelike that I fancy I could speak to her. I recalled to memory the time I had met her first as a grown-up girl. I saw the white, gauzy draperies studded with bunches of violets, the bare shoulders, and the face a little too small but fresh like a spring morning, and so original ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... wicked earls and seven-foot guardsmen of Ouida, Robert W. Chambers and The Duchess. But described realistically and coldbloodedly, with all that wealth of minute and apparently inconsequential detail which Dreiser piles up so amazingly, he becomes a figure astonishingly vivid, lifelike and engrossing. He fits into no a priori theory of conduct or scheme of rewards and punishments; he proves nothing and teaches nothing; the forces which move him are never obvious and frequently unintelligible. But in the end he seems genuinely a man—a ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... this lone figure who stood like Horatius at the bridge—the old simile was always coming to him—and under its influence his despatches took on a vivid coloring and a keen, searching quality that thrilled all who read. And many other newspapers gave the same lifelike impression. ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... own noble words how Sir Thomas Browne's life appeared to himself. Let us now look at how he appeared to other observing men. The Rev. John Whitefoot, the close and lifelong friend of Sir Thomas, has left us this lifelike portrait of the author of Religio Medici. 'For a character of his person, his complexion and his hair were answerable to his name, his stature was moderate, and his habit of body neither fat nor lean, but [Greek text]. In his habit of clothing he had an aversion to all ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... for a nail from some corpse. I wanted a nail; it was a fancy of mine, a little whim. I had found a nice piece of birch-root that I wanted to carve to a pipe-bowl in the shape of a clenched fist; the thumb was to act as a lid, and I wanted a nail to set in, to make it specially lifelike. The ring finger was to have a little ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... is not pleased with Dumas, or with the effectists who delight genteel people at all the theatres, and in most of the romances, what, I ask, will satisfy this extremely difficult Spanish gentleman? He would pretend, very little. Give him simple, lifelike character; that is all he wants. "For me, the only condition of character is that it be human, and that is enough. If I wished to know what was human, I should ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... diameter". And as it is with these things, so it is with all knowledge. Bold indeed must be the man who can define the point at which belief passes into certainty. Even the "fine frenzy" of the poet, his pictures of gods and heroes, are as lifelike to himself and to his hearers as though he ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... Seti I, constructor of magnificent edifices; Ramses III, oppressor of the Israelites; and many other famous kings, queens, priests, and warriors. The wooden statue of a village sheik with good-natured face and crystal eyes, and the tinted limestone, lifelike statues of Prince Rahotep and his wife Nofret, could they have spoken, might have revealed the secrets of ages long before the times of the mummies; and the gray stone figure of Chepren, which was found ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... Grandmama, and Mrs. Hilary echoed "Most," at which Grandmama eyed her with a twinkle, knowing that it bored her, like all the Russians. Mrs. Hilary cared nothing for style ("Literature!" said Lady Adela. "Give me something to read!"); she liked nice lifelike books about people as she believed them to be, and though she was quite prepared to believe that real Russians were like Russians in books, she felt that she did not care to meet either of them. But ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... on lutes and tambourines behind them, and accompanying the instruments with their voices. While this was going on a puppet-show was introduced, in which the figures acted a play and danced almost in as lifelike a manner as performers on a stage. The nautch-girls continued their performances throughout the whole evening, but the other entertainments were varied. The puppet-show was succeeded by a band of tumblers, ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... as M. Jourdain wrote prose, and who do not even suspect that they possess that chief attribute of literary style—naturalness. What pure, what ready wit! What good humor, what unconstraint, what delightful ease! What a series of charming portraits, each more lifelike, more animated, still better than all the others! "These little miniatures—due to the brush of a woman of the world—are better worth studying than is many a picture ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... never thought I should be fool enough to roll up, so she won't expect me. As a matter of fact, if he's described any one, he's probably drawn a lifelike word-picture ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... ses Peter, who was watching Ginger pretending to give Sam Small the 'arf-dollar, and Sam pretending in a most lifelike manner to ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs |
