"Portray" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... labor; I have learned that the man who prides himself on getting on the wrong side of every public issue is as pernicious an enemy to the country as the man who openly fires upon the flag; and I have seen mute sufferings of men in prison which no human pen can portray. ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... ground, then the snow-covered terrain ahead of the aircraft will invariably appear to be flat. Slopes and ridges will disappear. The line of vision from the flight deck towards the horizon (if there is one) will actually portray a white even expanse which ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... of everflowing water. The spot is entirely cut off and separated from all [ordinary] means of approach. Around it are many lakes and groves, and flowers in bloom at all seasons of the year; so that the very spot seems to portray the rape of the damsel, with which story, from our very infancy, we have been familiar. Close by, there is a cavern with its face towards the north, of an immense depth, from which they say that father Pluto, in his chariot, suddenly ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... was my next task, and how shall I find words to describe the passion of grief and apprehension with which I set about it? It must go undescribed, for there are certain emotions of the human heart and mind which mere words are powerless to portray. Perhaps it is well that this should be the case, for no one who has not passed through such an experience as mine could possibly understand what I endured as I made my slow way toward the ruined house, subconsciously noting, as I went, the evidences ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... perceive them, he studiously endeavours to conceal, as being calculated to injure him in the opinion of others. Such persons consequently do not give themselves out for what they actually are; their secret escapes from them unwittingly, or against their will. Rightly, therefore, to portray such characters, the poet must lend us his own peculiar talent for observation, that we may fully understand them. His art consists in making the character appear through slight hints and stolen glimpses, and in so placing the spectator, that whatever delicacy of observation it may require, he can ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... profound natural philosopher, an exact observer of nature, he was at the same time a learned statistician, an indefatigable social observer, an unwearied philanthropist, and the most powerful describer of nature that perhaps ever undertook to portray her great and glorious features. It is this extraordinary combination of qualities that render his works so surprising and valuable. The intellectual and imaginative powers rarely coexist in remarkable vigour ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... like me. She disliked me because I was a landscape painter and did not in my pictures portray the privations of the peasants, and that, as she fancied, I was indifferent to what she put such faith in. I remember when I was travelling on the banks of Lake Baikal, I met a Buriat girl on horseback, wearing a shirt and ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... followed is the most beautiful which language has ever recorded. Story-telling, though often abused, is the medium by which truth can be most irresistibly conveyed to the majority of minds, and in the present instance we have a desire to portray in some slight degree the importance of Charity ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... responsible relations with people. They need models who, because of their religious faith, are able to admit when they are wrong and can ask for forgiveness without feeling a loss of personal dignity. They need religious teachers who can portray, both by word and by example, the great personalities of the tradition, the heroes and saints; teachers who are clear about what their contribution really is, who can make clear to youth the heroism of a man of faith and let it stand forth without all the confusions of superstitious ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... illiteracy in the mass that they must depend to carry out their plans. An ignorant voter may be an honest one but unless he is intelligent enough to study public questions for himself he is an easy prey for the political sharper. It is beyond the power of the pen to portray what a magnificent government would be possible with an educated electorate. The idea can be approximated only when we consider how much we have been able to accomplish even with all the inefficiency, vice and ignorance ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... said gently under cover of the general buzz of excited comment aroused by the picture, "mademoiselle, M. Delmotte is destined to a high place among the great men of the world. While to some is given the power to portray famous events, to a very few indeed it is given to create such epochs. Such men are necessarily set apart from their fellows. Despite the promptings of their hearts, they must forego many friendships which would otherwise be dear to them. M. Delmotte is both fortunate and ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... is to depict a human soul in action, with all the pertinent play of circumstance, while Browning's is to portray the processes of its mental and spiritual development: as he said in his dedicatory preface to "Sordello," "little else is worth study." The one electrifies us with the outer and dominant actualities; ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... "As often as you shall eat this bread, and drink the chalice, you shall show the death of the Lord, until He come." Wherefore it is unbecoming for them to slay or shed blood, and it is more fitting that they should be ready to shed their own blood for Christ, so as to imitate in deed what they portray in their ministry. For this reason it has been decreed that those who shed blood, even without sin, become irregular. Now no man who has a certain duty to perform, can lawfully do that which renders him unfit for that duty. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... MAY-FLOWER history and its collaterals had already permitted the author and others to construct mentally, and one which confirms in general the conceptions wrought out by the best artists and students who have attempted to portray the historic ship herself. ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... necessary that he should have some knowledge of the manners, customs, and literature of the age when it was written, and with the lucubrations of honest, but "magotie- headed" John Aubrey, as he is termed by Anthony a Wood. Although I have already endeavoured to portray his mental and personal characteristics, and have carefully marked many of his merits, eccentricities, and foibles, I find, from a more careful examination of his "Natural History of Wiltshire" than I had previously devoted to it, many anecdotes, peculiarities, opinions, ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... straw-colour of the beech, the copper hues of the oaks; and, indeed, Sophy found that she could exhaust all the brightest colours of her paint-box, and yet not give sufficient variety or brilliancy to portray correctly the gorgeous tints of the landscape spread out before the window; nor was there blue to be found equal to the blue of the lake, still less of the sky above it. She was glad that she had finished ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... of contrast, to show something charming; some gentle virgin head, circled with a halo, some sweet personification of innocence, clasping the dove of peace to her bosom. No: I saw nothing of the sort, and therefore cannot portray it. The pupil in the school possessing the happiest disposition was a young girl from the country, Louise Path; she was sufficiently benevolent and obliging, but not well taught nor well mannered; moreover, the plague-spot ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... refer more particularly to the future or spiritual world, (c) that in each series there is an episode after the sixth which is either an elaboration of the sixth or an introduction to the seventh. (14) Compare these three series again and note, (a) that they portray the same events in similar language, (b) that the victory of the righteous and the destruction of the wicked are portrayed in each, (c) that the victory of the redeemed predominates in the first (seals) while the destruction of the wicked predominates in the last (vials). (15) In the series note ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... her beautiful goddess almost on her knees to accept. All these traits, which showed that Georgina was far from perfect, caused me a misery proportionate to my longing to have her all that was lovely and excellent. It is indeed unfair to write of faults which are so easy to portray, and to say nothing of the beauty of feature and charm of manner, which might have been enough to persuade any one who looked into her face that she was one of God's own angels. What does beauty mean if it be not the blossoming of inner perfection into outward loveliness? And ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... abused, such as literacy tests and poll taxes. As we approach the 100th anniversary, next January, of the Emancipation Proclamation, let the acts of every branch of the Government—and every citizen—portray that "righteousness ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy
... better theories and worse poems. They give us vague phrases instead of images, and personified qualities instead of men. They may be better able to analyse human nature than their predecessors. But analysis is not the business of the poet. His office is to portray, not to dissect. He may believe in a moral sense, like Shaftesbury; he may refer all human actions to self- interest, like Helvetius; or he may never think about the matter at all. His creed on such subjects will no more influence ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... does it really exist, this tragic and comical, evasive and unavoidable figure which we make no claim to portray, but at most to divest of some of its shadows? It were rash to affirm it too loudly; but meanwhile, in the realms where we suppose it to reign, everything happens as though it did exist. Do away with it and ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... never-resting temptations. He calls himself a fool at times for resisting, and his mind pictures the delights he misses—if not from direct experience, from information he gathers in books and from those who know—and if he yields, then self-reproach embitters him. But correctly to portray the situation is to drop our hypothetical adolescent, for here is where individual reaction and individual situations are too varied to be met with in one case. Some do not inhibit their sex desires at all; others resist now and then, others yield occasionally; ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... exquisite descriptions with which his writings are filled, and while, with picture-words, he could reproduce all the tender beauty of a sunset in the Alps, or the soft, singing gurgle of the mountain-brook, no one better than he could also portray every subtile shade and feature of the human mind. He excelled in analyzing character. His mental perception was sympathetic and ready. His mind-eye was so keen and so piercing, that nothing could escape its searching glance. The most insignificant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... upon my mind when I reflect that these resolutions are intended to express what General Lee's surviving soldiers feel toward General Lee. The committee are fully aware of their inability to do justice to the sentiments that inspire the hearts of those for whom they speak. How can we portray in words the gratitude, the pride, the veneration, the anguish, that now fill the hearts of those who shared his victories and his reverses, his triumphs and his defeats? How can we tell the world what we can only feel ourselves? How can we give expression to the crowding memories called ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... point, Dupre. I claim the actor has no right to hear applause—that he should not know there is such a thing as an audience. His business is to portray life exactly ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... be too feeble to portray his agony of body and mind as he lay for long months upon his bed of suffering; but when he arose therefrom, with a feeble and distorted body, and a scar upon his forehead, he was changed in heart also, crushed in spirit, humble, ...
