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More "Imaginary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... directly under the bud, leaving an inch and a half of wood above. Or this last form is modified by making a long sloping cut from the bud to the upper end, thereby exposing the maximum amount of cambium. Advantages are claimed for each form, but these are mostly imaginary, and the cutting may be made to suit the fancy of the propagator if a few essentials ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... seen that her whole body was constrained by the working of her mind. At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... how to play such tricks upon his less experienced companions, deceives them by his intonations, while he is well aware that no enemy is approaching the house; but he does it scientifically, by the inflections of his voice, as a man speaking to other men would do in announcing the arrival of an imaginary enemy. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... appearance a confused result of belladonna, bleached hair, antimony and mineral acids, until one is compelled to discuss her character, and wonder whether the line between a decent and indecent life is, like the equator, an imaginary line. ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... am, and always shall be, proud of having been connected with Punch. I wrote both prose and verse—more of the former than the latter—and my contributions ranged in extent from a column down to a single line. My subjects were generally 'topical,' sometimes 'imaginary,' and the verse included a good many parodies." Mr. Sketchley, it should be observed, is one of the few members of the inside Staff—at least, within the last forty years—who have ever resigned their appointments, Richard Doyle, Mr. Henry Silver, and Mr. Harry ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... at work on a drawing. Edgar's teaching had improved her so much that, under a sore longing to obtain some good studies, she had ventured to place in the shop one of her best imaginary groups, and to her surprise and delight, it had brought her in fifteen shillings, and an ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... immediacy or between the present immediacy and anticipation. The present is a wavering breadth of boundary between the two extremes. Thus our own sense-awareness with its extended present has some of the character of the sense-awareness of the imaginary being whose mind was free from passage and who contemplated all nature as an immediate fact. Our own present has its antecedents and its consequents, and for the imaginary being all nature has its antecedent and its consequent ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... himself was, as it were, obliged to bow; the glee-singers murmured among themselves (their eyes rolling over their glasses towards one another as they sucked brandy-and water), and that mischievous little wag, little Nadab the Improvisatore (who had just come in), began to mimic him, feeling his imaginary whiskers, after the manner of the stranger, and flapping about his pocket-handkerchief in the most ludicrous manner. Hoskins checked this ribaldry by sternly looking towards Nadab, and at the same time called upon the gents to give their orders, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... on deck, when he struck the keynote to an orchestra, that made the air vibrate as with the combined discharge of rifles. The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as—much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead—Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings! not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... the square-root becomes imaginary. From this we conclude that in the theory of relativity the velocity c plays the part of a limiting velocity, which can neither be reached nor exceeded by any ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... This classification dates from the time of Posidonius. It is the successio and inclinatio of Seneca; but the ancients had already judiciously remarked, that the nature of these shocks is too variable to permit any subjection to these imaginary laws.) ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... Bligh describes the mutiny as "a close-planned act of villainy," and attributes the conspiracy not to his own harshness, or to disloyalty provoked by "real or imaginary grievances," but to the contrast of life on board ship, "in ever climbing up the climbing wave," with the unearned luxuries of Tahiti, "the allurements of dissipation ... the female connections," which the sailors had left behind. Besides his own apology, there are the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... hardly an exaggeration to say that honest work is never thrown away. If we do not find the imaginary treasure, at any ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... a grievous state of things, that in the nineteenth century there are but few shoemakers who know how to make a shoe! The shoe is made not to fit a real foot, but a fashionable imaginary one! The poor unfortunate toes are in consequence screwed up as in ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... a sheet of foolscap, and began to type-write with alarming speed—click, click, click; while Elsie, rising to the occasion, set to work to transcribe imaginary shorthand as if her ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... system there. Never had Carol bent his head before King or Communes, the Church or Finance. Intrusted in the days of yore with the keeping of a French March, the title of marquis in their family meant no shadow of imaginary office; it had been a post of honor with duties to discharge. Their fief had always been their domain. Provincial nobles were they in every sense of the word; they might boast of an unbroken line of great descent; they had ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... definition of the function located behind Self-esteem. Equally imaginary is the doctrine of the Edinburgh phrenologists, who call it Concentrativeness. The observations of Gall led him to regard it as a portion of the organ of Pride, and as giving to animals a love of lofty locations. Gall was nearer right than Spurzheim or ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... Lizzie carrying on an imaginary conversation with Elviry Marshall, after she'd cried over me for half an hour. And, Daddy, nobody was surprised but me! ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... numberless heroes of the French romances. She had been in love with Prince Rodolph and Prince Djalma while she was yet at school, and had settled the divorce question, and the rights of woman, with Indiana, before she had left off pinafores. The impetuous little lady played at love with these imaginary worthies as a little while before she had played at maternity with her doll. Pretty little poetical spirits! It is curious to watch them with those playthings. To-day the blue-eyed one is the favourite, and the black-eyed one is pushed behind the drawers. To-morrow blue-eyes may take ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... there would have puzzled herself to explain. It was not to worship, not to repent of her heinous sin: she neither repented nor desired to repent. But it seemed pleasant to play at repentance and put on imaginary sackcloth. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to the Christmas parties, where all the young fellows will propose to me, but I will toss my head and refuse them every one." At this moment she tossed her head in unison with her thoughts, when down fell the milk pail to the ground, and all her imaginary ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... "protected" the Turk from the imaginary danger of Fowler, for about a week, at twenty-five dollars a day. Then one evening he happened to go out and met Fowler, "and," said he, "the moment I saw him I knowed he felt mean, for he begun to shoot at my feet," which certainly did seem to offer presumptive ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... it was, that my prose began to run upon stilts, or that I mistook a momentary enthusiasm for a poetical inspiration. In fact, every thought and conception is so far raised above the common train of ideas, that the error is excusable, especially too when the imaginary poet ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... calibre, rounded gracefully into the channel, from a wood-yard. This boat—the Flatfoot, No. 3—seemed, by her straining and puffing, to throw the gauntlet to the Chalmetta; a challenge, real or imaginary, which the latter made haste to accept,—or, rather, her sleepy firemen did, for, without leave or license, they crammed her furnaces to their utmost capacity. The effects of this movement were soon perceptible in every part of the boat, for she creaked and groaned like a ship in a gale. But ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... ice-polished rocks that the glaciers once dropped along Maine valleys, when his quiet voice summoned me back to India and the convalescent camp beyond whose outer gate I stood. Two flags on lances formed the gate and the boundary line was mostly imaginary; but one did not trespass, because at about the point where vision no longer pierced the mist there stood a sentry, and the grounding of a butt on gravel and now and then a cough announced ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... at other times a bandit engaged in feats of plunder. All possible scenes in history or imagination that she understood did the child try to enact in the wilderness. But she went there now with no intention of posing in any imaginary part. She went there ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... Draw the floor plan of an imaginary house or apartment to be built in your locality for a family of four, and list the furnishings ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... artist must twist into realistic semblance, clear to the eye, the imaginary product of the author. He must not add to it nor take away from it—even for the sake of beauty in his picture—one iota of the facts given him. His imagination, grasping all the ideas of the author, must assemble them and find a place for each one, good, ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... his dining at the White House, of which so many imaginary versions have been given, was this: having received so many expressions of approval from all sections of the country on his appointment of ex-Governor Jones to a Federal judgeship in Alabama, which appointment was made, as described in a previous chapter, on the recommendation of Booker ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... Notwithstanding the praise which had been lavished upon him during his travels, he remained unspoilt, and, apart from his music, as child-like as ever. When not engaged in actual composition, his mind, in the course of his long journeys, had been occupied with the creation of an imaginary kingdom, peopled entirely by children, to which he had given the title of 'Ruecken.' Of this kingdom he supposed himself to be king, and he was never tired of planning and arranging its buildings, drawing maps of the towns, framing ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... native Chaldeans ought to fill, will now learn a lesson of modesty to which they have hitherto been strangers. Far better for our beloved Chaldea if the superstitious brood had been left in their own country. May the gods grant that every Hebrew office-holder may so cling to his imaginary god as to walk straight from office into sure destruction. My motto is 'Chaldeans for Chaldea!' Personally, I have no hostility toward these young men. Nay! But, O my country! my country! it is for thee my heart bleeds! Sons! ye shall do well to be on your ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... satraps ordered rock-reliefs of battles instead of burghers ordering brazen images of boxers and runners, Praxiteles and Lysippus might have remained in mente Dei, if, indeed, even there. Similarly, once given your Pisan sculptors, Giotto, nay, your imaginary Cimabue, you inevitably get your Donatello, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and eventually your Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Titian; for the problems of form and of sentiment, the questions of perspective, anatomy, dramatic expression, lyric suggestion, architectural decoration, were established, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... stories. And it is almost impossible to select half a dozen stanzas of classic verse from Tennyson or Rossetti or Browning or Shelley or Byron, which do not contain anything about kissing, embracing, or longing for some imaginary or real beloved. Wordsworth, indeed, is something of an exception; and Coleridge is most famous for a poem which contains nothing at all about love. But exceptions do not affect the general rule that love is the theme of English ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... egg from a nest," he told the boys. Curving one hand into an imitation nest holding an imaginary egg, he hovered over it with the other hand, rubbing it gently, explaining to the boys, who watched him with absorbing interest, how the egg would change to a beautiful fluff of feathers and music, and after ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... Wallace (1876), Darwin warmly approves the former's "protest against sinking imaginary continents in a quite reckless manner, as was stated by Forbes, followed, alas, by Hooker, and caricatured by Wollaston and (Andrew) Murray." ("Life and Letters", III. page 230.) The transport question thus became of enormously enhanced importance. We need not be surprised then ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... is!" remarked Tom, still amused. "Here is a man forever after rocks, rocks, and there goes a miner set upon becoming rich and discovering some imaginary mine." ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... than I do in passing from Dover to Calais of the one-inch plank that is between me and Eternity. I have assured myself that as long as the time will appear in passing now, I shall think some time hence its progress not so slow, and I will not add imaginary to real evils, by supposing it possible that I shall not ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... first of many talks with Dan, who told Harvey why he would transfer his dory's name to the imaginary Burgess-modelled haddocker. Harvey heard a good deal about the real Hattie at Gloucester; saw a lock of her hair—which Dan, finding fair words of no avail, had "hooked" as she sat in front of him at ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... no longer, but to make one short remark. Though the machinery is invention, and the names of the actors imaginary, I cannot but believe that the groundwork of the story is founded on truth. The scene is undoubtedly laid in some real castle. The author seems frequently, without design, to describe particular parts. ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole
... to you both. Remember then that you are a father, and that she is a mother,—titles that were conferred upon you both by the birth of that little angel who now sheds a radiance over our household by his endearing presence. Then think of him, think of what I say, and you will outlive your imaginary ills and all the jealous flickerings of your heart; therefore, I again ask you, Fred, to ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... high eulogiums on himself—"the most valorous adventurer!"—but it is not himself that he has before him, but the idol of his imagination, the imaginary being whom he is acting. And this, that it is entirely a third person, excuses his heart from the otherwise inevitable charge of selfish vanity; and so by madness itself he preserves our esteem, and renders those ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... their gratuitous behalf, and she might possibly set a notable example of domestic felicity. No married woman can convert herself into a feminine Knight of the Rueful Visage and ride about the country attempting to redress imaginary wrongs without leaving her own household in a neglected condition that must be an eloquent witness against her. As for the spinsters, we have always said that every woman has a natural and inalienable right to a good husband and a pretty baby. When, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... exercise. It does not check the true joyousness of Girlhood's nature, nor cast any darkening line into the future character. April suns are all the brighter for April showers. The real sorrows ordinarily incident to Girlhood are not many; the real causes for gloom are few; the most are imaginary. This is true of all ages. Our borrowed trouble is much more than that which comes as our own in the legitimate course of our life. Trouble is the worst article we can borrow. We have the least need ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... imagining, and do not indicate the true nature of anything, but only the constitution of the imagination; and, although they have names, as though they were entities, existing externally to the imagination, I call them entities imaginary rather than real; and, therefore, all arguments against us drawn from such ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... million more little angels are saying that same thing, at that same hour, to the same imaginary God, I say to myself, if that is a vain, empty infatuation, blessed ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... they smoked in silence and contentment. At length they began to converse softly in their own language. That they were talking about the sleeping girl was evident, for several times they glanced in her direction. Once Sam ceased in the midst of his talk, leaped to his feet, and clutched an imaginary object with both hands. He then squatted down again, and continued his tale of the tragedy that night by the shore of the ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... the Dutch vessels mentioned in the preceding notes. The name appears, from the earliest accounts, to have been well known, both to the Japanese and the Kamtschadales; and used by them, indiscriminately, for all the islands lying between Kamtschatka and Japan. It has since been applied to a large imaginary island, or continent, supposed to have been discovered by the Castricom and Breskes; and it may not, therefore, be improper to consider the grounds of this mistake, as far as can be collected from the journals of that expedition. The object of the voyage, in which those ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... midnight ramble. He recalled the dirty and foul condition of the patient when discovered in his room, and he examined all the vile and filthy places in the neighborhood, for the marks of some terrible struggle that might have taken place between the sleep-walker, and any real or imaginary demon. ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... fireman, fiercely shovelling imaginary coal; still another at the side of the box grasped the handle of the brake as one ready to die at his post if need be. The last Sullivan paced the length of the wagon-box, being thrown from side to side with fine artistry by the train's ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... and degrade them. An oft-quoted instance of their cruelty is recorded of a bailie named Landenburg, who publicly reproved a peasant for living in a house above his station. On another occasion, having fined an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of Melchi, a yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's messenger jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if he lost his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, that if he wanted to use a plough he had better draw it himself, being only a vile peasant. To this insult ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and the obstinacy of some misers, who endured the most cruel torments before they would discover the secret object of their affection, was fatal to many unhappy wretches, who expired under the lash for refusing to reveal their imaginary treasures. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... alternative theories of nature, both exhaustive and adequate, may seem somewhat imaginary. The human mind is, indeed, not rich and indeterminate enough to drive, as the saying is, many horses abreast; it wishes to have one general scheme of conception only, under which it strives to bring everything. Yet the philosophers, who are the scouts of common sense, have come in sight ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... characters of fairy tales are converted into historical personages. We can also watch the process by which feigned genealogies were constructed, which connected the princely houses of France with the imaginary heroes of the epics. The conclusion is that the poetical history of Charlemagne has only the faintest relations to the true history. And we are justified in supposing that, quite as little of the real history of events can ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... himself from formal and sacred engagements. He was unconscious and oblivious of times, places, persons and seasons; and falling into some poetic vision, some day-dream, he quickly and completely forgot all that he had repeatedly and solemnly promised; or he ran away after some object of imaginary urgency and importance, which suddenly came into his head, setting off in vain pursuit of it, he knew not whither. When he was caught, brought up in custody, and turned over to the ladies, with, Behold, your King! to be caressed, courted, admired, and flattered, the king of beauty ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... that call and understood it, and I went swift as a hurricane and mounted the stairs four steps at a time. I mounted the more rapidly because the stairway had already begun to fill with dread shadows; and in the turnings and corners I saw the imaginary forms of ghosts and monsters that at nightfall always pursued me as I ran up ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... the griefs of the rich are mostly imaginary and selfish. In this beautiful world, if we have our freedom, and health, and plenty of money, we are simply foolish to be down-hearted; only when death takes away our dear ones; and after a time the pain he gives ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... leaving the ends solid and shaping them. A different and very buoyant timber, according to him, was used for the out-rigger. This boy had travelled. He had seen the canoes further north as well as those of New Guinea, and it was found on investigation that his description of the local craft was quite imaginary. Captain Philip P. King, who came hither from Sydney in 1818, anchoring at Goold Island, thus describes the canoe of the period—"Their canoes were not more than five feet long, and generally too small for two people; two ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... a very public place, I take my change for my money. I digg him in the ribbs, or clap his padded old shoulders. I call him 'Bareacres, my old brick,' and I see him wince. It does my 'art good." It does Thackeray's heart good to pour himself out in indignation against some imaginary Bareacres. He blows off his steam with such an eagerness that he forgets for a time, or nearly forgets, his cacography. Then there are "Jeames on Time Bargings," "Jeames on the Gauge Question," "Mr. Jeames again." Of all our author's heroes Jeames is perhaps the most amusing. ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... evidently enjoyed the work. But it is better worth looking at, for all that, than the monument on the other side of the church, where the recumbent form of Sir Arthur Onslow is apparently giving vague directions to an imaginary audience. Wrapped in a Roman toga, he waves a sleeveless right arm; his left is propped by a set of Journals of the House of Commons. It is a relief to pass beyond such tawdry pomposities into the solemn little chapel, sacred to one of the great regiments of the Army, the Queen's, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... of imaginative metaphor, is Shakespeare's moonlight 'sleeping' on a bank; but half his poetry may be said to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common coin of discourse. Of imaginary creatures, none out of the pale of mythology and the East are equal, perhaps, in point of invention, to Shakespeare's Ariel and Caliban; though poetry may grudge to prose the discovery of a Winged Woman, especially such as she has been described by her inventor in the story ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... it into his head that business in this country has all gone to pieces,—thinks it must be reorganized. He writes letters about it all day and sends them to the papers with imaginary names. You may have seen some of them. ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... highly dramatic use of images is in connection with that mental process known as Imagination. As we study the writings of Jack London, Poe, Defoe, Bunyan, we move in a realm almost wholly imaginary. And as we take a cross-section of our minds when thus engaged, we find them filled with images. Furthermore, they are of great variety—images of colors, sounds, tastes, smells, touches, even of sensations from our own internal organs, such as the palpitations of the ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... wholly groundless, or my fears altogether imaginary, that the abolishing of Christianity may perhaps bring the Church into danger, or at least put the senate to the trouble of another securing vote. I desire I may not be mistaken; I am far from presuming to affirm or think that the Church is in danger at present, or as things now stand; but we know ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses. You will understand by the title that they are written in an imaginary character. I don't doubt they will fit some family-man well enough. I send it forth as "Oak Hall" projects a coat, on a priori grounds of conviction that it will suit somebody. There is no loftier illustration of faith ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... come at last. Jack picked himself up and ran to rescue the pail. The calf raised his head suddenly, the pail caught on one of his little horns, and he started off around the yard, unable to see, and jumping wildly over imaginary objects. Jack followed. A cow, which was perhaps the mother of the calf, started after Jack. The family dog, hearing the commotion, came running down from the house and began to pursue the cow. This wild procession went around the yard ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth
... silence, for nothing that fell on the ear seemed in accordance with what so charmed the eye; and thus a positive evil found entrance in the midst of much enjoyment. I acquired that habit of dreamy excursiveness into imaginary scenes, and among unreal personages, which is alike inimical to rational pursuits and opposed to spiritual- mindedness. To a period so early as the middle of my fourth year I can revert with the most perfect, most vivid recollection of my habitual thoughts and feelings; ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... while in name a renunciation of self, has all its foundations in the purest individualism. Rousseau, notwithstanding the method of Emile, treats man as a part of a collective whole, contracting manifold relations and owing manifold duties; and he always appeals to the love and sympathy which an imaginary God of nature has implanted in the heart. His aim is unity. Mr. Carlyle, following the same method of obedience to his own personal emotions, unfortified by patient reasoning, lands at the other extremity, and lays all his stress on the separatist instincts. The individual stands alone ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... murders Memnon in his Poem, and bemires himself in his description of the Rhine, I divert my self in these Satires. 'Tis plain from hence, that Alpinus liv'd in the time when Horace writ these Satires: and suppose Alpinus was an imaginary Name, cou'd the Author of the Poem of Memnon be taken for another? Horace, they may say, liv'd under the reign of the most Polite of all the Emperors; but do we live under a Reign less polite? and would they have a Prince who has so many ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... an imaginary foe, as such I reckon the creeds and ideas of other men; still, I cannot but ask myself whether it can add to the prosperity of the state when citizens cease to struggle against the pressure and necessity of life and console themselves for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... things in general. Marian was engaged in a friendly scuffle for an apple, and Allan was tossing Rosie up to the ceiling, while Norman, perched on the bannisters high above them all, waved his left hand, bidding farewell, with many words, to an imaginary Scotland, while with his right he beckoned to the "brave new world" which was to be the scene of ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... was an evasion. By forcing the tie they had merely marked the want of ease and confidence between them. As "Packer John" Paul could have enjoyed, nay, loved this man; as his father, the sum and finality of his filial dreams, the supplanter of that imaginary husband of his mother's youth, the thing was impossible. And the father knew it and did not resent it in the least, only pitied the boy for his needless struggle. He was curious about him, too. He wanted to understand ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... nothing but cards, green tables, piles of banknotes, and heaps of ducats. He played one card after the other, winning uninterruptedly, and then he gathered up the gold and filled his pockets with the notes. When he woke up late the next morning, he sighed over the loss of his imaginary wealth, and then sallying out into the town, he found himself once more in front of the Countess's residence. Some unknown power seemed to have attracted him thither. He stopped and looked up at the windows. At one of these he saw a head with luxuriant black hair, which was bent down, ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... now black, were mirrored and doubled in the still water at their feet, reflecting therein their sharply reversed outlines, and presenting the mirage of fearful precipices, over which we seemed to hang. The stars also were reversed in their order, making, in the depths of the imaginary abyss, a sprinkling of tiny ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was taken down in a search for imaginary treasure. It was set up again in 1822 on Weybridge Green as a memorial to the Duchess of York, who died 1820. The dial was not replaced, and was used as a stepping-stone at the Ship Inn at Weybridge; it still lies on one side of the Green. The streets of Seven Dials ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... fellow!" said Tourville: "then I am sure you will have no objection to take service with us." "What!" cried the prisoner; "I go with the French to fight against the English! Your honour must excuse me; I could not do it to save my life." [722] This poor fisherman, whether he was a real or an imaginary person, spoke the sense of the nation. The beacon on the ridge overlooking Teignmouth was kindled; the High Tor and Causland made answer; and soon all the hill tops of the West were on re, Messengers were riding hard ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... tuition of woman, some idea of its fallibility did cross his imagination or his memory; but then he blamed, most unjustly, his imagination for the suggestion. The danger would prove, as he would have it, to be imaginary. What danger could there be, when he knew, as he began and ended by saying to himself, that he was to consider Dora as a ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... living and intense stars, and felt palpably at their hearts that spell—wild, but mute—which nothing on or of earth can inspire; that pining of the imprisoned soul, that longing after the immortality on high, which is perhaps no imaginary type of the immortality ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... early life was that of an adventurer, his later was passed chiefly within the "rules" of the King's Bench prison. He is chiefly remembered as the author of The Three Tours of Dr. Syntax, a comic poem (?). His cleverest piece of work was a series of imaginary letters, supposed to have been written by the second, or "wicked" Lord Lyttelton. Of a similar kind were his letters between Swift and Stella. He also wrote the letterpress for various illustrated books, and was a ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... and after Colonel Morgan permitted him to reveal himself, Ellsworth told some first-class romances. He made Morgan's force out about four thousand, and did it with a skill that carried conviction. He would speak, in dispatches to various well-known Federals, of certain imaginary commands, under men whom they well knew. He telegraphed Prentice that Wash. Morgan was at Gallatin, with four hundred Indians, raised especially to seek for his ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... Within, the children were playing "keeping store." The little girl, as an opulent and extravagant customer, was purchasing of the boy, who sat behind a counter improvised from a nail-keg and the front seat, most of the available contents of the wagon, either under their own names or an imaginary one as the moment suggested, and paying for them in the easy and liberal currency of dried beans and bits of paper. Change was given by the expeditious method of tearing the paper into smaller fragments. The diminution of stock was remedied by buying the same article over again ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... saddle before he could offer to help, with the clean spring of the child who mounted the pony for the Thirty-Mile Ride. The day held mercilessly, though Georgie got down thrice to look for imaginary stones in Rufus's foot. One cannot say even simple things in broad light, and this that Georgie meditated was not simple. So he spoke seldom, and Miriam was divided between relief and scorn. It annoyed her that the great hulking thing should know ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... Olympian god was not there to start with, how did he originate? We can understand—at least after a course of anthropology—this desire of primitive man to acquire for himself the superhuman forces of the bull; but how does he make the transition from the real animal to the imaginary human god? First let us remember the innate tendency of primitive man everywhere, and not especially in Greece, to imagine a personal cause, like himself in all points not otherwise specified, for every striking phenomenon. If the wind blows it is because some being more or less ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... symmetrical as a circle, and as it was apparent that the heavenly bodies pursued tracks which were not straight lines, the conclusion obviously followed that their movements ought to be circular. There was no argument in favour of this notion, other than the merely imaginary reflection that circular movement, and circular movement alone, was "perfect," whatever "perfect" may have meant. It was further believed to be impossible that the heavenly bodies could have any other movements save those which were perfect. Assuming this, it followed, in Ptolemy's opinion, and ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... himself he had become intensely excited and exhausted by the eagerness with which he had spent a whole morning, with a wealth of imaginative force, in drawing a map of the garden of his house and converting it into the likeness of a war map, filled with imaginary Army Corps. Such excessive expenditure of nervous force is unusual even in older children, and as in this case is found usually only when there is a pronounced nervous inheritance. In little children ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... passing calmly through the wide doors and saving themselves, the maddened people, with the cruelty of frenzied beasts, cry and roar, crush one another and perish—not from the fire (for it is only imaginary), but from their own madness. It is enough sometimes when one sensible, firm word is uttered to this crowd—the crowd calms down and imminent death is thus averted. Let, then, a hundred calm, rational voices be raised to mankind, ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... circumstance is sufficient in itself to raise the book above many descriptions of travel to the Holy Land, whose authors, trusting to the fact that their assertions could not easily be disproved, have indulged their fancy, seeking to impart interest to their works by the relation of imaginary dangers, and by exaggeration of every kind, for the sake of gaining praise and admiration. Many such men might blush with shame on reading this journal of a ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... moments, he succeeded in covering almost two weeks in the labor of putting his house into order. His bedroom was next to the barricade that separated the long stone excavation from the bottomless abyss. Divided from the bedroom by an imaginary line, was the store-room of provisions. The cans and boxes were arranged along the floor with methodical exactitude. Different varieties of fruit and preserves were interspersed in such fashion that none was repeated until every variety ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... hand, and Squire in the other," as the patter-song had it. At the moment of assisted entry his paternal dignity was always at its stateliest, and it was not till he had gravely hung his cocked hat upon an imaginary door-peg in the middle of the hall and seen it flop floorward that he lost his calm. "Blood and 'ouns, ye've the door taken ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... very queer and shamefaced about my histrionic papa and mamma. It is striking to observe, not only how early, but how powerfully, imagination [13] is developed in our childhood. For some time after, I regarded those imaginary parents as sustaining a peculiar relation, not only to me, but to one another; I thought they were in love, if not to be married. But they never were married, nor ever thought of it, I suppose. All that drama was wrought out in ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... have been asked insultingly, Is it Octavius, is it Anthony, or is it Lepidus that has caused this bitterness of affliction? and when the answer could not be returned with certainty, to have been reproached that their sufferings were imaginary? The fact is that the King and Lords and Commons, by what is termed the omnipotence of Parliament, have constitutionally the right of enacting whatever laws they please, in defiance of the petitions or ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... is the worst of evils; and I believe that it is wholesome to put as far as we can our cramped minds in easier postures, and to let our spirits have a wider range. We know how a dog who is perpetually chained becomes fierce and furious, and thinks of nothing but imaginary foes, so that the most peaceful passer-by becomes an enemy. I have felt, since the war began, a certain poison in the air, a tendency towards suspicion and contentiousness and vague hostility. We must exorcise that evil spirit if we can; and I believe it is ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... therefore, passes through the carriage with a speed different from its speed outside. Since, however, it is the speed from hole to hole which determines the angle of aberration, no conclusion can be drawn from the latter as to the original velocity of the projectile. Let us assume the imaginary case that the projectile was shot forth from the gun with infinite velocity, and that the slowing-down effect of the wall was great enough to produce a finite speed of the usual magnitude, then the effect on the position of the exit hole would be precisely the same as if the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... Australian children assemble to play "Bushrangers and Bobbies," everybody wants to be a bushranger, and the guardian of the law is looked upon as quite an inferior character. Lots decide, however, the cast. The bushrangers sally forth and stick up an imaginary coach, or rob an imaginary country bank. The "bobbies" go in pursuit, and there is a desperate mock battle, which allows of much yelling and running about, ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... amidst the thousand uncertainties of life, there can be no enjoyment of tranquillity. The man of feeble and timorous spirit lives under perpetual alarms. He sees every distant danger and tremble; he explores the regions of possibility to discover the dangers that may arise: often he creates imaginary ones; always magnifies those that are real. Hence, like a person haunted by spectres, he loses the free enjoyment even of a safe and prosperous state, and on the first shock of adversity he desponds. Instead of exerting himself to lay hold on the resources that remain, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the short period of my unfortunate life. But I will not go into any further details, lest the world should laugh at me, though it would be hypocrisy in me to affect to conceal that, for several days after, I felt melancholy at this imaginary parting. ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on. ...
— Simple Sabotage Field Manual • Strategic Services
... all the aches and pains, coughs and colds, inflammations and consumptions, fevers and chills, at the hour of birth and at the time of death, and all intermediate points of life, to induce sleep and to promote wakefulness, and for all real or imaginary ills." ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... requisite, and has generally been observed by enlightened and civilized nations. It is a civil contract in civil society, but the sanction of religion should be superadded. The ancients considered it as a religious ceremony. They consulted their imaginary gods, before the marriage was solemnized, and implored their assistance by prayers, and sacrifices; the gall was taken out of the victim, as the seat of anger and malice, and thrown behind the altar, as hateful to the deities ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... clime the breezes blow over, every magic isle the waves murmur round, every subterranean retreat fancy has devised, every cerulean region the moon visits, every planet that hangs afar on the neck of night, be disenchanted of their imaginary charms, and brought, by the advance of discovery, within the relentless light of familiarity, for the common gaze of fleshly eyes and tread of vulgar feet, still the prophetic MIND would not be robbed of its belief in immortality; still the unquenchable instincts of the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... called by him St. Mary's. He believed that this bay was an arm of the sea, running northward and eastward, and communicating with the Gulf of St. Lawrence, thus making New England, with adjacent districts, an island. His proposed fort on the Chesapeake, giving access, by this imaginary passage, to the seas of Newfoundland, would enable the Spaniards to command the fisheries, on which both the French and the English had long encroached, to the great prejudice of Spanish rights. Doubtless, too, these inland waters gave ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... my flowers to Jip to smell. Then Jip growled, and wouldn't smell them. Then Dora laughed, and held them a little closer to Jip, to make him. Then Jip laid hold of a bit of geranium with his teeth, and worried imaginary cats in it. Then Dora beat him, and pouted, and said, 'My poor beautiful flowers!' as compassionately, I thought, as if Jip had laid hold of ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... popery," and roast beef as antichristian; and that Christmas had been brought in again triumphantly with the merry court of King Charles at the Restoration. He kindled into warmth with the ardour of his contest, and the host of imaginary foes with whom he had to combat; had a stubborn conflict with old Prynne and two or three other forgotten champions of the Roundheads, on the subject of Christmas festivity; and concluded by urging his hearers, in the most solemn and affecting manner, to stand to the traditionary ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... one of those figures in which nobody believes when they are transferred from real life, where we wonder at them, to the imaginary existence of a more or less literary description. The dress of this stranger, like that of all Neapolitans, displayed five colors, if the black of his hat may count for a color; his trousers were olive-brown, his red waistcoat ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... our early volumes it will be seen that this imaginary Prete Jani, Prester John, or the Christian Priest-king, had been sought for in vain among the wandering tribes of eastern Tartary. The Portuguese now absurdly gave that appellation to the Negus of Habesh, or Emperor of the Abyssinians; where a degraded species of Christianity prevails among a ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... his village fled from Agra and came to Chhattisgarh, where they founded the Agharia caste. And, in memory of this, when an Agharia makes a libation to his ancestors, he first pours a little water on the ground in honour of the dead Chamar. Such stories may be purely imaginary, or may contain some substratum of truth, as that the ancestors of the caste were Rajputs, who took wives from Chamars and other low castes. The Kirars are another caste with more or less mixed descent from ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... should remember that many diseases are to a great extent imaginary. And some of those not actually imaginary may at least be brought about through fears that are the results of abnormal delusions. And where such diseases are combated by mental forces of the right sort, a cure can be effected in many instances. In numerous ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... husband, more than from any one else, any feeling of the kind. Besides, after all, gentle lady, your suspicions may be totally groundless; and you may possibly be tormenting yourself with a whole train of imaginary evils. As you value your peace, then, keep from you, if possible, all such vexatious apprehensions, and remember, a man can very ill bear the idea of being suspected of inconstancy even when guilty; but when innocent, ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... coward," she cried; "your fears are all imaginary; another has owned the child, and the ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... imposed upon him some duties, it was true; and was, in so far, a good; but it also imposed most painful restraints. He had a strong persuasion that Bonaparte had not given up the pursuit of his supposed treasures, or the hope of mastering all his designs, real or imaginary; and he suspected that Mars Plaisir would be left long enough with him to receive the overflowings of his confidence (so hard to restrain in such circumstances as theirs!) and would then be tampered with by the agents of the First Consul. What was the nature and efficacy ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... begin the world again, with the experience which I now have of it, I would lead a life of real, not of imaginary pleasures. I would enjoy the pleasures of the table, and of wine; but stop short of the pains inseparably annexed to an excess of either. I would not, at twenty years, be a preaching missionary of abstemiousness and sobriety; and I should let other people do as they would, without formally ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... little significance, I believe, as clews to the saner courses of the mind, but he spoke only gently in his imaginary speeches to his wife. I had to listen, plodding wearily along with aching shoulders under the burden of the boat, to fond, affectionate words addressed to her in an incessant string. The thread of his ideas seemed to be that he had arrived home, worn-out and ill, and that he was resting his head ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... be a republic, aunty, like this country; then, no king is necessary. I have always supposed Neptune to be an imaginary being." ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... the rope square, stepped forward to an imaginary line, and looked down and out and up as if he were gazing at the pit of the orchestra beneath him, across at the body of the house, and ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... yelled Nellie Brocton. "Besides, this dance isn't going to be for soloists," and Nettie swung away with Janet, crooning and humming to the imaginary orchestra. ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... given him by the voice was corroborated, he says, that very day, by intelligence received of the discovery of a large tract of country rich in mines. [65] This imaginary promise of divine aid thus mysteriously given, appeared to him at present in still greater progress of fulfillment. The troubles and dangers of the island had been succeeded by tranquillity. He now anticipated the prosperous prosecution of his favorite enterprise, so long interrupted,—the exploring ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... sleep through some vast convulsion of Nature when a dripping tap is enough to keep us awake? I am told that there were people who slumbered peacefully through the San Francisco earthquake, merely stirring drowsily from time to time to tell an imaginary person to leave it on the mat. Yet these ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... great disquiet. His mind was agitated, his purposes indefinite; his confidence in himself seemed to falter. Where was that strong will that had always sustained him? that faculty of instant decision which had given such vigour to his imaginary deeds? A shadowy haze had suffused his heroic idol, duty, and he could not clearly distinguish either its form or its proportions. Did he wish to go to the Holy Land or not? What a question? Had it come to that? Was it possible that ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... with so many associations of a fanciful nature, in which the imagination takes delight, as might well induce one even less attached to the spot than the author, to accommodate, after a general manner, the imaginary scenes he was framing to the localities to which he was partial. But it would be a misapprehension to suppose, that, because Melrose may in general pass for Kennaquhair, or because it agrees with scenes of the Monastery in the circumstances ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... excluded;—Sir Willmott Burrell exulting in what he deemed the master-stroke of his genius;—and Constance Cecil, the fountain of whose tears was dried up, permitted Lady Frances Cromwell to sit up with her, while she assorted various letters, papers, and other matters, of real or imaginary value, of which she was possessed. Within that chamber one would have thought that Death was the expected bridegroom, so sadly and so solemnly did the bride of the morrow move and speak. She had ceased ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... constant care attend, Will for a dreadful giant take a mill, Or a grand palace in a hog-sty find: (From her dire influence me may heaven defend!) All things with vitiated sight he spies; Neglects his family, forgets his friend, Seeks painted trifles and fantastic toys, And eagerly pursues imaginary joys. ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... have are seldom soa heavy 'at we connot bear em, tho it may be hard wark, but when we're a bit cast daan, we dooant freeat hawf as mich abaat what we have to put up wi, as to what's gooin to happen. Imaginary evils are allus war to bide nor th' ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley
... which the American newspaper tumbles to these frauds. The yellow press especially luxuriates in them; woodcuts the callow bedizened bride, the jaded game-worn groom; dilates upon the big money interchanged; glows over the tin-plate stars and imaginary garters and pinchbeck crowns; and keeping the pictorial paraphernalia in cold but not forgotten storage waits for the inevitable scandal, and then, with lavish exaggeration, works the old story ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... both in the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland. Of course the mining population must furnish its contingent of legends and fables to this mythological repertory. If the fields are peopled with imaginary beings, either good or bad, with much more reason must the dark mines be haunted to their lowest depths. Who shakes the seam during tempestuous nights? who puts the miners on the track of an as yet unworked vein? who ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... be a Traitor; yet, if he had left one single brothel standing—say, in the Sandwich Islands—for the accommodation of any of Her Majesty's well-affected subjects, then the high treason was not high—high enough and up to the mark, that is, my fore-quarter could not be legally stuck up on the imaginary gates of Ballaarat. ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... and so frequently produce those very distresses they are designed to remedy; and if I am not misinformed, even among the ladies themselves, who are truly much to be pitied. Their condition of life makes them a prey to imaginary woes, which never fail to grow up in minds unexercised and unemployed. To get rid of these, it is said, there are who betake themselves to distilled spirits. And it is not improbable they are led gradually to the use ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... what was his love worth? If the lowliness of my position deterred him from asking me to marry him, I was wasting sympathy upon him, and taking needless precautions. The idea roused me strangely, and I found myself taking sides against myself in an imaginary debate as to the probabilities of his conduct. It made every vein in my body tingle, to think that birth or fortune might be able to affect his decision; and it seemed to me, as I sought my pillow that night, that ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... sacred rights to be secured; Then from his patriot tongue of flame The startling words for Freedom came. The stirring sentences he spake Compelled the heart to glow or quake, And, rising on his theme's broad wing, And grasping in his nervous hand The imaginary battle brand, In face of death he dared to fling Defiance ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... I returned to Oakland and started at the High School, which ran the usual school magazine. This publication was a weekly—no, I guess a monthly—one, and I wrote stories for it, very little imaginary, just recitals of my sea and tramping experiences. I remained there a year, doing janitor work as a means of livelihood, and leaving eventually because the strain was more than I could bear. At this time my socialistic utterances ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the Department The Imaginary Mistress The Middle Classes Cousin Betty The Country Parson In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following: Another Study of Woman ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... kingdom of the devil. Neither, indeed, are we dreaming of a Platonic state, as some wickedly charge, but we say that this Church exists, namely, the truly believing and righteous men scattered throughout the whole world [We are speaking not of an imaginary Church, which is to be found nowhere; but we say and know certainly that this Church, wherein saints live, is and abides truly upon earth; namely, that some of God's children are here and there in all the world, in various kingdoms, islands, lands, and cities, from the rising of the sun ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... McTurk's inky thumb over an imaginary arena full of bleeding Kings. "Placete, child of a generous race!" he cried ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... steadily, but sorrowfully, and, immediately afterward, we would hear him dancing down the corridor singing, "Safe in the Arms of Jesus." If he had given heed to one-half we said to him, he would have been safer in our hands than in those of his imaginary protector. He turned out a thief, an unmitigated liar, a dancing dervish, and, through all our experiences of six weeks with him, his chief reading was his Bible and Sunday-school books. The experience, however, was not lost on ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the trepidation of joy and surprise, awaited the guest who had just been announced. She had tried to form an idea of her, but what would this imaginary figure be ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... naturally a man of detached mind, with an inclination for looking at both sides of a question. This was no doubt strengthened by the common practice among professional rhetoricians of writing speeches on both sides of imaginary cases. The level-headedness produced by this combination of nature and training naturally led to the selection of dialogue. In one of the preliminary trials of The double Indictment, Drink, being one of the parties, and consciously incapable at the ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... willing enough to undertake the voyage under the guidance of Christian, whose education had given him a kind of ascendancy to which he had no other claim, for the chieftainship, with which Bailey chose to invest him, was purely imaginary. Christian was a natural actor. Bailey understood perfectly what would suit the popular idea of an Indian chief, and the story which he intended to tell, so that, together, they succeeded admirably. They made a profitable tour, and their success culminated in London when they ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... power in his tone of command which Mary was unable to resist. She felt very sure that he was imbecile or mad. She knew that madmen are apt to imagine themselves great personages, and to take upon themselves, with a wonderful power of impersonation, the dignity and authority of their imaginary rank; and she supposed that it must be thus with this strange old man. She struggled against her sense of terror. After all there could be no real danger, in the broad daylight, within the precincts of her own home, within call of ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... division of terms into Abstract and Concrete is based upon the kind of thing signified. It involves no reference to actual existence. There are imaginary as well as real substances. Logically a centaur is as much ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... Canada's vast resources, etc., etc.). Canada's future was unclouded by the political complications and entanglements of the older countries in Europe. For one hundred years they had been at peace with the Republic south of that imaginary line which delimited the boundaries, but which did not divide the hearts of these two peoples (great applause). For his part, while he rejoiced in the greatness of the British Empire he believed that Canada's first duty was to herself, to the developing ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... imaginary attacks, sometimes in showers, and we steaming in our ponchos or shivering without them, ploughing through the wet bushes or throwing ourselves flat in them. Then, from whatever positions we found ourselves in, we had to "simulate firing" at an enemy until ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... her and convince her of this. It is the same to her, at present, whether the cause be real or imaginary. She believes it real, and feels all its effects as real. Show her that it is imaginary, ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... pen. Besides, I have now nothing to say to that letter. It is to his 'Reflections,' in p. 32, which are open ground to me, that I refer. In them he deliberately repeats the epithet 'Protestant:' only he, in an utterly imaginary conversation, puts it into my mouth, 'which you preached when a Protestant.' I call the man who preached that Sermon a Protestant? I should have sooner called him a Buddhist. At that very time he was teaching his disciples to scorn and repudiate ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... that unreal, imaginary light upon these scenes, these persons, which is pure gift of his, there was a light, a poetry, in those persons and things themselves, close at hand we had not seen. He has enabled us to see it: we are so much the better-off thereby, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... passage from Weymouth to Normandy, I landed at Jersey. The little, secluded bays of that island are the most perfect poetry of the sea. They are types of the spot in which Horace, in his poetic mood of imaginary misanthropy, wished to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... injured by it, a meeting of the chiefs is called. They assemble in one of their forts, and, after a discussion, decide either for an amicable adjustment, or for an exterminating war. Thus these misguided beings are continually destroying each other for some imaginary insult. ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... for a period of at least two or three months for a newspaper or magazine in that language, if it is a modern one. Translate as before, but give most of your time to rapid oral translation for a real or imaginary American hearer. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... who do not know from actual experience the miseries of a malarious country, think only of combating the acute forms of infection, which often place the patient in danger of death. But this danger, though great, is for the most part imaginary, provided that assistance be obtained in time. But that which desolates families, and which causes a physical degradation of the human race exposed to the attacks of malaria, is the chronic poisoning, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... besieged. Speaking in a general way, it has no natural frontiers of any sort—neither mountains nor wide expanses of sea. Eastward are one hundred and thirty millions of people fanatically hostile as regards race, religion, and imaginary interests; westward is another great nation of forty millions, with a hatred on all these points intensified by desire for revenge; northward is a vigorous race estranged by old quarrels; and south is a power which is largely hostile on racial, religious, and historic grounds, and at ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... gondola for a moment, and as I gently swayed to and fro on the water, all paved with moonbeams, it seemed to me that I was on the confines of an imaginary world. It lay close at hand, enveloped in luminous, pale blue mist, through which the moon had cut a wide and glistening path; out to sea, the little islands, like moored black boats, only accentuated the solitude of this region of moonbeams and wavelets; ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... and party bantered party. Here the blue and white of Company "A" flaunted audaciously on the breeze beside the very seats over which the crimson and gray of "B" were flying, and these in their turn nodded defiance over the imaginary barrier between themselves and ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... practically all the thinkers of the world worthy of the name. To think otherwise would be to take the phenomena of the universe from the domain of Law and Order, and to relegate it; to the control of the imaginary something which men ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... desire in this essay to go further back into the roots of the subject, and my first position is plainly this; that imagination, pure and simple, is a common enough faculty; not perhaps the creative imagination which can array scenes of life, construct romantic experiences, and embody imaginary characters in dramatic situations, but the much simpler sort of imagination which takes pleasure in recalling past memories, and in forecasting and anticipating interesting events. The boy who, weary of the school-term, considers what he will do on the ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the picture of the ichthysauria romping in the mesozoic sea, that commonly accompanies a text-book of geology. Any such picture, and all such pictures, with their coloring and their temporal and spacial perspective, are imaginary. No such special and exclusive manifolds can be defined as having been then and there realized. But we have a geological knowledge of this period, that fulfils the formal demands of natural science, in so far as we can construct ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... a bit of imaginary dust from the polished surface of the table, had set a bit straighter, if that were possible, one or two of the chairs, and turned up the lamp a trifle higher, when "Little Jim" opened the door leading out on the piazza, and in tones ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... once upon a time, a certain rich miser conceived the design of spunging upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up, for this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to the physician, as that of an imaginary individual. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... proportion as society attains a general polish. The most essential service, I presume, that authors could render to society, would be to promote inquiry and discussion, instead of making those dogmatical assertions which only appear calculated to gird the human mind round with imaginary circles, like the paper globe which represents ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... well-ordered state in which the Emperor should hold to his subjects the place of deity. If such honor to a mortal seemed extravagant, yet in his view a wise emperor was far worthier of reverence than the imaginary ghosts of the popular superstitions. Yet, even Confucius could not quite succeed in banishing the idea of divine help, nor could he destroy that higher and most venerable worship which has ever survived amid all the corruptions of polytheism. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... never given me any trouble," said Mr. Phillips, "and to my mind, Mr. Dempster, the revelations, such as I have heard at least, are very puerile and contemptible; but that there must be a singular excitement attending even an imaginary conversation with the dead I can easily believe, and I do not care for exposing ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... with the fullest rights over navigation, and imperial jurisdiction over the western hemisphere. The Bull bestowing these concessions was dated the fourth of May, 1493, in the first year of his pontificate. An imaginary line, drawn from pole to pole and passing one hundred leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, separated the spheres of Spanish and Portuguese exploration, and the Bull expressly laid down as the principal reason for ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... "dissolving throes," real or imaginary, because I fancy that just now they are again making themselves felt, and perhaps with better reason than ever before in our history. People who venture to look ahead are asking themselves this question: If this war goes on much longer, what sort of England will emerge? Some are looking forward ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... wind that blows where we want to go, and you may be sure there was nothing unwelcome in a circumstance that carried me back to Edinburgh and Flora. From that hour I began to indulge myself with the making of imaginary scenes and interviews, in which I confounded the aunt, flattered Ronald, and now in the witty, now in the sentimental manner, declared my love and received the assurance of its return. By means of this exercise ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has been making one of his little jokes in the shape of a petition from some more or less imaginary Quakers. These hypothetical persons pretend to have converted to Christianity and soap some hundreds of warriors of the wild and bounding Shawnee variety. Of course, for a basis of evangelical operations on this scale, it is requisite to have some land on ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... only joking, George; you may sit still. I can guess what you are going to say, papa. 'Is not our voyage imaginary, and should we not be consistent?' Am ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... long been practiced, but they had also been rebuked. Goethe was the first who gravely justified adultery, rendered the sentimental voluptuary an object of enthusiastic admiration, and deified the heroes of the stage, in whose imaginary fortunes the German forgot sad reality and the wretched fate of his country. His fade assumption of dignity, the art with which he threw the veil of mystery over his frivolous tendencies and made his commonplace ideas pass for something incredibly ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... athleticism, supervened, had satraps ordered rock-reliefs of battles instead of burghers ordering brazen images of boxers and runners, Praxiteles and Lysippus might have remained in mente Dei, if, indeed, even there. Similarly, once given your Pisan sculptors, Giotto, nay, your imaginary Cimabue, you inevitably get your Donatello, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and eventually your Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Titian; for the problems of form and of sentiment, the questions of perspective, anatomy, dramatic expression, lyric suggestion, architectural decoration, were established, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... we may be quite sure that the Grist Tax, the Sicilian Banditti, the intrigues of France in Tunis, the perversity of the Pope, the poverty of Italian workmen, the factiousness of Italian politicians, every evil, in short, real or imaginary, under which Italy now suffers, or has suffered since 1870—would have been attributed to her connection with a Union presided over by the Austrian Emperor. National independence, like every other form ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... current of humanity that flowed through the long front streets and eddied about the entrances of amusement places. He asked himself if he were indeed awake, if, after all, this was his Ultima Thule? Already the labor, the hardship, the adventure of the trip seemed imaginary; even the town itself was unreal. Dawson was both a disappointment and a satisfaction to Pierce. It was not what he had expected and it by no means filled the splendid picture he had painted in his fancy. Crude, raw, unfinished, small, it was little more than Dyea magnified. But in enterprise ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... historical romance was an independent and arbitrary personage, who could compress time, resuscitate the dead, give mighty deeds to imaginary heroes, exchange substitutes for popular martyrs on the scaffold, and make the most stubborn facts subservient to her purpose. Indeed, her most favoured son boldly asserted her right to bend time and ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... makes existence real and not merely literary. Comte was inclined to thrive on martyrdom. His restless, eager mind invented troubles, if there were no real ones, but he was wise enough to know this, as he once said: "The trials of life are all of one size—imaginary pains are as bad as real ones, and men who have no actual troubles usually conjure forth a few. Thus far, happily, I am not reduced ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... are lured by its cheery blaze. Here sits the noted divine in search of recreation, and, incidentally, material for future sermonic use; a prominent physician, glad to escape for a season the complaining ills, real or imaginary, of his many patients; a judge, whose benign expression, as he straightens the leaders in his flybook, or carefully wipes the moisture from his split bamboo rod, suggests nothing of justice dispensed ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... the two conceptions of love which were current at that time,—the mediaeval and monkish conception, based upon a sensual idea which regarded women as the root of all evil and the source of all sin, and the modern or secular idea, which is spiritual and may become holy. In an imaginary conversation with Saint Augustine which Petrarch wrote to furnish a vehicle for the discussion of these matters, the poet exclaims that it is the soul—the inborn and celestial goodness—that he ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... And in the 28th chapter she tells us that "though there were nothing else to delight the sight in heaven but the great beauty of the glorified bodies, that would be an excessive bliss, particularly the vision of the Humanity of Jesus Christ our Lord...." "This vision," she continues, "though imaginary, I did never see with my bodily eyes, nor, indeed, any other, but only with the eyes of the soul." And thus it is that in heaven the soul does not see God only, but everything in God, or rather it sees that everything is God, for ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... we are to understand, not only the visible, but also imaginary continents depicted with the most extravagant fancy, heavens and hells of the Brahmanical Cosmology, extended by new discoveries) is uncreated. It exists, without ruler, only by the power of its elements, and is everlasting. The elements of the world are six substances—souls, ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... sleeves of her gown join them. Through the little holes in the pattern of these kindly mittens her white arms can be seen gleaming like snow beneath the faint rays of the early moon. With one hand she is playing some imaginary ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... customs,—knows more of these things and a thousand others from Dickens's novels than from all the histories, geographies, biographies, and essays in the language. Where is there another novelist who has so peopled a great city with his imaginary characters that there is hardly room for the living population, as one walks along ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... They test each." That did not surprise me, but I was not prepared to hear that the women do not have so many accidents as men, or break the machines so often. In explanation, the manager threw over an imaginary lever with vigor sufficient to shake the factory, "Men put their whole strength on, women are more gentle ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... gallantry would be looked upon as the highest affront, and would be thought to merit a drawn sword through the midriff. Should any one see his most intimate friend any where with a woman, he must never take notice of it, or mention it afterwards. Every thing of this nature is conducted with all imaginary gravity and decorum, by which the practice of gallantry becomes decent and easy; yet there are some jealousies in this regular commerce of love, which sometimes end fatally. A story of this kind happened shortly before I went to Lima. A young lady, who thought herself sole sovereign in the heart ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... frightened or repelled. Nor do we hear anything of childish loves; and though an entry appeared in his diary one Sunday in about the seventh or eighth year of his age, 'married two wives this morning,' it only referred to a vague imaginary appropriation of two girls whom he had just seen in church, and whose charm probably lay in their being much bigger than he. He was, however, capable of a self-conscious shyness in the presence of even a little girl; and his sense of certain proprieties was extraordinarily keen. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... his mouth, the unlike as well as the like. She loved his quick, Cockney accent, his Cockney oaths when he forgot himself—the way he always said "Yeyss" instead of "Yes"—his little assumptions of vanity in socks and tie. She loved a queer blend of Albert and Martin, the real and the imaginary, substance ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... the future on a great scale the policy, which she has hitherto pursued on a small scale, of claiming so-called 'compensations' when other Powers succeeded in developing their colonial spheres, and of invoking imaginary 'interests' as a reason why the efforts of explorers and diplomatists should not be allowed to yield to France their natural fruits of increased colonial trade. It is not our business to impugn or to defend the partition of Africa, ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... thoughts sometimes found refuge from severer studies among my friends in Ireland. I fancied strange revolutions at home; but I find it was the rapidity of my own motion that gave an imaginary one to objects really at rest. No alterations there. Some friends, he tells me, are still lean, but very rich; others very fat, but still very poor. Nay, all the news I hear of you is, that you sally out in visits among the neighbors, and sometimes make ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... disguise of satyrs, doubtless originated in the desire to approach more nearly to the presence of their divinity. The desire of escaping from self into something new and strange, of living in an imaginary world, broke forth in a thousand instances in those festivals. It was seen in the coloring of the body, the wearing of skins and masks of wood or bark, and in the complete costume belonging ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... style, take of foolscap paper a few quires; stuff them well with high-sounding titles—dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, ad libitum. Then open the peerage at random, pick a supposititious author out of one page of it, and fix the imaginary characters upon some of the rest; mix it all up with quantum suff. of puff, and the book is in a second edition before ninety-nine readers out of a hundred have found out the one is as little likely to have written, ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... of the cabin raised, the trade blowing through, hearing their report. Like journalists nearer home, when the day's news were scanty, these would make the more of it in words; and I have known one to fill up a barren morning with an imaginary conversation of two dogs. Sometimes the king deigns to laugh, sometimes to question or jest with them, his voice sounding shrilly from the cabin. By his side he may have the heir-apparent, Paul, his nephew and adopted son, six ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or 'champagne and oysters.' He got angry, and consequently flurried. He tried to quell the tumult by thundering out the denunciation which he had prepared. But the delight which the audience took in shrieking the items of their imaginary bill of fare was too much for him. He forgot what he had meant to say, floundered, attempted to pull himself together, and brought out the stale jest about providing each landlord with a single ticket ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... to talk with; and when his work was done he would walk out upon the mountain side in the bright winter sunlight of those great heights and hold an imaginary conversation with his wife or little son, and come home whistling ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... I with my man, and such made me sensible, that the true God is worshipped, tho' under imperfect similitudes; and that the false adoration which the Heathens give to their imaginary Deity, is as great an argument of the divine essence, as the most learned Atheists (falsely so called) can bring against it; for God will be glorified in his works, let their denominations be what it will; and I cannot be of that opinion which some conceive, ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... of Lawrence Armitage, while his constant companion, Aladdin, a sultan of unequaled magnificence, had a peculiar swing to his gait that reminded sharp-eyed observers of Hal Macy. The Four Fat Friars loomed large and gray, and fanned imaginary flies with commendable energy, while Snow White, accompanied by her faithful dwarfs, made a radiantly beautiful figure and was greeted with ejaculations of admiration wherever she chose ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... more appropriate. The chief duty of the troops consisted in lying at anchor at the intersections of wooded streams, waiting for rebels who never came. It was dismal work, and the raw recruits were full of the same imaginary terrors which have haunted other heroes less severely tested: the monkeys never rattled the cocoa-nuts against the trees, but they all heard the axes of Maroon wood-choppers; and when a sentinel declared, one night, that he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... wild and desolate stretch of country, for the region lying on either side of the imaginary line dividing Canada and New York State, at the point where the St. Lawrence flows north-east, ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... ridiculous. I give one startling instance out of a hundred of the irony remarked upon above. In his first important book, Dickens lashed the loathsome corruption of our oligarchical politics, their blaring servility and dirty diplomacy of bribes, under the name of an imaginary town called Eatanswill. If Eatanswill, wherever it was, had been burned to the ground by its indignant neighbours the day after the exposure, it would have been not inappropriate. If it had been entirely deserted ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Is this an imaginary difficulty, or do you mean to deal with it in future editions of the "Origin"?—Believe me ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... and with the utmost secresy, gathered what she was possessed of together, and, with her followers, embarked in search of some country where she might live free from tyranny and oppression. Undaunted by the dangers, real and imaginary, which beset the paths of the early navigators of the Mediterranean, the little band of adventurers pursued their course, steering westward, ever westward; away past Egypt, and past Libya, until they ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... talents for rule; though many of them have occupied the throne in difficult periods. It is remarkable, too, that they have, in a great number of instances, been distinguished by merits the most opposite to the imaginary and conventional character of women: they have been as much remarked for the firmness and vigour of their rule, as for its intelligence. When, to queens and empresses, we add regents, and viceroys of provinces, the list of women who have been eminent rulers of mankind swells to a great length.[1] ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... observed that the birds ceased to sing, and sat solitary on the housetops, by reason of the sight of a painted serpent set openly to view. So fares it with us novices, that here betray our imperfections: we, afraid to look on the imaginary serpent of envy, painted in men's affections, have ceased to tune any music of mirth to your ears this twelvemonth, thinking that, as it is the nature of the serpent to hiss, so childhood and ignorance would play the gosling, contemning and condemning what they ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... in the very corner of everyday life where God has put us, that this can take place, and the surrounding influences can have their share in bringing down to death the old nature. It is no mystical, imaginary world that draws out the latent forms of self, but the ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... standing looking at her—and had been speaking too—in an abstracted manner, which showed that though she was the object of his thoughts and eyes, to the exclusion even of tripe, he neither saw nor thought about her as she was at that moment, but had before him some imaginary rough sketch or drama of her future life. Roused, now, by her cheerful summons, he shook off a melancholy shake of the head which was just coming upon him, and trotted to her side. As he was stooping to ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... are kept thus: 4 Damas 1 Paisah; 4 Paisahs 1 Ana; 8 Anas 1 Mohur. The Ana is an imaginary money. The coin called a Mohur varies in its rate of exchange, but is commonly worth 34 Paisahs. The Paisah always exchanges for 4 Damas. On Prithwi Narayan’s accession, he called in all the gold and silver money and recoined it, so that I could procure no ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... quite so," chuckled Spokeshave, as pleased as Punch at the imaginary compliment. "I do believe I could teach Irving a thing or two if I ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... exultation in passing through the streets on foot and unknown. Save for the plunges into the office of her solicitors, she could seem to herself a woman who had never submitted to the yoke. What a pleasure it was, after finishing a number of pages, to start Eastward toward the lawyer-regions, full of imaginary cropping incidents, and from that churchyard Westward, against smoky sunsets, or in welcome fogs, an atom of the crowd! She had an affection for the crowd. They clothed her. She laughed at the gloomy forebodings of Danvers concerning the perils environing ladies in the streets after ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the revealed will of God are at variance with each other; that we are deceived by a scheme of things designedly arranged to convey false impressions of truth, and that while God treats us now as though we were accountable beings, He fixes our final destinies without any regard whatsoever to our imaginary freedom and ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... he had seen Thrums, except with his mother's eye, Tommy knew that the wise begin the Muckley by measuring its extent. That the square and adjoining wynds would be crammed was a law of nature, but boyhood drew imaginary lines across the Roods, the west town end, the east town end, and the brae, and if the stands did not reach these there had been retrogression. Tommy found all well in two quarters, got a nasty shock on the brae, but medicine for it in the Roods; on the whole, yelled a hundred children, by way ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... employing his wits, find something to eat where he never found it before; and feel that, like a terrapin, he might make himself at home wherever he might be. Men did actually become as independent of the imaginary "necessities" as the very wild beasts. And can a man learn all this and not know better than another how to economize what he has, and how to appreciate the numberless superfluities of life? Is he not ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... head, my lord!" said the Countess, "because you used the freedom and liberty of an English subject in choosing a wife? For shame! it is this distrust of the Queen's justice, this apprehension of danger, which cannot but be imaginary, that, like scarecrows, have induced you to forsake the straightforward path, which, as it is the best, is also ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... that it is," he said. "Those knights and poets and curious people of that kind lived in a sort of imaginary ecstasy—they exaggerated their emotions and lived at the top- height of their fancies. We in our time are much more sane and level-headed. And it's much better for us ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... with amusement; Bridgie was shaking her head, and murmuring, "Boys, don't! It's cruel!" Pixie was turning from one to the other with eager eyes, and mouth agape with excitement. She knew perfectly well that the conversation was planned for her benefit, and more than guessed its imaginary nature, but it was impossible to resist a thrill—a fear—a doubt! The bread-and-butter was arrested in her hand in ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... mission of the Holy Ghost does not apply to the imaginary vision which is that of prophecy; because as Augustine says (De Trin. ii, 6): "The prophetic vision is not displayed to corporeal eyes by corporeal shapes, but is shown in the spirit by the spiritual images ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... though in the tropics other animals prey upon them. [Footnote: It is very questionable whether there is any foundation for the popular belief in the hostility of swine and of deer to the rattlesnake, and careful experiments as to the former quadruped seem to show that the supposed enmity is wholly imaginary. It is however affirmed in an article in Nature, June 11, 1872, p. 215, that the pigs have exterminated the rattlesnake in some parts of Oregon, and that swine are destructive to the cobra de capello in India. Observing that the starlings, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... in all of us before the artist can be born. But they come in such a rainbow of glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in comparison. We are all artists; almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were happy! But art, of whatever nature, is a kind of mistress; and though these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness, others succeed, ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... otherwise than by virtue of a written contract, acts manifestly without "due process of the law," and consequently is liable to the slave's "action of false imprisonment," because "every man may be free to sue," &c. so that the slave-holder cannot avail himself of his imaginary property, either by the assistance of the common law, or of a court of equity, (except it appears that the said slave has voluntarily bound himself, without compulsion or illegal duress) for in both his suit will certainly appear both unjust ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... the black-sheep type that the people who assumed management of the affair considered it only fair to Sylvia (and to Harboro) to keep him in the background. Sylvia had never permitted Harboro to come to the house to see her. She had drawn a somewhat imaginary figure in lieu of a father to present to Harboro's mind's eye. Her father (she said) was not very well and was inclined to be disagreeable. He did not like the idea of his daughter getting married. She was all he had, and he was fearfully lonesome ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... comes to there, on the horse," added the driver, sweeping an imaginary horse's head, with a fine gesture, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... may do in regard to the elective franchise just what they are doing now in regard to slavery. They may provide that no man shall exercise the elective franchise who has been guilty of a crime, and then they may denounce these men as guilty of a crime for every little, imaginary, petty offense. They may declare that no man shall exercise the right of voting who has not a regular business or occupation by which he may obtain a livelihood, and then they may declare that the black man has no settled occupation and no business. It seems to me, therefore, necessary ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... his shoulder, were it only a blow-gun; or if his employer were any one but his beloved Frowenfeld, he would clap up the shutters as quickly as he had already done once to-day, and be off to the wars. He was just trying to hear imaginary pistol-shots down toward the Place d'Armes, when the ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... may appear, the professor goes on to say, philosophically, on the doctrine of the unity of the human race, it is not so; for what else than such an imaginary prolonged individual life is the life of the race? And what greater changes have occurred to our imaginary traveler than have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... love for his flesh and blood which might claim precedence over his own. Doubtless the feeling was unworthy of him, and he would, when the time came, play his part generously and well; but, so long as the matter was purely imaginary, we may allow him some natural ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... hum from the argumentative villagers, a lazy flop in the tank as a raho rose to the surface, an occasional outburst from the ducks, an angry clamour from the water-hens and blue-fowl. My dogs were lying round me blinking and winking, and making an occasional futile snap at an imaginary fly or flea. It was a drowsy and peaceful scene. I was nearly dropping off to sleep, from the heat and the monotonous drone of the putwarrie, who was intoning nasally some formidable document about ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... on the part of Maxence and M. de Tregars not to play, but only to pretend to play, and to continue to count imaginary points,—"One, two, ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... climbed half way up, and had fallen on her back in the ditch. Louise uttered a thousand and one exclamations when Amabel came home after this catastrophe; and Nurse, distrusting the success of any real penalties in her power, fell back upon imaginary ones. ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... this scheme must not be passed unnoticed. We have mentioned the heavy hangings at the lower end of the room. According to the plotter, it was behind these that Sarah Swarton—the intended witness of the imaginary scene—was concealed. The principal subjects represented on the arras were the Judgment of Solomon, and the Temptation of our first Parents in the Garden by the Serpent. The hangings had evidently not been removed for years, and did not reach within two feet of the ground—a circumstance ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... tailless hobby-horse of Rob's, on which they had ridden many imaginary miles, stood in one corner, and he crossed over to examine it, with ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... which is carried on at the same time. The kernels yield about 30 per cent. of oil, which answers well for lamps. It is also employed for various purposes in the arts, and has a place in the Chinese pharmacopoeia, because of its quality of changing gray hair to black, and other imaginary virtues. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... a vain and powerful spirit, which his works present, it is the loving and tender way in which he returns again to the memory of the past. These little recollections of bygone happiness were too much a part of the man to be carelessly or poorly told. The imaginary landscapes and visions of the most ecstatic dreamer can never rival such recollections, told simply perhaps, but still told (as they could not fail to be) with precision, delicacy, and evident delight. They are too much loved by the author ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Northern Voyagers. Imaginary scene in a court of justice. Love of God. Scene from Shakspeare. Efforts to save us. The protection of angels. The evening party. The dissolute son. A child lost in the woods. The sufferings of the Savior. The Holy ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... agree to that fact. Then by many illustrations I endeavored to describe the equator and told him it crossed the bridge. He got up and looked, but seemed unconvinced as well as unimpressed. Then I told him that it was an imaginary line that ran around the world right where it was fullest—half way between the north pole and the south pole. He brightened up at this and hastened to tell me that he had heard of the north pole ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... long outlived the tender passion myself, but in others I always regard it with a fatherly—nay—let me say, even grandfatherly interest. And so they are going to 'live and love together through many changing years,' as the poet says. Bless you," said Charley, lifting his hand over an imaginary pair of lovers at his feet—"bless you, my ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... more than an imaginary army, General Washington thus harassed and confined his adversary, he came to the hazardous resolution of freeing himself and his troops from the fear of a calamity which he found it impossible to ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... well to add that the variety of dunks implied in his question was imaginary. Shank had only one flask, but in the exuberance of convivial generosity he quoted his own father—who ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... conviction that I had really bewitched him. At length the curate of Notre Dame, who had married them, interfered, and after some time succeeded, though with considerable difficulty, in freeing him from his imaginary bonds. They lived together for twenty-eight years, and several children, now citizens of Rochelle, were the issue of ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... those thinkers who, when they are dealing with an imaginary future, base all their hopes on the possibility of a complete elimination of a certain motive from a certain special class of persons, are the very men who are most vehement in declaring that in this special class of persons the motive in question is something so ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... France, when the French Foreign Minister was practically driven out of office by Prussian interference. Why? What had he done? He had done nothing which a minister of an independent state had not the most absolute right to do. He had crossed the imaginary line drawn in French territory by Prussian despotism, and he had to leave. Europe, after enduring this for generations, made up its mind at last that the Hindenburg line must be drawn along the legitimate frontiers of Germany herself. There could be no other attitude than that for the emancipation ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... we carried on a conversation of a perfectly imaginary character, and with all the simplicity ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... any rate, I don't see that Sir Charles Langton has any claim upon you." There was silence for a minute, Sissy drawing an imaginary outline on Hardwicke's carpet with her riding-whip, he following her every ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... reader is not the Egypt of the maps. Undoubtedly it is not. The maps give the name of Egypt to a broad rectangular space which they mark out in the north-eastern corner of Africa, bounded on two sides by the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and on the two others by two imaginary lines which the map-makers kindly draw for us across the sands of the desert. But "this Egypt," as has been well observed, "is a fiction of the geographers, as untrue to fact as the island Atlantis of Greek legend, or the Lyonnesse of mediaeval romance, both sunk beneath ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... friends, lost his property, and was now ending his days with the cross of Saint-Louis and a pension of two thousand francs, as the legal reward of his services, paid from the fund of the Invalides de la Marine. The slight hypochondria which made him invent his imaginary ills is easily explained by his actual suffering during the emigration. He served in the Russian navy until the day when the Emperor Alexander ordered him to be employed against France; he then resigned and went to live at Odessa, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... which it binds the monarch to the maintenance of the laws existing at the time of its imposition. In the same spirit he banishes from all account the crowd of nonsensical objections to Papal supremacy, drawn from imaginary possibilities. Suppose a Pope, for example, were to abolish all the canons at a single stroke; suppose him to become an unbeliever; suppose him to go mad; and so forth. 'Why,' De Maistre says, 'there is not in ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... not seeming to notice her confusion, told her she was very sorry she was obliged to go out herself, and contrived, under various pretences, to keep her maid in the room. Miss Belfield, supposing this to be accidental, rejoiced in her imaginary reprieve, and soon recovered her usual chearfulness: and Cecilia, who really meant to call upon Mrs Delvile, borrowed Mrs Harrel's carriage, and set down her artless young friend at her new lodgings in Portland-street, before she proceeded to St James's-square, talking the whole time upon ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... formed, he clung with the obstinacy of an obstinate man. The remedium first; afterwards what they would, but the remedium first. He was not going to risk life, warm life, the vista of sunny unending to-morrows, of springs and summers and the melting of snows, for a craze, a scare, an imaginary danger! Why at that very minute the lad whom he had commissioned to seize the thing might be on the way with it. At any minute a step might sound on the threshold, and herald the promise of life. And then—then they might deal ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... which was wired a detonator and friction lighter. For practice purposes the explosive was left out, and the detonator wired into an empty tin. Each day lines of men could be seen about the country standing behind a hedge, over which they threw jam tins at imaginary trenches, the aim and object of all being to make the tin burst as soon as possible after hitting the ground. We were given five seconds fuses, and our orders were, "turn the handle, count four slowly, and then throw." ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... was like its predecessor: pressing boldly forward when the shade of night favored them; proceeding more cautiously through the day; resting sometimes in the center of the stream, and then again approaching the shore for food; now a prey to some imaginary fear, and then thrilling with hope, when they finally glided into the fair Ohio. Safely they reached their destination unpursued, and ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... claim on our friendship, and is a thing one is loth to part with, or change, even for a better book. But the well-tried friend of many voyages is oh! so hard to part with at sea. A resting-place in the solemn sea of sameness—in the trackless ocean, marked only by imaginary lines and circles—is a cheerless spot to look to; yet how many ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... me, which I felt bound to communicate to Moore. "My dear fellow," I said in a whisper, "is this quite sportsmanlike? You know you are after some treasure, real or imaginary, and, I put it to you as a candid friend, is not this just a little bit like poaching? Your brother's ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... James Graham, the representative of the Graemes of Netherby, on the English side of the border, was one of the most venerable and respected of British statesmen. The border men, who used to make such furious raids and forays, have now come to regard each other, across the imaginary line which divides them, as friends and neighbours; and they meet as competitors for victory only at agricultural meetings, where they strive to win prizes for the biggest turnips or the most effective reaping-machines; while the men who followed their Johnstone or Armstrong ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... powerful nation—a standing menace to their interest and power. But they began to look with alarm on the spectacle of these two brothers—brothers in blood, in aims, ambition, and future expectations, only an imaginary line separating them—with glaring eyes, their hands at each others throat, neither willing to submit or yield as long as there was a vestige of vitality in either. Even the most considerate and thoughtful of the North began to contemplate the wreck and ruin of their common country, and ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... Athenian populace was wont to pass whole days in the theatre, attending with unfaltering intellectual keenness and aesthetic delight to three or four long dramas, either of which would exhaust a modern audience,—the wild and vast systems of imaginary abstractions, which the Neo-Platonists, as also the German transcendentalists, so strangely devised and became enamored of,—the grotesque views of men and things, the funny universe altogether, which made up both the popular and the learned thought of the Middle Ages,—the Buddhistic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... of Toledo also make glistening glazed tiles. Some of these show scenes from the lives of favorite Spanish heroes, real and imaginary. There are some Toledo tiles that will tell you about Don Quixote of La Mancha, a hero invented 350 ...
— Getting to know Spain • Dee Day
... tremendous. A column of seething mud and water, twenty feet in diameter, shot full thirty feet into the air, overwhelming the launch in such a shower that many of the unprofessional spectators imagined she was lost. Thus an imaginary ironclad was sent, with a tremendous hole in her, to the bottom ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... Atticus is charming, isn't she?—pretty and nice and neat. Why shouldn't Atticus be the happiest man in the world? You say that everybody thinks he is. Ah, yes! that's because everybody behind the blinds or beside the curtains doesn't see the real things that go wrong,—only the imaginary ones." Atticus, when all alone in his library, with no holes in the curtains, might tell a different story. He might tell of a desolate heart, a solitary intellect,—hopes, dreams, buried. He might ask himself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality, one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they are more entertaining than Gil Blas, or Monte Cristo, or any of the imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been written in imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved life passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... unfortunately I cannot die unless I kill myself,—which it is possible I may do ere long. But in the meantime,"—he hesitated a moment, then went on, "in the meantime, I have a strong wish to be deluded—I use the word advisedly, and repeat it—DELUDED into an imaginary happiness, though I am aware that as an agnostic and searcher after truth—truth absolute, truth positive—such a desire on my part seems even to myself inconsistent and unreasonable. Still I confess to having it; and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and whispered, 'Mamma's own good boy.' Willie tripped lightly down the stairs and into the garden, where three little boys, of the respective ages of eight, six, and five, were playing at the well-known game which Charles Dickens terms 'an invasion of the imaginary domains of ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford
... going to stay. I never was needed before, but I guess I am now. And maybe you'll think it's funny, but I'm wanted! An imaginary daughter can't wait on a poor little cripple—it takes the flesh-and-blood kind. I found out she wanted me, and so I'm going to stay. It would have been lonesome, anyway, all alone in the Hive! I bequeath ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... to think of all the several contingencies which might defraud him of that good-fortune which seemed but just now within his grasp. He glared in the darkness at imaginary faces: sometimes at that of the handsome, treacherous schoolmaster; sometimes at that of the meek-looking, but no doubt, scheming, lady-teacher; sometimes at that of the dark girl whom he was ready ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... under the stress of present circumstances he persuaded himself that the end justified the means. Ignoring the fact that he was as devoid of relations as a tree is of leaves in December, he developed a sudden sense of obligation to an imaginary cousin whom he added, without legal authority, to the population of Peru, Indiana. By means of Miss Bartlett's white hand he frequently informed her that she was not to worry about him, because he was "doing splendid," and that a hospital "wasn't so worse when ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... labor in all departments of legitimate employment that it is difficult to find material to fill it. We hear much of the warfare between capital and labor, and strikes frequently paralyze the channels of legitimate trade, but the cause of the difficulty lies not in any real or imaginary conflict between capital and labor. The solution lies in the fact that every branch of legitimate labor is burdened with incompetent workmen, men who are in wrong occupations, who were never intended by nature for such work as the branches of trade they infest, ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... doubt that he was a Christian. I longed to ask him about Jerry, but I found that he did not understand a word of English. It was so dark, also, that he could scarcely see my gestures. I tried every expedient to make him comprehend my meaning. I ran on, and then seized an imaginary person, and conducted him back to the fort. I raised my hands in a supplicating attitude. I shook his hands warmly, to show how grateful I should be if he granted my request. At last I began to hope that he understood me. He shook my hands ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... bottomed chair minus the legs and without a back. Then I filled my short black pipe from the seal-skin tobacco-pouch, the contents of which had so often assuaged my troubled spirit when I brooded over griefs which then were immature, if not imaginary. It was a very pleasant smoke, I recollect,—so pleasant, that I rather congratulated myself upon my position; the only drawback to it being that I was shut out from a view of the town, as the wind and drift rendered it indispensable for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... recall afterwards what it was they chattered about, except that somehow he acquired the valuable knowledge that Miss Corner was called Cecily, and her sister Letty, and then—so far old Essex custom held—the masculine section was left for a few minutes for some imaginary drinking, and a lighting of cigars and cigarettes, after which everybody went through interwoven moonlight and afterglow to the barn. Mr. Britling sat down to a pianola in the corner and began the familiar ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... the imaginary beings of the novel were introduced, or, it should rather be said, were severally produced before us as actual embodiments. Occasionally, during one of the earlier scenes, it is true that the gentle voice of Rose Maylie was audible, while a few impressive words were spoken there also at ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... such a Being? He might in the same stile conclude that no objection deserved a reply. The whole of this is absurd; but when the Doctor begins to feel enthusiasm he is like the rest of the ecclesiastical arguers. They reason themselves into imaginary Beings with more imaginary properties and then fall down and worship them. God is said to have made man in the image of himself. If he has done so, man is up with him, for he in return makes God in his own image. Much as the imagination ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... of blood. There had been his cousin Amalie, whose marriage to another is said to have been the secret spring of sorrow by which Heine's laughter was fed. And there had been others, whose names—imaginary, maybe, in that they were doubtless the imaginary names of real women—are familiar to all readers of Heines poetry: Seraphine, Angelique, Diane, Hortense, ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... looseness and license a thing to be condoned, to be mixed with the blood of one's own posterity? Eben, I've never seen you make excuses for ungodliness before." The fierce old face suddenly cleared. "But there—there! This is all an imaginary danger. I'll watch them, but I'm sure that these two have no such ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... want to see him. I know him very well, and he was once a great friend of mine, but he is not now, and I don't think it would be advisable for us to meet. He nurses an imaginary grievance against me." ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... ambitious, and swells don't have as interesting diseases as poor people. One gets tired of giving them bread pills for imaginary ailments. But Dr. Wyant is not strong himself and I fancy a country practice is better for him than ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... you sure you understand me?" And in the darkness George's bodily lips moved in unison with those which uttered the words in his imaginary rendering of this scene. An eavesdropper, concealed behind the column, could have heard the whispered word "sure," the emphasis put upon it in the vision was so poignant. "You say you understand me, but ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... connected with his Department. The menacing attitude of some of the warlike bands of Indians inhabiting the district of country between the Arkansas and Platte rivers and portions of Dakota Territory required the presence of a large military force in that region. Instigated by real or imaginary grievances, the Indians occasionally committed acts of barbarous violence upon emigrants and our frontier settlements; but a general Indian war has been providentially averted. The commissioners under the act of 20th July, 1867, were invested with ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... with his wife, I have employed in some six or eight other stories, and whom I made as much the hero and heroine of 'Their Wedding Journey' as the slight fable would bear. In venturing out of my adoptive New England, where I had found myself at home with many imaginary friends, I found it natural to ask the company of these familiar acquaintances, but their company was not to be had at once for the asking. When I began speaking of them as Basil and Isabel, in the fashion of 'Their Wedding Journey,' they ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... darkness; the evening was warm and still. Impatient with what he thought the slow progress of the vehicle, Hugh sat with his body bent forward, straining as did the horse, on which his eyes were fixed, and perspiring in the imaginary effort. The address he had given was Mrs. Fenimore's; but when he drew near he signalled to the driver: 'Stop at the gate. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... neighbors, and not for the world would she add another feather's weight to the burdens under which her family faltered by involving them in a prosecution of the vile impostor who had sickened her with the exposure of a horrible trade. [Footnote: This character is not an imaginary one, and, on ample authority, I was told of an instance where the large sum of fifty dollars was obtained from some kindly family by this detestable method ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... religion. On his way from Jerusalem to Damascus with a warrant from the high priest to arrest the Christians, he was converted (about A.D. 35) by a direct interposition of the risen Lord. Every effort has been made by modern rationalists to explain this revelation as either an imaginary vision or an inward light in his conscience. The fact remains that St. Paul never speaks of it as a merely inward reality, that he does not number his conversion among the ecstatic states to which he was subject ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... you up, a sense of faintness comes over you, your eyes roll heavenward, your head falls helpless on your breast, your left side becomes numb, your liver quits working, your breath comes hot and heavy, your lips turn livid and tremble, your teeth chew on imaginary taffy, and you look around imploringly for somebody to take her away. If all this occurs to a person from looking at her, it would be sudden death or six months illness, to shake hands with her. If she comes to Milwaukee, there is one bald headed man going to the ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... began to think now that he himself would like to see the wonderful cloth while it was still on the looms. Accompanied by a number of his friends, among whom were the two faithful officers who had already beheld the imaginary stuff, he went to visit the two men who were weaving, might and main, without any ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... lived in small communities, embracing from ten to thirty cabins, for protection, but had no large towns, because of the impossibility of feeding great numbers at one point. They held it a part of their religion to seek vengeance for all injuries, real and imaginary, and their general traits of character were as savage as their habits. In war they had no pity on captives, no reverence for helpless age, and were strangers to the sentiments of honor and justice. They were brave, yet much given to cunning and ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... mean of you to pump Blossom! I wanted to go on thinking of you as Zuleika and have you call me something imaginary and romantic." ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... himself assailed by all the passionate expectancy that transforms the soul of youth into the incoherent canvas of an unfinished romance of love. Long ago he had known such evenings, those evenings of errant fancy, when he had allowed his caprice to roam through imaginary adventures, and he was astonished to feel a return of sensations that did not now ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... of imagining, and do not indicate the true nature of anything, but only the constitution of the imagination; and, although they have names, as though they were entities, existing externally to the imagination, I call them entities imaginary rather than real; and, therefore, all arguments against us drawn from such abstractions ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... sophister, overturn the sovereignty of Dionysius; inveigling him to cashier his guard of ten thousand lances, dismiss a navy of four hundred galleys, disband an army of ten thousand horse and many times over that number of foot, and go seek in the schools an unknown and imaginary bliss, and learn by the mathematics how to be happy; while, in the meantime, the substantial enjoyments of absolute power, riches, and pleasure would be handed over to Dion ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the plain ends; the hillsides rise and the river-bottoms dwindle away in the distance: such is the feeling that one experiences as he climbs these vine-clad slopes from either the Rhone, the Loire, or the Seine valleys, and here it is that the imaginary line is drawn between the vins ordinaires and the ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... the mantelpiece, with a yellow clock—which did not go—and glass ornaments in front. There was a small round table before the window, supporting wax fruit under a glass case. There was a hearthrug with a dazzling pattern of imaginary flowers. On the blue cloth of the middle table were four showily-bound volumes, arranged symmetrically. On the head of the sofa lay a covering worked of blue and yellow Berlin wools. Two arm-chairs were draped with long white antimacassars, ready to slip off at a touch. As in ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... during this performance Eustacia was half in doubt about the security of her position; yet it had a fearful joy. A series of attentions paid to her, and yet not to her but to some imaginary person, by the first man she had ever been inclined to adore, complicated her emotions indescribably. She had loved him partly because he was exceptional in this scene, partly because she had determined to love him, chiefly ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... rather in a diagonal. This is another characteristic of De Quincey; he is sometimes tediously exact in his details; perhaps the minuteness is justifiable in this instance, as the statement increases the realistic effect of an imaginary scene. ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... itself while out at rest. For the morrow the colonel had arranged a scheme—defence and counter-attack—which meant that skeleton batteries would have to be brought up to upset and demolish the remorseless plans of an imaginary German host; and there was diligent studying of F.A.T. and the latest pamphlets on Battery Staff Training, and other points of knowledge rusted by too much ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... wages to provide for your families during your absence. You have lately filled yourselves with meat, and you have become lazy; you have been frightened by the footprints of the Base; thus you wish to leave the country. To save yourselves from imaginary danger, you would forsake my wife and myself and leave us to a fate which you yourselves would avoid. This is your gratitude for kindness; this is the return for my confidence, when without hesitation I advanced you money. Go! Return to Katariff to your families! I know that all the excuses ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... of these places in turn, and when we were homeward bound I was landed at an imaginary port in "Spain." The boat had pushed off, when I called out to the skipper that I would walk home to Stromness if he would ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... "These are not imaginary stories, nor are they of a remote past. And I see other young men for whom I am anxious. Wear the coat a little longer, but pay for it out of your own money. Be considered 'tight' if necessary, but live within your means. It is good sense; more than that, ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... thermometer of peace and war in their criminal hands. But it is not commerce—it deserves not the name of commerce—it does not contribute to public welfare—it does not augment the elements of public prosperity—it is but immoral GAMBLING, which transfers an unproductive imaginary wealth from one hand into another, without augmenting the stock of national property:—that is not commerce: and it is a degradation of the character of a nation, when the interests of that speculation have the slightest influence, or are made of the ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... ammunition, mirrors, knives, scissors, &c. Park's proposed route was to proceed up the Gambia, cross the country to the Niger, when they were to sail down the river till they came to its termination. If, as Park supposed, in place of being lost, according to Major Rennel's theory, in some imaginary lake called Margara, it took a southerly direction, and might prove to be the river Congo; it was his intention to embark on board some slave-ship, and return, either by the way of St. Helena or the West Indies. Major Rennel earnestly advised Park against the ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... Landenburg, who publicly reproved a peasant for living in a house above his station. On another occasion, having fined an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of Melchi, a yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's messenger jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if he lost his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, that if he wanted to use a plough he had better draw it himself, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... inside the walls since I was a child, when it used to be let to strangers, before Mrs. Charmond's late husband bought the property. She is SO nice!" And Grace fell into such an abstracted gaze at the imaginary image of Mrs. Charmond and her niceness that it almost conjured up a vision of that lady ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... comfortless and unhallowed place. Noman commanded that silence should be kept, that not even a whisper should breathe from other lips than his own. He drew a line with his crutch upon the floor, and forbade that any should attempt to pass this imaginary demarcation. The auditors were all agape, and but that the door was fastened, some would doubtless have gone back, repenting of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... about any particular doctor," went on the shipping clerk, unabashed. "I'm agin all doctors. They're a bunch of crooks, I tell you. It's you women with your imaginary ailments who keep 'em going. If doctors had to depend on men for a living, they'd have to take to ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... objects which appear from indistinct environments are as a rule considerably distant. I know, further, that considerably distant objects seem much smaller, and hence I must assume that the horse, which in spite of its imaginary distance appears to retain its natural size, is really larger than it is. The train of thought is as follows: "I see the horse indistinctly. It seems to be far away. It is, in spite of its distance, of great size. How enormous ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of conversation; but owing to some circumstance which I cannot now recollect, I have no record of any part of it, except that there were several people there by no means of the Johnsonian school; so that less attention was paid to him than usual, which put him out of humour; and upon some imaginary offence from me, he attacked me with such rudeness, that I was vexed and angry, because it gave those persons an opportunity of enlarging upon his supposed ferocity, and ill treatment of his best friends. I was so much hurt, and had my pride ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... at this place [this is a letter of an imaginary correspondent to 'Mr. Spectator'] a company of strollers, who are very far from offending in the impertinent splendor of the drama. They are so far from falling into these false gallantries, that the stage is here ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... money; neither is it, properly speaking, credit. It, in effect, creates upon paper the sum which it appears to borrow, and lays on a tax to keep the imaginary capital alive by the payment of interest and sends the annuity to market, to be sold for paper already in circulation. If any credit is given, it is to the disposition of the people to pay the tax, and not to the government, which ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... out the light, lest the moment I lay down some "monstrum horrendum, informfe, ingens" should blast my sight with his hellish aspect! I had a double sense of sight and sound; one real, the other visionary; both equally strong and apparently real; so that while I distinctly heard imaginary footsteps ascending the stairs, the door opening and my curtains drawn, I at the same time as plainly heard any actual sound in or outside the house, and could not remark the slightest difference between them; and while I saw an imaginary assassin standing by my bed, bending ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... work is dedicated to Dr. Babington, "in remembrance of some delightful days passed in his society, and in gratitude for an uninterrupted friendship of a quarter of a century;" and in the preface the author, after saying that the characters are imaginary, intimates that "in the portrait of HALIEUS, given in the last dialogue, a likeness, he thinks, will not fail to be recognised to that of a most estimable physician, ardently beloved by his friends, and esteemed and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... ebb. After four years of struggle the patriots had met with a crushing defeat in 1814, and had been scattered to the four winds. Since then the viceroy of Spain had ruled the land with an iron hand, many of the leading citizens being banished to the desolate island of Juan Fernandez, the imaginary scene of Robinson Crusoe's career, while many others were severely punished and all the people ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... slave-traders have used it as a pretext for stirring up the rebellion among the natives. England for many years has been doing her best to suppress slave-trading, and the slave-traders make use of any grievance, imaginary or otherwise, in their attempts to overthrow the power of the white men, in order that their barbarous man-hunting may not be interfered with. Several men-of-war have been sent by England to Sierra Leone, and are to be reinforced by others; troops ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 23, June 9, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... native surgeon, long jealous of my reputation, was nominated by the governor to make inquiry and check my declaration. He naturally inserted in his report that I was deceived; that the malady of which I spoke was imaginary; and he succeeded in all this so well that the governor, enraged, condemned me in a penalty of six piasters. The following month I again brought forward the same soldier, as being incapable of performing his duties; a commission of eight ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... quoted as authorities in the History of the Early Christian Church, are neither genuine nor authentic;" that he has pretty well resolved St. Cyprian into a purely mythic personage; and shown that all the letters in his works passed between imagined or imaginary correspondents,—we think we are justified in pronouncing his History of the Church of Rome a work calculated to excite the deepest interest in all who peruse it (and by the omission of all long quotations in the learned languages, it is adapted for the perusal of all), to exercise great influence ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... twice she forgot herself, and limped over to some heap to relieve an imaginary struggling babe or moaning sleeper. Morning came. She had dozed. She looked to see the rag-heaps stir; they lay as still as corpses. The alarm-bells had ceased. She looked to see a new gang enter the far door. She listened for the gathering buzzing of voices in the ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... as soon as the Hakim had seen that his wound was healing well, and the arrival of the newly injured was expected; but none appeared, for the simple reason that the fresh tale of wounded was only imaginary, the Baggara chief, as was afterwards learned, having been successful in obtaining a large amount of plunder and many camels in his first raid after leaving the prisoners at the wells. These he had despatched under a small escort while he made for another village which had been ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... the right to consider my imaginary feelings in such a matter between yourself and ...? And besides, you did not quite keep silent, you remember. You said something that led me to think that you had discharged Mr. Surface ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... difference be inconsiderable, this is not an imaginary distinction. Anatomical observations prove that the capacity of the stomach is not the same—experiments have ascertained that one of the species cannot fulfil all the functions shared among the workers of a hive. We painted those ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... upon his subject as a purely imaginary one? Surely he must have had some definite form before his mental vision; for although sculpture cannot, like painting, tell an elaborate story, still each figure must have a moral and a meaning, must show cause for its existence, and indicate a possible function, or the mind of the spectator ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... against the Scottish banks, which were so honourably acquitted in 1826, we shall confine our further observations to the effects which must necessarily follow upon a change in the established currency. In doing so, we shall conjure up no phantoms of imaginary distress, but merely state the consequences as they have already been explained to Parliament by men who are far better able to judge than ourselves, and even—with deference be it said—than our legislators, of the substitution ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... artistic contemplation of her open actions, choice of phrase, and by-play. Without communication or pre-arrangement, each knew that the other would not let slip the opportunity, and, after the first five minutes of languid general converse; they were mentally at work comparing notes with one another's imaginary conversations, while they said "Yes," and "Indeed," and "I think so," and appeared to belong to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... peopled its buildings with the imaginary forms of doleful creatures, and shunned the fatal precincts where once family love and social affections had flourished; where hearts, long mouldered to dust, had beaten with tender affection, where all the little circumstances which make up life—the trivial round, the common task—had gone on ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... oftener a dime. Even that seemed large enough to fill one pocket and buy a world of things. To think over all the single articles that it would purchase was to possess them for that moment, and I never had a truer ownership in my life than that which was enjoyed in these imaginary possessions. Strangely enough, I could so feel my own what I knew the dime or the quarter would purchase, that I was content not to spend it at all. Yet a day would come when some sudden impulse or appetite ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... into my ideas, I begin by this half-million spent for an interest which you must agree is very nebulous,—that of fitting me to succeed my father in the ministry of some imaginary country, the name of which is ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... sit brooding over this map for hours. He would draw his boundaries with a pair of compasses, construct imaginary roads from town to town, and reconstruct a fortress from the imposing ruins in the bed of the River Waag. Nay, he even ventured upon the audacious experiment of cutting through the mountain chain separating the River Hernad from the River Poprad, and uniting these two rivers (in a state of nature ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... entered the yard-gate and stopped in the moonlight and, from his window, Crittenden looked down and watched him. The boy was going through the manual of arms with his buggy-whip, at the command of an imaginary officer, whom, erect and martial, he was apparently looking straight in the eye. Plainly he was a private now. Suddenly he sprang forward and saluted; he was volunteering for some dangerous duty; and then he ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... yourself in the annoyance you complain of,—in how far it may be the due and inevitable chastisement of some former sin; how, finally, it may turn to your present profit, by giving you a keener insight into the evils of your own heart, and a more indulgent view of the often imaginary wrongs ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... still considered to be ruling in some mystical fashion over an imaginary country, might have welcomed this species of circular communication. It was certainly wasted on the inhabitants of Hispaniola, who were considerably more concerned with their own health and prosperity than with that of Ferdinand and Isabella, ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... while waiting for news from Helm's expedition. Every day had its nimble, yet wholly imaginary account of what had happened, skipping from mouth to mouth, and from cabin to cabin. The French folk ran hither and thither in the persistent rain, industriously improving the dramatic interest of each groundless report. Alice's disturbed imagination reveled in the kaleidoscopic ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... a lady, who had treated me with hospitable kindness, I three times mistook her; once for an eminent novelist, once for a distinguished philanthropist, and once for an admired female performer on the Banjo. I carried on conversations with her in each of these three imaginary characters,—and I ask you, is this the way to shine in Society? You may say, "Wear spectacles"—but they are unbecoming. As to an eye-glass, somehow it irritates people even more than mere blindness does. Besides, it is always dropping ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... solicitude during their journey was a fear lest the good old gentleman, in his wild abandonment of joy, should forget himself, and eat so many oranges as to endanger his precious existence. But, happily, their fears proved imaginary. No such catastrophe occurred to mar their felicity, and the little party safely reached the hospitable mansion of Parson Grey, and were received with every demonstration of joy and welcome by the expectant inmates. Aunt Rachel was in her highest cap, and soon commenced preparations for the bridal ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... not injured. She is as innocent and as pure as before Lord Alphingham addressed her. Percy, you are increasing this just displeasure by imaginary causes. I do not believe it to be love for him that occasions her present suffering; I think, from the conversations we have had, it is much more like remorse for the past, and bitter grief that the confidence of our parents must, spite of their excessive kindness, be for a time entirely ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... My imaginary peer would have been especially edified by the speech of Lord MILNER, whom a small but noisy section of the Press persists in describing as more Prussian than the Prussians. Not under-estimating the difficulties in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... themselves, impelled by a fatal concurrence of circumstances, but with so much candour and innocence, that we cannot do otherwise than pardon their fall and even fail to comprehend that they have fallen, we are completely amazed when we descend from this imaginary world to enter ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... grimaces expressive of disgust. He informed me that the slaves employed on the sugar plantations, when beaten by their masters, in order to obtain an indirect revenge, spat in the syrup, and committed other filthy things as an imaginary punishment upon the whites. I frequently saw Sambo in Toronto, and many times he expressed thankfulness to me for his deliverance. I may here mention that shortly after the arrival of Sambo on board the Rose of Milton at Erie, two suspicious-looking ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... these and other words. She pondered over them as she lay in her stifling little dark bedroom at night, or attended to her work by day, and she waged many an imaginary battle for the beautiful, idle woman who represented the grace of life ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... coordinated, received or rejected. As over-intensification of feeling and emotion goes on, the normal action of the idea centers is interfered with and the individual has superinduced emotional and intuitional states which are no longer guarded by reason and thought. The emotion senses a purely imaginary condition and the idea centers have no power to reduce it to truth. As time goes on, all power of association is lost and the individual passes along, the plaything of his subjective states of mind. As he becomes more and more intensified subjectively, he opens the deep psychic ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... much at the hands of both Burns and Clarke. The young lady had reason to complain, when the poet volunteered to sing the imaginary love of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the roots by the handful. Meantime their tongues were not idle. Ulrich boastfully told her that Pater Benedictus had seen his picture of her father, recognized it instantly, and muttered something over it. His mother's blood was strong in him; his imaginary world was a very different one from that of the narrow-minded ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... began to probe the darkness in every direction; with every glance he allowed his head to dart out a little. The movement was like a chicken pecking at imaginary grains of corn. But eventually he satisfied himself that his quarry lay in the forward end of the car; that he was prone; that he, Lefty, had accomplished nine-tenths of his purpose by entering the place of his ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... put the animal into a trot. In vain the man remonstrated, and explained that such a pace would injure the elephant on a journey; threats prevailed, and the beast was soon swinging along at full trot, forced on by the sharp driving-hook, with the delighted Perkes striding across its neck, riding, an imaginary race. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... pillaged. Everywhere the army of suffering (armee de souffrance), the name given by the revolters to themselves, made, appeal to violent passions; popular rhymes were circulated from hand to hand, in the name of General Nu-pieds (Barefoot), an imaginary personage whom nobody ever saw. Some of these verses ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... nature he was a queer mixture of rashness and timidity, but through his mother's anxiety on his behalf the latter quality was constantly being nursed at the expense of all tendency to action. And so, in order to keep the balance, he revelled in the imaginary or real deeds of men whose very life-breath was danger. The more the books gave him of what he craved, the less he thought of looking for it ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... roared, and the audience roared with him; the scene ending with his being carried off to Hell on the Devil's back. Much of the old custom in these two personages is amusingly set forth in Ben Jonson's Staple of News, where, at the end of each Act, we have some imaginary spectators commenting on the performance. At the end of the first Act, one of them expressing a fear that the play has no Fool in it, as the Vice was often called, Gossip Tattle delivers herself thus: "My husband, Timothy Tattle, God rest his poor soul! was wont to say ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... he'd produced, laid in space on an imaginary voyage. The script-writer had had one of the characters say that no constellation would be visible at a hundred light-years from the solar system. It would be rather like a canary trying to locate the window he'd escaped from, from a block away, with no memories of the ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... had long yearned for the advent of the ideal poet. Macpherson had presented him,—but as of an era far remote; latterly Beattie, in The Minstrel, had set forth his growth under the inspiration of Nature,—but in a purely imaginary tale. Suddenly Burns appeared: and the ideal seemed incarnated in the living present. The Scottish bard was introduced to the world by his first admirers as "a heaven-taught ploughman, of humble unlettered station," whose "simple strains, artless and unadorned, seem to flow ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... to his wife's "your," he laid a faint emphasis on the word "now," to imply that those women were always inventing some fresh imaginary ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... Salem, but he did not make any warm friends among them. His sister Louisa, who was a more vivacious person than Elizabeth, was his chief companion and comfort. Seated at the window with her on summer evenings, he elaborated the plan of an imaginary society, a club of two, called the "Pin Society," to which all fees, assessments and fines were paid in pins,—then made by hand and much more expensive than now. He constituted himself its secretary, and wrote imaginary reports ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... saw the Cross of Fire, etc. Scott says here: "Inspection of the provincial map of Perthshire, or any large map of Scotland, will trace the progress of the signal through the small district of lakes and mountains, which, in exercise of my imaginary chieftain, and which, at the period of my romance, was really occupied by a clan who claimed a descent from Alpine,—a clan the most unfortunate and most persecuted, but neither the least distinguished, least powerful, nor least brave of the tribes ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... as all the ignorant flock hither, and conclude that my lord must be minister again. Yesterday, three bishops came to do him homage; and who should be one of them but Dr. Thomas.(988) the only man mitred by Lord Granville! As I was not at all mortified with our fall, I am only diverted with this imaginary restoration. They little think how incapable my lord is of business again. He has this whole summer been troubled with bloody water upon the least motion; and to-day Ranby assured me, that he has a stone in his bladder, which he himself believed ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... wants his mind at that time may feel. A man who comes here shivering in one of those days which mark the severity of an English summer, may imagine that he is basking in an African sun and he may feel an imaginary warmth from the representation of a tropical climate. If, on the other hand, he is suffering under those exceptional miseries which one of the few hot days of an English summer is apt to create, he may imagine himself inhaling the fresh breezes ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Great. These are too long for general reading, but a single volume condensation of the Frederick gives a good idea of Carlyle's method of combining biography and history. Carlyle outlived all his contemporaries—a lonely old man, full of bitter remorse over imaginary neglect of his wife, and full also of despair over the democratic tendencies of the age, which he regarded as the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... however, had no charms for the travellers of these light and giddy-paced times, and Meg's inn became less and less frequented. What carried the evil to the uttermost was, that a fanciful lady of rank in the neighbourhood chanced to recover of some imaginary complaint by the use of a mineral well about a mile and a half from the village; a fashionable doctor was found to write an analysis of the healing waters, with a list of sundry cures; a speculative builder took land in feu, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... my resentment against a gentleman who personated me in a paper called 'Mr. Bickerstaff's Vindication.' I'm grieved to find the times should be so very wicked, that one impostor should set up to reform another, and that a false Bickerstaff should write against an imaginary Partridge. And I am heartily concerned that one who shows so much wit, such extreme civility, and writes such a gentlemanlike style, should prefix my name to writings in which there appears so little solidity and no knowledge of the Arabian philosophy. If ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... wizards and witches. Many a poor iniquitous old woman, from some mysterious hints of her power to tell fortunes, or to gratify the revengeful feelings of her neighbours, was put to a cruel death. More enlightened times have dissipated this illusion, and driven these imaginary imps of darkness ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to themselves and their own requests to God; betwixt his speaking to men, and their speaking to him; between their professing of him before men, and praying and confessing to him. All this is but forged, imaginary worship,—worship falsely so called, which the Father seeks not, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... author of "Zeluco," used to say that at least two-thirds of a physician's fees were for imaginary complaints. Among several instances of this nature, he mentions one of a clothier, who, after drinking the Bath waters, took it into his head to try Bristol hot wells. Previous, however, to his setting off, he requested his physician to favour him with a letter, stating his ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... hat trimmed with a gray feather. All Katy's dreams about the "saintly invalid" seemed to take wings and fly away. But the more she watched Cousin Helen the more she seemed to like her, and to feel as if she were nicer than the imaginary person which she and ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... that the name was "manufactured by the Arab story-tellers after the pattern of their own names (e.g. Nur al-Din or Noureddin, light of the faith, Tajeddin, crown of faith, etc.) for the use of their imaginary Christian female characters." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... seven miles distant from said station, where he built a cabin, cleared some land, which he put in corn next season, not apprehending any danger from the Indians, although he was considered a frontier settler. But this imaginary state of security did not last long; for one morning in August, 1782, having stepped a few paces from his door, he was suddenly surprised by an Indian appearing between him and the door, with tomahawk uplifted, almost within striking distance. ...
— Heroes and Hunters of the West • Anonymous
... 1695. But the most famous, though also least important, of Milton's early critics was the greatest of English scholars, Richard Bentley, who in 1732 issued an edition of Paradise Lost in which whole passages were relegated to the margin as the spurious interpolations of an imaginary editor. Such a book is, of course, merely a curiosity connecting two {251} great names. The real beginning in the work of editing Milton as a classic should be edited was made by Thomas Newton, afterwards Bishop of Bristol, who in 1749 brought out an edition of Paradise ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... show that he was still living. Never in his life had Providence given him a chance of playing so much mischief, and he was not going to be disobedient. They opened his shirt at the breast to give him air, they anxiously searched the side of his head for the wound, and washed away imaginary blood with very dirty pocket-handkerchiefs. They bathed his forehead with such profuseness that the water ran down his chest, whereat Speug expressed himself in low but stern tones, so Nestie advised them to stick to his head; and some of the smaller boys were ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... and fresh-water fishes, in greater detail than I suppose you have given to these lower animals. The point which has interested me most, but I do not say the most valuable point, is your protest against sinking imaginary continents in a quite reckless manner, as was stated by Forbes, followed, alas, by Hooker, and caricatured by Wollaston and [Andrew] Murray! By the way, the main impression that the latter author has left on my mind is ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... official act over, imaginary troubles cease and real ones begin. Oswald, grieved beyond expression to learn that Lisbeth is the daughter of Muenchhausen and Emerentia, is on the point of leaving the Farm immediately and Lisbeth forever; Lisbeth, having ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... into his imaginary paradise, and Nan into that domestic purgatory on a summer day,—the kitchen. There were vines about the windows, sunshine on the floor, and order everywhere; but it was haunted by a cooking-stove, that family altar whence such varied incense rises to appease the appetite of household ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a course of action, I am not one to turn back. Warner drove me; he was plainly disgusted, and he steered the livery horse as he would the Dragon Fly, feeling uneasily with his left foot for the clutch, and working his right elbow at an imaginary horn every time a dog got in ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... armour and movements, so that in course of time what appeared formidable to their imagination would become familiar by being often seen. For it was the opinion of Marius that mere strangeness adds many imaginary dangers to real danger; but that through familiarity even real dangers lose their terrors. Now the daily sight of the enemy not only took away somewhat of the first alarm, but the threats of the barbarians and their intolerable arrogance ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... did they question? None. What deliberation did they enter upon? None. What public did they call in? None. Thus, no public, no deliberation, no counsellors, no witnesses, judges who are not magistrates, a jury where none are sworn in, a tribunal which is not a tribunal, imaginary offences, invented penalties, the accused absent, the law absent; from all these things which resembled a dream there came forth a reality: ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... inevitable moment when Herbert will turn to me with, "I say, old fellow, you can't let me have that ten bob you touched me for the other day, can you? Hate to ask you, but I haven't got a sou ..." But I won't—no, I won't. I will let my imaginary debt mount up, I will let it increase even at the rate at which Herbert's has decreased, but I will not pay it. Herbert, of course, will always be kind to me about it, for he is a generous creature; and every time we go into action he will probably wring my hand and beg me ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... day, marveling at its wonderful pomp; then, after having reveled in the sight of a hurricane over the plain where the whirling sands made red, dry mists and death-bearing clouds, he would welcome the night with joy, for then fell the healthful freshness of the stars, and he listened to imaginary music in the skies. Then solitude taught him to unroll the treasures of dreams. He passed whole hours in remembering mere nothings, and comparing his ...
— A Passion in the Desert • Honore de Balzac
... hasty steps towards the bed; but, ere he reached it, he conquered the impulse that drew him thither, and, shrouding his face more deeply in his cloak, returned to his former position. The dying woman, in the mean time, had thrown herself back upon the bed; and her sobbing and wailing, imaginary as was ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thoughtfully, looking from the picture to his companion. "Well," he raised an imaginary glass high, ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... as have been experienced. No thought is ever entirely original. Even imagination cannot create anything absolutely unlike anything which ever existed. All the fabled beings who, according to the ancient mythology, filled the spaces and waters, were but human creatures adapted to imaginary environments. Faith in the existence of the soul after death could not have originated in the soul itself; to believe that would be to contradict the laws of thought. It seems to have been born with the soul, and yet not to be a part ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... almost as certainly and rapidly as the most absolutely governed nation. The numerous nobility, formerly so powerful, cheerfully accompanied their sovereign in his wars, or, on the civil changes of the state, courted the approving smile of royality. The crafty policy of the crown had created a new and imaginary good, of which it was the exclusive dispenser. New passions and new ideas of happiness supplanted at last the rude simplicity of republican virtue. Pride gave place to vanity, true liberty to titles of Honor, a needy independence ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... said. "There seem to be only a few men stationed at each of those points. Ostensibly, they're there as a safe-guard—in case the imaginary raiders attempt to break out ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz
... visit, among others at the old cabinet, which does not, at first view, strike him very strongly. But, on musing about his visit afterwards, he finds the recollection of the cabinet strangely identifying itself with his previous imaginary picture of the palatial mansion; so that at last he begins to conceive the mistake he has made. At this first [visit], he does not have a personal interview with the possessor of the estate; but, as the Hospitaller and himself go from room ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning. Should this apprehension of domestic danger, whether real or imaginary, extend and intensify itself until it shall pervade the masses of the Southern people, then disunion will become inevitable. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and has been implanted in the heart of man by his Creator for the wisest ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... called idiosyncrasies appear to be, and doubtless are, due to disordered intellect. But they should not be confounded with those which are inherent in the individual and real in character. Thus, they are frequently merely imaginary, there being no foundation for them except in the perverted mind of the subject; at other times they are induced by a morbid attention being directed continually to some one or more organs or functions. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... works of Gower have, however, come down to us; they are ballads and madrigals, for imaginary Iris,[613] Court poems, imitations of Petrarch,[614] the light verses of a well-taught man. He promises eternal service to his "douce dame"; his "douce dame" being no one in particular. He writes for others, and they are welcome to draw from his works: "The love-songs ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... 'Stonor's too content just to criticize, just to make his delicate pungent fun of the men who are grappling—very inadequately of course—still grappling with the big questions. There's a carrying power'—he jumped to his feet again and faced an imaginary audience—'some of Stonor's friends ought to point it out—there's a driving power in the poorest constructive policy that makes the most brilliant criticism ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... identity of Thyrza and the question whether the person addressed under this name really existed, or was an imaginary being, have given rise to much speculation and discussion of a more or ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Benshie, sometimes called the Shrieking Woman, is an imaginary being, supposed by the Irish to predict, by her shrieks and wails, the death of some member in the family over which she exercises a kind of supervision. To this fable Moore alludes ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... material, leather, straps, and dozens of items are administered with the same spirit of jealous guardianship by Day, Lashly, Oates and Meares, while our main storekeeper Bowers even affects to bemoan imaginary shortages. Such parsimony is the best guarantee that we are prepared to face ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... could give way to her feelings, talk with Matilda. But Mr. Pyecroft stretched out his legs, settled back, clasped his hands behind his head, and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. He had an intellectual interest in some imaginary escapade of the far-distant Mrs. De Peyster; but no more; and he was ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... to a question put by Lord Lytton to one of the forty, Sir William Richmond, K.C.B., is of value, as showing that the grievances of "the outsiders" were not imaginary:— ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... spring, there is very little muscle in the thick legs which look like pillars, and the back is far too broad. But Donatello is saved by his tact; he was ostensibly making the portrait of a lion; though he gives none of its features, he gives us all the chief leonine characteristics. He excelled in imaginary animals, like the Chinese artists who make admirable dragons, but ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... case as that of the imaginary physician who says: "You have heart trouble? Then take a quart of rhubarb decoction and stay twelve days in the hospital." Another patient says: "I have broken my leg." And the doctor: "All right, take a pint of rhubarb decoction and 17 days in the hospital." A third has inflammation of ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... attempt to interpret them. To consider these difficulties in detail would be to write a commentary on the first eleven chapters. Only some general remarks can here be offered. Some difficulties are imaginary, the inventions of special pleading. In these the commentaries of modern rationalists abound. They are to be set aside by fair interpretation. But other difficulties are real, and should not be denied or ignored by the honest expositor. If ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... crude talk in which the unwise deliver their judgments upon the conditions of success in the relations between men and women, has flowed with unprofitable copiousness as to this not very inviting case. People construct an imaginary Rousseau out of his writings, and then fetter their elevated, susceptible, sensitive, and humane creation, to the unfortunate woman who could never be taught that April is the month after March, or that twice four and a half are nine. Now we have already ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... method, and which pleased me best, was the way of bringing over the whole equations to one side, making it equal to nothing, and thereby forming his compound equations by the multiplication of simples, from thence also determining the number of roots, real or imaginary, in each. This artifice, on which all the rest of his doctrine is grounded, was that which most made me to set a value on him, presuming it had been properly his own; but afterwards I perceived that he had it from Hariot, whose Algebra ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... there that Mr Benjamin Gompertz (the author of the "Principles and Application of Imaginary Quantities") resided and the mother of Sir Moses breathed ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... little of real life, and less of love and marriage, up to the time she had met Rex! Her heroes had been imaginary ones, her ideas of love only girlish, romantic fancies. It was all very exciting and charming. She was very fond of handsome Rex, but she had yet to learn the depths of love which, sooner or later, brightens the ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... couldn't! You are too intensely absorbent, you are too rigidly individual. The flame in you would never consent even for an instant to be the flame in anybody else—any of those people who, for the purpose of the state, are called imaginary. Never!" ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... If he had been content with a small fee, he needed only to have told the truth; but his story was required to put a fair face on the amount of his request. And in what an amiable light it sets Elisha! He would not take for himself, but he has nothing to give to the two imaginary scholars, who have come from some of the schools of the prophets in the hill-country of Ephraim, thirsting for instruction. How sweet the picture, and what a hard heart that could refuse the request! Truly said Paul, 'The love of money is a root ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was moving with deliberate steps, the imaginary winding-sheet dragging slowly after him. There was an automatic precision in ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... have puzzled herself to explain. It was not to worship, not to repent of her heinous sin: she neither repented nor desired to repent. But it seemed pleasant to play at repentance and put on imaginary sackcloth. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... able to leave the port. I had been told that a sum had been placed to the credit of the Fram for our stay in Buenos Aires, but I neither saw nor heard anything of it while we were there, and it was no doubt somewhat imaginary. ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... killed, if they ventured out, by the fierce coast tribes. The boys nodded, to show that they understood what he wished to say but, pointing to the water a few yards from shore, went through the action of fishing; then, burdening themselves with imaginary fish, they pointed to the village, and showed that they ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... shape of Festus. She became conscious of his approach, and moved more quickly. He moved more quickly still, and overtook her. She turned as if in answer to a call from him, and he walked on beside her, till they were out of sight. The old man then played upon an imaginary fiddle for about half a minute; and, suddenly discontinuing these signs of pleasure, went ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... you velly nice apple tart. Miss Betty." The Chinese cook flourished his rolling pin with one hand and swung his apron viciously with the other as he held open the screen door and swept out some imaginary flies. ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... upon that," said Mr Rugg, preparing to put on the rim and the head. The band was ready, too; and he turned the wheel and pulled out an imaginary thread with such gravity that all laughed. "Well, what do you think of it, girls?" he asked after a little time. "Will you ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... the first three voyages is, he angrily declares, tinctured by his poisonous malice and envy, the result of twelve years of exile. He is positive of the identity of the vicious person behind the mask of the imaginary memoirist: ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... the digestive juices or checks them altogether. In a similar way, perhaps, we shall some day have explained to us the unquestioned fact that mothers who maintain a happy disposition nurse their babies efficiently, while those who are inclined to worry often experience real or imaginary ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... do use the center of the earth as the place from which to observe these celestial bodies and, in imagination, transfer our eye there. Then we will find projected on the celestial sphere not only the heavenly bodies but the imaginary points and circles of the earth's surface. Parallels of latitude, meridians of longitude, the equator, etc., will have the same imaginary position on the celestial sphere that they have on the earth. Your actual position ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... the circus band stopped short. Then came a fanfare of trumpets, and far down the line from behind the crimson curtains near to the bandstand, a dignified figure all in white, emerged and tripped along the grassy way, halting now and then to gaze fixedly at some imaginary object just above the heads of those on the upper row of seats, the very drollery of which ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... Madame de la Mesangere.—This lady was the daughter of Madame de la Sabliere.—Translator. She was the lady termed La Marquise with whom Fontenelle sustained his imaginary "conversation" in the "Plurality of Worlds," a book which became very popular both in France and England. [44] Dido's faithless guest.—Aeneas, with whom Dido, according to Virgil and Ovid, was in love, but who loved not, and ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... rider. This is the establishment of a University." Alluding to certain published letters which revived old controversies, he begged his old friend not to allow his peace of mind to be shaken. "It would be strange indeed, if, at our years, we were to go back an age to hunt up imaginary or forgotten facts, to disturb the repose of affections so sweetening to the ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... those few who knew and survive him, liked to tell how Mr. Fuller used to say, that when he was in the pulpit, and saw a buirdly man come along the passage, he would instinctively draw himself up, measure his imaginary antagonist, and forecast how he would deal with him, his hands meanwhile condensing into fists, and tending to "square." He must have been a hard hitter if he boxed as he preached—what "The Fancy" would ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... audience experiences at the same time the same emotions, and if these emotions are not at once transformed into acts, it is because the most unconscious spectator cannot ignore that he is the victim of illusions, and that he has laughed or wept over imaginary adventures. Sometimes, however, the sentiments suggested by the images are so strong that they tend, like habitual suggestions, to transform themselves into acts. The story has often been told of the manager of a popular ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... future with Joe always around a corner, watching her, obsessed her. She felt aggrieved, insulted. She even shed a tear or two, very surreptitiously; and then, being human and much upset, and the cat startling her by its sudden return and selfish advances, she shooed it off the veranda and set an imaginary dog after it. Whereupon, feeling somewhat better, she went in and locked the balcony ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... with my finger, in the sand, of a mule in the water; while I imitated by pantomime the struggles of the drowning. I then pointed to myself; and, using my arms as in swimming, shook my head and my finger to signify that I could not swim. I worked an imaginary paddle, and made him understand that I wanted him to paddle me across the river. Still he remained unmoved; till finally I used one argument which interested him more than all the rest of my story. I untied a part of the shirt round one foot and ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... her, Nature triumphantly asserted itself, and she who wept passionately from the bitter realisation of her own accumulated wrongs, was wildly applauded as the queen of actresses, who so successfully simulated imaginary woes. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Wycherley gently remonstrates with his young admirer for excessive adulation; he omitted from his own letters the phrase which had provoked the remonstrance; and, with more daring falsification, he manufactured an imaginary letter to Wycherley out of a letter really addressed to his friend Caryll. In this letter Pope had himself addressed to Caryll a remonstrance similar to that which he had received from Wycherley. When published as a letter to Wycherley, it gives the impression that Pope, at the age of seventeen, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Incidents, they are generally suited to our Notions of the Things and Persons described, and tempered with a due Measure of Probability. I must only make an Exception to the Limbo of Vanity, with his Episode of Sin and Death, and some of the imaginary Persons in his Chaos. These Passages are astonishing, but not credible; the Reader cannot so far impose upon himself as to see a Possibility in them; they are the Description of Dreams and Shadows, not of Things or Persons. I know that many Criticks look upon the Stories of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... some excitement in Russian society. A more appropriate, or at any rate explanatory title, would have been the Tempter. It is descriptive of the first manifestation of doubt and cynicism in his youthful mind, allegorically as the visits of a "demon." Russian society was moved to embody this imaginary demon in the person of a certain friend of Pushkin's. This must not be confounded with Lermontoff's poem bearing the same title upon which Rubinstein's new opera, "Il ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... He whom ambition, or hope of personal advantage, has led to disturb the peace of a well-ordered government, let him fall a victim to the laws; but surely youth, misled by the wild visions of chivalry and imaginary loyalty, may plead ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... feelings, showing that a change was coming over me, and exhibiting towards the imaginary persons before me the decided look of the inflexible commander, who was determined and ready to order them away to execution. Looking and acting as if the tender and forgiving feelings of the father had again got the ascendency, ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... painting of these scenes from real life, he passed gradually to the painting of things purely imaginary—to those visible only to ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... wait upon the Governor. Afterwards people recalled, with a disposition to connect Seymour with this master-stroke in politics, that he had never declined by letter, and that the reasons given, like the illness that kept him from facing the convention, were largely imaginary. "That crowd saw how beautifully they were done," said Depew, then secretary of state at Albany, "while Dean Richmond's language was ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... unwarily, to his own ruin, become the instrument of Warwick's vengeance, and had thrown himself entirely in the power of his most inveterate enemies; that the mortal injuries which the one royal family had suffered from the other were now past all forgiveness, and no imaginary union of interests could ever suffice to obliterate them; that, even if the leaders were willing to forget past offences, the animosity of their adherents would prevent a sincere coalition of parties, and would, in spite of all temporary ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... follows:—Taking an imaginary line drawn from the Areonal to Mars as the base line of an isosceles triangle, we were moving along the left side of the triangle, and Mars was moving in a slightly curved line along the right side. Our paths were therefore converging, and ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... herself in his place. Her imagination is more likely to be over-active than too sluggish. One of the most popular classes of the "Society for the Encouragement of Study at Home" is that devoted to imaginary travels in Europe. She is wonderfully adaptable, and makes herself at ease in an entirely strange milieu almost before the transition is complete. Both M. Blouet and M. Bourget notice this, and claim ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... my thoughts sometimes found refuge from severer studies among my friends in Ireland. I fancied strange revolutions at home; but I find it was the rapidity of my own motion that gave an imaginary one to objects really at rest. No alterations there. Some friends, he tells me, are still lean, but very rich; others very fat, but still very poor. Nay, all the news I hear of you is, that you sally out in visits among the neighbors, and sometimes make a migration from the blue ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... letter, you tell me, is confidential. I always keep the secrets of my friends when I can do it honestly, though I confess I do not like to be encumbered with them. In this instance I will be your confidant. But let me ask you, can a difference between Mr. ———— and me, either real or imaginary, be of any consequence to the world? I think not. Tories, you say, triumph. They may make sport of it; but indeed, my friend, it is too unimportant a matter for a sensible Whig to weep and break his heart ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... many of the absurd, perverse, unkind, unpleasant things which people do are not knavish at all—they are silly, selfish little diplomacies, guileless obedience to conventions, unreasonable deference to imaginary authority. People don't mean any harm by such tricks—they are the subterfuges of weakness: but when you come upon real cynical deliberate knavishness—that is different. There's nothing amusing ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... languish, and being dead there was an end of them; but the caged canaries continuing with us, cannot be dismissed from the mind with the same convenient ease. After all, I begin to think that my imaginary reforms, if carried out, would not quite content me. The "compunctious visitings" would continue still. I look out of the window and see a sparrow on a neighbouring tree, loudly chirruping. And as I listen, trying to find comfort by thinking ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... resolute cure. The magistrates interdicted the poets and players not only from using real names but from representing real subjects. This admirable refinement produced correspondent effects: comedy assumed a new character, and acquired a new name. The poets being obliged to bring imaginary subjects and fictitious names upon the stage, the safety of individuals from those butcher slanderers was secured, and that safety begat tranquillity—thus the theatre was gradually purified and enriched; ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... same materials, it must be expected they will supply from invention the want of intelligence; and that under the title of "The Life of Savage," they will publish only a novel, filled with romantick adventures, and imaginary amours. You may therefore, perhaps, gratify the lovers of truth and wit, by giving me leave to inform them in your Magazine, that my account will be published in 8vo. by Mr. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... pictures of the novelist. Fair, young girls, how could you linger over the unreal when passing through such scenes of God's own work? How could you shut out that gorgeous sunset, turn from all the pure and heavenly feelings such scenes must awaken, to sympathize with imaginary beings ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... young college men are deterred from becoming Dry Agents by thinking of the comparative scantiness of the monetary rewards. This difficulty is only an imaginary one—for, luckily, as soon as a man's code of honor has been elevated to the extent that it permits him to take up a career of pussy-footing there is generally eliminated at the same time any objection ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... why she shouldn't be," says the professor calmly—is there a faint suspicion of hauteur in his tone? "As we are on the subject of myself, I may as well tell you that my brother is Sir Hastings Curzon, of whom"—he turns back as if to take up some imaginary article from the floor—"you ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... the 30th past, you and your Correspondent are very severe on a sort of Men, whom you call Male Coquets; but without any other Reason, in my Apprehension, than that of paying a shallow Compliment to the fair Sex, by accusing some Men of imaginary Faults, that the Women may not seem to be the more faulty Sex; though at the same time you suppose there are some so weak as to be imposed upon by fine Things and false Addresses. I cant persuade my self that your Design is to debar the Sexes the Benefit of each others Conversation ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... disturbed till the Confederates came in close proximity. Then was repeated the alarm and consternation of two years before, fears for the safety of the capital being magnified by the confusion and discord existing among the different generals in Washington and Baltimore; and the imaginary dangers vanished only with the appearance of General Wright, who, with the Sixth Corps and one division of the Nineteenth Corps, pushed out to attack Early as soon as he could get his arriving troops in hand, but under circumstances that precluded celerity ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... plain ends; the hillsides rise and the river-bottoms dwindle away in the distance: such is the feeling that one experiences as he climbs these vine-clad slopes from either the Rhone, the Loire, or the Seine valleys, and here it is that the imaginary line is drawn between the vins ordinaires and the vins ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... accompanied by the powerful magnetism of his voice and presence, Darrell seemed to see the Oriental festival which he had depicted and to feel a soothing influence from the very simplicity and beauty of the imaginary scene. ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... the most valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality, one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they are more entertaining than Gil Blas, or Monte Cristo, or any of the imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been written in imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved life passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... situation it is most probable beforehand that he would possess. If my premises are right and my deductions legitimate, it follows that there can be no poetic medium between the swains of Theocritus and those of an imaginary golden age. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... very true," consented the Chamberlain, laughing softly. "I take it not amiss myself if it's proffered in the right way—which is to say, for the qualities I know I have, and not for the imaginary ones. As I was saying, give me the simple heart and honesty; they're not very rife in ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... some of the conditions that the progressive minds of the world are trying to solve and remedy. It is only a question of how much longer the majority of people will pay homage to an imaginary God for imaginary benefits in an imaginary life ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... structure is then hollowed out, forms a simple tube, detaches from its place of origin, and henceforth lies freely in the cardiac cavity. Presently the tube bends into the shape of an S, and turns spirally on an imaginary axis in such a way that the hind part comes to lie on the dorsal surface of the fore part. The united vitelline veins open into the posterior end. From the anterior end spring ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... excuse for their careful lubricities, the team could always conjure up an enticing special feature from an imaginary foreign correspondent, aimed direct at the family circle and warning against the "Moral Pitfalls of Paris," or the "Vampires of High Life in Vienna." The invariable rule was that all sex-stuff must have a ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... being so, can't you see the rest? My life ended in a way when the dream of my life ended. I attach no importance to living for itself, and if anything final happened to me it wouldn't leave a blank anywhere. You're different. In sober honesty you oughtn't to run into any needless danger—real or imaginary. I'm thinking of Mary only ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... delicate nerves that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have often troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the nature of their affliction, and had even proved it by experiments upon themselves. "As to an imaginary cry," said I, "do but listen for a moment to the wind in this unnatural valley while we speak so low, and to the wild harp it makes of ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... better known, perhaps, than any other in the world, and one with which almost every human being who can write is perfectly familiar. Of course it will be understood that the quantities given above are altogether imaginary. It is impossible to remember the exact figures after so many years, but they are inserted to show the ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... not be allowed to "muffle up his throat," and keep his notes for some imaginary and far-off spring. He has not the excuse of the mavis. He must give us more of his own "clear fluting." Let him, with that keen, kindly and thoughtful eye, look from his retreat, as Cowper did, upon the restless, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the entrance with laborious exaggeration of effect, dragging one foot after another, clutching at the palings of an imaginary fence, while pitching his voice at a feeble ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... a bunch. Oh, you poor child! Mrs. Slater, she doesn't know how!" Miss Forsythe was deeply moved and illustrated by picking imaginary daisies on the porch. Ardelia's quick eye followed her gestures, and stooping, she scooped the heads from three daisies and started back ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... sensations become associated with verbal images in the mind, and finally the excitation of the verbal images results also in the revival of the original sensation. There is perhaps no one of us who has not seen wholly imaginary moving shadows or flashing lights in the dark. Such cases are not good illustrations of the point, possibly, but most of us can at will hear a connected succession of notes with which we have familiarized ourselves. ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... the world by the friends and the opponents of the respective parties. It is only necessary to state here, that Colonel Burr, on that occasion, was ranked among the supporters of Lee, and had himself real or imaginary cause of complaint against ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... to a sense of its rights and dignity, to emancipate it from superstition, from its subjection to the clergy, and its fear of unseen powers, to withdraw it from the contemplation of the stars or an imaginary heaven after death, and fix it on the great and glorious work ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... contemplation of her open actions, choice of phrase, and by-play. Without communication or pre-arrangement, each knew that the other would not let slip the opportunity, and, after the first five minutes of languid general converse; they were mentally at work comparing notes with one another's imaginary conversations, while they said "Yes," and "Indeed," and "I think so," and appeared to belong to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... exclaimed Dot, clapping his hands. The snug picture had fascinated his childish fancy; Allan's fireside had obscured the lights of paradise. From this time this imaginary home of Allan's became his favorite castle in the air. When we were together he would often talk of it as though it were reality. We had planted the garden and furnished the parlor a dozen times over before the year was out; and so strong is a settled imagination ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... [Footnote: Id., pt. ii. pp. 177, 552.] From that moment McClellan could have marched anywhere. He could have marched to Fredericksburg and joined Pope, and Halleck could have met them with Burnside's troops. But the vast imaginary army of the Confederacy paralyzed everything, and the ponderous task of moving the Army of the Potomac and its enormous material by water to Washington went on. The lifeless and deliberate way in which it went on made it the 1st of September when ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... he was repaid for the inconvenience by the feeling of virtue derived from the delay. He was relieved that he did not have to cough any more, or to invent any more tales of his interviews with the imaginary lung-specialist. Sometimes he had guilty feelings because of all the lying he had had to do; but he told himself that it was for Henriette's sake. She loved him as much as he loved her. She would have suffered needless agonies had she known the truth; she would never have got over it—so it would ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... classes which claimed an exclusive right to direct men's minds. As for the double nature of the book, we have the words of two of the men most concerned in its preparation. First there is an anecdote by Voltaire, certainly inaccurate, probably quite imaginary, but setting forth most clearly one cause of the ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... the huge lamp, rubbed an imaginary spot off the glistening glass, turned up the wick and touched it with the ready match. Then he came forth and eyed the westering sun. That monarch, riding through the longest day of the year, was reluctant to give up his power; but David was patient. ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... authority, both among Catholics and Protestants. Even more inflexible was Remigius, criminal judge in Lorraine. On the title-page of his manual he boasts that within fifteen years he had sent nine hundred persons to death for this imaginary crime.(256) ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... and change of occupation is conducive to his happiness. Nothing is quite so restful to him as to do something with his hands; therefore, with his blocks he builds a house, fences it around with his splints, and strews the ground with imaginary trees and animals. He lives in this nursery play, and in it he ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... be a sudden draught," said Professor Biggleswade. "But as both window and door are shut, it could only be imaginary." ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... bottomless chasm. Every indentation, every acclivity that casts a shadow, gives the impression of that soundless depth. The bottom of the sea seems loopholed with cavities that pierce the solid globe and the dark abysses of space beyond. The diver is surrounded by pitfalls, real and imaginary. There is no graduation. The shallow concave of a hand-basin is as the shadow ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... peasants are rough, untutored, wild and constantly angry, hating everybody and everything without understanding why. They are suspicious and materialistic, having no sacred ideals. Russian intelligents live among imaginary ideals without realities. They have a strong capacity for criticising everything but they lack creative power. Also they have no will power, only the capacity for talking and talking. With the peasants, they cannot like anything or anybody. Their love and feelings are imaginary. Their thoughts and ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... Bristol to be reposted to ——.' That was the end of it. I had paid ten francs for learning the agreeable fact that I had been duped,—for the satisfaction of knowing that for two years and a half I had been wasting my sympathy and even tears on a set of purely imaginary characters and the little intrigante ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the door he not only drew back a foot to let her pass. He drew his whole body back, bowed for all the world like any shop-walker letting out a customer, even thrust out a hand, as by remembered instinct and as if to pull open an imaginary swing-door for a departing customer of rank. In short, for a moment the man reverted to his past—to Farrell of the Tottenham Court Road. . . . Nor was this all. As she went by him he slewed about ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nights employs! Thus tunes her soul to tender nuptial joys! And when the cruel morning calls to bed, And on her pillow lays her aching head, With the dear images her dreams are crown'd, The die spins lovely, or the cards go round; Imaginary ruin charms her still; Her happy lord is cuckol'd by spadille: And if she's brought to bed, 'tis ten to one, He marks the forehead of her darling son. O scene of horror, and of wild despair, Why is the rich Atrides' splended heir Constrain'd to quit his ancient lordly seat, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... what should the tale be about? After cogitating at my lodging, with bread and water before me, I concluded that I would write an entirely fictitious narrative called "The Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell, the Great Traveller." This Joseph Sell was an imaginary personage who had come ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... rather too suddenly, for, seeing the yacht had reached home, Mr. Farrell beamed. Complacently his wife smoothed an imaginary wrinkle ...
— The Log of The "Jolly Polly" • Richard Harding Davis
... still pointed out where the future engineers made their first essays in modelling. The boys found the clay for their engines in the adjoining bog, and the hemlocks which grew about supplied them with imaginary steam-pipes. They even proceeded to make a miniature winding-machine in connexion with their engine, and the apparatus was erected upon a bench in front of the Thirlwalls' cottage. The corves were made out of hollowed corks; the ropes were supplied by twine; and a few bits ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... the positions in which they were observed by the early astronomers, because the revolving earth is rocking like a top, with the result that the pole does not always keep pointing at the same spot in the heavens. Each year the meeting-place of the imaginary lines of the ecliptic and equator is moving westward at the rate of about fifty seconds. In time—ages hence—the pole will circle round to the point it spun at when the constellations were named by the Babylonians. It is by calculating ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... condemnation. The recent Congressional elections have furnished a direct and trustworthy test of the advance thus far made in the practical establishment of the right of suffrage secured by the Constitution to the liberated race in the Southern States. All disturbing influences, real or imaginary, had been removed from all ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... than in our estimations of ourselves. We are all of us sharp-sighted enough to the faults of others but we are all blind by nature to our own faults. Our blindness to our own shortcomings is oftentimes little short of ludicrous. We have a strange power of exaggerating our imaginary virtues and losing sight utterly of our defects. The longer and more thoroughly one studies human nature, the more clearly will he see how hopeless is the task of convincing other men of sin. We cannot ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... ironmaster turning his face to the smoke and fires, and the trooper to the green country. Early in the afternoon the subdued sound of his heavy military trot is heard on the turf in the avenue as he rides on with imaginary clank and jingle of accoutrements ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... external objects. The sole aim of our remarks has, however, been to prove that internal experience in general is possible only through external experience in general. Whether this or that supposed experience be purely imaginary must be discovered from its particular determinations and by comparing these with the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... find him—" He went through another pantomime with the fingers of his right hand, spreading them out and clenching them together like the closing of a fan, clutching out with them somewhat in the manner of the wings of a wind-mill sweeping imaginary objects toward itself with practised skill. Ben-Zayb responded with another pantomime, opening his eyes wide, arching his eyebrows and sucking in his breath eagerly as though nutritious ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... Let us take an imaginary trip through this region, starting on our wanderings from the Rhine, where it breaks through the vine-clad slate mountains of the Westerwald and the Eifel. A short distance above the mouth of the Ahr we leave its banks, turning to the west, and entering the mountains at the village of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... the Duncan Campbell, of whom memoirs were written by Defoe, a real or an imaginary person? If the former, where can one find any authentic account ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.19 • Various
... a superior is it ours to question, in imaginary wisdom, as is the manner of the world, the propriety of the order. As an archangel, commissioned by the Supreme Intelligence to execute his decrees, and pour pestilence or famine upon a land devoted to destruction for its sins, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... as to the nationality. It reads as {...}, or 'Ashenel, and no doubt designates the owner. No. 5 is beautifully engraved on a chalcedony. It represents a stag attacked by a griffin, which has jumped suddenly on its back. The drawing is excellent, both of the real and of the imaginary animal, and leaves nothing to be desired. The inscription, which occupies the upper part of the field to the right, is in Cyprian characters, and shows that the gem was the signet of ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... dismounted and watered at the stream, Mrs. Folsom's heart was gladdened by his confident and joyous bearing. Twice, thrice he had seen Red Cloud and all his braves, and there was nothing, said he, to worry about. "Ugly, of course they are; got some imaginary grievances and talk big about the warpath. Why, what show would those fellows have with their old squirrel rifles and gas-pipe Springfields against our new breech-loaders? They know it as well as we do. ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... characteristic of my profession. It is not ours, my lord, to live in air-built castles, and to deal in imaginary hypotheses. On the contrary, we are continually talking of the weakness and the frailty of humanity. Does any man impeach one of our body of bribery and corruption? We confess that these practices may seem to run counter with the fine-spun systems of morality; ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... The imaginary progress of the circuit-rider was brought to a stop by the arrival of the last course of the luncheon. From a pretty glass dish uprose a wondrous structure. Within an encircling wall of delicate, candied tracery was heaped a little ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... Collins and Walsingham, two characters in The Onyx Ring, are partly drawn, not very felicitously, from Carlyle and Goethe. In his Life of Sterling, Carlyle says of the story: "A tale still worth reading, in which, among the imaginary characters, various friends of Sterling's are shadowed forth not always in the truest manner." It is reprinted in the second volume of Sterling's Essays and Tales, edited by ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... followed by a further elaboration of Canada's vast resources, etc., etc.). Canada's future was unclouded by the political complications and entanglements of the older countries in Europe. For one hundred years they had been at peace with the Republic south of that imaginary line which delimited the boundaries, but which did not divide the hearts of these two peoples (great applause). For his part, while he rejoiced in the greatness of the British Empire he believed that Canada's first duty was to herself, to the developing ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... of quartz-stone, and the pain they occasion is always felt. Another sorcerer, however, can draw them out, and the pieces of stone pretended to be thus obtained are kept as great curiosities. Perhaps the clearest ideas of the imaginary powers of these sorcerers, and of the dread in which they are held, will be found from the following account, obtained from a native with the utmost difficulty, (for the subject is never willingly mentioned,) and reported ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... remarks on historical writing, from which it appeared that Mr. Wordsworth has small value for anything but contemporary history. He laments that Dr. Arnold should have spent so much of his time and powers in gathering up and putting into imaginary shape the scattered fragments of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... caterpillar tread is curved up in the arc of a huge circle at the front which gives the vehicle its wonderful tractive powers. This large curvature acts as a huge wheel with a tremendously long leverage equal to the radius of the circlet or the spokes of the imaginary wheel of the same diameter. Only that portion of the assumed wheel which would come in contact with the ground acts as the lever, and it is just this portion that is reproduced in the front end ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... for this lady's principal delight was, to assist the needy, and her only earthly or worldly caprice, that of restoring the Tower and its environs, and furnishing, to what she conceived had been its state, in the, perhaps, imaginary days of the exaltation ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... April 18, 1862, my brigade, then stationed at Roanoke Island, embarked upon the steamer Ocean Wave for an expedition up the Elizabeth River, the object of which was to destroy the locks of the Dismal Swamp canal in order to prevent several imaginary iron-clads from ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... I remember of imaginative metaphor, is Shakespeare's moonlight 'sleeping' on a bank; but half his poetry may be said to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common coin of discourse. Of imaginary creatures, none out of the pale of mythology and the East are equal, perhaps, in point of invention, to Shakespeare's Ariel and Caliban; though poetry may grudge to prose the discovery of a Winged Woman, especially ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... mixed with a dozen others; to all appearance they are similar cards. The subject, being awakened, is requested to look over the packet, and does so without knowing the reason of the request, but when he perceives the card on which the portrait was suggested, he at once recognizes the imaginary portrait. It is probable that some insignificant mark has, owing to his visual hyperacuity, fixed the image in ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... half-serious. The speaker, in her imaginary conversation, gives her own history and that of the man she thinks she might have loved. The story is on the "Maud Muller" motive, but with less of sentimentality. The setting suggests the life of art students in Paris, or in some Italian city. The poem is a plea for the freedom of the ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... that the blamed raft was not long enough; that is, the upper part of my body being heavier, it took more door to support it, so that my feet were projecting beyond the lower edge, and every second or so the nibbling of some imaginary shark sent them flying up into the air in undignified gymnastics. The consoling part of it was that Miller was paying no notice. He still sat up, rigid, in his canoe, clutching the sides stiffly and looking neither to right nor left. From where ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... second Lord Lyttelton, who died in 1779, was the real substance of the shadow of Junius, hitherto sought in vain. That this Lord Lyttelton was fully competent to the task, I do not doubt; and that there are many points in his character which may well be reconciled with the knowledge we possess of the imaginary Junius, I also admit—but this is all. The author of the review has wholly failed, in my opinion, to prove his case and the remark he makes on Mr. Britton's theory (as to Col. Barre) may equally well apply to his own, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... his ends, whatever they may be at the moment. John Dunn, on the other hand, is plotting to succeed Cetywayo, and so on ad infinitum. Such is the state of affairs with which our unfortunate Resident has to contend. Invested with large imaginary powers, he has in reality nothing but his personal influence and his own wits to help him. He has no white man to assist him, but living alone in a broken-down tent and some mud huts built by his son's hands (for the Government have never kept their promise to ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... You have heard the story of the lives of the great artists. They have been shown to you in their weakness and in their strength. The times and manners amid which they lived have been painted for you in more or less imaginary colors. I propose something ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
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