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More "Fable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great festivals were retained. But it was not thought desirable that Saint Valentine, Saint Chad, Saint Swithin, Saint Edward King of the West Saxons, Saint Dunstan, and Saint Alphage, should share the honours of Saint John and Saint Paul; or that the Church should appear to class the ridiculous fable of the discovery of the cross with facts so awfully important as the Nativity, the Passion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension of her ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... interests. France is agonizing, that is certain; we are all sick, all corrupt, all ignorant, all discouraged: to say that it was WRITTEN, that it had to be so, that it has always been and will always be, is to begin again the fable of the pedagogue and the child who is drowning. You might as well say ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... HIS PLACE.—The old fable of a social contract, by virtue of which man becomes a member of a society, agreeing to renounce certain rights he might exercise if wholly independent, and to receive in exchange legal rights which guarantee to the individual the protection of life and ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... of getting a bad character," said Josh. "He'll be treating us like the shepherds did the boy in the fable who ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... do to give him more; I felt I should become the fable of Kirkby-Lonsdale if I did; and I looked him in the face, sternly but still smiling, and addressed him with a ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fable, Ruth? The story about all the pains and torments which flew out of Pandora's box, and how Hope came out last—that blessed Hope—and healed the wounds? Here, a moment after the blow has fallen, I am hoping ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... themselves, and so are much more highly individualized. The Tatler and the Spectator very greatly extended the range of essay-writing, and with it the flexibility of prose style; it is this extension that gives to them their modern quality. Nothing came amiss: fable, description, vision, gossip, literary criticism or moral essays, discussion of large questions such as marriage and education, or of the smaller social amenities—any subject which would be of interest to a sufficiently large number of readers ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... "The Fable of the Oak and the Violet." In a large garden there grew a fine oak tree, with its wide-spreading branches, and at its foot there grew a sweet and modest violet. The oak one day looked down in scorn upon the violet, and said: "You, poor ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, every thing that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchimy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable[26].' ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... been our fortune to traverse together, at various periods, the countries of chivalry, history, and fable—Spain, Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy; and what Athens and Constantinople were to us a few years ago, Venice and Rome have been more recently. The poem also, or the pilgrim, or both, have accompanied me from first to last; and perhaps it may be a pardonable vanity ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... the commonly accepted name for the well-known collection of stories about animals, though we cannot be sure that any of them, were written by the Greek slave of that name, who, Herodotus tells us, lived about the year 55O B.C. The fable about animals is probably the oldest form of story known. Its object is to teach a lesson to men and women, without seeming to do so, and because of this concealed lesson it has always been a great favorite with all nations. In Russia, for example, where a man did not dare say what he thought ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... purity and continuity of the European type. We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain. Copper-coloured men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion and patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that Don Quixote was an African fable on the lines of Uncle Remus. I have never heard that the heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro ancestry. In the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognise the resurrection ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... eager apprehension of the rejoicing and the love of Eternity. What truth there was in such faith I dare not say that I know; but what manner of human souls it made, you may for yourselves see. Here are enough brought to you, of the thoughts of a believing people.[180] This maid in her purity is no fable; this is a Venetian maid, as she was seen in the earthly dawn, and breathed on by the breeze of her native sea. And here she is in her womanhood, in her courage and perfect peace, waiting for ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... you did, and letting that brother of mine get away sneering and sniggering at me, with his nose cocked up in the air, and swelling with pride till he's like the frog in the fable." ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... The fable invented to account for this desire on the part of Mrs. Sheldon was very innocent. The doctors had ordered a milder climate than England for the dear convalescent—Madeira, Algeria, Malta—or some other equally remote quarter of the globe. It was impossible that Mr. or Mrs. Sheldon could ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... repeated to his Northern crowds the fable of negro suffering in the South until he believed the lie himself. He believed it with every beat of his stern Puritan heart. And he had repeated and shouted it until the gathering Abolitionist mob believed it as a message from God. The fact that the system of African slavery, as actually ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... child for religious education; and that an education based on "reality," as in this method we would adopt, is too arid, and tends to dry up the founts of spiritual life. Such reasoning, however, will not be accepted by religious persons. They know well that faith and fable are "as the poles apart," since fable is in itself a thing without faith, and faith is the very sentiment of truth, which should accompany man even unto death. Religion is not a product of fantastic imagination, it is the greatest of ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... League, take part, without knowing it, in a Masonic institution, and in building up this new state of society, from which religion is to be banished. Well may the Bishop of Metz say: 'These persons forget that, like Proteus in the fable, Freemasonry knows how to multiply ad infinitum its transformations and its names. Yesterday it called itself 'Les Solidaires,' or 'morality independent of religion,' or 'freedom of thought'; to-day ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... and must be able to do it," Ayrault continued. "Throughout Nature we find a system of compensation. The centripetal force is offset by the centrifugal; and when, according to the fable, the crystal complained of its hard lot in being unable to move, while the eagle could soar through the upper air and see all the glories of the world, the bird replied, 'My life is but for a moment, while you, set in the rock, will live forever, and will see ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... The pretty fable that the storks or angels fetch the babies cannot long satisfy the growing mind. Children wish to understand, yet it is easy for them to see that parents do not wish to explain the mystery. Curiosity ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... importance of details in this case would have been the excessive probability that Malory would have described an entertainment consonant with the usage of his own day, although at no period of early history was there ever so large an assemblage of guests at one time as met, according to the fable, ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... like the little brook We've heard of in the fable, Employ our hearts, our heads and hands, In doing what we're able; Till all Columbia praise our deeds, And nations, o'er the waters, Will tune their harps and chant their song, ...
— The Snow-Drop • Sarah S. Mower
... themselves can clearly perceive that they neither possess talent, intellect, public spirit, nor any other qualification calculated either to amuse or to instruct. When I see a sensible man in other respects fall into an inconsistency of this sort, I am always reminded of the fable of the Eagle, the Owl, and her young ones. The fact is, that I am more proud of my father than of any of my ancestors, because I know him to have been an excellent and an honest man, and one who by his industry and talent became a second founder of his family. But as the object of my labours will ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... when St. Mark, snatched into ecstasy, heard the voice of an angel saying to him: 'Peace be to thee, Mark; here shall thy body rest.'" The angel goes on to foretell the building of "una stupenda, ne piu veduta Citta;" but the fable is hardly ingenious ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the graceful Greeks, Grey with the moss of eld and venerable, The fauns, the nymphs, the half-defaced antiques, The gods and men of mythologic fable, And legends of steel-casqued and mailed men, The old heroic tales of love and glory, Of knight, and palmer, and the Saracen, And the ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... brought forth to make sport for the Philistine lords and ladies. This proceeds from no dislike, real or affected, to the aristocracy of these realms. But they have their place, and I have mine; and, like the iron and earthen vessels in the old fable, we can scarce come into collision without my being the sufferer in every sense. It may be otherwise with the sheets which I am now writing. These may be opened and laid aside at pleasure; by amusing themselves with the ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... judges; the consecration of one of whose descendants, Abimelech (before noticed), connects the subject with the earliest and one of the most beautiful fables of the East—that of the trees going forth to anoint a king[16]. Selden regards this fable as a proof "that anointing of kings was of known use in the eldest times," and "that solemnly to declare one to be a king, and to anoint a king, in the Eastern parts, were but synonymies[17]." The elegant allusion to the olive tree, "honouring both God ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... nations. The old Greek was large in brain, but not in heart. He had created his gods in his own image, and they were—what they were. There was no goodness in his religion, and we can tolerate it only as it is developed in the Homeric rhapsodies, in the far-off fable-time of the old world, and amongst men who were but partially self-conscious. In that remote Homeric epoch it is tolerable, when cattle-stealing and war were the chief employments of the ruling caste,—and we may add, woman-stealing, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Heywood, who had heard everything, and saw clearly the arrow that the earl had shot at the queen. "Princess Elizabeth, her true and dear friend, who never leaves her side. Besides, her maids of honor, who, like the dragon in the fable, keep watch over ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... his wife's embraces, And on Andromache[186] his helmet laces. Great Agamemnon was, men say, amazed, On Priam's loose-trest daughter when he gazed. Mars in the deed the blacksmith's net did stable; In heaven was never more notorious fable. 40 Myself was dull and faint, to sloth inclined; Pleasure and ease had mollified my mind. A fair maid's care expelled this sluggishness, And to her tents willed me myself address. Since may'st thou see me watch and night-wars move: He that will not ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... the naked legend of the negro's origin, one of those nursery tales in which the ignorant of Christendom still believe But the deduction from the fable and the testimony to the negro's lack of intelligence, though unpleasant to our ignorant ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... after these shares. I replied that such conduct would be that of a fool, the conduct of impertinence, rather than of conceit; that it was not mine, and that since he pressed me so much I would tell him my reasons. They were, that since the fable of Midas, I had nowhere read, still less seen, that anybody had the faculty of converting into gold all he touched; that I did not believe this virtue was given to Law, but thought that all his knowledge was a learned trick, a new and skilful juggle, which put the wealth of Peter into the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... accurately know what she wanted. The effect of seeing some one so hard, so clear, so alien, was much as if, a gracefully moulded but fragile earthenware pot, she had suddenly, while floating down the stream, found herself crashing against the bronze vessel of the fable. ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the possessor of enormous wealth. Novelists described the old man's life and gave some really interesting details of the atrocities committed by him while he was in the service of the Prince of Mysore. Bankers, men of a more positive nature, devised a specious fable. ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... True, the Coliseum will seem vaster close at hand, but from no point can it be seen so completely and clearly, in its immensity and its dilapidation combined, as from that. The Tarpeian Rock seems an absurd fable—its fatal leap the daily sport of infants—but in all ancient cities the same glaring discrepancy between ancient and modern altitudes is presented, and especially, we hear, at Jerusalem. The Seven Hills whereon Rome ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... looked as pleased as if he had been a boy of six, rather than a man of sixty, and Ralph rushed recklessly here and there and everywhere, with his head thrown back and his eyes rivetted upon the soaring kite, until, like Genius in the fable, he was suddenly prostrate through stumbling over an ...
— The Story of the White-Rock Cove • Anonymous
... emerges from the flower, shaking the yellow dust—A Hen comes on the scene as in La Fontaine's fable. A Cuckoo calls, as ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... which Bajazet was imprisoned by Timur, so long and so often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected as a fable by the modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity. They appeal with confidence to the Persian history of Sherefeddin Ali, according to which has been given to our curiosity in a French version, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Your sex's much-lov'd enemy; For other foes we are prepar'd, And Nature puts us on our guard: In that alone such charms are found, We court the dart, we nurse the hand; And this, my child, an Aesop's Fable Will prove ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... and the Fable are all common and popular modes of conveying instruction. Each is distinguished by its own special characteristics. The Tale consists simply in the narration of a story either founded on facts, or created ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... to be cheated he could make no objection, except where it might come under his cognizance, and then he must take the liberty to remonstrate, or to give up his agency to some of the many, who could play better than he could the part of the dog in the fable, pretending to guard his ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... pluck to send to himself his annuity in order not to appear in the eyes of a community, which loves the main chance, to be entirely without resources. Many of his friends (he was by that time dead, you will please remark) have contested mordicus this curious fact, declaring it to be a fable, and upholding the Chevalier de Valois as a respectable and worthy gentleman whom the liberals calumniated. Luckily for shrewd players, there are people to be found among the spectators who will always sustain them. Ashamed of ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... any of the conditions which obtained in older communities where great literature arose. There is no glamour of old Romance about our early history, no shading off from the actual into a dim region of myth and fable; our beginnings are clearly defined and of an eminently prosaic character. The early settlers were engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with nature, and in the establishment of the primitive industries. Their strenuous pioneering days were followed by the feverish excitement of the gold period and ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... arrangements of this jovial regiment, and were at last as regular at table, as the adjutant and the paymaster, and so might they have continued, had not prosperity, that in its blighting influence upon the heart, spares neither priests nor laymen, and is equally severe upon mice (see Aesop's fable) and moral philosophers, actually deprived them, for the "nonce" of reason, and tempted them to their ruin. You naturally ask, what did they do? Did they venture upon allusions to the retreat upon Ross? Nothing of the kind. Did they, in that vanity which wine inspires, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... multitudes unacquainted with this life of Shelley? Perhaps they are; indeed, one may feel pretty sure that the great bulk of them are. To these, then, I address myself, in the hope that some account of this romantic historical fable and the fabulist's manner of constructing and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... see giddy, coquetting, restless girls become sobered by marriage? A great object in life is decided; one on which their thoughts have been running in all their vagaries, and they seem to verify the beautiful fable of Undine. A new soul beams out in the gentleness and repose of their future lives. An indescribable softness and tenderness takes place of the wearying vanity of their former endeavours to attract admiration. Something of this sort took place ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... but a wondrous House of Sorrow, And Happiness therein a lying Fable. When first they mix'd the Clay of Man, and cloth'd His Spirit in the Robe of Perfect Beauty, For Forty Mornings did an Evil Cloud Rain Sorrows over him from Head to Foot; And when the Forty Mornings pass'd to Night, Then ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... immemorial served the Tartar instead of wine or spirits. The horse then is his friend under all circumstances, and inseparable from him; he may be even said to live on horseback, he eats and sleeps without dismounting, till the fable has been current that he has a centaur's nature, half man and half beast. Hence it was that the ancient Saxons had a horse for their ensign in war; thus it is that the Ottoman ordinances are, I believe, to this day dated from "the imperial stirrup," ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to ascertain them in lasting verity. Picturesquely and dramatically he portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on fable. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... votre faon la fable suivante de La Fontaine. Du palais d'un jeune lapin Dame belette, un beau matin, S'empara: c'est une ruse. Le matre tant absent, ce lui fut chose aise. Elle porta chez lui ses pnates, un jour Qu'il tait ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... whole city: he, on the relation of the matter, determined that the poor man's money should be put between two empty dishes, and the cook should be recompensed with the jingling of the poor man's money, as he was satisfied with the smell of the cook's meat." This is affirmed by credible writers as no fable, but an undoubted truth.—FULLER'S Holy State, lib. iii. ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... pieces, in which the poet has under his language a different meaning from what it expresses,—a meaning which there should be nothing in that language to indicate. Such a piece may be compared to the sopic fable; but, while it is the object of the fable to inculcate the virtues of morality and prudence, an historical interpretation has to be sought for the metaphorical pieces of the Shih. Generally, moreover, the moral of the fable ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... after Jupiter was married to Metis, she conceived by him, and was with child, but Jupiter suffered her not to stay, till she brought forth, but eat her up; whereby he became himself with child, and was delivered of Pallas armed, out of his head. Which monstrous fable containeth a secret of empire; how kings are to make use of their counsel of state. That first, they ought to refer matters unto them, which is the first begetting, or impregnation; but when they are elaborate, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... Nugent, obtained for him, from Dr. Madox, Bishop of Worcester, the vicarage of Snitterfield, worth about 140l. After having inserted some small poems in Dodsley's Collection, he published (in 1767) Edgehill, for which he obtained a large subscription; and in the following year, the fable of Labour and Genius. In 1771, his kind patron, Lord Willoughby de Broke, added to his other preferment the rectory of Kimcote, worth nearly 300l. in consequence of which he ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... a private in the ranks, an obscure workman among master builders. But she could offer her victory over herself, and ask her country to take back and use a character hewn and shaped in accordance with its traditions. Her husband's citizenship had become a legal fable. She would take it and weld it with her own, and, content never to know the outcome, lay them both together upon the ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... Tielitz and Messer also boasted of their present-day mistresses who were so often changed for reasons of economy. The hilarious game, as Gard learned, was to obtain favors in exchange for nothing as far as possible. Trickery, lies, abuse, kicks, were employed to this purpose. Female chastity? A fable for the impotent. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... It is no fable that the Aloe grows about a hundred years (a few more or less) before it blooms; and, after yielding its seed, the stem withers and dies. If we remember right, a beautiful specimen in full bloom, was exhibited three or four years since at the Argyll ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... speculation than that of George Eliot. Had she only lived earlier in the century she might easily have become the centre of a mythos. As it is, many of the anecdotes commonly repeated about her are made up largely of fable. It is, therefore, well, before it is too late, to reduce the true story of her career to the lowest terms, and this service has been well done by the author of the present ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... upon their dead fellows; and the mournful lowings of cattle, on their entering the slaughter-house, publish the impression made upon them by the horrible spectacle they are there struck with. It is with pleasure we see the author of the fable of the bees, forced to acknowledge man a compassionate and sensible being; and lay aside, in the example he offers to confirm it, his cold and subtle style, to place before us the pathetic picture of a ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... day this changed, and we camped at the foot of a granite mountain. It made one think of the Glass Mountain of fable, with its smooth stretches of polished rock shining in the sun. That a human being should dare to take a wagon over such a place seemed incredible. Yet there the road was, zigzagging up the rocky slope, while here and there ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... Mandeville, a London physician of French extraction, and born in Holland, had aroused attention by his poem, The Grumbling Hive; or Knaves Turned Honest, 1706, and in response to vehement attacks upon his work, had added a commentary to the second edition, The Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices Public Benefits, 1714. The moral of the fable is that the welfare of a society depends on the industry of its members, and this, in turn, on their passions and vices. Greed, extravagance, envy, ambition, and rivalry are the roots of the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... reflection—to have been an echo, a shadow, a futile attempt; but this at last was life itself, this was a fact, this was reality. For these things one lived; these were the things that people had died for. Love had been a fable before this—doubtless a very pretty one; and passion had been a literary phrase—employed obviously with considerable effect. But now he stood in a personal relation to these familiar ideas, which gave them a ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... conservative. He lacked that restless technical curiosity which spurred Poe and Whitman to experiment with new forms. But Lowell revealed early extraordinary gifts of improvisation, retaining the old tunes of English verse as the basis for his own strains of unpremeditated art. He wrote "A Fable for Critics" faster than he could have written it in prose. "Sir Launfal" was composed in two days, the "Commemoration ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... friendship never parted, But among the evil-hearted; Time's sure step drag, soon or later, To his judgment, such a Traitor; Lady Lukshmi, of her grace, Grant good fortune to this place; And you, Royal boys! and boys of times to be In this fair fable-garden wander free.' ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... a fable or the posy of a ring, Sir Dragon?" she said, sharply. "Do you come to try or tempt me, or is this perchance but some part of my Lord of Misrule's Yule-tide mumming? 'Sblood, sir; only cravens sneak behind masks to strike and threaten. Have off your disguise, ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... but the time came when all this was thrown aside. It was the old fable again of the bee and the bee-moth. Having failed in her first efforts, she was now very gradually gluing ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... amuse you, tell you, if you like, the story of the Ass's Skin or the fable of the Fox and the Crow, ...