— Tiger and Tom and Other Stories for Boys • Various
... Crystal Palace at Sydenham, for instance, which formed the building for the Great Exhibition, and which is now a sort of museum of curiosities. It is gigantic, like London itself, and like so many things in London, but how can I portray the gigantic? All the ordinary sensations produced by size are intensified several times here. It is two miles in circumference and has three stories of prodigious height; it would easily hold five or six buildings ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... Renaissance on the other hand delighted not so much in the type as in the variation from it. Preoccupied with the unique mystery of the individual soul—a sense of which was Christianity's gift to Christendom—he endeavored to portray that wherein a particular person is unique and singular. Acutely conscious also of his own individuality, instead of effacing it he made his work the vehicle and expression of that individuality. The history of Renaissance ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... poets, orators, philosophers, because it gratifies their natural talent for admiring, and because they are reverentially grateful to the genius which can so clearly read their secrets, and so powerfully portray their souls to themselves. Sophocles, the highest Greek poet, whose firm and delicate portraitures of feminine character were not equalled in antique literature, must have had many admirers and friends ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... of this time the countenance of Mr. Samuel Weller had exhibited an expression of the most overwhelming and absorbing astonishment that the imagination can portray. After looking from Job to Jingle, and from Jingle to Job in profound silence, he softly ejaculated the words, 'Well, I AM damn'd!' which he repeated at least a score of times; after which exertion, he appeared wholly bereft of speech, and again cast ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... peaked gables, and walls four feet thick, must have caught his observant eye. However striking Ward Beecher's word-painting may be, it would I opine, have required the marvellous pencil of the author of "The House with the Seven Gables," Nathaniel Hawthorne, becomingly to portray all the arcana of such a building as the Chien d'Or (the old Post Office), with its ghastly ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... accomplishments of those wonderful interpreters of the works of the noble masters, who have, either through the enchanting modulations of their voices or with skilful touch upon instruments, evolved their magic strains. Let an abler pen than mine portray the sublime triumphs of Hasse, Mario, Wachtel, Santley, Whitney; of Albani, Malibran, Lind, Parepa Rosa, Nilsson; of Haupt, Paganini, Vieuxtemps, Ole Bull, ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... of scattering applause along through an act seems to me to be better than the Mannheim way of saving it all up till the act is ended. I do not see how an actor can forget himself and portray hot passion before a cold still audience. I should think he would feel foolish. It is a pain to me to this day, to remember how that old German Lear raged and wept and howled around the stage, with never a response from that hushed house, never a single ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Here and there a green island or a fishing-boat rested upon the surface of the tranquil blue. For miles and miles the eye followed indented grassy slopes, that rolled away on either side of the harbor, and the most delicate pencil could scarcely portray the exquisite line of creamy sand that skirted their edges and melted off in the clear margin of the water. Occasional little cottages nestle among these green banks, not the Acadian houses of the poem, "with thatched roofs, and dormer windows projecting," but comfortable, homely-looking buildings ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... suffered during that long toilet are beyond the powers of language to portray, for Prue surpassed herself and was the very essence of fussiness. But Sylvia bore it patiently as a last sacrifice, because her sister was very tender-hearted still, and laughed and cried over her work till all was done, when she surveyed ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... plan of the poem is Spenser explains in a prefatory letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. The whole is a vast epic allegory, aiming, in the first place, to portray the virtues which make up the character of a perfect knight; an ideal embodiment, seen through Renaissance conceptions, of the best in the chivalrous system which in Spenser's time had passed away, but to which ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Him."(1103) With anthems of celestial melody the holy angels, a vast, unnumbered throng, attend Him on His way. The firmament seems filled with radiant forms,—"ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands." No human pen can portray the scene; no mortal mind is adequate to conceive its splendor. "His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of His praise. And His brightness was as the light."(1104) As the living cloud comes ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... seek to write of E. Maxwell Snurge as his friends have written of him, tall, courageous, and vitally intelligent. Nor as his enemies have chronicled him, short, fat and intensely stupid. I will endeavour with a few brief flourishes of the pen, to portray the various intricacies of his character as I see them, clearly and dispassionately with the eyes of a psychological observer, whose hand is uncorrupted by the bribes of ruthless profiteers, grafters and ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... the public has received my first book, "Thirty-one Years on the Plains and in the Mountains," has tempted me into writing this second little volume, in which I have tried to portray that part of my earlier life which was spent in piloting emigrant and government trains across the Western Plains, when "Plains" meant wilderness, with nothing to encounter but wild animals, and wilder, hostile Indian tribes. When every step forward ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... cannot but consider Mr Mitford as having failed, he will record, indeed, all that is interesting and important in military and political transactions; but he will not think anything too trivial for the gravity of history which is not too trivial to promote or diminish the happiness of man. He will portray in vivid colours the domestic society, the manners, the amusements, the conversation of the Greeks. He will not disdain to discuss the state of agriculture, of the mechanical arts, and of the conveniences of life. The progress of ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... phrase or term under which we can justly represent it. The first great master of the new world was Dante, but not the Dante of the exquisite sentiment but artificial form of the Vita Nuova, but the great imaginative realist of the Divine Comedy, the artist who could portray the passion and pain of Francesca and her lover, and with equal power the masterful figure of Farinata, whose dauntless soul not hell itself could quell; who could pass from the vivid drama of the fierce contemporary life ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... Cosmogonies usually portray the action of the SPIRIT on the WATERS.