"Imagery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reply the Nilghai lifted up his voice with a shout that shook the windows, in 'The Men of the Sea,' that begins, as all know, 'The sea is a wicked old woman,' and after rading through eight lines whose imagery is truthful, ends in a refrain, slow as the clacking of a capstan when the boat comes unwillingly up to the bars where the men sweat and tramp in ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... read and reread them—cullings from Chaucer, from Spenser, from the Elizabethan lyrists, the border balladry, fierce, tender, oh, so human—till she knew pages of them by heart, and their vocabulary influenced her own, their imagery tinged all her leisure thoughts. It seemed to her, whenever she debated returning them, that she could not bear it. She would get them out and sit with one of them open in her hands, not reading, but staring ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... hand, the whole tremendous imagery of the supernal world simply slipped off altogether from a great proportion of the men and women whose time and thought were absorbed in the toils and sorrows and pleasures of the world about them. To make a future heaven ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... represent earlier stages of amalgamation in which Hindu and aboriginal ideas are already compounded. When the smallpox goddess is identified with Kali, the procedure is correct, for some popular forms of Kali are little more than an aboriginal deity of pestilence draped with Hindu imagery and philosophy. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... (delirium) 503[obs3]; reverie, trance; day dream, golden dream; somnambulism. conception, Vorstellung[Ger], excogitation[obs3], "a fine frenzy"; cloudland[obs3], dreamland; flight of fancy, fumes of fancy; "thick coming fancies" [Macbeth]; creation of the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey[obs3], whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest[obs3], geste[obs3], extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... literature; his knowledge of life, extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by which he attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse communion with certain orders of society and classes of human creatures. The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he was congenitally melodramatic; and before very long his habit of attributing special catch-words, gestures, and the like to his characters, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... That should thy little limbs have quicken'd? Limbs so firm, they seem'd to assure Life of health, and days mature: Woman's self in miniature! Limbs so fair, they might supply (Themselves now but cold imagery) The sculptor to make Beauty by. Or did the stern-eyed Fate descry That babe or mother, one must die; So in mercy left the stock And cut the branch; to save the shock Of young years widow'd, and the pain When Single State comes ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... in which marched the Duke of Alva, the Prince of Orange, and other great personages, carrying the sword, the globe, the sceptre, and the "crown imperial," contained no emblems or imagery worthy of being recorded. The next day the King, dressed in mourning and attended by a solemn train of high officers and nobles, went again to the church. A contemporary letter mentions a somewhat singular incident as forming the concluding part of the ceremony. "And the service being ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... suppose the young ladies interested in this picture to be affected by any chagrin at the loss of an invitation to a ball, or the like worldliness,)—it seems to me the stress of such calamities might be represented, in a picture, by less appalling imagery. And I can assure my fair little lady friends,—if I still have any,—that whatever a young girl's ordinary troubles or annoyances may be, her true virtue is in shaking them off, as a rose-leaf shakes off rain, and remaining debonnaire and bright in spirits, or even, as the rose ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth) which could by any literary ingenuity be turned into a stage play except the parables with which Christ enforced and illustrated His sermons. The sublime language and imagery of the Apocalypse have furnished forth the textual body of many oratorios, but it still transcends the capacity of ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... is excellent, and the somewhat homely imagery only enhances in my mind the truth of the sentiment. PIERPONT, Sir, is a ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... the contrary, he likes it. But the ordinary Boy, I believe, is not a prey to ambition and, if he can find service to his mind, easily reconciles himself to living on his wages, or, as he terms it, in the practical spirit of oriental imagery, "eating" them. The conditions he values seem to be,— permanence, respectful treatment, immunity from kicks and cuffs and from abuse, especially in his own tongue, and, above all, a quiet life, without ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... oracles of | God's word and to vanish in the mixture of | their own inventions; so in the self-same | manner, in inquisition of nature they have | ever left the oracles of God's works, and | adored the deceiving and deformed imagery | which the unequal mirrors of their own | minds have represented unto them{53}. Nay | 53. compare this with the later idea of it is a point fit and necessary in the | Idols front and beginning of this work without | hesitation or reservation to be professed, | that it ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... stock of the Italian people, is seasoned with proverbial sayings, the wisdom of centuries condensed in a few nervous words. When emotion fires their brain, they break into spontaneous eloquence, or suggest the motive of a poem by phrases pregnant with imagery. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... upon the door of his native state, and mighty was the reverberation. In a few weeks Page's Greensboro address had made its way all over the Southern States, and his melancholy figure, "the forgotten man" had become part of the indelible imagery of the Southern people. The portrait etched itself deeply into the popular consciousness for the very good reason that its truth was pretty generally recognized. The higher type of newspaper, though it winced somewhat at Page's strictures, manfully ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... rendered them into English, with all their original fire? Yes, I was confident I had; and I had no doubt that the public would say so. And then, with respect to Ab Gwilym, had I not done as much justice to him as to the Danish Ballads; not only rendering faithfully his thoughts, imagery and phraseology, but even preserving in my translation the alliterative euphony which constitutes one of the most remarkable features of Welsh prosody? Yes, I had accomplished all this; and I doubted not that the public would receive my ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... prospect brightens, and we are led to expect some liveliness of imagery, some warmth of poetical colouring;—but here is no such thing.—There is no task more difficult to a Poet, than that of Rejection. Ovid, among the ancients, and Dryden, among the moderns, were ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... "Beware Nahoum!" But those who had been at the Palace said: "Beware the Inglesi!" This still Quaker, with the white shining face and pontifical hat, with his address of "thee" and "thou," and his forms of speech almost Oriental in their imagery and simplicity, himself an archaism, had impressed them with a sense of power. He had prompted old Diaz Pasha to speak of him as a reincarnation, so separate and withdrawn he seemed at the end of the evening, yet with an ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... may weave his wreath of victory for the conqueror; the historian, with all the pomp of splendid imagery, may describe the heroism of the day of slaughter; but, after all, and none know this better than the men most familiar with it, a great battle is the most hateful and hellish sight that the sun looks on in all ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... text is from the Book of Daniel, a Book which takes us into a world of visions and trances and mystical imagery. There is a world within the world; a life beyond life. That world is not only the sphere of God, but of recognizable beings, meditating presences subject to rule, with organization and degrees, activities and authorities. It is a host, a kingdom, swayed by law and purpose. In ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... What is solid and simple, carve out; what is thin and entangled, beat out. I give you all kinds of forms to be delighted in;—fluttering leaves as well as fair bodies; twisted branches as well as open brows. The leaf and the branch you may beat and drag into their imagery: the body and brow you shall reverently touch into their imagery. And if you choose rightly and work rightly, what you do shall be safe afterwards. Your slender leaves shall not break off in my tenacious iron, though they may be rusted a little ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... that the older British poets, with that true feeling for nature which distinguishes them, have closely adhered to the simple and familiar imagery which they found in these popular superstitions; and have thus given to their fairy mythology those continual allusions to the farm-house and the dairy, the green meadow and the fountain-head, that fill our minds with the delightful associations of rural life. It is curious ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... unreservedly, he would not have dwelt upon them afterwards, or have troubled himself to recall their circumstances. Here we trace his human weakness. Yet again we are reminded that it was the weakness of Caesar; for the dreams were noble in their imagery, and Caesarean (so to speak) in their tone of moral feeling. Thus, for example, the night before he was assassinated, he dreamt at intervals that he was soaring above the clouds on wings, and that he placed his hand within the right hand of Jove. It would seem that perhaps some obscure ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of subjects and the widest ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... sun-burst with the cry of David: 'Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth so shalt thou drive them away!' Even to common minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse, gave a loftiness and ardor of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip-shod vulgarisms ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... thing more than the imagery of your own fancy, or selections from the numberless slanders of a time-serving and corrupt press? If they are founded on facts, it is in your power to state the facts. For my own part, I am utterly ignorant of any, even the least, justification for them. I am utterly ignorant that the abolitionists ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... how to begin with quiet beauty and serene grace: the hurrying measures, the crowding epithets, and startling imagery of the northern poetry suited his intoxicated fancy. His "Thor battering the Serpent" was such a favorite that he presented it to the Academy as his admission gift. Such was his love of terrific ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... the town. The imagery and carved work on the front of the cathedral was much injured in 1641. The cross upon the west window is said to have been frequently aimed ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the allegorical interpretation which Krishna's romances now received. In Christian literature, the longing of the soul for God was occasionally expressed in terms of sexual imagery—the works of the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, including 'songs of the soul in rapture at having arrived at the height of perfection which ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... portion of knowledge. Science has of late "been enlisted under the banners of imagination," by the irresistible charms of genius; by the same power, her votaries will be led "from the looser analogies which dress out the imagery of poetry to the stricter ones which form the ratiocination of philosophy[1]."—Botany has become fashionable; in time it may become useful, if it be not so already. Chemistry will follow botany. Chemistry is a science well suited to the talents and situation ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... anger of Elizabeth, sure to be aroused by the preference of any beauty to her own. To deceive the Queen,—to whom, in gratitude for past favors, and, mayhap, with a lively appreciation of others yet to come, he is offering up homage,—he describes her Majesty by the very same imagery he had elsewhere employed to depict his lady-love; and ostensibly applies to the royal Elizabeth the amatory terms which are covertly meant for an Elizabeth of his own,—between whom and her royal type he either saw or affected to see a personal resemblance. Here we find ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... conception of sculpture as the art of fiction in solid substance, we are now to consider what its subject should be. What—having the gift of imagery—should we by preference endeavor to image? A question which is, indeed, subordinate to the deeper one—why we should wish to ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... would fain bow in reverence. But it may not be; we cannot receive him as a true poet—as in any poetic quality the peer of his matchless wife. We hear much of his subtile psychology—we deem it psychological unintelligibility. His rhythm is rough and unmusical, his style harsh and inverted, his imagery cold, his invective bitter, and his verbiage immense. His illustrations are sometimes coarse, his comparisons diminish rather than increase the importance of the ideas to which they are applied. His pages are frequently as chaotic as those of Wagner's music; leaf after leaf ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... which he gave it. He swore to Berry: he swore to me: and in all honesty he swore to the car. For this, since Ping and Pong were duplicates, he may be forgiven. He described the morning's incident with a wealth of picturesque detail and an abundance of vivid imagery, while an astute cross-examination only served to adorn the ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... and Honor,' introduced as a song of one of the shepherds into these pastorals, exhibits no very masterly strokes of a sublime and inventive fancy. It has much of the trite imagery usually applied in the fabrication of these ideal edifices. It, however, shows our author in a new walk of poetry. This magnificent tower, or castle is built on inaccessible cliffs of flint: the walls are of gold, ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... John Moore;" Gray's "Elegy;" Mrs. Hemans's "Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers;" Cowper's "My Mother's Picture;" Jones's "What Constitutes a State;" Scott's "Lochinvar;" Halleck's "Marco Bozzaris;" Drake's "American Flag;" and Mrs. Thrale's "Three Warnings." As an introduction to the thought, imagery and diction of Shakespeare, there were "Hamlet's Soliloquy," "Speech of Henry Fifth to his Troops," "Othello's Apology," "The Fall of Cardinal Wolsey" and his death, the "Quarrel of Brutus and Cassius" (often ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... thenceforth Icarian. Between what we have assumed to be the base of fact, and the legend which has been invested with such poetic grace in Greek story, there is no more than a century or so of re-telling might give to any event among a people so simple and yet so given to imagery. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... fanning themselves with diabolical irony, only to see a painting of a female form over whose writhing body boats were sailing, or a four-headed ram, or birds with human heads flying away with a mummified corpse. On the ceiling, too, there was strange imagery; and when she looked at the floor to rest her bewildered fancy, her eyes fell on a troop of furies pursuing the wicked, or a pool of fire by which horrible ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... nudity of his statues.[140] Some of the work of Bandinelli and Bronzino had to be removed. What was a rational and healthy protest has survived in grotesque and ill-fitting drapery made of tin—very negation of propriety. Although needed for biblical imagery, the nude in Italy was always exotic; in Greece it was indigenous. From the time of Homer there had been a worship of physical perfection. The Palaestra, the cultivation of athletics in a nation of soldiers, the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... Yochai, who lived in the second century. The Zohar, it was pretended, had been concealed in a cavern in Galilee for more than a thousand years, and had now been suddenly discovered. The Zohar is, indeed, a work of genius, its spiritual beauty, its fancy, its daring imagery, its depth of devotion, ranking it among the great books of the world. Its literary style, however, is less meritorious; it is difficult and involved. As Chatterton clothed his ideas in a pseudo-archaic English, so Moses of ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... an inspired orator who owes much of his advancement to eloquent tongue. Their platform manner is totally different. Lloyd George is fascinatingly magnetic in and out of the spotlight while Smuts is more coldly logical. When you hear Lloyd George you are stirred and even exalted by his golden imagery. The sound of his voice falls on the ear like music. You admire the daring of his utterance but you do not always remember everything ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... to establish any legal parentage whatever, that others had enjoyed a State's guardianship and discipline, and that a majority had left their paternal roofs without any embarrassing preliminary formula, were mere passing clouds that did not dim the golden imagery of the writer. From that day the Saints were adopted as historical lay figures, and entered at once into