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More "Visionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... theatrical managers when a beggarly account of empty boxes nightly proves the Drama is at a discount—all benefits visionary, and the price of admission is regarded as a tax, and the performers as ex-actors?——when they get scarcely enough to pay for lights, and ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... now before us contains, in my opinion, one of those visionary provisions, which, however infallible they may appear, will be easily defeated, and will have no other effect than to promote cunning and fraud, and to teach men those acts of collusion, with which they would otherwise never ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... sudden a vision of creamy walls and orange roof, draped in fantastic festoons of roses, with a single curving palm-tree stuck black and feathery against the gold sunset, it is hardly to be wondered at that I should slip into a mood of visionary enjoyment, looking for a time on the whole thing as the misty phantasm of a ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... nothing too hard to be credited. Something like this was done by the priests of ancient Greece and Rome; and a few centuries ago, tricks of the same nature were practiced by the monks, and other libertines, upon some of the visionary and enthusiastic women of Europe. Hence we need not think it strange, if the Fakiers generally succeed in attempts of this nature; when we consider that they only have to deceive a people brought up in the most consummate ignorance; and that nothing can be more flattering to female vanity, than ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... make no attempt in this book to deal with Society as a whole. I leave to others the formulation of ambitious programmes for the reconstruction of our entire social system; not because I may not desire its reconstruction, but because the elaboration of any plans which are more or less visionary and incapable of realisation for many years would stand in the way of the consideration of this Scheme for dealing with the most urgently pressing aspect of the question, which I hope may be put ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... political questions, Mr. Bryan followed a much more radical tendency than Mr. Wilson. His opponents call him a dishonest demagogue. I, on the contrary, would prefer to call Mr. Bryan an honest visionary and fanatic, whose passionate enthusiasm may go to make an exemplary speechmaker at large meetings, but not a statesman whose concern is the world of realities. He who in his enthusiasm believes he will be able to see his ideal realized in this world ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... history of the human mind, though it is neither science nor philosophy. It cannot be concealed, however, that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally visionary, the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things to their natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical enthusiasm is much the same; and both have received a sensible shock from the progress ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... desire to explore the wonders of the canyon, to shoot in the patches of forest, to fish in the river, and find he knew not what in those wondrous solitudes where man had probably never yet trod, he heard a call, and, brought back to himself from his visionary expedition, he shouted ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... struggled alone, until the tempest of his grief had passed, and light once more dawned upon his soul. His dreamy eyes, in whose depths one visionary object had been mirrored, now rested upon things with quick and apprehensive intelligence; his ears, that had been pained with one monotonous dirge of woe, now opened to the sounds of the outer world around; and his ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... perhaps, but certainly not many of the words. The doctor, it was clear, wished to coax from him the most intimate description possible of his experience. He put things crudely in order to challenge criticism, and thus to make his companion's reason sit in judgment on his heart. If this visionary Celt would let his intellect pass soberly and dissectingly upon these flaming states of wider consciousness he had touched, the doctor would have data of real value ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... privately tested, indisputably proved, and reported to a Government, or to a council of military men, at the period when the battering-ram and cross-bow were chief implements in war, it is probable that the civilians would have treated the author as a wild visionary, and that the professional council, true to the esprit de corps, would have spurned the supposed insult to their superior understanding. Science and the arts, both of peace and war, nevertheless, in despite of all such retarding ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... in a scene created by us, and partly impressed upon us, and which one motion of the head on the pillow may dissolve, or deepen into more oppressive delight! In some such dreaming state of mind are we now; and, gentle reader, if thou art broad awake, lay aside the visionary volume, or read a little longer, and likely enough is it that thou too mayest fall half asleep. If so, let thy drowsy eyes still pursue the glimmering paragraphs—and wafted away wilt thou feel thyself to be into the heart ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... scorched by fever into his brain; but how did they happen to remain on his belief as gospel truths? The delirium had vanished: why had not the painted scenery of the delirium vanished, except as visionary memorials of a sorrow that was cancelled? Why was it that craziness settled upon this mariner's brain, driving him, as if he were a Cain, or another Wandering Jew, to 'pass like night—from land to land;' and, at uncertain intervals, wrenching him until he made rehearsal of his ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... American historian second to none of his European contemporaries in [v.03 p.0308] the same line. He displayed the heroic, epic value of American history, its unity with the great central stream, and dispelled for ever the extravagant conceptions of a sentimental world just emerging from the visionary philosophy of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... untroubled eternity, and life becomes, in the language of Plato, a meditation or practising of death. This excessive preoccupation with a problematic future has been a fruitful source of the most fatal aberrations both for nations and individuals. In pursuit of these visionary aims the few short years of life have been frittered away: wealth has been squandered: blood has been poured out in torrents: the natural affections have been stifled; and the cheerful serenity of reason has been exchanged for the melancholy gloom ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... very gay and merry," said Josephine. "So I am, but I suppose that I have something deeper in my nature, that 'crops out' occasionally, as the geologists say. I suppose that I am a visionary in some respects and among my visions is a love worthily fixed and fully returned. So few seem to find this, that I fear I shall miss it—either miss it altogether or find it too late. The thought is a sad one, and that song seems insensibly to blend with it. ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... careful realism which distinguishes all Arnold Bennett's work, it is curious to note the fine use that he makes of his realistic genius in the handling of a visionary situation. ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... eighteen centuries resisted alike the storm of persecution and the sunshine of tolerance, and whose one consolation in the long exile was the dream of Zion. The artist in Barstein began to thrill. What more fascinating than to catch sight of the dreamer beneath the manufacturer, the Hebrew visionary ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... beach, we sat down to discuss the cocoa-nuts at our leisure, which occupied us some little time. Upon looking round, after we had finished, we discovered that our convoy had disappeared, and Johnny, whose imagination was continually haunted by visionary savages and cannibals, manifested considerable uneasiness upon finding that we ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... the self-same field we glean The field of the Samosatene, Each something takes and something leaves And this must choose, and that forego In Lucian's visionary sheaves, To twine a modern posy so; But all any gleanings, truth to tell, Are mixed with mournful asphodel, While yours are wreathed with poppies red, With flowers that Helen's feet have kissed, With leaves of vine that garlanded The ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... new base of supply for a column in East Tennessee as well as another in Georgia, the occupation of Knoxville and the Clinch and Holston valleys to the Virginia line was easy. Without it, all East Tennessee campaigns were visionary. It was easy enough to get there; the trouble was to stay. Buell's original lesson in logistics, in which he gave the War Department a computation of the wagons and mules necessary to supply ten thousand men at Knoxville, was ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Theory. The system is a combination of socialism and Islam derived in part from tribal practices and is supposed to be implemented by the Libyan people themselves in a unique form of "direct democracy." QADHAFI has always seen himself as a revolutionary and visionary leader. He used oil funds during the 1970s and 1980s to promote his ideology outside Libya, supporting subversives and terrorists abroad to hasten the end of Marxism and capitalism. In addition, beginning in 1973, he engaged in military operations in northern Chad's Aozou Strip ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... older version reads "Roc" and informs us that "it is a prodigious bird, found in the deserts of Africa: it will bear two hundred pounds weight; and many are of opinion that the idea of this bird is visionary." In Weber ii. 63, this is the device of "Zafagnie," who accompanies her husband ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... contrasting second section, with the sustained accompaniment and the melody in one of the middle parts, the entrance of the bright A major, after the gloom of the preceding bars, is very effective. The third movement has the character of a nocturne, and as such cannot fail to be admired. In the visionary dreaming of the long middle section we imagine the composer with dilated eyes and rapture in his look—it is rather a reverie than a composition. The finale surrounds us with an emotional atmosphere somewhat akin to that of the first movement, but more agitated. After eight bold introductory bars ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Alaska, the imported reindeer, at first decried and ridiculed, has now become the slender foundation for extravagant speculations of prosperity. The "millions of acres waiting for the plough" in the interior have lately been supplemented in this visionary treasury by the capitalisation of the vast tundras of the coast, the golden wheat-fields of the one finding counterpart in the multitudinous herds of the other. The growing dearth of cattle-range in the United States ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... and, in another line or hemistich, grow indifferent or slightly averse. He sheds the luminous suns of dreams upon men & women who would do well with footlights; waters their way with rushing streams of Paradise and cataracts from visionary hills; laps them in divine darkness; leads them into those touching landscapes, "the lovely that are not beloved;" long grey fields, cool sombre summers, and meadows thronged with unnoticeable flowers; speeds his carpet knight—or ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... almost exclusively from the desire of the people to escape further bloodshed; it was guarded by the Royalist Cossack clans, as lawless as they are brave. The Ufa Directorate derived its authority from the moderate Social Revolutionary party composed of the "Intelligenzia"—republican, visionary, and impractical. Kerensky was, from all accounts, a perfect representative of this class, verbose and useless so far as practical reconstructive work was concerned. This class blamed the unswerving loyalty of the Cossacks and the old army officers for all the crimes of which the Tsars ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... Farmers, who had barely been able to get a living from their sterile acres, had become millionaires. The whole region was alive with fortune-hunters, from every quarter of the country. Millions of dollars were in the pockets of men who were ready to purchase. Seedy, crazy, visionary fellows were working as middle-men, to talk up schemes, and win their bread, with as much more as they could lay their hands on. The very air was charged with the contagion of speculation, and men seemed ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... down quickly, in the new quarters; some visionary, romancing phase of Nancy's character and Nancy's roses disappeared for a time. She baked and boiled, sewed on buttons, bandaged fingers, rose gallantly to the days' demands. She learned the economical value of soups and ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... Visionary scenes appear! Words delusive cheat the ear! Be ye there, and be ye here! (They stand amazed and gaze at ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... was not altogether visionary. He had made it his business to find out about what it would cost to get to the Border, and he realized he must have money for other ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... were conveniently remote. I do not say this as desiring for one moment to suggest that he purposely selected those objects, and not others which might be more readily examined. He certainly believed in the reality of the communications he described. But possibly there is some law in things visionary, corresponding to the law of mental operation with regard to scientific theories; and as the mind theorises freely about a subject little understood, but cautiously where many facts have been ascertained, so probably exact knowledge of a subject prevents the operation of those illusions which are ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... or rather almost identical class of facts admitted by the least visionary naturalists and included under the name of Morphology. These facts show that in an individual organic being, several of its organs consist of some other organ metamorphosed{456}: thus the sepals, petals, stamens, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... years, told me that when he was on the cruising-ground, he fished all night in his dreams, and that many a time he has rubbed the skin off his knuckles by striking them against the ceiling of his bunk when he raised his arms to thrust the harpoon into visionary ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... Barnes' only near relative, a brother. Always a visionary, easy-going, impractical little man, he had never been willing to stick at steady employment, but was always chasing rainbows and depending upon his sister for a home and means of existence. When the Klondike gold fever struck the ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... long retirement was in some measure retrieved) to her two executors, Dr. Berkley the late lord bishop of Cloyne, and Mr. Marshal one of the king's Serjeants at law. Thus perished under all the agonies of despair, Mrs. Esther Vanhomrich; a miserable example of an ill-spent life, fantastic wit, visionary schemes, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... direction quite the contrary of his. Run over the names that will readily occur of modern novelists and short-story writers, and ask yourself whether the vivid coloring of these realistic schools must not inevitably have blanched to a still whiter pallor those visionary tales of which the author long ago confessed that they had "the pale tints of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade." With practice has gone theory; and now the critics of realism are beginning to nibble at the accepted estimates of Hawthorne. A very damaging bit of dissection ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... asked Charles, and as the baron, with a low bow, assented, the Emperor continued: "Then it is scarcely an intrigue, at any rate a successful one, unless he is unlike the usual stamp. But no! I noticed the man. There is something visionary about him, like most of the Germans. But I have never ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... women are far better educated than the men." The answer was obvious. "If women are, according to your admission, fitted for the higher plane, why keep them on the lower?" My friend then went on to say, that the whole of this scheme was considered to be of the most morally visionary character, and the proof of this feeling was the slight opposition it met, "for," said he "if it were looked on by society as serious, it would be at once, and forcibly, opposed in the church, by the press, in all public ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... inspiration in the Great Purpose which drives on for the achievement of the human task on earth. The dreamer of dreams is born to translate his visions into reality, or to lie broken before the task. Steve was no visionary. He was something more, something greater. His was the stern heart of purpose selected for the translation of the dream of the dreamer who ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... deteriorating influence upon the young, and misleading influence upon all, but it actually leads to false views of life, and an unsound philosophy such as transcendental idealism, pessimism, indolence, and the pursuit of visionary falsehoods which a well-balanced mind would intuitively reject. These follies are cultivated by a pedantic system of education, and by the accumulated literature which such education in the past has developed, feeble and faulty in style, superficial in conception, and sadly ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... ignorant, tyrannical, and despotic tyrant. Any attempt to force a channel of commerce, beyond the territories of these savage chiefs, without having first, either by presents or other means, obtained their co-operation, is too visionary a scheme for even the most enterprising adventurer to dare to undertake. King Jacket and King Boy, with the king of Eboe, may be said to be in the command of the estuary of the Niger, and, therefore, any attempt to establish a channel of commerce without allowing ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Mr. Jackson smiled once more upon the company, and, applying his left thumb to the tip of his nose, worked a visionary coffee-mill with his right hand: thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime (then much in vogue, but now, unhappily, almost obsolete) which was familiarly denominated 'taking a grinder.' (Imagine a modern solicitor's clerk ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... and above rear white-terraced palaces as swans that strain their throats to the sky. The mighty East is in penitence. Or, Elijah is rapt to heaven in a fiery whirlwind; or God creates light. This latter is one of the most extraordinary conceptions of a great visionary and worthy of William Blake. Or Sadak searching for the waters of oblivion. Alas, poor humanity! is here the allegory. A man, a midget amid the terrifying altitudes of barren stone, lifts himself painfully over a ledge of rock. Above him are vertiginous ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... in having imagination, since that visionary faculty opens the mental eyes to facts that more practical and duller intellects could ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... visionary optimism in regarding her daughters' futures. The girls were all to marry, of course, and marry well, far above ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... brought him to Stone Court. Raffles denied this with solemn adjurations; the fact being that the links of consciousness were interrupted in him, and that his minute terror-stricken narrative to Caleb Garth had been delivered under a set of visionary impulses which ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the second of May held forth a promise which, according to a very usual trick of English weather, it has not kept; and was so mild and smiling and gracious, that, without being quite so foolish as to indulge in any romantic and visionary expectation of ever seeing summer again, we were yet silly enough to be cheered by the thought that spring was coming ...
— Honor O'callaghan • Mary Russell Mitford
... its uncertain rays upwards, and made the central face quiver as it were into life, I would shrink, horror-stricken, under the clothes, and silently pray for the morning. It was certainly a fearful room for a visionary child like myself, with whom the existence of ghosts made an article of faith, and who had been once before frightened even unto ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... (1775-1839), who was afterwards to be for a while so intimately associated with Lamb. Charles Lloyd was the son of a Quaker banker of Birmingham. He had published a volume of poems the year before and had met Coleridge when that magnetic visionary had visited Birmingham to solicit subscribers for The Watchman early in 1796. The proposition that Lloyd should live with Coleridge and become in a way his pupil was agreed to by his parents, and in September he accompanied the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... thousands. Indeed, since that interview in which Philip Sheldon had made so light of his stepdaughter's chances, and ratified his consent to her marriage with so humble a literary adventurer as himself, Mr. Hawkehurst had come to consider the Haygarthian inheritance as altogether a visionary business. If it were certain, or even probable, that Charlotte was to inherit a hundred thousand pounds, was it likely that Mr. Sheldon would encourage such an alliance? This question Mr. Hawkehurst always answered in the negative; and as days ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... possession of your visionary mind now?" she queried. "Just when I thought you were quite contented to stay with me, you start off to teach a score or more of ignorant little savages in some obscure part of some obscure region, not yet blessed with the telegraph ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... England took a wholly literary form. In France it was what people did that was wild and elemental; in England it was what people wrote. It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... scene passed before him now he got to his feet and, with that look of the visionary in his eyes, which those only know who have watched the born gamester, said, "I'll back my hand till the last throw." Then it was, as his eyes gazed in front of him dreamily, he saw the card on his mirror bearing the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and lose the substance;—the common fate of those who hazard a real blessing for a visionary good. ...
— Rock A Bye Library: A Book of Fables - Amusement for Good Little Children • Unknown
... woman's lover! It was too amazing. Brangwen went home despising himself for his own poor way of life. He was a clod-hopper and a boor, dull, stuck in the mud. More than ever he wanted to clamber out, to this visionary polite world. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... amiable, far from unaccomplished, but too convivial sovereign, had a continued use for money: Gibson was observant to keep him well supplied. Kalakaua (one of the most theoretical of men) was filled with visionary schemes for the protection and development of the Polynesian race: Gibson fell in step with him; it is even thought he may have shared in his illusions. The king and minister at least conceived between them a scheme of island confederation—the most obvious fault of which was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... now at the thirtieth of April. On the fifth day from this the Visionary Nun is expected to appear. In my last visit to the Convent I provided myself with a dress proper for the character: A Friend, whom I have left there and to whom I made no scruple to confide my secret, readily consented to supply me with a religious habit. Provide ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... have brought affluence to the struggling artist, who (as Cromek taunted him) was frequently "reduced so low as to be obliged to live on half a guinea a week." Not that this was entirely the fault of his contemporaries. Blake was a visionary, and an untuneable man; and, like others who work for the select public of all ages, he could not always escape the consequence that the select public of his own, however willing, were scarcely numerous enough to support him. His most individual works are the "Songs ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... example and the presence of this fear could not have been resisted long. Lincoln was not a man who could be accused of taking any course without a reason well thought out; we can safely conclude that in the summer of 1862 he nursed a hope, by no means visionary, of initiating a process of liberation free from certain evils in that upon ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... chap," said I, reaching out my hand and shaking it in the air with my visionary friend—"thanks. I've studied these things with some care, and I've tried to find a reason for everything in life as I know it. I have always regarded Henry as a moral man—as is natural, since in spite of all you can say he is ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... may be disposed to regard the above statements concerning the "planes of being" as somewhat visionary, theoretical, or imaginary, we would say: "Go to modern science, and verify this statement." The following quotation from a writer on the subject will serve to illustrate this fact, viz.: "We are apt to think that we are familiar ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... successive season sway'd The fruitful sceptre of our milder clime Since My Loved ****** died! but why, ah! why Should melancholy cloud my early years? Religion spurns earth's visionary scene, Philosophy revolts at misery's chain: Just Heaven recall'd it's own, the pilgrim call'd From human woes, from sorrow's rankling ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... Reich, which had been a wiggery so long. Nobody could guess of what it was that France or the world might be with child: nobody, till the birth in 1789, and even for a generation afterwards. France is weakly and unwieldy, has strange enough longings for chalky, inky, visionary, foolish substances, and may be in the family-way for aught ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... when he plotted the ruin of his country with a cabal of bad ministers, or, equally unprincipled, supported its cause with bad patriots,—one laments that such parts should have been devoid of every virtue: but when Alcibiades turns chemist; when he is a real bubble and a visionary miser; when ambition is but a frolic; when the worst designs are for the foolishest ends,—contempt extinguishes all reflection ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... importance; but they connected it with the development of transcontinental communication, and trade with China and Japan, rather than with internal development, or what railroad men call local traffic. They were somewhat visionary, no doubt, but none of them dreamed that the future of the Pacific road depended more on the business that would grow out of the peopling of the deserts it traversed than upon ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... travelled farther yet and saw all the country beyond, all the land of the To Be, all the giant valley of the Mississippi, all the rolling, endless plains, all Mexico with snowy peaks and mines of gold. The apparition did not come dazzlingly. He was no visionary. He weighed and measured and reckoned carefully with his host. But there, beyond the mountains, lay no small part of the habitable world,—and the race of conquerors had not died with Alexander or Caesar, Cortez or Pizarro! Witness Marengo and Austerlitz and that throne at Fontainebleau! He dropped ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... must therefore be employed to oppose these visionary schemes. They must be publicly denounced as what they really are—as an unhealthy and feeble Utopia, or a cloak for political machinations. Our people must learn to see that the maintenance of peace never can or may be the goal of a policy. The policy ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... obstinate to excess. He formed his attachments with caution and timidity, but when once formed they were cordial and permanent. In the midst of a tumultuous crowd he walked in solitude. Wrapped in his own visionary ideas, he was often a stranger to the world about him; and, sensible of his own deficiency in the knowledge of mankind, he scarcely ever ventured an opinion of his own, and was apt to pay an unwarrantable deference to the judgment of others. Though far from being weak, no man was more ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... poet indeed, a visionary, a mystic, and a Christian; none of which names can be truly applied to Milton. And if we wish to find Love enjoying his just supremacy in poetry, we cannot do better than seek him among the lyrists of the Court of Charles II. Milton, self-sufficient and censorious, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... having been so dazzled, and that if we are to represent the rays we ought also to cover our sky with pink and blue circles. I should on the whole consider it utterly false in principle to represent the visionary beam, and that we ought only to show that which has actual existence. Such we find to be the constant practice of Turner. Even where, owing to interposed clouds, he has beams appearing to issue from the orb itself, they are broad bursts ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... The dreams of the visionary have "come to pass!" the unseen El Dorado of the "fathers" looms, in all its virgin freshness and beauty, before the eyes of their children! The "set time" for the Golden age, the advent of which has been looked for and longed for during many centuries of iron wrongs and hardships, ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... saw certainly what they could not see; and his romance was always a fruit of the soil. The artist in him, seeming to be in conflict with the peasant, fortified, clarified the peasant, extracted from that hard soil a rare fruit. You see in his face an extraordinary mingling of the peasant, the visionary, and the dandy: the long hair and beard, the sensitive mouth and nose, the fierce brooding eyes, in which wildness and delicacy, strength and a kind of stealthiness, seem to be grafted on an inflexible ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... favorite preconceived ideas—and then I called to mind the poor fellow's speech about the beetle's being "the index of his fortune." Upon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled, but, at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity—to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary, by ocular demonstration, of the fallacy of the opinions ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Germans under Arminius (Hermann), completed the humiliation of Augustus, for, in this defeat, he must have foreseen the future victories of the barbarians. All ideas of extending the empire beyond the Rhine were now visionary, and that river was henceforth to remain its boundary on the north. New levies were indeed dispatched to the Rhine, and Tiberius and Germanicus led the forces. But the princes returned to Rome without effecting ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... days in the country to the eastward of Bagdad; the Persian deserter, who had artfully led them into the spare, escaped from their resentment; and his followers, as soon as they were put to the torture, confessed the secret of the conspiracy. The visionary conquests of Hyrcania and India, which had so long amused, now tormented, the mind of Julian. Conscious that his own imprudence was the cause of the public distress, he anxiously balanced the hopes of safety or success, without obtaining a satisfactory answer, either from gods ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the party among ourselves at present which opposes the augmentation of our forces, and derides the idea of our being in any peril from the sudden attack of a French expedition. The Syracusan orator told his countrymen to dismiss with scorn the visionary terrors which a set of designing men among themselves strove to excite, in order to get power and influence thrown into their own hands. He told them that Athens knew her own interest too well to think of wantonly provoking their hostility:—"EVEN IF THE ENEMIES ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... in amazement. Mrs. Mowbray almost felt inclined to believe she was a dreamer, so visionary did the whole scene appear. A dense crowd of witnesses stood at the entrance. Foremost amongst them was the sexton. Suddenly a shriek was heard, and the crowd opening to allow her passage, Sybil ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... abiding trust He rose from out the dust, As Death's swift chariot passed him by the way; No visionary dream Was his—no trifling theme— The Soul's great ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... incompatible with the tranquility of society; their apparent exemption from want and care and servitude to business, excites impracticable hopes in the minds of those who are even more ignorant and unreflecting—and their locomotive habits fit them for a dangerous agency in schemes, wild and visionary, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... the second merit, that of activity, there can be little doubt as to where it lies between the planner of the Utopia and the convert of the brotherhood. The modern Socialist is a visionary, but in this he is on the same ground as half the great men of the world, and to some extent of the early Christian himself, who rushed towards a personal ideal very difficult to sustain. The visionary who yearns toward an ideal which is practically impossible is not useless or mischievous, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... my mind; and when I found myself in London, in the autumn of 1854, just after the battle of Alma had been fought, and my old friends were fairly before the walls of Sebastopol, how to join them there took up far more of my thoughts than that visionary gold-mining speculation on the river Palmilla, which seemed so feasible to us in New Granada, but was considered so wild and unprofitable a speculation in London. And, as time wore on, the inclination to join my old friends of the 97th, 48th, and ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... that all his dreams of Faerie did not make him neglectful of his earthly estate. Like Shakspere, like Scott, Spenser did not cease to be a man of the world—we use the phrase in no unkindly sense—because he was a poet. He was no mere visionary, helpless in the ordinary affairs of life. In the present case it would appear that he was even too keen in looking after his own interests. Professor Craik charitably suggests that his poverty 'rather than rapacity may be supposed ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... through that narrow, shut-up chamber a gust of mountain air were sweeping like a breath of fresh life. Mr. Gresley was vaguely stirred in spite of himself, until he remembered that it was all fantastic, visionary. He had never felt like that, and his own experience was his measure of the utmost that is possible in human nature. He would have called a kettle visionary if he had never seen one himself. It was ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... almost always did under the influence of Peel, recommended the Tory peers not to carry their opposition too far, and before long Lord Lyndhurst, who was by temperament and intellect a very shrewd and practical man, with little of the visionary or the fanatic about him, thought it well to accept Wellington's advice, and to urge its acceptance on his brother Conservatives. Lord John Russell recommended the House of Commons to accept a compromise on a few insignificant details in no wise affecting ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to the account which he gave of his voyage, while Columbus enjoyed the satisfaction of being able to prove the solidity of his schemes to those very persons who had with disgraceful ignorance rejected them as the projects of a visionary adventurer. ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... coalesced into one reverent devotion to beauty and nobility wherever they might bloom. It was accordingly a poignant sense for the excellence of real things that made Plato wish to transcend them; his metaphysics was nothing but a visionary intuition of values, an idealism in the proper sense of the word. But when the momentum of such enthusiasm remained without its motive power, and its transcendence without its inspiration in real experience, idealism ceased to be an idealisation, an ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... or another every year or two from 1809 to 1814,[68] but no occurrence of tangible character until the Boxley plot of 1816 in Spottsylvania and Louisa Counties. George Boxley, the white proprietor of a country store, was a visionary somewhat of John Brown's type. Participating in the religious gatherings of the negroes and telling them that a little white bird had brought him a holy message to deliver his fellowmen from bondage, he enlisted many blacks in his project for insurrection. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... could not last long without having a bad effect on the body. I had an illness, which, although I was racked with pain, was a positive relief to me, as it compelled me to live in the present suffering, and not in the visionary researches I had been continually making before. My kind uncle came to nurse me; and after the immediate danger was over, my life seemed to slip away in delicious languor for two or three months. I did not ask—so much did I dread falling into the old ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... like his body. Superficial people called it narrow, because the sheer length of it diverted their attention from its breadth. Visionary, yet eager for the sound impact of the visible, it was never more alert than when it, so to speak, sat still, absorbed in its impressions. It was the sport of young and rapid impulses, which it seemed to obey sluggishly, while, all the time, it moved with immense, slow ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... berth, "vowed that, if God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that class of beings with whom my lot has been so long cast.'' This vow he carried out in no visionary scheme of mutiny or foolish "paying back'' to the captain, but by awakening a "strong sympathy'' for the sailors "by a voice from the forecastle,'' in his ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... rid myself for one moment of the idea that an engine really works, with weary, reluctant strength like a genii slave, waiting vengefully for the time of retaliation, which sooner or later is sure to come; or of the visionary notion that a graceful, gliding ship, with all sails set, receives the same pleasure from its own motion and beauty that a snow-white swan must do "as down she bears before the gale," with her ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... the court, the senate the admiralty, and the academy of sciences decided to provide with a lavish profusion that would dazzle the world with the brilliancy of Russian exploits. Russia was in the mood to do things. The young savants who thronged her capital were heady with visionary theories that were to astonish the rest of mortals. Scientists, artisans, physicians, monks, Cossacks, historians, made up the motley roll of conflicting influences under Bering's command; but because Bering was a Dane, this command was not supreme. He must convene a council of the Russian ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... tarpaulin hoods, or at carriage windows, or shielded by enormous dripping wicker hats, or bared to the pelting rain. Curious odors greeted him, as of sour vegetables and of unknown rank substances burning. He stared like a visionary at the streaming ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... losing their heads, and to a large extent achieved it. I had known Mr. Krebs for more than twenty years, and while I did not care to criticise a fellow-member of the bar, I would go so far as to say that he was visionary, that the changes he proposed in government would, if adopted, have grave and far-reaching results: we could not, for instance, support in idleness those who refused to do their share of the work of the world. Mr. Krebs was well-meaning. I refrained from dwelling too long ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... anthropomorphic idea of God—the idea of the Prophet and Psalmist, wholly untouched by the questioning of Job; become tender, through the mellowing growth of centuries; sublimated in a heart of exquisite goodness and tenderness; and mixed with a visionary interpretation of the world. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... there were various visionary reports of new discoveries of gold regions, one of a lake that the sands of its banks were rich with gold. All you had to do, to make your fortune, was to wash it out, which produced quite a sensation, ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... a barn standing by itself in a poor, marshy orchard, and packed with hay; to make it more attractive, we were told it had been the scene of an abominable murder, and was now haunted. But the day was beginning to break, and our fatigue was too extreme for visionary terrors. The second or third, we alighted on a barren heath about midnight, built a fire to warm us under the shelter of some thorns, supped like beggars on bread and a piece of cold bacon, and slept like gipsies with our feet to the fire. In the meanwhile, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "wild west wind." Mere impersonation and invocation in apostrophe and paeans are not necessarily worship. Doubtless these spells and charms often arose from a superstitious half-belief, an imaginative freak, such as possesses the civilized visionary who shows a coin to the new moon to propitiate its fancied waxing influence in behalf of a balance at the banker's, or the Christianized Scotch Highlander of even the early nineteenth century who threw a piece of hasty ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... right his unfailing sagacity. Of no other American statesman can they be so unqualifiedly affirmed. They are indeed his peculiar distinction and glory. Here he is the transcendent figure in our political history. And yet, he was no fanatical visionary, Utopian dreamer, but a practical moralist in the domain of politics. When president and party turned a deaf ear to him and his simple straightforward remedy to try their own, he did not break with them. On the contrary foot to foot and shoulder to shoulder he kept step with both as far as ...
— Charles Sumner Centenary - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 14 • Archibald H. Grimke
... better financial investment than a working-class paper; but Lizzie, alas, could not be made to see it. And then his eye was caught by an advertisement of an oil-company, published in a Socialist paper, which lifted it above suspicion. But again Lizzie blocked the way. She begged her visionary husband to turn the money over to her; she argued that half of it belonged to her anyhow—had she not done her part to earn it? "What part?" Jimmie asked; and she answered that she had kept quiet—and what more had ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... ill-bred but by no means breadless. (That's my own and not very funny, by the way.) Did I tell you, Denis, that Leslie is going to begin educating the People in Appreciation of Objects of Art? Isn't it a nice idea? I'm to help. Leslie's a visionary, you know. I believe plutocrats often are. They've so much money and are so comfortable that they stop wanting material things and begin dreaming dreams. I should dream dreams if I was a plutocrat. As it ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... guilt alone, Like brain sick frenzy in its feverish mood. Fills the light air with visionary terrors And shapeless forms ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... to the conduct of other Princes and States, has greatly injured us by relaxing our exertions. But the opinion as to pecuniary aid has been still more pernicious. People have flattered themselves with a visionary idea, that nothing more was necessary, than for Congress to send a Minister abroad, and that immediately he would obtain as much money as he chose to ask for. That, when he opened a loan, hundreds ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... we fancied we were actually close to the spot, we strained our eyes in vain to see a single hut,—all was gloomy, dismal, cheerless, and solitary. It seemed the work of enchantment; every thing was as visionary as "sceptres grasped in sleep." We had paddled along the banks a distance of not less than thirty miles, every inch of which we had attentively examined, but not a bit of dry land could any where be discovered which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... in posse, but not in esse. To be less pedantic and more exact, they existed as slips of blank paper, with a Government stamp. To give them a mercantile character for a time—viz., until presented for payment—they must be drawn by an imaginary ship-owner or a visionary merchant, and indorsed by at least one shadow, and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... and just see what was there. Many a day I spent poring over the map of the Colony, longing and longing to push out into the vast blank spaces of the unknown. Even at that time I planned out the expedition which at last I was enabled to undertake, though all was very visionary, and I could hardly conceive how I should ever manage to find the necessary ways ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... in subsequent years, and that such literal obedience is practicable, reasonable and conducive to the highest well-being of society. Secondly, it has been said that Jesus was a gentle and honest visionary, who erroneously believed that the possession of riches rendered religious progress impossible, but that strict compliance with His commands would be destructive of civilization. Laveleye declares that ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... the scene that presented itself to the view of Piper Steenie Steenson, when he was ushered by the phantom of his old friend Dougal M^cCallum into the presence of the ghastly revellers carousing in the auld oak parlour of the visionary Redgauntlet Castle, ever been painted? (See Redgauntlet, Letter xi.) If it has, is there any engraving of the picture extant or ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... time when I had such thoughts,' said Miss Graham; 'when I was quite a young girl I used to long to join a Sisterhood, and devote myself to good works for the rest of my life; but I was shown how visionary and unpractical such ideas were, and after a time I ceased ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... That one word was more eloquent than all the rest of his words put together. This fellow is no visionary. His scheme may be daring, and unprincipled, but—he knows very well what ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Sabbath observance was not fundamental, and while the reading of the Bible was a medium of communication by God's spirit, its importance was secondary to the immediate movements of the spirit. The works of the Labadists disclose a high form of faith and aspiration, but vitiated by many visionary and impracticable features, in Maryland by the mercenary instincts of their leader, Sluyter. Nor was the general state of religion in Maryland at the time of their experiment such as to foster a profoundly ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... of the opinion that Mushet's "new compounds and alloys," promised well as an auxiliary to the Bessemer process but that "the evil which it was intended to remove was more visionary than real." Bessemer's chief difficulty was the phosphorus, not the oxide of iron "as Mr. Mushet assumes." This, Bessemer no doubt would deal with in due course, but meanwhile he did well "to concentrate his energies upon the steel operations," after which ...
— The Beginnings of Cheap Steel • Philip W. Bishop
... ancient theories to some of the new facts, and much wit and ingenuity would be required to modify and defend their old positions. Each new invention would violate a greater number of known analogies; for if a theory be required to embrace some false principle, it becomes more visionary in proportion as facts are multiplied, as would be the case if geometers were now required to form an astronomical system on the assumption of the immobility of ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... being of course in our possession—would think of nothing but making the best terms they could for themselves." To his dismay, however, and to the extreme annoyance of the admiral, General Dundas, commanding the army, refused to move against Bastia, condemning the attempt as visionary and rash. Meantime the French, unmolested except by the desultory efforts of the insurgent Corsicans, were each day strengthening their works, and converting the possibilities Nelson saw into the impossibilities of ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... pictures of that period, fills the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the hillsides with pools of water, and the pools of water with flowering reeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and in his visionariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion of Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or less refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... are young—while yet the dew lingers on the green leaf of spring—while all the brighter, the more enterprising part of the future is to come—while we know not whether the true life may not be visionary and excited as the false—how deep and rich a transport is it to see, to feel, to hear Shakspeare's conceptions made actual, though all imperfectly, and only for an hour! Sweet Arden! are we in thy forest?—thy "shadowy groves and unfrequented glens"? ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of his life; he busied himself so intensely in visionary bustle that he forgot his real solitude. But one day the consciousness of his own folly and inaction pierced him deeply. He compared twenty months with the life of man. "The period of human existence," said he, "may be reasonably ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... was not to be hoodwinked: he must see the money standing in my name on the day appointed. His doubts were evident, but he affected to be expectant. Not a word of Sarkeld could be spoken. My success appeared to be on a more visionary foundation the higher ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... encountered Silas Daunt, "Slip on your hat and coat. Come along with me to the State House. I'll show you how practical politics can settle a rumpus, after a visionary has tumbled down ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... which were also consulted; and thus a very respectable array of scientific arguments in favor of Miscegenation were soon compiled. The sentimental and argumentative portions were quickly suggested from the knowledge of the authors of current politics, of the vagaries of some of the more visionary reformers, and from ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... the Reformation before they say 'Amen' to the unsavory and brazen laudations of the profligate opponent of Christian marriage, Christian decency, and Christian propriety. Compare the teachings of Luther on polygamy with those of Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet and visionary, and see their striking similarity. Mormonism in Salt Lake City, in Utah, which has brought so much disgrace to the American people, is but a legitimate outgrowth of Luther and Lutheranism." This, then, is what will have to be done: a comparison ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... bring things to pass in a way that excited his enthusiasm. He never tired of listening to his stories of what he had done and of what he was going to do. As for Washington, Harry thought he was a man of ability and comprehension, but "too visionary," he told the Colonel. The Colonel said he might be right, but he had never noticed anything visionary ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "a psychological drama in two acts." It relates the story of the last day and night in the life of a visionary girl, the hereditary princess of Burren in Clare, in the west of Ireland. On the eve of her marriage to Hugh Fitz Walter, a rich young Englishman, whom she will wed only for her father's sake to reestablish him in his position as "The O'Heynes" among the neighboring gentry, she wanders ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... listen to the evidence of a witness who appeared of his own accord and declared that he had often met the ghost. This witness was none other than the man whom all Paris called the "Persian" and who was well-known to every subscriber to the Opera. The magistrate took him for a visionary. ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... in inducing the lady to promise, that, in the event of my allowing her to break off her present engagement, she will wait for the somewhat remote and visionary contingency ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... of the affair given by themselves; although more, it is believed, to suit the taste and belief of the time they lived in than their own. The two brothers had passed many hours silent and in the dark; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the visionary world, into which they had unconsciously slipped, presented to both such phenomena—founded on the meditations and recollections in which both had been immersed—as were easily rendered in the exoteric types ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... real history must walk shadowed under the veil of modesty; for the soul, still less than the body, will consent to be revealed to all eyes. Hence, although most of my books have seemed true to some, they have all seemed visionary to most. ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... things that are valuable: but they are not practical; they all fail in the application of knowledge to useful ends. I am not an educated man myself, but I have known many who are, and they are all alike—shallow, superficial, visionary. They need to put away their books and sit down among the everlasting hills and think. You have done well to come out here, young man. This ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... though, as the first prophet of "China for the Chinese," he found a fundamental truth, he found it too soon for immediate utility. On political matters he and the I.G. disagreed; the latter was far too wise to hold with Gordon's somewhat visionary idea that China could raise an army as good as the best in the twinkling of an eye; and when Gordon left Peking after a very short stay, he ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... senseless, that I dare not aver, that the horrid creatures of the house were personally aiding and abetting: but some visionary remembrances I have of female figures, flitting, as I may say, before my sight; the wretched woman's particularly. But as these confused ideas might be owing to the terror I had conceived of the worse than masculine violence she had been permitted to assume to me, for expressing my abhorrence ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... leaps up on his mother's arm;— I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!— But there's a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have looked upon,— Both of them speak of something that is gone; The pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat. Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Lord Goderich subscribed L500 to the maintenance of the strikers. But, although he lived in this highly idealistic society, surrounded by young men who saw visions and old men who dreamed dreams, Lord Goderich was neither visionary nor dreamer. He passed, under Lord Russell, Lord Palmerston, and Mr. Gladstone, through a long series of practical and laborious offices. He became Secretary of State for India, and for War; and, when Lord President of the Council, attained ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... his descriptive passages the dream-character of his scenery is notorious; it is not the clear, recognisable scenery of Wordsworth, but a landscape that hovers athwart the heat and haze arising from his crackling fantasies. The materials for such visionary Edens have evidently been accumulated from direct experience, but they are recomposed by him into such scenes as never had mortal eye beheld. "Don't you wish you had?" as Turner said. The one justification for classing Shelley with the Lake poet is that he loved Nature with a love even ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... gendarmerie under Colonel Valentine Baker. Associated with this crowd of silly and inexperienced boys was an old grey-bearded American doctor, who believed in the whole cock-and-bull story as if it had been gospel, and had undertaken to act as surgeon aboard that visionary craft. He was a delightful old fellow, and, for all his simplicity, had a vein of humour in him. Odd as it may sound, he was a man of some distinction, and had served with conspicuous honour in the Civil War, He had money ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... be done, to help these men to secure work for a time after their discharge from prison. This would prevent a vast majority of criminals from returning to the prison after their first term. That my views on this subject may not be considered visionary, and that I may not be regarded as standing alone in my suggestions, I will give a portion of the report of Rev. J. Gierlow, ex-chaplain of the ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... the curate; "then by my faith he must take up his quarters in the yard, in spite of his marvellous birth and visionary adventures, for the stiffness and dryness of his style deserve nothing else; into the yard with him and the other, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... world, mixing with young men and meeting young women, he would outgrow his romantic fancy concerning Ida; but the event was very different. As year after year he returned home to spend his vacations, it was evident that his visionary passion was strengthening rather than losing its hold ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... scholarly and costly volumes in glazed cases. The house must have been taken furnished; for it had no congruity with this man of the shirt sleeves and the mean supper. As for the earl's daughter, the earl and the visionary consulships in foreign cities, they had long ago begun to fade in Challoner's imagination. Like Dr. Grierson and the Mormon angels, they were plainly woven of the stuff of dreams. Not an illusion remained to the knight-errant; not a hope was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... included originally in "The Visionary" (a tale now known as "The Assignation"), in July, 1835, and appeared as a separate poem entitled "To Ianthe in Heaven," in Burton's 'Gentleman's Magazine' for July, 1839. The fifth stanza is now added, for the first ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... sexual connection plays an important part in his teaching and prophesies. The apostle St. Paul was also a visionary who passed suddenly from one extreme to another as the result of hallucination. Pascal, Napoleon, and Rousseau presented very ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... which still I formed just as my fancy wished; there, for the first two days I walked and sighed, and told my new-born passion to every gentle wind that played among the boughs; for yet no lady bright appeared beneath them, no visionary nymph the groves afforded; but on the third day, all full of love and stratagem, in the cool of the evening, I passed into a thicket near a little rivulet, that purled and murmured through the glade, and passed into the ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee concerning Me?" The purport of this question seems to have been to probe Pilate's conscience, and make him aware of his own growing consciousness that this prisoner was too royal in mien to be an ordinary Jewish visionary. It was as though He said: "Dost thou use the term in the common sense, or as a soul confronted by a greater than thyself? Do you speak by hearsay or by conviction? Is it because the Jews have so taught thee, or because thou recognizest ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... was nothing visionary about Garraway's. "Garraway's, twelve o'clock. 'Dear Mrs. B., Chops and Tomato Sauce, Yours, Pickwick,'" not only implicated Mr. Pickwick, but conjured up an old and historic coffee house of city fame. It stood ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... sounded out; 'Peculiar and insuperable difficulties prevent a general revival in cities: such are the occupations, such the habits, such the temptations, and such the superabounding iniquity, that it were visionary to hope for any general and powerful work of mercy.' Well, then, had we not better give all up; and let human nature here sink into its natural channels; and let multitudes before our eyes continue to crowd the gates of the second death! O God, forbid such ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton
... that Henry had stood alone for almost forty years, and had he fallen before these few ounces of gold reached his country, the spirit of discovery might have perished with him, and his designs might have been condemned as the dreams of a visionary. The importation of this gold, and the establishment of the African company in Portugal, to continue the remark of the same author, is the primary date, to which we may refer that turn for adventure which sprung up in Europe, which pervaded all the ardent spirits in every ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... difficulty of a new invention, and the fact that the paddle-boat had established itself in public estimation. The engineering and shipbuilding world were dead against him. They regarded the project of propelling a vessel by means of a screw as visionary and preposterous. There was also the official unwillingness to undertake anything novel, untried, and contrary to routine. There was the usual shaking of the head and the shrugging of the shoulders, as if the inventor ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... deputy warden of the Leavenworth Penitentiary, one W.H. Mackay, wrote a letter to the Attorney-General on the 6th of November, 1913, parts of which were published in newspapers about that time. In this letter he said that Mr. LaDow was egotistical, arrogant, negligent, extravagant, visionary and impractical, showed favoritism to prisoners, and was totally unfit for the position he held. He ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... of the French who have read a little are mere pedants, nearly unacquainted with modern nations, their commercial and political relation, their internal laws, characters, or manners. Their studies are chiefly confined to Rollin and Plutarch, the deistical works of Voltaire, and the visionary politics of Jean Jaques. Hence they amuse their hearers with allusions to Caesar and Lycurgus, the Rubicon, and Thermopylae. Hence they pretend to be too enlightened for belief, and despise all governments ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... luxury corrupts a people, and destroys the spirit of liberty. JOHNSON. 'Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual[502]. Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private man. What Frenchman is prevented from passing his life ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... absolute finality, that for a space of several seconds I was rendered literally speechless with amazement. The colossal impudence and audacity of the proposal took my breath away. But I soon collected my scattered faculties, and forthwith proceeded vigorously to remonstrate with the visionary enthusiast who, I instantly recognised, must be the originator ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... I have already observed, it is very difficult for an individual to occupy himself with the happiness of another when he is himself miserable. The devotee, who imposes penances on his own head, who is suspicious of every thing, who is full of self-reproaches, and who is heated by visionary meditation, by fasting and seclusion, must naturally be irritated against all those who do not believe it their duty to make such absurd sacrifices. He can scarcely avoid being enraged at those audacious ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... I understand Mr. Maxwell's statement. It is perfectly impracticable to put it into practice. I felt confident at the time that those who promised would find it out after a trial and abandon it as visionary and absurd. I have nothing to say about Miss Winslow's affairs, but," she paused and continued with a sharpness that was new to Rachel, "I hope you have no foolish notions in this ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... without any preconceived idealistic balderdash interfering; it was resolved to pitilessly sacrifice any idealistic preconceived notion which could not be brought into harmony with facts actually discovered in their mutual relations, and without any visionary notions. And materialism in general claims no more. Only here, for the first time in the history of the materialistic philosophy, was an earnest endeavor made to carry its results to all questions arising in the realm of knowledge, at ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... from the contagion of the times by his own example, and, to say the truth, she had every good quality that could recommend her to the bosom of a man of discernment and worth. But, alas! how frail and short are the joys of mortals! One unfortunate hour ruined his darling visionary scheme of happiness: she was introduced to an infamous woman, was drawn into play, liked it, and, as the unavoidable consequence, she was ruined,—having lost more in one night than would have maintained a hundred useful families for a twelvemonth; and, dismal to tell, she felt ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... truth of her statements, besides Mr. Hayden himself confessed to having heard of the wonderful works, though he had never mentioned it before, strangely enough. At the time it probably appeared so vague and visionary, that he had thought best not to excite her curiosity and ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... man—his round performed—cannot quietly sink to the private individual. Can such a man caress his wife, or kiss his child, when he knows not how many hearts are bursting with joy, or breaking with sorrow, from the tidings he has conveyed? To our mind, a postman should be an abstracted visionary being, endowed with a peculiar countenance, betraying the unnatural sparkle of the opium-eater, and evincing intense anxiety at the delivery of each sheet. But these,—they wait not to hear the joyful shout, or heart-rending moan—to know if ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... and at last, here in this hand of mine, I held the wedding license. There were the two names in the sweet old visionary connection,—David Copperfield and Dora Spenlow; and there in the corner was that parental institution, the Stamp Office, looking down upon our union; and there, in the printed form of words, was the Archbishop of Canterbury, invoking a blessing on us and doing it as cheap as could possibly ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... guilt of unbelief, and insist upon the historical character of every miraculous account, while we are indignant if any one demands an equally literal rendering of the precepts concerning human conduct? He that hath two coats is not to give to him that hath none: this would be 'visionary,' 'utopian,' 'wholly unpractical,' and so forth. Or, again, he that is smitten on the one cheek is not to turn the other to the smiter, but to hand the offender over to the law; nor are the commands relative to indifference as to the morrow and a neglect of ordinary prudence ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... as to the result of that conversation. I was very impulsive by nature, and I had fallen in love with Mrs. Morton. The worn look on the beautiful young face had touched me somehow. One of my queer visionary ideas came over me as I recalled her expression. I thought that if I were an artist, and that my subject was the "Massacre of the Innocents," that the mother's face in the foreground should be Mrs. Morton's. "Rachel Weeping for her Children;" something of the pathetic maternal ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... people, but they contended that his place was in the editor's chair, in the pulpit, or upon the lecture platform, not as the chief executive of the nation. Furthermore, it was said that this great orator had views on political, social, and economic questions which bordered on the visionary, and that any man who had openly supported free silver, anti-imperialism, or even the guaranty of bank deposits, could not be safely trusted with the ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... garret. After all this accumulation of work, all this expenditure of genius, to think that he did not yet have an assured living! He had frightful attacks of depression, but they had no sooner passed than his will power was as strong as ever, his fever for work redoubled, and his visionary gaze discerned the fair horizons of hope as vividly as though they were already within reach of his hand. Then he would shut himself into his room, breaking off all ties with the social world, or else would flee ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... of little children who were innocent and knew no care; and over whole acres lay the bloom of the ling, and nothing more lovely grows on earthly hills. Through breaks in the woodland she saw afar the Alpine heights, and the bright visionary peaks of snow floating in the blue air like glimpses ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... many years must elapse before it comes, and when it does come (if ever) I shall be so unlike what I am now, and shall have so outlived my days of youth and romance—though not, I am sure, of love for her—that even I feel how visionary all such hopes must be, and try to crush them rudely myself, and have the pain over, rather than suffer time to wither them, and keep the disappointment in store. No, Kate! Since I have been absent, I have had, in that poor fellow ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... dream'd the faggots were alight, And that myself was fasten'd to the stake, I And found it all a visionary flame, Cool as the light in old decaying wood; And then King Harry look'd from out a cloud, And bad me have good courage; and I heard An angel cry 'There is more joy in Heaven,'— And after that, the trumpet of the dead. [Trumpets without. ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... to China, and thence home, Isabella had, in vulgar phrase, "taken a liking" to Jones, the boatswain, and formed, what was probably conceived, at that time, the visionary plan of breaking him from his intemperate habits. She communicated her scheme to her husband shortly after their marriage, who most cheerfully coincided in opinion with her. Jones was accordingly sent for, and regularly installed in the family. ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... do the blessings of that true liberty appear, which our happy constitution affords to every one the means of enjoying at home; where property is secured from violence, and where the life of the meanest subject is equally protected with that of the prince. Let those visionary men, who amuse themselves in building Utopian governments, and those who, from real or fancied injury or neglect, feel the chagrin of disappointment, visit other countries, and experience how justice is administered in other nations; they will then be taught ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... their way; they no doubt teach many things that are valuable: but they are not practical; they all fail in the application of knowledge to useful ends. I am not an educated man myself, but I have known many who are, and they are all alike—shallow, superficial, visionary. They need to put away their books and sit down among the everlasting hills and think. You have done well to come out here, young man. This is good; ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... of an old woman. What did old women know of the world? Aubrey was not aware that sixty years before, that very grandmother, then young Lettice Eden, had thought exactly the same thing of those who stood in her way to the same visionary Paradise. ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... sense of what is fit," she said. "You—I must say it again—can't know anything about me. You have woven fancies about that photograph, but you must recognise that I'm not the girl you have, it seems, created out of them. In all probability she's wholly unreal, unnatural, visionary." She contrived to smile, for she was recovering her composure. "Perhaps it's easy when one has imagination to endow a person with qualities and graces that could never belong to them. It must be easy"—and though she was unconscious of it, there was a trace of bitterness in her ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... annually on our coasts which might be saved; and I feel assured that if the British public will continue their earnest support to our great National Institution, this death-roll must continue to be diminished. My friends sometimes tell me that I am a visionary—that many of my opinions are ridiculous. Is it ridiculous that I should regard the annual loss of nearly 600 lives, and above two millions of money, as being worthy of the serious attention of every friend of ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... inferiors—abandoned to the dangerous inspirations of solitude, and with no other consolation than my books—books which had been chosen for me by my mother's confessor, and which were calculated to fill my imagination with visionary and romantic fancies. The only conversation I heard dealt with the means of leaving all the family fortune to my brother, so that he might uphold the splendor of the name, and with the necessity of marrying me to some ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... other young Americans, had good principles and high ideals inculcated from his earliest boyhood and took to them as a duck takes to water. Nor is he weak. But although he is a hard and steady worker he is also visionary. He speculated on the stock market before he was married. Probably not now as the market is moribund. He is frantic to get rich...for more ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... strange, visionary way of talking sometimes, Rose," replied Annette, as her friend ceased speaking. "All that may do for your transcendentalists, or whatever you call them; but it won't do when you come down to the practical matter-of-fact ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... sharp pale face. Martin had a faded daguerreotype of him set against the background of the old Wiltshire kitchen, his black clothes hung upon him like a disguise, his eyes burning even upon that faded picture with the fire of his spirit. For James Warlock was a mystic, a visionary, a prophet. He walked and talked with God; in no jesting spirit it was said that he knew God's plans and could turn the world into a blazing coal so soon as he pleased. It was because he knew with certainty that God would, in person, soon, descend upon ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Robin-hoods, Cartouches, and Macheaths do in a century. It is in this part of medicine that I wish to see a reform, an abandonment of hypothesis for sober facts, the first degree of value set on clinical observation, and the lowest on visionary theories. I would wish the young practitioner, especially, to have deeply impressed on his mind the real limits of his art, and that when the state of his patient gets beyond these, his office is to be a watchful, but ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... thinking, a prey to a strange sort of restlessness that had of late taken possession of him. For this young man's gay and happy butterfly-life was entirely gone. The tragic disappearance of Nina, followed by the sudden shattering of all his visionary hopes in connection with Honnor Cunyngham, had left him in a troubled, anxious, morbid state that he himself, perhaps, could not well have accounted for. Then the sense of solitariness that he had experienced when he found that Nina had so unexpectedly vanished from his ken ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... point Isabel hid her face on her arm—he was no ghost: he knew what he wanted and he meant to have it: and it was a far cry from visionary Heroes to Lawrence Hyde in the flesh, son of a Jew, smelling of cigar-smoke, and taking hold of her with his large, fair, overmanicured hands. A far cry even from Val or Jack Bendish: from the cool, mannered Englishman to the hot Oriental ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... what happened to Madame de Riva, a nun in the convent of St.——. She had to disappear after it became known that she was with child, and M. de Frulai, my predecessor, went mad, and died shortly after. J. J. Rousseau told me that he died of poison, but he is a visionary who sees the black side of everything. For my part, I believe that he died of grief at not being able to do anything for the unfortunate woman, who afterwards procured a dispensation from her vows from the Pope, and having got married is now living at Padua without any ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the theoretical and the practical life were well balanced. He was both a visionary and a man capable of bringing his visions to pass. No philosophical conception was too general for him, and no detail of observation or inference too small. No fact could appear too slight for his intense and comprehensive scrutiny, ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... was Mrs. Barnes' only near relative, a brother. Always a visionary, easy-going, impractical little man, he had never been willing to stick at steady employment, but was always chasing rainbows and depending upon his sister for a home and means of existence. When the Klondike ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... for having gone upon such an enterprise and venturing so far. That the admiral was a foreigner who had no favor at court; and as so many wise and learned men had already condemned his opinions and enterprise as visionary and impossible, there would be none to favor or defend him, and they were sure to find more credit if they accused him of ignorance and mismanagement than he would do, whatsoever he might now say ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... Jesus, and afterwards Dean of Ely, did all he could, records a friend of a somewhat later date, "to keep him within bounds; but his repeated efforts to reclaim him were to no purpose, and upon one occasion, after a long discussion on the visionary and ruinous tendency of his later schemes, Coleridge cut short the argument by bluntly assuring him, his friend and master, that he mistook the matter altogether. He was neither Jacobin, [8] he said, nor Democrat, but a Pantisocrat." And, leaving the good doctor to digest this new ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Build and blow up, as best ye may, And do your worst to scare away Some visionary foe,— But, if in brute and blundering power You tear down Rodolph's granite tower, Defeat and scorn and shame that hour Shall whelm you like an arrowy shower— Haro! a ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... eyes glowing with the light of a visionary, Winchester stepped forward, and Lyveden got upon his feet. For a moment the two men looked one another in the face. Then Winchester shivered suddenly, put a hand to his head, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... a solid basis of material interests to which the best part of the manhood of France would tenaciously adhere, defying alike the plots of reactionaries and the forces of monarchical Europe. Of these interests Buonaparte was to be the determined guarantor. Amidst much that was visionary in his later policy he never wavered in his championship of the new peasant proprietors. He was ever the peasants' General, the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... I am no visionary—no dreamer; and yet my life has been a ceaseless struggle between the realities of everyday care, and a myriad of shadowy phantoms which ever haunt me. In the crowded and thronged city; in the green walks and sunny forests of my native hills; on the broad and boundless prairie, carpeted with ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... in considering Petrarch's attachment as visionary, others, who have allowed the reality of his passion, have been mistaken in their opinion of its object. They allege that Petrarch was a happy lover, and that his mistress was accustomed to meet him at Vaucluse, and make him a full compensation ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... as a new base of supply for a column in East Tennessee as well as another in Georgia, the occupation of Knoxville and the Clinch and Holston valleys to the Virginia line was easy. Without it, all East Tennessee campaigns were visionary. It was easy enough to get there; the trouble was to stay. Buell's original lesson in logistics, in which he gave the War Department a computation of the wagons and mules necessary to supply ten thousand men at Knoxville, was a solid piece of military arithmetic from which ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... that infect the blood: And sure, my lord, if I can read aright, These foolish fancies you have had to-night Are certain symptoms (in the canting style) Of boiling choler, and abounding bile; This yellow gall, that in your stomach floats, Engenders all these visionary thoughts. When choler overflows, then dreams are bred 150 Of flames, and all the family of red; Red dragons, and red beasts, in sleep we view, For humours are distinguish'd by their hue. From hence we dream of wars and warlike things, And wasps and ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... the unknown depths of the past. As one reads, an extraordinary procession of persons seems to pass before one's eyes—Moses, Archimedes, Achilles, Job, Hector and Charles the Fifth, Cardan and Alaric, Gordianus, and Pilate, and Homer, and Cambyses, and the Canaanitish woman. Among them, one visionary figure flits with a mysterious pre-eminence, flickering over every page, like a familiar and ghostly flame. It is Methuselah; and, in Browne's scheme, the remote, almost infinite, and almost ridiculous patriarch is—who can doubt?—the only possible centre and ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... its Saxon side. No States so much as Kentucky and Tennessee and, later, Missouri—daughters of Old Virginia in her glory—contributed to the forces of the frontiersmen. Texas, farther to the south, put her stamp indelibly upon the entire cattle industry of the West. Visionary, impractical, restless, adventurous, these later Elizabethan heroes—bowing to no yoke, insisting on their own rights and scorning often the laws of others, yet careful to retain the best and most advantageous customs of any conquered country—naturally ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... scatterbrained visionary!" snaps J. Q. "You and your potential grandfather rubbish! What about the grandsons of good Americans? Do you not reckon them in ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... years had gradually been dropping from his thoughts all through his journey across Egypt and the Continent. They were no more than visionary now. Nor was he occupied with any dream of the things which might have been but for his great fault. The things which had been, here, in this small town of Ireland, were too definite. Here he had been most happy, here he ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... from his first voyage. He had been scorned as an adventurer by the courtiers of Lisbon, mocked as a visionary by the learned priests of the Council in Salamanca, who, with texts from the Scriptures and quotations from the saints, had tried to convince him that the world was flat; he had been pointed at by the rabble in the streets as a madman who maintained that there was a land where ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... love for his fellow-men, with an aggressive eagerness for martyrdom in their behalf; his nature was unusually, even abnormally, fine and sensitive; and his poetic quality was a delicate and ethereal lyricism unsurpassed in the literature of the world. In both his life and his poetry his visionary reforming zeal and his superb lyric instinct are ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... years ago a small group of photographers in New York City and vicinity formed a nucleus for the institution of a society. Its name was ambitious—The Pictorial Photographers of America; its aims and objects sounded visionary, almost fantastic. Already many times printed, they bear repetition and have been incorporated in a separate page in this book. In one sense these aims were visionary, because they were thought out and formulated by men of vision, who now stand justified: in hardly one of ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1922 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... Being no visionary, he did not underestimate the power of circumstance. This Betty had learned from him. And what could practically be done with circumstance such as this? The question had begun to recur to her. What could she herself have ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... me thy face— My faith and love Shall henceforth fixed be, And nothing here have power to move My soul's serenity. My life shall seem a trance, a dream, And all I feel and see Illusive, visionary—thou The one reality. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... contrary of his. Run over the names that will readily occur of modern novelists and short-story writers, and ask yourself whether the vivid coloring of these realistic schools must not inevitably have blanched to a still whiter pallor those visionary tales of which the author long ago confessed that they had "the pale tints of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade." With practice has gone theory; and now the critics of realism are beginning to nibble ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... of less consequence than the direction in which his face is turned. The arrow may fall short, but to what mark was it shot? In all regions of life a wise classification of men arranges them according to their aims rather than their achievements. The visionary who attempts something high and accomplishes scarcely anything of it, is often a far nobler man, and his poor, broken, foiled, resultless life far more perfect than his who aims at marks on the low levels and hits them full. Such lives ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... away From his visionary herds And his splendid yesterday, Turns to meet the loathly birds Flocking round him from the skies, Waiting ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... concerning Me?" The purport of this question seems to have been to probe Pilate's conscience, and make him aware of his own growing consciousness that this prisoner was too royal in mien to be an ordinary Jewish visionary. It was as though He said: "Dost thou use the term in the common sense, or as a soul confronted by a greater than thyself? Do you speak by hearsay or by conviction? Is it because the Jews have so taught thee, or because thou recognizest ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... living from their sterile acres, had become millionaires. The whole region was alive with fortune-hunters, from every quarter of the country. Millions of dollars were in the pockets of men who were ready to purchase. Seedy, crazy, visionary fellows were working as middle-men, to talk up schemes, and win their bread, with as much more as they could lay their hands on. The very air was charged with the contagion of speculation, and men seemed ready to believe anything and do anything. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... characteristic of man is reason, which labours to perfect all things that he judges to be good, and to transform all evil. Ultimate results are out of sight for all human faculties except the early-waking eyes of long-chastened hope; but reason loves this visionary mood, though she prefer that it be sung, and find that less lyrical speech brings on it something of ridicule; for such a rendering betrays, as a rule, faint desire or small power to serve her ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... case the welfare of his own people, of his own state, must be for every man the highest objects of his efforts; then only, starting from his own nation, may his wishes have a higher aim. I cannot respect anyone who abandons the soil of patriotism in order to waste his time on visionary schemes in the domain of politics, to wax enthusiastic over universal peace and to call all ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... eyes! always my eyes! Well, for once, at least, I will redeem even that visionary pledge," and her glance swept the room hastily. "But I advise that you accept my surrender quickly, sir—I am not sure but this was Captain Grant's dance, ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... When it came to the black coffee, and then to the 'petits verres' of cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to atop, it was something that so far transcended my home-kept experience that it began to seem altogether visionary. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of stained glass and falls on marble columns, bronzed beams, mosaic walls, screens of wrought iron and carved wood. We walk as if through an interlaced forest and undergrowth of rich entangled colours. It all seems visionary, unreal, fantastic, until we climb the bench by the end of the inner screen and look upon the Rock over which the ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... have been thought mad to propose; but science has proved that it can be carried out; and it is only a few days since a large meeting was held in Liverpool with a view of tunnelling under the Mersey, and thus connecting Liverpool and Birkenhead. Nor do these schemes seem at all visionary when we learn that our go-ahead Transatlantic cousins have a project before the Legislature of New Jersey for laying wooden tubes underground, through which the mails and small parcels will be forwarded at the rate of 150 miles an hour! Through a ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... interests and the "special interests" resent excessively the recent tendency of intelligent judges to look at precedent and history. Mr. Debs will tell you that such matters are aristocratic and reactionary; Mr. Rockefeller, or his lawyer, that they are both visionary and obsolete. Yet a statute may only represent the sudden will of a small body of mediocre intelligence on a new subject (or an old one) which they have never studied. It is true that if they make a mistake they can amend ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... of a project, formed by Hawthorne during his residence in England, of writing a romance, the scene of which should be laid in that country; but this project was afterwards abandoned, giving place to a new conception in which the visionary search for means to secure an earthly immortality was to form the principal interest. The new conception took shape in the uncompleted "Dolliver Romance." The two themes, of course, were distinct, but, by a curious process of thought, ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of parents—from the company of kind friends, and associates. Oh! I was well cured of the sea fever, and would have given half my life to be on land again! How I reproached myself for my folly! How I reproached that friend of the family—the old salt—whose visionary adventures had no doubt been the cause of my sea longings! how in my heart I now execrated both him, and his fanciful stories! Would I had never heard them! would that I had never run ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... Schwab, entitled "Of Unavoidable Injustice," [Footnote: Ueber das unvermeidliche Unrecht.] where the author describes what he calls the Universal State, in which nations will be to each other as citizens in the Municipal State. He is not so visionary as to imagine that justice will always be inviolate between nations in the Universal State, for it is not always so between citizens in the Municipal State; but he confidently looks to the establishment between nations of the rules which now subsist between citizens, whose differences ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... strong and simple, my Mother possessed no quality of the mystic. She never pretended to any visionary gifts, believed not at all in dreams or portents, and encouraged nothing in herself or others which was superstitious or fantastic. In order to realize her condition of mind, it is necessary, I think, to accept the view that she had formed a definite conception of the absolute, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... I have had report of him. He is a visionary. There is no sedition in him. He affirms ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... Superior elicited a hoot of derision. I have lived to wander through fields of six hundred acres north of the Saskatchewan. Thirty years ago any one suggesting settlement on Peace River, or at Athabasca, would have been regarded as a visionary fool. Yet wheat is ground into flour on Peace River, and the settler is at Athabasca; and soft Kansas fall wheat sent to Peace River has by a few years' transplanting been transformed into Number One Hard spring wheat. ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... that, old man," he said. "The lady is a base materialist, while I—your funny old master—am sprouting wings and growing a halo as a visionary." Vane looked sideways at the girl. "He manages to make his own life, Joan. He'd be as happy with me in a garret as he would in a palace. . . . Probably happier, because he'd mean more to me—fill a ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... glorious, Segismund, if you Your visionary honour wore so ill As to work murder and revenge on ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... be in two places at once. Adj. impossible; not possible &c. 470; absurd, contrary to reason; unlikely; unreasonable &c. 477; incredible &c. 485; beyond the bounds of reason, beyond the bounds of possibility, beyond the realm of possibility; from which reason recoils; visionary; inconceivable &c. (improbable) 473; prodigious &c. (wonderful) 870; unimaginable, inimaginable[obs3]; unthinkable. impracticable unachievable; unfeasible, infeasible; insuperable; unsurmountable[obs3], insurmountable; unattainable, unobtainable; out of reach, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Prophet, was to be a redeemer, and a King; [189:4] but they did not understand how their lowly Master was to establish His title to such high offices. [189:5] Though they "looked for redemption," and "waited for the kingdom of God," [189:6] there was much that was vague, as well as much that was visionary, in their notions of the Redemption and the Kingdom. We may well suppose that the views of the multitude were still less correct and perspicuous. Some, perhaps, expected that Christ, as a prophet, would decide the ecclesiastical controversies of the age; [189:7] others, probably, anticipated that, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... accommodate ancient theories to some of the new facts, and much wit and ingenuity would be required to modify and defend their old positions. Each new invention would violate a greater number of known analogies; for if a theory be required to embrace some false principle, it becomes more visionary in proportion as facts are multiplied, as would be the case if geometers were now required to form an astronomical system on the assumption of the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... muttered Heron to himself, as he cast the book to the ground, and rose to his feet. "One would think that George Sand's visionary young monk had walked straight out of the book into my room. Begging, I suppose. Good evening. You have called on behalf of some charity, I suppose? Come nearer to the fire; it ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... distance, the Alleghany and North Mountains rear their wooded crests. A few of the summits offer even more extensive prospects. From some nearly all of Loudoun, with a considerable area of Fairfax and Fauquier, is in full view. Other more distant areas within visionary range are portions of Prince William, Rappahannock, and Culpeper counties, in Virginia, Frederick and Montgomery counties, in Maryland, and even some of Prince George County, east of Washington City. ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... civilization, when shown towards an ignorant, tyrannical, and despotic tyrant. Any attempt to force a channel of commerce, beyond the territories of these savage chiefs, without having first, either by presents or other means, obtained their co-operation, is too visionary a scheme for even the most enterprising adventurer to dare to undertake. King Jacket and King Boy, with the king of Eboe, may be said to be in the command of the estuary of the Niger, and, therefore, any attempt to establish a channel of commerce without allowing them to participate ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... for June 27, 1896, Lady Henry Somerset says, in closing a sketch of Frances Willard: "The Temperance cause, in spite of the gigantic strides it has made of late years toward success, is still relegated to the shadowy land of unpopular and supposedly impracticable and visionary reform." ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... were necessary to a just exercise of power in the people, whose representatives should share in the administration of the government. And many of the leaders in the revolution, even in its incipient stage, on the other hand, had such ambitious views, or visionary projects, that nothing would satisfy them, but an entire relinquishment of power long claimed and exercised by the Kings of ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... faith and practice of Christian life. And here it is necessary to guard against what is childish, visionary, and exuberant, against things that only feed the fancy or excite the imagination, against practices which are adapted to other races than ours, but with us are liable to become unreal and irreverent, against too vivid sense impressions ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... Sheldon had made so light of his stepdaughter's chances, and ratified his consent to her marriage with so humble a literary adventurer as himself, Mr. Hawkehurst had come to consider the Haygarthian inheritance as altogether a visionary business. If it were certain, or even probable, that Charlotte was to inherit a hundred thousand pounds, was it likely that Mr. Sheldon would encourage such an alliance? This question Mr. Hawkehurst ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation,[2] it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being. Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... betook herself more and more to her other friend, lamented over present evils, made visionary amendments and erected dreamy worlds of perfection, till she condemned and scorned all that ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with which we usually deal—has thrust past the current notion to the Fact: that the claim of such a saint as Teresa is bound up with her declaration that she has achieved union with the Divine Essence itself. The visionary is a mystic when his vision mediates to him an actuality beyond the reach of the senses. The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyond thought to the pure apprehension of truth. The active man is a mystic when he knows his actions to be a part ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... to each of the dolls, and walked slowly round and round the miserable room, pointing out visionary persons of distinction and objects of interest. "Here's the queen, my dears, in her gilt coach, drawn by six horses. Do you see her scepter poking out of the carriage window? She governs the nation with that. Bow to the queen. And now look at the beautiful bright water. There's the ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... Massachusetts, planted half an acre. From this he made between one and two hundred brooms which he peddled in a horse-cart in neighboring towns. The following year he planted an acre; and the tall broom-corn with its spreading panicles attracted much attention. Though he was thought visionary when he predicted that broom manufacture would be the greatest industry in the county, and though he was sneeringly told that only Indians ought to make brooms, he persevered; and his neighbors finally planted and made brooms ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... sometimes fancied myself in a dream—I could scarcely credit the reality of what passed. For instance, when I walked into the room and put my hand into Miss Martineau's, the action of saluting her and the fact of her presence seemed visionary. Again, when Mr. Thackeray was announced, and I saw him enter, looked up at his tall figure, heard his voice, the whole incident was truly dream-like, I was only certain it was true because I became miserably destitute of self-possession. Amour propre suffers terribly under such circumstances: ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... I were a transcendental visionary, I might say, that at the hour you saw my image before you, my thoughts, my mind, my spirit, whatever you choose to call my inner self, was actually with you, and so became visible to you; but—" ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... make Germany the principal seat of war, and transfer thither Wellington, with all the troops in Spain, and those which can be spared from the islands of the United Kingdom. Let them consider me a visionary; the future will, perhaps, prove to them that I was right. Oh, a victory over Napoleon in Germany would loosen the fetters of all governments, throw the most determined efforts of many millions of people into the ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... becoming a new man; if it makes you understand that pain is a deliverer; if it increases your respect for the conscience of others; if it renders forgiveness more easy, fortune less arrogant, duty more dear, the beyond less visionary. If it does these things it is good, little matter its name: however rudimentary it may be, when it fills this office it comes from the true source, it binds you to man and ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... to say, the popular verdict lay with Cuvier; talent won for the time against genius, and Lamarck was looked upon as an impious visionary. His faith never wavered, however. He believed that he had gained a true insight into the processes of animate nature, and he reiterated his hypotheses over and over, particularly in the introduction to his Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertebres, in 1815, and in his Systeme des ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... clear view of its importance to the city of Cleveland and the Mahoning Valley, and confidently anticipated for them, in the event of its completion, a rapidity and extent of development and prosperity, which were then regarded as visionary, but which ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... will remain after you are gone to put them in practice?' 'Not one,' was the reply. Robert Owen knew Fourier in his old age. He said that Fourier learned of him all the truth that he had. The rest of his system was imagination, and the imagination of a visionary. Owen made the best impression by his rare benevolence. His love of men made us forget his 'three errors.' His charitable construction of men and their actions was invariable. He was the better Christian in ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... as he looked after him rather sadly. The man's perfect simplicity, his eagerness for the most lofty ideals, the spotless purity of his life, commanded Gilbert's most true admiration. And yet to the Norman, Arnold of Brescia was but a dreamer, a visionary, and a madman. Gilbert could listen to him for a while, but then the terrible tension of the friar's thought and speech wearied him. Just now he was almost glad that his companion should depart so suddenly; but as he watched him he saw him stop, ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... profitless inaction, enunciating truths which are of no value to mankind until it rediscovers them for itself. No man of trained reasoning power could fail to see that the Golden Rule is not a piece of visionary altruism, but a sound principle of practical self-interest. Or, could anything be clearer, to one who takes the trouble really to think about it, than that he who advances himself at the expense of his fellow men does not advance, but sinks down into the class of murderers for gain, thieves, and ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... that they raise men above the dominion of pain and pleasure, that obloquy becomes glory, that death itself is contemplated only as the beginning of a higher and happier life. She knows that a person in this state is no object of contempt. He may be vulgar, ignorant, visionary, extravagant; but he will do and suffer things which it is for her interest that somebody should do and suffer, yet from which calm and sober-minded men would shrink. She accordingly enlists him in her service, assigns to him some ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... like many other similar projects, to certain failure, and must consequently result in loss and possibly ruin to Mr. Morse. For one, he felt conscientiously scrupulous in giving a vote which would aid or tempt a visionary enthusiast to ruin himself. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... that Falkland who was courted by sages, and adored by the fair. His youth, distinguished in its outset by the most unusual promise, is tarnished. His sensibility is shrunk up and withered by events the most disgustful to his feelings. His mind was fraught with all the rhapsodies of visionary honour; and, in his sense, nothing but the grosser part, the mere shell of Falkland, was capable of surviving the wound that his pride ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... the angel of benevolence,—quoth Reason, whispering in his ear, would have been 19 a better metaphor,—certainly inhabits the aged bosom of your father's sister). Horatio's upraised eye rested on the wrinkled front of his antique relative, just as the corrective thought gleamed in visionary brightness o'er his brain; the poetic inspiration of the moment fled like the passing meteor, but the feeling which excited it remained engrafted on his memory for ever. "How shall we find him out, my dear Horatio?" said my aunt, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... benighted negroes the blessings of sermons, tithes, and church rates? Christianity, it has, on the other hand, been asserted, is the only practical system of civilisation; but this is manifestly the idea of a visionary. For ourselves, we must confess we incline to the opposite opinion; and think either the bishops or Jack Ketch (we hardly know which we prefer) by far the more rational means. Indeed, when we consider the high state of civilisation ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... not know of the spiritualistic orgies in Switzerland, she knew that my father was a spiritualist. And this vexed her, not only because she conceived it to be visionary folly, but because it was 'low.' She knew that it led him to join a newly-formed band of Latter-Day mystics which had been organised at Raxton, but luckily she did not know that through them he believed himself ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the eye at this point to a distance of many miles. His attention was fixed on the landscape far away, and Grace's approach was so noiseless that he did not hear her. When she came close she could see his lips moving unconsciously, as to some impassioned visionary theme. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Those visionary maids - I feel a sharp and sudden poke Between the shoulder-blades - "Why, Brown, my boy! Your growing stout!" (I told you ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... as it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets on the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind assumption to accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, that he too like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, and like other poets found them or made them ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Street he left the train and strode across the park, his imagination playing happy, visionary tunes. He would drop in to-morrow at St. Isidore's on his way back from White and Einstein's. He must see more of those fellows at Henry's clinic; they seemed a good set. And he was not sure that he should answer the Baltimore man so flatly. He would write for further details. When he reached the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the mind as did ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... completely in this error in Parleyings with Certain People, in which book, with the exception of the visionary landscapes in Gerard de Lairesse, and some few passages in Francis Furini and Charles Avison, imagination, such as belongs to a poet, has deserted Browning. He feels himself as if this might be said of him; and he asks in Gerard de Lairesse if he has ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... roved through many a necromantic vale, Portraying chiefs who knew to tame The goblin's ire, the dragon's flame, To pierce the dark, enchanted hall Where Virtue sat in lonely thrall. From fabling Fancy's inmost store A rich, romantic robe he bore, A veil with visionary trappings hung, And o'er his Virgin ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... missed, without seeking to reclaim it. The hopelessness of such a passion she never considered, nor asked herself its end, or scarce suspected its aim; it was pleasant to her at the time, and she looked not to the future, but fed it with visionary schemes, and soothed it with voluntary fancies. Now she knew all was over, she felt the folly she had committed, but though sensibly and candidly angry at her own error, its conviction offered nothing but sorrow ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... despondency and never despair, he did not deceive himself with false or impossible expectations. He was quick to perceive the real and the practical, and while enterprising in the extreme he was not in the least visionary. His nerve, his powers of discrimination, the readiness with which he could surrender schemes found to be impracticable, if by chance he became involved in them, and his energy and close attention to his affairs, made ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... with those tokens would but enervate his resolves and embitter his resignation. You can guess not the extent of the sacrifice, the bitterness of the pang, when, averting his head, he dropped those relics on the hearth. The evidence of the desultory ambition, the tokens of the visionary love,—the same flame leaped up to devour both! It was as the ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a second-rate master would have little more effect than a common waggon on the highway; yet those subjects are so poetically treated throughout, the parts have such a correspondence with each other, and the whole and every part of the scene is so visionary, that it is impossible to look at them without feeling in some measure the enthusiasm which seems to have ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... had no funds for special research and Dr. Veeder's ideas were so far ahead of his time that, then, they seemed visionary. Now, twenty years later, when a great deal of similar work has been done in Europe and in this country, we see that Dr. Veeder was a real pioneer, although, of course, many of his conclusions are still doubtful. Yet, in poverty, in discouragement, ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... Christians; and in reserve, most terrible of all weapons, were the powers of excommunication and interdict, which could shut men and cities from the rites of the Church and the presence of the Lord. Who shall say, remembering these things, that the aims of the mediaeval Church were visionary or impracticable? ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... it, Amine, since you are so earnest. I can refuse you nothing; but I have a foreboding that yours and my happiness will be wrecked for ever. I am not a visionary, but it does appear to me that, strangely mixed up as I am, at once with this world and the next, some little portion of futurity is opened to me. I have given my promise, Amine, but from it I would fain ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and dates, probably out of regard to the honour of the families concerned. If Dame Gourlay was able actually to play off such a piece of jugglery, it is clear she must have had better assistance to practise the deception than her own skill or funds could supply. Meanwhile, this mysterious visionary traffic had its usual effect in unsettling Miss Ashton's mind. Her temper became unequal, her health decayed daily, her manners grew moping, melancholy, and uncertain. Her father, guessing partly at the cause of these appearances, made a ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... peasant. We have only to look into the earnest, loving face to read that here is a mother. There are two pictures of this sort, evidently studied from the same Bohemian models. In one, the mother looks down at her babe; in the other, directly at the spectator, with a singularly visionary expression. When weary with the senseless repetition of the set compositions of past ages, we turn with relief to a simple portrait mother like this, at once the most primitive and the most advanced form of Madonna art. It is only another ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... great measure escaped the peculiar temptations that assaulted Faithful, yet he sympathized with him; nor did the latter deem the gloomy experiences of his brother visionary or imaginative, though he had been exempted from them. One man, from a complication of causes, is exposed to temptations of which another is ignorant; and in this case he needs much sympathy, which he seldom meets with; while they, who are severe on him are liable to be baffled in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... he afterward said, "I did a little of a number of things fairly well—sang, played the guitar and violin, acted, painted signs and wrote poetry. My father did not encourage my verse-making for he thought it too visionary, and being a visionary himself, he believed he understood the dangers of following the promptings of the poetic temperament. I doubted if anything would come of the verse-writing myself. At this time it is easy to picture my father, a lawyer ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... that trust? That it was no less so with Diana did not weigh with her. Diana was different. When she was allowed a free hand with her fortune she would buy yachts and houses and diamonds, and scatter it right and left, which was good in its way; but it would never satisfy her, Meryl, the visionary and dreamer, who looked with grave eyes to the far skies, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... policy, subject to all the limitations that I have described, the foreign policy of England should always be inspired by the love of freedom. There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations for the development of ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... to rob and to squander seemed the complementary parts of my new destiny. I walked up Bush Street, whistling, brazening myself to confront Mamie in the first place, and the world at large and a certain visionary judge upon a bench in the second. Just outside, I stopped and lighted a cigar to give me greater countenance; and puffing this and wearing what (I am sure) was a wretched assumption of braggadocio, I reappeared on the scene of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inquiries our landlord told us that the city over the river had been built by one man, who was a visionary, and who had a great deal more money than common sense. "It is not as big a town as you would think, sirs," he said, "because the general mistiness of things in this valley makes them look larger than they are. Those hills, for instance, when you get to ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... projects, to be sure, were of a rather visionary cast; but we seriously thought, nevertheless, of prolonging our stay in the valley for an indefinite period; and, with this understanding, we were turning over various plans for spending our time pleasantly, when several women came running into the house, and hurriedly besought ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... first time Bienville the man, Bienville the visionary, Bienville the enthusiast, the dreamer of dreams and the builder of castles. I watched ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... celebrated musaeum; statues, busts, pictures, medals, tables inlaid in the way of marquetry, cabinets adorned with precious stones, jewels of all sorts, mathematical instruments, antient arms and military machines, that the imagination is bewildered, and a stranger of a visionary turn, would be apt to fancy himself in a palace of the fairies, raised and adorned by the ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... uncertainly as if she were in a dream. Could this unlooked-for, bewildering satisfaction be indeed real, and not a visionary thing which would presently fade? She looked about. There was actuality in the scene. The cottonwoods rustled crisply, Alejandro Vigil was calling to his dog, and the tinkle of his herd stole softly upon her ear. The great hills rose majestic as of old upon ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... my child! Reproach not thy unhappy father, whose fondest hopes have proved visionary. The merciful God who, through Charles, has sent these tears, will, through thee, my Francis, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... meteorites which come to the earth out of the depths of space, where something approaching the zero temperature is supposed to prevail, also contradicts this assumption. Still less warrant is there for a visionary forecast at one time entertained that at absolute zero matter will utterly disappear. This idea was suggested by the observation, which first gave a clew to the existence of the absolute zero, that a gas at ordinary temperatures ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... that is not the most interesting part of it. He wanted to pay me in flesh—human flesh, and he offered to make me a king into the bargain, if I would forgive him the debt. The latter part of the proposal was purely visionary. The promise to pay in so much humanity he is able to perform. I have not ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... hops—and going back to De Witt Point with a dozen offers of marriage. That's the kind of work the imagination does. But this simple and appealing situation—this beautiful young girl, with her poor little illusions, her secret hopes half hidden from herself, her ignorant past, her visionary future—" ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... flitting and passing beneath that shade. Here I have a garden laid out in such a way as to afford the fullest scope for the imagination, and furnished with thickly grown trees, beneath whose leafy screen a visionary like myself may conjure up phantoms at will. This to me, who expected but to find a blank enclosure surrounded by a straight wall, is, I assure you, a most agreeable surprise. I have no fear of ghosts, and I have never heard it said ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and morning dew, to leave behind only a memory of mingled pain and sweetness, recalled in after time with something of self-pity and something of surprise that such things had ever seemed real and not visionary, and had touched the warm springs in the heart now chilled, it may be, by the stern exigencies ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... A visionary pedigree and imaginative genealogical account of Roebuck's ancestors—commencing in the year 1801, and carefully brought down to the present time. Very elaborate, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 13, 1841 • Various
