"Literal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... go to France," said the literal youth. "I want to go up to Michilimackinac, and there is the great Lake Huron. That is enough for me. If the ocean is any bigger I do not want ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... may sound, it is the literal fact that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his widowed mother. Furthermore, the prayer was not made to him, but offered in secret and in all sincerity at ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... had preached about it for the last fifteen years as Mr. Headley did last Sunday, if they had told people plainly that, if the cholera was God's judgment at all, it was His judgment of the sin of dirt, and that the repentance which He required was to wash and be clean in literal earnest, the cholera would be ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... would enable me, as he said, directly to execute the legacy parts of the will; and he would needs at the instant force into my hands a paper relating to that subject. I put it into my pocket-book, without looking into it; telling him, that as I hoped he would do all in his power to promote a literal performance of the will, I must beg his advice and assistance in ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... Nothing so terrorizes a blushing girl as a blushing man. And then—though they did sometimes digress—Clotilde and her partner met to talk "business" in a purely literal sense. ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... "purpose"), and, when so "acquired," then began to serve the "purpose" assigned, the argument would not have involved the fallacy which we are now considering. But, as it stands, the argument reverts to the teleology of pre-Darwinian days—or the hypothesis of a "purpose" in the literal sense which sees the end from the beginning, instead of a "purpose" in the metaphorical sense of an adaptation that is evolved by the very modifications ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... the dedication of his own system, put into a poetical dress by Mr. Pope, laid his lordship under the necessity of never resenting any injury done to him by the poet afterwards. Mr. Pope told no more than literal truth, in calling Lord Bolingbroke his guide, philosopher, and friend." The existence of this very manuscript volume was authenticated by Lord Bathurst, in a conversation with Dr. Blair and others, where he said, "he had read the MS. in Lord Bolingbroke's handwriting, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... the afternoon was an apple-guessing contest, the names of different varieties of apples to be guessed from literal definitions, thus: The Royal Apple—. King. After that there was an apple-peeling contest in Hallowe'en fashion and each girl threw the peeling over her left shoulder to discover the initial of ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... between the various sections of the Allied missions and American officials—beginning with that between the President and Mr. Balfour—were councils of war. They symbolized the joining of hands across the sea in a literal sense—across a sea infested with German submarines, which the envoys, incidentally, escaped both in coming ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... even to violence; to refrain from telling him would seem like condoning Don Carlos's conduct. She was torn by conflicting emotions and could not make up her mind how to act. Act, however, she did, in a literal sense, for although her heart was still throbbing wildly and her mind was in a whirl, she managed somehow to ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... check their merriment. Perhaps the time was at hand when they would not have much occasion for laughter, and he, with all his seriousness and his humdrum, literal way of taking things, did not consider that it was part of his duty to be melancholy, preferring rather to close his eyes or look the other way when his men were enjoying themselves. But his attention was attracted to a second group not far away, another soldier ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... sense not entirely literal, for reasons which are not necessary to be explained, this man of wondrous wisdom saw that he had been made a dupe. Cunning as a fox were his would-be friends; but having got him to the bush, there they let him gambol as he would, ensnaring him to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... to me (a me lo 'ntrodussi); but Boccaccio here uses the word introdurre in its rarer literal sense to lead, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... that he was the idealist historian of the poet, and that the adventures which he related of him were not to be taken in the literal and Judaic sense. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... none for her, until she had laid the Atlantic between herself and St. Sebastian's. Life was to be for her a Bay of Biscay; and it was odds but she had first embarked upon this billowy life from the literal Bay of Biscay. Chance ordered otherwise. Or, as a Frenchman says with eloquent ingenuity, in connection with this story, 'Chance is but the pseudonyme of God for those particular cases which he does not subscribe openly with his own sign manual.' She crept up stairs to ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... rescue mankind from their various errors, and to reveal a new system of truth and perfection. The most learned of the fathers, by a very singular condescension, have imprudently admitted the sophistry of the Gnostics. [291] Acknowledging that the literal sense is repugnant to every principle of faith as well as reason, they deem themselves secure and invulnerable behind the ample veil of allegory, which they carefully spread over every tender part of the Mosaic ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... Plutarch may mean that Pompeius really attempted to enter the gate in a chariot drawn by elephants, and finding that he could not do it, he got out and mounted a chariot drawn by horses. This is perhaps nearer the literal version of the passage, and agrees better with Plinius (N. ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... the weak or the base in you, will often persuade you what fine and splendid books they are. (Of course, I use the word "true" in a wide and essential significance. I do not necessarily mean true to literal fact; I mean true to the plane of experience in which the book moves. The truthfulness of *Ivanhoe*, for example, cannot be estimated by the same standards as the truthfulness of Stubbs's *Constitutional History*.) In reading a book, a sincere questioning of oneself, "Is it true?" ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... human reason and the most urgent necessities of the moral life. The doctrine of an atonement is intelligible only in so far as it too comes within the range of spiritual experience. The apostolic language took colour from the traditions concerning sacrifice. Much has been taken by the Church as literal dogmatic statement which should be taken as more figure of ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... material and literal in their conversations, and one cannot say the slightest word to the women in jest, however slight it be; for the most discreet thing that they will answer to one will be, Tampalasanca, which means, "You are a [232] shameless fellow;" and, if not that, [233] a tempest of words, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... body, who to save us died; The faithful this thing signified receive: What is't those faithful then partake or leave? For what is signified and understood, Is, by her own confession, flesh and blood. Then, by the same acknowledgment, we know They take the sign, and take the substance too. The literal sense is hard to flesh and blood, But nonsense never can ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... closely packed together. Hence, every living germ contains all the organs and parts of the body, in the form and arrangement they will present later, already within it, and thus the whole embryological process is merely an evolution in the literal sense of the word, or an unfolding, of parts that were pre-formed and folded up in it. So, for instance, we find in the hen's egg not merely a simple cell, that divides and subdivides and forms germinal layers, and at last, after all ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... out of existence. 