— The Imaginary Invalid - Le Malade Imaginaire • Moliere
... genius required a frequent rein; Walpole's intellect needed the perpetual spur. Yet Walpole, with his lack of imagination, of eloquence, of wit, of humor, and of culture, went farther and did more than the brilliant Bolingbroke. It was the old fable of the hare and the tortoise over again; perhaps it should rather be called a new version of the old fable. The farther the hare goes in the wrong way the more she goes astray, and thus many of Bolingbroke's ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... opposition to the Government; for all these societies and associations connect themselves directly with politics. [See Note 1.] It is of little consequence by what description of tie "these sticks in the fable" are bound up together; once bound together, they are, not to be broken. In America religion severs the community, but these societies are the bonds which to a certain ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... making the beasts talk. Of course they never do talk that way, and if they did talk, they would not be giving that kind of advice But then they never did talk. Did you ever hear of a beast talking, Ernest, except in a fable?" ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... by a small rod, tipped apparently with sponge saturated with some combustible naphtha-like fluid, so that a pale, lambent flame followed the course of the rod as Margrave guided it, burning up the herbage over which it played, and leaving a distinct ring, like that which, in our lovely native fable talk, we call the "Fairy's ring," but yet more visible because marked in phosphorescent light. On the ring thus formed were placed twelve small lamps, fed with the fluid from the same vessel, and lighted by the same rod. The light emitted by the lamps was more vivid and ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... lesser good qualities of moderation, forbearance, and silence would amply suffice. In silence and In hope shall your strength be."[7] So he dismissed me, ashamed of myself, it is true, but, like the giant of fable, strengthened by having fallen. On leaving him I felt as if all the insults in the world would henceforth fail to make me utter one single word of complaint. I was much consoled afterwards by coming across, in one of his letters, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... Briney, hard at his syntax, with the Fibulae AEsiopii, as he called it, placed open at a particular passage, on the seat under him, with a hope that, when Philemy will examine him, the book may open at his favorite fable of "Gallus Gallinaceus—a dung-hill cock." Phaddy himself is obliged to fast this day, there being one day of his penance yet unperformed, since the last time he was at his duty; which was, as aforesaid, about five years: and Katty, now that everything ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... walking together in a little natural glade of the bush that bordered one side of the kraal, when, at the end of it, looking like some wood nymph of classic fable in the light of the setting sun, appeared the lovely Mameena, clothed only in her girdle of fur, her necklace of blue beads and some copper ornaments, and carrying ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... should be avoided, as much as possible, in moral education; for prohibitions may often become the cause of greater immorality, than they were intended to prevent. The fable of the hen, whose very prohibition led her chickens to the fatal well, has often been realized in life, there is a certain curiosity in human nature to look into things forbidden. If Quaker youth should have the same desires in this respect as others, they cannot gratify them but at the expence ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... multitude of lights all along the coast. At six in the morning, seeing none of the natives on shore, and observing that the pendant was taken away, which probably they had learnt to despise, as the frogs in the fable did King Log, I ordered the lieutenant to take a guard on shore, and, if all was well, to send off, that we might begin watering: In a short time, I had the satisfaction to find that he had sent off for water-casks, and by eight o'clock, we had four tons of water on board. While our ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... Giovanni had half hoped, half feared, would be the case,—a figure appeared beneath the antique sculptured portal, and came down between the rows of plants, inhaling their various perfumes as if she were one of those beings of old classic fable that lived upon sweet odors. On again beholding Beatrice, the young man was even startled to perceive how much her beauty exceeded his recollection of it; so brilliant, so vivid, was its character, that she glowed amid the sunlight, and, as Giovanni whispered ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... than aught wild chivalry could tell. There's not a scene of this dim, daily life, But, in the splendor of one truthful thought As from creation's palette freshly wet, Might make young romance's loveliest picture dim, And e'en the wonder-land of ancient song,—— Old Fable's fairest dream, a nursery rhyme. How calm the night moves on, and yet In the dark morrow, that behind those hills Lies sleeping now, who knows what waits?—'Tis well. He that made this life, I'll ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... classical opera, called No, which is performed on stages specially built for the purpose in the palaces of the principal nobles. These No represent the entertainments by which the Sun Goddess was lured out of the cave in which she had hidden, a fable said to be based upon an eclipse. In the reign of the Emperor Yomei (A.D. 586-593), Hada Kawakatsu, a man born in Japan, but of Chinese extraction, was commanded by the Emperor to arrange an entertainment ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... This expression deserves to be noticed particularly, inasmuch as it effectually disposes of the story—which can scarcely be regarded otherwise than as a fable—that the assassination of Lignerolles, a little over four months later (December, 1571), was compassed by Charles IX. and his mother, because they discovered that he had become possessed of the secret of the projected massacre of St. Bartholomew. If these royal personages had anything ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... was a complaint of the iconoclastic tendency of New Historians. Nothing was safe from their sacrilegious research. Every tradition, however venerable, however precious, was resolved into a myth or a fable. "For example," he said, "we have always believed that certain lands which this college owns in Berkshire were given to us by King Alfred. Now the New Historians come and tell us that this could not have ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... should cease to act like a foolish boy who has inherited (what appears to him) a limitless fortune; not for fear of his coming, like his prototype in the parable, to live on "husks" for he is doing that already, but lest like the dog of the fable, in grasping after the shadow of a banquet he miss the simple meal that ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... knows the fable of the old man, the boy and the ass; but not one in a thousand knows that it was written nearly four hundred years ago by a man who for forty years was a member of the Secretariate to nine Popes, from Innocent VII. to Calixtus III. First in the Bugiale of the Vatican, where the officers ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... any of your learned correspondents inform me whether the fable of Cupid and Psyche was invented by Apuleius; or whether he made use of a superstition then current, turning it, as it suited his purpose, into the beautiful fable which has been handed down to us as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... more elegant or digestible. For the credit of Greek farmers, I am sorry that Eumaeus has nothing better to offer his landlord,—the most abominable dish, Charles Lamb and his pleasant fable to the contrary notwithstanding, that was ever set before ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... the picture of male carnality that such women conjure up belongs almost wholly to fable, as I have already observed in dealing with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt Gamble, a paralogist on a somewhat higher plane. As they depict him in their fevered treatises on illegitimacy, white-slave trading and ophthalmia neonatorum, the average male adult of the Christian and ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Aeolus, renowned in fable for his robberies, and for the tortures to which he was put by Pluto. He was cunning enough to break loose out of hell, but Hermes brought ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... chronological order, and leaving Gallathea for later treatment, we pass on to Endymion, the second of the allegorical dramas, and, without doubt, the boldest in conception and the most beautiful in execution of all Lyly's plays. The story is founded upon the classical fable of Diana's kiss to the sleeping boy, but its arrangement and development are for the most part of Lyly's invention: indeed, he was obliged to frame it in accordance with the facts which he sought to allegorize. All critics are agreed in identifying Cynthia with Elizabeth and Endymion with Leicester, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... nothing obscure in our frontispiece picture of 'Red Ridinghood.' It sets before us a child's version and vision of a child's fable that is imperishable, and as such makes an immediate appeal to the eye. She is not acting a part or posing as a princess, but is simply a cowering little girl, frightened at the wolf and eager to protect her basket. In her freshness and simplicity, ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... the dead was ridiculous, and only meant to keep up a belief in the fable of purgatory, as the fate of all is finally decided, on the departure of the soul ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... indomitable strength. In, however, all these forms of religion, whether inherently false from the beginning, or so overlaid in some after stage by the fictitious and the untrue as to have their original substratum of truth covered up by error and fable, there is such a want of coherency between the theistic and human elements, that we always find them undergoing a process of separation. We see the human element ever laying hold on the popular mind, and there manifesting itself in the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... much for that person's sake; yet in that period we do not care whether we suffer or die, and in after life, when we look back at those hours of youth, we wonder at the way in which we then felt. In European life of to-day the old Greek fable is still true; almost everybody must run Atalanta's race and abide ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... according to the fable, is a creature hatched in the chilling waters of Arctic regions, and is consequently by nature so cold that it delights in the burning heat of a furnace. Fire, said the ancients, cannot consume it nor ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... swept away from the higher regions of the intelligence. "For several to command," says he, "is not good, there should be but one chief. A tradition, handed down from the remotest antiguity, and transmitted under the veil of fable, says that all the stars are gods, and that the Divinity embraces the whole of nature. And round this idea other mythical statements have been agglomerated, with a view to influencing the vulgar, and for political ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the world there came a time when there was danger of truth being corrupted and mingled with fable among those who did not follow the guidance of God, as did Abraham and the patriarchs; then the great lawgiver, Moses, was given the divine commission to make a written record of the creation of the world and of man and to transmit it to later ages; and because ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... like the Jews in the Maccabees, we rely upon the Lord to fight our battles, without lifting a weapon in our defence, or, like the wagoner in the fable, we content ourselves with calling on Hercules, we shall find in the end that 'Faith without Works is dead.' ... The world, as you say, is 'the world'—a quarrelling, vicious, fighting, plundering world—yet it is a very good world for good men. Why should man torment ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... canyon, which had seemed like a hunter's fable rather than truth. Slone's sight dimmed, blurring the spectacle, and he found that his eyes had filled with tears. He wiped them away and looked again and again, until he was confounded by the vastness and the grandeur and the vague sadness of the scene. Nothing he ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... is well worth while for us to know, once and always, that they are not a similitude, nor a fable nor semi-fable; that they are an everlasting highest fact! "No Lake of Sicilian or other sulphur burns now anywhere in these ages," sayest thou? Well, and if there did not! Believe that there does not; believe it if thou wilt, nay hold by it as a real increase, a rise to higher stages, to wider ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... at him, but they had no more effect upon the culprit than did the grass upon the bad boy in the fable; so the farmer got a long pole and prodded the apple thief until he whined and came scratching ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... life, he wrote a work in their defence. The theory that errors of transcription might possibly have crept into the text, was totally rejected. No such thing could, by any contingency, occur. The fable of Aristeas was still considered worthy a place in the canon. The sanctity of the Hebrew language, and other Rabbinical notions, were defended. Christ was discovered in every book of the Old Testament; ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... in the sun, and to my great surprise fifty-four returned to life, licked themselves clean, and joyfully went back to the hive, where they probably informed their companions of such an adventure and escape, as I believe had never happened before to American bees." Must one regard this as a fable? It is by no means as remarkable a yarn as one may find told by other naturalists of the same century. There is, for example, that undated letter of John Bartram's, in which he makes inquiries of his brother William concerning "Ye Wonderful ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... that the novel is not a drama, not a history, nor fable, nor any sort of philosophical treatise. It may have sentences, paragraphs, or perhaps chapters, in every style and of the highest excellence, as a shapeless architectural pile may rejoice in some exquisite ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... die in childbirth as she had never done so before. I have no explanation for the "denouement" and give the story as it happened, allowing my readers to judge for themselves whether or no any credence should be given to the fable after such ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... charming story is supposed to have but little foundation in fact. Many of Rodrigo's legendary exploits are still less authentic; but history and fable unite in declaring him a warrior of no common stamp. His master, King Ferdinand, as we have said, invaded the territories of his brothers and friends, besides those of his enemies. Garcia, Ramirez, and Bermudez successively fell before his attacks, which ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... exercise their delightful vein in those points of highest knowledge, which before them lay hidden to the world; for that wise Solon was directly a poet it is manifest, having written in verse the notable fable of the Atlantic Island, which was continued by Plato. {6} And, truly, even Plato, whosoever well considereth shall find that in the body of his work, though the inside and strength were philosophy, the skin, as it were, and beauty depended most of poetry. ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... Thyrza must not discover her excitement, and went up the stairs slowly, regaining breath, trying to smooth her face. A fable to account for Mr. Boddy's summons was ready on her tongue. She entered, and found ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... Remembering also the words that Narada had said, he began to repent greatly for his folly. Even in this way, O tiger among kings, a weak and foolish person, by provoking the enmity of a powerful one, is at last obliged to repent like the Salmali in fable. Even when possessed of equal might, people do not suddenly wage hostilities with those that have injured them. On the other hand, they display their might gradually, O king! A person of foolish understanding should never provoke the hostility of one ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... gold lace. She could tell of persons who had been born above a hundred years ago, persons she had herself seen and talked to; and her way of talking was not like that of many grown-up people who make children covetous and envious. That was not grandmamma's way; she was like the eagle in the fable, always trying to encourage her eaglets to fly upwards; and she did this so pleasantly that her grandchildren were never tired of hearing her talk. One of grandmamma's stories is so interesting that we will relate it in ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... archives of his memory. To the child we owe the celebrity of the Cigale, of whose misfortunes he has babbled during his first lessons in recitation. It is he who will preserve for future generations the absurd nonsense of which the body of the fable is constructed; the Cigale will always be hungry when the cold comes, although there were never Cigales in winter; she will always beg alms in the shape of a few grains of wheat, a diet absolutely incompatible with her delicate capillary "tongue"; and in desperation ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... you think of this for a marvel?" for one can never be sure that the listeners will regard the matter in the same way that the teller does. Yet here is a case that makes an exception to this good rule, and I maintain that it is in truth wonderful, and, although it has the appearance of being a fable, it ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... my sweat—was an imp of darkness. My fool's paradise I had planted with all manner of fair flowers and lordly trees, and in my folly believed that those who had been my friends were forever after assured of pleasant places, lovely perfumes, and grateful shade; but like the Grecian in the ancient fable, I found I had sown dragon's teeth, and the crop I reaped was of hatred ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... appreciates and honors courage: the courage of Christianity, which sustained martyrs in the amphitheatre, at the stake, and on the rack; the courage of Patriotism, which inspired millions in our own land to realize the historic fable of Curtius, and to fill up with their own bodies, if need be, the yawning chasm which imperiled the republic; the courage of Humanity, which is witnessed in the pest-house and the hospital, at the death-bed of ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... his stress on the separatist instincts. The individual stands alone confronted by the eternities; between these and his own soul exists the one central relation. This has all the fundamental egotism of the doctrine of personal salvation, emancipated from fable, and varnished with an emotional phrase. The doctrine has been very widely interpreted, and without any forcing, as a religious expression for the conditions of ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... (Summaria Doctrina) Hardenberg taught: "St. Augustine and many other fathers write that the body of Christ is circumscribed by a certain space in heaven, and I regard this as the true doctrine of the Church." (Tschackert, 191.) Hardenberg also published the fable hatched at Heidelberg (Heidelberger Landluege, indirectly referred to also in the Formula of Concord, 981, 28), but immediately refuted by Joachim Moerlin, according to which Luther is said, toward the ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... was not probably congenial, that he was tied hand and foot in his treatment by the learned lady's written instructions (on hearing that he had represented Venus as nude, she declared that if one single figure were altered the whole fable would be ruined), and it is only in the wide sweep of clear sky and hills and river that the ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... this fish,' he asks, 'or one resembling it in vocal qualities, have given rise to the fable of the Sirens?' ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... supplies a better fable than any invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet who appears in illiterate ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... a bad scare already, sir!" remarked Hugh, greatly enjoying the experience, although it made him think of a fable in one of his earlier books concerning the sport of stoning that was "fun for the boy but death to ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Flying Squadron • Robert Shaler
... hieroglyphic figure of Adonis seems to have signified the spirit of animation or life, which was perpetually wooed or courted by organic matter, and which perished and revived alternately. Afterwards the fable of Adonis seems to have given origin to the first religion promising a resurrection from the dead; whence his funeral and return to life were celebrated for many ages in Egypt and Syria, the ceremonies of which Ezekiel complains as idolatrous, accusing the women of Israel of lamenting over ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... is popular, because it tells the truth about people. If the ruin of Samson by a woman, and the ruin of Hercules by a woman, have a common legendary origin, it is gratifying to know that we can also explain, as a fable, the ruin of Nelson by a woman and the ruin of Parnell by a woman. And, indeed, I have no doubt whatever that, some centuries hence, the students of folk-lore will refuse altogether to believe that Elizabeth Barrett eloped with ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... often, as the mere consequence of the transition from wood to stone, (a figure carved out of one wooden log must have necessarily its feet near each other, and hands at its sides,) these literal changes are as nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the bestowing of apparent life. The figures of monstrous gods on Indian temples have their legs separate enough; but they are infinitely more dead than the rude figures at Branchidae sitting with their hands on their knees. And, briefly, the work of Daedalus is the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... of the evening. His theme was a complaint of the iconoclastic tendency of New Historians. Nothing was safe from their sacrilegious research. Every tradition, however venerable, however precious, was resolved into a myth or a fable. "For example," he said, "we have always believed that certain lands which this college owns in Berkshire were given to us by King Alfred. Now the New Historians come and tell us that this could not have been the case, because ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... universe to me. When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch out to the utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwellings of my countrymen, and subdued to fertility by their labours, the earth's very centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a fable, to have forgotten which would have cost neither my imagination nor understanding ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Saints contain an immense quantity of material of first rate importance for the historian of the Celtic church. Underneath the later concoction of fable is a solid substratum of fact which no serious student can ignore. Even where the narrative is otherwise plainly myth or fiction it sheds many a useful sidelight on ancient manners, customs and laws as well as on the curious and often intricate ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... impression, false idea; bubble; self-decit, self-deception; mists of error. heresy &c (heterodoxy) 984; hallucination &c (insanity) 503; false light &c (fallacy of vision) 443; dream &c (fancy) 515; fable &c (untruth) 546; bias &c (misjudgment) 481; misleading &c v.. V. be erroneous &c adj.. cause error; mislead, misguide; lead astray, lead into error; beguile, misinform &c (misteach) 538 [Obs.]; delude; give a false impression, give a false idea; falsify, misstate; deceive &c 545; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... thousand bridges quicker. Science and art alone won't do, The work will call for patience, too; Costs a still spirit years of occupation: Time, only, strengthens the fine fermentation. To tell each thing that forms a part Would sound to thee like wildest fable! The devil indeed has taught the art; To make it not the devil is able. [Espying the animals.] See, what a genteel breed we here parade! This is the house-boy! that's the maid! [To the animals.] Where's the old lady gone ...
— Faust • Goethe
... thought, and sometimes it is this, most clearly, that the author is following. Not the cycle of life everlasting, in which the rage of nations is an incident, a noise and an incursion from without—but the strife itself, the irrelevant uproar, becomes the motive of the fable. War and Peace, the drama of that ancient alternation, is now the subject out of which the form of the book is to grow. Not seldom, and more frequently as the book advances, the story takes this new and contradictory alignment. The centre shifts from the general ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... wise were able In proper terms to write a fable: Their tales would always justly suit The characters of every brute. The ass was dull, the lion brave, The stag was swift, the fox a knave; The daw a thief, the ape a droll, The hound would scent, the wolf would prowl: A pigeon would, if shown by AEsop, Fly ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... amounts to saying everything must give way to the considerations of war. It is taking the argument in the fable of the wolf and the lamb as serious philosophy and accepting the position of the wolf. They fail entirely to see the humor of the fable, and hence the fallacy ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... in the country, or that they here remain longer uncorrupted than in towns, whether large or small. Nor is it proved that in former times the country possessed any advantage in these respects, as compared with our own days and with the modern town. The entire fable of rural innocence appears to rest, not upon an actual comparison between town and country, but rather upon the more lively interest felt in town life, and especially in the life of the great towns: in towns, immorality has been more carefully studied and more ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... the Incas written by Captain Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. On three cloths were figures of the Incas with their wives, on medallions, with their Ayllus and a genealogical tree. Historical events in each reign were depicted on the borders. The fable of Tampu-tocco was shown on the first cloth, and also the fables touching the creations of Viracocha, which formed the foundation for the whole history. On the fourth cloth there was a map of Peru, the compass lines for the positions of towns being ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... and deferential as they have performed their functions that I have taken no note of them, having rarely experienced serious illness. Had Aesop possessed my anatomy, he would have had small data for inditing his fable as to the discord between the "Members" and their commissariat, and the long generations might have lacked that famous incentive to harmony and co-operation. I venture to say this in explanation of my stubborn optimism, which is due much less to any tranquil ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... misery and darkness this story gained implicit belief; but at length men arose who suspected that it was a fable and imposture, and that Jesus Christ, so far from being a God, was only a man like themselves. But a numerous set of men, who derived and still derive immense emoluments from this opinion, in the shape of a popular belief, told the vulgar that if they did not believe in the Bible ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... hateful than pretension. The fable of the "Frog and the Bull" illustrates the absurdity of it. Yet it is of every-day occurrence, and we continually meet with instances of it. Persons in humble class of life will often ape their betters, dressing after them, and absolutely going without necessary food ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... not!" But I had to yield. My dream was that our General had told me a fable. It was of a young rat, which seeing a cockerel, whose tail was scarcely longer than his own, leap down into a barrel, gather some stray grains of corn and fly out again, was tempted to follow his example, but having got in, could only stay there. The ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... fully convinced that Claire was seeking to deceive him; but her confidence astonished him. He wondered what fable she ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... peasant and Peruvian noble. But it was upon the temple crowning a near elevation that the eye would rest, in rapt astonishment at its magnificence and grandeur. The description may sound like a scrap from some eastern fable, but none the less it is a fact culled from the ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... intended only for a moral Reflexion on the sudden Revolutions and Vicissitudes of Fortune? But the Length of this Article is inconsistent with the nature of a Reflexion; and if any thing like this was intended, it must come in as the epimuthion, the Moral of the Fable; which will make the Contents of this Article, still more different from the nature of a Character, than any thing that has ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... is to marry me. Don't look like that, Aunt Sarah. It is true;—it is, indeed." She had now dragged her chair close to her aunt's seat upon the sofa, so that she could put her hands upon her aunt's knees. "All that about Miss Brownlow has been a fable." ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... island; which is likewise a most beautiful country. Next unto Arui there are two rivers Atoica and Caura, and on that branch which is called Caura are a nation of people whose heads appear not above their shoulders; which though it may be thought a mere fable, yet for mine own part I am resolved it is true, because every child in the provinces of Aromaia and Canuri affirm the same. They are called Ewaipanoma; they are reported to have their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh
... papa took me by the hand and led me into the dark room again, and I found that the giant which had frightened me so much was nothing but a pair of trowsers, thrown over the back of an arm-chair. The next day mamma made me learn the fable of the 'Camels.'" ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... god, the burgesses were compelled to impose a threefold punishment upon their wives—they were to lose their votes; the children were to receive no more the mother's name; and they themselves were no longer to be called Athenians, after the goddess." It seems to me this fable teaches that physical force was indeed the governing power in Athens at that day, and that men ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... are! He said nothing of himself. He was absorbed in my stories concerning you. I told him as pretty a fable as La Fontaine related of the Avare qui avait perdu son tresor! I said you were a beautiful chatelaine besieged by an army of lovers, but the knight errant Fortunatus had alone won your favor, and would receive your hand! The brave Colonel! I could see he winced at this. His steel cuirass was ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Parthenope, one of the Syrens, celebrated by Homer in his "Odyssey," being shipwrecked on this coast, landed here, and built a town, to which she gave her name; others attribute its foundation to Hercules, some to Eneas, and others to Ulysses. These are mere freaks of fiction and fable; and it is more probable that Naples was founded by some Greek colonies; this may be inferred from its own name, Neapolis, and from the name of another town contiguous to it, Paleopolis. Strabo speaks of these Greek colonies, whence ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... benevolent and disinterested. Perhaps congeniality in these points led Bentley to make the statement, just quoted, a little too strong. He wrote more than a century after the witchcraft proceedings; just at that point when tradition had become inflated by all manner of current talk, of fable mixed with fact, before the correcting and expunging hand of a severe scrutiny of records and documents had commenced its work. The drag-net of time had drawn along with it every thing that anybody had said; but the process of sifting and discrimination had not begun. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... of humor, and always employed it in illustration of his argument—but never for the mere sake of provoking merriment. In this respect he had the wonderful aptness of Franklin. He often taught a great truth with the felicitous brevity of an Aesop fable. His words did not flow in an impetuous torrent, as did those of Douglas; but they were always ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... guest, if but for an hour. As the story was an old one, so many an artist before Gerome had played with it as a subject for a picture. Jean-Francois Millet himself, another pupil of Delaroche, though earlier than Gerome, had tried his hand at illustrating Anacreon's fable before he found his proper field of work in portraying the occupations of the men and women about him, the peasants among whom he ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... ever the way for others by an eternal silence—that seemed well. Punishment thereafter, the Cure would say. But was it not worth while being punished, even should the Cure's fond belief in the noble fable be true, if one saved others here? Who—God or man—had the right to take from him the right to destroy himself, not for fear, not through despair, but for others' sake? Had he not the right to make restitution to Kathleen for having given her nothing but himself, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... man, and they won't have that man, from seventeen to twenty-five: but then, afraid, as the saying is, that God has forgot them, and finding their bloom departing, they are glad of whom they can get, and verify the fable of the parson ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... policy of abstention was often urged at the council-table and opposed by Wolsey, who, according to More, used to repeat the fable of the men who hid in caves to keep out of the rain which was to make all whom it wetted fools, hoping thereby to have the rule over the fools (L. and P., vii., 1114; More, English Works, p. 1434). It had cost England, says More, ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... before escaping was due to his cunning. And I have seen so many instances of his cunning that, with my two scientific eyes wide open, I could believe him almost as wise as he was thought to be in the olden days of fable and folk-lore. How cool and collected he ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... interested at this early age in the variability of plants! I told another little boy that I could produce variously colored primroses by watering them with certain colored fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and has never been tried by me. I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once gathered much valuable fruit from my father's ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... her influence and the transformation she effected. Her life and legend formed the stepping-stone for Scotland into authentic history as into a consolidated and independent existence. The veil of fable and uncertainty cleared away before the mild shining of her name and story. Like Edinburgh coming suddenly into sight, as in some old and primitive picture, high upon its rock, with the slope of the Castle Hill on one side and the precipices round, and the white ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... attacking me for? The two rats in Gogol's fable sniffed first and then ran away, but you attack ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... of men and women give, wreck many a young man of otherwise good intentions. The sinner is the man who cannot say no. The fall through vice to sin is a matter of slow transition. One virtue after another is yielded up as the strain on the will becomes too great. In Kipling's fable of Parenness, the demon appears before the clerk in the Indian service, who has been too long a good fellow among the boys. It asks him to surrender three things in succession: his trust in man, his faith in woman, then the hopes and ambitions of his childhood. When these ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... those scribblers, who having no talents of a writer but what is taught by the writing-master, are yet nowise afraid nor ashamed to assume the same titles with the greatest genius, than their good brother in the fable was of braying ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... like a zoetrope at the rate of nineteen miles a second? Could we tolerate the notion of a mighty King delivering a sublime fiat and then remember that for all practical purposes he is hanging head downwards in space? A strange fable might be written of a man who was blessed or cursed with the Copernican eye, and saw all men on the earth like tintacks clustering round a magnet. It would be singular to imagine how very different ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Of humour sweet, with many years to stay, Is natural enough, 'tis true; To wait for him a hundred years, And all that while asleep, appears A thing entirely new. Now at this time of day, Not one of all the sex we see Doth sleep with such profound tranquillity: But yet this Fable seems to let us know That very often Hymen's blisses sweet, Altho' some tedious obstacles they meet, Are not less happy for approaching slow. 'Tis nature's way that ladies fair Should yearn conjugal joys to share; And so I've not ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... found us to his sorrow a thousand years ago, very slow to move, even when we see a thing ought to be done. Let us hope that in this matter—we have been so in most matters as yet—we shall be like the tortoise in the fable, and not the hare; and by moving slowly, but surely, win the race at last. But now think for yourself: and see what you would do to save these people from being poisoned by bad water. Remember that the plain question is this—The rainwater comes down from heaven ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... persuade myself, that others will like this little fable as much as I do: so curiously simple, and yet so strangely profound is its delicate epitome of the old old story, the course of true love, ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... upon which lay a man-child of such exquisite beauty that he could scarce have been born of mortal parents. His body was bare, but round his neck was a glistening chain of marvellously wrought gold, fastened to which was this gem lying on his breast. This was doubtless the origin of the Hebrew fable of the finding of Moses, who, as all scholars know, was not a Hebrew, but an Egyptian priest in the House ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... I look down towards his feet; but that's a fable. If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... after cure, but that still upon every cross turn of Affairs against the Church, the irresistible Magnetism of the Good Old Cause (as some still think it) would quickly draw him out of the Good Old Way. The Fable tells us of a Cat once turn'd into a Woman, but the next sight of a Mouse quickly dissolv'd the Metamorphosis, cashier'd the Woman, and restor'd the Brute. And some Virtuosi (skill'd in the useful Philosophy of Alterations) have thought ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... description—never a solitary stone came his way. But he had no heart for digging. He was always thinking of the diamonds in that remote spot which he had ignorantly let slip from his grasp, like the dog in the fable dropping the substance for the shadow. He would have gone back to look for them, but he'd spent most of his little capital in that wild-goose chase, and the miserable remnant oozed away like water in a place where the barest necessaries of life ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... quaint version of the fable from the Bestiary of Philip de Thaun, published by Mr. Wright (Popular Treatises ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... other proofs have you besides your own words that all this is not a fable based by you ...
— The Miser (L'Avare) • Moliere
... Egyptian paintings.) And whereas Strabo is, says M. Monceaux, the only writer of antiquity who questions the existence of the dwarfs, all the others are on the side of Aristotle, who says—"This is no fable; there really exists in that region (the sources of the Nile), as people relate, a race of little men, who have small horses and who live in holes." And these little men were of course the ancestors of Schweinfurth's and ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... great, yea, most high, Sackiema, by which name they—living without a king—call him who has the command over several hundred among them, and who by our people are called Sackemakers; and as the people listen, some will begin to mutter and shake their heads as if it were a silly fable; and others, in order to express regard and friendship for such a proposition, will say Orith (That is good). Now, by what means are we to lead this people to salvation, or to make a salutary breach among them? I take the liberty ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... concubine "Aminah" (the "Faithful"), when Sakhr, transformed to the King's likeness, came in and took it. The prophet was reduced to beggary, but after forty days the demon fled throwing into the sea the ring which was swallowed by a fish and eventually returned to Sulayman. This Talmudic fable is hinted at in the Koran (chaps. xxxviii.), and commentators have extensively embroidered it. Asaf, son of Barkhiya, was Wazir to Sulayman and is supposed to be the "one with whom was the knowledge of the Scriptures" (Koran, chaps. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... does not go on growing. It is not that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by God and then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control it, and then it gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and from bad to worse, until ...
— Progress and History • Various
... read again, the history of Mithridates," said Madame de Villefort in a tone of reflection, "and had always considered it a fable." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... remains on that tree by the morning.' The woman understood the metaphor, and in an hour or two, aided by other strapping Zulu females, attacked the unfortunate Basuto and killed him with clubs. But Cetywayo having thus, like the monkey in the fable, employed a cat's paw to do his dirty work, began to think the Basuto's untimely death might have an ugly appearance in my eyes, so gave orders in my presence that, as a punishment, six of the women who had killed the Basuto should also be put to death. This was too much for ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... unhappy waters, void of light, No bird presumes to steer his airy flight; Such deadly stenches from the depth arise, And steaming sulphur that infects the skies. From hence the Grecian bards their legends make, And give the name Aornus to the lake. Four fable bullocks in the yoke untaught, For sacrifice, the pious hero brought. The priestess pours the wine betwixt their horns: Then cuts the curling hair, that first oblation burns, Invoking Hecate hither to repair; (A powerful name in ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... appear to extend beyond the period of the flood, and from these the "dark idolater of chance," who would rejoice to prove that "Book of Books" a splendid fable, draws his deductions. But how he fails. The learned men of China, those held in the greatest repute amongst a people where such a reputation is not easily obtained, themselves admit, that the history of their empire in its infancy, is, for the most part, apocryphal, ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... me alone: I that have feign'd so many hundred gods, Can easily forge some fable for the turn: Whist, madam; away, away: you fright the fowl; Tactus comes ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a love-call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel that the command of Nature (if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of Nature instead of the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at least Schopenhauer looks like a pigmy beside ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... said Captain Rik firmly. "They talk a deal of stuff about it, more than nine-tenths of which is lies—pure fable. I don't believe in electricity; more than that, I don't believe in steam. Batteries and boilers ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... fixed in Mr. Johnson's opinion, that he was indeed a most acute observer of their effects; and used to say sometimes, half in jest, half in earnest, that they were the remains of his old tutor Mandeville's instructions. As a book, however, he took care always loudly to condemn the "Fable of the Bees," but not without adding, "that it was the ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Bajazet was imprisoned by Timur, so long and so often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected as a fable by the modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity. They appeal with confidence to the Persian history of Sherefeddin Ali, according to which has been given to our curiosity in a French version, and from which I shall collect and abridge, a more specious narrative ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of persons, who had sold the interest of their country, and their honor, to foreign interests, would have been different from that of certain persons? For our part, we do not doubt but that this report is a fable. The folly, the pride, the obstinacy which conducted us on the bank of Arguin, have no need of having another crime added to them. Besides, if there are, sometimes, persons who sell their honor, there are none who, at the same time, sell their lives; and those whom people would accuse of something ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... Paris, was in reality the eye and brain of Europe, the place of origin of almost every literary form, the place of finishing and polishing, even for those forms which she did not originate. She not merely taught, she wrought—and wrought consummately. She revived and transformed the fable; perfected, if she did not invent, the beast-epic; brought the short prose tale to an exquisite completeness; enlarged, suppled, chequered, the somewhat stiff and monotonous forms of Provencal lyric into myriad-noted variety; devised the prose-memoir, and left capital ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... for any other worldly blessing. And in reply to some faint objections of Mrs. Amelia's (taken from certain theological works like the Washerwoman of Finchley Common and others of that school, with which Mrs. Osborne had been furnished during her life at Brompton) he told her an Eastern fable of the Owl who thought that the sunshine was unbearable for the eyes and that the Nightingale was a most overrated bird. "It is one's nature to sing and the other's to hoot," he said, laughing, "and with such a sweet voice as you have yourself, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the policy of the ostrich, Helena," said Forbes, grimly. "It may or may not be a fable as regards ostriches— I don't know enough about them to feel certain, but it is unquestionably too often true of mankind. I believed my head was hidden and imagined the remainder of my body was safe in consequence. Now I ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... in a minute, Tom," she said. "A cup of hot coffee'll do the poor craythur, yer grandfather, a power of good. So he's fable, is he?" ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... imagined; so that probably no attempt to paint or represent it to the senses can ever succeed. We can bear—at least we often have to bear—that a man should seem an ass to the mind's eye; but that he should seem such to the eye of the body is rather too much, save as it is done in those fable-pictures which have long been among the playthings of the nursery. So a child, for instance, takes great pleasure in fancying the stick he is riding to be a horse, when he would be frightened out of his wits, were the stick to quicken and expand into an ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... story does not carry its own moral, what fable does, I wonder? Before the arrival of that hamper, Master Briggs was in no better repute than any other young gentleman of the lower school; and in fact I had occasion myself, only lately, to correct ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... was always fighting him. What are you to do but to fight cruelty, and fight falsehood, and fight fraud and treachery,—when they come upon you and would overwhelm you but for fighting? You have not been fool enough to believe that fable about a duel? I did stand once, armed, and guarded my bedroom door from him, and told him that he should only enter it over my body. He went away to the tavern and I did not see him for a week afterwards. That ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the gust came roaring down furiously upon them, pelting fiercely with rain, flapping and tearing at Theodora's cloak, like the wind in the fable, trying to whirl her off her feet, and making vehement efforts to wrench the umbrella out of Percy's hand. A buffet with wind and weather was a frolic which she particularly enjoyed, running on before the ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... matter? "I have only tumbled down, papa, amongst these nasty nettles, and got stung rather sharply." That is interesting. Do you know how it is that nettles sting? "Oh, papa," said Jack, pitifully, "you are like the man in the fable who was giving a lecture to the drowning boy; the boy asked him to get him first of all out of the water, and to give him the lecture afterwards. Now, you should first tell me how to cure these nettle stings, and I would then be more inclined ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... Spiders," 1873, which is full of interesting details. The book is moreover remarkable in having resuscitated our knowledge of the existence of the seed-storing habit. Mr. Moggridge points out that the ancients were familiar with the facts, and quotes the well-known fable of the ant and the grasshopper, which La Fontaine borrowed from Aesop. Mr. Moggridge (page 5) goes on: "So long as Europe was taught Natural History by southern writers the belief prevailed; but no sooner did the tide begin to turn, and the current of information ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... year James Russell Lowell published his "Bigelow Papers," a humorous satire on the Mexican war in Yankee dialect, the "Indian Summer Reverie," and "A Fable for Critics." ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... ubi supra. This expression deserves to be noticed particularly, inasmuch as it effectually disposes of the story—which can scarcely be regarded otherwise than as a fable—that the assassination of Lignerolles, a little over four months later (December, 1571), was compassed by Charles IX. and his mother, because they discovered that he had become possessed of the secret of the projected massacre of St. Bartholomew. If these ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... wont to laugh at love, And those who suffer'd that blind boy abuse The noble gifts were given them from above. What metamorphose strange is this I prove I Myself now scarce I find myself to be, And think no fable Circe's tyranny, And all the tales are told of changed Jove; Virtue hath taught with her philosophy My mind into a better course to move: Reason may chide her fill, and oft reprove Affection's power, but what is that to me? Who ever think, and never ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the merry old gentleman, "I knew you would do that. If you had done any differently there would have been no point to the fable." ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... composed of anti-slavery men who had learned their creed from him, Senator Toombs, in a tone full of exultation but not remarkable for delicacy, declared that "Actaeon had been devoured by his own dogs." The fable would be equally applicable in describing the manner in which the Southern men, who owed their forgiveness and their immunity to Mr. Seward, turned upon him with hatred and with imprecation. They were graciously ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... doubtless it had an allusion to some topic or scandal of the day; whoever can elucidate it will render good service to Medallic History, for hitherto it has baffled all commentators and collectors of medals. The windmill (indicative of the poplar fable that the Prince was the son of a miller), and the Roman ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various
... all interests affected by his action, but also a special responsibility for those with whose direct execution he is charged, is an impartial judgment. It expresses a broad and intelligent view of the total situation. In the fable of the fox and the grapes, the action of the fox is due to the folly of a too fluent attention. Similarly, he who lets go his present hold of the web of interests simply because his eye happens to alight on another vantage-point, is as much the blind slave of novelty as ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... renowned edifice marvels are related by the ancient Arabian and Spanish chroniclers; 'and I doubt much,' adds the venerable Agpaida, 'whether many readers will not consider the whole as a cunningly devised fable, sprung from an oriental imagination; but it is not for me to reject a fact which is recorded by all those writers who are the fathers of our national history: a fact, too, which is as well attested as most of the remarkable events in the story of Don Roderick. None but light and inconsiderate ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... course, if the rival interests clashed, litigation was the result:—the Courts and juries often decided what they little understood, and at times not at all, after the pleading of well fee'd lawyers; a pretty fair illustration of the fable of the boys and frogs; it may be fun for the lawyers but it is death to the hopes of many a poor patentee. We are, however, pleased to perceive a disposition manifested by the courts to sustain patents; even if occasionally an unjust claim is recognized as a valid one, it is better, according ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... month) will produce them; as we might have seen abundantly in the gardens of the Thuilleries, and that of Luxembourgh at Paris, where they usually sow themselves, and come up very thick; and so do they in many places of our country, tho' so seldom taken notice of, as that it is esteemed a fable, by the less observant and ignorant vulgar; let it therefore be tried in season, by turning and raking some fine earth, often refreshed, under some amply spreading tree, or to raise them of their seeds (being well dried a day or two before) sprinkled on beds prepar'd ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... said whimsically, "I am afraid we are rather like the shepherdess and the chimney-sweep of the fable I read you very long ago. We climbed up so far that we could see the stars, once, very long ago, Patricia, and we have come back to live upon the parlor table. I suppose it happens to all the little ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Prometheus was bound to Caucasus, nor would Cepheus, with his wife, his son-in-law, and his daughter have been enrolled among the constellations, but that their more than human knowledge of the heavenly bodies had transferred their names into an erroneous fable. From whence all who occupied themselves in the contemplation of nature were both considered and called wise men; and that name of theirs continued to the age of Pythagoras, who is reported to have gone to Phlius, as we ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... infinitesimal successes. However, as I really believe there is some good done in the long run—gutta cavat lapidem non vi in this business—it is a useful and honourable career in which no one should be ashamed to embark. Always remember the fable of the sun, the storm, and the traveller's cloak. Forget wholly and for ever all small pruderies, and remember that you cannot change ancestral feelings of right and wrong without what is practically ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there I think party differences in the Church, and even the variations between Christian sects are concerned, both being different ways of viewing the same truth. These may, like the knights in the old fable, find that both were right about the shield, both have the same foundation. But where the foundation is not the same, the results of the teaching ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a heap of 'Pandanus', 'Nipa', or Fern leaves, like those of which his bed is made, and he is especially careful to wrap up his head in them. It is this habit of covering himself up which has probably led to the fable that the Orang builds huts ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Palmer's money as his own; so he could only smile, rather sadly, and wish his new friends success. How many of his acquaintances had invested good money in a hole in the ground! Even the most prudent, in some unguarded moment, had parted with thousands of dollars, like the dog in the fable which dropped the real bone to seize the shadow. There was Mack, proprietor of the hotel at Graniteville, making lots of money at his business and losing it all in mining ventures. Only the other day Mack had remarked ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... its chance. It will willingly forego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feel that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs. And if I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down its lion-strength, I shall be more than ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... for the honour of humanity that, the whole account was demonstrated to be a fable." (Vol. IV., ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... induced by spirituous liquors, with the well known story of Prometheus, which seems indeed to have been invented by physicians in those ancient times, when all things were clothed in hieroglyphic, or in fable. Prometheus was painted as stealing fire from heaven, which might well represent the inflammable spirit produced by fermentation; which may be said to animate or enliven the man of clay: whence the conquests of Bacchus, as well as the temporary mirth and noise of his devotees. But the after punishment ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... went into a learned discussion with my lord of Montacute and Master Sandy as to the origin of the snapdragon, which he, with his customary assumption of deep learning, declared was "but a modern paraphrase, my lord, of the fable which telleth how Dan Hercules did kill the flaming dragon of Hesperia and did then, with the apple of that famous orchard, make a fiery dish of burning apple brandy which he ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... told you before that Separ was a place once—a sort of place; but you will relish now, I am convinced, the pithy fable of its name. ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... Wisdom or Human Understanding, by which the God of Vengeance is dethroned, and gives place to the eternal rule of the God of Love. To but few of those present could this idea of Langhetti's be intelligible. The most of them merely regarded the fable and its music, without looking for any meaning beneath ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... built an aerial chariot with sides of iron and clad with wings. The chariot was driven through the sky till it stood over Dwarakha, where Krishna's followers dwelt, and from there it hurled down upon the city missiles that destroyed everything on which they fell.' Here is pure fable, not legend, but still a curious forecast of twentieth century bombs from a rigid dirigible. It is to be noted in this case, as in many, that the power to fly was an attribute of evil, not of good—it was the demons who built the chariot, even as at Friedrichshavn. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... buried treasure was an intangible thing. In England, the promises of the Greek's dying message were satisfying by their very vagueness. In Africa, face to face with the tremendous solitude, they became unbelievable, a dim fable akin to the legends of vanished islands and those mysterious races to be found only in unknown lands, which have tickled the imaginations of mankind, ever since the dawn of human intelligence. So, a live millionaire ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... Lord Glistonbury, "my patience is now exhausted, and I must not let you expose yourself here, before our friend, as a novice—Hey! hey!—Why, will you never open your eyes, and see the world as it is! Why! what!—Did you never read the fable of the dog and his master's meat?—Well! it is come to that now in England; and he is a foolish dog, indeed, who, when he can't save the meat, won't secure ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... merit. The respect of which we speak should, in the strongest degree, be a possession of the immediate occupant, and will naturally become dim,—or perhaps be exaggerated,—in regard to the past, as history or fable may tell of them. No one need hesitate to speak his mind of King John, let him be ever so strong a stickler for the privileges of majesty. But there are degrees of distance, and the throne of which we wish to preserve the dignity seems to be assailed when unmeasured evil is said of one who has sat ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... companions. The musketeer sifted all he possibly could out of the host, whom he found cunning, mistrustful, and devoted, body and soul, to M. Fouquet. In order not to awaken the suspicions of this man, he carried on his fable of being a probable purchaser of some salt-mines. To have embarked for Belle-Isle at Roche-Bernard would have been to expose himself still further to comments which had, perhaps, been already made, and would be carried to the castle. Moreover, it was singular that this ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... examined the house. A large building, square and new, very high, seemed, as in the fable of the mountain and the mouse, to have given birth to a tiny little white house, which nestled near it. This little house was the original dwelling, and had been built by the former owner. The tower had been erected ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... in this world to be the antagonist of good, out of the way of the gods in heaven. Wherefore also we should fly away from ourselves to them; and to fly to them is to become like them; and to become like them is to become holy, just and true. But many live in the old wives' fable of appearances; they think that you should follow virtue in order that you may seem to be good. And yet the truth is, that God is righteous; and of men, he is most like him who is most righteous. To know this is wisdom; and in comparison of this the wisdom of the arts or the seeming wisdom of politicians ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... the latter consideration, which is easily deducible from hence, we shall only appeal to the wonderful effect, which the fable, pronounced by Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon, produced among his hearers; or to the fable, which was spoken by Menenius Agrippa to the Roman populace; by which an illiterate multitude were brought back to ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... of it," with a little shrug of her pretty shoulders; "but I don't believe in it. It's a myth! a fable!" ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... education proceeded. Already a good horseman, he was now initiated into the arts of the manege, which, when carried to perfection, almost realize the fable of the Centaur, the guidance of the horse appearing to proceed from the rider's mere volition, rather than from the use of any external and apparent signal of motion. He received also instructions in his field duty; but, I must own, that when ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... well as defiance in her voice—scorn because he stood before her so silently; scorn because the fierce torrent of her anger had flowed unchecked. She had only to stand up to him, it seemed, and like the giant of the fable he dwindled to a pigmy. She was no longer hurt by his passivity. ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the last [eighteenth] century was the calumny known as mercheta mulierum, now known as a malignant fable popularized by novelists and playwrights. Another suggestion is that it is a custom that has survived from some prehistoric race; a third that it has grown up at different points...." Mr. Peacock regards the last as the most likely. "It is only when the population becomes relatively ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... of appearances, Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only, May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters, The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known, (How often they dart out of themselves ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Lit. "neck." The Muslims fable that all will appear at the Day of Resurrection with their good and evil actions in visible form fastened about their necks. "And each man, we constrain him to carry his actions (ta'r, lit. bird, i.e. fortune as told by augury from the flight of birds, according ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... head upon the dressing-table and laughed heartily. She had suddenly bethought herself of Aesop's fable of the lion and ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... of the beast-fable, latter-day amplifications of the simple tale of animals credited with human cunning, such as primitive man told to his naked children as they huddled around the embers in the cave, which was then their only home. The beast-fable is a ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... investigate the causes of this disaster? It is a curiosity which can be easily gratified. The Democratic party was killed in cold blood by Southern traitors. There never was a more causeless, malicious, or malignant murder. The fool in the fable who gained an unenviable notoriety by killing the goose which laid golden eggs, Balaam, who, but for angelic interposition, would have slain his faithful ass, were praiseworthy in comparison. Well might any one of the Northern victims of this cruel outrage have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Fable," Mr. Bulfinch endeavored to impart the pleasure of classical learning to the English reader by presenting the stories of Pagan mythology in a form adapted to modern taste. In this volume the attempt has been made to treat in the same way the stories of the ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... and was only recently destroyed to make room for the modern Post-office, the church itself having passed into the hands of the English. The coincidence of the two churches being dedicated to the same saint doubtless helped the growth of the unjust fable. But in an age of great women, in the times of Lucrezia Borgia, great and bad, of Catherine Sforza, great and warlike, Vittoria Colonna was great and good; and the ascetic Michelangelo, discovering in her the realization of an ideal, laid at her feet ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... influence of opium, I lose for a season my chief source of misery, myself; my mind takes a new and unnatural channel; and I have often thought that any one, even that of insanity, would be preferable to its natural one. It is drawn, as it were, out of itself; and I realize in my own experience the fable of Pythagoras, of two distinct existences, enjoyed ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... world was predictable from what had gone before. In spite of popular fable to the contrary, the division between classes had become increasingly clear. Among other things, tax systems were such that it became all but impossible for a citizen born poor to accumulate a fortune. Through ability he might rise to the point of earning ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... Burns was more influenced by some other characteristics of Scotland than he was by its scenery. There was, first, its romantic history. That had not then been separated, as it has since been, from the mists of fable, but lay exactly in that twilight point of view best adapted for arousing the imagination. To the eye of Burns, as it glared back into the past, the history of his country seemed intensely poetical—including ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Have, formed a Club this season, where His Lordship sometimes takes the chair, And gives us many a bright oration In praise of our sublime vocation; Tracing it up to great King MIDAS, Who, tho' in fable typified as A royal Ass, by grace, divine And right of ears, most asinine, Was yet no more, in fact historical, Than an exceeding well-bred tyrant; And these, his ears, but allegorical, Meaning Informers, kept at high rent— Gem'men, who touched ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... services to philosophy, and whose entire works must not be judged of by the single particular which I am about to mention. In the year 1829, M. Cousin was developing at the Sorbonne the meaning of these verses of La Fontaine, which introduce the fable of the Wolf and ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... mariners, carried to Samos, and bought by Iadmon, one of the geomori, or landed aristocracy of the island. The little girl grew day by day more beautiful, graceful and clever, and was soon an object of love and admiration to all who knew her. AEsop, the fable-writer, who was at that time also in bondage to Iadmon, took an especial pleasure in the growing amiability and talent of the child, taught her and cared for her in the same way as the tutors whom we keep to educate our ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Russia. An abundant cheap supply, firstly, of English and French books, in English and French, but in the Russian character, by means of which Russians may rapidly learn French and English—for it is quite a fable that these languages are known and used in Russia below the level of the court and aristocracy—and, secondly, of Russian books in the Latin (or some easy phonetic development of the Latin) type, will do more to facilitate interchange and intercourse between Russia and France, America and Britain, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... poetry. His works in all were forty-four in number: and it is said that on the very day of his death (it took place in 735) he was dictating to his amanuensis, and had just completed a book. His works are wonderful for his time, and not the less interesting for a fine cobweb of fable which is woven over parts of them, and which seems in keeping with their venerable character. Thus, in speaking of the Magi who visited the infant Redeemer, he is very particular in describing their age, appearance, and offerings. Melchior, the first, was old, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... little, if any, of the faith of the operation of God in the hearts of poor men, to believe the Scriptures, and things contained in them. Many, yea, most men believe the Scriptures as they believe a fable, a story, a tale, of which there is no certainty! But alas! there are but few do in deed and in truth believe the Scriptures to be the very Word ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... A fable told by La Fontaine, Two centuries or more ago, Describes some rats who would arraign A cat, their direst foe, Who killed so many rats And caused the deepest woe, This ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... the breed, unless it crosses with it. The common law of inheritance may be expected to keep both the original and the variety mainly true as long as they last, and none the less so because they have given rise to occasional varieties. The tailless Manx cats, like the curtailed fox in the fable, have not induced the normal breeds to dispense with their tails, nor have the Dorkings (apparently known to Pliny) affected the permanence of the common sort ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... the world would call him so. Afy thought such an Adonis had never been coined, out of fable. He had shiny black hair and whiskers, dark eyes and handsome features. But his vain dandyism spoilt him; would you believe that his handkerchiefs were soaked in scent? They were of the finest cambric, ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... it. I am a child in these matters. I had only seen a chicken in its wild state once or twice before we came down here. I had never dreamed of being an active assistant on a real farm. The whole thing began like Mr. George Ade's fable of the author. An author—myself—was sitting at his desk trying to turn out something that could be converted into breakfast food, when a friend came in and sat down on the table and told him to go right ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... Pontine marshes, which lay spread out below as far as the sea line, extending east and west from Terracina in the bay of Fondi, the Volscian Anxur, to the angle of the coast where rises suddenly, between the marshes and the sea, the mountain promontory of Circeii, celebrated alike in history and in fable. Within the space visible from this one point, the destinies of the human race were decided. It took the Romans nearly five hundred years to vanquish and incorporate the warlike tribes who inhabited that narrow tract, but, this being ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... Paper" shows that England's claim that she entered this war solely as a protector of the small nations is a fable. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... poem—not its prose translation—were printed as headnotes on each page. For this e-text, only the line numbers of each complete "Fable" are given. Line numbers used in footnotes are retained from the original text; these, too, refer to the Latin poem and are independent of line divisions in ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... play 'Pygmalion and Galatea,' is a perversion of Ovid's fable of the Sculptor of Cyprus, the main interest of which upon the stage is derived from its cynical contrast between the innocence of the beautiful nymph of stone whom Pygmalion's love endows with life, and the conventional prudishness of society. ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... who was an ardent admirer of the fair sex, of which he had had but little experience, used to take upon himself, like a true French knight, to defend all the beauties that we were attacking so unmercifully. He would laughingly accuse the abbe of arguing about women as the fox in the fable argued about the grapes. For myself, I used to improve under the abbe's criticisms; this was an emphatic way of letting Edmee know how much I preferred her to all others. She, however, appeared to be more scandalized than flattered, and seriously reproved ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... Dardanus) has not come down, should we say that Dardanus while alive was a common peasant, and dead became noble? And this is not contradicted by the story that he was the son of Jupiter (for this is a fable, of which, in a philosophical discussion, we should take no heed); and yet if our opponent should wish to fall back on the fable, certainly that which is covered by the fable would ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... strong; indeed, her plainness was more than Quakerish, it was Spartan, she was totally destitute of the knicknacks so dear to the girlish heart, and though she had grown used to looking at grapes like Reynard in the fable, I am sure she often felt the sting of her grandfather's needless, almost cruel, economy. This was evidenced by what was ever after spoken of by us girls as the ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... we object to the whole plan and conception of the fable, as turning mainly upon incidents unsuitable for poetical narrative, and brought out in the denouement in a very obscure, laborious, and imperfect manner. The events of an epic narrative should all be ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... seemed to grow enormous bats' wings, which spread out until they obscured the whole sky. The ghostly figure resembled a wild creature of fable, born of the weird fancy of a Dore, or an avenging angel of the Apocalypse. Then the rider shrank together again and seemed to be bouncing up and down on the back of his horse like ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... has been indicated, children's literature is of two kinds: first, the traditional kind that grew up among the folk of long ago in the forms of rhyme, myth, fairy tale, fable, legend, and romantic hero story; and, second, the kind that has been produced in modern times by individual authors. The first, the traditional kind, was produced by early civilization and by the childlike peasantry of long ago. The best of the stories produced by ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... the Parable, and the Fable are all common and popular modes of conveying instruction. Each is distinguished by its own special characteristics. The Tale consists simply in the narration of a story either founded on facts, or created solely by the imagination, and not necessarily associated with the teaching of any ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... darkness; and it is doubtful whether we possess any of the twelve sorts known to the ancients, (Goguet, Origine des Loix, &c., part ii. l. ii. c. 2, art. 3.) In this war the Huns got, or at least Perozes lost, the finest pearl in the world, of which Procopius relates a ridiculous fable.