... been my opinion, that only the clear and steady light of truth can guide men to virtue, and that the lesson which is impracticable must be unuseful. Whoever shall design to regulate his conduct by these visionary characters will be in the condition of superstitious people, who choose rather to act by intimations they receive in the dreams of the night, than by the sober counsels of morning meditation. Yet I confess it has been ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... assessed him by his broad, well-knit figure and weather-beaten complexion, puckered with wrinkles born of jolly laughter, or by the somewhat austere and controlled set of his mouth and by the ardent luminous grey eyes, with their touch of the visionary ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... year had passed since, in the early evening, as Larry the Bat, he had burrowed so ironically for refuge in Chang Foo's den—from her! It seemed like some mocking unreality, some visionary dream that, so short a while before, he had read those words of hers that had sent the blood coursing and leaping through his veins in mad exultation at the thought that the culmination of the years had come, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... Antonio. Her friend had furnished her with a catalogue of his perfections in gross, which her active thoughts were busily arranging into form and substance. But little practised in the world or its disappoinments {sic}, the visionary girl had already figured to herself a person to suit these qualities, and the animal was no less pleasing, than the moral being of her fancy. What principally delighted Julia in these contemplations on the acquaintance of Anna, was the strong inclination he had expressed to know herself. This flattered ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... York, acting harmoniously with the Garrett family, formed a syndicate of capitalists representing the Richmond Terminal system, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, the Northern Pacific Railroad, and other properties. The ultimate plan, which proved too visionary, was to consolidate under one control a vast network of lines extending ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... thee babbling to the vale Of sunshine and of flowers, But unto me thou bring'st a tale Of visionary hours." ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... outward things, which, in the pictures of that period, fills the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the hillsides with pools of water, and the pools of water with flowering reeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and in his visionariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion of Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or less refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Delivered," who bewitched Rinaldo, one of the Crusaders, by her charms, as Circe did Ulysses, and who in turn, when the spell was broken, overpowered her by his love and persuaded her to become a Christian. The Almida Palace, in which she enchanted Rinaldo, has become a synonym for any merely visionary but ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... elements, attaining the most satisfactory results at the least possible cost to the student. This project, for a youth without capital, dependent upon his abilities for his personal support, was regarded even by sympathetic friends as visionary. But nothing progressive is accepted as a mere optimistic vision by the predestined reformer. Remote Huguenot and immediate Yankee ancestry is perhaps a good combination for pioneer material. However this may be, his efforts were crystallized, shaped, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... some great iron-tongued funeral bell. Then came the rain, introduced swiftly by the deafening clatter of another thunder crash that made one stagger like a ship in a wild sea, and we strained our eyes to gaze into a visionary chasm cleaved in twain by the furious lightning. Playing upon the face of the unruffled river, with a brilliancy at once awful and enchanting, this singular flitting and wavering of the heavenly electricity, as it flashed haphazardly around all things, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... a Chartist, a Communist, all that is commonly called wild and visionary. Ay! but being visionary is something. It shows a soul, a being not altogether sensual; a creature who looks forward for ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the age to cultivate the spirit of peace, and looked forward with benevolent hope to the ultimate institution of a General Congress of nations for the adjustment of their controversies. But he was no visionary and no enthusiast. He knew that as yet war was often inevitable—that pusillanimity provoked it, and that national honor was national property of the highest value; because it was the best national defence. He admitted only defensive war—but he did not narrowly define it. He held that to be ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... against the Greeks, whom he spoke of as ungrateful wretches. Themistokles refused utterly to join Pausanias, but nevertheless told no one of his treasonable practices, either because he hoped that he would desist, or that his visionary and impossible projects would be disclosed by other means. And thus it was that when Pausanias was put to death, certain letters and writings on this subject were found, which threw suspicion upon Themistokles. The Lacedaemonians loudly condemned him, and many of his own countrymen, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... there it has a sheen like velvet; little blue flames start up and flicker and play about in the glowing depths of the brasier. A mysterious artist comes and adapts that flame to his own ends; by a secret of his own he draws a visionary face in the midst of those flaming violet and crimson hues, a face with unimaginable delicate outlines, a fleeting apparition which no chance will ever bring back again. It is a woman's face, her ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... p. 281. There is doubt as to whether Boisy's tale does not refer to Jeanne la Feronne, a visionary. Varlet de Vireville, Charles VII., ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... uneasiness. "Do you?" she said, making an effort to stay balanced under the visionary gaze of the shining grey eyes. ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... "It seemed not too visionary a hope, for Nat's designs grew prettier and prettier, and the agent bought all I carried him. One week I remember he paid me thirty dollars; and as he handed it to me, seeing how pleased I looked, ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... being so likely to be befooled as the other form of tribunal. This arbitrator, especially, knew the elasticity of an expert's opinion, and therefore I was not alarmed for my client. The amount was soon arrived at by reducing the sum claimed by no less than L90,000. Thus vanished the visionary claim and the expert. He evidently had not been trained by the cunning old surveyor whose experience taught him to be moderate, and ask only twice as much as you ought ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... wain which had borne the sacred body unto Dunum; and they stayed not to follow its track, believing that it carried the precious burden, until it came within the borders of Ardmachia, unto a certain river which is named Caucune. Then the visionary wain disappeared; and the people, frustrated of their hope, unsatisfied and sad, returned ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... "Great expecter," says Thoreau; "great feller," says Sam Staples, "for talkin' big ... but his daughters is the gals though—always DOIN' somethin'." Old Man Alcott, however, was usually "doin' somethin'" within. An internal grandiloquence made him melodious without; an exuberant, irrepressible, visionary absorbed with philosophy AS such; to him it was a kind of transcendental business, the profits of which supported his inner man rather than his family. Apparently his deep interest in spiritual physics, rather than metaphysics, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... gentleness and sweetness of disposition, he was more like Shakespeare than any other Englishman whom I can think of; but in Coleridge the poet soon disappeared, and a little later the philosopher in him faded into the visionary and sophist; he became an upholder of the English Church and found reasons in the immutable constitution of the universe for aprons and shovel-hats. Shakespeare, on the other hand, though similarly endowed, was far more richly ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Demand seems an unreal power because it is intangible; but it is the mightiest power in the world. It is a power that is free for you to use. No one can use it for you. The Mental Demand is not a visionary one. It is a potent force, which you can use freely without cost. When you are in doubt it will counsel you. It will guide you when you are uncertain. When you are in fear it will give you courage. It is the motive power which supplies the energies necessary to the achievement of the ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... Stafford House manifesto, and the received impression, which no force of fact can alter, is, that slave-owners are divided into but two classes—brutalised depraved "Legrees," or enthusiastic, visionary "St. Clairs"—the former, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... retribution, they yet agree with Benjamin Whichcote, the Cambridge Platonist, that "heaven is first a temper, then a place"; while of hell there is much to recall the noble sentence of Juliana of Norwich, the fourteenth-century visionary, "to me was showed no harder hell than sin." "Nothing burneth in hell but self-will," is a saying in the "Theologia Germanica."[24] They insist that the difference between heaven and hell is not that one is a place of enjoyment, the other of torment; ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... Philosophers (a trifle visionary, perhaps) has been speculating as to certain possible (or, perhaps, impossible) results flowing from the practice among publishers of ante-dating their monthly issues. Thus, supposing that the world should be destroyed by fire (and why not? ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... intellect, with studious tastes and habits, but there is too much reason to believe that his genius did not lie in the management of practical life. Details of business were apparently out of his sphere. "It was like cutting stones with a razor," says one who knew him. "He was a visionary," says another, "who always saw a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow." This was a kind of defect which, though it cost her dear, Mrs. Child, of all persons, could most easily forgive. One great success he achieved: that was in winning and keeping ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... was introduced on the state railways of Hungary by M. Barosz, the Hungarian Minister of Commerce, on the 1st of August, 1889. The adoption of the new tariff was ridiculed and condemned as visionary by road experts, who even went so far as to prove to the satisfaction of practical railroad men that the innovation was destined to be a failure. For a month or two it almost seemed as if their prediction ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... An idle signal, for the brittle fleet (I thought I could have died to save it) near'd, Touch'd, clink'd, and clash'd, and vanish'd, and I woke, I heard the clash so clearly. Now I see My dream was Life; the woman honest Work; And my poor venture but a fleet of glass Wreck'd on a reef of visionary gold.' ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... Arthur himself, the cause of it. Since the night when the "ghost," as he called it, first entered his heart, and since the dream of home hovered over his pillow, he had felt as if it might be possibly a visionary counterpart of one of those events which "cast their shadows before," and he had striven right manfully against every impulse which might in any way tend to make himself the fulfiller of it. Often, when the stern reproof, or the sly sneer, had awakened ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... I have lived to wander through fields of six hundred acres north of the Saskatchewan. Thirty years ago any one suggesting settlement on Peace River, or at Athabasca, would have been regarded as a visionary fool. Yet wheat is ground into flour on Peace River, and the settler is at Athabasca; and soft Kansas fall wheat sent to Peace River has by a few years' transplanting been transformed into Number One Hard spring wheat. Canada's arctic belt has shrunk a little each ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... in metaphysical disquisition. But while we condemn his speculative notions as degrading to human nature, and subversive of the most important interests of mankind, we must admit that he has prosecuted his visionary hypothesis with uncommon ingenuity. Abstracting from it the rhapsodical nature of this production, and its obscurity in some parts, it has great merit as a poem. The style is elevated, and the versification in general harmonious. By the mixture of obsolete ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... outgrowth of a project, formed by Hawthorne during his residence in England, of writing a romance, the scene of which should be laid in that country; but this project was afterwards abandoned, giving place to a new conception in which the visionary search for means to secure an earthly immortality was to form the principal interest. The new conception took shape in the uncompleted "Dolliver Romance." The two themes, of course, were distinct, but, by a curious process of thought, one grew directly ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... would have little more effect than a common waggon on the highway; yet those subjects are so poetically treated throughout, the parts have such a correspondence with each other, and the whole and every part of the scene is so visionary, that it is impossible to look at them without feeling in some measure the enthusiasm which seems to have inspired ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... the people handling such things. Much could be said for either type of establishment. The thing must come; it is as logical as one, two, three. There are some, perhaps, who remember the roars of derision which went up when the first automobile garage was established in their town. Such a thing was visionary-there would never be enough machines ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... I think of the heavier stroke which was first to fall. A few days after this dream I was charging myself with being visionary; yet a few of these most impressive dreams, I believe, have been designed for our instruction. My husband was seized with a heavy cold, accompanied by a severe cough, that was increasing; yet he was able to be about the house and barn, giving directions, as to outdoor work, but nothing appeared ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... enable him to purchase a better boat than Prince's old tub. But he did not think much about this matter; in fact, he was gazing at Miss Grace and Miss Emily, as they walked so gracefully on the deck. He was not sentimental, romantic, or very visionary; but these two young ladies were so pretty, and so elegant, and so finely dressed, that he could not help looking at them; besides, they were as sociable now as he could wish. Bobtail joined them in their promenade on the deck, and was admitted to the privilege ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... "You're a scatterbrained visionary!" snaps J. Q. "You and your potential grandfather rubbish! What about the grandsons of good Americans? Do you not reckon them in at ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... impossible: where the contrary is the case, there is nothing too hard to be credited. Something like this was done by the priests of ancient Greece and Rome; and a few centuries ago, tricks of the same nature were practiced by the monks, and other libertines, upon some of the visionary and enthusiastic women of Europe. Hence we need not think it strange, if the Fakiers generally succeed in attempts of this nature; when we consider that they only have to deceive a people brought up in the most consummate ignorance; and that nothing can ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... imaginary pupil, to assume on my own part the age, health, knowledge, and talents required for the work of his education, to guide him from birth to manhood, when he needs no guide but himself. This method seems to me useful for an author who fears lest he may stray from the practical to the visionary; for as soon as he departs from common practice he has only to try his method on his pupil; he will soon know, or the reader will know for him, whether he is following the development of the child and the natural growth ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... not altogether visionary. He had made it his business to find out about what it would cost to get to the Border, and he realized he must have money for other expenses ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... civilization, the air is thick with detritus; here—if only because a long pralaya and fallow time have made the land new,—the detritus is negligible; perhaps it is not even forming, but consumed as we go; because at least we have glimpses of the Way. Result: the mental outlook that extended there, in visionary moments, to some six inches, before one's nose, here has broadened out to take in some seas and mountains; in comparison, it runs to far horizons. I take it that this is the experience of us all. So this is what that wise Solomon meant: ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the world, I have occasionally built castles in the air, and equally of course they have invariably tumbled down in due time with a crash This particular castle however, not only attained to a great elevation in the visionary builder's eyes, but it covered so vast an area of land, that the story of its rise and fall deserves to be placed on record, as a warning to aerial architects and also as a beacon-light to ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... cherished journey to the Holy Land. In Palestine he was treated with coldness as an ignorant enthusiast, capable of subverting the existing order of things, but too feeble to be counted on for permanent support. His motive ideas were still visionary; he could not cope with conservatism and frigidity established in comfortable places of emolument. It was necessary that he should learn the wisdom of compromise. Accordingly he returned to Spain, and put himself to school. Two years spent in preparatory studies at Barcelona, another period ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... was visionary, when Lake explained, as he did in his effort to enlist capital with which to build his first submarine boat, that he could safely submerge his invention and steer it about on the bed of the ocean as readily as a man can steer an automobile about the streets of a city, that while submerged he could ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... to prevent her downward drop from beginning again she searched all the occupations open to her. She could not find one that would not have meant only the most visionary prospect of some slight remote advancement, and the certain and speedy destruction of what she now realized was her chief asset and hope—her personal appearance. And she resolved that she would not even endanger it ever again. The largest part of the little capital ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... I know a bit about such things. A big surgery journal, back in the '40s, had published a visionary article on grafting a whole limb, with colored plates as if for a real procedure[A]. Then they'd developed techniques for acclimating a graft to the host's serum, so it would not react as a foreign body. First, they'd transplanted hunks ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... of Sierra Leone. Dr. Vincent justly remarks, that Henry had stood alone for almost forty years, and had he fallen before these few ounces of gold reached his country, the spirit of discovery might have perished with him, and his designs might have been condemned as the dreams of a visionary. The importation of this gold, and the establishment of the African company in Portugal, to continue the remark of the same author, is the primary date, to which we may refer that turn for adventure which sprung up in Europe, which pervaded all the ardent spirits in every country for ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... for telling it to you, it's what brought me to Lunnon Bridge was a quare dhrame I had at home in Ireland, that tould me just to come here, and I'd find a pot of goold." For such was the interpretation given by Shamus to the vague admonition of his visionary counsellor. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... thought myself.... T. Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the greatest man he ever knew; I coincide." Wordsworth's influence is evident in a letter from Coleridge to his brother George in April, 1798: "I love fields and woods and mountains with almost a visionary fondness. And because I have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as that fondness has increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of implanting it in others, and to destroy the bad passions not by combating them but by keeping them in inaction." Under the ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... literature as a profession; Dennie was the second. When inaugurating the Port Folio he wrote of himself: "He has long been urged by a sober wish, or, if the sneering reader will have it so, he has long been deluded by the visionary whim, of making literature the handmaid of fortune, or at least of securing something like independence, by exertion, ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... political events indulge too much in sycophantic flattery, while others have their brains addled by brooding on some fancied wrong, or their minds have lost their even poise by dwelling on insane reforms or visionary projects. All this may have its use, but the subscriber has preferred to look at things in a more cheerful way, to pluck roses rather than nettles, and neither to throw ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... quays, past the Place de la Concorde. The road was so smooth, the day so fine, that as terraces, trees, and fountains went by, it would have needed but a little imagination on his part to believe himself carried away on the wings of Fortune. But the young man was no visionary, and as he bowled along he examined the new leather and straps, and put questions about the hay-merchant to his groom, a young fellow perched at his side looking as cool and as sharp as a stable terrier. The hay-merchant, it ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... opinion, as to the conduct of other Princes and States, has greatly injured us by relaxing our exertions. But the opinion as to pecuniary aid has been still more pernicious. People have flattered themselves with a visionary idea, that nothing more was necessary, than for Congress to send a Minister abroad, and that immediately he would obtain as much money as he chose to ask for. That, when he opened a loan, hundreds would run to see who should have the honor of subscribing to it, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... new husband and new home, her new title indeed, made her seem another woman, and if she thought of Chris at all it was to imagine what he would think of these changes, and to fancy what he would say of them, when they met. No purely visionary meeting can hold the element of passion, and so it was a remote and spiritualized Chris of whom Norma came to think, far removed from the actual man of ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... at the thirtieth of April. On the fifth day from this the Visionary Nun is expected to appear. In my last visit to the Convent I provided myself with a dress proper for the character: A Friend, whom I have left there and to whom I made no scruple to confide my secret, readily consented to supply me with a religious habit. Provide a carriage, ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the Author of All Good still continues to call for our warmest gratitude. Especially have we reason to rejoice in the exuberant harvests which have lavishly recompensed well-directed industry and given to it that sure reward which is vainly sought in visionary speculations. I can not, indeed, view without peculiar satisfaction the evidences afforded by the past season of the benefits that spring from the steady devotion of the husbandman to his honorable pursuit. No means of individual comfort is more certain and no source of national ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... Mysticism. It leads to the heartless doctrine, quite unworthy of the man, that public calamities are to the wise man only stage tragedies—or even stage comedies.[145] The moral results of this self-centred individualism are exemplified by the mediaeval saint and visionary, Angela of Foligno, who congratulates herself on the deaths of her mother, husband, and children, "who were great obstacles in the ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... homes, I hope, from houses divided against themselves into parlors and kitchens," said mother, earnestly. "If I should tell you all I think about it, you would say it was visionary, I am afraid. But I believe we have got to go back to first principles; and then the ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... cottage with thatched roof and square leaded panes—a setting for romance, for dreams of visionary splendor. ...
— Futurist Stories • Margery Verner Reed
... the hope of the dawn. Trial is good for any one, but hopeless suffering for none. Philip had not been without hope, but it was a visionary indulgence, against all evidence. It was the hope of youth, not of reason. He stuck to his business doggedly, he stuck to his writing doggedly, but over all his mind was a cloud, an oppression not favorable to creative effort—that is, creative effort sweet and not cynical, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Mrs. King was to go home with her and make a little visit. Bessy thought she would rather stay with Doris, and she was captivated with the Royall House and Eudora. The children never seemed in the way of the grown people there, and if elderly men talked politics and city improvements,—quite visionary, some thought them,—the young people with Alice and Helen had the garden walks and the wide porch, and discussed the enjoyments of the time with the zest of enthusiastic ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... church, school, or parsonage, rum was the grand master of ceremonies, the indispensable celebrant at the various stages of its completion. The party who dug the parson out after a snow-storm, verily got their reward, a sort of prelibation of the visionary sweets of that land, flowing not, according to the Jewish notion, with milk and honey, but according to the revised version of Yankeedom, with milk and rum. Rum was, forsooth, a very decent devil, if judged by the exalted character of the company it kept. It stood high on the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... in your mind too?" said Edith, in a still lower tone than he; for it was high treason to be sad at Merry Mount. "Therefore do I sigh amid this festive music. And besides, dear Edgar, I struggle as with a dream, and fancy that these shapes of our jovial friends are visionary and their mirth unreal, and that we are no true lord and lady of the May. What is the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The visionary fiction of Walter Pater keeps as nearly to a method of that kind, I suppose, as fiction could. In Marius probably, if it is to be called a novel, the art of drama is renounced as thoroughly as it has ever occurred to a novelist to dispense with it. I scarcely ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... in the same manner, or that the Cutchery court and the grand jury of Salem could be regulated on a similar plan. I was persuaded that government was a practical thing, made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians. Our business was to rule, not to wrangle; and it would have been a poor compensation that we had triumphed in a dispute, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... brothers who were equal," said Carvel, in reflective tones. "I do not know why the ideal freedom and equality, attaching to the ideal brothers, should not be as good as any other visionary aim for tangible earthly government; but it certainly does not seem so easy of realization, nor so sound in the working, as our good English principle that exceptions prove the rule, and that the more exceptions there are the better the rule ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... her some very beautiful thing indeed,' cried Ella, with emphasis, and eyes dilating at some visionary magnificence. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deceptive, and creates a false impression with the community. Had not the through time of steamers this season been suppressed, the governor of the State would not have imagined five-day trips from Buffalo to New York, as per his message, and our city editors would not have ventilated such visionary pretensions. There are a multitude of horse-boat captains that can reduce their net canal time of movement below the Baxter's, which has been so extensively commented upon; but their so doing would not expedite the transfer of grain ...
— History of Steam on the Erie Canal • Anonymous
... the sustained accompaniment and the melody in one of the middle parts, the entrance of the bright A major, after the gloom of the preceding bars, is very effective. The third movement has the character of a nocturne, and as such cannot fail to be admired. In the visionary dreaming of the long middle section we imagine the composer with dilated eyes and rapture in his look—it is rather a reverie than a composition. The finale surrounds us with an emotional atmosphere somewhat akin to that of the first ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Sir Justin grimly. "Julia, you asked this person to my house under the impression that he was the nephew of that particularly obnoxious fanatic, Count Herbrand Bunker, and still engaged upon furthering his relative's philanthropic and other visionary schemes." ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... Hazlitt's criticism, but the point of it would be misunderstood if it were construed as depreciation of Scott. What may be considered merely memory in contrast to Shakespeare's imagination is regarded by Hazlitt as a limitless source of visionary life when compared with the ideas of self-centred authors like Byron. This is what Hazlitt says in another essay ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... answered him, a grunt from the cook, and a moan from Neddie. Our spirits were too low to be stirred even by Blodgett's visionary tales. It was hard to believe that the moon above the mountains was the same that had shone down upon us long before off ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... central point of exchange, the heart of trade, the force of whose contraction and expansion will be felt throughout every artery of the commercial world; and San Francisco will then stand the second city of America. Is this visionary? Twenty ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... somehow, after a few weeks, there did not seem to be quite as many bees; a few days later, I was quite sure there was not. I examined the combs, and behold there was not a cell containing a young bee of any age, not even an egg in any one of these old stocks. My visionary anticipations of future success speedily retrograded about ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... that I care for this intimate association with Mr. Edwardes," he curtly announced. "I am not enamored of the vaporings of visionary and self-ordained preachers." ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... advantage of any circumstances that may disturb the ordinary life of a city, or throw discredit on its magistrates, we were accosted by Paul Lecamus, a man whom I have always considered as something of a visionary, though his conduct is irreproachable, and his life honourable and industrious. He entertains religious convictions of a curious kind; but, as the man is quite free from revolutionary sentiments, I have never considered it to be my duty to interfere with him, or ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... sterilisation of the bearers of certain superior qualities, intellectual or physical. In a more general way he attacks the democratic movement, a movement, as P. Bourget says, which is "anti-physical" and contrary to the natural laws of progress; though it has been inspired "by the dreams of that most visionary of all centuries, the eighteenth." (V. de Lapouge, "Les Selections sociales", page 259, Paris, 1896.) The "Equality" which levels down and mixes (justly condemned, he holds, by the Comte de Gobineau), ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... then," said his companion, pursuing the idea, "might we also believe in that wondrous and wild influence which the stars have been fabled to exercise over our fate; hence might we shape a visionary clew to their imagined power over our birth, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... doubt the truth of her statements, besides Mr. Hayden himself confessed to having heard of the wonderful works, though he had never mentioned it before, strangely enough. At the time it probably appeared so vague and visionary, that he had thought best not to excite her curiosity and ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... be done. His Handbook to the library of the British Museum is a very comprehensive and instructive volume. It is a triumphant refutation of the opinions of those who, to the vast injury of literature, and serious inconvenience of men of letters, slight common sense and real utility in favour of visionary schemes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various
... use every honest exertion to turn out of power those weak and wicked men whose wild and visionary theories have been tested and found wanting. Above all, we ought to drive from our shores foreign influence, and cherish American feeling. Foreign influence has been in every age the curse of republics—its jaundiced eye sees every thing in false colors—the thick atmosphere of prejudice by ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... to her two executors, Dr. Berkley the late lord bishop of Cloyne, and Mr. Marshal one of the king's Serjeants at law. Thus perished under all the agonies of despair, Mrs. Esther Vanhomrich; a miserable example of an ill-spent life, fantastic wit, visionary schemes, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... he engaged in this Visionary Dissection, told us, that there was nothing in his Art more difficult than to lay open the Heart of a Coquet, by reason of the many Labyrinths and Recesses which are to be found in it, and which do not appear in the Heart of any ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the Third Universal Theory. The system is a combination of socialism and Islam derived in part from tribal practices and is supposed to be implemented by the Libyan people themselves in a unique form of "direct democracy." QADHAFI has always seen himself as a revolutionary and visionary leader. He used oil funds during the 1970s and 1980s to promote his ideology outside Libya, supporting subversives and terrorists abroad to hasten the end of Marxism and capitalism. In addition, beginning in 1973, he engaged in military operations in northern Chad's Aozou Strip - to gain access ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... naturally fiery and exalted with the vivid poetry of Homer. While yet a boy, and probably about the time when Phrynichus first elevated the Thespian drama, he is said to have been inspired by a dream with the ambition to excel in the dramatic art. But in Homer he found no visionary revelation to assure him of those ends, august and undeveloped, which the actor and the chorus might be made the instruments to effect. For when the idea of scenic representation was once familiar, the epics of Homer suggested ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... packed with hay; to make it more attractive, we were told it had been the scene of an abominable murder, and was now haunted. But the day was beginning to break, and our fatigue was too extreme for visionary terrors. The second or third, we alighted on a barren heath about midnight, built a fire to warm us under the shelter of some thorns, supped like beggars on bread and a piece of cold bacon, and slept like gipsies with our feet to the fire. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... while he explained some system. This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf. Men are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No one remembers after a really good talk who has said the good things. Every man speaks to a visionary multitude; a mystical cloud, that is called ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... And not rank with thee! (A knock.) Oh death! I know it—'tis my famulus— My fairest fortune now escapes! That all these visionary shapes A soulless groveller should banish thus! (WAGNER in his dressing gown and night-cap, a lamp in his ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... occasion, when I may be better able to perform it; for I am just now particularly hungry, and am always better able to resist temptation with a full stomach than an empty one. As I find it displeasing to Sir Ralph, I will not insist upon my visionary partner in the dance, at least until I am better able to substantiate the fact; and I shall listen to your lectures, worthy sir, with great delight, and, I doubt not, with equal benefit; but in the meantime, as carnal wants ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... rocks like the rest of the neighbourhood of the Trossachs—a secluded farm, a plot of verdant ground with a single cottage and its company of out-houses. We turned back, and went to the very point from which we had first looked upon Loch Achray when we were here with Coleridge. It was no longer a visionary scene: the sun shone into every crevice of the hills, and the mountain-tops were clear. After some time we went into the pass from the Trossachs, and were delighted to behold the forms of objects fully revealed, and even surpassing in loveliness and variety ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... tenderly, "it is time I came home to relieve you; you have grown a visionary, unsubstantial Esther, with large eyes and a thin face; but somehow I never liked the ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Empress, accompanied by the high officers of her court and the ladies of her household, came in sight of the chair of state which she was about to occupy, she suddenly stopped, and to the horror and astonished awe of her courtiers, she pointed to a visionary being seated on the imperial throne. The occupant of the chair was an exact counterpart of herself. All saw it and trembled, but none dared to move towards the mysterious presentment ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... cried M'Nicholl stoutly; "I deny the existence of anything of the kind, and I denounce every one that maintains any such whim as a visionary, ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... satisfied that the seeds of belief were deeply sown in the human heart. It was on that principle that he permitted and justified, though he did not dare to authorize the revival of La Trappe and other austere orders. He contended that they might operate as a safety-valve for the fanatical and visionary ferment which would otherwise burst forth and disturb society. In his remarks on the death of Duroc and in the reasons he alleged against suicide, both in calm and speculative discussion and in moments of strong emotion (such as occurred ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... fancied myself in a dream—I could scarcely credit the reality of what passed. For instance, when I walked into the room and put my hand into Miss Martineau's, the action of saluting her and the fact of her presence seemed visionary. Again, when Mr. Thackeray was announced, and I saw him enter, looked up at his tall figure, heard his voice, the whole incident was truly dream-like, I was only certain it was true because I became miserably destitute of self-possession. Amour propre suffers terribly under such circumstances: ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... boyhood's visionary mood, When glowing Fancy, innocently gay, Flings forth, like motes, her bright aerial brood, To dance and shine in Hope's prolific ray; 'Tis sweet, unweeting how the flight of years May darkling roll in trials and in tears, To dress the future in what garb we list, And ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... miles of oranges, unmeasured fields of cane, colossal sugar-house—they were all there, and all the rest of it, with the slaves, slaves, slaves everywhere, whole villages of negro cabins. And there were also, most noticeable to the natural, as well as visionary eye—there were the ease, idleness, extravagance, self-indulgence, pomp, pride, arrogance, in short the whole enumeration, the moral sine qua non, as some people considered it, of the wealthy slaveholder ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... he did not hear the clock when it struck again. The story was absorbing. It was as if through that narrow, shut-up chamber a gust of mountain air were sweeping like a breath of fresh life. Mr. Gresley was vaguely stirred in spite of himself, until he remembered that it was all fantastic, visionary. He had never felt like that, and his own experience was his measure of the utmost that is possible in human nature. He would have called a kettle visionary if he had never seen one himself. It was ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... comfortably dispense. I had nearly forgotten to warn you against the capricious works of BEUGHEM; a man, nevertheless, of wonderful mental elasticity; but for ever planning schemes too vast and too visionary for the human powers ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... This idea of travel in Africa and lion-hunting made him shudder beforehand; and when the house was re-entered, and whilst the complimentary concert was sounding under the windows, he had a dreadful "row" with Quixote-Tartarin, calling him a cracked head, a visionary, imprudent, and thrice an idiot, and detailing by the card all the catastrophes awaiting him on such an expedition—shipwreck, rheumatism, yellow fever, dysentery, the black plague, elephantiasis, and the rest ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... connected with these appeals against him. It is clear that all his dreams of Faerie did not make him neglectful of his earthly estate. Like Shakspere, like Scott, Spenser did not cease to be a man of the world—we use the phrase in no unkindly sense—because he was a poet. He was no mere visionary, helpless in the ordinary affairs of life. In the present case it would appear that he was even too keen in looking after his own interests. Professor Craik charitably suggests that his poverty 'rather than ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... the same visionary optimism in regarding her daughters' futures. The girls were all to marry, of course, and marry well, far above their ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... in this error in Parleyings with Certain People, in which book, with the exception of the visionary landscapes in Gerard de Lairesse, and some few passages in Francis Furini and Charles Avison, imagination, such as belongs to a poet, has deserted Browning. He feels himself as if this might be said of him; and he asks in Gerard de ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... exemplary I know they are; and those among them with whom I am acquainted are especially lovers of the true faith, and are persons in whom I have unbounded confidence." The inquisitors, on hearing this, were so fully convinced that the poor widow's representations had no other foundation than the visionary workings of a disordered brain, that they allowed the learned doctor to depart with her under his charge. Thus was the danger to the infant Church at Seville for the time mercifully removed, and while it gained strength to endure the coming persecutions, the number of Christ's true ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... primarily concern truth or falsehood. They relate to good or evil. What in the result is likely to produce evil is politically false, that which is productive of good politically is true." Assuming thus the visionary's right to decide before the result what was "likely to produce evil," Burke vigorously sought to kindle war against the French Republic which might have developed itself peacefully, while Paine was striving for an international Congress ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... from that of ordinary talk. The poets of Italy, Spain, and France began to rain influence and to modify and refine not only style but vocabulary. Men were discovering new worlds in more senses than one, and the visionary finger of expectation still pointed forward. There was, as we learn from contemporary pamphlets, very much the same demand for a national literature that we have heard in America. This demand was nobly answered in the next generation. But no man contributed so much to the transformation ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... every morning when he was a boy going to work: "Ever remember, my dear Dan, that you should look forward to being some day manager of that concern!"—this fruitful maxim is perfectly fitted to shine forth in the heart of the Hyde Park rough also, and to be his guiding-star through life. He has no visionary schemes of revolution and transformation, though of course he would like his class to rule, as the aristocratic [65] class like their class to rule, and the middle-class theirs. Meanwhile, our social machine ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... from Spain, as evidence of a false nature. He is charged with ambition, cupidity, and arrogance, in demanding titles, dignities, and money as fruits of his discoveries. He was, we are told, a fanatic, a visionary, a tyrant, a buccaneer, a liar, and a slave-trader. He was ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... that has stood there for nearly a century. For years I have tried in vain to rent or sell it. I have left no stone unturned, Quinby. I know I am regarded as a visionary, a ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... there would flow for his happy constitution interest and delight. "All fables have their morals," says Thoreau, "but the innocent enjoy the story." There is a truth represented for the imagination in those lines of a noble poem, where we are told that in our highest hours of visionary clearness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pleasing in harmony: let me add, also, that it awakens some passions which we perceive not in ordinary life. Particularly the most elevated sensation of music arises from a confused perception of ideal or visionary beauty and rapture, which is sufficiently perceivable to fire the imagination, but not clear enough to become an object of knowledge. This shadowy beauty the mind attempts, with a languishing curiosity, to collect into a distinct object of view and comprehension; but it sinks and escapes, like ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the austerity of his puritanism. Doubtless Governor John Winthrop in his hasty and harsh dictum respecting the Nashaway planters, classed John Prescott among those "corrupt in judgment." But it must be remembered that in Winthrop's visionary commonwealth there was no room for liberty of conscience. All were esteemed corrupt in judgment or even profane whose religious beliefs, when tested all about by the ecclesiastic callipers, proved not to have been cast in the doctrinal mould prescribed by the self-sanctified founders of the Massachusetts ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... to the voice of her triumphs; and the poor Doctor Brown, in the midst of all this hubbub, cut his own throat with his own razor. Whether this dismal catastrophe were exactly due to his mortification as a baffled visionary, whose favorite conceit had suddenly exploded like a rocket into smoke and stench, is more than we know. But, at all events, the sole memorial of his hypothesis which now reminds the English reader that it ever existed is one solitary notice of good-humored satire pointed at it by ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... an early age, I found that I had not the heart for the fray. Stamped on my narrow forehead, on my whole being, perhaps, so clearly that every unsympathetic boss could understand at once, was the mark of the visionary. My pitiable willingness to ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Adelphian Society of Greenfield. "In my dreamy way," he afterward said, "I did a little of a number of things fairly well—sang, played the guitar and violin, acted, painted signs and wrote poetry. My father did not encourage my verse-making for he thought it too visionary, and being a visionary himself, he believed he understood the dangers of following the promptings of the poetic temperament. I doubted if anything would come of the verse-writing myself. At this time it is easy to picture my father, a lawyer of ability, regarding ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... China and Japan. An adventurous, erratic line, whose stages were now the capitals of the world, and now some unknown halting-place in the immeasurable waste. And what on earth did it mean? Was it the record of an actual journey, or some yet untraveled visionary route? ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... referred to moral, causes; while an exercise of the phantasy, almost as degrading as the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of scientific speculation. Then came the mysticism of the Middle Ages, Magic, Alchemy, the Neoplatonic philosophy, with its visionary though sublime abstractions, which caused men to look with shame upon their own bodies, as hindrances to the absorption of the creature in the blessedness of the Creator. Finally came the scholastic philosophy, a fusion, according to Lange, of the least mature notions of Aristotle with ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... might slowly decompose the decayed age; he had the time to combat against time, and when he fell he was the conqueror. His disciples filled courts, academies, and saloons; those of Rousseau grew splenetic and visionary amongst the lower orders of society. The one had been the fortunate and elegant advocate of the aristocracy, the other was the secret consoler and beloved avenger of the democracy. His book was the book of all oppressed and tender souls. Unhappy and devotee himself, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... intelligible, I appear to degrade art by bringing her down from her visionary situation in the clouds, it is only to give her a more solid mansion upon the earth. It is necessary that at some time or other we should see things as they really are, and not impose on ourselves by that false magnitude ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... life and every meter a black one. Only the graves of the whites are marked. You can see the unending procession of headstones along the right of way. During its construction the project was bitterly assailed. The wiseacres contended that it was visionary, impracticable, and impossible. In this respect it suffered the same experience as all the other pioneering African railways and especially those of Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... to be a redeemer, and a King; [189:4] but they did not understand how their lowly Master was to establish His title to such high offices. [189:5] Though they "looked for redemption," and "waited for the kingdom of God," [189:6] there was much that was vague, as well as much that was visionary, in their notions of the Redemption and the Kingdom. We may well suppose that the views of the multitude were still less correct and perspicuous. Some, perhaps, expected that Christ, as a prophet, would decide the ecclesiastical controversies of the age; [189:7] others, probably, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... years waiting in vain for encouragement at the court of Spain. He applied unsuccessfully to the governments of Venice, Portugal, Genoa, France, England. Practical men said, "It can't be done. He is a visionary." Doctors of divinity said, "He is a heretic; he contradicts the Bible." Isabella, being a woman, and a woman of sentiment, wished to help him; but her confessor said no. We all know how he was compelled to put down mutiny in his crew, and how, after ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... the other hand, these long fingers were smooth jointed, he would, while having the same desire for ideality and for everything intellectual, be impulsive and inspirational, would lack a sense of detail and a love for detail in his own work, would be visionary, artistic, emotional. Such a person would be suited to artistic work, such as painting, making designs, models, etc., but could not be trusted to perform anything requiring detail, research or science, and would be utterly useless in any position ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... and the academy of sciences decided to provide with a lavish profusion that would dazzle the world with the brilliancy of Russian exploits. Russia was in the mood to do things. The young savants who thronged her capital were heady with visionary theories that were to astonish the rest of mortals. Scientists, artisans, physicians, monks, Cossacks, historians, made up the motley roll of conflicting influences under Bering's command; but because Bering was a Dane, this command was not ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... was as wild as wind; just as one need not be a strategist to keep out of the way of a motor-bus. Well, that is the first mystery; what had become of the English general's head? The second riddle is, what had become of the Brazilian general's heart? President Olivier might be called a visionary or a nuisance; but even his enemies admitted that he was magnanimous to the point of knight errantry. Almost every other prisoner he had ever captured had been set free or even loaded with benefits. Men who had really wronged him came away touched by his simplicity and sweetness. ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... lawn and flower-garden; the pattering of the rain against the glass; the stretching out of the Shadow's arm, and the fall of the statue in fragments on the floor—these objects and events of the visionary scene, so vividly present to his memory once, were all superseded by later remembrances now, were all left to fade as they might in the dim background of time. He could pass the room again and again, alone and anxious, and never once think ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... else to do between crops. We should have stuck to a white man's land, north into Arizona where the Three Hills of Gold are waiting, to say nothing of the Lost Stone Cabin mine, lost not twenty miles from Quartzite, and in plain sight of Castle Dome. Now there is nothing visionary about that, Kit! Why, I knew an old-timer who freighted rich ore out of that mine thirty years ago, and even the road to it has been lost for years! We know things once did exist up in that country, Kit, and down here we are all tangled up with Mexican-Indian stories of ghosts and ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... function of nature was free, that which furnished the nursery could not be restrained. Nature has required the powerful to be just; but she has not otherwise intrusted the preservation of her works to their visionary plans. What fuel can the statesman add to the fires of youth? Let him only not smother it, and the effect is secure. Where we oppress or degrade mankind with one hand, it is vain, like Octavius, to hold out in the other, the baits of marriage, or the ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... (1658-1743), a churchman without vocation, was a Norman of noble family, and first published his Memoires pour rendre la Paix Perpetuelle a l'Europe in 1722. As Siegler-Pascal well shows (Les Projets de l'Abbe de Saint-Pierre, 1900) he was not a mere visionary Utopian, but an acute and far-seeing thinker, practical in his methods, a close observer, an experimentalist, and one of the first to attempt the employment of statistics. He was secretary to the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the little china dog, and looked down earnestly at her, as she sat on the chintz-covered sofa behind the tea-table. At her back was the long casement window, and the last gleams of the wintry sun caught her hair. To the man's visionary fancy they ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... inhabitants of Fitchburg drew up a spirited remonstrance, in which they were joined by the people in those portions of the three adjoining towns not included in the proposed new township. In this remonstrance every statement of the petitioners was denied, and the whole thing denounced as visionary. This matter engrossed the attention of both parties during 1790, and the result was that the General Court refused to incorporate ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... can. All's fair in war, you know, but Ledwith is the worst kind of patriot, a visionary one, exalted, as ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... not political. I have had report of him. He is a visionary. There is no sedition in him. He ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... left my shop. I cannot understand it. They seem to object to me on such curious and inconsistent sort of grounds, these scientific men, and these innovators. They say that I give people superstitions and make them too visionary; they say I give people sausages and make them too coarse. They say my heavenly parts are too heavenly; they say my earthly parts are too earthly; I don't know what they want, I'm sure. How can heavenly things be too heavenly, or earthly things too earthly? How can one be ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... the two poles, the extremes,—both of them remote and chilly,—of good and evil, from which the writer withdrew, after exploring them, into more temperate regions. The movement of these persons is visionary, and their personality faint. But I have marked a few characteristic portions of the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... thou art an ass thyself! Is it not well to bring away the most we can," returned the visionary, sore dismayed; when, seeing how their talk apart made the Frank suspicious, he relapsed into English with a ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... know the Gospel, then nothing is as it should be; the heavens are on the point of falling and the earth about to be destroyed. They can only judge, censure and deride, saying: "Oh, yes, he is truly evangelical; indeed, he is a visionary!" Thus they indicate their utter blindness. With the beam constantly in their own eyes, they show how little they ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... was the deep voice of the maid of the long trail speaking of the streams and the waving grass of that visionary Land of ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... and Canada alone could give trouble. The next difficulty was with France, and there the Senate blocked advance, but England assumed the task, and, owing to political changes in France, effected the object — a combination which, as late as 1901, had been visionary. The next, and far more difficult step, was to bring Germany into the combine; while, at the end of the vista, most unmanageable of all, Russia remained to be satisfied and disarmed. This was the instinct of what might be named McKinleyism; the system ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... of a genius isolated, comparatively speaking, and concentrated upon a small part of human life. His frequent journeys abroad and the wider range of his reading now brought him into the full current of European thought, and led to a substitution of practical ideals for those of the visionary. He felt that he must reculer pour mieux sauter, and for nearly a decade he produced little original work. Yet his first attempt at a modern problem-play, 'De Nygifte' (The Newly Married Pair), curiously enough, dates from as far back as 1865. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Francis of bad heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun and moon. There may have been heralds stupid enough to say so even in that much more logical age, but it is no sufficient way of dealing with visions or with revolutions. St. Thomas of Canterbury was a great visionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as England was concerned his revolution failed and his vision was not fulfilled. We are therefore told in the text-books little more than that he wrangled with the King about certain regulations; the most crucial being whether "criminous clerks" should ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... of the latest developments in the moving-picture art," he resumed, "an X-ray moving picture, a feat which was until recently visionary, a science now in its infancy, bearing the formidable ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... very picturesque and interesting figure, is Gabriele d'Annunzio—very much in earnest, wholly sincere, but fanatical, egotistical, intolerant of the rights or opinions of others, a visionary, and perhaps a little mad. I imagine that he would rather have his name linked with that of that other soldier-poet, who "flamed away at Missolonghi" nearly a century ago, than with any other character in history save Garibaldi. D'Annunzio, like Byron, was an exile from his native ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... of the heavier stroke which was first to fall. A few days after this dream I was charging myself with being visionary; yet a few of these most impressive dreams, I believe, have been designed for our instruction. My husband was seized with a heavy cold, accompanied by a severe cough, that was increasing; yet he was able to be about the house and barn, giving directions, ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... rose slowly from the ground, with the assistance of his friend, and looked with the same wild gaze around him. Such a look! I shall never forget it; there was that intense expression of searching anxiety, as if he sought to trace the outlines of some visionary spirit as it receded before him. Quickly reassured, as it seemed, by the glance he threw on all sides, his countenance lighted up, not with pleasure, but with a fiendish expression of revengeful triumph, which even his voice ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... morning—there was nothing visionary about them. She did surprise her father with a neat breakfast table, and Johnnie surprised himself ...
— Dorothy Dale • Margaret Penrose
... of the faith and practice of Christian life. And here it is necessary to guard against what is childish, visionary, and exuberant, against things that only feed the fancy or excite the imagination, against practices which are adapted to other races than ours, but with us are liable to become unreal and irreverent, against too vivid sense impressions and especially ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... this religious reverence for the rights of man. Lloyd Garrison has been, for the last twenty-five years, the best-hated man in these Northern States, not because he failed to see just how a Union of Free and Slave States could endure; not because of any visionary theory of political action or the structure of society he cherished; but, strangely enough, because he stood-up for man and his divine right to freedom. This was what the aristocracy hated in him, and this is what, with inexpressible rage, it saw gaining in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... for anybody; he had likes and dislikes, admirations and partialities, jealousies, too, and well-defined tastes where feminine beauty was in question, but it was not in him to err from excess of charity. The imaginative and visionary parts of life—and no one is wholly without them—soon turned into severe reality whenever he found himself confronted with that sole absorbing interest—his career. Marriage, in his own case, seemed an imperative duty. He was an eldest son, the heir to an earldom and a vast estate; ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... exult in it. Do you know what a difference there is between the absent one and the present one—between the distant image against whom our doubts, our fears, our suspicions, raise up hosts of imaginary giants, barriers of visionary walls, and the beloved face before the sight of which the hosts are fled, the walls are vanished? Isaura, we meet again. You know now from my own lips that I love you. I think your lips will not deny that you love me. You ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... highest Beings, whose powers exceed even those attributed by men to their gods—if even these are bound by and are subservient to Law, then imagine the presumption of mortal man, of our race and grade, when he dares to consider the Laws of Nature as "unreal!" visionary and illusory, because he happens to be able to grasp the truth that the Laws are Mental in nature, and simply Mental Creations of THE ALL. Those Laws which THE ALL intends to be governing Laws are not ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... over the life of the unfortunate Mary. Amidst discontent and misery at home, disgrace and failure abroad, the fantastic comparisons, the delirious analogies, the child which was to be born of the Virgin Mary for the salvation of mankind—where were now these visionary and humiliating dreams? ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... polygamous phase of the Reformation before they say 'Amen' to the unsavory and brazen laudations of the profligate opponent of Christian marriage, Christian decency, and Christian propriety. Compare the teachings of Luther on polygamy with those of Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet and visionary, and see their striking similarity. Mormonism in Salt Lake City, in Utah, which has brought so much disgrace to the American people, is but a legitimate outgrowth of Luther and Lutheranism." This, then, is what will have to be done: a comparison will have ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... has each successive season sway'd The fruitful sceptre of our milder clime Since My Loved ****** died! but why, ah! why Should melancholy cloud my early years? Religion spurns earth's visionary scene, Philosophy revolts at misery's chain: Just Heaven recall'd it's own, the pilgrim call'd From human woes, from sorrow's rankling worm; Shall ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... say yes. On the contrary, taking his life as an illustration, good only was to be inferred. I remembered very well when his mind diverged into this new direction. Some years had intervened. I thought to see him grow visionary or enthusiastic. Not so, however. There was a change progressively visible; but it was in the direction of sound and rational views of life. A broader humanity showed itself in his words and actions. Then came the subtler vein of religious sentiments, running like ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... mess of the Gordons in the village of Franvillers along the Albert road, and listening to a long monologue by a Gordon officer on the future of the tanks. He was a dreamer and visionary, and his fellow-officers laughed ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... but she felt inspired to pass the remainder of her life in some place consecrated to the Blessed Virgin, and waited for Divine Providence to direct her. She proposed her views to her confessor, but he being also ignorant of the projected establishment of Montreal, treated her as a visionary. Yet as she persisted in asking advice, he spoke of her in Paris to persons more enlightened than himself. Those with whom he conversed did not fail to recognize something remarkable in her vocation, and she was accordingly introduced to the ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... surprise as the Indian does through the streets of a civilized city which he has entered for the first time. Yet Nature, sooner or later, vindicates her mysteries; voices from the unseen penetrate the din of civilization. The child philosopher and materialist often becomes the visionary of riper years, running into illuminism, magnetism, and transcendentalism, with its inspired priests and priestesses, its revelations and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... man situated as Smith is must be beset with requests of all kinds. Now it is an inventor needing capital; again it is some visionary who comes to advocate a brilliant scheme which must surely yield millions of profit. A choice has to be made between these projects, rejecting the worthless, examining the questionable ones, accepting ...
— In the Year 2889 • Jules Verne and Michel Verne
... effort to prevent her downward drop from beginning again she searched all the occupations open to her. She could not find one that would not have meant only the most visionary prospect of some slight remote advancement, and the certain and speedy destruction of what she now realized was her chief asset and hope—her personal appearance. And she resolved that she would not even ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... monstrously heaving, oil-dripping surroundings. He was a small, deliberate man, with oceans of repressed energies. His skin had the waxy whiteness of a pond lily. An exquisitely trimmed black moustache adorned his mouth. The deep brown eyes of a visionary rested beneath the gentle, scythe-like curves of thin ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... stirring up trouble for the Yugoslavs in the spring. They referred with pleasure to the presence of sundry Bulgarian komitadjis in Albania, Finzi declared that the Italian Government would satisfy the Croats and give them Rieka as soon as Croatia had achieved her independence and a less visionary promise was made of disturbances in Rieka. On March 1 the two Italian officers left for Triest and on March 3 Rieka was confronted with another coup d'etat. The fascisti of Triest and of Gulia Venetia descended on the town ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... purchase peace to the land. Whereat the King smiled, and bid him return to Ireland." The saving was questionable; for to prevent an insurrection by timely concessions, is incomparably less expensive than to suppress it when it has arisen. The "purchase of peace" was equally visionary; for the Irish never appear to have been able to sit down quietly under unjust oppression, however ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... a little older, my mental horizon widened somewhat, but my erratic notions became accordingly more expansive. I was simply a little dreamer and my thoughts were all visionary. It is true that I was quite young, but the proverbial straws pointing the direction of the wind had an application in ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... row of black and visionary pines By twilight glimpse discerned! Mark how they flee From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... words made the vision of such a life more fully present to her than it had ever been before; and the vision for the time excluded all realities,—all except the returning sun-gleams which broke out on the waters as the evening approached, and mingled with the visionary sunlight of promised happiness; all except the hand that pressed hers, and the voice that spoke to her, and the eyes that looked at ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... chiefs. Cheschapah turned his impudent yet somewhat visionary face upon his father. "What do you know of medicine?" said he. "Two sorts of Indians are among the Crows to-day," he continued to the chiefs. "One sort are the fathers, and the sons are the other. The young warriors are not afraid of the white man. The old plant corn ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... under examination, either before the Magistrates or in Court, had indicated a fixed and absolute prejudice or conviction against him. This Letter of Proctor's, printed in my book, [ii., 310] utterly disperses the visionary fabric of the Reviewer's fancy, that Cotton Mather was his "spiritual adviser," counselling him in frequent visits to the Salem Jail. It denounces, in unreserved language, "the Magistrates, Ministers, Juries," as under the "delusion of the Devil, ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... normal girl, Rose-Marie had thought ahead to the time when she would have a home and a husband. She had dreamed of the day when her knight would come riding—a visionary, idealized figure, always, but a noble one! She had pictured a hearth-fire, and a blue and white kitchen with aluminum pans and glass baking dishes. She had even wondered how tiny fingers would feel as they curled about her hand—if ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... Two lunatics The hawk In Madrid In Pamplona Don Tirso Larequi A visionary rowdy Sarasate Robinson ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... out on his march to Vincennes, that he was not indulging a visionary impulse. The enterprise was one that called for all that manhood could endure, but not more. With the genius of a born leader he measured his task by his means. He knew his own courage and fortitude, and understood the best capacity of his men. He had genius; that ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... golden opportunities which, once past, might never come again. So I reasoned; so time went on; so I lived, plodding on by day in the Ecole de Medecine, but, when evening came, resuming my studies at the leaf turned down the night before, and, like the visionary in "The Pilgrims of the Rhine," taking up my dream-life at the point where I ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... The force of example and the presence of this fear could not have been resisted long. Lincoln was not a man who could be accused of taking any course without a reason well thought out; we can safely conclude that in the summer of 1862 he nursed a hope, by no means visionary, of initiating a process of liberation free from certain evils in that upon which he ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... but then I have been suffered to doze all these years in the enjoyment of old childish habits and sympathies, without being called on to more active and serious duties of life. I have not put away childish things, though a man. But, at the same time, this visionary inactivity is better than the mischievous activity of so many I see about me; not better than the useful and virtuous activity of a few others: John ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... I took a sentimental view of our subject. We women always instinctively take the sentimental view, you know. My doctor was severely scientific and frightfully sceptical. He thought me an absurd visionary." ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... the faggots were alight, And that myself was fasten'd to the stake, I And found it all a visionary flame, Cool as the light in old decaying wood; And then King Harry look'd from out a cloud, And bad me have good courage; and I heard An angel cry 'There is more joy in Heaven,'— And after that, the trumpet of the ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... glowing with the light of a visionary, Winchester stepped forward, and Lyveden got upon his feet. For a moment the two men looked one another in the face. Then Winchester shivered suddenly, put a hand to his ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... say if he knew of my determination; and was it filial and just to let him remain in ignorance of it? Yet I reasoned that after all I had made no final decision. I was attracted, it is true, by what might be called a visionary theory; but when I had given the principles of moderation further thought, I might conclude not to devote myself to them. It would be time enough later to speak of the subject. At present I was only ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... California, Mr. Dana, lying in his berth, "vowed that, if God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that class of beings with whom my lot has been so long cast.'' This vow he carried out in no visionary scheme of mutiny or foolish "paying back'' to the captain, but by awakening a "strong sympathy'' for the sailors "by a voice from the forecastle,'' in his "Two Years ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... up and down enjoying it sub-consciously, for really our—that is Bickley's and my own—intelligences were concentrated on that sepulchre and its contents. Where Bastin's may have been I do not know, perhaps in a visionary teapot, since I was sure that it would take him a day or two to appreciate the significance of our discoveries. At any rate, he wandered off, making no remarks about them, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... family for a number of years, while they resided near this place, and we have no hesitation in saying that we consider them destitute of that moral character which ought to entitle them to the confidence of any community. They were particularly famous for visionary projects; spent much of their time in digging for money which they pretended was hid in the earth, and to this day large excavations may be seen in the earth, not far from their residence, where they used to spend their time in digging for hidden treasures. ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... came to this Design, To work him by a kind of Touch Divine. To raise some holy Spright to do the Feat. Nothing like Dreams and Visions to the Great. Did not a little Witch of Endor bring A Visionary Seer t'a cheated King? And shall their greater Magick want Success, Their more Illustrious Sorceries ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise. Dante was alone—except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless. The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his home and the voices of his daughters; Shakespeare had his free associates of the stage; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the forces which should have been employed in saving Ghent and in the protection of the English shores against the threat of invasion were squandered by John of Gaunt in a war which he was carrying on alone the Spanish frontier in pursuit of the visionary crown which he claimed in his wife's right. The enterprise showed that the Duke had now abandoned the hope of directing affairs at home and was seeking a new sphere of activity abroad. To drive him from the realm had been from the ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... which seemed days of misery. For many consecutive nights I dared not undress myself nor put out the light, lest the moment I lay down some "monstrum horrendum, informfe, ingens" should blast my sight with his hellish aspect! I had a double sense of sight and sound; one real, the other visionary; both equally strong and apparently real; so that while I distinctly heard imaginary footsteps ascending the stairs, the door opening and my curtains drawn, I at the same time as plainly heard any actual sound in or outside the house, and ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... girl, who had scarce spoken to a dozen young men in her life, she was comparing four faces; one of a visionary character of which she had dreamed for ten years, and three which had recently entered into the small circle of her affairs. It was little pleasure to her to talk to those bald diplomats, who were always ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... importance to the city of Cleveland and the Mahoning Valley, and confidently anticipated for them, in the event of its completion, a rapidity and extent of development and prosperity, which were then regarded as visionary, but which the result ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... activity and daring optimism. They believe in anything that is good enough in that country, and are in consequence cheerfully willing to attempt anything, even if to other men it would appear altogether visionary and impossible, and simple faith goes a long way when supplemented by patient labour. Laura suddenly became conscious that the manager of the pulp-mill, a little wiry man, in white shirt and store clothes, was speaking at the head of ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... degree, the responsibility of parents in relation to temperance. By habits of intemperance, they not only degrade and ruin themselves, but transmit the elements of like degradation and ruin to their posterity. This is no visionary conjecture, the fruit of a favorite and long-cherished theory. It is a settled belief resulting from observation—an inference derived from innumerable facts. In hundreds and thousands of instances, parents, ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... the lure of greener pastures gripped these men and the necessity for ready money oppressed, they were wont to sell their holdings for a few hundred dollars. Gradually it became the fashion in Humboldt to "unload" redwood timber-claims on thrifty, far-seeing, visionary John Cardigan who appeared to be always in the market for any claim ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... the first time Bienville the man, Bienville the visionary, Bienville the enthusiast, the dreamer of dreams and the builder of castles. I watched ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... middle of the nineteenth the spirit of revolt in England took a wholly literary form. In France it was what people did that was wild and elemental; in England it was what people wrote. It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... when I may be better able to perform it; for I am just now particularly hungry, and am always better able to resist temptation with a full stomach than an empty one. As I find it displeasing to Sir Ralph, I will not insist upon my visionary partner in the dance, at least until I am better able to substantiate the fact; and I shall listen to your lectures, worthy sir, with great delight, and, I doubt not, with equal benefit; but in the meantime, as carnal wants ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... optime constitutam rempublicam, quae ex tribus generibus illis, regali, optimo, et populari, sit modice confusa;" yet Tacitus treats this notion of a mixed government, formed out of them all, and partaking of the advantages of each, as a visionary whim; and one that, if effected, could never be lasting ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... taken lightly, but something in the tone of them roused a jealous fear which was always dormant in Mrs. Seal's breast. She was terribly afraid that one of these days Mary, the young woman who typified so many rather sentimental and enthusiastic ideas, who had some sort of visionary existence in white with a sheaf of lilies in her hand, would announce, in a jaunty way, that she was about to ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... one need not be a strategist to keep out of the way of a motor-bus. Well, that is the first mystery; what had become of the English general's head? The second riddle is, what had become of the Brazilian general's heart? President Olivier might be called a visionary or a nuisance; but even his enemies admitted that he was magnanimous to the point of knight errantry. Almost every other prisoner he had ever captured had been set free or even loaded with benefits. Men who had really ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... nation; the most distant prospect of which is sufficient to warm the soul of any man who has the least regard for his country, with courage sufficient to despise the imputations that may be thrown upon him as a visionary projector, for taking so much pains about an affair that can tend so little to his private advantage. We will now add a few words with respect to the advantages arising from having thus digested the history of circumnavigators, from the earliest account of time to the ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... these in later years exercised considerable influence in the International. But, as a rule, the groups of the Communist League were little more than debating societies whose members were filled with sentimental, visionary, and insurrectionary ideas. Marx himself finally lost all patience with them, because he could not drive out of their heads the idea that they could revolutionize the entire world by some sudden dash and through ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... a great financial panic came to the business and monetary affairs of the country. It was the logic of an inflated currency, wild and visionary enterprises, bad investments, and prodigal living. Banks tottered and fell, large business houses suspended, and financial ruin ran riot. Northern attention was diverted from Southern politics to the "destruction that seemed to waste at noon-day." Taking advantage ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... himself, his parents, his Uncle and Aunt, Mike Callaghan, the policeman, and the Fifty-fifth Street millionaire; about Cis and her mother, Barber and his father, Mrs. Kukor, One-Eye and the other cowboys, Buckle, Boof, David, Goliath (mingling the real, the historical, the visionary and the purely fictional), young Edward of England, that Prince's numerous silk-hatted friends, the four millionaires, the janitress, Mrs. Reisenberger and her baby, the flea-bitten mare, the postman, Edwarda (he showed the new doll), then, in quick succession, his favorite ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... which Allan had seen standing opposite to him at the long window; the view over a lawn and flower-garden; the pattering of the rain against the glass; the stretching out of the Shadow's arm, and the fall of the statue in fragments on the floor—these objects and events of the visionary scene, so vividly present to his memory once, were all superseded by later remembrances now, were all left to fade as they might in the dim background of time. He could pass the room again and again, alone and anxious, and never once think of the boat drifting away in the moonlight, and ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... steamers this season been suppressed, the governor of the State would not have imagined five-day trips from Buffalo to New York, as per his message, and our city editors would not have ventilated such visionary pretensions. There are a multitude of horse-boat captains that can reduce their net canal time of movement below the Baxter's, which has been so extensively commented upon; but their so doing would not expedite the transfer of grain from ...
— History of Steam on the Erie Canal • Anonymous
... strain in the aesthetic impression. The man himself does not know it, and that is the reason he includes it. His sense of fitness is dwarfed or paralyzed. We in the community come to regret that he is so "visionary," with all his talent; so we accommodate ourselves to his unfruitfulness, and at the best only expect an occasional hour's entertainment under the spell of his presence. This certainly is not the man to ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world—amid things as strange as any that are described in the "Arabian Tales" . . . amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin, fountains more wonderful than the golden water of Parizade, conveyances more rapid than ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Haygarth's thousands. Indeed, since that interview in which Philip Sheldon had made so light of his stepdaughter's chances, and ratified his consent to her marriage with so humble a literary adventurer as himself, Mr. Hawkehurst had come to consider the Haygarthian inheritance as altogether a visionary business. If it were certain, or even probable, that Charlotte was to inherit a hundred thousand pounds, was it likely that Mr. Sheldon would encourage such an alliance? This question Mr. Hawkehurst always answered in the negative; and as days and weeks went by, and ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... steamer, that never went anywhere, sailed on. But the wood-nymph did not vanish; the sunbeam was still on the editorial chair, lighting up the little face with a celestial halo. And when she spoke again, it was as if the music that filled the visionary glades was ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... beetle's being "the index of his fortune." Upon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled, but, at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity—to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary, by ocular demonstration, of the fallacy of the opinions ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and sexual connection plays an important part in his teaching and prophesies. The apostle St. Paul was also a visionary who passed suddenly from one extreme to another as the result of hallucination. Pascal, Napoleon, and Rousseau presented very marked ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... practically disappeared; there is an island of hell and an island of paradise.[1303] The island conception is the last relic of paganism, but now the voyage is undertaken for the purpose of revenge or penance or pilgrimage. Another series of tales of visionary journeys to hell or heaven are purely Christian, yet the joys of heaven have a sensuous aspect which recalls those of the pagan Elysium. In one of these, The Tidings of Doomsday,[1304] there are two hells, and besides heaven ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... with the brightness of his new-found faith untarnished, but without, he remembered, scratching the armor of their profound doubt in everything. One could see, looking at the slender black figure, at the visionary gaze of the gray wide eyes, at the shape of the face, broad-browed, ovalled, that this man's psychic make-up must lift him like wings into an atmosphere outside a material, outside even an intellectual world. He could breathe freely only in a spiritual air, and things hard to ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... in the old regime of France allied with political despotism, was, however, ruthlessly condemned to the guillotine, along with the head of the Capets, never to be replaced by the ferocious spirit of democracy, revelling in the realization of all other visionary abstractions of perfect liberty, equality, levelling of distinctions and monopolies. With the reign of the rights of man was established, in the body politic, that of prohibition and restriction over the body industrial—gradually ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... inhabitants, and any refractory bands that might be disposed to pour in from the province to join the factious could be effectually prevented entering Paris. Whatever may be the different opinions on the subject, every one must regret such a tremendous expense for almost a visionary object, whilst there is so much capital and labour required for increasing the facilities of communication by means of improved roads, canals, or railways from the opposite points ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... characteristics which he afterward treated in modified forms. They are the two poles, the extremes,—both of them remote and chilly,—of good and evil, from which the writer withdrew, after exploring them, into more temperate regions. The movement of these persons is visionary, and their personality faint. But I have marked a few characteristic portions of the book ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... not to be left out from the benevolent operations which Mrs. Fry now commenced. The officers of Newgate despaired of any good result; the people who associated with Mrs. Fry, charitable as they were, viewed her plans as Utopian and visionary, while she herself almost quailed at their very contemplation. It also placed a great strain upon her nervous system to attend women condemned to death. She wrote: "I have suffered much about the hanging of criminals." And again: "I have just returned ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... distant country; and, shocked with the recollection of her separation from the circle of her friends, determined to pass over to Lisbon to attend her. This resolution was treated by her acquaintance as in the utmost degree visionary; but she was not to be diverted from her point. She had not money to defray her expences: she must quit for a long time the school, the very existence of which probably depended ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... as to the character of the creature that had made those tracks. He had hunted elephants in the jungles of Bengal, and knew all the peculiarities of the grand quadruped. Such footmarks as were now under his eyes could not have been made by a mere visionary animal, but only by a real ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... temper, conceived that it might not be amiss to sow the seeds of jealousy in his mind: they might be turned to some use hereafter, either by prejudicing the Prince against Isabella, if he persisted in that union or by diverting his attention to a wrong scent, and employing his thoughts on a visionary intrigue, prevent his engaging in any new pursuit. With this unhappy policy, he answered in a manner to confirm Manfred in the belief of some connection between Isabella and the youth. The Prince, whose passions wanted little fuel to throw ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole
... the earth, milking out the surplus capital of the effete East, and building up this town—and what happens? Four thousand old silurian fossils comb the moss on the north side of 'em, with mussel shell, and turn over and yawp that old Alphabetical is visionary. Here I get a canning factory and nobody eats the goods; I hustle up a woollen factory, and the community quits wearing trousers; I build for them a streetcar line to haul them to and from their palatial residences, and what do the sun-baked human mud turtles ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... nature had concentrated on those eyes, treating all the puny rest of him with careless indifference. They are eyes that delight in seeing, eyes to seek a place in the first row of the grand stand of world events, eyes that turn steadily outward upon objective reality. Not the eyes of a visionary—House got his visions of the brotherhood of man and the rest of it at second-hand from Wilson—eyes that glow not with the internal fires of a great soul, but with ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... altar that Augustus erected the "Ara primogenito Dei" to commemorate the Delphic prophecy of the coming of our Saviour. Standing on a spot so thronged with memories, the dullest imagination takes fire. The forms and scenes of the past rise from their graves and pass before us, and the actual and visionary are mingled together in strange poetic confusion. Truly, as Walpole says, "memory sees more than our eyes in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... promulgation of dogmas founded on the Western Paradise, we must not forget that both of them preached a new Buddha—not the real figure in history, but an unhistoric and unreal phantom, the creation and dream of the speculator and visionary. Amida, the personification of boundless light, is one of the luxuriant growths of a sickly scholasticism—a hollow abstraction without life or reality. Amidaism is utterly repudiated by many Japanese Buddhists, who give no place to his idol on their altars, and reject utterly the teaching ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... interwoven when times are happiest—flourished in that sunny place: it was not really wonderful that Ippolita the stone-cutter's daughter, classically fair, indisputably a beauty, should win all seeing eyes and be the despair of all rhymers. Given the vision to the visionary (and both came in their time), she might be trusted with the rest; for she was remarkable by contrast; there were none like her. The Paduan girls are all charming, and mostly pretty. Ippolita was neither: she was beautiful, and when you came to know her face, lovely. They are ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Love's Despair is but Hope's pining Ghost! For this one hope he makes his hourly moan, He wishes and can wish for this alone! Pierced, as with light from Heaven, before its gleams (So the love-stricken visionary deems) Disease would vanish, like a summer shower, Whose dews fling sunshine from the noon-tide bower! Or let it stay! yet this one Hope should give Such strength that he would bless his ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... valuable: but they are not practical; they all fail in the application of knowledge to useful ends. I am not an educated man myself, but I have known many who are, and they are all alike—shallow, superficial, visionary. They need to put away their books and sit down among the everlasting hills and think. You have done well to come out here, young man. This ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... effect on Society and Politics. That effect will perhaps be found to have been more considerable than his contemporaries imagined; for, though it became a convention to praise his literary performances and judgments, it was no less a convention to dismiss as visionary and absurd whatever he wrote about the ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... to what has been described in this book, that there is as yet no prospect of coming to an understanding with many people. It is here that we come to the point where the desire must arise that it should no longer be a characteristic of our present day culture to at once decry as fanciful or visionary a method of research which differs from its own. But on the other hand it is also a fact at the present time that a number of people can appreciate the supersensible method of research, as it is presented in this book, people who understand that the meaning of life is not revealed in general phrases ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... handicapped young people is practically assured. As with the nation today, so with those interested in the welfare of the blind—we look to the children for the fulfillment of our highest ideals, and hope, in their advancement, to see our "dearest dreams come true." I am often called visionary, and I am proud to confess that I have a vision, a wonderful vision of the future of the blind. It may not be realized during my lifetime, but if some of the children I have inspired will take up the torch, and carry it on unfalteringly, I shall be satisfied. Meantime, I ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... of the first to see the importance of Canada; and after 1685 he was supported by James in the attempt to divert the fur trade from Montreal to Albany by bringing the Iroquois Indians under English control. The scheme, which involved nothing less than the ruin of Canada, was by no means a visionary one. The Five Nations, lying south of the chain of lakes, could profit but little by the fur trade while it remained in French hands. But let Albany replace Montreal as the chief market, and they would become the indispensable middle carriers between the northern tribes and the English. ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... conformations of vice. The Spendthrift, or degraded man of fortune, lives by shifts, by schemes, by loans, by sponging on the novice, by subscription, or on commiseration's uncertain aid. He has however in perspective some visionary scheme of emolument and dishonour blended, to put into execution as soon as he obtains his discharge. The uncertificated Bankrupt has many opportunities left yet; he has other dupes, other tricks of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... atmosphere in Western America. In Arizona, I believe, the phenomenon is even more noticeable, at times. The trees stand out distinctly and almost individually on hills miles and miles away, and a camera speedily proves how really free is the atmosphere of all visionary obstruction. A photograph of a horse, a bullock, or of any such object out on the hills, will secure a reproduction of a background quite extraordinary in the extent ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... turn, has had an interview with the goddess of nature upon a hill-side. For our own part, we confess that we have no great predilection for such mysterious intercourse, and would rather draw our inspiration from tangible objects, than dally with a visionary Egeria. But the fault is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... fearing his ambition, thought they could only keep him quiet by employing him, and gave him command of the so-called Army of England. But he was bent on the conquest of Egypt. He appears to have had something visionary in his temperament, and to have dreamed of founding a mighty empire from the stand-point of the East, the glow and glamour of which seem always to have had a certain fascination for him. He therefore employed the resources of the Army of England to prepare for an expedition to Egypt, and the Directory ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... drew up a spirited remonstrance, in which they were joined by the people in those portions of the three adjoining towns not included in the proposed new township. In this remonstrance every statement of the petitioners was denied, and the whole thing denounced as visionary. This matter engrossed the attention of both parties during 1790, and the result was that the General Court refused to incorporate the ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... indulge too much in sycophantic flattery, while others have their brains addled by brooding on some fancied wrong, or their minds have lost their even poise by dwelling on insane reforms or visionary projects. All this may have its use, but the subscriber has preferred to look at things in a more cheerful way, to pluck roses rather than nettles, and neither to throw filth nor to ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... of the warm sunny shower The visionary boy from shelter fly; For now the storm of summer rain is o'er, And cool, and fresh, and fragrant is the sky. And, lo! in the dark east, expanded high, The rainbow brightens to the setting Sun! Fond fool, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... It is the duty, no doubt, of people who are responsible for the education of these young men to try and turn them into respectable citizens, Sometimes the process is successful; sometimes it is not. Often enough these visionary, perverse people are misunderstood and shunted till they make shipwreck of their lives. The path of originality is even harder than the path of the transgressor, because the stakes for which the man of genius ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in these days of imminent dismay, my thoughts flew out as to a fair protecting saint; until the inspiration of her visionary presence wrought in my fancy with such a dramaturgic power, that I seemed to walk daily with her, and to know all those delicate and sweet propinquities by which liking passes into affection and affection is glorified into love. So far ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... steel of a suit well known to the eyes of the sentinels, visionary none the less, with useless truncheon in hand, resuming the memory of old martial habits, but with quiet countenance, more in sorrow than in anger, troubled—not now with the thought of the hell-day to which he must sleepless return, but with that unceasing ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... Charles, and as the baron, with a low bow, assented, the Emperor continued: "Then it is scarcely an intrigue, at any rate a successful one, unless he is unlike the usual stamp. But no! I noticed the man. There is something visionary about him, like most of the Germans. But I have never seen ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fighting the party over in her dream; and as the visionary custard-cups crashed down through one lobe of her brain into another, she gave a start as if an inch of lightning from a quart Leyden jar had jumped into one of her knuckles with its ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... pauperism,' put in Herbert blandly; 'a reductio ad absurdum of all your visionary Schurzian philosophy, my dear Ernest. Look at it another way, now, and just consider. Which really and truly matters most to you and me, a great work of art or a highly respectable horny-handed son of toil, whose acquaintance we have ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... only mortification and humiliation. Her director rebuked her for indulging silly fancies; the Mother Superior asserted that if God granted her request, it would be only as a punishment for her presumption; others, whose judgment she equally deferred to, pronounced the project visionary and delusive, yet her great courage never failed, for it was founded on a perfect confidence that in His own time, God would do His own work, using her as his instrument, all unworthy though she was. In two letters, she fully ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... affect to misunderstand your meaning for I have known others as visionary as yourself in fancying that such ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... home with her and make a little visit. Bessy thought she would rather stay with Doris, and she was captivated with the Royall House and Eudora. The children never seemed in the way of the grown people there, and if elderly men talked politics and city improvements,—quite visionary, some thought them,—the young people with Alice and Helen had the garden walks and the wide porch, and discussed the enjoyments of the time with the zest of enthusiastic ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... greater good of the greater number, and I have fought only for those men who promised to govern unselfishly and as the servants of the people. But when the fighting was over, and they were safe in power, they had no use for me nor my advice. They laughed, and called me a visionary and a dreamer. 'You are no statesman, General,' they would say to me. 'Your line is the fighting-line. Go back to it.' And yet, when I think of how the others have used their power, I believe that I could have ruled the people as well, and yet given them more freedom, and made ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... After dinner in the smoking-room I turned over with this gentleman a very curious collection of the works of Blake, which were new to him. Finding that he evidently knew something about art, I explained to him that Blake was a very strange visionary—that he believed that the spirits of the dead appeared to him, and that ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of setting worlds in order, which are bound to fail. We consider too little plans for putting our own households in order, which might easily be made to succeed. A large part of our seeming ills would be dispelled if we could but turn from the visionary to the practical. We need the influence of vision, we need the inspiring power of ideals, but all these are worthless unless they can be ...
— Better Homes in America • Mrs W.B. Meloney
... in some degree resumed the calmness of his demeanor, and questioned me very rigorously in respect to the conformation of the visionary creature. When I had fully satisfied him on this head, he sighed deeply, as if relieved of some intolerable burden, and went on to talk, with what I thought a cruel calmness, of various points of speculative ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Bonaparte may come to the front and crush down disorder with an iron heel; but that will not be until the need for a saviour of society is evident to all. I hope, my dear fellow, you will not be carried away with these visionary ideas. I can, of course, understand your predilections for a Republic, but between your Republic and the Commune, for which the organs of the mob are already clamoring, there is no shadow of resemblance. They are both founded, it is true, on the will of the ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... man in modern industry who is running his business in the right way and who has made a success of it and has proved it—he may look visionary to class-socialists and to other people who decide by measuring off masses of fact, and counting up rows of people and who see what anybody can see, but he is after all in arranging our social programme the only man of any material importance for ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... She was further of peculiar service in keeping all safe and smooth between the ward and guardian. All Beauclerc's romance the general would have called by the German word "Schwaermerey,"—not fudge—not humbug—literally "sky-rocketing"— visionary enthusiasm; and when it came to arguments, they might have turned to quarrels, but for Lady Davenant's superior influence, while Lady Cecilia's gentleness and gaiety usually succeeded in putting all serious ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... But he was also active in the lumber industry in the Saginaw district and several other things. It was difficult for a man of such mercurial, restless temperament to stay constant to any one occupation; in fact, had he been less visionary he would have been more prosperous, but might not have had a son so gifted with insight and imagination. One instance of the optimistic vagaries which led him incessantly to spend time and money on projects that would not have appealed to a man less sanguine was the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... sophists and visionary theorists, that the RIGHT does not exist to enslave the barbarian; that to assert such right is fatal to the principle of human equality. To which I answer, that barbarity is not humanity, but its opposite, and the right of the one to control the ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... agree with Benjamin Whichcote, the Cambridge Platonist, that "heaven is first a temper, then a place"; while of hell there is much to recall the noble sentence of Juliana of Norwich, the fourteenth-century visionary, "to me was showed no harder hell than sin." "Nothing burneth in hell but self-will," is a saying in the "Theologia Germanica."[24] They insist that the difference between heaven and hell is not that one is a place of enjoyment, the other of torment; it is that in the one ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... the matter in hand, however. Believe me, without farther instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation's vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the soldiership of early Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of Tuscany; the splendid human energy and beauty of Venice. I have no time to do this to-night (I have done it elsewhere before now); but I proceed to apply the principle to ourselves ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... me thoughtfully for a minute, and then: "I fear you think me a visionary, monsieur, or even worse, a trifler with men's lives. If you are illiberal, you may deem me no better than a common murderer. Our need is misunderstood, misrepresented. But I will not attempt to defend it with you now—some other time perhaps. Let me tell you of ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... was yet more overcome when he began to examine these presentments of humanity, magnified as by the eyes of a visionary, overflowing in mighty sympathetic pages of cyclopean symbolisation. Royal grace and nobility, sovereign peacefulness and power—every beauty shone out like natural florescence. And there was perfect science, the most audacious foreshortening ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... should live together as brothers, seeking one another's elevation and spiritual growth." It was essentially socialistic in its conception and execution and, although professedly altruistic in its nature, was in reality a visionary scheme which reflected but little credit upon the judgment of either its originators or its patrons. Its company was composed of "members" and "scholars," to whom may be added a celebrated list of those who sojourned at the Farm for brief periods and were known as "visitors." ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... it—'tis enough to have thee in my power—but to make use of the advantage which the fortune of the pen has now gained over thee, would be too much—No—! by that all-powerful fire which warms the visionary brain, and lights the spirits through unworldly tracts! ere I would force a helpless creature upon this hard service, and make thee pay, poor soul! for fifty pages, which I have no right to sell thee,—naked as I am, I would ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... eye is as adequate as a slight motion of the cranium to an equine quadruped devoid of its visionary capacities." ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... Jean-Marie is the proud possessor of a fashionable kepi. Besides, we had a glass of Hermitage last night; the glow still suffuses my memory. I was growing positively niggardly with that Hermitage, positively niggardly. Let me take the hint: we had one bottle to celebrate the appearance of our visionary fortune; let us have a second to console us for its occultation. The third I hereby dedicate ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only influence for good to which they yield. Is there so little of true elevation and dignity in this position that American women should be in such hot haste to abandon it for a position as yet wholly untried, entirely theoretical and visionary? ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... gradually been dropping from his thoughts all through his journey across Egypt and the Continent. They were no more than visionary now. Nor was he occupied with any dream of the things which might have been but for his great fault. The things which had been, here, in this small town of Ireland, were too definite. Here he had been most happy, here he had known the uttermost of his misery; here ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... subsequently appealed to it. Your sudden love, conceived in the very grounds of the house so associated with recollections in themselves strange and romantic; the peculiar temperament and nature of the girl to whom your love was attracted; her own visionary beliefs, and the keen anxiety which infused into your love a deeper poetry of sentiment,—all insensibly tended to induce the imagination to dwell on the Wonderful; and, in overstriving to reconcile each rarer phenomenon to the most positive laws of Nature, your ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sovereign had become,—just when her rejection of the proposals of so many foreign princes had confirmed the suspicion that her heart had given itself at home,—just, in short, when every thing conspired to sanction hopes which under any other circumstances would have appeared no less visionary than presumptuous,—at the very juncture most favorable to his ambition, but most perilous to his reputation, lord Robert Dudley lost his wife, and by a fate equally ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... lined with scholarly and costly volumes in glazed cases. The house must have been taken furnished; for it had no congruity with this man of the shirt sleeves and the mean supper. As for the earl's daughter, the earl and the visionary consulships in foreign cities, they had long ago begun to fade in Challoner's imagination. Like Doctor Grierson and the Mormon angels, they were plainly woven of the stuff of dreams. Not an illusion remained to the knight-errant; not ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... will use your prerogative, and make all right with that casting-vote of yours. I may have had successes, I may have made a name, my lectures may have been well received:—all this amounts to nothing; it is visionary; it is a mere bubble. The truth must come to light now; I am put to a final test; there will be no room for doubt or hesitation after this. It rests with you, whether my literary rank shall be assured, or my pretensions—but no! with such ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... overlooked, are the forced and fantastic interpretations, the arbitrary allegories and mystic expansions of proper names, to which this indiscriminate Bibliolatry furnished fuel, spark, and wind. A still greater evil, and less attributable to the visionary humour and weak judgment of the individual expositors, is the literal rendering of Scripture in passages, which the number and variety of images employed in different places to express one and the ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... no visionary dream, like those in which, with fatal pertinacity, you have so oft indulged; and, on recollection, the rent of his tenement is in arrears; 'twill offer favourable opportunity for my calling and sounding him; the contract must ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... possible improvements. Later theories were no more satisfactory. The French Revolutionary philosophers, especially Rousseau, with his theory of voluntary social contract, and the Utopian dreamers who followed, were longing for justice and political efficiency, but their theories seem crude and visionary from the point of view of the social science ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... was put, and principle carried it against policy, there being for my amendment I think 60, and only 3 for the householder plan. Thus then, my friends, whether I was right or whether I was wrong, I not only was the first to propose the adoption of the wild and visionary scheme of universal suffrage at a great public meeting, but I also stood firm to the cause, when those who have since so ably advocated the principle, were (in evil hour) from policy about to abandon it. Let, therefore, all the blame of the reformers having so determinedly advocated the ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... marry her as he is yours, we may reasonably hope that Heaven will restore to us what is ours, as it is still in existence and not yet alienated or destroyed. And as we have this consolation springing from no very visionary hope or wild fancy, I entreat you, senora, to form new resolutions in your better mind, as I mean to do in mine, preparing yourself to look forward to happier fortunes; for I swear to you by the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... better educated than the men." The answer was obvious. "If women are, according to your admission, fitted for the higher plane, why keep them on the lower?" My friend then went on to say, that the whole of this scheme was considered to be of the most morally visionary character, and the proof of this feeling was the slight opposition it met, "for," said he "if it were looked on by society as serious, it would be at once, and forcibly, opposed in the church, by the press, in all public assemblies and private circles." ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... "Maeve" "a psychological drama in two acts." It relates the story of the last day and night in the life of a visionary girl, the hereditary princess of Burren in Clare, in the west of Ireland. On the eve of her marriage to Hugh Fitz Walter, a rich young Englishman, whom she will wed only for her father's sake to reestablish him in his position as "The O'Heynes" among the neighboring gentry, she wanders ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... is not new. It is not a Utopian and visionary theory, unsupported by experience. It has been successfully tried in the Island of Barbadoes, by the late Joshua Steele; and the result exceeded his most sanguine expectations. "The first principles, of his plan," says Mr. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... his prodigious empire, and the work that he did was solid. He never perceived the value of Bombay, which is the best harbour in Asia, and did not see that the key of India is the Cape of Good Hope. His language was sometimes visionary. He beheld a cross shining in the heavens, over the kingdom of Prester John, and was eager for an alliance with him. He wished to drain the Nile into the Red Sea. He would attack Mecca and Medina, carry off ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... aggressive eagerness for martyrdom in their behalf; his nature was unusually, even abnormally, fine and sensitive; and his poetic quality was a delicate and ethereal lyricism unsurpassed in the literature of the world. In both his life and his poetry his visionary reforming zeal and his superb ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... black one. Only the graves of the whites are marked. You can see the unending procession of headstones along the right of way. During its construction the project was bitterly assailed. The wiseacres contended that it was visionary, impracticable, and impossible. In this respect it suffered the same experience as all the other pioneering African railways and especially those of Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Uganda, ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... that the science of alchemy was much encouraged by the royal visionary. Though he had commissioned three adepts to make the precious metals, and had not received any returns, his credulity remained unshaken, and he issued a pompous grant in favour of three other alchemists, who boasted that they could not only transmute metals, but could impart perpetual ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... are prone to war, and war consumes them. He favored, therefore, all the philanthropic efforts of the age to cultivate the spirit of peace, and looked forward with benevolent hope to the ultimate institution of a General Congress of nations for the adjustment of their controversies. But he was no visionary and no enthusiast. He knew that as yet war was often inevitable—that pusillanimity provoked it, and that national honor was national property of the highest value; because it was the best national defence. He admitted only defensive war—but he did not narrowly define it. ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... occurred to him that failure was possible, or that, with the amount of capital which he believed was still at his disposal, the plan was unpractical. Young, highly optimistic, and somewhat visionary, his dreams assumed the status ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... service to me; for it is absolutely necessary that I should discuss single and double creations, as a very crucial point on the general origin of species, and I must confess, with the aid of all sorts of visionary hypotheses, a very hostile one. I am delighted that you will take up possibility of crossing, no botanist has done so, which I have long regretted, and I am glad to see that it was one of A. De Candolle's desiderata. By the way, he is curiously ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... power, purity, and love, poised on the empurpled air, and requiring no other support; looking out, with her melancholy, loving mouth, her slightly dilated, sibylline eyes, quite through the universe, to the end and consummation of all things;—sad, as if she beheld afar off the visionary sword that was to reach her heart through HIM, now resting as enthroned on that heart; yet already exalted through the homage of the redeemed generations who were to salute her as Blessed. Six times have I visited the city made glorious ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... plans. He would repair and put in order implements of hunting, or any thing else which might be deemed to have some relation to war. He would make bows and arrows in the chimney corner—lost, all the time, in melancholy reveries, or in wild and visionary schemes of ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... were not always appreciated by the public of the day. In one of his advertisements we find him complaining bitterly of 'the extraordinary concourse of unruly people who robbed him, and treated with savage rudeness his extraordinary services.' Something of a visionary, too, was Sir Balthazar;—yet, with all his vanity as to his own merits—his coxcombry about his proceedings,—a sort of reformer and benefactor also in a small way. At one time we find him advertising that, besides lecturing gratis, he will lend from one shilling to six, gratis, 'to such as are ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... ought to have Vision and Ideals. I guess some of the fellows in my business think I'm pretty visionary, but I just let 'em think what they want to and go right on—same as you do.... By golly, this is nice to have a chance to sit and visit and kind of, you might say, brush up on ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
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