'Significance,' in the sense of standing as the sign of other mental states, is taken to be the sole function of what mental states we have; and from the perception that our little primitive sensation has as yet no significance in this literal sense, it is an easy step to call it first meaningless, next senseless, then vacuous, and finally to brand it as absurd and inadmissible. But in this universal liquidation, this everlasting slip, slip, slip, of direct ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... name of Lady Bray to conjure popularity, she had set up her establishment immediately after her husband's death. Then the old lady herself had fallen asleep—in her case a literal description of her disease. One night they had put her quietly to bed as usual, and in the morning she was still asleep—a slumber which really must ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... guide with whom I talked, who had lived in and about the canon for twenty-six years, said, "While we have been sitting here, the canon has widened and deepened"; which was, of course, the literal truth, the mathematical truth, but the widening and deepening could not have been ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... environment is in which the individual must live, the longer is the period of infancy needed in which the necessary habits and capacities may be acquired. In the human being the period of infancy extends in a literal sense through the first five years of the individual's life. But in civilized societies it extends factually much longer. By the end of the first five years the child's physical infancy is over. It can take care of itself so far as actually ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... as they were meant; not understanding every thing perversely in the absolute and literal sense, but giving fair construction as to an after-dinner conversation; allowing for the rashness and necessary incompleteness of first thoughts; and not remembering, for the purpose of an after taunt, words spoken peradventure after the fourth glass. The Author wishes ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... quite literal. I would have it begin with the engagement. I would have the betrothed—the mistress and the lover—come before the magistrate or the minister, and declare their motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with them, and represent that they ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... benevolence is not an ultimate fact, but an emanation from self-love, through the association of ideas, it has been fancied that these writers dispute the existence of disinterested benevolence or sympathy. Now, the selfish system, in its literal import, is flatly inconsistent with obvious facts, but this is not the system contended for by the writers in question. Still, this distortion has been laid hold of by the opponents of utility, and maintained to be a necessary part of that system; hence the supporters of utility ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... did not jounce up and down on the diving board to start. He simply leaped upward, and went ceilingward for easily fifteen feet, and hung stationary for a full breath, and then began to descend in literal slow motion. He fell only two and a half feet the first second, and five feet more the one after, and twelve and a half after that.... It took him over four seconds to drop forty-five feet into the water, and the splash ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Interior, certifies, That the present document is a literal copy of the original, which is deposited in the Secretaryship under his charge; in proof of which he signs it, with the approval of the President of the Revolutionary Government in Bacoor, the 6th ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... humour in narrative, adhering in the most literal manner to facts, and yet contriving to bring them out by that graphic literalness under their most ludicrous aspect, what can equal St. Luke's description of the riot at Ephesus? The picture of the narrow ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... as well as in Latin or Greek. Yet the spirit of the ancient languages, further is declared to be superior to that of the modern. I allow this to be the case; but I do not find that the English style is improved by learning Greek. It is known that literal translations are miserably bad, and yet young scholars are taught to translate, word for word, faithful to their dictionaries. Hence those who do not make a peculiar study of their own language, will not improve in it by learning, in this manner, Greek and Latin. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... What, therefore, is his authority on the matter—creation by a Deity—which cannot be tested? What sort of "inspiration" is that which leads to the promulgation of a fable as divine truth, which forces those who believe in that inspiration to hold on, like grim death, to the literal truth of the fable, which demoralises them in seeking for all sorts of sophistical shifts to bolster up the fable, and which finally is discredited and repudiated when the fable is finally proved to be a fable? If ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... "Old Songs of the Dales," appended to his T' Hunt o' Yatton Brigg, p. 37, second edition. 2. Gloomy. 3. Thickening. 4. The literal meaning of this line is, When the death-salve bedaubs a wrinkled brow, rites such as these do not fetch (i.e. supply) one's want. The reference is to extreme unction. 5. Window shutters. 6. The hounds of death. 7. Stalk. 8. Stealthy. 9. Little. ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... on these topics—as how could there be under the wayward teaching of Batoche? But her intuitions were crystal clear. There were no breaks, no obscurations in her spiritual vision. It was evident that she had studied and communed direct with nature, and that her soul had grown in literal contact with the winds and the flowers, the trees and the water courses, and the pure untrammelled elements ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... as he was; nay, I should have thought with less danger of my life. But he is a peculiar man; and I repeat it, we have hot heard the last of him. You will find that by serving the King he understands in a very literal sense; and there is a young gentleman(52) who it is believed intends those words shall not ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... its derivatives 'sphery,' 'insphere,' and 'unsphere' (Il Pens. 88), is used by Milton with a literal reference to the cosmical framework as a whole (see Hymn Nat. 48) or to some portion of it. In Shakespeare 'sphere' occurs in the wider sense of 'the path in which anything moves,' and it is ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... are warranted in assuming that the figures were destroyed by Ludlow's troopers when he garrisoned the belfry. But such an assumption requires many facts to support it which are not forthcoming. We have no proof that Hollar's sketch was intended to be a literal transcript of what he saw; it is quite possible that for the sake of effect he preferred to complete the design according to the supposed intention of its builders. We are not certain that the niches were all filled originally; ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... ministry, and the idea of her lecturing on Darwin or Herbert Spencer was deeply shocking to her mother and aunts. In one sense the family had staked its literary as well as its spiritual hopes on the literal inspiration of Genesis: what became of "The Fall of Man" in ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... things in this world," said Gordon with gloomy reflection, "or else simple things which we are strange not to believe. Sometimes I think people will have to take to the Bible again in that literal sense in which so many are now inclined to disregard it. Well, Elliot, I honestly feel that you have nothing to fear in taking poor little Clemency. I should tell you if I thought otherwise. She will make you happy, and I can think of no reason to warn you ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... which the weight of tradition and polite taste were all on the side of Pope. What Theobald had done, in modern terms, was to open the rift between criticism and scholarship or, in eighteenth-century terms, to proclaim himself a "literal critic" and to insist upon the need for "literal criticism" in the understanding and just appreciation of an older writer. The new concept, which Theobald owed largely to Richard Bentley as primate of the classical scholars, ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... few months later, in this secluded spot, the Countess Franceschini gave birth to a son, whom her parents lost no time in conveying to a place of concealment and safety. The murder took place a fortnight after this event. I give the rest of the story in an almost literal translation from a contemporary narrative, which was published, immediately after the Count's execution, in the form of a pamphlet[22]—the then ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Caroline, that is an excellent objection. You might also, with some propriety, object to the term equilibrium being applied to a body that is without weight; but I know of no expression that would explain my meaning so well. You must consider it, however, in a figurative rather than a literal sense; its strict meaning is an equal diffusion. We cannot, indeed, well say by what power it diffuses itself equally, though it is not surprising that it should go from the parts which have the most to those which have the least. This subject is best explained by a theory suggested ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... in the text some extracts from Raffles' translations, it may be well to say a word as to the value of these versions. What Vreede says of a particular passage is true of these renderings in general: "They are not literal translations, but the spirit of ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... "miracle" could not have been announced at a more opportune time. For some years the scientific world had been agog over the question whether such a form of lightning as that reported—appearing in a clear sky, and hurling literal thunderbolts—had real existence. Such cases had been reported often enough, it is true. The "thunderbolts" themselves were exhibited as sacred relics before many an altar, and those who doubted their authenticity had ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... literal maniac is different from all other persons in dispute in this vital respect: that he is the only person whom we can, with a final lucidity, declare that we do not want. He is almost always miserable ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... saukir, one hired by the day, week, or year. Now, the term here translated "bondman" is the generic EVEDH, evedh, elsewhere translated "servant," and therefore should have been thus translated here, unless a different rendering is required by the context. The more literal reading of the Hebrew is, "And thy men-servants and thy maid-servants which shall be to thee from the nations around you, of them shall ye procure the man-servant and maid-servant." What, then, was the difference between the Hebrew ...
— Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible? • Isaac Allen
... which have guided me on the present occasion are the same as those followed in the translation of Schiller's complete Poems that was published by me in 1851, namely, as literal a rendering of the original as is consistent with good English, and also a very strict adherence to the metre of the original. Although translators usually allow themselves great license in both these points, it appears to me that by so doing ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... literal meaning, means an infusion of intelligence that lifts up the minds of man, and it is generally so accepted by the world at large, but education, as far as Catholicism goes, means only a rehearsal of abominations, which have been practiced upon the followers of this creed ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... at home was not in the literal sense of the proverb. It turned out that he had been neighbouring to some purpose. Old Simpson could not move himself about indoors or attend to his work without, and Jim, who had not before this attached ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... departments of the drama, will hereafter be the subject of our investigation. We shall also, on the other hand, show that without them a drama becomes altogether prosaic and empirical, that is to say, patched together by the understanding out of the observations it has gathered from literal reality. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... stroke of fortune that fixed Ann Arbor as the location of the University of Michigan. A literal interpretation of history may suggest that politics and speculation had their share in the selection of the site, but these factors might have operated quite as easily in favor of some other Michigan village. The fact remains that Ann Arbor was chosen. ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... a literal copy of a notice served by a worthy inhabitant of Gravesend upon his neighbor, whose fowl ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... religion in any way. Theology is a field in which I have had no training, but that is the very reason why I dare write of it. I do not even assume that there is a God in the traditional sense. The idea is too great to be made concrete and literal. No single fact of nature can be fully understood by our finite minds. But I do feel vaguely that the laws that compass us, and make our lives possible, point always on—"beyond the realms of time and space"—toward the existence of a mighty overruling spirit. If this is a ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... religious book, and, instead of understanding each sentence according to the main purpose and intention, interpret every phrase in its literal sense as conveying, and designed to convey, a metaphysical verity, or historical fact:—what a strange medley of doctrines should we not educe? And yet this is the way in which we are constantly in the habit of treating the books of ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... actual experience. An Essene he never became, but he remained throughout his life very partial to certain forms of the Essene belief, more especially those which coincided with the Greco-Roman superstitions of the time, such as the literal prediction of future events, the meaning of dreams, the significance of omens.[2] These ideas, handed down from primitive Israel, had lived on among the masses of the people, though discarded by the learned teachers, ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... the old Northern Races should have held a strong attraction for Borrow is not to be wondered at. His restless nature and his roving habits were well in tune with the spirit of the old Heroic Ballads; whilst his taste for all that was mythical or vagabond (vagabond in the literal, and not in the conventional, sense of the word) would prompt him to welcome with no common eagerness the old Poems dealing with matters supernatural and legendary. Has he not himself recorded how, when ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... is a good dry farmer on a small scale, and farming is a laborious business in the shifting sands of Hopiland. Their corn is their literal bread of life and they usually keep one year's crop stored. These people have known utter famine and even starvation in the long ago, and their traditions have made them wise. The man tends the fields and flocks, makes mocassins, does the ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... A literal translation has been adhered to as far as possible—one or two remarks at the close being the only additions. So if any defects exist in the work they belong solely to the translator, whose aim has not been rhetorical composition, ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... expanded the first line of 13, as a closely literal version would scarcely be intelligent to the general reader. The sense is that the evil consequences, that have now overtaken thee, arose even then when the beneficial counsels of Vidura were ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... graver persons and graver concerns, celebrate the most drunken and disgusting orgies; where obscenity and blasphemy formed the seasoning of conversation. For the profligate companions of these revels, he invented the appellation of his roues, the literal meaning of which is men broken on the wheel; intended, no doubt, to express their broken-down characters and dislocated fortunes; although a contemporary asserts that it designated the punishment that most of them merited. Madame de Labran, who was present at one of the regent's suppers, ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... of the boy and the wolf, had then a literal application. Every child in the days of our fathers knew the story of Putnam, and the she-wolf which he dragged from its den. This and similar tales go far to make up the popular reputation of the hero, and it was as a man of the people ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... holding a horse, or running errands, earns threepence, and puts it into a pocket with a hole at the bottom, to the man or woman who puts the savings of years into a rotten speculation, all know the literal meaning of Haggai's text, 'He that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... literal translation of the word biology, science of life, is full explanation of its scope. A course in the subject is not Zoology, nor Botany, nor Bacteriology, nor Physiology—but rather all of these in one. Biology should logically follow the nature ...
— Adequate Preparation for the Teacher of Biological Sciences in Secondary Schools • James Daley McDonald
... day one of the Fathers, as the villagers called them, made his rounds, starting soon after sunrise and sometimes not getting back till after dark, for Father Philip had no belief in the efficacy of fasting and meditation and prayer unless they were supplemented by a literal obedience to the commands of Him who went about doing good. When priest or deacon entered the Retreat, no matter what he was, rich or poor, wedded or single, he had to take the vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. When he left to go back into ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... to understand this. Hostilities having commenced, however, but a few days after Berthier's arrival at Munich, this too celebrated chief of staff was so foolish as to adhere to a literal obedience of the order he had received, without conceiving its obvious intention: he not only desired the army to assemble at Ratisbon, but even obliged Davoust to return toward that city, when that marshal had had the ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... some other true story and end with some marvellous coincidence or miraculous conversion. Most days in real life end exactly as they began, so far as visible results are concerned. We do not find, as a rule, when we go to the houses—the literal little mud houses, I mean, of literal heathendom—that anyone inside has been praying we might come. I read a missionary story "founded on fact" the other day, and the things that happened in that ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... historically interesting) passages of the Divine Comedy, and the popular songs of Tigri's collection, are as much the outcome of these Tuscan mountains and hills, as is any picture in which we recognise their outlines and colours. Indeed, it happens that of literal rendering (as distinguished from ever-present reference to quality of air or light, to climbing, to rock and stone as such) there is little in the Commedia, none at all in either the old or the more modern lyrics, and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... the non-literal application of the scriptures. Her father very rarely read, but he had collected many books of reproductions, and he would sit and look at these, curiously intent, like a child, yet with a passion that was not childish. He loved the early Italian painters, but ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... thought, evaded the spirit of Mr. Skinner's ultimatum while conforming to its literal terms, Cappy Ricks hurried home leaving his general manager a stunned and horrified man. In this instance, however, Cappy had erred in his strategy. Skinner was calm, cold-blooded, suave, politic and deferential, ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... this time had ceased to be literal, except so far as it applied to Dick. Other cadets at his table talked among themselves, though never to Prescott. Greg, being Dick's roommate, was the sole cadet exempted ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... old and tolerant—except of novelties—she has long since ceased to attack them, and they have themselves mostly lost all definite religious meaning. As the old pagan faith decayed, they tended to become in a literal sense "superstition," something standing over, like shells from which the living occupant has gone. They are now often mere "survivals" in the technical folk-lore sense, pieces of custom separated from the beliefs that once gave them meaning, performed only because in a vague sort of ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... longer." But the Marcellus of this special occasion was mute. "Longer, longer," whispered the prompter. Then out spoke Marcellus, to the consternation of his associates: "Well, say two hundred!" So prosaic a Marcellus is only to be matched by that literal Guildenstern who, when besought by Hamlet to "Play upon this pipe," was so moved by the urgent manner of the tragedian, that he actually made the attempt, seizing the instrument, and evoking from it ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... negro was ploughing, with a single ox harnessed in some primitive manner,—with pieces of wood, for the most part, as well as I could make out through an opera-glass. The soil offered the least possible hindrance, and both he and the ox seemed to be having a literal "walk-over." Beyond him—a full half-mile away, perhaps—another man was ploughing with a mule; and in another direction a third was doing likewise, with a woman following in his wake. A colored boy of seventeen—I guessed his age at twenty-three—came up the road in ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... enormities Mr. Everett, who has a light hand in writing upon some subjects, comprizes with great tenderness in the following expressions, "our copies of the New Testament by the lapse of time, have suffered some literal alterations, which may have fallen occasionally on the quoted texts (he is trying to justify the writers of the New Testament, for quoting the Old Testament otherwise than it is written) and thus made them to differ from the reading of ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... generate thoughtfulness. The town is old, and very mean, but has, I think, a market. In this house, the Welsh translation of the Old Testament was made. The Welsh singing Psalms were written by Archdeacon Price. They are not considered as elegant, but as very literal, and accurate. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... I was at school I felt exceedingly obliged to Homer's messengers for the exact literal fidelity with which they delivered their messages. The seven or eight lines of good Homeric Greek in which they had received the commands of Agamemnon or Achilles they recited to whomsoever the message was to be carried; and as they repeated them verbatim, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... "good hap" it had been to "do some little service" in promoting them. The object of the writer is declared to be, that he might be "more capable to assist in lifting up a standard against the infernal enemy." The literal meaning of this expression is, that he might be enabled to get up another witchcraft delusion under his own special management and control. Can any thing be imagined more artful and dishonest than the plan he had contrived to keep himself out of ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... that he takes this figure literally. It is his effort to avoid materializing the mind that forces him to hold the position which he does. To put the mind in the brain is to make of it a material thing; to make it parallel to the brain, in the literal sense of the word, would be just as bad. All that we may understand him to mean is that mental phenomena and physical, although they are related, cannot be built into the one series of causes and effects. He is apt to speak ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... and terrific Scythe of Time (for I now discovered the literal import of that classical phrase) had not stopped, nor was it likely to stop, in its career. Down and still down, it came. It had already buried its sharp edge a full inch in my flesh, and my sensations grew indistinct and confused. At one time I fancied myself in Philadelphia with the stately Dr. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... varied assortment of "Minenwerfer" with which to entertain us at all hours, day and night. A good many people, even among the soldiers themselves, think that Minenwerfer or "Minnie" for short, is the name of the projectile or torpedo, while, as a matter of fact, it is the instrument which throws it; a literal translation being "mine-thrower." In the same way they often speak of the shells thrown by trench mortars as "trench mortars" themselves. Now the family of "Minnies" is a large one and includes every device, from the ancient types used by the Greeks and Romans, with springs of ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... by far the grandest and most Aryan-like character ever evolved from a savage mind, and who is more congenial to a reader of Shakespeare and Rabelais than any deity ever imagined out of Europe, there are found strange giants: some literal Jotuns of stone and ice, sorcerers who become giants like Glooskap, at will; the terrible Chenoo, a human being with an icy-stone heart, who has sunk to a cannibal and ghoul; all the weird monsters and horrors of the Eskimo mythology, witches and demons, inherited ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 'Chinese ravs' n. Jiao-zi (steamed or boiled) or Guo-tie (pan-fried). A Chinese appetizer, known variously in the plural as dumplings, pot stickers (the literal translation of guo-tie), and (around Boston) 'Peking Ravioli'. The term 'rav' is short for 'ravioli', which among hackers always means the Chinese kind rather than the Italian kind. Both consist of a filling in a pasta shell, but the Chinese kind includes ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... its bearer. Hence the conviction which he brings with him when he tells us the impossible. And then his style, in its ardent and luminous simplicity, flexible to every bend of the spirit which it clothes with flesh, helps him in the idiomatic translation of dreams. The visions of Swedenborg are literal translations of the imagination, and need to be retranslated. Coleridge is equally faithful to the thing seen and to the laws of that new world into which ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... the facts of each individual nation, as the written word is translatable into its language, but appertaining to the realm of the imagination rather than to that of the understanding, and precious for spiritual rather than literal truths. More briefly, I have wondered whether she may not intend that such details as whether the Virgin was white or black are of very little importance in comparison with the basing of ethics on a story that shall appeal to black races as ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... is perhaps the most literal translation of [Greek: kosmos], which, however, here means the whole preparations for the funeral. Something like it is implied in Hamlet, ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... henceforth to have their wives in common. Dee, a little startled, inquired whether the spirits might not mean that they were to live in common harmony and good-will? Kelly tried again, with apparent reluctance, and said the spirits insisted upon the literal interpretation. The poor fanatic, Dee, resigned himself to their will; but it suited Kelly's purpose to appear coy a little longer. He declared that the spirits must be spirits, not of good, but of evil; and refused to consult them any more. He thereupon took his departure, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... has a wealthy aunt who is very fond of him, or he is employed by a business that is growing fast, or he owns property which seems sure to increase in value, or some other good fortune is likely to befall him. The literal meaning of "prospect" is "looking forward." So most of us have come to think of our prospects as just possible occurrences in the future, to the happening of which we may look ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... obtained by suggestion. The technique is varied and interesting, but the whole drawing lacks that individual something which we call Style. In the Lalanne drawings we see foliage convincingly represented by means of the mere outlines and a few subtle strokes of the pen. There is no attempt at the literal rendering of natural objects in detail, all is accomplished by suggestion: and while I do not wish to be understood as insisting upon such a severely simple style, much less upon the purist theory that the function of the pen is concerned with form alone, I would impress upon the ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... woodenly for a while. His was a literal mind, and he knew nothing of Sally's finances beyond the fact that when he had first met her she had come into a legacy of some kind. Moreover, he had been hugely impressed by Fillmore's magnificence. It seemed plain enough that the Nicholases ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... moved swiftly to execute her bidding did Venters's clogged brain grasp at literal meanings. He leaped to catch ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... we know him, as we know no other man whose face we never saw, whose voice we never heard. Boswell boasted that he had "Johnsonized the land," and that he had shown Johnson in his book as no man had ever been shown in a book before; and the boast is after a hundred years seen to be a literal statement of fact. But after all Boswell did not make Johnson's reputation. On the contrary, it was Johnson's name that sold Boswell's book. No man owes so much to his biographer as Johnson to Boswell, but that must not make us forget that Johnson was the most famous man ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... would annually sell more than it would buy, and that a balance in gold and silver would be annually returned to it. It is upon this principle that the treaty of commerce between England and Portugal, concluded in 1703 by Mr Methuen, has been so much commended. The following is a literal translation of that treaty, which consists of three ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... where it most obscured—or least distinctly illustrated—its idea; and I re-wrote a few sentences which I now offer in their amended form. A phrase or two in "One Word More" has been altered for the sake of more literal accuracy. No other correction worth specifying has ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... are inconsistent with facts. Some widows are virgins, but there is not always a father or mother to give them away by the formula of "virgin gift." The women all have a notion, taken from the words of a heroine in the Mahabharata, that a woman can be given but once.[1299] They cling to the literal formula. By the form of first marriage also a woman passes into the kin of her husband for seven births (generations), the limit of degrees of consanguinity. It is irreligious and impossible to change the kin again, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... the present day a University is, in England, a corporation whose power of granting (p. 005) certain degrees is recognised by the State; but nothing of this is implied in the word "University." Its literal meaning is simply an association. Recent writers on University history have pointed out that Universitas vestra, in a letter addressed to a body of persons, means merely "the whole of you" and that the term was by no means restricted to learned bodies. It was frequently applied to municipal ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... when he is a poet, a co-respondent, or a neologist it is thought rather a pity; and he is spoken of in undertones. Neology is considered especially reprehensible. The junior member of the Board of Revenue, or even the Commissioner of a division (if he be pukka)[M], may question the literal inspiration of Genesis; but it is not good form for a Collector to tamper with his Bible. A Collector should have no leisure for ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... respect of longevity, must be reckoned Lady Louisa Stuart, sister and heir of the last Earl of Traquair. She was a friend and correspondent of Sir Walter Scott, who in describing "Tully Veolan" drew Traquair House with literal exactness, even down to the rampant bears which still guard the locked entrance-gates against all comers until the Royal Stuarts shall return to claim their own. Lady Louisa Stuart lived to be ninety-nine, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... being like burning-glasses. The objects must also be far enough apart for contrast—the farther the better, provided the distance be not so great as to change humour into the ludicrous. Referring to the desirability of a good literal translation of Homer, Beattie makes the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... hospitals and universities of Europe. It was proved that alcohol was not a remedy which was specifically required in any disease; also that its value was most seriously questioned as a general remedy by many able men, and its substitution was practical and literal in most cases. Statistics were presented proving that alcohol was dangerous, and never a safe remedy, and laboratory investigations confirming and explaining its action were given. Since then a sharp reaction has been going on in Europe, and ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... an art which merely addresses the eye; it does not in any particular exercise the moral sense. And second, painting, in common with all the other arts, implies the dangerous quality of imagination. A man of imagination is never moral; he outsoars literal demarcations and reviews life under too many shifting lights to rest content with the invidious distinctions of ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... still better, telegraph, since the wire is so handy—on business. Well, of course, it is for you to judge whether you will add postscripts of another sort. There, you make me say more than a woman ought, because you are so obtuse and literal. Good afternoon—good-bye! This will be ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... called the perfection of human nature? Is there one way of living concerning which we may say that whosoever adopts it has, in so far as he does adopt it, discerned and attained the purpose of his being? The literal force of the word in our text gives pertinence to that question, for it distinctly means 'having reached the end.' And if that be taken as the meaning, there need be no doubt about the answer. Grand old words have taught us long ago 'Man's chief end is to glorify God ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... accuracy of some of Borrow's statements in his books, to which Martineau replied that he could not be entirely depended on; not that he meant to mislead or misrepresent, but his imagination, or some eccentricity in his mental equipment, caused him occasionally to depart from literal fact. Very possibly; but Borrow's imagination brought him much nearer to essential truth than adherence to what they supposed to be literal facts could ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... conceived an affection for a young nobleman called Walther, and had promised to marry him at an early date. Here, then, was a complication indeed, and Hans was sorely puzzled to know how to act, while the unfortunate Minna was equally perplexed, and for many weeks she endured literal torment, her heart being racked by a constant storm of emotions. She was deeply attached to Walther, and she felt that she would never be able to forgive herself if she broke her promise to him and failed to bring him the happiness which both were confident their marriage would produce; ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... realises passion and suffering with such objective force. The word "suffering" drops from his pen in curiously unexpected contexts. The fact of it seems to obsess him. Yet it is no morbid obsession. He seems to be dominated by sympathy in its literal meaning, and it gives his work a surprising richness of texture.... I dare press this book upon all such as need something more than mere yarns, who have an eye for admirably sincere workmanship and are interested in their fellows—fellows of all ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... of the soul is partly