—Those of the Muscogees, Athapascas, Quiches, Mixtecs, Iroquois, Algonkins, and others.—The Flood-Myth an unconscious attempt to reconcile a creation in time with the eternity of matter.—Proof ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... work, it is wise to allow the pupils as much freedom in talking and movement as possible, so as to portray the home life. They should be taught, however, that when their conduct interferes with the order of the room or the comforts and rights of others, they must suppress their inclinations. During the time of teaching there must be perfect quiet and attention. Marks are sometimes ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Management • Ministry of Education
... portray his figure according to the measurements of a natural body, which shall be of universal proper proportions; in addition to this he should measure himself and see in which part his own figure varies greatly or less from the aforesaid pattern of excellence, and when he ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... Pantomime was deemed to be one, owing to the bad odour in which this form of entertainment had got to during the last days of the Empire. Notwithstanding this the church was only too glad to avail itself of Pantomime as a vehicle to portray before the world at large, and in order to turn attention to the great moral truths to be deduced from the death of Him on Calvary Hill. These exhibitions of religious subjects, in the form of tableaux vivants, took place in the churches, ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... away in the rustling blast, and other leaves lift up their green heads." There is probably not five per cent of the population of California to-day, of those days, scenes and events of which I have tried to portray. Another generation have taken their places who can know but little of those times except by tradition. I, being one of the pioneers, felt it a duty, or an inspiration seemed to come over me as an obligation I owed to myself and compatriots of those times, to do what I could to perpetuate ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... attempt to portray the excitement of Hillsboro after this letter arrived. To say that it was as if a gold mine had been discovered under the village green is the feeblest of metaphors. For an entire week the town went to bed at night tired ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... spirit of the republic breathed in the noble figures so exquisitely painted; typifying in the one on the right, the Goddess of Liberty watching over the destiny of the republic. In the one on the left, Liberty with her torch lighting the world. So perfectly did the painter's art portray the "Spirit of '76," that a new tide of patriotic devotion to the republic and its glorious flag, swelled the hearts of all who saw ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... romances he created a new school of fiction, called the modern novel, by introducing into his romance of pseudo-knighthood a faithful description of the lower classes, and intermingling the phases of popular life. But he had no one-sided tendency to portray the vulgar only; he brought together the higher and the lower in society, to serve as light and shade, and the aristocratic element was as prominent as the popular. This noble and chivalrous element disappears in the novels of the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... notion of drawing, not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover's profile, that she might be detected in the design. There she fell miserably short of the true heroic height. At present she did not know her own poverty, for she had no lover to portray. There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no, not even a baronet! There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door; no, not one young man whose ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... which have successfully withstood the ravages of time, two apparently represent lizards, and the third seems to portray a monstrosity—a human being with a rudimentary tail. A German philosopher might possibly build upon this embryonic tail a theory to prove that the Australian aboriginal is indeed and in fact the missing link, and thereby excel ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the likeness of some celebrated individual, or it must represent a face which, independently of peculiar associations, corresponds with the universal ideas of beauty. So the pen of the biographer should portray only those who by their public have interested us in their private characters; or who, in a superior degree, have possessed the virtues and mental endowments which claim the general love and admiration of mankind.' ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... of whose power I sing, Electric, deathless energy of mind, Harp of the soul, by genius swept, awake! Inspire my strains, and aid me to portray The base and joyless vanities which man Madly prefers to everlasting bliss!