possession of uninterrupted ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... taken place with the weak Laplander, or with the well-grown, strong, bold Fin. It makes a difference in temperament, as great as between minor and major in the same piece of music. That touch of rich colour in our nation, of which the poet Wergeland's endless wealth of imagery and flight beyond logic are a representation, is certainly Finnish—at any rate, there is very little of it in our old Sagas. And it can be understood from this, what grandeur of nature the Fin has added to the Norwegian character. The Fin admixture has been a great and ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... perhaps another Celtic trait that his affections and emotions, passionate as these were, and liable to passionate ups and downs, found the most eloquent expression both in words and gestures. Love, anger, and indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what we read of Southern races. For all these emotional extremes, and in spite of the melancholy ground of his character, he had upon the whole a happy life; nor was he less fortunate in his death, which at the last ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... most were the Revelations and the Prophecies,—parts whose dim and wondrous imagery, and fervent language, impressed her the more, that she questioned vainly of their meaning;—and she and her simple friend, the old child and the young one, felt just alike about it. All that they knew was, that they ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Wandsworth, Homer would have found imagery by which to improve his description of the abode of Vulcan; for how feeble must have been the objects of this nature, which a poet could view on the shores of the Mediterranean, compared with the gigantic machinery of an English iron-foundry. The application of the expansive ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... slighted them unreservedly, he would not have dwelt upon them afterwards, or have troubled himself to recall their circumstances. Here we trace his human weakness. Yet again we are reminded that it was the weakness of Csar; for the dreams were noble in their imagery, and Csarean (so to speak) in their tone of moral feeling. Thus, for example, the night before he was assassinated, he dreamt at intervals that he was soaring above the clouds on wings, and that he placed his hand within the right hand of Jove. ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... horror of Winter, take in their turns possession of the mind. The poet leads us through the appearances of things as they are successively varied by the vicissitudes of the year, and imparts to us so much of his own enthusiasm that our thoughts expand with his imagery and kindle with his sentiments. Nor is the naturalist without his part in the entertainment, for he is assisted to recollect and to combine, to arrange his discoveries, and to amplify the sphere of his contemplation. The great ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... boyhood. And I have met with no conjecture on the point that bears greater likelihoods of truth, than that another three, far different in merit, were addressed, much later in life, to the same object. The prevailing tone and imagery of them are such as he would hardly have used but with a woman in his thoughts; they are full-fraught with deep personal feeling, as distinguished from exercises of fancy; and they speak, with unsurpassable tenderness, of ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... written a really great poem on these terms, though deprived of the concrete imagery of a Dante or a Milton. If he had fairly grasped some definite conception of the universe, whether pantheistic or atheistic, optimist or pessimist, proclaiming a solution of the mystery, or declaring all solutions to be impossible, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... this preference for one particular kind of mental imagery, and that the motor, or muscular kind, which gives this type of child his peculiarity in this more psychological period. When we pass from the mere outward and organic description of his peculiarities, attempted above in the case ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... Diaz, was published in the Echo du Morvan, a review which for eighteen months maintained its existence in spite of provincial indifference. Some knowing persons at Nevers declared that Jan Diaz was making fun of the new school, just then bringing out its eccentric verse, full of vitality and imagery, and of brilliant effects produced by defying the Muse under pretext of adapting German, English, and ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... that a book is by the author of "Mehalah" is to imply that it contains a story cast on strong lines, containing dramatic possibilities, vivid and sympathetic descriptions of Nature, and a wealth of ingenious imagery.'—Speaker. ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... sense in which the full corn in the ear may be said to be wrapped up in its kernel, and it can unfold only according to the laws of its being. The first account of Creation sets forth, with the beautiful imagery of the Orient, the general and ultimate truth. The second account, with the same grand simplicity, foreshadows the method and the long, slow process by which this ultimate end ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... parents of the baby I buried yesterday? Are there no pictures in these stricken souls worth viewing? As you pass through these chambers of imagery, and view one of these exquisitely painted pictures after another, you have the whole splendid career mapped out before you. Such triumphs, such honours, such laurels for his brow! The glory of ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... of which the sea is driven through some unknown subterranean channel, roaring and thundering with a fearful noise, which rises in hollow echoes through the aptly-named "Devil's Throat." About this hole no grass grew: the rocks rose wild, jagged, and precipitous, all around it. If ever the ghastly imagery of Dante's terrible "Vision" was realized on ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... put it elsewhere with Wandering Willie's Tale, which it more specially resembles in the way in which the ordinary turns into the extraordinary. It falls short of Scott in vividness, character, manners, and impressiveness, but surpasses him in beauty[90] of style and imagery. In particular, Nodier has here, in a manner which I hardly remember elsewhere, achieved the blending of two kinds of "terror"—the ordinary kind which, as it is trivially called, "frightens" one, and the other[91] terror which accompanies the intenser pleasures ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... as distinct from the individuals who compose it, has no apparatus for feeling pain or pleasure. There are no social sensations. Perceptions and mental imagery are individual and not social phenomena. Society lives, so to speak, only in its separate organs or members, and each of these organs has its own brain and organ of control which gives it, among other things, the power of independent locomotion. This ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... for picturesque and appropriate imagery, for keen and faithful portraiture Mr. McGaffey has no superior. And there will be many to say that this book entitles him to recognition as the interpreter of his ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... in Herodotus (VI., 105-106) with Browning's more spirited and poetic version. Observe how the strong patriotism, the Greek love of nature, and the Greek reverence for the gods are brought to the fore. What imagery in the poem is especially effective? What is the claim of Pheidippides—as Browning presents him—to memory as a hero? What ideals are ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... and impressive, in the teaching of our Lord. The Sermon on the Mount is a most pleasing specimen of His method of conveying instruction. Whilst He gives utterance to sentiments of exalted wisdom, He employs language so simple, and imagery so chaste and natural, that even a child takes a pleasure in perusing His address. There is reason to think that He did not begin to speak in parables until a considerable time after He had entered upon His ministry. [23:1] By these symbolical discourses He at once blinded ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the stories in the book this was the last one would have supposed Dan would like best, and even Mrs Jo was surprised at his perceiving the moral of the tale through the delicate imagery and romantic language by which it was illustrated. But as she looked and listened she remembered the streak of sentiment and refinement which lay concealed in Dan like the gold vein in a rock, making him quick to feel and to enjoy fine colour in a flower, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... rest, what imagery, what exaltation we find in this Appendix! Dazed with imagined beauty we pass from one splendid haunt to another. One of them has three golf-courses of its own; several are replete with every comfort (and is not "replete" the perfect epithet?). Here is a seductive one "on the sea-edge," and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... "wide in range, of profound significance and infinite ingenuity," to defend and justify immoral intercourse with a gipsy trull. The poem consists of the speculations of a libertine, who coerces into his service truth and sophistry, and "a superabounding wealth of thought and imagery," and with no further purpose on the poet's part than the dramatic delineation of character. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is spoken of in a similar manner as the justification, by reference to the deepest principles of morality, of compromise, hypocrisy, lying, and a selfishness that ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... the same with the poetry of outward nature as with the poetry of human passion.[31] In Addison's "Letter from Italy," in Pope's "Pastorals," and "Windsor Forest," the imagery, when not actually false, is vague and conventional, and the language abounds in classical insipidities, epithets that describe nothing, and generalities at second hand from older poets, who may ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... is the imagery of the fairy-songs in the Tempest and the Midsummer Night's Dream; Ariel riding through the twilight on the bat, or sucking in the bells of flowers with the bee; or the little bower-women of Titania, driving ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... attempt to alter or supersede the originals. Nor could any attempt have succeeded. There are specimens which exist, independent of those collected by Macpherson, which present a peculiarity of form, and a Homeric consistency of imagery, distinct from every other species of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... thou prove,"[209] is a charming song; but "Logan burn and Logan braes" is sweetly susceptible of rural imagery; I'll try that likewise, and, if I succeed, the other song may class among the English ones. I remember the two last lines of a verse in some of the old songs of "Logan Water" (for I know a good many different ones) which ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Ode to Evening is that here at least Collins can tell the truth without falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of the world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use of personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into imagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up his view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent upon expressing any other man's experiences but his own when ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... your picture, twice show truth, Beyond mere imagery on the wall,— So note by note bring music from your mind Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,— So write a book shall mean beyond the facts, Suffice the eye and save ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... to rise to the idea; but he could feel it enough to make any sacrifice that still remained to be made. As to what such sacrifice was now to be made to, here Newman stopped short before a blank wall over which there sometimes played a shadowy imagery. He had a fancy of carrying out his life as he would have directed it if Madame de Cintre had been left to him—of making it a religion to do nothing that she would have disliked. In this, certainly, there was ...
— The American • Henry James
... children of their Kings that did not inherit. At the bottom of the stairs is the Pantheon, built eighty feet square, and is, I guess, about sixty feet over; the whole lining of it in all places is jasper, very curiously carved, both in figures and flowers and imagery; and a branch for forty lights, which is vastly rich, of silver, and hangs down from the top by a silver chain, within three yards of the bottom, and is made with great art, as is also this curious knot of jasper on the floor, that the reflection of the branch and lights is ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if you will, into which we peep for a moment, and see it at work weaving strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century has its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations and subtle moralising, it is an element in the local colour of a great age. It illustrates also the faith of that age in all oracles, its desire to hear all voices, its generous belief that ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... relationship between some of the latter and the Biblical Song of Songs. In that marvellous poem, outspoken praise of earthly beauty, frank enumeration of the physical charms of the lovers, thorough unreserve of imagery, are conspicuous enough. Just these features, as Wetzstein showed, are reproduced, in a debased, yet recognizable, likeness, by the modern Syrian wasf—a lyric description of the bodily perfections and adornments of a newly-wed pair. ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... made a gesture expressive of the motion of a night bird beating its wings, and, lapsing into silence, stood smiling at Pierre, who was bewildered. Beauclair had told him all that beforehand, using almost the same words and the same imagery. Point by point, his prognostics were realised, there was nothing more in the case than natural ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the strangers attending his meetings, that this John the Baptist, mighty preacher though he be, was but the herald of one much greater than he, who should follow—that he was the forerunner of the Master, according to the Oriental imagery which pictured the forerunner of the great dignitaries, running ahead of the chariot of his master, crying aloud to all people gathered on the road that they must make way for the approaching great man, shouting ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... was already shining into poetry. Ch'u Yuan, the first great poet, belongs to this same fourth century; it is a long step from the little wistful ballads that Confucius gathered to the "wild irregular meters," * splendid imagery, and be it said, deep soul symbolism of his great poem the Li Sao (Falling into Trouble). The theme of it is this: From earliest childhood Ch'u Yuan had sought the Tao, but in vain. At last, banished by the prince whose minister he had been, he ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... however, refrain from giving a passage from Shakespeare, even though it should appear trite, which illustrates the emblematical meaning often conveyed in these floral tributes, and at the same time possesses that magic of language and appositeness of imagery for which ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... he pointed out to me numberless faults of style, incoherent and fantastic imagery, sentiment alike exaggerated and a thousand leagues removed from nature. He considered, and still considers, Pierre Corneille to be a blind enthusiast of the ancients, whom we deem great since we do not know them. In his eyes, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Too late! The only art that I ever could achieve was that of giving happiness to Isabel and being worthy of her devotion. Her letters came frequently, always so full of wise observations, striking fancies and imagery; so many with thanks for what I had been to her. She wrote me that Uncle Tom's will, as he had dictated it, had been probated and acquiesced ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... trust the everlasting hills. And was old David right, he thought that day, when he held the earthquake and the volcano as the truest symbols of the history of human kind, and of the dealings of their Maker with them? All the magnificent Plutonic imagery of the Hebrew poets, had it no meaning for men now? Did the Lord still uncover the foundations of the world, spiritual as well as physical, with the breath of His displeasure? Was the solfa-tara of Tophet still ordained for tyrants? And did the Lord still arise out ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... say. Instead of learning from the folk-song, Schiller had learned originally from Klopstock; and what he had learned was to pose and philosophize and invest fictitious sentiment with a maze of bewildering and far-fetched imagery. Then he had lost sympathy with Klopstock's religiosity, had acquired a better opinion of the things of sense, and had had his introduction to doubt and disgust and rebellion. When now these moods sought expression in verse, the verse took the form of impassioned rhetoric. He sang not as the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Savage's works; and that, though it cannot be denied to contain many striking sentiments, majestic lines, and just observations, it is in general not sufficiently polished in the language, or enlivened in the imagery, or digested in the plan. Thus his poem contributed nothing to the alleviation of his poverty, which was such as very few could have supported with equal patience; but to which it must likewise be confessed that ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... seal of their repentance. The nature of his ministry is declared to have been a fulfillment of the prediction of Isaiah who described "one crying in the wilderness," one sent of God to prepare the way for the coming of Christ. This preparation is pictured in terms of Oriental imagery. When a monarch was about to make a journey, a servant was sent before him to prepare the highway. Valleys needed to be filled, hills lowered, crooked places made straight, rough ways made smooth. Thus, before men would be ready to receive Christ, moral obstacles must be removed; men must repent ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... delight and reverence Madonna pictures like this have awakened as we read the words of an old chant. In quaint diction and with fanciful imagery the writer tried to express his feelings in the presence of a painting which, if not this veritable Madonna of the Chair, was ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... (although they are more like winged archbishops) that stand guard upon the door, of the cherubs in the corners, of the scapegoat gargoyles, or the quaint and spirited relief, where St. Michael (the artist's patron) makes short work of a protesting Lucifer. We were never weary of viewing the imagery, so innocent, sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense—in the sense of inventive gusto and expression—so artistic. I know not whether it was more strange to find a building of such merit in a corner of a barbarous isle, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at Paris. Visited the Paris office of the New York Herald, where many files of American and European papers can be perused. A visit to the "Louvre" is a joy for the layman, as for the connoisseur, galleries a mile or more in length hung with paintings grand in imagery and beauty of old masters, French and Italian, centuries old. Many showed the silent, slow and impressive steps of age. But "you may break, you may scatter the vase if you will, the scent of the roses will linger there still," for on shrunken canvas or from luster dimmed ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... frequently in the scriptures as a type of the highest human good. All of the most joyous emotions of the mental and physical natures of man are described in the imagery of light. Throughout the Book it is used to typify the ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... Emma Goldman says, "high strung." His ear is tuned to hear unintermittently the agonized cry. To follow the imagery of Shelley, he seems to be living in a "mind's hell,"[4] wherein hate, scorn, pity, remorse, and despair seem to be tearing out the nerves by their bleeding roots. Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson, Francois Coppee, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... poetry—of poetical presentation, which is independent of any subject or intention, which is capable of being adapted perhaps to all, certainly to most, which lies in form, in sound, in metre, in imagery, in language, in suggestion—rather than in matter, in sense, in definite ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... by his vehemence, Ricciardetto by his amours, Astolfo by an ostentatious rashness and self-committal; but in all these respects they appear to have been made to the author's hand. Neither does the poem exhibit any prevailing force of imagery, or of expression, apart from popular idiomatic phraseology; still less, though it has plenty of infernal magic, does it present us with any magical enchantments of the alluring order, as in Ariosto; or with love-stories as good as Boiardo's, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... of it is rich in thought and imagery, and happy expressions; and of the disjecta membra[315] scattered throughout, and as yet unarranged, a good dramatick poet might avail himself with considerable advantage. I shall give my readers ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... able and sympathetic reviewer of this essay, in the 'New York Tribune,' 'in which Mr. Martineau delights often impairs the distinctness of his statements by diverting the attention of the reader from the essential points of his discussion to the beauty of his imagery, and thus diminishes their power of conviction. 'To the beauties here referred to I bear willing testimony; but the reviewer is strictly just in his estimate of their effect upon my critic's logic. The 'affluence of illustration,' and ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... sentence, polished and balanced with rhetorical skill, and delivered with the emphasis and inflection of a great orator. One critic thought it a revelation to find a man who could be eloquent with studied composure, who could be fervid without wildness, and who could hold imagery and metaphor to the steady place of relentless logic without detracting from ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... also, certain papers, wherein is painted some babblerie or other, of imagery woork, and these they call My Lord of Misrule's badges: these they give to every one that wil give money for them, to maintaine them in their heathenrie, devilrie, whordome, drunkennes, pride, and what not. And who will not be buxom to them, and give them money for these their devilish cognizances, ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... hold to his antagonists by mixing up sentiment and imagery with his reasoning; so that being unused to such a sight in the region of politics, they were deceived, and could not discern the fruit from the flowers. Gravity is the cloke of wisdom; and those who have nothing else think it an insult ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... arts, professions, and occupations of life, grow out of our connection with matter. The natural philosopher, the physician, the lawyer, the artist, and the legislator, find the objects or occasions of their researches in matter. The poet borrows his beautiful imagery from matter. The sculptor and painter express their noble conceptions through matter. Material wants rouse the world to activity. The material organs of sense, especially the eye, wake up infinite thoughts in the mind. To maintain, then, that the mass of men are and must be so immersed in ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... that if I went again on foreign service, I might meet with some young lady who would send me out of the world with a cup of poison, or by some fatal spell break the magical chain which now bound me to Emily. This poetical imagery had no more effect on them, than my prose composition. I then appealed to Emily herself. "Surely," said I, "your heart is not as hard as those of our inflexible parents? surely you will be my advocate on this occasion? ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... is lost beneath a weight of accretion, like the thick moss blurring the chiselled outlines of some carven monument. After careful scrutiny of the miniature temple which suggests so many interpretations of symbolic imagery, we return to the little presbytery to hear of the subsiding river, and the good priest, announcing that the raft can now be safely negotiated, accompanies us to the tottering structure, a straw matting laid over three crazy boats punted across the turbulent stream. A half-hour's ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... society, such as heart disease. Such handicaps, however, are limited to relatively few of a population. The raison d'etre of the greater number of minor mental inefficiencies the psychanalyst puts down to handicaps in the unconscious. Again he mistakes figurative imagery for explanations. The conception of endocrine diversity in the make-up supplies us with the rationale of the vast majority of organic and functional defects and inferiorities, in short, subnormalities of any group, large ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... and artificial, with very little of nature, and not much of life. He formed a peculiar idea of comic excellence, which he supposed to consist in gay remarks and unexpected answers; but that which he endeavoured, he seldom failed of performing. His scenes exhibit not much of humour, imagery, or passion: his personages are a kind of intellectual gladiators; every sentence is to ward or strike; the contest of smartness is never intermitted; his wit is a meteor playing to and fro with alternate coruscations. ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... immortality of the soul."—The important thing now is to plant this entirely philosophic faith in all hearts. We introduce it into the civil order of things, we take the calendar out of the hands of the Church, we purge it of its Christian imagery; we make the new era begin with the advent of the Republic; we divide the year according to the metric system, we name the months according to the vicissitudes of the seasons, "we substitute, in all directions, the realities of reason for the visions of ignorance, the truths of nature for a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Souls, for instance, and Old Morality—the quaintness is merely decorative: the essentials are sound and human enough to be of lasting interest and to have a capacity of common application. Elsewhere his imagery is apt to become strange and unaffecting, his fancy to work in curious and desolate ways, his message to sound abstruse and strange; and these effects too are deepened by the qualities and the merits of his style. It is peculiarly his own, but it is ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... is largely due to an almost entire abstention on the part of the writers from figurative language, or at least from all imagery that is not readily recognized as Scriptural. Bread and beef are what men demand for a steady diet. Sweetmeats are well enough, now and then, ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... takes high rank among the modern poets, many of his admirers holding him to be the greatest one alive, he is a far greater orator. His diction is perfect, his wealth of imagery exhaustless; I have seen him sway a vast audience as a wheat-field is swayed by the wind. His life he values not at all; the four rows of ribbons which on the breast of his uniform make a splotch of color were not won ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... faithful rendering of the Book which, aside from its spiritual teaching, contains some of the noblest examples of style in the whole range of human literature: the elemental simplicity of the Books of Moses, the glowing poetry of Job and the Psalms, the sublime imagery of Isaiah, the exquisite tenderness of the Parables, the forged and tempered argument of the Epistles, the gorgeous coloring of the Apocalypse. All these elements entered in some degree into the translation of 1611, and the result was a work of such beauty, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... thing he needs, and the belief that fits one man will not fit another. Religious opinions are never thrown away: they evolve into something else, and we use the old symbols and imagery to express ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... above. Many of the animals have keen sensory discrimination. Feeble-minded children, unless of very low grade, do not differ very markedly from normal children in sensitivity of the skin, visual acuity, simple reaction time, type of imagery, etc. But in power of comprehension, abstraction, and ability to direct thought, in the nature of the associative processes, in amount of information possessed, and in spontaneity of ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... of a Supreme Force, and of the origin and progress of the visible world. With like ability Gotama deals with his inquiry into the nature of man. With Oriental imagery he bids us consider what becomes of a grain of salt thrown into the sea; but, lest we should be deceived herein, he tells us that there is no such thing as individuality or personality—that the Ego is altogether a nonentity. In these profound ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... which required concentration was asked, Edna was inclined to work carelessly, but in general her capacities proved to be decidedly good. She was accustomed to read nothing but the lightest literature and fairy stories and her interests were of the superficial sort. Neither in powers of imagery or imagination, nor by anything else ascertained about her mental abilities did we come to know of any point of special bearing ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... greeted the regiment held the happy mean between theatrical gush and a sermon. It was adorned with pompous imagery, and contained numerous eulogiums of the reigning family. "Christian humility" and "God's assistance" played a great part therein, and it dealt rude thrusts at those who waged war in secret upon the sup-porters of throne ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... charities, are placed high above us—legible to every eye, and shining like the stars, with a splendour that is read in every clime, and translates itself into every language at once. Such is the imagery of Wordsworth. But this is otherwise estimated in the policy of papal Rome: and casuistry usurps a place in her spiritual economy, to which our Protestant feelings demur. So far, however, the question between ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... of the profession of literature can read Dickens's private letters and not stand amazed at the unbounded affluence of imagery, sentiment, humour, and keen observation which he poured out in them. There was no stint, no reservation for trade purposes. So with his conversation—every thought, every fancy, every feeling was expressed ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... boyhood to old age he continues the idol of the imaginations of both. The boy of ten, and the old man of seventy, alike delight to read and quote him for the music of his verses, and the beauty of his sentiments, precepts, and imagery.[31] ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... I should like to dwell for a moment on what have been called the "by-products" of the Library story hour. Besides guiding his reading, a carefully prepared, well told story enriches a child's imagination, stocks his mind with poetic imagery and literary allusions, develops his powers of concentration, helps in the unfolding of his ideas of right and wrong, and develops his sympathetic feelings; all of which "by-products" have a powerful influence on character. Thus the library story hour becomes, if properly utilized, an ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... positively endows a man with beauty, happiness, and holiness—when we have got that, then the question next cries aloud for answer—this well-spring of salvation, is—what? Who? And the first answer and the last answer is GOD—GOD HIMSELF. It is no mere bit of drapery of the prophet's imagery, this well-spring of salvation; it is something much more substantial, much deeper than that. You remember the old psalm, 'With Thee is the fountain of life: in Thy light shall we see light'; and what David and John after him called life, Isaiah and Paul after him calls salvation. And ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... to the stormy western sky where the day died in splendour, added simply in the poetic imagery that so often springs to the ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... revaluation of its elements on a new esthetic basis. In "Salome" music is largely a decorative element, like the scene,—like the costumes. It creates atmosphere, like the affected stylism of much of Oscar Wilde's text, with its Oriental imagery borrowed from "The Song of Solomon," diluted and sophisticated; it gives emotional significance to situations, helping the facial play of Salome and her gestures to proclaim the workings of her mind, when speech has deserted her; it is at its ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... or be placed on an easel,—whether the bust of Psyche should stand on the marble table in the hall, or on a bracket in the library; all of which points were debated with a breadth of survey, a richness of imagery, a vigor of discussion, that would be perfectly astonishing to any one who did not know how much two very self-willed argumentative people might find to say on any point under heaven. Everything in classical antiquity,—everything in Kugler's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... possibility of all imagery, of all our pictorial modes of expression, is contained in the ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... "Religious Isolation," deserve mention; and it is with pleasure we find one, in the tenor of strong appreciation, written on reading the Essays of the great American, Emerson. The sonnet for "Butler's Sermons" is more indistinct, and, as such, less to be approved, in imagery than is usual with this poet. That "To an Independent Preacher who preached that we should be in harmony with nature," seems to call for some remark. The sonnet ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... from the antique, quite changed its character, becoming more geometrical and conventional in its form. That which particularly distinguishes Lombard from Byzantine art is its sculpture abounding with grotesque imagery, with illustrations of every-day life, of a fanciful mythology not yet quite extinct, and allusions, no longer symbolic but direct, to the Christian creed; the latter quality a striking evidence of the triumph of the Roman Church over all iconoclastic adversaries in Greece." What is here ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... woman, you are not merely the handiwork of God, but also of men; these are ever endowing you with beauty from their hearts. Poets are weaving for you a web with threads of golden imagery; painters are giving your form ever new immortality. The sea gives its pearls, the mines their gold, the summer gardens their flowers to deck you, to cover you, to make you more precious. The desire of men's hearts has shed its glory over your youth. You are one half woman ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... beliefs. "It was in answering Robert Browning;" she wrote, "that my mind refused to bring forward argument, turned recreant, and sided with the enemy." Something of this period of Browning's Sturm und Drang can be divined through the ideas and imagery ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... exposed to a hurricane at sea. We too generally limit this passage to its literal sense. To Bunyan, who had passed through such a deep experience of the "terrors of the Lord," when he came out of tribulation and anguish, he must have richly enjoyed the solemn imagery of these words, depicting the inmost feelings of his soul when in the horrible deeps of doubt and despair. But young Christians must not be distressed because they have never experienced such tempests: thousands of vessels of mercy get to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... imagine that such external decorations of the churches, where a few solemn figures told almost as shadows on the golden background brightly reflecting the sun, must have been even more glorious than the imagery of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... hardly another American woman-poet whose poetry is generally known and loved like that of Sara Teasdale. 'Rivers to the Sea', her latest volume of lyrics, possesses the delicacy of imagery, the inward illumination, the high vision that characterize the poetry that will endure the test ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... the ordinary Hebrew culture. The general manner of all the Hebrew prophets, of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, or Joel, is the same—the manner of the fiercest afflatus, of entire abandonment, finding expression in phrases of magnificent solemnity and in imagery of the profoundest awesomeness. This manner the Greeks never show. Not even AEschylus, the most Hebraic of Hellenes, has any passages in which he loses control of his artistic sense. Neither he nor any other Hellene sees ecstatic visions or dreams ecstatic dreams. There is no place ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Lords of Little Egypt; and from this fact seems originally to have arisen the notion that they were Egyptians. But this seems less like an assertion of their origin than like a piece of Scriptural phraseology. The Hussites used in that way a Biblical imagery, like the Puritans of a later age. Like the Puritans, they called their opponents Moabites, Amalekites, and so on. With the Puritans, Egypt was always "the house of bondage," and that name was the common designation of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... are fast. I would fain keep all the cry as well as all the wool to ourselves; but as for giving over work, that can only be when I am in woolen.'"[53] From this time forward the brightness of joy and sincerity of inevitable humor, which perfected the imagery of the earlier novels, are wholly absent, except in the two short intervals of health unaccountably restored, in which he wrote ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... that a book is by the author of "Mehalah" is to imply that it contains a story cast on strong lines, containing dramatic possibilities, vivid and sympathetic descriptions of Nature, and a wealth of ingenious imagery.'—Speaker. ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... but irresistibly that afternoon, as we rode easily across the land of the Philistines in a few hours, that we had never really read the Old Testament as it ought to be read,—as a book written in an Oriental atmosphere, filled with the glamour, the imagery, the magniloquence of the East. Unconsciously we had been reading it as if it were a collection of documents produced in Heidelberg, Germany, or in Boston, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... Prooem.) and the uniform imagery of Ossian's Poems, which, according to every hypothesis, were composed by ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... all the efforts of the king his father, despite the guards and his young men companions, despite the beauty of the dancing-girls, the mysteries of life came home to him, and he was afraid. It is a beautiful story told in quaint imagery how it was that the knowledge of sickness and of death came to him, a horror stalking amid the glories of his garden. He learnt, and he understood, that he too would grow old, would fall sick, would die. And beyond death? There was the fear, ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... apart, whom such a theme Has bound together, and hereafter aid In trivial expression, that have been So hideously dignified?—Would God That tearing you apart would tear the thread I strung you on! Would God—O God, my mind Stretches asunder on this merciless rack Of imagery! O, let me sleep a while! Would I could sleep, and wake to find me back In that sweet summer afternoon with you. Summer? 'Tis summer still by the calendar! How easily could God, if He so willed, Set back the world a little turn ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... for iron; but in this mine you will find the various metals and gems in neighbouring "pockets" and nuggets, and seams and beds. Here you may gather the golden opinions of the ancients in close proximity to those of the moderns. Here you will find pearls of thought, sparkling gems of imagery, broad seams of satire, and silvery streams of sentiment, with wealth of wisdom and of wit. Hard iron-fisted facts also, and funny mercurial fancies are to be found here in abundance, and there are tons of tin in the form of rubbish, which is usually left at a pit's ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... and delays make great havoc of both hero and heroine. They give way to melancholy, indulge in amorous rhapsodies, and become very emaciated. So far the story is decidedly dull, and its pathos, notwithstanding the occasional grandeur and beauty of imagery, often verges on the ridiculous. But, by way of relief, an element of life is generally introduced in the character of the Vidushaka, or Jester, who is the constant companion of the hero; and in the young maidens, who are ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... he saw something white and gay gleaming through the boles of the oak-trees, and presently there was clear before him a most goodly house builded of white marble, carved all about with knots and imagery, and the carven folk were all painted of their lively colours, whether it were their raiment or their flesh, and the housings wherein they stood all done with gold and fair hues. Gay were the windows ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... should fail to understand with greater ease, but that we should probably not understand at all. Wagner thus forced language back to a more primeval stage in its development a stage at which it was almost free of the abstract element, and was still poetry, imagery, and feeling; the fearlessness with which Wagner undertook this formidable mission shows how imperatively he was led by the spirit of poetry, as one who must follow whithersoever his phantom leader may direct him. Every word in ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... entertained himself with the many marvellous sights which are hidden away beneath the waters of the great ocean and which have a life and imagery of their own, stranger and more mysterious perhaps than those on which men are accustomed to look. But in time he became restless and dissatisfied with himself. The unpleasant thought crept slowly into his heart that in a moment of passion he had basely deserted ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... the same way the idea of the progress of Humanity seems to us to have been derived from the Christian belief in the coming of the Kingdom of God through the extension of the Church, and to that final triumph of good over evil foretold in the imagery of the Apocalypse. At least the founders of the Religion of Humanity will admit that the Christian Church is the matrix of theirs so much their very nomenclature proves and we would fain ask them to review the process of disengagement and ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... chief, whose death song they have sung amidst the wail of the squaws. Yet Whirlwind does not grieve. He has found another squaw, fleeter than the antelope, more graceful than the fawn, whose voice is like the singing birds, and face fairer than imagery of the spirit land. Let my brother go to his home, but Whirlwind's home is where the antelope is, he will live ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... (1809-1892), the author of The Princess, In Memoriam, and the Idylls of the King, held the first place among the poets of his day. An adept in the metrical art, he combines in these mature productions, with terseness of diction and fresh, striking imagery, deep reflection and sympathy with the intellectual questionings and yearnings of the time. In his lyrical poems the fullness of his power is seen. He was, without question, a consummate literary artist. Browning (1812-1889), careless of rhythmical art, with a defiance of form, but with dramatic ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... squander so much that is beautiful on such an orgy of blood and violence. Romeo and Juliet is full of beautiful poetry; but even here occasional lapses show the undeveloped taste of the young writer. Notice the flowery and fantastic imagery in the following passage, where Lady Capulet is praising Paris, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... of Troy divine': we begin to miss that high and equable sublimity which never flags or sinks, that continuous current of moving incidents, those rapid transitions, that force of eloquence, that opulence of imagery which is ever true to nature. Like the sea when it retires upon itself and leaves its shores waste and bare, henceforth the tide of sublimity begins to ebb, and draws us away into the dim ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... departed, and in its place is a gnawing, clamorous, ravening desire. The vitiated body, full of indescribable and mysterious pain, the still more tortured mind, sinking under a burden of remorse, guilt, fear, and awful imagery, both unite in one desperate, incessant ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... of unhappy end in imagery Of gold or jewelled bands he saw exprest; Then eagles' talons, the authority With which great lords their delegates invest: Bellows filled every nook, the fume and fee Wherein the favourites of kings are blest: Given to those Ganymedes that have their hour, And ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... doubtfully. He does not know exactly what to do. She hears him, and starts to her feet, pointing with one hand to yonder peak, and with the other to that knife-like edge that seems cleaving heaven with its keen and glistening cimeter of snow, reminding one of Isaiah's sublime imagery, 'For my sword is bathed in heaven.' She points at the grizzly rocks, with their jags and spear- points. Evidently she is beside herself, and thinks she can remember the names of those monsters, born of earthquake and storm, which cannot be named nor known but by sight, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... in the imagery of romance. He sought 'a treasure—a treasure that would destroy a Kingdom.' And his indicatory data seemed to be the dried ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... and ornamental articles, which she disposes of for her mother's benefit. She is very useful among the other pupils, and is well informed with regard to various branches of useful knowledge. She is completely matter-of-fact in all her ideas, as Dr. Howe studiously avoids all imagery and illustration in his instructions, in order not to embarrass her mind by complex images. It is to be regretted that she has very few ideas on ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... tendency was due in part to an idealizing dissatisfaction with the crudeness of their actual life (as well as to frequent inability to enter into the realm of deeper and finer thought without the aid of somewhat mechanical imagery); and no doubt it was greatly furthered also by the medieval passion for translating into elaborate and fantastic symbolism all the details of the Bible narratives. But from whatever cause, the tendency hardened into a ruling convention; thousands upon thousands of medieval ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... waterbox of the engine, in imminent peril of being jerked from his place, battering his silver trumpet insanely against the brake rods, beseeching, threatening profanely. And profanity at that time was a fine art. Men studied its alliteration, the gorgeousness of its imagery, the blast of its fire. The art has been lost, existing still, in a debased form, only among mule drivers, sailors, and the owners of certain makes of automobiles. The men on the rope responded nobly. The roar of their going over the plank road was ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... study, and quite devoid of science, she yet notes well, and interests us in, the animals, plants, human occupants and natural phenomena generally of the countries visited. And without any command or affectation of imagery or fine language she is very graphic in her descriptions of sea and shore. Her account of a visit to the great Hawaian volcano is one of the best we have ever read, being simple, terse and vivid, without the overloading with detail that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... knew him well. Who that has once read or heard his songs, can forget their rich and graceful imagery; the fertile fancy, the touching sentiment, and the "soul reviving" melody, which characterize every line of these delightful lyrics? Well do we remember, too, his "old buff waistcoat," his courteous manner, and his gentlemanly pleasantry, long after this Nestor of song had retired to enjoy the ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... that he saw the vision intellectually, and hence that chiding of the intellectual that pervades his books? Be it as it may, his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lack- lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... elements, something which has a place apart in English poetry. Death's Jest-Book is perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a page without its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A slave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parable ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... gunboats, the mortars, from all the batteries, are flashes, clouds of smoke, and thunderings, which bring to mind the gorgeous imagery of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, descriptive of the scenes of ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,—only this gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as well as in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of feeling and imagery that takes me by surprise. And then besides, and most of all, I am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy confidence in me. Perhaps I owe it to my—Well, no matter! How one must love the editor who first calls him the ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... is likely to become a more permanent part of the mental substratum than any formal logical presentation of ideas. How much more will this be the case with the child who feels more than he reasons, who delights in cadence and rhythm, and who loves a world of imagery! ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... describing his voyage from Philadelphia to London in 1772. Friend Woolman, like the sturdy Quaker that he was, was horrified (when he went to have a look at the ship Mary and Elizabeth) to find "sundry sorts of carved work and imagery" on that part of the vessel where the cabins were; and in the cabins themselves he observed "some superfluity of workmanship of several sorts." This subjected his mind to "a deep exercise," and he decided that he would have to take passage in the steerage instead ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... very sound of the language keeps for us the freshness of the imagery—the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole—which has so long become publica materies. It is not withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it is now. The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to the dead language, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 1845. In this he traces the story of the human race from the creation through the Scriptural, classical, and feudal periods down to the present century, and closes with foreshadowings of a peaceful and happy future. It is picturesque, full of lofty imagery and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... above all, a greater truth to life and nature. It was felt that the degenerated classicists were "barren of imagination and invention," offered in their insipid artificialities nothing but "rhetoric, bombast, fleurs de college, and Latin-verse poetry," clothed "borrowed ideas in trumpery imagery," and presented themselves with a "conventional elegance and noblesse than which there was nothing more common." On the other hand, the works of the master-minds of England, Germany, Spain, and Italy, which were more and more translated and read, opened new, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... other remarks fertile in the imagery of love, the two pretty cousins amused themselves until supper time, playing with ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... abstract is hardly won, and only by use familiarized to the mind. Examples are akin to analogies, and have a reflex influence on thought; they people the vacant mind, and may often originate new directions of enquiry. Plato seems to be conscious of the suggestiveness of imagery; the general analogy of the arts is constantly employed by him as well as the comparison of particular arts—weaving, the refining of gold, the learning to read, music, statuary, painting, medicine, the art of the pilot—all of which occur in this dialogue alone: though he is also aware that 'comparisons ...
— Statesman • Plato
... anticipation, I had dwelt upon the homeward ride with Mildred. A-camelback, I was, as it were, upon my native heath, master of myself, assured, and at ease. I had planned to tell her of my love, plead my cause with Oriental fervor and imagery, but before we reached shore the tempest was so loud that she could not have heard me unless I had shouted, and I had no mind to bawl my love. Worse still, when once we were going across the wind and later into it, I could ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis |