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... enuf of 'em, an' I'd like to be home where I can be down onto the flat groun' an' not like to what's his name's coffin, what I heerd the boys speakin' about, what got hitched half way up to heaven an' stuck there. He's a fable feller, ov course; Mahomet, that's his name; there ain't never been no such doin's sence miracle days 'cept in the theayters an' them places. An' t'other night Miss Dodge, she asked me would I go to the opery, an' I says 'yes.' I was boun' to see all there was to ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... Origine and Use of Satire. The Excellency of Epic Satire above others, as adding Example to Precept, and animating by Fable and sensible Images. Epic Satire compar'd with Epic Poem, and wherein they differ: Of their Extent, Action, Unities, Episodes, and the Nature of their Morals. Of Parody: Of the Style, Figures, and Wit proper to this Sort of Poem, and the ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... wind in a fable, that strove which of them should take from the traveller his cloak, having like the wind tried rough, boisterous, violent means to our friends before, but in vain, resolved now to imitate the sun, and shine as ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... connected with this wreck made it an object of great awe to my boyish fancy; but in truth the whole neighborhood was full of fable and romance for me, abounding with traditions about pirates, hobgoblins, and buried money. As I grew to more mature years I made many researches after the truth of these strange traditions; for I have always been a curious ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... sacerdotal power is seldom firmly established without a struggle, the memory whereof is carefully preserved as a warning of the danger of incurring the divine wrath. A good example of such a myth is the fable of the rebellious Zuni fire-priest, who at the prayer of his orthodox brethren was destroyed with all his clan by a boiling torrent poured from the burning mountain, sacred to their order, by the avenging gods. Compare this with the story of Korah; and it is interesting to observe how the ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... answer that I do not believe any such power exists in creative nature, for I think that God reserves to himself this prerogative, as well as that of reading the hearts of men, or of granting wealth to those who have nothing; unless, that is to say, we are prepared to believe the Colchian fable concerning the renewal of AEson and the researches of the sibyl ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... heed of Erasmus. He treats theology as a fool's jest, and the Gospel as a fable good for ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... to save Nechayeff from being arrested by the Swiss authorities and sent back to Russia, defends him on precisely these grounds, claiming that Nechayeff had taken the fable of William Tell seriously. Cf. OEuvres, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... another's ideas from the appropriation of another's phraseology, we have only to say that a literary man always knows when he is stealing. Whether found out or not, the process is belittling, and a man is through it blasted for this world and damaged for the next one. The ass in the fable wanted to die because he was beaten so much, but after death they changed his hide into a drum-head, and thus he was beaten more than ever. So the plagiarist is so vile a cheat that there is not much chance for him, living or dead. A minister who hopes to do good with each ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... at him in amazement, and assumed the idiotic expression which led many people to believe that the accident that had happened to him—exactly like that of the Duc d'Orleans, you know—was not a fable of his own invention; but he dared not make the slightest observation. Surely some one had changed his son-in-law. Was this really Risler, this tiger-cat, who bristled up at the slightest word and talked of nothing ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... reembarked. They gathered, too, from the signs of their savage visitors, that the wonderful land of Cibola, with its seven cities and its untold riches, was distant but twenty days' journey by water. In truth, it was on the Gila, two thousand miles off, and its wealth a fable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... universally advocated, is to avoid drugs. The importance of this and its union with right exercise have been demonstrated in the impressive language of fable. ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice. It is the one calling in which at the beginning the only exertion is that of self-indulgence; all the prizes are at the commencement. It is the ever new embodiment of the old fable of the sale of the soul to the Devil. The tempter offers wealth, comfort, excitement, but in return the victim must sell her soul, nor does the other party forget to exact his due to the uttermost farthing. Human nature, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... of the inconsistency of the human mind, that, having built his castle with so little view to durability, Walpole entailed the perishable possession with a degree of strictness, which would have been more fitting for a baronial estate. And that, too, after having written a fable entitled "The Entail," in consequence, of some one having asked him whether he did not intend to entail Strawberry Hill, and in ridicule of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... the circle of initiated priests, the Hierophants of the sanctum sanctorum of the old temples, under the guise of religious fables, it may not be amiss to search for universal truths even under the patches of fiction's harlequinade. This fable about the Pleiades, the seven Sisters, Atlas, and Hercules exists identical in subject, though under other names, in the sacred Hindu books, and has likewise the same occult meaning. But then like the Ramayana ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... now especially sublime. The numerous deep gorges presented the appearance of lakes, on account of the dense vapors with which they were filled, and the pinnacles and crags to the South East, piled in inextricable confusion, resembling nothing so much as the giant cities of eastern fable. We were rapidly approaching the mountains in the South; but our elevation was more than sufficient to enable us to pass them in safety. In a few minutes we soared over them in fine style; and Mr. Ainsworth, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... they say thou art Earth's satellite; yet when I gaze on thee my thoughts are not of thy suzerain. They teach us that thy power is a fable, and that thy divinity is a dream. Oh, thou bright Queen! I will be no traitor to thy sweet authority; and verily, I will not believe that thy influence o'er our hearts is, at this moment, less potent ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... led into the ring, and one acted the gardener of the fable, went on a hunting trip, waltzed, took off its hat, and played dead. After this performance came the donkey. But it defended itself well; its kicks sent the dogs flying through the air like balloons; with its tail between its legs and its ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... Infallibility of Human Judgment," it occasioned an acquaintance between us. He took great notice of me, called on me often to converse on those subjects, carried me to the Horns, a pale alehouse in——Lane, Cheapside, and introduced me to Dr. Mandeville, author of the "Fable of the Bees," who had a club there, of which he was the soul, being a most facetious, entertaining companion. Lyons, too, introduced me to Dr. Pemberton, at Batson's Coffee-house, who promis'd to give me an opportunity, sometime or other, ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... sun accepted the wind's challenge to contest for the traveler's cloak, I dare say all the spectators of the novel highway robbery—the moon, the stars, the trees, birds and beasts, and others that the fable does not mention—took odds that the wind would snatch off the wayfarer's garment in triumph. However, the wind whipped and thrashed the poor man in vain. The stronger it blew and the more it walloped the cloak's folds, the tighter and more determinedly the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... meadow—a brook that many a time has served to turn my water-wheel. Oh, those days of miniature water-wheels, and kites, and wind-mills! how happy they were, and how I love to think of them now! By the way, have you ever read Miss Gould's poetical fable about the little child and the Blue Violet? I must recite a stanza or two of this poem, I think. The child speaks ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... an abounding sense of humor, and always employed it in illustration of his argument—but never for the mere sake of provoking merriment. In this respect he had the wonderful aptness of Franklin. He often taught a great truth with the felicitous brevity of an Aesop fable. His words did not flow in an impetuous torrent, as did those of Douglas; but they were always well ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... (significant only because of the Me in the centre), creeds, conventions fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth and spreads to the roof of heaven. The quality of BEING, in the object's self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto—not criticism by other standards and adjustments ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... was only to show the party cantering by at an easy pace and looking as if they were engaged in some trial of skill, and in spite of the peril in which he was placed Chris's thoughts played a strange prank, suggesting to him the old fable of the boys and ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... of a woman so young and so lovely, Jacques Ferrand felt sometimes his mind wandering; a devouring imagery pursued him, waking or sleeping. The ancient fable of the Nessus' shirt was realized ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... faintly, and in the great room rose the busy silence of those minutes which precede repasts. Suddenly the four men by the breakfast fable stood back. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of no use as a time-keeper if it should become discouraged and come to a standstill by calculating its work a year ahead, as the clock did in Jane Taylor's fable. It is not the troubles of to-day, but those of to-morrow and next week and next year, that whiten our heads, wrinkle our faces, and bring us to ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... brief report of Brother John Kline's sermon on this occasion I have but touched some of the points in his argument, gathered from the Diary, and from a personal conversation with him afterwards. He wound up with the Fable of the Clock and ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... and of herself. She did not invoke God, we very well know, but she had faith in the genius of evil—that immense sovereignty which reigns in all the details of human life, and by which, as in the Arabian fable, a single pomegranate seed is sufficient to reconstruct ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... his Northern crowds the fable of negro suffering in the South until he believed the lie himself. He believed it with every beat of his stern Puritan heart. And he had repeated and shouted it until the gathering Abolitionist mob believed it as a message from God. The fact that the system of African slavery, as actually ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... to the newly-discovered country. The later voyages of Thorwald Ericsson, of Thorlstein Ericsson—both brothers of Leif—and of Thorfinn Karlsefne, are recounted in the Sagas. The story of these early colonists or "builders," as they called themselves, is weakened by an infusion of fable, such as the tale of the fast-running one-legged people; but with all allowances, the fact of Viking adventure on the American mainland is unquestioned and unquestionable, though we may say of these brave sailors, with Professor ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... favour, our Country pastime made is. We are a few of those collected here, That ruder Tongues distinguish villager; And to say veritie, and not to fable, We are a merry rout, or else a rable, Or company, or, by a figure, Choris, That fore thy dignitie will dance a Morris. And I, that am the rectifier of all, By title Pedagogus, that let fall The Birch upon the breeches of the small ones, And humble with a Ferula the tall ones, Doe here present ...
— The Two Noble Kinsmen • William Shakespeare and John Fletcher [Apocrypha]
... discourse is neatly illustrative of a neoclassic critical method and of the kind of psychological assumptions upon which such arguments could proceed. From the rather copious use of allegory and metaphor, as civilizing instruments, Ogilvie traces the rise of the religious fable as part of the inevitable sequence of imaginative development. To account, therefore, for the irregularity of the ode, for the "enthusiasm, obscurity and exuberance" (p. xxiv) which continue to characterize it, he refers to its anciently established character, a character not susceptible ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... to extend itself over the whole earth, make the working classes restless and discontented. They chafe under restraints as unavoidable as illness or death. What floods of nonsense have we not seen poured out about the conflict between labor and capital? It is the old fable over again: the strife of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... possibility avoid casting its lot with one side or the other, it should cast it with the North. For many weeks the two Presidents played the game for this invaluable stake with all the tact and skill of which each was master. It proved to be a repetition of the fable of the sun and the wind striving to see which could the better make the traveler take off his cloak, and fortunately the patience of Mr. Lincoln represented the warmth of the sun. He gave the Kentuckians time to learn by observation and the march of events that neutrality was an impossibility, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... plaster has got to be removed before the fatal day of her return," and puffed until his cheeks sank in, and the tears came to his eyes. "What is this quail fable, anyway?" ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... shall not contradict this delightful tradition, But beg—No, I won't, I will take it—permission, To state, that I think there's a word to be said, From a different text, on the opposite head. And so I'll invent, as well as I'm able, A new home-made, allegorical fable; And my honest purpose shall be, to see If the scoundrel rich have not borne a part In those noble charities, which are The pride of this jolly old city's heart. And if I shall find that the virtuous ...
— Nothing to Say - A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing - to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' • QK Philander Doesticks
... I substituted. "But you have your own stand-point of view, of course. The shield that to you is white, to me is black as Erebus. You remember the knights of fable?" ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... resolve into distempered fancies, identified the enigmatical Margrave. And now both she, the representative of the formal world most opposed to visionary creeds, and he, who gathered round him all the terrors which haunt the realm of fable, stood united against me,—foes with whom the intellect I had so haughtily cultured knew not how to cope. Whatever assault I might expect from either, I was unable to assail again. Alike, then, in this, are the Slander and the Phantom,—that which appalls us most in their power over us ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and held only by an act of faith. Yet that astonishing revelation, enough to make any youthful messenger forget where he himself was bound, through turning to follow with his eyes that acceptance by a carrier's cart of the verity of the fable, is nowhere mentioned, I have found since, in any guide to London, though you may learn how ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... accustomed current when, in his early life, he wrote a work in their defence. The theory that errors of transcription might possibly have crept into the text, was totally rejected. No such thing could, by any contingency, occur. The fable of Aristeas was still considered worthy a place in the canon. The sanctity of the Hebrew language, and other Rabbinical notions, were defended. Christ was discovered in every book of the Old Testament; the perfect ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators... Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness and read ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of fairyland, and now, in this tardy awakening of the imaginative part of her nature, she thought sometimes of Capri much as a child is wont to think of the enchanted countries, nameless, regionless, in books of fable. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Victoria, unconsciously repeating his words. "But that doesn't explain you," she exclaimed: "You are like nobody I ever met, and you have a supernatural faculty of appearing suddenly, from nowhere, and whisking me away like the lady in the fable, out of myself and the world I live in. If I become so inordinately grateful as to talk nonsense, you mustn't blame me. Try not to think of the number of times I've seen you, or when it was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... you to follow me in spirit to the very home and birth-place of freedom, to the land where we need not myth or fable to add aught to the fresh and gladdening feeling with which we for the first time tread the soil and drink the air of the immemorial democracy of Uri. It is one of the opening days of May: it is the morning of Sunday; for men then deem ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... Such as are beautiful for Colour. A strange Bird. Water-Fowls resembling Ducks and Swans. Peacocks. The King keeps Fowl. Their Fish, How they catch them in Ponds, And how in Rivers. Fish kept and fed for the King's Pleasure. Serpents. The Pimberah of a prodigious bigness. The Polonga. The Noya. The Fable of the Noya ana Polonga. The Carowala. Gerendo. Hickanella. Democulo, a great Spider. Kobbera-guson, a Creature like an Aligator. Tolla-guion. The people eat Rats. Precoius Stones, Minerals, and other Commodities. The People ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... "The demon of curiosity has a hold of you, Molly; remember the fable they made us repeat: De loin c'est quelque chose, et de pres ce n'est rien. Now you shall go straight into your bed, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... terrae filius or son of the earth, who was strong only when his foot was on the earth, lifted in air he became weak as water, a weakness which Hercules discovered to his discomfiture when wrestling with him. The fable has been used as a symbol of the spiritual strength which accrues when one rests his faith on the immediate fact ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... gives to every man Some gift serviceable; Write I never could nor can Hungry at the table; Fasting, any stripling to Vanquish me is able; Hunger, thirst, I liken to Death that ends the fable. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... scruples on the score of giving up his profession and thereby losing all chance of ever attaining to the dignity of Lord Chancellor, he certainly kept them to himself, for he had no wish to run counter to the inclination of Kate, or he might find himself in the position of the dog in the fable, who had thrown away the substance to endeavour to grasp the shadow. Tom, in reality, had never liked a London life, and had a constant hankering after field sports, shooting and fishing; and now he believed ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... comes on the stage of human affairs, the fable of the Hercules repeats itself. He gets a sword from Mercury, a bow from Apollo, a breastplate from Vulcan, a robe from Minerva. Many streams from many sources bring to him their united strength. How else ...
— Charles Sumner Centenary - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 14 • Archibald H. Grimke
... restrained her fury, until she recovered the love-letter she had written to me. As soon as she had secured it, she hired some persons to testify by oath, that, in the absence of his Excellency, I had attempted to violate her. This fable was represented with so much art and speciousness, that the president did not doubt its truth, and I was ordered to be put in prison. In this, my despairing condition, I saw no other means of deliverance than to confess the crime, with which I had been charged, and supplicate the president ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... they will always be reduced to act, as the Grecian chiefs did, according to the best of their convictions. Nevertheless, for the satisfaction of those who distrust romance and insist upon reality, we will leave fable for fact, and take as our next illustration an incident that may any ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... inch Italian and Neapolitan. Her youth had been all love, and her age was all superstition. She was garrulous, fond,—a gossip. Now she would prattle to the girl of cavaliers and princes at her feet, and now she would freeze her blood with tales and legends, perhaps as old as Greek or Etrurian fable, of demon and vampire,—of the dances round the great walnut-tree at Benevento, and the haunting spell of the Evil Eye. All this helped silently to weave charmed webs over Viola's imagination that afterthought and later years might labour vainly to dispel. And all ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the old fable of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. We will vouch that the following read us as luminous a comment thereon as may be desired: 'Polite,' 'urbane,' 'civil,' 'rustic,' 'villain,' 'savage,' 'pagan,' 'heathen.' Let ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with all that rebellious self, over which the poor soul rules as it may, and rules so poorly? Oh! there is an inner unrest, the necessary fate of every man who does not take Christ for his King. But when He enters the heart with His silken leash, the old fable comes true, and He binds the lions and the ravenous beasts there with its slender tie and leads them along, tamed, by the cord of love, and all harnessed to pull together in the chariot that He guides. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... the American girl is neither an affectation, nor a prejudiced fable, nor a piece of stupidity. The German woman, quoted by Mr. Bryce, found her American compeer furchtbar frei, but she had at once to add und furchtbar fromm. "The innocence of the American girl passes abysses of obscenity without stain or ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Verbe eternel de sortir de son repos mais comme c'etoit par la Vierge Marie qu'il avoit voulu descendre parmi les hommes et se mettre en leur puissance, on croyoit ne pouvoir mieux faire que de choisir dans la fable, le fait d'une pucelle pouvant seule servir de piege a la licorne, en l'attirant par le charme et le parfum de son sein virginal qu'elle lui presentoit; enfin l'ange Gabriel concourant au mystere etoit bien reconnoissable sous les traits du venenr aile ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... corner of his cab with fully half his cry to finish out; and, curiously, all the time a sad little story from an old holiday in the country kept haunting him. It was at once a fact and a fable concerning a happy little family of swallows, whose sudden tragedy he had seen with ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... Callao was completely overwhelmed by the sea. Several travellers have related that on calm days with a clear sky the old town may be seen beneath the waves. I have also heard the same story from inhabitants of Callao. It is doubtless a mere fable. Under the most favorable circumstances I have often examined the spot—the Mar brava, as it is called—without being able to discover a trace of the ruins ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... for a Time only; is a 'Time-phantasm, yet reckons itself real!' The Merovingian Kings, slowly wending on their bullock-carts through the streets of Paris, with their long hair flowing, have all wended slowly on,—into Eternity. Charlemagne sleeps at Salzburg, with truncheon grounded; only Fable expecting that he will awaken. Charles the Hammer, Pepin Bow-legged, where now is their eye of menace, their voice of command? Rollo and his shaggy Northmen cover not the Seine with ships; but have sailed ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... overproduction. The "avalanch of nuts" is an old wife's fable. Do not talk to us about overproduction, when the food problem is giving the gravest concern to the master minds of the world. With population increasing and food supply diminishing the gaunt specter of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... properly so called, depends on the recognition of the order and awe of lower and loftier animal life, first clearly taught in the myth of Chiron, and in his bringing up of Jason, AEsculapius, and Achilles, but most perfectly by Homer, in the fable of the horses of Achilles, and the part assigned to them, in relation to the death of his friend, and in prophecy of his own. There is, perhaps, in all the "Iliad," nothing more deep in significance—there is nothing in all literature more perfect in human ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... most remote antiquity; and granting that ages of ignorance and superstition have involved the history of the different constellations in a chaos of contradictory traditions, there is no doubt at the foundation some seeds of truth which may even yet emerge from the rubbish of fable, and bear fruit most precious. That the zodial[23] signs are significant records of something worthy of being preserved, is prejudice to deny; and we must be allowed to regard the Gorgons and Hydras of the skies as interesting problems yet unsolved, ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... whole, my view of the operations of the Colonization Society, in relieving the slave States of the evil which weighs them down more than a hundred tariffs, is illustrated by an old fable, in which it is stated, that a man was seen at the foot of a mountain, scraping away the dust with his foot. One passing by, asked him what he was doing? I wish to remove this mountain, said he. You fool, replied the other, you can never do it in that ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... "Is this a fable or the posy of a ring, Sir Dragon?" she said, sharply. "Do you come to try or tempt me, or is this perchance but some part of my Lord of Misrule's Yule-tide mumming? 'Sblood, sir; only cravens sneak behind masks to strike and threaten. Have off your ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... criticizing this antithesis at present, but evidently it is quite different from the other. It is practically the distinction used in the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama, and it flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison, for example, in examining Paradise Lost considers in order the fable, the characters, and the sentiments; these will be the substance: then he considers the language, that is, the style and numbers; this will be the form. In like manner, the substance or meaning of a lyric may ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... she began, "La Ligue des Rats: fable de La Fontaine." She then declaimed the little piece with an attention to punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice and an appropriateness of gesture, very unusual indeed at her age, and which proved she had been ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Where the greatest pains have been lavished on that sort of research, little knowledge has been gained; and the most diligent inquirers have been compelled either to confess that they were baffled, or rather than own their disappointment, to substitute fable for fact, and pass the fictions ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... the Persian fable—the pebble that was not the rose, but had caught some of its fragrance by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... settlers been so strong handed, the work now accomplished could not have been performed before the winter; but it was the fable of the bundle of sticks exemplified. Such a building would not have been attempted except for the sake of the ladies, as the settlers would have employed all their strength in preparing the ground for cultivation. That necessary proceeding was not ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... far as our consciousness is concerned, things are merely groups of actual and potential reactions on our own part, that is to say of expectations which experience has linked together in more or less stable groups. The practical man and the man of science in my fable, were both of them dealing with Things: passing from one group of potential reaction to another, hurrying here, dallying there, till of the actual aspect of the landscape there remained nothing in their thoughts, trams ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... which you performed at that important juncture was marked with characters so peculiar, that, realizing the fairest fable of antiquity, its parallel could scarcely be found in the authentic records of ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... The Fable. The King of Navarre and his three courtiers, Biron, Dumaine and Longaville, have sworn to study for three years under the usual collegiate conditions of watching, fasting, and keeping from the sight and speech of women. They are forced to break ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... maiden-hair have been steeped, as good raise mirth and jollity in the guests (in imitation of Homer's Helen, who with some medicament diluted the pure wine she had prepared), do not understand that that fable, coming from round Egypt, after a long way ends at last in easy and fit discourse. For whilst they were drinking Helen ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... imposture runs a golden thread of truth. As his first journey, occupying nearly two of the three volumes, was probably confined to the Valley of the Cuanza River, so his second, extending beyond the equator, and to a meridian 25deg. east of Paris, becomes fable as he leaves the course of the Loge Stream. Yet, although he begins by doubting that the Coango and the Zaire are the same waters, he ends by recognizing the fact, and his map justly lays down the Fleuve Couango dit Zaire a son embouchure. Whether the tale of the mulatto surveyor be fact or ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... 20, says that both the spring and the remains of the tree were shown in his time. The whole of this fable has been translated into verse by Cicero, de Div. ii. 30. Compare the following passage of Apuleius de Deo Socr. p. 52, ed. Elm. "Calchas longe praestabilis ariolari, simul alites et arborem contemplatus est, actutum sua divinitate ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... this famous robber? First of all, she kept on asking her husband about it, and he replied that the whole story about Fatia Negra was only a Wallachian fable. It was true that robberies were committed by men who regularly wore black masks, but it was never one and the same man who was guilty of these misdeeds. Nevertheless the name had won a sort of nimbus of notoriety among the common people, many had made use of it as well as of ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... greatest curiosity in the collection was that of three portraits belonging to the pre-historical age, and, according to mythical tradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher, whose origin and attributes were as much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of an Indian Budh or ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the weak in intellect." They "hurry away from the educated, as not fit subjects of their imposition, and inveigle the rustic." "Thou," says the heathen magistrate to the martyr Fructuosus, "who as a teacher dost disseminate a new fable, that fickle girls may desert the groves and abandon Jupiter, condemn, if thou art wise, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... burst forth, "that we all know, and you know that we all know, is but a fable. Doth not Madam Cavendish treat you as a son, and are you not a convict in name only, so far as she is concerned? I say, Harry, you can ride my horse to the winning on Royal Oak Day, at the races. What ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... truths of the latest researches be given first. Then the fable, or folklore, or former explanation which once vouched for the origin of the sun, moon, or stars, or other natural objects, seems to the children like their own childish fancies about ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... bones are hurl'd; Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides Where thou perhaps, under the whelming tide Visitest the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great Vision of the guarded mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold, —Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth: —And, O ye dolphins, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Posterity has taken Raleigh's view, and all Englishmen, from Lord Bacon to Lord Tennyson, have united in praising this fight as one 'memorable even beyond credit, and to the height of some heroical fable.' ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... 1868.—The Arabs have some tradition of the Emir Musa coming as far south as the Jagga country. Some say he lived N.E. of Sunna, now Mteza; but it is so mixed up with fable and tales of the Genii (Mageni), that it cannot refer to the great Moses, concerning whose residence at Meroee and marriage of the king of Ethiopia's daughter there is also some vague tradition further north: the only thing ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... meaning. Jocasta was no other than Miss Esmond, Maid of Honor to her Majesty. She had told Mr. Esmond this little story of having met a gentleman somewhere, and forgetting his name, when the gentleman, with no such malicious intentions as those of "Cymon" in the above fable, made the answer simply as above; and we all laughed to think how little Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix had profited by her ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... as you did, and letting that brother of mine get away sneering and sniggering at me, with his nose cocked up in the air, and swelling with pride till he's like the frog in the fable." ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... course of the evening, Jerrold spoke with high appreciation of Emerson; and of Longfellow, whose Hiawatha he considered a wonderful performance; and of Lowell, whose Fable for Critics he especially admired. I mentioned Thoreau, and proposed to send his works to Dr. ———, who, being connected with the Illustrated News, and otherwise a writer, might be inclined to draw attention ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... time a thing happened in Skane which created a good deal of discussion and even got into the newspapers but which many believed to be a fable, because they had not ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... apples at him, but they had no more effect upon the culprit than did the grass upon the bad boy in the fable; so the farmer got a long pole and prodded the apple thief until he whined and came scratching down ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... inspired them to eloquent expression of the thoughts, the loves, the hopes, and the aspirations which were our own as well as theirs, these writers of our South are living still and will live through the long procession of the years. In the garden of our lives they planted the flowers of poesy, of fable, and of romance. With the changes of the years those flowers may have passed into the realm of the old-fashioned, like the blossoms in Grandmother's garden, but are there any sweeter or ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... construction, were scattered here and there, the homes of peasant and Peruvian noble. But it was upon the temple crowning a near elevation that the eye would rest, in rapt astonishment at its magnificence and grandeur. The description may sound like a scrap from some eastern fable, but none the less it is a fact culled from the ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... low opinion of poetry, the neo-Aristotelians among the critics began to stress the view that fable, design, and structure were the really essential elements in poetry, and that these were the product of reason, or judgment. And because reason was the means by which truth was discovered, poetry by virtue of its rational framework became capable ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... amber moon Illumines footing on forbidden wall; Where, 'stead of pursy jeweler's display, Parading peacocks brave the passer-by, And swans like angels in an azure sky Wing swift and silent on unchallenged way. No land of fable! Of the Hills I sing, Whose royal women tread with conscious grace The peace-filled gardens of a warrior race, Each maiden fit for wedlock with a king, And every Rajput son so royal born And conscious of his age-long heritage He looks askance at Burke's ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... Orleans Princes, was thinking of starting a racing stable, and finished up by believing that he really was a fashionable man, and strutted about, and was puffed out with conceit, as he had probably never read La Fontaine's fable, in which he tells the story of the ass that is laden with relics which people salute, and so ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... impossible to know. But the Hebrews received the Mysteries from the Egyptians; and of course were familiar with their legend,—known as it was to those Egyptian Initiates, Joseph and Moses. It was the fable (or rather the truth clothed in allegory and figures) of OSIRIS, the Sun, Source of Light and Principle of Good, and TYPHON, the Principle of Darkness and Evil. In all the histories of the Gods and Heroes lay couched and hidden astronomical details and the history of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... those who have not seen and yet have believed—those who trust in him more than that—who believe without the sight of the eyes, without the hearing of the ears. They are blessed to whom a wonder is not a fable, to whom a mystery is not a mockery, to whom a glory is not an unreality—who are content to ask, "Is it like Him?" It is a dull-hearted, unchildlike people that will be always putting God in mind of his promises. Those promises are good to reveal what God is; ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... many of you do not see that the same is true when you deal with good chemists or electricians belonging to the astral or mental planes. They have no more authority qua their knowledge of these planes than the chemist. I often wish that in the Theosophical Society the old fable of the Jewish Rabbis was better remembered and applied. Two Rabbis were arguing, and one of them, to support his side of the argument, made a wall fall down; whereupon the other Rabbi sensibly remarked: "Since when ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... curiosity and speculation than that of George Eliot. Had she only lived earlier in the century she might easily have become the centre of a mythos. As it is, many of the anecdotes commonly repeated about her are made up largely of fable. It is, therefore, well, before it is too late, to reduce the true story of her career to the lowest terms, and this service has been well done by the author of ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... essentials in children's books if your selection must be small? Our children can grow up without Henty. They must not grow up without the classics in myth and fable and legend, the books which have delighted grown people and adults for generations, and upon the child's early acquaintance with which depends his keen enjoyment of much of his later reading, because of the wealth of ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... it), I found none so fit as he who peopled the beautiful and far-famed city of Athens, to be set in opposition with the father of the invincible and renowned city of Rome. Let us hope that Fable may, in what shall follow, so submit to the purifying processes of Reason as to take the character of exact history. We shall beg that we may meet with candid readers, and such as will receive with indulgence the ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... earth, yielded up her mighty whales, that Mr. Gathergold might sell their oil, and make a profit on it. Be the original commodity what it might, it was gold within his grasp. It might be said of him, as of Midas in the fable, that whatever he touched with his finger immediately glistened, and grew yellow, and was changed at once into sterling metal, or, which suited him still better, into piles of coin. And, when Mr. Gathergold had become so very ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... the panic. I am such a butterfly that I seem out of place in a work-a-day community. I am constantly advised, like the volatile person in the fable, to learn wisdom from my aunt; but I can't, for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... put such silly nonsense into your head? Don't let that stupid fable hide from you the beautiful truth of birth. That is an absurd story, Zoe, invented by those to whom the most sublime fact in the world seems nasty. Babies are born, dear—out of lo—out of the union of ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... of Circe, who changed the soldiers or companions of Ulysses into swine. We know also the fable of the Golden Ass, by Apuleius, which contains the account of a man metamorphosed into an ass. I bring forward these things merely as what they are, that is to say, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Consciences: and yet will they not cease? Doth the Innocent, forbeare the calling of them, Iuridically to aunswere him, according to the rigour of the Lawes: and will they despise his Charitable pacience? As they, against him, by name, do forge, fable, rage, and raise slaunder, by Worde & Print: Will they prouoke him, by worde and Print, likewise, to Note their Names to the World: with their particular deuises, fables, beastly Imaginations, and vnchristen-like slaunders? Well: Well. O (you such) my vnkinde Countrey men. O vnnaturall Countrey ...
— The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara • John Dee
... "In realising the fable of the boys and the frogs with the poor old Dominie, forgetting that what may be sport to you ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... humorous rhyme "did it—quiddit" is but one of the many whimsical rhyming effects in the poem. The use of a light, semi-jocose form to give the greater emphasis to serious subject-matter is characteristic of Browning. Lowell in "A Fable for ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... off into dreamland, listening to the whispering of the leaves above you, and catching glimpses through them, of a sky so deliciously blue, and stars so wonderfully bright. It seemed as though in this favoured spot, the fable of a perpetual summer was to be realised, and the whole circle of the year was to be crowned with the same freshness and verdure and beauty, the same profusion of fruits and flowers, which we had thus far enjoyed. But such expectations, if any of ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... so much of fable mingled with the traditionary biography of this "Devonshire worthy," that most persons probably will dismiss the claim altogether. He became weary of his life, and, being determined to rid himself from the direful apprehensions of dangerous approaching evils, he adopted this strange ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... pounds, and which, by the by, lamed him for several days. But he was heroic as the singer who broke his collar-bone by the ut di petto. A peculiar accompaniment was a dulcet whistle with lips protruded; hence probably the fable of Pliny's Astomoi, and the Africans of Eudoxus, whose joined lips compelled them to eat a single grain at a time, and to drink through a cane before sherry-cobblers were known. Others joined him, dancing either vis-a-vis or by his side; and more than ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... three times as large as those of ordinary men, have been found. Probably the skulls of Lauang, which are pressed out in breadth, and covered with a thick crust of calcareous sinter, the gigantic skulls (skulls of giants) have given rise to the fable of ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... by way of Prose, I shall only now give the Reformer a little further Advice, in return of his, in my Lyrical way, which is in a Fable of A Dog and an Otter; and to turn his own words upon him, the Citation may possibly be of some service to him, for if not concern'd in the Application, he may at least be precaution'd by the Moral. I find he knows ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... receive, And that we in the sacrament believe. Then, said the Hind, as you the matter state, Not only Jesuits can equivocate; For real, as you now the word expound, From solid substance dwindles to a sound. Methinks an AEsop's fable you repeat; You know who took the shadow for the meat: Your Church's substance thus you change at will, 50 And yet retain your former figure still. I freely grant you spoke to save your life; For then you lay ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... his absorption in business it had been easy for him to miss what lay beneath the surface. But for the accident of his meeting with Clara, his temperament would have carried him through life, unconscious of love from his own experience and regarding it as a fable of ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... unfortunate (?) King has named a host of things, alive and dead. It was worshipped and mummified in parts of Ancient Egypt e.g. Heracleopolis, on account of its antipathy to serpents and because it was supposed to destroy the crocodile, a feat with AElian and others have overloaded with fable. It has also a distinct antipathy to cats. The ichneumon as a pet becomes too tame and will not leave its master: when enraged it emits an offensive stench. I brought home for the Zoological ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... first. He said that he prayed, when alone in the turret, but omits the statement (previously made by him) that he deprived Ruthven of his dagger, a very improbable tale, told falsely at first, no doubt, as Robertson the notary at first invented his fable about meeting with Henderson, coming out of the dark staircase. This myth Robertson narrated when examined in September, but omitted it in the trial in November. Henderson now explained about his first opening the wrong window, but he sticks to it that ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... wish. Lastly—though this is a matter of less moment—if any of our politicians, who used to make their calculations and conjectures according to persons and precedents, must needs interpose his judgment in a thing of this nature, I would but remind him how (according to the ancient fable) the lame man keeping the course won the race of the swift man who left it; and that there is no thought to be taken about precedents, for the thing ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... but in their own forms, as in appetite of lust appeared. And the heresy of the Anthropomorphites was ever censured for a gross conceit bred in the obscure cells of solitary monks that never looked abroad. Again the fable so well known of QUIS PINXIT LEONEM, doth set forth well that there is an error of pride and partiality, as well as of custom and familiarity. The reflexion also from glasses so usually resembled to the imagery of the mind, every man knoweth ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... of their expositions, he reserved his own opinion to himself, and commanding that all these notions should be concealed from me, he ordered the interpreter to ask me what it meant. I answered, that it was an invention of the painter, to shew his art, and that it represented some poetical fable, which was all I could say, having never seen it before. He then called upon Mr Terry to give his opinion, who could not; on which the king asked him, why he brought up with him an invention in which he was ignorant? On this I interposed, saying Mr Terry ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... not to mind it. Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do not count a man's years, until he has nothing else to count. The vast inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus. In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we shall all be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... agree with the majority. But, as the question cannot be ignored, I should like to say that I hold firmly the conviction that all trade should be carried on for the mutual advantage of the parties engaged. The old fable of AEsop may be quoted, which relates to a quarrel between the different members of the body. Every one of us can be, and should be, helpful to every other, independent of nation, country, and creed. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Bishop of Avranches supposes That all these large and varying doses Of fable mean naught else ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... what is't you read— Romance or fairy fable? Or is it some historic page Of kings and crowns unstable?' The young boy gave an upward glance— 'It is the ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... find that it is written with such an easy air of truth that you will half believe in Sir John's marvels. Every now and again, too, he puts in a bit of real information which helps to make his marvels seem true, so that sometimes we cannot be sure what is truth and what is fable. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... the Irish Saints contain an immense quantity of material of first rate importance for the historian of the Celtic church. Underneath the later concoction of fable is a solid substratum of fact which no serious student can ignore. Even where the narrative is otherwise plainly myth or fiction it sheds many a useful sidelight on ancient manners, customs and laws as well as on the curious ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... In its only foreign language translation, the Letter, somewhat abbreviated, is appended to the German translation of The Fable of the Bees by Otto Bobertag, Mandevilles Bienenfabel, Munich, 1914, ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... the Siren who sang and slew is now The fable outworn of an age remote, And the women to whom to-day we bow Have long abjured her sinister note; She heals, she helps, she follows the plough, And her song has fairly ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... be a poor tinker," said I; "but I may never have undergone what you have. You remember, perhaps, the fable of the fox who had lost ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... a more lively illustration of the principle here insisted upon, if I recall to the reader's recollection the legend of the Seven Sleepers. The scene of that popular fable was placed in the two centuries which elapsed between the reign of the emperor Decius and the death of Theodosius the younger. In that interval of time (between the years 249 and 450 of our era) the union of the Roman empire had been ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... restless heart and fevered brain, Unquiet and unstable, That holy well of Loch Maree Is more than idle fable! ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... for the whole household, could we reasonably expect the girl to announce the fact, in the parlor above, in the same tone in which she ordinarily states that the butcher has called for his orders? Aesop, in his very first fable, (as arranged by good Archdeacon Croxall,) has inculcated but a mean opinion of the cock who forbore to crow lustily when he turned up a jewel of surpassing richness, in the course of his ordinary scratching, and under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... doubtful and useless opinion, and was at length rejected as the absurd invention of heresy and fanaticism." The Millennium is stigmatised, in what once stood as the forty-first Article of the English Church, as "a fable of Jewish dotage." We wonder whether the plain-spoken divines who drew up that article included Jesus Christ, St. Paul, and St. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... often that they have become fables. "Not all lies, nor all true, all foolishness, nor all sense; so much have the storytellers told, and so much have the makers of fables fabled to embellish their stories that they have made all seem fable." [4] He omits the prophecies of Merlin from his narrative, because he does not understand them. "I am not willing to translate his book, because I do not know how to interpret it. I would say nothing that was not exactly as I said." [5] To this scrupulous regard for ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... on one common errand bound, One common fate o'erwhelms; and so, me-seems, A fable have we of our daily round, Who in these groves of learning here are found Climbing Parnassus' slopes. Our aim is one, And one the path by which we strive to soar; Yet, truer still, or ere the prize be won, A common ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... a wondrous House of Sorrow, And Happiness therein a lying Fable. When first they mix'd the Clay of Man, and cloth'd His Spirit in the Robe of Perfect Beauty, For Forty Mornings did an Evil Cloud Rain Sorrows over him from Head to Foot; And when the Forty Mornings pass'd to Night, Then ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... rabbis of the time were on the one hand developing by dialectic discussion the oral tradition into a vast system of religious ritual and legal jurisprudence; on the other, weaving around the law, by way of adornment to it, a variegated fabric of philosophy, fable, allegory, and legend. Simultaneously the Alexandrian preachers—they were never quite the same as the rabbis—were emphasizing for the outer world as well as their own people the spiritual side of the religion, elaborating a theology that should satisfy the reason, and seeking ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... fixed upon as one to work me this unmitigated evil. I do not know her, and I believe I do not care to know her, and I am thirsting for the hour to come when I shall study her. Is not this to have the poison of a bite in one's blood? The wrath of Venus is not a fable. I was a hard reader and I despised the sex in my youth, before the family estates fell to me; since when I have playfully admired the sex; I have dallied with a passion, and not read at all, save for diversion: her anger is not a fable. You may interpret ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... whose mysterious flight has long been known in Russia. And Catharine will have her tracked in all countries and upon all routes. Therefore, save Natalie, by seeming to give her up. Return home and relate to them a fable of a false princess by whom you had been deceived, and whom you abandoned as soon as you discovered the deception. They will everywhere lend you a believing ear, as people gladly believe what they wish, and by this means only can you assure the ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... seize this famous robber? First of all, she kept on asking her husband about it, and he replied that the whole story about Fatia Negra was only a Wallachian fable. It was true that robberies were committed by men who regularly wore black masks, but it was never one and the same man who was guilty of these misdeeds. Nevertheless the name had won a sort of nimbus of notoriety among the common people, many had made use of it as ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... Bobadil[361] who trained up a hundred gentlemen to fight very nearly, if not altogether, as well as myself. And so far I am convinced of this, that I believe were I to publish the Canongate Chronicles without my name (nom de guerre, I mean) the event would be a corollary to the fable of the peasant who made the real pig squeak against the imitator, while the sapient audience hissed the poor grunter as if inferior to the biped in his own language. The peasant could, indeed, confute the long-eared ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... Legislature compels the closing of the shutters. He is never intoxicated—it is simply a habit, a sort of fuel to feed the low cunning in which his soul delights. So far from intoxication is he, that there is a fable of some hard knocks and ill usage, and even of a thick head being beaten against the harder stones of the courtyard behind, when the said thick head was helpless from much ale. Such matters are hushed up in the dark places of the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... true Church. They told us that our delusion, as they called our Church, was dead; that the Presbyterians and Fifth Monarchy men and all their rabble had stifled the last remnant of life that had been left in her; that the Episcopacy, even if we scouted the Nag's Head fable, was perishing away, and that England was like Holland or the Palatinate. But Eustace smiled gravely at them, and asked whether the Church had been dead when the Roman Emperors, or the heretic Arians, persecuted her, and said that he knew that, even if he never should see ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of this reptile have probably given occasion to a fable, which says that cocks can lay eggs, but that these always produce serpents; and that though the cock does not hatch them, the warmth of the sand and atmosphere answers the purposes of incubation. The eggs of the tzepho, of which she lays eighteen or twenty, are equal to those of a pigeon, while ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... perfect and sinless, therefore the sympathy of Christ was deeper than any human sympathy, howsoever tender it may be; for what unfits us to feel compassion is our absorption with ourselves. That makes our hearts hard and insensitive, and is the true, 'witches' mark'—to recur to the old fable—the spot where no external pressure can produce sensation. The ossified heart of the selfish man is closed against divine compassion. Since Jesus Christ forgot Himself in pitying men, and Himself 'took our infirmities and bare ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... railroad, and become the carriers to a great extent for Europe. But this is but a portion of the advantage of this work. Our western mountains are almost literally mountains of gold and silver. In them the Arabian fable of Aladdin is realized.... Let the road be completed, and the comforts as well as the necessaries furnished by Asia, the manufactures of Europe, and the productions of the States can be brought by the iron horse almost to the miner's door; and in the production and possession ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... slapped him encouragingly on the back. "You'll blunder right ahead to glory, same as you always do. You'll make hard work of it and all that, but you'll get there. Don, you're exactly like the porpoise—no, the tortoise in the fable. You don't look fast, old man, but you keep on moving ahead and saying nothing and when the hares arrive you're curled up on the finish line fast asleep. Tortoises can't curl up, though, can they? And, say, what the dickens is a tortoise, anyway? ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... been born of mortal parents. His body was bare, but round his neck was a glistening chain of marvellously wrought gold, fastened to which was this gem lying on his breast. This was doubtless the origin of the Hebrew fable of the finding of Moses, who, as all scholars know, was not a Hebrew, but an Egyptian priest in the ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... but whose name is not now remembered. Those days are fast becoming to our younger race almost mythical, so that every living word from the actors in them is of use in vivifying scenes that else would seem dim fable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... Aesop's fable about the mountain which gave birth to a mouse may be a relic of Totemism; so also may be the mountain symbols on the standards of Egyptian ships which appear on pre-dynastic pottery; the black dwarfs of Teutonic mythology ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... purpose, coupled with an undaunted and fearless perseverance, have given issue time and again to achievements even greater, though still less promising, than the undertaking of the little mouse in the fable, but for those who can yet take heart, in the face of possible failure, I think half ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... a camp; this evening loud with life, to-morrow all struck and vanished, 'a few earth-pits and heaps of straw!' For here, as always, it continues true, that the deepest force is the stillest; that, as in the fable, the mild shining of the sun shall accomplish what the fierce blustering of the tempest has in vain essayed. Above all, it is ever to be kept in mind, that not by material but by mental power, are men and their ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... prunes; cover them, and let them swell in the hot water till they are soft. Then drain them, and extract the stones; spread the prunes on a large dish, and dredge them with flour. Take one jill or eight large fable-spoonfuls from a quart of rich milk, and stir into it, gradually, eight spoonfuls of sifted flour. Mix it to a smooth batter, pressing out all the lumps with the back of the spoon. Beat six eggs very light, and stir them, by degrees, into the remainder ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... own inclination to make exaggerated statements for the purpose of causing a sensation. "I told another little boy," he writes in his autobiography, "that I could produce variously-colored polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain colored fluids, which was, of course, a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me. I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... Cecilia's Day' Pope is generally confessed to have miscarried; yet he has miscarried only as compared with Dryden, for he has far outgone other competitors. Dryden's plan is better chosen; history will always take stronger hold of the passions than fable: the passions excited by Dryden are the pleasures and pains of real life; the scene of Pope is laid in imaginary existence; Pope is read with calm acquiescence, Dryden with turbulent delight; Pope hangs upon the ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... whose fathers they have descended to us. From these, and from no other source, we have obtained all that is known of God and divine works, from the beginning of the world. Even among the Turks and the heathen, all their knowledge of God—excepting what is manifestly fable and fiction—came from the Scriptures. And our knowledge is confirmed and proven by great miracles, even to the present day. These Scriptures declare, concerning this article, that there is no God or divine being save this one alone. They not only manifest him to us from ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... connection with it, the secretary of the Birkenhead Docks fainting away during the proceedings. Mr. Hope-Scott is said to have received a fee of 10,000l.; but a friend, likely to be well informed, thinks this is a fable. ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... impenetrable and freeze curiosity) that Clotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartar trained in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at the Hungarian Baths on the borders of the Styrian highlands. The scene at all events is pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floating threads. A stranger to the Baths, dressed in white and scarlet, sprang from his carriage into a group of musical gypsies round an inn at the arch of the chestnut avenue, after pulling up to listen to them for a while. The music had seized him. He snatched bow and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank down into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might save the situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... even in his own heaven, so he had to sin on earth, but no one was betrayed by him! The nymph who ravished Hylas would have controlled her passion had she thought Hercules was coming to forbid it. Apollo recalled the spirit of a boy in the form of a flower, and all the lovers of Fable enjoyed Love's embraces without a rival, but I took as a comrade a friend more cruel than Lycurgus!" But at that very instant, as I was telling my troubles to the winds, a white-haired old man entered the picture-gallery; his face was care-worn, and he seemed, I know not why, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... Chaldæa, it is now impossible to know. But the Hebrews received the Mysteries from the Egyptians; and of course were familiar with their legend,—known as it was to those Egyptian Initiates, Joseph and Moses. It was the fable (or rather the truth clothed in allegory and figures) of OSIRIS, the Sun, Source of Light and Principle of Good, and TYPHON, the Principle of Darkness and Evil. In all the histories of the Gods and Heroes lay couched and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... of Jenny's unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A caricature of himself, reading (the book was upside-down). In the background a dancing couple, recognisable as Gombauld and Anne. Beneath, the legend: "Fable of the Wallflower and the Sour Grapes." Fascinated and horrified, Denis pored over the drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious Rouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The expression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered by a feeble envy; the attitude ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... Was inly wroth, and could no longer hold: To the relater of that history He turned; and, "Many things we have been told" (Exclaimed that ancient) "wherein truth is none, And of such matters is thy fable one. ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the collection was that of three portraits belonging to the pre-historical age, and, according to mythical tradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher, whose origin and attributes were as much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of an Indian Budh or ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... clad, of watchet steele, full grim, Fring'd round about the sides, with twisted gold, Spotted with shining stars vnto the brim, Which seem'd to burn the spheare which did th[e] hold: His bright sword drawn, of temper good and old, A full moone in a fable night he bore, On painted shield, which much adorned him, With this short ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... illustration of his argument—but never for the mere sake of provoking merriment. In this respect he had the wonderful aptness of Franklin. He often taught a great truth with the felicitous brevity of an Aesop fable. His words did not flow in an impetuous torrent, as did those of Douglas; but they were always well chosen, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... high, in high relief, and supporting a rich cornice. These are male, as Caryatides are female statues placed to perform the office of pillars. By the Greeks they were named Atlantes, from the well-known fable of Atlas supporting the heavens. Here they are made of terra-cotta, or baked clay, incrusted with the finest marble stucco. Their only covering is a girdle round the loins; they have been painted flesh-color, with black hair and beards; the moulding of the pedestal and the baskets on their heads ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... year of my authorship, and completed in the fourth. It was, therefore, composed almost simultaneously with Eugene Aram, and afforded to me at least some relief from the gloom of that village tragedy. It is needless to observe how dissimilar in point of scene, character, and fable, the one is from the other; yet they are alike in this—that both attempt to deal with one of the most striking problems in the spiritual history of man, viz., the frustration or abuse of power in a superior intellect originally inclined to good. Perhaps there ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mistaken, then. We meet again and part again forever to-night, for the last time in this lower world, or that upper one either, in which you believe, and which I know to be a very pretty little fable." ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... the curiosity to seek him out, examine, question, and discourse with him; and, after some reflection, accepted Christian baptism from the venerable man. In Snorro the story is involved in miracle, rumor, and fable; but the fact itself seems certain, and is very interesting; the great, wild, noble soul of fierce Olaf opening to this wonderful gospel of tidings from beyond the world, tidings which infinitely transcended all else he had ever heard or dreamt of! It seems certain he was baptized here; date not ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... since that long-gone day have the dead of this fabled land been carried to the Carrion Caves, that in death and decay they might serve their country and warn away invading enemies. Here, too, is brought, so the fable runs, all the waste stuff of the nation—everything that is subject to rot, and that can add to the foul stench that ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in progressive skill, or often, as the mere consequence of the transition from wood to stone, (a figure carved out of one wooden log must have necessarily its feet near each other, and hands at its sides,) these literal changes are as nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the bestowing of apparent life. The figures of monstrous gods on Indian temples have their legs separate enough; but they are infinitely more dead than the rude figures at Branchidae sitting with their hands on their knees. And, briefly, the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... truth and honour, failing to make Paullus happy, you do fail me! Fail me, and nothing, in the world's history or fable, shall match the greatness ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... truths that God is really the Maker and Author of all things, and that man has a spiritual being, and so forth, surely gain nothing from being conveyed to the world in the folds of a fable. And when it is not in a confessed fable, but a fable put forth as fact—"God said," "God created," "it was so"—not only is there no gain, but our sense of fitness and of truth receive a shock. A parable is always discernible as a parable, a vision as a vision. ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... for them. I am not in this like many other Publishers, who make the Works of other People their own, without acknowledging the Piracy they are guilty of, or so much as paying the least Complement to the Authors of their Wisdom: No, Gentlemen and Ladies, I am not the Daw in the Fable, that would vaunt and strut in your Plumes. And besides, I know very well you might have me upon the Hank according to Law, and treat me as a Highwayman or Robber; for you might safely swear upon your Honours, ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]
... All that they fable lovers feel of anguish and despite, I in myself comprise, and so my strength is crushed outright; And if thou seekst a watering-place, see, from my streaming eyes, Rivers of tears for those who thirst run ever day and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... cage in which Bajazet was imprisoned by Tamerlane, so long and so often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected as a fable by the modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity. [46] They appeal with confidence to the Persian history of Sherefeddin Ali, which has been given to our curiosity in a French version, and from which I shall ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... 'Le siege d'Ostende fut, pendant ces trois ans, la fable et la nouvelle de l'Europe; on ne se lassait pas d'en parler. Des princes, des etrangers de toutes les nations venaient y assister.'—L'Abbe Nameche, ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... is first in the adjustment of the harmony of the individual stanza as a verse paragraph, and secondly in the management of their fable. Spenser has everywhere a certain romance-interest both of story and character which carries off in its steady current, where carrying off is needed, both his allegorising and his long descriptions. The Fletchers, unable to impart this interest, or ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... "vegetable wool" into Europe. The fable of the "vegetable lamb of Tartary" persisted almost down to modern times. The Moors cultivated cotton in Spain on an extensive scale, but after their expulsion the industry languished. The East India Company imported cotton fabrics ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... a-sayin', I reckon I've had 'bout enuf of 'em, an' I'd like to be home where I can be down onto the flat groun' an' not like to what's his name's coffin, what I heerd the boys speakin' about, what got hitched half way up to heaven an' stuck there. He's a fable feller, ov course; Mahomet, that's his name; there ain't never been no such doin's sence miracle days 'cept in the theayters an' them places. An' t'other night Miss Dodge, she asked me would I go ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... But the Bishop of Lucon, within whose diocese the sacred mountain stands, appears to have been unwilling to relinquish the advantage which he expected to result from a wide-spread belief in this infamous fable. Accordingly, in July, 1852, it was again reported that no less than three miracles were wrought there by the Holy Virgin. ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... naked legend of the negro's origin, one of those nursery tales in which the ignorant of Christendom still believe But the deduction from the fable and the testimony to the negro's lack of intelligence, though unpleasant to our ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... necessarily concerned only with those who are equal in birth and in power; and that for men of pre-eminent virtue there is no law—they are themselves a law. Anyone would be ridiculous who attempted to make laws for them: they would probably retort what, in the fable of Antisthenes, the lions said to the hares—'where are your claws?'—when in the council of the beasts the latter began haranguing and claiming equality for all. And for this reason democratic States have instituted ostracism; equality is above all things their aim, and therefore ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... maturity and education at which it is able to produce a true philosophy on the one hand, and accept it on the other. Simplex sigillum veri: the naked truth must be so simple and comprehensible that one can impart it to all in its true form without any admixture of myth and fable (a pack of lies)—in other words, without masking ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... heart of others, and when she considered the mystery of the hawk feathers she was troubled with a great horror. He called her to him when the assembly was over and told her of her beauty, and praised her simply and frankly as though she were a fable of the bards; and he asked her humbly to give him her love, for he was only subtle in his dreams. Overwhelmed with his greatness, she half consented, and yet half refused, for she longed to marry some warrior who could carry her over ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... the moral fable, To youth ingenuous, profitable. Nobility, like beauty's youth, May seldom hear the voice of truth; Or mark and learn the fact betimes That flattery is the nurse of crimes. Friendship, which seldom nears ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... reade Ionas frutefully & not as a poetis fable/ but as an obligacon betwene God and thy soule/ as an ernist peny geuen [the] of God/ [that] he wil helpe [the] in time of nede/ if thou turne to him and as the word of god [the] only fode and life of thy soule/ ...
— The prophete Ionas with an introduccion • William Tyndale
... time been writing some little Dramas on classical subjects, one of which was the Rape of Proserpine, a very graceful composition which she has never published. Shelley contributed to this the exquisite fable of Arethusa and the Invocation to Ceres.—Among the Nymphs gathering flowers on Enna were two whom she called Ino and Uno, names which I remember in the Dialogue were irresistibly ludicrous. She also ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... founded on the Icelandic Sagas. "What is a saga?" "Is it a fable or a true story?" The answer is not altogether simple. For such sagas as those of Burnt Njal and Grettir the Strong partake both of truth and fiction: historians dispute as to the proportions. This was the manner of the saga's growth: ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... and mulatto faces. Herodotus, in an incontrovertible passage, alludes to the Egyptians as "black and curly-haired"[4]—a peculiarly significant statement from one used to the brunette Mediterranean type; in another passage, concerning the fable of the Dodonian Oracle, he again alludes to the swarthy color of the Egyptians as exceedingly dark and even black. AEschylus, mentioning a boat seen from the shore, declares that its crew are Egyptians, because of ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... are likely to be different by October 1. I would have the dupes of pacifism read carefully the following extract from his speech; if they remain deaf to its meaning, it can only be because, like the man in the fable, they do not wish ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... disappointments, and coldness, and disaffection. "The servant is not greater than his lord." All true; he had preached that doctrine to himself for twenty years, and earnestly strove to live by it. I do not say that he sunk under the humiliation; only, don't you remember the fable of the last straw that broke the camel's back? What I do say is, that he had borne hundreds and thousands of "straws." Also, remember it was the Lord who called him from work. Assuredly he did not call himself. I think ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... calm set in round the negro minstrel. Orpheus was no fable: the animals obeyed this new enchantment; and when Dick, on recovering from his terror, was unable to understand what was going on around him, he saw himself surrounded by an audience a hundred fold more attentive to the charms of music than any which had hitherto ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... itself does not go on growing. It is not that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by God and then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control it, and then it gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and from ...
— Progress and History • Various
... human mind, that, having built his castle with so little view to durability, Walpole entailed the perishable possession with a degree of strictness, which would have been more fitting for a baronial estate. And that, too, after having written a fable entitled "The Entail," in consequence, of some one having asked him whether he did not intend to entail Strawberry Hill, and in ridicule ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... how can I! I hate talking about it, it sounds so pharisaical, but my father wanted me to be a Christian, and you know what Christianity meant to him. As I have said again and again, it comes to this—either war is wrong and hellish, or Christianity is a fable. Both cannot be right. And if I went as a soldier I should have to renounce my Christianity—at least that is how it seems, to me. If I went to a recruiting station I should have to go there over Calvary; ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... tte—tte with him; his recitations from Shakespeare, and his ingenious etymologies and dissertations on the roots of the English language were a high treat." And another declares that nothing "came amiss to his memory; he would set a child right in his twopenny fable-book, repeat the whole of the moral tale of the Dean of Badajos, or a page of Athenus on cups, or Eustathius on Homer." One anecdote tells of his repeating the "Rape of the Lock," making observations as he went on, and noting the various readings. And an intimate ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... Centuriators, Heylin, and others, mention a forged letter, under the name of Udalrirus, said to be written to pope Nicholas, concerning the heads of children found by St. Gregory in a pond. But a smore ridiculous fable was never invented, as is demonstrated from many inconsistencies of that forged letter: and St. Gregory in his epistles everywhere mentions the law of the celibacy of the clergy as ancient and inviolable. Nor was any pope Nicholas contemporary with St. Udalricus. See Baronius and Dom de {Sainte} ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... refined perceptions, assisted by careful cultivation. Narrow indeed is the boundary which divides unfeminine flippancy from the graceful nonsense which good authority and our own feelings pronounce to be "exquisite."[85] The unsuccessful attempt at its imitation always reminds me of Pilpay's fable of the Donkey and the Lapdog:—The poor donkey, who had been going on very usefully in its own drudging way, began to envy the lap-dog the caresses it received, and fancied that it would receive the same if it jumped upon its master as the lap-dog did: how awkwardly and unnaturally its ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... none of his business. But he was half an Englishman by birth and altogether one by bringing up, and he therefore could not admit that she should be apparently enjoying herself, while he was gloomily brooding over the misfortunes that put her beyond his reach. The fable of the Dog in the Manger must have been composed to describe us Anglo-Saxons. It is sufficient that we be hindered from getting what we want, even by our own sense of honour; we are forthwith ready to sacrifice life and limb to prevent any other man from getting it. The magnanimity ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... head, "you've got the Golden Bride! Keep her if you can. That's a pretty fable of your father's. I gave him the idea, though. Austin filches a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... good people of Boston and Plymouth! And thus it was that Morton's fabricated tale of the Weymouth hanging passed into genuine history along with the "blue laws" of Connecticut. One cannot help believing that the mischievous perpetrator of the fable laughed up his sleeve at its result, and one cannot resist the thought that he was probably delighted to have the scandal attached to those righteous neighbors of his who had run him ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... students of history which was, in its way, unique. He showed them a great historian at work. In his comparison of authorities, in his references to and fro, in his appeal to every source of illustration, from fable to architecture, from poetry to charters, he made us familiar not only with his results, but with his methods of working. It was a priceless experience. Year after year he continued these lectures, informal, chatty, but always ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... over the boy. He began to weary of fable and cry out for fact. He had just entered his fourteenth year. He was growing fast; and, but for that dwarfing deformity, would have been unusually tall, graceful and well-proportioned. But along with this increase of stature had come a listlessness and languor which troubled Lady Calmady. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... vermiculate cares and pains was this human heart of ours! Oh, surely it needed some refuge! If no saviour had yet come, the tortured world of human hearts cried aloud for one with unutterable groaning! What would Bascombe do if he had committed a murder? Or what could he do for one who had? If fable it were, it was at least a need—invented one—that of a Saviour to whom anyone might go, at any moment, without a journey, without letters or commendations or credentials! And yet no: if it had been invented, it could hardly be by any one in the need, for such even now could hardly be ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... of that city. He traveled widely in the Greek world and in the East, as a preparation for his great task of writing an account of the rise of the Oriental nations and the struggle between Greece and Persia. Herodotus was not a critical historian, diligently sifting truth from fable. Where he can he gives us facts. Where facts are lacking, he tells interesting stories in a most winning style. A much more scientific writer was Thucydides, an Athenian who lived during the epoch of the Peloponnesian ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... A legendary king of Ethiopia, who was slain at Troy by Achilles—a fable, says Rawlinson, which is "one of those in which it is difficult to determine any germs of truth." His name was given by the Greeks to one of the Colossi at Thebes in Egypt, from which, when touched ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... all which antiquity believed, whether of reality or fable, on the subject of that magnificent warrior, who was the proudest boast of Europe and their chivalry, and with whose dreadful name the Saracens, according to a historian of their own country, were wont to rebuke their startled ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... that a large portion of his countrymen still think it unjustifiable. The civil war, indeed, has been more discussed, and is less understood, than any event in English history. The friends of liberty labored under the disadvantage of which the lion in the fable complained so bitterly. Though they were the conquerors, their enemies were the painters. As a body, the Roundheads had done their utmost to decry and ruin literature; and literature was even with them, as, in the long run, it ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... meaning founded in the deepest laws of life, and that all were curiously connected and mutually reflected in one vast system. It would be worth while to know, not only that dove and goblet, flower and ring were each the 'motive' of a graceful fable, but also that this fable was something more than merely fanciful or graceful—that it had a deep meaning, and that each and all were essential parts of one vast whole. And it would be pleasant, I presume, to see these myths and meanings somewhat illustrated ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... it! The Poet knows the truth,—but what are Poets? Only the Prophets and Seers! Only the Eyes of Time, which clearly behold Heaven's Fact beyond this world's Fable. Let them sing if they choose, and we will hear them in our idle hours,—we will give them a little of our gold,—a little of our grudging praise, together with much of our private practical contempt and misprisal! ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of to-day has neither recognized nor worked up to it; and the Theology of to-day covers it with fable, mystery, and miracle ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... disclosed in the following certificate, cannot fail to remind one of the fable of the "Country maid, and ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector
... march. She, too, had begun to doubt. Here, in the desert, the buried treasure was an intangible thing. In England, the promises of the Greek's dying message were satisfying by their very vagueness. In Africa, face to face with the tremendous solitude, they became unbelievable, a dim fable akin to the legends of vanished islands and those mysterious races to be found only in unknown lands, which have tickled the imaginations of mankind, ever since the dawn of human intelligence. So, a live millionaire being a more definite asset than the hoard of a forgotten city, she had coolly ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... whole of the Old Testament the vine is represented as one of the most precious blessings bestowed by the Creator upon man. In the incomparable fable of Jotham, when he lifted up his voice on the summit of Mount Gerizim, and cried to the men of Shechem, 'Hearken unto me, ye men of Shechem, that God may hearken unto you,' he told them that when the trees of the forest went forth to anoint them ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... which was lost in the Middle Ages) all have the same general character, with the single exception of the Amphitruo. This is more of a burlesque than a comedy, and is full of humour. It is founded on the well- worn fable of Jupiter and Alcmena, and has been imitated by Moliere and Dryden. Its source is uncertain; but it is probably from Archippus, a writer of the old comedy (415 B.C.). Its form suggests rather a development of the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... said the musician; "yet let me say for myself, that I will not yield to the king of minstrels, Geoffrey Rudel, though the King of England hath given him four manors for one song. I would be willing to contend with him in romance, lay, or fable, were the judge to ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... has been remarked that the Goddess is made to command nature—the breeze, the sleep of the Suitors. It is the method of fable thus to portray intelligence, whose function is to take control of nature and make her subserve its purpose. The breeze blows and drives the ship; it is the divine instrument for bringing Telemachus to Pylos, a part of the world-order, especially upon the present ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... is an ancient fable—a critic picked out all the faults of a great poet and presented them to Apollo. The god received the gift graciously and set a bag of wheat before the critic with the command that he separate the chaff from the kernels. The critic ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... he lifted in sport, And, believe me, I tell you no fable, A gallon he drank from the quart And planted it down on the table. 'A miracle!' every one cried, And they all took a pull at the stingo. They were capital hands at the trade, And they drank till they fell; yet, by jingo! The pot still frothed over ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... impossible that something similar to what they related to me really happened when the early Portuguese discoverers first came to Aru, and has formed the foundation for a continually increasing accumulation of legend and fable. I have no doubt that to the next generation, or even before, I myself shall be transformed into a magician or a demigod, a worker of miracles, and a being of supernatural knowledge. They already believe that all the animals I preserve ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... contemptuous perfection of feature and dress, of the French aristocracy of the old regime. The very chair on the back of which his hand rested seemed a part of the type—one of those beautiful white chairs of the period, on which, on snowy, glittering tapestry, was woven a Fable of Lafontaine in ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... to Samos, and bought by Iadmon, one of the geomori, or landed aristocracy of the island. The little girl grew day by day more beautiful, graceful and clever, and was soon an object of love and admiration to all who knew her. AEsop, the fable-writer, who was at that time also in bondage to Iadmon, took an especial pleasure in the growing amiability and talent of the child, taught her and cared for her in the same way as the tutors whom we keep to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... as defiance in her voice—scorn because he stood before her so silently; scorn because the fierce torrent of her anger had flowed unchecked. She had only to stand up to him, it seemed, and like the giant of the fable he dwindled to a pigmy. She was no longer hurt by his passivity. ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain. Copper-colored men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion and patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that "Don Quixote" was an African fable on the lines of "Uncle Remus." I have never heard that the heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro ancestry. In the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognize the resurrection of a Christian and cultured nation after its age of bondage. But Russia ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... through the nerves of an entomologist when he puts his hand on a specimen unknown, undescribed. The hunter trembles when he espies in the thicket the royal hart whose existence has been called a fable. My emotion was all of this, intensified; nearer, perhaps, to the feeling of the elected mortal who has discovered a new continent. For I had ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... Secretary and Mr. Provost, with whom I did not drink, nor yet was bidden, and on the morrow departed from thence, thinking more than I did say, and being glad that I was out of the court, where many men, as I did both hear and perceive, did wonder at me. And here shall be an end for this time of this fable. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... behindhand with the earth, yielded up her mighty whales, that Mr. Gathergold might sell their oil, and make a profit on it. Be the original commodity what it might, it was gold within his grasp. It might be said of him, as of Midas in the fable, that whatever he touched with his finger immediately glistened, and grew yellow, and was changed at once into sterling metal, or, which suited him still better, into piles of coin. And, when Mr. Gathergold had become so very rich that it would ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... are intermixed with fable; as, that the Hellusii and Oxionae [276] have human faces, with the bodies and limbs of wild beasts. These unauthenticated reports I ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... out the meaning of this fable, we regard the account of Varro, we shall find, that by Juno was signified the earth; by Jupiter, the heavens; but if we believe the Stoics, by Juno is meant the air and its properties, and by Jupiter the ether: hence Homer supposes she was nourished by Oce{)a}nus and Tethys: that is, by the ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... from an amber moon Illumines footing on forbidden wall; Where, 'stead of pursy jeweler's display, Parading peacocks brave the passer-by, And swans like angels in an azure sky Wing swift and silent on unchallenged way. No land of fable! Of the Hills I sing, Whose royal women tread with conscious grace The peace-filled gardens of a warrior race, Each maiden fit for wedlock with a king, And every Rajput son so royal born And conscious of his age-long ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... instinct? A mother is as cunning to get at her children as a girl can be in the conduct of a love intrigue. If your Marquise really wanted to give her children food and clothes, the Devil himself would not have hindered her, heh? That is rather too big a fable for an old ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... proceed to a regular examination of the tragedy before us, in which I shall treat separately of the Fable, the Moral, the Characters, the Sentiments, and the Diction. And first ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... cordially that the whole story is a lie; and he may rely upon my support at all times to the extent of denying that any vestige of truth probably lay at the foundations of his ingenious apologue. And what I say of the English fable, I am willing to say of the French one. Both, I dare say, were the rankest fictions. But next, what, after all, if they were not? For, in the rear of all discussion upon anecdotes, considered simply as true or not true, comes finally a valuation of those anecdotes in their moral ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... and quick to the last degree; sometimes it is remarkable for rotundity and mellowness. I can easily conceive that two people who had seen him on different days might dispute about him as the travellers in the fable ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... elaborate compositions were proposed. He felt capable of achieving so much, his mind teemed with so many panoramic and single conceptions,—historical, allegorical, ideal, and illustrative of standard literature or classical fable,—that only time and expense presented obstacles to unlimited invention. Perhaps no one can conceive this peculiar creativeness of his fancy and aptitude of hand, who has not had occasion to talk with Crawford of some projected monument or statue. No sooner was he possessed of the idea to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... every nation on earth has some particular traditions regarding the dog. The Esquimaux, a nation inhabiting the polar regions, have a singular fable amongst them respecting the origin of the Dog-Rib Indians, a tribe which inhabits the northern confines of the American continent. It is thus detailed in Captain Franklin's "Second Journey ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... Sisenna, the friend of Atticus, and they had a great success at Rome. Plutarch, in his life of Crassus, tells us that after the defeat of Carhes (Carrhae?) some Milesiacs were found in the baggage of the Roman prisoners. The Greek text; and the Latin translation have long been lost. The only surviving fable is the tale of Cupid and Psyche,[FN1] which Apuleius calls 'Milesius sermo,' and it makes us deeply regret the disappearance of the others." Besides this there are the remains of Apollodorus and Conon, and a few traces to be found in Pausanias, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... being driven by the wind was anchored in a marshy place, when St. Mark, snatched into ecstasy, heard the voice of an angel saying to him: 'Peace be to thee, Mark; here shall thy body rest.'" The angel goes on to foretell the building of "una stupenda, ne pi veduta Citt;" but the fable is hardly ingenious enough ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... great many men, dear CONTINENTAL, who quite unwittingly are ever crying aloud, 'Look at me, chickens.' After all, 'tis only the old fable of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... or some other reasons Egypt has been occupied by man from the most remote antiquity. The oldest records of the human race, made three thousand years ago, speak of Egypt as ancient then, when they were written. Not only is Tradition silent, but even Fable herself does not attempt to tell the story of the origin of her population. Here stand the oldest and most enduring monuments that human power has ever been able to raise. It is, however, somewhat humiliating to the pride of the race to ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... at his resemblance with the demi-god, to whom fable itself ascribes no more generous devotion!" cried the young lady, with ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... extremity, and about 2 feet in thickness. A more brilliant scene perhaps never presented itself to the human eye, nor was it easy for us to divest ourselves of the idea that we actually beheld one of the fairy scenes depicted in Eastern fable. The light of the torches rendered it ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... come so far to preach to me the fear of the gods. We Cyclops care not for your Jove, whom you fable to be nursed by a goat, nor any of your blessed ones. We are stronger than they, and dare bid open battle to Jove himself, though you and all your fellows of the earth join with him." And he bade them tell him where their ship ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... it, and found that his hard cash had changed to withered leaves. Precisely such a transformation had overtaken that eight thousand pounds, at the moment when it had fallen from the hands of a man who might have made an honest use of it. The fable was, and was not, true, so far as he remembered, and his fancy dwelt curiously about the history. There was no possibility of turning back the withered leaves to gold, and making them jingle and glitter again as only one's own ready money can jingle and glitter. ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... are assigned to a Being, I have called the result 'Religion;' where the same Being acts like Zeus in Greek fable, plays silly or obscene tricks, is lustful and false, I have spoken of 'Myth.'[3] These distinctions of Myth and Religion may be, and indeed are, called arbitrary. The whole complex set of statements about the Being, good or bad, sublime ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... my harts, for the honour of England and our brave General the Earle of Pembrooke! [Exeunt soldiers.] So I have discharg'd my selfe of these. Hot shot![121] now to my love. Some may say the tale of Venus loving Mars is a fable, but he that is a true soldier and a Gent. as Dick Bowyer is, & he do not love some varlet or other, zounds he is worse then a gaping Oyster without liquor. There's a pretty sweet fac't mother[122] that waits on the ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... Wash far away,—where'er thy bones are hurl'd; Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides Where thou perhaps, under the whelming tide Visitest the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great Vision of the guarded mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold, —Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth: —And, O ye dolphins, waft ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of Evangeline and her lover," he there says, "is as poetical as the fable of the Odyssey, besides that it comes to the heart as a fact that has actually taken place in human life." He speaks of "its pathos all illuminated with beauty,——so that the impression of the poem is nowhere dismal nor despondent, and glows ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... be found who had seen the corn removed;—not one. In fact people who had not seen, as the bailiff had, the corn covering the broad field one day, and the same field bare the next, began to think that the fact was not so; and that the miraculous night's work was a fable. It was certain that the bailiff had been deterred from entering on the ground, but it was also certain that nothing but words had been used to deter him; he had not been struck or even pushed; he had only been frightened; ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... Burton slowly. "I may be a bit tired of Singapore. It's a queer thing, though, that you fellows have drifted back here again. The call of the East is no fable. It's a call that ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... had been received there upon this matter, which was regarded at the prefecture as a fable. The invention of this fable ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... saying, "Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and Rowena, Arthur and Mordred, are mythical persons, whose very existence may be questioned, and whose adventures must be classed with those of Hercules and Romulus." It is difficult to write of a period of which the same writer has said, "an age of fable completely separates two ages of truth." Yet no one knew better than this accomplished historian himself that an age of fable and an age of truth cannot be distinguished with absolute precision. It is not that what is presented ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... fully, meets satisfactorily—the need. Now none will deny that this need is deep,—real. Hence it can be no mere sentiment, no airy speculation, no poetical imagination, no cunningly devised fable that can meet that need. The remedy must be as real as the disease, or it avails nothing. No phantom key may loosen so hard-closed a lock as this: it must be real, and be made for it. For suppose ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... members of the Nichiren sect, Namu-my[o]-ho-ren-ge-ky[o]—"O, the Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law."[20] His history, full of amazing activity and of romantic adventure, is surrounded by a perfect sunrise splendor, or, shall we say, sunset gorgeousness, of mythology and fable. The scenes of his life are mostly laid in the region of the modern T[o]ki[o], and to the cultivated traveller, its story lends fascinating charms to the landscape in the region of Yedo Bay. Nichiren was a fiery patriot, and ultra-democratic ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... husband goes to bed, taking the baby with him, and thus receives the neighbours' compliments." "It has been found also in Navarre, and on the French side of the Pyrenees. Legrand d'Aussy mentions that in an old French fable the king of Torelose is 'au lit et en couche' when Aucassin arrives and takes a stick to him and makes him promise to abolish the custom in his realm. The same author goes on to state that the practice is said still to exist in some cantons of Bearn, where it is called 'faire la couvade.' ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... said on this Subject is, and that the Story you have given us is not quite two thousand Years Old, I cannot but think it a Piece of Presumption to dispute with you: But your Quotations put me in Mind of the Fable of the Lion and the Man. The Man walking with that noble Animal, showed him, in the Ostentation of Human Superiority, a Sign of a Man killing a Lion. Upon which the Lion said very justly, We Lions are none of us Painters, else we could show a hundred ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Piedmont was not quite seven years old, when his preceptor, Cardinal (then Father) Glendel, explained to him the fable of Pandora's Box. He told him that all evils which afflict the human race were shut up in that fatal box; which Pandora, tempted by Curiosity, opened, when they immediately flew out, and spread themselves over the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... the harmless folly of the time! We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty. Our life is short, and our days run As fast away as does the sun. And, as a vapour or a drop of rain, Once lost, can ne'er be found again, So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade, All love, all liking, all delight Lies drown'd with us in endless night. Then, while time serves, and we are but decaying, Come, my Corinna, come, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... out of this simple plot I might weave something attractive; because the reign of James I., in which George Heriot flourished, gave unbounded scope to invention in the fable, while at the same time it afforded greater variety and discrimination of character than could, with historical consistency, have been introduced, if the scene had been laid a century earlier. Lady Mary Wortley Montague has said, with equal truth and taste, that the most romantic region of every ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... mouth, and when he saw his shadder in the water, made a spring at it and dropped the meat which he held in his mouth, and it was at once carried away by the current." "Well," said the teacher, "as you remember the story so well, you can perhaps tell me what lesson we can learn from this fable." "I thought," replied the boy, "when I read the story, that the best way is to hold on to what we are sure of, and not grab after a shadder and lose the whole." "Your idea is certainly a correct one," ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... breath so long that I could not help thinking of the frog in the fable, that wanted to swell itself as big as the ox. Then I looked into his face earnestly. Slap went the lid of his right eye; down went my head, and up went my heels. We shot through the passage like an arrow, and rose to the surface of the ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... the celebrity of the Cigale, of whose misfortunes he has babbled during his first lessons in recitation. It is he who will preserve for future generations the absurd nonsense of which the body of the fable is constructed; the Cigale will always be hungry when the cold comes, although there were never Cigales in winter; she will always beg alms in the shape of a few grains of wheat, a diet absolutely incompatible with her delicate capillary "tongue"; and in desperation ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... Lessing, aged twenty-nine, returned to his old work in Berlin. Again he translated, edited, criticised. He wrote a tragedy, "Philotas," and began a "Faust." He especially employed his critical power in "Letters upon the Latest Literature," known as his Literatur briefe. Dissertations upon fable, led also to Lessing's "Fables," produced in ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... my guard against them." Thereat they laughed the more, and answered him, "Oh, foolish traveler, your head is certainly full of dreams! There are no such things as sirens; all that is an old Greek fable, a fairy tale with no meaning except for old Greeks and modern babies! You will never meet with any sirens or harpies, nor will you ever see again the Princess of whom you talk, unless, indeed, in your dreams. It is this country that is the only real one, there is nothing at all beyond the sunset." ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... from a beginning to a well-defined conclusion, and is full of striking episodes that suggest the culmination. It seems to me to be to a certain extent allegorical, albeit such an interpretation may be unreasonable. At least it is a fable thoroughly characteristic of the negro; and it needs no scientific investigation to show why he selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... vague that its originals are not recognized. Bradley, in short, repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its image in the water. With a world of particulars, given in loveliest union, in conjunction definitely various, and variously definite, the 'how' of which you 'understand' as soon as you see the fact of them,[1] for there is no how except the constitution ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
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