— Come! let us mount gay Fancy's rapid car, And trace through forest and o'er mountain rude The bounding footsteps of the ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... difficult to portray their astonishment and joy when I entered into a detail of what had occurred, and wound up with the message from the Grand Duke; and I hardly need add, now that I wind up my story, that the proofs of ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Notary's fair sweetheart, Telimena, was spreading abroad the gleams of her beauty and of her toilet, from top to toe of the very latest style. What manner of gown she wore, and what her coiffure was like, it were vain to write, for the pen could never express it; only the pencil could portray those tulles, muslins, laces, cashmeres, pearls and precious stones—and her ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... plot of the story," wrote Edmond de Goncourt, "is secondary. The authors have rather preferred to paint the modern young woman as she is: the product of the artistic and masculine system of education in force during the last thirty years. We have also attempted to portray the modern young college man influenced by the republican ideas of the time since Louis Philippe." Edmond de Goncourt died on July ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... after one has mastered the technical difficulties one should try to steep one's personality into that of the character one is to portray, and for that reason all study, no matter what it is, and reading of all kinds help one in ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... discussed the utmost idealistic conclusions of all that which, to my mind, was necessary and inseparable from the perfect state and from social order, I inquired whether it would not be possible to realise all this with a king at the head, and entered so deeply into the matter as to portray the king in such a fashion, that he seemed even more anxious than any one else that his state should be organised on genuinely republican lines, in order that he might attain to the fulfilment of his own highest aims. I must own, however, that I felt bound to urge this king ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... never portray the satisfaction that you afforded me at the grand meeting in Chicago of the National Chris- tian Scientist Association in 1888. Your public and private expressions of love and loyalty were very touch- ing. They moved me ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... REALIZED the blessedness of obedience. In his own words: "He came not to do his own will, but the will of him that sent him." In his last great prayer with his disciples he says: "And now, Father, I come to thee, having finished the work thou didst give me to do." These words portray ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... "If you have leisure to praise me, I can have done you no good." "He used indeed so to address us that each one of us, sitting there, thought that some one had been privately telling tales against him in particular, so completely did Rufus seize hold of his characteristics, so vividly did he portray our ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... be brief in descanting upon this part of her career. As I cannot describe the mysteries of freemasonry, although I have a shrewd idea that it is a humbug, so an uninitiated man cannot take upon himself to portray the great world accurately, and had best keep his opinions to ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... From the ceiling are suspended wax and plaster of paris reproductions called ex-votos of literally every portion of the body—feet, hands, limbs, heads, all portions—the ceiling space is completely covered with these uncanny figures. The wall is hung with pictures, which portray all sorts of scenes, such as a man in shipwreck, a carpenter falling down a ladder, a child falling out of a second-story window, death chambers of various people, etc. These figures and pictures are intended to represent miracles. When these people were in their afflictions ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... spectacle of wild natives, rising by the influence of a few good Englishmen from lawless misrule to a settled government, where vice is punished without partiality, is very beautiful to philanthropists, and makes one think better of human nature and its capabilities. I wish I could portray the hilly and thorny road by which this has been attained! It would, methinks, create a new interest in Sarawak, if the past and the present could be fairly set before the discerning world; we should again ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... homely, tall or short, fair or dark, plump or spare. I was interested in their eyes, but, somehow, I was still more interested in their mouths. Some mouths would set my blood on fire. I would invent all sorts of romantic episodes with myself as the hero. I would portray my engagement to some of the pretty girls I had seen, our wedding, and, above all, our married life. The worst of it was that these images often visited my brain while I was reading the holy book. ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... imaginations will easily portray in far more glowing and picturesque colors than our poor pencil can paint. So we leave you to conjure up all the bright visions you choose with which to deck the futures of our young debutants in the great drama of wedded life. And some of you young writers, ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... feel it and portray it in its reality, to love it for itself, to behold in it the only real, lasting, and changing beauty, without any idiotic idea of ennobling it by mutilation. To understand that all so-called ugliness is nothing but the mark of individual character, to create real men and ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... rill;— Eyes with mute rapture every waving line, Prints with adoring kiss the Paphian shrine, And learns erelong, the perfect form confess'd, 35 Ideal Beauty from its mother's breast. Now in strong lines, with bolder tints design'd, You sketch ideas, and portray the mind; Teach how fine atoms of impinging light To ceaseless change the visual sense excite; 40 While the bright lens collects the rays, that swerve, And bends their focus on the moving nerve. How thoughts to thoughts are link'd with viewless chains, Tribes leading tribes, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... all, the story is preeminently the story of Morgan. I have striven to make it a character sketch of that remarkable personality. I wished to portray his ferocity and cruelty, his brutality and wantonness, his treachery and rapacity; to exhibit, without lightening, the dark shadows of his character, and to depict his inevitable and utter breakdown finally; yet at the same time to bring out ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... one has been able hitherto to portray George's devotion only through the medium of his speeches, to produce these