mythical or figurative, and partly literal. Not that either he or we can draw a line between them, or say, 'This is poetry, this is philosophy'; for the transition from the one to the other is imperceptible. Neither must we expect to find in ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... error," said the literal Agatha, as she smoothed down Little Poll's skirts and twisted her ringlets into formal corkscrews. "Right THERE, you are in error, my dear. The reason I told Robert to marry you was because he said to me, when he suggested going after you to stay the night with me, that he had seen you in ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... interminably, one hardly knows whether to or from battle with the English and the Austrians, from victory or defeat:—Well! he has become like one of our family. "He will go far!" my father declares. He would go far, in the literal sense, if he might—to Paris, to Rome. It must be admitted that our Valenciennes is a quiet, nay! a sleepy place; sleepier than ever since it became French, and ceased to be so near the frontier. The grass is growing deep on our old ramparts, and ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... to the impatient, who want results to come as they walk. Probably this is a reason that it is occasionally said that Emerson has no vital message for the rank and file. He has no definite message perhaps for the literal, but messages are all vital, as much, by reason of his indefiniteness, as in spite ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... The son [Greek: Deute paides,] etc., was written by Riga, who perished in the attempt to revolutionize Greece. This translation is as literal as the author could make it in verse. It is of the same measure as that of the original. [For the original, see Poetical Works, 1891, Appendix, p. 792. For Constantine Rhigas, see Poetical Works, 1899, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... study; and this is essentially the case even with the school which in many respects was the most unmistakably decorative and idealistic in intention: the school of Giotto. The Giottesques are more than decorative artists, they are decorators in the most literal sense. Painting with them is merely one of the several arts and crafts enslaved by mediaeval architecture and subservient to architectural effects. Their art is the only one which is really and successfully architecturally decorative; and to appreciate ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... on his capital, a nation may do so for a time by living upon its capital, giving to other nations by means of an increased debt a lien upon its future wealth. But a whole industrial community can never live upon its capital, can never in the literal sense of the term "spend too much." This statement requires a single qualification. While a community can never by "spending" deplete its capital, while it cannot increase its "spending" without at the same time increasing its real capital,[169] it will ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... hold new growth, Whose faiths are clamped against access of wisdom; Fraught with some sadness, too, for those just souls Who, clothed in rigid teachings found too scant, Are fain to piece the dear accustomed garb, Till here a liberal, there a literal fragment, Here new, there old, here bright, there dark, disclose Their vestiture a strange discordant motley. But O rare motley,—starred with thirst of truth, Patched with desire of wisdom, zoned about With ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... as the Holy Spirit uses the instrument that the new birth results. "It is the Spirit that giveth life" (John vi. 63, A. R. V.). In 2 Cor. iii. 6, we are told that "the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life."(1) This is sometimes interpreted to mean that the literal interpretation of Scripture, the interpretation that takes it in its strict grammatical sense and makes it mean what it says, kills; but that some spiritual interpretation, an interpretation that "gives the spirit of the passage," by making it mean ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... of love and life, the translations of which from Bengali are published in this book, were written much earlier than the series of religious poems contained in the book named Gitanjali. The translations are not always literal—the originals being sometimes ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... ill-matched rivals, without noticing at the same time Dryden's quarrel with Rochester, who appears to have played off Settle in opposition to him, as absolutely, and nearly as successfully, as Settle ever played off the literary [literal?] puppets, for which, in the ebb of ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... great wonder, which this learned philosopher will render visible to them." Yet all this while the royal family have not so much as even thought of seeing the wonders of Mr. Katterfelto. This kind of rhodomontade is very finely expressed in English by the word puff, which in its literal sense, signifies a blowing, or violent gust of wind, and in the metaphorical sense, a ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... like him, of course," gasped Anne, wondering if she were telling the literal truth. Certainly she did not DISlike Billy. But could the indifferent tolerance with which she regarded him, when he happened to be in her range of vision, be considered positive enough for liking? WHAT was Jane trying ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... You are too literal, Marchese! Of course I jest—you could not suppose me to be in earnest! But I am sure we are passing through the waves of a new ether—not altogether suited to the average human being. The average human being is not made to inhabit the higher ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... white stone houses, literally blazing with light. I had never imagined such a beautiful, attractive place, and indeed the contrast between the dismal London of the "sixties" and this brilliant, glittering town was unbelievable. Paris certainly deserved the title of "La Ville Lumiere" in a literal sense. I like the French expression, "une ville ruisselante de lumiere," "a city dripping with light." That is an apt description of the Paris of the Second Empire, for it was hardly a manufacturing city then, and ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... "why should it be?" once answered,—once able to say to themselves quietly, "It is all right; the beauty and the joy are there; the song is sung, though we are of the listeners; the miracle-play is played, though but a few take literal part, and many of us look on, with the play, like the song, moving through our souls only, or our souls moving in the vital sphere of it, where the stage is wide enough for all;"—once come to this, ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... your life. Why, therefore should I now take it?" Of course, I didn't say "young lady" as there is no Caspakian equivalent for that term; but I have to allow myself considerable latitude in the translation of Caspakian conversations. To speak always of a beautiful young girl as a "she" may be literal; but it seems ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tadpole, Desiree Beck"—was this very lady now so politely entertaining us. To all this add the significant fact that "Villette" is an autobiographical novel, which "records the most vivid passages in Miss Bronte's own sad heart's history," not a few of the incidents being "literal transcripts" from the darkest chapter of her own life, and the light which the consideration of this fact throws upon her relations with members of the family will help us to apprehend the stand-point from which the Hegers judge Miss Bronte and her work, and to excuse, if not to justify, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... another class of virtues—of all those which admit of being directly contrasted with justice, and which may for shortness' sake be without much inaccuracy comprehended under the general designation of generosity—it may, with literal truth, be said that the practice of them is no part of our duty to our neighbour. Provided we are careful to let every one have what, between him and us, are his bare dues, we may be selfish, mean, sordid to excess, without infringing any one else's rights, without the smallest ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... this occasion it was very different—now, for the first time in my life, I felt what the passion for play really was. My success first bewildered, and then, in the most literal meaning of the word, intoxicated me. Incredible as it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that I only lost when I attempted to estimate chances, and played according to previous calculation. If I left everything to luck, and staked without any care or consideration, I was sure to win—to win in ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... commentaries on it, a dry wilderness of arid and futile subtlety. Lefevre tried to see simply what the text said, and as it became more human it became, for him, more divine. His preface is a real cry of joy at his great discovery. He did, indeed, interpret everything in a double sense, literal and spiritual, and placed the emphasis rather on the latter, but this did not prevent a genuine effort to read the words as they were written. Three years later he published in like manner the Epistles of St. Paul, with commentary. Though he spoke of the apostle as ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... before Bonanza: this is properly speaking the port of San Lucar, although it is half a league distant from the latter place. It is called Bonanza on account of its good anchorage, and its being secured from the boisterous winds of the ocean; its literal meaning is "fair weather." It consists of several large white buildings, principally government store-houses, and is inhabited by the coast-guard, dependents on the custom-house, and a few fishermen. A boat came off to receive those passengers whose destination was San Lucar, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Lord saith: [Sidenote: Deut. 32. v. 21. Rom. 10. v. 19.] I will prouoke them to enuy (namely such as keepe not his Law) by a people, which is no people, and by a foolish nation will I anger them. This prophecie is fulfilled, according to the literal sense thereof, vpon all nations which obserue not the Law of God. All this which I haue written concerning the land of Pascatir, was told me by certaine Friers prdicants, which trauailed thither before euer the Tartars ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... transubstantiation, but at the same time they affirm, that, under either kind or species, only one whole entire Christ, and the true sacrament, is received. But why are those words, "This is my body," to be taken in a literal sense, any more than those concerning the cup? Our Saviour says, "I am the true vine, I am the door." St. Paul says, "Our fathers drank of the rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ;" and writing to the Corinthians, he affirms, that, "he had fed them ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... writings are devoid of value as pictures of life and manners; and even in descriptions of incredible and pointless miracles precious scraps of folk-lore are often embedded. In most, if not in all, cases, the incidents recorded in the Lives are to be criticised as genuine traditions, whatever their literal historicity may be; few, if any, ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.' I have gone through so many yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have realised to its full the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure of speech, but a literal fact. Any to-morrow I might die. It is scarcely two months since I came back from the grave: is it worth while to be anything but radiantly glad? Of all things that life or perhaps my temperament has given me I prize the gift ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... follows: "Ovidius utroque lascivior" and he could not have given a terser or more comprehensive criticism. Of all Latin poets, not excepting even Plautus, Ovid possesses in the highest degree the gift of facility. His words probably express the literal truth, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... sufficiently to indicate what had been the fate of its late owner. The song is popular in France, and is rather a good specimen of the style of composition to which it belongs. The translation is strictly literal.] ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... not so much exposed to itI kept terra firmayou fairly committed yourself to the cold night-air in the most literal of all senses. But such adventures become a gallant knight better than a humble esquire,to rise on the wings of the night-windto dive into the bowels of the earth. What news from our subterranean Good Hope!the terra ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... These expressions cannot be understood in a literal sense, for Whitman was born, not in the South, but in the State of New York. The precise sense to be attached to them may be open to some difference ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... apply but to the slave? After directing that the labour of all the household, 'man-servant and maid-servant,' should cease, it then proceeds to the ox and the ass, and the stranger that is within thy gates. Now, gentlemen, this cannot be applied to the stranger in the literal sense of the word, the hospitality of the age forbidding that labour should be required of him. At that time slaves were brought from foreign lands, and were a source of traffic, as may be inferred by the readiness with which ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Republic of Colombia, differences arose between the parties to the arbitration in regard to the scope and extension of the award, of which certain articles were contested by Colombia, while Italy claimed their literal fulfillment. The award having been made by the President of the United States, as an act of friendly consideration and with the sole view to an impartial composition of the matter in dispute, I could not but feel deep concern at such a miscarriage, and while unable to accept the Colombian ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... mystic expansions of proper names, to which this indiscriminate Bibliolatry furnished fuel, spark, and wind. A still greater evil, and less attributable to the visionary humour and weak judgment of the individual expositors, is the literal rendering of Scripture in passages, which the number and variety of images employed in different places to express one and the same verity, plainly mark out for figurative. And lastly, add to all these the strange—in all other writings unexampled—practice of bringing together into ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... florid renditions. With feeling and comprehension if that be possible. I except'—here his eye swept the back benches—'our friend and companion Beetle, from whom, now as always, I demand an absolutely literal translation.' The ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... children, among whom his son Joshua shone conspicuous, by displaying at a very early period a superiority of genius and the rudiments of a correct taste. Unlike other boys, who generally content themselves with giving a literal explanation of their author, regardless of his beauties or his faults, young Reynolds attended to both these, displaying a happy knowledge of what he read, and entering with ardor into the spirit of his author. He discovered ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... bitter, Honora. I'm rebuked. I'm literal. I'm instructed. I have brought you down here to talk the situation over with me. I can get men in plenty to advise me, but I want to know what you think about a number of things. Moreover, I want you to tell me what you imagine Miss Barrington ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... better than so many will take pains to do, though far from the best that might be done, one likes to make an end of the matter by Print. I suppose very few People have ever taken such Pains in Translation as I have: though certainly not to be literal. But at all Cost, a Thing must live: with a transfusion of one's own worse Life if one can't retain the Original's better. Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle. I shall be very well pleased to see the new MS. of Omar. I shall one day (if ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... facts and the theory of Galvani were equally accepted; and a grateful world insisted upon styling the new science, as it was deemed, "Galvanism." Thus a word was added to all the languages, which has been found useful in its literal sense, and forcible in its figurative. Whatever we may think of Galvani's philosophy, we cannot deny that he immortalized his name. He died a few years after, fully satisfied with his theory, but having no suspicion of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... was the thought with which he had started. He was still thinking about the people in the house which he had left; but instead of remembering, with whatever accuracy he could, their looks and sayings, he had consciously taken leave of the literal truth. A turn of the street, a firelit room, something monumental in the procession of the lamp-posts, who shall say what accident of light or shape had suddenly changed the prospect within his mind, and ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... foundation of all lies a strong determination to make the preparation of their souls or spirits for the future life the pre-eminent business of life, and to obey in the strictest and most literal manner what they believe to be the will of God as revealed and declared by Jesus Christ. In the following paragraphs I give a brief summary of what may be ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... and eat the buds of the basswood, and then bring an apronfull home to her family. In one neighbourhood a beef bone passed from house to house, and was boiled again and again in order to extract some nutriment from it. This is no fiction, but a literal fact. Many other equally uninviting bills of fare might be given, but these no doubt will suffice. Sufficient has been said to show that our fathers and mothers did not repose upon rose-beds, nor did they fold their hands in despair, but ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... reporter-errant, whose whole soul is dyed with belief in the great establishment whose behest he obeys—one of the last refuges in which mediaeval humility is to be found. As a part of the same habit of mind, Mr. Stanley shows a fine, literal, unquestioning championship of the object of his quest, Dr. Livingstone; but he seems to admire the doctor, after all, rather as an ornamental possession of the New York Herald. The great traveler's good-nature to Mr. Bennett, as a voluntary correspondent and coadjutor by brevet with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... this portentous warning was better grounded and had a more literal meaning than might be supposed; for the swinging gate communicated with the burial-ground, and almost directly in little Pansie's track there was a newly dug grave, ready to receive its tenant that afternoon. Pansie, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... and suck oranges, and quaff ginger-pop; in the boxes, Miss, gazing through her curls, thinks the Fairy Prince the prettiest creature she ever beheld, and Master, that to be a clown must be the pinnacle of human happiness: while up in the galleries the hard literal world is for an hour sponged out and obliterated; the chimney-sweep forgets, in his delight when the policeman comes to grief, the harsh call of his master, and Cinderella, when the demons are foiled, and the long parted lovers meet and ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... of old time, that riches have wings; and, though this be not applicable in a literal strictness to the wealth of our patriarchal brethren of the South, yet it is clear that their possessions have legs, and an unaccountable propensity for using them in a northerly direction. I marvel that the grand jury of Washington did not find a true bill against the North Star for aiding ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the case. I cannot insult him with advice, which he would never have wanted, if he was capable of attending to it. May my habitation never be fixed among the tribe that can't look beyond the present gratification, that draw fixed conclusions from general rules, that attend to the literal meaning only, and, because a thing ought to be, expect that it will come to pass. B. has made a confidant of Skeys; and as I can never speak to him in private, I suppose his pity may cloud his judgment. If it does, I ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... our power. It would take the Border States and the control of the Mississippi, and worse than this, it would establish a war which would rage without intermission until we should be crushed, perhaps into literal tribute and vassalage. Every dispute arising from our entangled neighborhood—and these would be innumerable—would be determined with an insolence and a cruelty far surpassing any thing which we have heretofore experienced; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... over his soul and body that was at once more grim and more ridiculous than anything in Mr Venus's rare collection. That light-haired gentleman followed close upon their heels, at least backing up Mr Boffin in a literal sense, if he had not had recent opportunities of doing so spiritually; while Mr Boffin, trotting on as hard as he could trot, involved Silas Wegg in frequent collisions with the public, much as a pre-occupied blind man's dog may be seen to involve ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... literal sense the Caribbean is a mediterranean sea; but the adjective must be qualified when comparison is made with the Mediterranean of the Old World or with the Gulf of Mexico. The last-named bodies of water communicate with ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... vindictive ferocity of such men, would be pacing the taste and humanity of our readers a bad compliment. It is enough to say that a fund was raised for Flanagan's defence, and a threatening notice written to be pasted on the Bodagh Buie's door—of which elegant production the following is a literal copy:— ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... which they were beset, they had spiritual troubles also. They fully believed in witchcraft as did all their contemporaries, in a personal devil who was busily plotting the ruin of their souls, in an everlasting hell of literal fire and brimstone, and in a Divine election, by which most of them had been irrevocably doomed from before the creation of the world to eternal perdition, from which nothing which they could do, or were willing to do, could help to rescue ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... but to bring to the observation of his piece their highest powers of imagination, whereby alone can full justice be done to a majestic theme. The central topic of the choric speech is the essential limitations of all scenic appliances. The dramatist reminds us that the literal presentation of life itself, in all its movement and action, lies outside the range of the stage, especially the movement and action of life in its most glorious manifestations. Obvious conditions of space do not allow "two mighty ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... rendered into our language, would form a very portly volume. But though several parts of them have found translators, the whole have never yet appeared in English; and, of some pieces, the most accomplished scholar would scarcely undertake to furnish at once a literal and an intelligible version. [370:5] His style is harsh, his transitions are abrupt, and his inuendos and allusions most perplexing. He must have been a man of very bilious temperament, who could scarcely distinguish ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... rocks alone cannot be much less than fifty-five millions of years, serves to cast additional ridicule upon the Church's present attitude of stubborn adherence to these prehistoric scriptural legends as literal, God-given fact. But, to make the right use of these legends—well, that ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... silence. I am not the man calmly to let pass black insinuations against the character of a friend. No, I stood up for him. I am glad to think how I stood up for him, not only metaphorically, but in the most literal sense of the term; for I found myself continually getting up, and Marston as often pulling me down again ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... the woman, becoming more literal as she went on, "and Marie Blanc knows it. Her husband once got the loan of it from Cloudbrow, and she looked at it with care, because she had never seen such a knife before. She knew all its marks. Why does Cloudbrow deny that it is his? Because it was Cloudbrow who killed Perrin. If it ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... don't believe he could let it. It would set everybody talking. Why should he turn his mother and sisters out-of-doors? Oh, I never thought of anything so dreadful!" cried Minnie and Chatty, one uttering one exclamation, and another the other. They were very literal, and in the minds of both the grievance was at once taken for granted. "Oh, I never could have thought such a thing of Theo,—our own brother, and ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... the chief impression made on a near observer. In politics the Americans are first and foremost jurists, and indeed in a narrower and more literal sense than the English Imperialists, with whom, according to their old traditions, justice only serves as a cloak for their political ambitions. I cannot judge how far the Americans have become full-blooded Imperialists since their entry into ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... one thing you concentrate on that thing, you deliberately and carefully study everything in it, while in a sketch you work only for general effect. The study is the storehouse of facts to the painter. By it he assures himself of the literal truths he needs, collecting them as material in color or black and white, and as mental material by his mental understanding of them, only to be gained ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... "that Laura is gone. She is very literal-minded. She might not understand that we could be hastily married and even lease a house, this way, and still ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... joy or sorrow, or to be conscious that he was not dining at Ancester. The General fished up a wandering eyeglass to look at him, and said:—"Quite correct!" Miss Smith-Dickenson remarked upon the dangers attendant on over-literal interpretations. The Hon. Mr. Pellew perceived in this that Miss Dickenson had ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the applauded representation of Mercadet, at the Gymnase, stimulated other managers of theatres to go on exploiting his Comedy. In September, the Shagreen Skin, arranged by Judicis, was played at the Ambigu-Comique, with tableaux of almost literal imitation, yet bringing to life again, in the denouement, the chief dramatis personae, and making the whole ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton |
