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More "Imaginative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intensity of passion, is a splendid imaginative quality. Few writers of English prose have such command of figurative expression. It must be said, however, that Burke was not entirely free from the faults which generally accompany an excessive use of figures. Like other great masters of a decorative style, he frequently becomes pompous ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... know now, was Bruce Cummings) never went to France, for he was dying, though he did not know it, when he presented himself for medical examination. But it is clear that though secluded from the turmoil in a country cottage, paralyzed, and his trunk already dead, Barbellion's sensitive mind and imaginative sympathy knew more of what was happening to his fellows in France, and what it meant for us all, than the combined Cabinet in Downing Street. That spark of dying light was aware when the luminaries on whom we depended were blind and ignorant. In his ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... vegetation, grassy plains, and deserts). The effect produced by this small volume has doubtlessly been more powerfully manifested in the influence it has exercised on the sensitive minds of the young, whose imaginative faculties are so strongly manifested, than by means of any thing which it could itself impart. In the work on the Cosmos on which I am now engaged, I have endeavored to show, as in that entitled 'Ansichten der Natur', that ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... down to imagination, arises mainly from their want of it. You writers of novels supply that defect for them by a pictorial style, by an infinity of minute details, and petty aids to realizing, all which an imaginative reader can do for himself on reading a bare narrative of sterling facts ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... mind, rather thoughtful than imaginative, found no idol like "Divine Philosophy." It delighted to plunge itself into the mazes of metaphysical investigation; to trace the springs of the intellect; to connect the arcana of the universe; to descend into the darkest caverns, or ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... been efficiently worked, maintained or developed. I will not harrow my readers with a description of its condition. One little quotation from the summing up in my report will suffice to indicate the state of affairs, and, to the imaginative mind, present a picture of the whole. "Everything has for years past been allowed to run down; the direction and management have been characterised by extreme parsimony; and the disabled condition of the engines is undoubtedly due to lack of proper upkeep, ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... is none the less unnatural. The characters are comparatively commonplace, the women especially being mere shadows; the motion is slow; and the inevitable passages of fine writing are, as the extolled soliloquy of Lioni, rather rhetorical than imaginative. The speeches of the Doge are solemn, but prolix, if not ostentatious, and—perhaps the vital defect—his cause fails to enlist our sympathies. Artistically, this play was Byron's most elaborate attempt to revive the unities and other restrictions of the severe ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... interesting story of Alexander Alane, or Alesius. Principal Lorimer, in his 'Scottish Reformation,' has thrown further light on him. And Dr Merle D'Aubigne, who appears to have minutely examined most of his tracts and commentaries, has wrought into his graphic but imaginative narrative much of the information which they have been the chief means of handing down to us. It was after his expatriation that he received from Melanchthon the name of Alesius, ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... Scotch painter, born in Edinburgh; he was an artist of great imaginative power, and excelled in the weird; his best picture, exhibited in 1828, was "The Hopes of Early Genius Dispelled by Death," though his first achievements in art were his illustrations of the "Ancient ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... had during the above conversation lighted a short pipe, and devoted himself with considerable assiduity to a pewter pot—which he looked at with a technical eye, as if mentally casting it into crown pieces,—now nodded assent. He was not of an imaginative or philosophic turn, like Mr. Blinks. He saw none of the sentiment of his business, but pursued it on a system of matter of fact, because he profited by it. This difference between the producer and the middle-man may be ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... indefatigable social observer, an unwearied philanthropist, and the most powerful describer of nature that perhaps ever undertook to portray her great and glorious features. It is this extraordinary combination of qualities that render his works so surprising and valuable. The intellectual and imaginative powers rarely coexist in remarkable vigour in the same individual; but when they do, they produce the utmost triumphs of the human mind. Leonardo da Vinci, Johnson, Burke, and Humboldt, do not resemble single men, how great soever, but rather clusters of separate ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... place his qualities thus:—Love of approbation sixteen. Benevolence fourteen. Combativeness fourteen. Adhesiveness two. Amativeness is not yet of course fully developed, but I expect will be prodeegiously strong. The imaginative and reflective organs are very large—those, of calculation weak. He may make a poet or a painter, or you may make a sojer of him, though worse men than him's good enough for that—but a bad merchant, a lazy lawyer, and a miserable mathematician. He has wit and conscientiousness, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... still a mere student, and not recovered from that fine intoxication in which classical literature drenches a young imaginative soul, and that at last we find him 'resting in the hopes of an eternal day.' 'Lochleven' is the spent echo of the 'Seasons,' although, as we said before, its descriptions possess considerable merit. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Oh, I should say most imaginative and cultivated young women feel like that. I wouldnt give a rap for one who didnt. Shakespear pointed out long ago that a woman wanted a Sunday husband as well as a weekday one. But, as usual, he didnt follow ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... as easy to play with dollars as with dimes—just as easy to write an order for a thousand as for ten. And it's easier to do business with big men. They're more imaginative, quicker to grasp." ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... more suitable in this sense for the visionary than that of life in other worlds. It has always had an attraction for imaginative minds, simply because it is enwrapped in so profound a mystery; and there has been little to restrain the fancy, because so little is certainly known of the physical condition of other worlds. Recently, indeed, a somewhat sudden and severe check has been placed on the ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... had almost forgotten him. Even his old colleagues at the hospital scarcely recognized him, and when they did stop to chat after the meeting, they examined him indifferently, as if they were making notes. Lindsay had probably spread his story, with some imaginative details. According to the popular tale Sommers had been "thrown down" by Miss Hitchcock because he had mixed himself up with a married woman. Then he had been discharged by Lindsay for the same reason, and had sunk, had run away with the woman, and had come ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... sign was sufficient to chase away the imaginative notions that had beset Pen's awakening. His hand went at once to the water-bottle slung to his side, and, as he held the mouth to his comrade's lips and forgot the pain he suffered in his strained and stiffening joints, ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... formed disguised allegorical poems. Here the instructive function of the first poets is related to the enlarging of the reader's imagination, so that Ogilvie's rather shrewd defense of lyric poetry is based upon the civilizing effects of imaginative appeal. ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... that are not only delightful to dwell upon, but are also elevating and refining in their influence upon character. The fairy tale, the folk tale, and the fable, owe their popularity with young children to the predominance of the imaginative element. The traditionary fairy tales and folk stories are usually more suitable than those that appear in teachers' magazines and modern holiday books for children. The hardest thing for the educated mind to do is to ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... which included a few portraits and some imaginative subjects, the greater number were painted in oils, and the largest canvas would not have seemed out of place on the walls of ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... urgent for the reliefs and contrasts of a finer humanity. These last are not wanting; yet it must be said that we hardly escape, even with them, into the old freedom and freshness of the author's imaginative worlds, and that the too conscious unconsciousness of Esther flings something of a shade on the radiant goodness of John Jarndyce himself. Nevertheless there are very fine delineations in the story. The crazed little Chancery lunatic, Miss Flite; the loud-voiced tender-souled Chancery ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... with the complexity of present problems always before them, tend to depreciate. He had the first quality which is necessary for popularity: he was readily intelligible. In addition he was prompt, combative, and magnanimous; shrewd, but never subtle; sensible, but not imaginative. He had no ideas which he wished to carry out; he did not like ideas. He wanted England to dominate in Europe and to use her power good-naturedly afterwards; to be, in fact, what a nobleman may be in his ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... size in America has been the subject of and focus for as much good literature as Santa Fe. Pittsburgh and dozens of other big cities all put together have not inspired one tenth of the imaginative play that Santa Fe has inspired. Some of the transcontinental railroads probably carry as much freight in a day as went over the Santa Fe Trail in all the wagons in all the years they pulled over the Santa ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... mathematics, fencing, and music. Mathematics he found hard dull work, as have so many men of like temperament, before and since, but music and fencing and geography were more to his liking. He was an ardent, imaginative youth, and chafed under all drudgery and routine. His foster-mother, in the absence of his father, suffered him to do much as he pleased, and he pleased to "play hookey" most of the time, joining boys of his own age and disposition, ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... He voiced other expletives, too, even more forcefully indicative of surprise. He was not an imaginative man; it did not occur to him to doubt his sanity or to wonder if he were awake, nevertheless he opened one of the pokes and incredulously examined its contents. "I'm dam' if it ain't!" he said, finally. "I should reckon they was ready to quit. Argentine! Why, Jack'll bust the bottom out of a ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... power had undergone any sensible alteration. Nay, further, if we look at the case in the concrete, then we must say that in a whole class of cases, the idea of a complete defeat of the enemy would be a mere imaginative flight, especially when ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... brought up in the belief of the miracle, and who fancy that the prosperity of their city and all that it contains is somehow connected with its due performance. The priests could not discontinue it but by acknowledging the imposture, and by an imaginative people, who are the slaves of prejudice, and attached to it by force of inveterate habit, the acknowledgment would not be believed, and they would only incur odium by it; there it is, and (for some time at ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... about the Opera ghost in which, since we first took over the duties of MM. Poligny and Debienne, we had been so nicely steeped"—Moncharmin's style is not always irreproachable—"had no doubt ended by blinding my imaginative and also my visual faculties. It may be that the exceptional surroundings in which we found ourselves, in the midst of an incredible silence, impressed us to an unusual extent. It may be that we were the sport of a kind of hallucination brought about by the semi-darkness of the theater and the ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... watching Woburn's approach with the unexpectant eye of one who has full confidence in his capacity for digesting surprises. Not that there was anything surprising in Woburn's appearance; but the night-clerk's callers were given to such imaginative flights in explaining their luggageless arrival in the small hours of the morning, that he fared habitually on fictions which would have staggered a less experienced stomach. The night-clerk, whose unwrinkled bloom showed that he throve on this high-seasoned diet, had a fancy for classifying ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... very kind to the poor little better-nurtured outcast, once, in a sudden attack of illness, applying hot blacking-bottles to his side with much tenderness. But, of course, they were rough and quite uncultured, and the sensitive, bookish, imaginative child felt that there was something uncongenial and degrading in being compelled to associate with them. Nor, though he had already sufficient strength of character to learn to do his work well, did ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... morning, a human being with a fixed idea, an unquestioned faith in his destiny. His star shone clear. He was born to great things. In those early years that followed it was not a matter of an imaginative child's vanity, but the unalterable, serene conviction of a child's soul. The prince and princess were realities, his future greatness a magnificent certitude. You must remember this, if you would understand Paul's after-life. It was built on this radiant ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the 'hundred tongues,' which the old Poets often clamour for, were of supreme service! In defect of any such organ on our part, let the Reader stir up his own imaginative organ: let us snatch for him this or the other significant glimpse of things, in the fittest sequence ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... not, however, intend to weary or to entertain the reader, as may be, by a long description of the Yangtze gorges. Time and time again have they fallen to the imaginative pens of travelers—mostly bad or indifferent descriptions, few good; none better, perhaps, than Mrs. Bishop's. But at best they are imaginative—they lack reality. It has been said that the world of imagination ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... poet's endowment of genius as blank verse, and hence the secret of Marlowe's improvements over his predecessors is his superior poetic gift. He seems to have felt and thought and written with an enormous imaginative power; by making his verse an organic expression of this power he achieved an almost new medium, ranging in variety from ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... The imaginative Greeks did not worship the statues of the gods per se, but only admired them as the fitting representations of those mysterious forces that hold sway over earth, air, fire, and water, or reverenced them as the symbols of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the coarsest interpretation, as a wild desire for adventure and intention of joining herself to the roving troopers, the soldiers always hated and dreaded in rural life. He suddenly appears in the narrative in a fever of apprehension, with no imaginative alarm or anxiety about his girl, but the fiercest suspicion of her, and dread of disgrace to ensue. We do not know what passed when she returned, further than that her father had a dream, no doubt after the first astounding explanation of the purpose ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... intellectual part, the practical intellect is compared to the speculative, as the estimative is to the imaginative power in the sensitive part. But the estimative differs from the imaginative, as power form power, as we have said above (Q. 78, A. 4). Therefore also the speculative intellect differs from ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... dismissed him from the conversation and her thoughts with a few careless words of contempt. Such minds as that of Miss Delafield were quite outside the field of De Chauxville's influence, while that Frenchman had considerable power over highly strung and imaginative natures. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... poets declare their inheritance. But they do not stop there. To the indomitable power of the Puritan conscience they have added a wealth of imaginative sympathy. They have made sweetness to be the issue of strength, and beauty to be the halo of power. They have seen the vision of the rainbow round the throne. They have touched with divine light the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Landor's personal animosity towards Byron, he considered him a "great poet,"—"the keenest and most imaginative of poets"; nor should we attribute this dislike to the bitter attacks made by Byron upon the "deep-mouthed Boeotian," though surely such would be sufficient to excite indignation in more amiable breasts. It was Byron's furious assaults upon Landor's beloved friend, Southey, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... in the same way modesty cripples the force of an upright mind, while unblushing confidence is a source of strength to a man without conscience. Regulus is a case in point. He has weak lungs, he never looks you straight in the face, he stammers, he has no imaginative power, absolutely no memory, no quality at all, in short, except a wild, frantic genius, and yet, thanks to his effrontery, and even just to this frenzy of his, he has got people to regard him as an orator. Herennius Senecio very neatly ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... Burns's treatment of nature there is imaginative beauty as well as humble truth. His language in description, though not mystical or highly idealized, is often rich in feeling, and his personality was potent enough to pervade his most objective writing. Thus he ranks among those who have put lovers of poetry under obligation for a fresh glimpse ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... history, and the supposition is nothing more than a speculative fancy. Still, there is a limbo of curious evidence bearing on the subject of pre-natal influences sufficient to form the starting-point of an imaginative composition. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the hands of the critics. Already the Browning library is large. Some of the criticism is good; much of it, regarding the author as philosopher and symbolist, is totally askew. Reams have been written in interpretation of Childe Roland, an imaginative fantasy composed in one day. Abstruse ideas have been wrested from the simple story of My Last Duchess. His poetry has been the stamping-ground of theologians and the centre of prattling literary circles. In this tortuous ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... an imaginative person, luckily. She got up and made her toilet, and splashed herself briskly in a basin of cold water. The effect of these ablutions was singular—they effected a total cure ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... fashion, this child, in whom the simplicity of practical life and the poetry of imaginative life were curiously blended, she had a fashion of going to her window every night when the moon or stars were shining, to look out for a minute or two before she went to bed; and sometimes the minutes were more than any good grandmother or aunt would have considered wholesome ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the more imaginative and impatient reformers find out when they come to themselves, if that calming change ever comes to them. Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them to themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That will reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... of Sienkiewicz in this volume is perhaps the most interesting and fascinating he has yet produced. It is in the very first rank of imaginative and historical romance. The time and scene of the noble story are laid in the middle ages during the conquest of Pagan Lithuania by the military and priestly order of the "Krzyzacy" Knights of the Cross. And the story exhibits with splendid force the collision of race passions and fierce, violent ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... who does not remember in childhood some white or black or yellow Scheherzarade, who, by that talent of telling endless feats of fairies and magicians, and kings and queens, was more dear and wonderful to a circle of children than any orator of England or America is now? The more indolent and imaginative complexion of the Eastern nations makes them much more impressible by these ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, no less than in other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely knit interdependence of ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... were set diagonally, whereas the American Indians had theirs parallel. In other respects, he saw great resemblances. He expressed himself as greatly interested in the discovery of an oral literature among the Indians, in the form of imaginative legends. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... fundamental differences. They are important enough to have led so great a critic as Professor Jebb to argue that Milton's drama is too Hebrew to be Hellenic at all. His point is that Greek tragedy aims at producing an imaginative pleasure by arousing a "sense, on the one hand, of the heroic in man; on the other hand, of a superhuman controlling power"; and he asserts that this is not the method adopted by Milton in Samson. Samson is throughout a free man; his misfortunes are the fruit of his own folly. ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... successful at the mouth of the harbor), to rig the dangerous and productive archipelago off Squid Beach and Nolan's Cove with similar contrivances. There was not another man in Chance Along capable of conceiving such ideas; but Dennis was ambitious (in his crude way), imaginative, daring, unscrupulous and full of ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... has been combined with that suffering which is inseparable from extensive changes in the condition of the people, men of speculative or imaginative genius have sought in the contemplation of an ideal society a remedy, or at least a consolation, for evils which they were practically unable to remove. Poetry has always preserved the idea, that at some distant time or place, in the Western islands or the Arcadian region, an innocent and contented ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... my mind whether some particulars do not need explanation. Doubtless the nimble wits of the sagacious have fathomed to their satisfaction all that seemed mysterious; but there may be others who, either less imaginative or more indolent, would like an elaborate elucidation. These latter I invite to accompany me across the blue Atlantic to the pleasant town of Exeter, in the lovely county of Devon, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... made himself very useful by acting as waiter, and hopped about with pots and pans, leading the steaming food on the skinners' plates. Jo watched him with interest, but still was unable to consider him anything but an imaginative failure—a man who perhaps had seen ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... open to doubt. If he left Sitka before the completion of the Avos, Russia would go unavenged for the present. Or himself? Rezanov, sanguine and imaginative as he was, even to the point of creating premises to rhyme with ends, was very honest fundamentally. He turned abruptly on his heel, and calling to the officers that he would announce his decision on the morrow, ordered ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... were studies of certain medico-psychological problems. They preached Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit the freedom of the will. In Elsie Venner, in particular, the weirdly imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast with this, and gives a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole. The Yankee characters, in particular, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... that his thought must come to that practical solution of a yes or no which would make an end of his delightful doubts and yearnings. The positive and the known are, after all, so much less, under imaginative measure, than the uncertain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... than knitting or quilting a comfortable—and are just about as exciting. Each dance is supposed to be a poem expressed by gesture and posturing—the poetry of motion—a sentimental pantomime, and imaginative Hindus claim to be able to follow the story. The orchestra, playing several queer looking fiddles, drums, clarinets and other instruments, is employed to assist in the interpretation, and produces the most dreary and monotonous ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... universal suffrage, plunged headlong into the snare set for them by the President, and combined with his open or secret partisans to reject the proposition of the Questors. Changarnier had blindly vouched for the fidelity of the army; one Republican deputy, more imaginative than his colleagues, bade the Assembly confide in their invisible sentinel, the people. Thus the majority of the Chamber, with the clearest warning of danger, insisted on giving the aggressor every possible advantage. If the imbecility of opponents is the best augury of success in a ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... which has been too popular, especially in anthologies of mildly entertaining rhymes, is sickly at its best, and fails to retain the interest of a child. Possibly, in pleading for imaginative art, one has forgotten that everywhere is Wonderland to a child, who would be no more astonished to find a real elephant dropping in to tea, or a real miniature railway across the lawn, than in finding a toy elephant or a toy engine awaiting him. Children are so accustomed to novelty ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... seems a very commonplace object; but how interesting the veritable slipper of Empedocles, who flung himself into Etna, whose slipper was disgorged by the volcano, and as a link, connecting the seen with the unseen, the grassy earth with the burning entrails of the eternal furnace, became intensely imaginative! A feather in a cap (even though it were an eagle's) seems, from its position, an object sufficiently artificial; but how affecting the black plume of Ravenswood floating on the waves which had engulphed the proud head that once ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... have to face a candidate representing a united party; one whose power of analysis is as great as Hughes', and to this will be added this feature of strength in the Democratic candidate—the power of appeal to the emotional or imaginative side of the American people. Added to this will be the strength of conviction in urging his cause that comes to a man who has passed through a world crisis amid great dangers and who has brought to consummation substantial ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blow down than his neighbors. With us descendants of the Puritans especially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value thermometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The other day (5th July) I marked 98o in the shade, my high water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen it before. I happened to meet a neighbor; as we mopped ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... varieties of tartan which their woollen clothes present, and even the features of the people (which are of an Aryan rather than a Tartar type), strongly reminded me of the Scotch Highlanders." He had the support, too, of one of those imaginative savants who delight in Welsh, Erse and Gaelic philology, who insisted "that the names of innumerable places in Tibet and Tartary are identical with the local names of the Gaelic language." Add to this the fact ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... to our story we may quote from that curious old tome, "Purchas his Pilgrimage," the following quaintly imaginative passage,— ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... consciousness than our consciousness? Is our whole instinctive belief in higher presences, our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship, to count for nothing? Is it but the pathetic illusion of beings with incorrigibly social and imaginative minds? ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... that we may have made in Fleet Street an atmosphere in which a man can be so passionate as Sir Lancelot and as pure as Sir Galahad. But, after all, we have in the modern world erected many such atmospheres. We have, for instance, a new and imaginative appreciation of children." ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... of mortals of all times and opens the door for imaginative activity, causing us to wonder why life should be a fitful fever, followed by an incommunicable sleep. Much of what we call literature would not survive the test of Shakespeare's definition; but true literature must appeal to imagination and feeling as well as to intellect. No mere definition can ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... sensitive than Lamartine but more imaginative, began with lyrical poems which were somewhat reminiscent of the classical manner, then went on to pictures of the East, thence to meditations on what happened to himself, and on all subjects (Autumn Leaves, Lights and Shades); ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... thankfulness as she kissed him, and his sisters sprang at him and devoured him, while all the time he bemoaned his piece of the stump of an aralia, and a bit of cone of a pinus, and other treasures to which imaginative regret lent such an aid, that no doubt he would believe the lost contents of his bag to have been the most precious articles that he had ever collected; his father, however, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... womanhood does not perish; but, in these present confusions of change, women of the more emotional and imaginative type are less potent than they have been and will be again. They appear equally inimical and heretical to the opposing camps of hausfrau and of suffragist. Their intellectual forces, liberated and ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... what his aunt taught him, poor as was her teaching. Then his heart and imagination were more in the ascendency. Now he had begun to admire the intellectual qualities of that literature more, and its imaginative less; for he had begun to think truth attainable through the forces of the brain, sole ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... fully illumined passages to the surrounding transparent darks are so gradual and so subtle that one scarcely notices that the effect has been arranged—the concentration is an integral part of the imaginative apprehension of the subject. It is otherwise with Raeburn, in his earlier work at least. Later he attained much the same results by less arbitrary and apparent means, by swathing the hands and arms—the high tone of which ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... were employed in the mode Dehrasin-Karabharna, which corresponds to our own major scale, it would have a pronounced Scotch tinge so long as the melody ascended; but let it descend and the Scotch element is deserted for a decided North American Indian, notably Sioux tinge. The Hindus are an imaginative race, and invest all these ragas and modes with mysterious attributes, such as anger, love, fear, and so on. They were even personified as supernatural beings; each had his or her special name and history. It was proper to use some of them only at midday, some in the morning, and ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming. If mind and body were both healthy, and had food enough and fair play, I doubt whether any men would be more temperate than the imaginative classes. But body and mind often flag,—perhaps they are ill-made to begin with, underfed with bread or ideas, over-worked, or abused in some way. The automatic action, by which genius wrought its wonders, fails. There is only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... in its whirling eddies the debris of submarine mountains heaped up in rugged confusion or scattered over its sandy bottom. Porphyry and black granite bowlders, in every conceivable form and size, lay strewn over the plain. Sometimes so fantastic did their shapes become that the least imaginative of our party could picture the gigantic ruins of some mighty citadel, with its ramparts, bastions and towering castle. For many hours we were traversing this weird and desolate valley, and when the sun cast long shadows across our track as he sank to rest, his ruddy light falling upon the dark ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... course," he confessed. "It just was my way of testing what your Professor Michael told about you—that you are extraordinarily intelligent, virile, and imaginative. Had you sent the wallet to me, I should have sought elsewhere for my man. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... the gray old trunk formed a second thrilling midnight picture, but at this moment young Farrar was in no mood for studying effects. He felt rather unstrung by his recent emotions; and, though he was by no means an imaginative youth, he actually took it into his head half seriously that the whooping, hooting thing was taunting him with making a failure of the jacking business. Without pausing to consider whether the owl would furnish meat for the camp or not, he let fly at him ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... had a powerful grip on life and good things. He was young, just twenty-six, strong and healthy, though slim-built in body, alert and vigorous in mind, unperturbed in soul, buoyant and warmly imaginative. Just at that moment the joy of life was almost at full flood in him, for he had recently been reveling in a new and glorious experience, and now carried it with him, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... historian (whose duty it is to apply all known tests of genuineness to papers purporting to shed new light on the past). This borrowing from the newspaper has its evident advantages, but it has its dangers also, even in the hands of a poet as adroit as Daudet and as imaginative. Perhaps the story of his which is most artistic in its telling, most shapely, most harmonious in its modulations of a single theme to the inevitable end, developed without haste and without rest, is "Sapho;" and "Sapho" is the novel of Daudet's in which ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... as he stood over him and saw the upturned eye, was sure it was so. No doubt indeed Ben thought so too, but poor imaginative Ben had somehow fancied it would be with his brother as with the King who guarded that other sacred Cup, and when all was over, was quite disappointed that Stead needed his strong arm as much as ever, ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Now all the imaginative dreads and nightmare terrors were faded away, and she felt beneath her feet the solid sanity of Hugo's self. She had seen the Works on an exceptionally bad day; she had gone there, overdrawn and ignorant, looking for horrors; what she had actually seen and felt had been mysteriously ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... how these lines and passages were taken from his own previous work and turned to better account in later poems, and to note the gradual improvement of his style. In his last book, 'Songs from the Mountains', there are fewer echoes; the touch is surer, and the imaginative level at his highest. The shining wonder is that, under the conditions of Australian life between 1860 and 1880, he should have written so much ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... his 'gran seggio,' though described with solemn pomp of phrase, cannot be compared with the Mystic Rose of Paradise (ix. 55-60). What Tasso lacks is authenticity of vision; and his heightened style only renders this imaginative poverty, this want ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Clem as a weigher and disburser of moneys. I noticed that she chose to accept Miss Caroline's earliest letters about their good fortune with a sort of half-tolerant attention, as an elder listens to the wonder-tales of an imaginative child, or as I had long listened to Clem's own dreamy-eyed recital of the profits already his from "brillions" of chickens not yet come even to ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... clustering islands, intersected by a bewildering maze of channels winding hither and thither, with the thin sickle of the young moon, gleaming softly silver-white, hanging just above the whole. It was one of those skies that set the imaginative dreamer's fancy free to wander afar into the realms of fairyland and to picture all sorts of strange, unreal happenings; the sort of sky that probably suggested to the simple mind of the Indian the poetic idea that when gazing upon it he was vouchsafed a vision ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... period, and is interesting from the piquant style in which it is written. I fancy that these two are the only efforts of the kind which he made,—and in both he dealt with the two great caricaturists of his time, he himself being, in the imaginative part of a caricaturist's work, equal in power ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... inspired this composition History of the text Various accounts of the design of Rameau's Nephew Juvenal's Parasite Lucian Diderot's picture of his original Not without imaginative strokes More than a literary diversion Sarcasms on Palissot ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... certain voices. I cannot translate it into words,—only into feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world or on the very threshold of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... best calculated to foster the poetic temperament. "He has got," wrote Professor Wilson, "a poet's education: he has lived the greater part of his days amidst pastoral scenes, and tended sheep among the green and beautiful solitudes of nature." Sufficiently imaginative, he does not, like his minstrel predecessor the Ettrick Shepherd, soar into the regions of the supernatural, or roam among the scenes of the viewless world. He sings of the mountain wilds and picturesque valleys of Caledonia, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... flaming figure. He has named his book fittingly "Stories of the Prophets," and interesting stories has he told. He has brought to his task not only a sympathetic appreciation of his subject, but an imaginative faculty that has enabled him to supply links in the narrative suggested if not actually given in the incidents preserved in ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... from it to examine that organization of human labor and that control of the wills of the masses of Egypt which made it possible, and then again looks up at it, one marks great fissures that rend the whole mass and one hears the foundations groan. To speak thus is only an imaginative way of saying, what all the anthropologists and archaeologists tell us, that to the building of any one of the great pyramids went the enforced labor of upwards of a million men for many years, who were literally driven by the lash of the whip. There is no ground for supposing that ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... look fell on the massive mirror on the wall opposite, and I cried out, for I saw the two of us in its golden frame as in a picture. The picture was so marvellously beautiful, so strange, so imaginative, that I was filled with deep sorrow at the thought that its lines and colors would ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... was at the other end of the huge building that there dwelt the solitary offspring of this unnatural union, a boy now in the eleventh year of childhood, companionless, physically inactive, mentally over-quick, perceptive, and quaintly imaginative. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... whales; educational sort of games that will aid them in acquiring knowledge of natural history. We will show them how to play Pirates and Red Indians and Ogres—sensible play that will help them to develop their imaginative faculties. That is why grown-up people are so dull; they are never made to think. But now and then," I continued, "we will let them play their own games, say on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. We will invite other grown-ups to come to tea with them, and let ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... and Fernan Caballero, whose earliest novel dates from 1849, was at their head. The Revolution of September, 1868, marked an advance in Spanish fiction, and Valera came forward as the leader of a more national and more healthily vitalised species of imaginative work. The pure and exquisite style of Valera is, doubtless, only to be appreciated by a Castilian. Something of its charm may be divined, however, even in the English translation of his masterpiece, Pepita Jimenez. The mystical and aristocratic genius of Valera appealed to a small audience; ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... of all, but also greatest, has to be considered the immensity of his imaginative achievement, the huge space that he has filled for us with vivid creation, the range of amusement, of instruction, of (after a fashion) edification which he has thrown open for us all to walk in. It is possible that he himself and others more or less well-meaningly, though ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... made some mistake. Probably Professor Hobkin was a gynaecologist. A scholar is a very different sort of man. A scholar is overflowing with humour and invention—perhaps addicted to wine, but what of that?—a delightful companion, generous, subtle, imaginative—as stands to reason. For he spends his life in company with the finest human beings that have ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... you, a prisoner to the desk. I have been chained to that gally thirty years, a long shot. I have almost grown to the wood. If no imaginative poet, I am sure I am a figurative one. Do "Friends" allow puns? verbal equivocations?—they are unjustly accused of it, and I did my little best in the "imperfect Sympathies" ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... one man of genius who has done much for this philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated:—I mean Emanuel Swedenborg.[91] The most imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an attempt of course must have difficulty which no genius could ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is a dreamy, imaginative youth, who revolts against his father's plans for him to be a servitor of big business. The love of a fine girl turns Bibb's life from failure ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... without seeing how readily he falls into the place of disciple of Beethoven. "I knew no other pleasure," he says in A Pilgrimage to Beethoven, "than to plunge so deeply into his genius that at last I fancied myself become a portion thereof." The Pilgrimage, though an imaginative work, is the medium he employed to give utterance to his regard for Beethoven. His letters to musical friends, to Liszt, to Fischer, especially those to Ulig, are filled with praise of the older master. In a letter to Meyerbeer, in 1887, he states how he came to be a musician. "A passionate admiration ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... not do to swallow the cow and worry at the tail. I have been looking over the files of newspapers, and those of Hong-Kong teem with abuse;—this, notwithstanding the fact that I have made a Treaty which exceeds everything the most imaginative ever hoped for. The truth is, they do not really like the opening of China. They fear that their monopoly will be ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... insist that there may be living creatures in the moon, for all that—of course, differently constituted from the inhabitants of our earth, and susceptible of existing without air. There is, however, no evidence of any kind to support such a theory; it is a mere fancy, the dream of an imaginative brain. Upon the same grounds, it may be argued, that the interior of the earth is inhabited, and that elves and gnomes are possible beings. Besides, the telescope has been brought to so high a degree of perfection, that objects the size of a house can ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... and the imaginative were blended equally and in the highest conceivable degree as combined with delicate female nature. Those letters, although written to a man in whose heart romance must long ago have been dead, showed how complex was her character, ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... architectural beauty wholly and entirely to purity of line and perfection of proportion. There is a prevailing spirit of repose, a sense of space, fair, lightsome, and adapted to serene moods of the meditative fancy in this building, which is singularly at variance with the religious mysticism and imaginative grandeur of a Gothic edifice. The principal beauty of the church, however, is its tone of colour. Every square inch is covered with fresco or rich woodwork, mellowed by time into that harmony of tints which blends the work ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... part of our vocabulary which especially illustrates the tendencies shown in popular name-giving, one is struck by the keen observation and imaginative power shown by our far-off ancestors, and the lack of ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... fitted for speech. But where history seems in a manner to force our assent by the concurrence of numerous and credible witnesses, we are to conclude that an impression distinct from sensation affects the imaginative part of our nature, and then carries away the judgment, so as to believe it to be a sensation: just as in sleep we fancy we see and hear, without really doing either. Persons, however, whose strong feelings of reverence to the deity, and tenderness for religion, will not allow them ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... more imaginative and bolder than the others, is the mechanical or kinetic theory. This last absolutely desires that we should represent to ourselves, that we should imagine, how phenomena really take place; and in seeking for the property of ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... and the past are but servants that wait on her with impulse and suggestive circumstance. Starting from the favor of the tribune, she carried him forward indefinitely. The wonder is, not that things so purely imaginative as the results she points us to can make us so happy, but that we can receive them as so real. They must be as gorgeous poppies under the influence of which, under the crimson and purple and gold, reason lies down the while, and is not. Sorrows assuaged, home and the fortunes ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... for a job like this. I realize it more and more every day, but I will stick it out till I break down. To be nervous, over-imaginative, terribly sensitive to suffering, is a poor equipment for the man who starts out to drive wounded on the battlefield. I am haunted by the thought that my car may break down when I have a load of wounded. Once indeed it did, and a man died while I waited ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... to the imaginative power of the youthful mind, and the manner in which beliefs are visualized, and appear as realities of perception. To illustrate this principle have been included a few examples belonging rather to individual than to general opinion. The little ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... figures and faces more essentially Gothic than those of the Maragatos. They are strong, athletic men, but loutish and heavy, and their features, though for the most part well-formed, are vacant and devoid of expression. They are slow and plain in speech, and those eloquent and imaginative sallies so common in the conversation of other Spaniards seldom or never escape them; they have, moreover, a coarse, thick pronunciation, and when you hear them speak, you almost imagine that it is some German or English peasant attempting ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... have been subjected during prenatal life, and long and costly ceremonies are often performed to rid persons of such baneful inheritance. In fact Indians physically normal have submitted to prolonged treatment by their medicine-men when advised by them for such imaginative ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... battles, of voyages, of invasions, of destructions, of slaughters, of sieges, of tragedies and deaths, of courtships, of military expeditions; and all this strictly historical. For we do not here speak of their "imaginative tales," which give still freer scope to fancy; such as the Fenian and Ossianic poems, which are also founded on facts, but can no more claim the title of history than the ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... is the matter, sister?" said Mrs. Tulliver. She was not an imaginative woman, but it occurred to her that the large toilet-glass in sister Pullet's best bedroom was possibly broken ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... and dramatic incidents connected with the old life of Scottish clans. Each tale has at the end an unexpected turn or quick bit of action, and these endings are almost invariably tragic. The style is well suited to the character of the stories, which are wild, weird, and queer. They have a true imaginative vein. ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... the last, least detail. Take all this stuff, for instance; especially their ability to transform iron into a fluid allotrope, and in that form to use its intra-atomic energy as power. Something brand new—unheard of except in the ravings of imaginative fiction—and yet he described their converters and projectors so minutely that Fred was able to work out the underlying theory in three days, and to tie it in with our own super-ship. My first thought was that we'd ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... wish to take my readers further into imaginative landscape, and to show it to them, if possible, under additional lights. I despair of succeeding if I cannot do it by one or two simple examples. In passing through a gallery we may stop before a picture to be struck, almost startled, by the exact copy which it ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... the Southern Cross, occurs a terrible circular abyss, the Coal Sack. So sharply defined is it, so suggestive of a void and bottomless cavern, that the contemplation of it afflicts the imaginative mind with vertigo. To the naked eye it is as black and as dismal as death, but the smallest telescope reveals it ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... stage is entirely conventional and academic; of course there are exceptional cases—rare, alas! The ideal seems to be to reach chromo-lithographic effects and the beauties of the old-fashioned valentine; for the suggestive, the mysterious, the imaginative little affection is shown. The real tub has developed into the real tree with real blossoms and real leaves wired on, not a thing regarded as a matter of form and colour, but as a realistic imitation of a natural object. Broad effects are frittered away ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Dulwich Gallery. There is, on the right-hand side of it, an object, which I never walk through the room without contemplating for a minute or two with renewed solicitude and anxiety of mind, indulging in a series of very wild and imaginative conjectures as to its probable or possible meaning. I think there is reason to suppose that the artist intended it either for a very large stone, or for the trunk of a tree; but any decision as to its being either one or the other of these must, I conceive, be the extreme of rashness. It ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... judge his character fairly. Few men have so laid bare the thoughts and feelings of their hearts. It is easy to blame the unmanly laments which he utters over his health, his solitude, and his sufferings, real or imaginary; few imaginative writers have the every-day virtues. His egotism, too, is difficult to defend. If, as he himself admits, he invariably took an undue share of talk, often in fact monopolizing it, wherever he was, we must remember that the brilliance of his gifts was admitted ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... she is really dying? People like that are often hysterical, often nervously imaginative." Selwyn's voice was worried. "You ought not to be sent for ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... then, gives us in generous measure the "certain jolly humors" which R.L.S. says we voyage to find. He throws off flashes of imaginative felicity—as where he says of canes, "They are the light to blind men." Where he describes Mr. Oliver Herford "listing to starboard, like a postman." Where he says of the English who use colloquially phrases known to us only in great literature—"There are primroses in ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... first version of "Christabel." The period at Nether Stowey, from 1797 to 1798, was Coleridge's most fruitful year as a poet. All his best poetic works had their origin at that time. Swinburne has said of Coleridge: "For height and perfection of imaginative quality he is the greatest of lyric poets, this was his special power and is his special praise." Much of the charm and magnetic suggestion of his famous poem "Christabel" rests on its exquisite vowel-music. The same is true of his wonderful "Rime ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... the vision of the end through any enterprise, who would always put the curb of expediency on emotional impulses, who would invariably judge a theory not by its underlying principle, but by its practical application. A charming face, too, complex and imaginative, a face which made the rugged and open countenance of the Governor appear primitive and undeveloped. Corinna admired Benham; she respected him; she liked—was it even possible, she asked herself, that she loved him? Yet here again she was ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... flitches. It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, no less than in other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely knit interdependence of the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Is Accompanied by Intellective and Imaginative Vision Is More Excellent Than That Which Is Accompanied by ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... for the imagination. Books, music, pictures, inspiring plays. The Campfire Girls' movement is valuable in its imaginative aspect. ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, without which no production is possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with a strenuous exercise of choice. And yet the imaginative vocabulary seems to be spontaneous also. It does not flow from experience only or mainly, but from a richer source. Not by any conscious imitation of particular forms are the grand strokes of the painter executed, but by repairing ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the day before its arrival the next January. We may be short on flowers in our garden, but we are long on seed catalogues in our library. We do not believe in catalogue houses excepting seed catalogues. We find them more marvelous than the Arabian Nights, more imaginative than Baron Manchausen, and more alluring than a circus poster. We care not who steals the Mona Lisa so long as Salzer sends us pictures of his cabbages. The art gallery of the Louvre may be robbed of its masterpiece without awakening a pang in our breasts, if Dreer ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... frequented the house long enough. M. de Bargeton, spread at full length in his great chair, appeared to see and understand all that was going on; his silence added to his dignity, and his figure inspired Lucien with a prodigious awe. It is the wont of imaginative natures to magnify everything, or to find a soul to inhabit every shape; and Lucien took this gentleman, not for a granite guard-post, but for a formidable sphinx, and thought it necessary ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... unsurpassed, but unapproachable. It was the first of detective-stories, and it has had thousands of imitations and no rival. The originality, the ingenuity, the verisimilitude of this tale and of its fellows are beyond all praise. Poe had a faculty which one may call imaginative ratiocination to a decree beyond all other writers of fiction. He did not at all times keep up to the high level, in one style, of "The Fall of the House of Usher," and in another, of "The Murders in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... rival in his own part of the country was Callinan, the well-to-do farmer who lived near Craughwell, of whom the old women in the workhouse spoke. I have heard some of Callinan's poems and songs; but I do not find the imaginative power of Raftery in them. He seems, in distinction to him, to be the poet of the domestic affections, of the settled classes. His songs have melody and good sentiments; and they are often accompanied by a ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... none of these distinguished characters wrote poetry; but I take it, poetry is a low species of writing, quite inferior to prose, and unworthy one's attention. Look at the splendid qualities of these great men, particularly in the line in which the imaginative faculties tend. See how they fascinated the ladies, who it is well known adore a fine imagination. How well they talked love, the noblest of all subjects—for a man's idle hours. Then observe the schemes they projected. Conquests, consolidations, empires, dominion, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... future. These attitudes are widespread in the western world of the 1970's, particularly among the young. These effects, on the whole negative, are offset by a number of positive factors. Human beings are curious and imaginative. They are also ingenious, inventive and intuitive. All of these attributes are assets when dealing with the future ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... or imaginative quality, and courage, and insight into ordinary human nature, and far-sightedness of what can be expected of people, do not get on with the ordinary millionaire. It cannot be denied that millionaires and artists get together in time; but ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... theoretic; let him be stringent on predestination, but latitudinarian on fasting; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of Time; ardent and imaginative on the pro-millennial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious toward every other infringement of the status quo. Let him fish for souls not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... makes her quake with sympathetic cold; the willows by the pool, bent low and white under that invisible harshness, seem agitated and helpless like herself.' The italicised sentence represents the high-water mark of George Eliot's prose; that passage alone should vindicate her imaginative power. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... bombshell of the already prepared telegrams, were within a few hours to paralyse industrial England, to keep her ships idle in the docks, her trains motionless upon the rails, her mines silent, her forges cold, her great factories empty. Even the least imaginative felt the thrill, the awe of the thing he was doing. On paper, in the brain, it seemed so wonderful, so logical, so certain of the desired result. And now there were other thoughts forcing their way to the front. How would their names live ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lend a human soul. But there is a lower level,—that of tranquil contentment and easy acquiescence in the conditions in which we find ourselves; a lower level, in which old age trudges patiently when it is not using its wings. I say its wings, for no period of life is so imaginative as that which looks to younger people the most prosaic. The atmosphere of memory is one in which imagination flies more easily and feels itself more at home than in the thinner ether of youthful anticipation. I have told you some of the drawbacks of age; I would not have you forget its privileges. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... pursuit of her, after she was turned into the moon. A similar legend exists in Greenland {341b} and in the island of Borneo, and it was known to the old Irish. It is in fact a spontaneous myth, or one of the kind which grow up from causes common to all races. It would be natural, to any imaginative savage, to regard the sun and moon as brother and sister. The next step would be to think of the one as regularly pursuing the other over the heavens, and to this chase an erotic cause would naturally be assigned. And as the pursuit is interminable, the pursuer never ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... part of us including ambition, ideal, sympathy, and all that I have called ideas? Would it not be worth while to find such ideas as all people can live upon without diminishing each other's share, instead of the ideas, the imaginative satisfactions which each must refuse to his neighbour, and about which, therefore, all of us are bound to fight like hungry animals? Thus to reform our notions of what is valuable and distinguished would bring about an ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... story, dealing with the adventures of eighteen jovial, big hearted Montana cowboys. Foremost amongst them, we find Ananias Green, known as Andy, whose imaginative powers cause many lively and ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... imaginative, inquisitive, myth-making, light-hearted, tender-hearted, and altogether charming young adventurers who start out so gayly ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... spot, replete with relics of history, but uneventful in daily life; and a real adventure at his own doors could hardly fail to leave an impression on the boy's mind. The historical associations of St Mary's Isle made it an excellent training-ground for an imaginative youth. Monks of the Middle Ages had noted its favourable situation for a religious community, and the canons-regular of the Order of St Augustine had erected there one of their priories. A portion of an extensive wall which had surrounded the cloister was retained in the Selkirk manor-house. ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... its leaven of error is a reminder of the old antislavery assumption that till the end of time the Negro must be a hewer of wood and drawer of water, with no mental life to speak of. This error is best confuted by proof of the race's actually wide range of intellectual demands, imaginative sympathies, moral questionings; and for this reason, if for no other, one thanks Mr. George Marion McClellan for venturing on the publication of his verses. This gentleman is a graduate of Fisk University, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... pleasant rhymes for children, and some still linger in the collections; but they are not of singular merit. Much better than these are the lyrics which are to be found scattered through her prose romance, 'Phantasmion'—lyrics which undoubtedly have imaginative value. They are much less known than they deserve to be, though a few of them have recently been reprinted. They are not, however, to be compared with the best that Hartley furnished. Sara had ideas, but her mode of expression inclined to the turgid. Hartley was clearer ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... enjoyed the excitement of the 'wild countries' as thoroughly as he had expected. On his return to England he published anonymously an account of what he had seen in Greece and Turkey, in a volume which, if occasionally florid and imaginative, is still a lively and copious piece of description. It is even now worth turning to for a picture of the ruin and distraction of Greece after the final expulsion ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... "The imaginative richness, the marvellous ingenuity of plot, the power and subtlety of the portrayal of character, the charm of the romantic environment,—the entire atmosphere, indeed,—rank this novel at once among the great creations."—The ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... out the people to use the railways, the steamships, the houses, and the land. It was in this way that "the frontier speculator paved the way for the frontier agriculturalist who had to be near a market before he could farm." The spirit of this imaginative enterprise, which laid out railways and towns in advance of the people, is seen in an advertisement of that day: "This extension will run 42 miles from York, northeast through the Island Lake country, and will have five good ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... representing the Redemption of the World, the Conversion of the Gentiles, the Resurrection of the Dead, the Last Judgment, the Condemnation of the Wicked, the Reception of the Just into the habitations of the blest. Finally, the Assumption and Coronation of the Blessed Virgin sums up, with an imaginative legend, this series of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... had a name which amused us, though it was appropriate enough, so far as the shape went. It was called a "mushroom," it being, in fact, a sort of wooden umbrella, not unlike those which the French market-women spread over their heads in the streets of Paris, and which, more sentimental and imaginative, they term a "Robinson" in honour of Robinson Crusoe.[22] This mushroom was the scene of a remarkable occurrence, that it will scarcely do to relate, but which, taking all together, furnishes a ludicrous sample of national manners, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and stables. Drills for the infantry were necessarily suspended, several sentries, even, being taken off their posts. The men clustered in the squad-rooms and listened with more or less credulity to the theories and confirmatory statements of fact as related by the imaginative or loquacious of their number. The majority of the officers gathered under the flaring lamp-lights at the sutler's store and occupied themselves pretty much as did their inferiors in grade, though poker and punch—specialties of Mr. Finkbein, the sutler—lent ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... looks without a smile at the poor ambassadors, whom he cajoles from morning to night. You admire the actor who bullies his public. But when at an evening party he engages in close conversation with a handsome woman, the play of his countenance shows the direction of his thoughts, and those of the imaginative observer are imperceptibly carried to a roadside in a lonely forest, in which the principal objects are prostrate postilions, an overturned carriage, trembling females, and a select party of the ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... the 'Scutcheon; Saul; The Pied Piper of Hamelin; My Last Duchess; Waring. I only mention a few (all different in note, subject and manner from one another), in order to mark the variety and range of imaginative power displayed in this wonderful set of little books. The Bells of poetry's music, hung side by side with the golden Pomegranates of thought, made the fringe of the robe of this high priest of song. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... came. The best energies of military science had been devoted to defending itself against the impending blow. France was like a nation which put up its right arm to ward off a blow, and could not give the whole of her strength to the great things which she was capable of. That great, bold, imaginative, fertile mind, which would otherwise have been clearing new paths for ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... candor—that candor which developed into the noble probity which marked his conduct to the last. Without candor there can not be truth, and, as he himself has said, there can be no other virtue without truth. Fortunately for him, by the wise sanction his mother had given to his perusal of imaginative writings, she had robbed them of a mystery unhealthy in itself; and he came through these stolen readings substantially unharmed, because he knew that his fault was only the lighter one of sitting up when he was ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... after he became convinced she would not come. Upon his return through the grove he reached a point where the unreal and imaginative perceptions were suddenly and stunningly broken. He did hear a step. He kept on, as before, and in the deep shadow he turned. He saw a man just faintly outlined. One of the riders had been watching him—had followed him! Slone had always expected this. So had Lucy. And now it had happened. ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... system of anathema may be consonant to what the philosophers call a high and imaginative mood of passion, but it is surely as unjust as any fulminations that ever emanated from the Papal Chair. No doubt Cousin Amy behaved shockingly; but why, on that account, should the Bank of England, incorporated ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... have been a strange spectacle—so strange that it made a lasting impression on the least imaginative mind of the three, for he tried in his rude way to reproduce it on that Cornish beach after the lapse of thirty long years. He threw bits of rock on the sand to indicate the positions in which they had sat. From his description ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... others that the Church has always accepted them and accepts them now as "additional proofs of the truth of Scripture." A little juggling with words, a little amalgamation of texts, a little judicious suppression, a little imaginative deduction, a little unctuous phrasing, and the thing is done. One great service this eminent and kindly Catholic champion undoubtedly rendered: by this acknowledgment, so widely spread in his published lectures, he made it impossible for Catholics or Protestants longer to resist the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... man was neither presumptuous nor vain. He had been once repulsed and but now utterly rejected. He had no reason to hope, and yet—perhaps it was his poetical and imaginative temperament—he could not resign ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... haven't made up my mind yet whether it was good or bad for me, as an actress, to cease from practicing my craft for six years. Talma, the great French actor, recommends long spells of rest, and says that "perpetual indulgence in the excitement of impersonation dulls the sympathy and impairs the imaginative faculty of the comedian." This is very useful in my defense, yet I could find many examples which prove the contrary. I could never imagine Henry Irving leaving the stage for six months, let alone six years, and I don't think it would have been of the slightest benefit to him. But he had ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... nature which it embodies, directly recall Young's Conjectures on Original Composition. Like Young he proclaims that genius is a law to itself, that all imitation and subservience to rule is disastrous to imaginative production. "Principles," he declares, "are even more injurious to genius than examples." The burden of the Essay is the glorification of the genius of the architect of Strassburg cathedral, and of Gothic architecture in general, which, Goethe maintained, should be correctly designated ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... that there can be little sympathy between the Countess Hahn-Hahn, an imaginative and somewhat capricious fine lady, with strong aristocratic and exclusive tendencies, and such a matter-of-fact person as Mr Boas, who, in spite of his sentimentality, which is a sort of national infirmity, and although he informs us in one part of his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... very pleasant one, every way, but somehow John did not feel as if David had as much outside help as he needed. The young man was not imaginative; an ideal, however high, was a far less real thing to David than to old John. He pondered during many sleepless hours the advisability of having David sign the pledge. David had always refused to do it hitherto. ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... were inclined to be definite and clear-cut to the point of hardness. She did not know the meaning of over-wrought nerves, nor the difficulties of a nature more imaginative than her own. She had found her will-power sufficient to meet all the emergencies of her life, and she was disposed to feel a little contemptuous, especially of late, at a persistent condition of difficulty ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... gloomy than he had been even when he departed from the ranch that morning. The certainty of Denver that he would find it impossible to stay by his program of honest work had made a strong impression upon his imaginative mind, as though the little safecracker really had the power to look into the future and into the minds of men. Where he should look for work next, he had no idea. And he balanced between a desire to stay near the town and work out his destiny ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... "Guide" reduces to a psychological theory. "Prophecy," he says, "is, in truth and reality, an emanation sent forth by the Divine Being through the medium of the Active Intellect, in the first instance to man's rational faculty, and then to his imaginative faculty; it is the highest degree ... of perfection man can attain; it consists in the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty." Maimonides distinguishes eleven degrees of inspiration, and three essential ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... passionate eloquence,—a thousand gushes of bitter, heart-humbling tears. To them had been revealed all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, which she could not confide to the sneering and unsympathising of her own sex. The solemn druidical groves were not more holy to their imaginative and mysterious worshippers, than were those old oaks to ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... was deeply bored by his colorless, humdrum existence, so far removed from that other purely imaginative life which rose from the pages of his books and enveloped him with an ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... course Kristofa who knew how to put everything in a captivating, magic light. A little walk, a possible engagement, an evening at a dance, everything was moulded by her busy imaginative power into events that never wanted a hero, that interesting, mystic being, who was seen, now with a cigar, now without one, who sometimes pretended he did not know them, sometimes nodded, or only smiled. The person ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... our poets declare their inheritance. But they do not stop there. To the indomitable power of the Puritan conscience they have added a wealth of imaginative sympathy. They have made sweetness to be the issue of strength, and beauty to be the halo of power. They have seen the vision of the rainbow round the throne. They have touched with divine light the prosaic story of New England, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... synonymous; happiness, also, though not quite identical in meaning, being occasionally substituted for them. Enjoyment, it must be observed, is of very various kinds, measures, and degrees. It may be sensual, or emotional, or imaginative, or intellectual, or moral. It may be momentary or eternal; intoxicating delight or sober satisfaction. It may be unmixed and undisturbed, in which case, however short of duration or coarse in quality, it may in strictness be called happiness; or it may be troubled ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... result was beyond any poor words of mine. All spoken language is totally inadequate to describe the shocks and horrors of an intense bombardment. It is not that man himself lacks the imaginative gift of words but that he has not the word tools with which to work. They do not exist. Each attempt to describe becomes near effrontery and demands ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... when he read that highly imaginative story of Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," and wondered if it would ever be possible for man to create such a marvelous underseas craft as that which the famous French writer described. Today the imaginative ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... mer-men and women, is his pedestal. Advancing from it in the water at the four relatively respective points of the compass, North, South, East and West, are groups representing the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans and the North and the South Seas; groups richly imaginative, expressing types of Oriental, Occidental, Southern and Northern land and sea life. The interrupted outer circle of water motifs represent Nereids driving spouting fish. Vertical zones of writhing figures ascend the sphere at the base of the Victor. Across ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... so keenly alive and imaginative that he was interested in nearly everything and everybody, looked back over his shoulder at the fine old remodeled colonial house on the hill with its broad sweep of lawns, its background of splendid trees, mountains in the distance, and the lively river at its feet, and, distinctly urban as he was, ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... after him, and follows it with an intellect unequaled in its imaginative flight. Plato lighted the fire which has burned high in the enthusiasts of the spirit,—the mystics, the ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... so foreign to Western habits of thought that it is well that we should try to understand it at its best. Prussia proper has not been rich, like the rest of Germany, in poets and imaginative writers; but she is fortunate to-day in possessing in the greatest living Greek scholar, Professor von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, a man who by birth and breeding is able to put the highest interpretation ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... the task, Mrs Wilfer's impressive countenance followed her with glaring eyes, presenting a combination of the once popular sign of the Saracen's Head, with a piece of Dutch clock-work, and suggesting to an imaginative mind that from the composition of the salad, her daughter might prudently omit the vinegar. But no word issued from the majestic matron's lips. And this was more terrific to her husband (as perhaps she knew) than ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... taken up his own defense, but did not care to do so, or did it carelessly in some letters written to intimate friends. To Moore he wrote:—"Like all imaginative men, I, of course, embody myself with the character while I draw it; but not a moment after the pen is from the paper." He always, however, begged that he might be judged by his acts; and a short time before he died at Missolonghi, after recommending Colonel Stanhope to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... be surprised by the most natural things in the world, until it became an obsession, and a part of his journalistic equipment. In a sense Chesterton is the everlasting boy, the Undergraduate Who Would Not Grow Up. There must be few normally imaginative town-bred children to whom the pointed upright area-railings do not appear an unsearchable armoury of spears or as walls of protective flames, temporarily frozen black so that people should be able to enter and leave their house. Every ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... strenuous efforts needed for discharge of our appointed tasks. The Apostle, like all men of imaginative and sensitive nature, was accustomed to speak in metaphors, which expressed his fervid convictions more adequately than more abstract expressions would have done. That vigorous figure of a 'course' speaks more ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Brunel, we are reminded of him as the principal rival and competitor of Robert Stephenson. Both were the sons of distinguished men, and both inherited the fame and followed in the footsteps of their fathers. The Stephensons were inventive, practical, and sagacious; the Brunels ingenious, imaginative, and daring. The former were as thoroughly English in their characteristics as the latter were perhaps as thoroughly French. The fathers and the sons were alike successful in their works, though not in the same degree. Measured by practical and profitable results, the Stephensons ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... systematic and analytical arrangement. The most casual consideration of these classifications, however, renders apparent the relative simplicity of the task of classifying natural objects differentiated by fixed natural laws as compared with the task of classifying the products of the creative and imaginative faculties as applied to the useful arts. The chimera and other animal monsters occur only as figments of the mind. Zoological classification does not have to classify combinations of birds, fishes, reptiles, and mammals, nor does it deal in ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... stagnant moat wore a bright star on its bosom. The scene, the soft and tender influence which it possessed—the hour, soothing and elevating the mind, freed from the harassing and petty cares of existence—to a romantic and imaginative disposition these were all favourable to its effects—the development of that ethereal spirit of our nature, that enchanter whose wand conjures up the busy world within, creating all things according to his own pleasure, and investing them with every attribute ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... catch that big one," she laughed, "so Mr. Baumberger can go home and attend to his own business!" It took imagination to feel sure there had been a significant accent on the last of the sentence, and Baumberger must have been imaginative. He lowered his head like a bull meditating assault, and his leering eyes shot her a glance of inquiry and suspicion. But Miss Georgie Howard met his look with a smile that was nothing more than ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... conjoined according to the agreement, and things that disagree are removed according to the disagreement. The spirits and angels who are from the earth Jupiter have relation, in the Grand Man, to the IMAGINATIVE [PART] OF THOUGHT, and thus to an active state of the interior parts; while the spirits of our Earth have relation to the various functions of the exterior parts of the body, and when these desire to have the dominion, the active or imaginative [part] of thought from ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... in both London and New York, first presented in a marvellous stage-setting by Beerbohm Tree, and pronounced "the most strikingly imaginative production the ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... wisdom in the French was reckoned weakness in the Germans and the Prussian Guards, whose return to Berlin, concealed in furniture-vans to hide their pitiable plight, was graphically described in the English press by an imaginative American journalist, were really sent as a contribution to that immense effort in the East by which, in spite of the Somme campaign, Germany first closed the gaps in the crumbling Austrian front ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... a time when Liszt's greater works had partly not yet been written, and partly were not yet known in the wider circles, speaks of poverty of invention, and considers his compositions rather those of a virtuoso than of imaginative significance.] ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... since in the successive parks of Celt and Saxon, Dane and Norman. The edible snail, still scattered thinly over our southern downs, and abundant at Box Hill and a few other spots in Surrey or Sussex, was brought over, they tell us, by the same luxurious Italian epicures, and is even now confined, imaginative naturalists declare, to the immediate neighbourhood of Roman stations. The mediaeval monks, in like manner, introduced the carp for their Friday dinners. One of our commonest river mussels at the present day did not exist in England at all a century ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... generally without that preliminary experience in journalism which most of the male writers have undergone. It is not enough for a novelist to "know life"; he must also know the literary aspect of life, must have the imaginative power to select and adapt actual experiences artistically. Young women who write are prone to record things "just as they happened." This is a mistake. Aristotle laid down the fundamental principle of creative work in ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... a donkey!" This is an average specimen of his playful way of ridiculing. In sterner moods he was grander. Of a Jew money-lender he said, that "he might die like Judas, but that he had no bowels to gush out";—also, that "he would have sold our Saviour for more money." An imaginative color distinguished his best satire, and it had the deadly and wild glitter of war-rockets. This was the most original quality, too, of his satire, and just the quality which is least common in our present satirical literature. He had read the old writers,—Browne, Donne, Fuller, and Cowley,—and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... I may say so without offence, I really think many forms of Pantheistic Atheism more agreeable to an imaginative mind than Unitarianism as it is professed in terms: in particular, I prefer the Spinosistic scheme infinitely. The early Socinians were, to be sure, most unaccountable logicians; but, when you had swallowed their bad ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... by me to account for this strange cognomen. His head, which was covered with a transparent down, like that which clothes very small chickens, plainly permitting the scalp to show through, to an imaginative mind might have suggested that succulent vegetable. That his parents, recognizing some poetical significance in the fruits of the season, might have given this name to an August child, was an oriental ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... opera "Fidelio" and the song "Adelaide,"), Beethoven had complete mastery of the artform. He left his stamp in 9 symphonies, 5 piano concertos, 10 violin sonatas, 32 piano sonatas, numerous string quartets and dozens of other key works. Many of his works are ingeniously imaginative and innovative, such as his 3rd symphony (the "Eroica"), his 9th Violin Sonata (the "Kreutzer"), his "Waldstein" piano sonata, his 4th and 5th piano concertos, or his "Grosse Fugue" for string quartet. (Of course, each of Beethoven's works adds its own unique ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... God of Friendship be my witness, that all I shall now relate is derived either from my own experience, or from such careful inquiry as I was able to make of others; and is free from all imaginative additions of my own. I will begin with, the friendship of Agathocles and Dinias. The story is well known in Ionia. This Agathocles was a native of Samos, and lived not many years ago. Though his conduct showed him to be the best of friends, he was of no better family and in no better circumstances ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... vulgar vividness which is the very life-blood of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Villon, of Heine—and of all those who were not only great artists but great humanists. As a purely descriptive poet, he can take his place with the masters of sea and landscape. As an imaginative realist, he showed those who were stumbling from one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that they themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than anything in the world—or out of it. Few things ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... proving that in these special dreams there can have been no more than an instantaneous, mass impression of all the elements of the dream upon the brain,[7] and that the dream itself has been produced by the imaginative action of the soul in the astral body, an extremely subtle one, whose vibratory power is such as to transform altogether our ordinary notions of ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... ideas unconsciously acquired from others. Some memory or imaginative effort which does not come from the gazer's ordinary self. Revivals of memory. Illustrations ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... mother, Emmeline B. Wells, made the report for Utah. Delegates were present from twenty States, and most of them were entertained in the hospitable homes of the city. A reception, attended by 500 guests, was tendered by Mr. and Mrs. Hubbell, at their elegant residence on Terrace Hill. An imaginative reporter on this occasion transformed Miss Anthony's historic garnet velvet gown, worn for the past fourteen years, into a "magnificent royal purple," and her one simple little pin into "handsome diamonds." A pleasant reception ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... easily be understood how these women, as a rule, exerted little influence on their sons. Their imaginative side was too deeply hidden, the nature of their pleasures too secret, too mysterious. Male youth, following its obvious pleasure, went with the men to the hunt. The women remained outsiders. The boy who chose ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... established to have caused this young creature to seclude herself from general society for so long a period. The facts of her parentage must have been imprudently confided to her when young, and an imaginative temperament had done the rest. The secresy with which she guarded these ideas served to strengthen them. He could only hope that the life she was now leading would diminish their influence, or perhaps totally destroy her singular belief. Maurice thought it would be easy to wait for time ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... frame house on a woody island of the Ohio River, not in the present; but in the future, and in a marble palace in the splendid domain of Aaron I. The two enthusiastic women, allied in a common cause, inspired alike by the experience of wifehood and maternity, similarly ambitious, passionate and imaginative, reciprocated each other's sentiments and strengthened each ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... was very much surprised by the President's face and manner. It is, in its way, one of the most remarkable faces I have ever seen. Not imaginative, but very powerful in its firmness (or perhaps obstinacy), strength of will, and steadiness of purpose. There is a reticence in it too, curiously at variance with that first unfortunate speech of his. A man not to be turned or trifled with. A man (I should say) who must ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... studded with the most poetical imagery, and marked in every part with the happiest graces of expression, while it is calm, chaste, and flowing, and transparent as water. There is a habit among nearly all the writers of imaginative literature, of adulterating the conversations of the poor with barbarisms and grammatical blunders which have no more fidelity than elegance. Hawthorne's integrity as well as his exquisite—taste prevented ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Goldsmith's hands. Apparently he did not much profit by it, for she confessed he was one of the dullest boys she had ever dealt with, insomuch that she had sometimes doubted whether it was possible to make anything of him: a common case with imaginative children, who are apt to be beguiled from the dry abstractions of elementary study by the picturings ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... mouth of a passage so much smaller that the roof was only twelve inches above the sides of the boat and I could touch both walls at the same time. By running the boat across this it was held in place by the current, and I could sit at ease and enjoy the position, which even the least imaginative person can readily conceive to ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... done in the wilds. Then there came the inspiration to write his poem on Sir John Franklin, and he had done so, winning the college prize for poetry. But no one had seen any change in him in those months; and, indeed, there had been little or no change, for he had an equable and practical, though imaginative, disposition, despite his avoirdupois, and his new purpose did not stir him yet from ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... ferocity—the ferocity, not of a man who has killed people, but of a man who sits down and conscientiously tries to imagine what it is like to kill people. It is essentially the same kind of ferocity in imaginative fiction as the ferocity of Nietzsche in lyrical philosophy or of Malthus in speculative politics. When Mr Kipling talks of men carved in battle to the nasty noise of beef-cutting upon the block, or of men falling over like the rattle of fire-irons in the ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... sleep is absolutely necessary for imaginative brain work, long holidays are not so. I have noticed that those who let their brains 'lie fallow,' as it is termed, for any considerable time, are by no means the better for it; but, on the other hand, some daily recreation, ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... effort. Of course, I should not mention this abortive project, only that it has been utterly thrown aside and will never now be accomplished. The Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me. It takes away not only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with it, possibly, into a Limbo where our nation and its polity may be as literally the fragments of a shattered dream as my unwritten Romance. But I have far better ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are mixed together, and the strange creature which results from the combination is now under one influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of him except from the old-fashioned moral—or, if you please, imaginative—point of view. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the valley and the hill, all realms of solitude and shade, inspire enthusiasm and ardor in the imaginative spirit. They are beneficial for this purpose. For the training of a great poet they are necessary. They have the effect of lifting the mind to the contemplation of vastness, depth, height, profundity. This produces an intensity of mood—the natural result of any association between our own feelings ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... strange chill of the blood, that creeping kind of feeling all over you, which is one of the enjoyments of Christmastide. Coleridge (says the late Mr. George Dawson)[88] "holds the first place amongst English poets in this objective teaching of the vague, the mystic, the dreamy, and the imaginative. I defy any man of imagination or sensibility to have 'The Ancient Mariner' read to him, by the flickering firelight on Christmas night, by a master mind possessed by the mystic spirit of the poem, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... to know the truth, but the world ought not at this period of unstable equilibrium to be disturbed by rumor, ought not to be disturbed by imaginative combinations of circumstances or, rather, by circumstances stated in combination which do not belong in combination. For we are holding—not I, but you and gentlemen engaged like you—the balances in your hand. This unstable equilibrium rests upon scales that are in your hands. For the food ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... space is, of course, nothing new. For many years, writers of imaginative fiction have described trips to the moon and distant planets. More recently, comic books and strips have gone in ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... upon other matters. The two had long talks at night. Sally suddenly knew how valuable a friend she had in Miss Summers. She knew the value of an unselfish readiness to serve; and she herself was generous enough and, in a sense, imaginative enough not to exploit Miss Summers. There was a good understanding between them. And Sally, as she looked round at the mahogany furniture in this old house, and saw the dull carpets and engravings which Madam had gathered together in other days for the suitable ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... and to substitute some supposed 'cold reason'; and it is only want of practice that makes the concurrent use of analysis and of poetic perception difficult or irksome. And, in the second place, these dissecting processes, though they are also imaginative, are still, and are meant to be, nothing but means to an end. When they have finished their work (it can only be finished for the time) they give place to the end, which is that same imaginative reading or re-creation of the drama from ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... civilization and formed disguised allegorical poems. Here the instructive function of the first poets is related to the enlarging of the reader's imagination, so that Ogilvie's rather shrewd defense of lyric poetry is based upon the civilizing effects of imaginative appeal. ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... (Q. 84, A. 6), it is better to have recourse to another explanation, and to hold that men have no such foreknowledge of the future, but that they can acquire it by means of experience, wherein they are helped by their natural disposition, which depends on the perfection of a man's imaginative power, and the clarity ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... sentiments until we feel them kindled into union with the lustre of a holier light than even that which leads our steps to God through the beauty of his own works. For this reason it is, that all imaginative affections are much stronger in the country than in the town. Love in the one place is not only freer from the coarseness of passion, but incomparably more seductive to the heart, and more voluptuous in its conception of the ideal beauty with which it invests ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... as much as I do at death. The scheme of existence does not appeal to me, at the moment, as the most perfect which a highly imaginative Creator could have invented. My transcendental philosophy seems a pretty good working article when things are going smoothly, but it is not quite equal to ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... cultivate the ability to use them. The plasticity of the child's mind is such that a new impression may be erased quickly by a newer one; his character receives a decided bent only through repeated impressions of the same kind. The imaginative faculty is one of the earliest to appear, and a weakness of our educational systems is the failure to realize its importance and to pay sufficient attention to its development. It is well known that imagination is the creative power of the mind which gives life to all work, so that without ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... federal constitution; they had civil and political ceremonies as wisely conceived and as dignified as they were impressive, romantic, and beautiful. Their literature, historical and imaginative, was handed down from generation to generation; and if memory were at fault, there were the wampum belts in ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... a splendid imaginative appeal in this remarkable passage. Again the italics are mine. It is, of course, impossible to accept this statement, as Bachofen does, as an historical account of what happened through the agency of women at the time of which he is treating. Yet, we can find a suggestion of truth that is eternal. ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... The poet himself is never cynical; his joyousness is all too apparent in the very manner and intensity of expression. The "lads" of Ludlow are so human to him, the hawthorn and broom on the Severn shores are so fragrant with associations, he cannot help but compose under a kind of imaginative wizardry of exultation, even when the immediate subject is grim or grotesque. In many of these brief, tense poems the reader confronts a mask, as it were, with appalling and distorted lineaments; but behind it the poet smiles, perhaps sardonically, but smiles ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... great master, feeling instinctively the poverty and want of sharp contrast in the externals of our New England life, always shades off the edges of the actual, till, at some indefinable line, they meet and mingle with the supersensual and imaginative. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... Greece, the idea was for a short time entertained of offering it to Lord Stanley. 'If he accepts,' Disraeli wrote to his friend Mrs. Willyams, 'I shall lose a powerful friend and colleague. It is a dazzling adventure for the house of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy they will prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon and Lancashire to the Attic Plains.' 'The Greeks really want to make my friend Lord Stanley their king. This beats any novel; but he will not. Had I his youth I would not ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... the arch of the tomb swung back on golden hinges, and opened only by a curiously-shaped golden key, which never left Mr. Murray's watch-chain; consequently what filled the penetralia was left for the conjecture of the imaginative; and when his mother expressed a desire to examine it, he merely frowned and ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Some imaginative children amuse themselves with these phantasms, and then, if encouraged to relate them, will constantly transgress the boundary line between truth and falsehood, and weave their little romance. When they happen on waking they are usually preceded by frightful ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... observation of. Actuality: in argument. Adams. Adjectives. Advantages: of expressing ideas gained from experience; of imaginative theme writing. Adverbs. Agreement. Allen, Elizabeth A. Allen, James Lane. Ambiguity. Analogy: argument from. Antithesis. Apostrophe: rule for; as figure of speech. Argument: purpose of; use of explanation in; by stating advantages and disadvantages; by use of specific instances; ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... a less imaginative child who likes to find some reason for things—a girl. Out at the work of picking blackberries, she explains, "Those rather good ones were all bad, mother, so I ate them." Being afraid of dogs, this little girl of four years old has all kinds of dodges ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... show that he had been studying the early poems of Milton. He has contrived to bury under a rubbish of verbiage one of the most purely imaginative passages ever written by ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... nor stout, he was to-day an imposing figure. Having received his hard knocks and endured his losses, there was that about him which touched and awakened the sympathies of the imaginative. People thought him naturally agreeable, and his senatorial peers looked upon him as not any too heavy mentally, ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... to be scorned. Nor must it be supposed that the lack of reverence implies any want of idealism, or any poverty of imagination, any absence of love or desire of the good and beautiful. The American is idealist and imaginative beyond the Englishman. ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... however, little time for introspection in the Army, and especially when one engages in a tilt with an R.T.O. The R.T.O. has been glorified by an imaginative soul with the title of "Royal Transportation Officer." As a matter of fact, the "R" does not stand for "royal," but for "railway," and the "T" is "transport," nothing so grandiose as "transportation." Now an R.T.O.'s job, though it may be a safe one, is not enviable. He is forced to combine ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... relations in England who urged on him the need for making February the shortest month of the year. Let us be grateful to His Holiness that he was so persuaded. He was a little obstinate about Leap Year; a more imaginative pontiff would have given the extra day to April; but he was amenable enough for a man who only had his relations' word for it. Every first of March I raise my glass to Gregory. Even as a boy I used to drink one of his powders to him at about this ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... of the visitors. Their faces do not fade from my memory. They haunt me with a gentle refrain of the world-as-it-might-be. The world as they would like it to be is certainly not always habitable, but it is generally one of exuberant imaginative verdure. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
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