comestibles as Exhibit A, to show that he loved Aline with no common love; for it had not been an easy task to get them there. In a house of smaller dimensions ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... enthusiastically. "Did you ever see the like of this grand war canoe? History in every line of it! Picture to yourselves the bygone days in which such a canoe, filled with painted braves, stole along in the shadows fringing the bank of some noble stream. Portray to your own minds such a marauding band stealing down stream upon some settlement, there to fall upon our hardy pioneers and put them ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... at the time of the lawn fete," she said. "That morning a woman begged to see me, sobbing so piteously I could not refuse her an audience. No power of words could portray the sad story of suffering and wrong she poured into my ears, of a niece—beautiful, young, passionate, and willful—and of her prayers and useless expostulations, and of a handsome, dissolute lover to whom the girl was ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... I have portrayed the "tender passion" and its melancholy result on the hill-side—a fitting illustration of the fact that the course of true love never did run smooth, especially if there were big rocks to knock one's toes against. And now, in Canto IV, I am about to portray childish innocence in ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... by the Romans Quintilian and Cicero, who nevertheless, held that though he surpassed the beauty of man in nature, yet he did not approach the beauty of the gods. It was reserved for Pheidias to portray the highest conceptions of divinity of which the Greek mind was capable in his statues of Athene in the Parthenon at Athens, and ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... with pure childishness is a unique subject for art, and one which few have had the genius to portray. Two great painters are famous in history for their remarkable success in this line of work,—Van Dyck, of Belgium, and Velasquez, ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... on, sweet flow'rs, while yet you may; Your fading leaves will soon portray The lovely, fragile form, Which passed from earth while skies seemed fair, Like vapors quiv'ring in the air, ...
— The Snow-Drop • Sarah S. Mower
... vade-mecum of the traveller. This guide is so much the more precious because Chardin took care to engage at Constantinople a clever draughtsman named Grelot, by whom were reproduced the monuments, cities, scenes, costumes, and ceremonies which so well portray what Chardin called, "the every day ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... defendant stole from him by fraud the fruits of his labor. When the plaintiff then testifies that in 1890 he opened a small store in Fourteenth Street, moved in 1896 to Twenty-third Street and thence in 1916 to an up-town street off the Avenue, the dates will sink into the jurors' minds and they will portray for themselves the twenty-six years of painstaking effort. No eloquence then could rival the effect of the witness's slow, bare recital of his progress. Yet without counsel's prologue what could be more dull than the naming of street numbers ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... of you to think of making the change," he replied quickly, "and I am very glad you did. I wanted it to portray you as ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... some months of the life with few words. I have tried to portray it on the farm as it appeared to me, and leave you to think that it continues on and on, ever in the same general current, through the long, clear days and moonlight nights of summer, and the cooler days and misty evenings of the later ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... all eternity. The bottom of accountability had fallen out. My first business was to put it in again." The coldness and indifference of the Church, which ministers usually employ the vivid language of the Bible regarding the ways of Zion to portray, he described in the equally vivid, but less dignified New England vernacular. "What did I do at Litchfield but to 'boost'? They all lay on me, and moved very little, except as myself and God moved them. I spent sixteen of the best years of my life ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... tried the latch of the door. I hastened to prevent an intrusion, and then immediately returned to my dying antagonist. But what human language can adequately portray that astonishment, that horror which possessed me at the spectacle then presented to view? The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large mirror—so at first ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... of the seasons, one day is less like another in Venice than anywhere else; the lagoon wears a different aspect each morning when you rise, the sky offers a varied composition of cloud each evening as the sun sets. Words cannot describe Venice, nor brush portray her ever-fleeting, ever-varying charm. Venice is to be felt, not reproduced; to live there is to live a poem, to be daily surfeited with a wealth of beauty enough to madden an artist ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... dost So rob us of ourselves, we take no mark Though round about us thousand trumpets clang! What moves thee, if the senses stir not? Light Kindled in heav'n, spontaneous, self-inform'd, Or likelier gliding down with swift illapse By will divine. Portray'd before me came The traces of her dire impiety, Whose form was chang'd into the bird, that most Delights itself in song: and here my mind Was inwardly so wrapt, it gave no place To aught that ask'd admittance from without. Next shower'd into my fantasy a shape As of one ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... of the entrance of the conquering Spaniards into the Alhambra after the capture of the city, might, with the change of a word or two, still portray the visit of a party of ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... divided into two departments. One was dignified by the word "Cafe" painted in black letters on the white ground of the painted pane, though on the door was the simple American word "Bar." Over the door of the other was an attempt to portray three gilded balls. The proprietor of this bifurcated establishment, a man with red hair, a low forehead, a broad chin, and brawny shoulders, a long lip and long arms, rejoiced in the name of Nicholas Crimins, though by most of ...
— Bred In The Bone - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... the Southern people accepted it as a fair, and certainly as an honest, treatment of a very difficult subject. Possibly Page was a little hard upon the Confederate veteran, and did not sufficiently portray the really pathetic aspects of his character; any shortcomings of this sort are due, not to any failing in sympathy, but to the fact that Page's zeal was absorbingly concentrated upon certain glaring abuses. And as to the accuracy of his vision in these respects there could ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... avail to describe the sluggish waters of the Dead Sea, but what pen can portray the Indian Ocean lashed ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... in 1852, set the world on fire over the wrongs of the slave,—or rather the wrongs of slavery, for that wonderful book did not portray the negro as the only sufferer from this hoary iniquity,—Mrs. Stowe, in her new capacity as a champion of liberty, conceived the plan of raising a fund for the benefit of the colored race, and in 1853 invited Douglass to visit her at Andover, Massachusetts, where she ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... can portray the stupefaction and rage of Sir Rudolph when a man who had managed to slip unobserved from the castle at the time of its capture bore the news to him in the forest. All opposition there had ceased, and the whole of ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... Carrie Brown Memorial Fountain he says: "The design of the fountain represents the struggle of life symbolized by a group of figures which is intended to portray, according to Miss Yandell, not the struggle for bare existence, but 'the attempt of the immortal soul within us to free itself from the handicaps and entanglements of its earthly environments. It is the development of character, the triumph of intellectuality and spirituality ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... things to portray by written words is that peculiar mixture of moods expressed in a woman's countenance when, after having been sedulously engaged in establishing another's position, she suddenly suspects him of undermining her own. ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... signs, and nodding his head; at last he bent down, putting his arm in front of him, and raising it like an elephant's trunk, walking with the measured steps of that animal, so as fully to make them Understand that he intended to portray an elephant. ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... elevation (plan) 626. ichnography^, cartography; atlas; outline, scheme; view &c (painting) 556; radiograph, scotograph^, sciagraph^; spectrogram, heliogram^. V. represent, delineate; depict, depicture^; portray; take a likeness, catch a likeness &c n.; hit off, photograph, daguerreotype; snapshot; figure, shadow forth, shadow out; adumbrate; body forth; describe &c 594; trace, copy; mold. dress up; illustrate, symbolize. paint &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... colours, because his pictures resembled not living figures but ancient statues of marble or other suchlike things. This censure piqued the mind of Andrea; but, on the other hand, it was of great service to him, for, recognizing that Squarcione was in great measure speaking the truth, he set himself to portray living people, and made so much progress in this art, that, in a scene which still remained to be painted in the said chapel, he showed that he could wrest the good from living and natural objects no less than from those wrought by art. But for all this Andrea was ever ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... narrow stairways decayed with age, reeking with filth, and overrun with vermin; the rotten floors, ceilings begrimed, crumbling, ofttimes too low to permit you to stand upright, and windows stuffed with rags; or why try to portray the gaunt shivering forms and wild ghastly faces in these black and beetling abodes, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... affect to a great extent the form and structure of the drama; the conscious or unconscious demands of the audience, as we have observed in the preceding chapter, determine for the dramatist the themes he shall portray; and the range or restrictions of his actors have an immediate effect upon the dramatist's great task of character-creation. In fact, so potent is the influence of the actor upon the dramatist that the latter, in creating character, goes to work very differently ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... of truth. Consider, for instance, its effect on what is called historical painting. What do you at present mean by historical painting? Now-a-days it means the endeavoring, by the power of imagination, to portray some historical event of past days. But in the Middle Ages, it meant representing the acts of their own days; and that is the only historical painting worth a straw. Of all the wastes of time and sense which Modernism has invented—and ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... January number of this magazine appeared an excellent and comprehensive historical sketch of Fitchburg. It is proposed in this article to portray as briefly as possible, and by the aid of engravings, the present condition ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... humiliated people also made him the scapegoat for the sins of neglect and omission of which their Government stood convicted. In the testimony offered at his trial there was a touch, rude, vivid, and very human, to portray him in the final hours of the tragic episode at Detroit. Spurned by his officers, he sat on the ground with his back against the rampart while "he apparently unconsciously filled his mouth with tobacco, putting in quid ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... of the street door, which Madame Orio was opening to let herself out, that she might seek in the church the repose of which her pious soul was in need, I got myself ready and looked for my cloak and for my hat. But how can I ever portray the consternation in which I was thrown when, casting a sly glance upon the young friends, I found the three bathed in tears! In my shame and despair I thought of committing suicide, and sitting down again, I recollected my brutal speeches, and upbraided myself for having ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the only marvels of these volcanic basins. The beauty of their pools of boiling water is almost inconceivable to those who have not seen them. No illustration can do them justice; for no photographer can adequately reproduce their clear, transparent depths, nor can an artist's brush ever quite portray their peculiar coloring, due to the minerals held in solution, or else deposited upon their sides. I can deliberately say, however, that some of the most exquisitely beautiful objects I have ever seen in any portion of the world are the superbly ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... that the study of mystery in all its forms is the noblest to which the mind of man can devote itself; and truly it has ever been the occupation and care of those who in science and art, in philosophy and literature, have refused to be satisfied merely to observe and portray the trivial, well-recognised truths, facts, and realities of life. And we find that the success of these men in their endeavour, the depth of their insight into all that they know, has most strictly accorded with the respect in which they held all they did not know, with ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... has remarked on Borrow's neglect to portray the higher traits in the gipsy woman's character. Mrs. Herne and her grandchild Leonora, who are instanced as the two great successes of his Romany group, are both steeped in wickedness, and by omitting to draw a picture of the women's loftier side, he is said to have ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... traversed the passages of our underground railway system without being hurriedly aware in passing of a picture in reds and browns, representing a faun-like figure piping to an audience of three rather self-conscious rabbits. This pleasing group does not portray an actual scene from Autumn (LANE), but is rather to be taken as symbolic of the atmosphere of Miss MURIEL HINE'S latest book. The faun, I imagine, stands for Rollo, the middle-aged lover of the country, into whose happy life other, more human, loves break ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... indeed, aware that both these positions have been attacked. I was much pleased, some time after I had begun to write this little book, to find in a review of the present year of grace these words: 'Scott only knew a small portion of human nature, and he was unable to portray the physiognomy of the past.' I feared at first that this might be only one of the numerous flings of our young barbarians, a pleasant, or pleasantly intended, flirt of the heels of the New Humour. But the context showed that the writer was in deadly earnest. I shall not attempt ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... lordly air they assumed in the initial stages of acquaintanceship, and the humour of it was exhilarating when the period for evaporation came, and they shone forth in all their artless simplicity. I cannot pretend to portray or exactly reproduce the scene of a sailor's political or any other controversy for that matter; I can only hope to convey some idea of it; and the rest must be left to the imagination ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... Oceanus was an old god with a long beard and horned head who lived in a maritime cavern with his wife, Tethys, and his three hundred daughters, the Oceanides. No Argonaut had ever dared to come in contact with these mysterious divinities. Only the grave Aeschylus had dared to portray the Oceanides—virgins fresh and demure, weeping around the rock ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... "the scenes I am now about to describe are terrible in the extreme, even in their baldest statement. I cannot portray what actually took place; I doubt whether any one could; I can only give impressions of what I saw and heard when nearly all of us were almost insane from excitement. There are men who are cool in battle,—our colonel ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... have spoken the prologue of a play Wherein I have no part, and laugh, and sit Contented in the wings, whilst you portray An amorous maid with gestures that befit This lovely role,—as who knows better, pray, Than I that helped you in ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... he writes histories, not romances. But, in his sense, poetic invention means, not creation, but 'discovery;' that is, 'a quick, sagacious penetration into the true essence of all objects of our contemplation.' Perhaps we may say that it is chiefly a question of method whether a writer should portray men or angels—the beings, that is, of everyday life—or beings placed under a totally different set of circumstances. The more vital question is whether, by one method or the other, he shows us a man's heart or only his clothes; whether he appeals to our intellects ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen |
