"Allegory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... least to my own satisfaction, that the ancient lawgivers did not invent the mysteries, and that AEneas was never invested with the office of lawgiver: that there is not any argument, any circumstance, which can melt a fable into allegory, or remove the scene from the Lake Avernus to the Temple of Ceres: that such a wild supposition is equally injurious to the poet and the man: that if Virgil was not initiated he could not, if he were, he would not, reveal the secrets of the initiation: that the anathema ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... and dark, spicy and rich, under the frosty rime above; and laying a specially large piece in one of grandma's quaint little china plates, Polly added the flowers and handed it to Tom, with a look that said a good deal, for, seeing that he remembered her sermon, she was glad to find that her allegory held good, in one sense at least. Tom's face brightened as he took it, and after an inspection which amused the others very much he looked up, saying, with an air of relief, "Plums all through; I 'm glad I ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... The "rock-work" caverns were in fancy of an amazing vastness, and the abode of goblins, elves, gnomes, enchanted knights, persecuted princesses—all the creatures of delightful Fairyland. A certain dark, winding, apparently endless tunnel was the Valley of the Shadow of Death of John Bunyan's allegory. On the sward before the entrance Christian grappled with Apollyon: "And Apollyon, espying his opportunity, began to gather up close to Christian, and wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful fall; and with ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... Petrarca. Allegory, which you named with sonnets and canzonets, had few attractions for me, believing it to be the delight in general of idle, frivolous, inexcursive minds, in whose mansions there is neither hall nor portal to receive the loftier of the Passions. A stranger to the Affections, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... simple response: important, with other passages, to show how naturally it came to them (i.e. the Hellenes and Xenophon) to give a spiritual application to their rules of bodily and mental training. These things to them are an allegory. The goal is lofty, if not so sublime as St. Paul's or Comte's, the Christians or Positivists (there has been an alteration for the better in the spiritual plane, and Socrates helped to bring it about, I believe), but ceteris paribus, the words ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... I like your allegory, Arnold," she said. "After all, the gardens are the nursery of life, are they not? The great things of ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... has now grown so familiar to teachers that it will serve for illustration without repetition here. It is the type of story which specifically teaches a certain ethical or conduct lesson, in the form of a fable or an allegory,—it passes on to the child the conclusions as to conduct and character, to which the race has, in general, attained through centuries of experience and moralizing. The story becomes a part of the outfit of received ideas on manners and morals which is an ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... A good example of the moral dilemmas in which Chretien delights to place his characters. Under the displeasing shell of allegory and mediaeval casuistry we have here the germ of psychological ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... Dickensons all in white mosquito netting. They go through a series of beautiful evolutions, floating over the sleeping figure of Columbus. The dance they do is meant to typify, or rather to signify,—as a matter of fact we needn't worry much about what it signified. It is an allegory, done in white mosquito netting. That is generally held to be quite enough. Let us ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... anxious to learn the true meaning of this allegory, * * * I requested him to explain to me the meaning of his ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... any biologist or physiologist to grapple with this problem. One and all, they shirk it, or simply state it to be insoluble. It is here that I state guidance and organising power are essential. My little physiological parable or allegory (p. 296) I think sets forth the difficulty fairly, though by no means adequately, yet not one of about fifty reviews I have read even ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... natives are usually arranged by the parents of the respective families. The nubile age of females is from about 11 years. The parents of the young man visit those of the maiden, to approach the subject delicately in an oratorical style of allegory. The response is in like manner shrouded with mystery, and the veil is only thrown off the negotiations when it becomes evident that both parties agree. Among the poorer classes, if the young man has no goods to offer, it is frequently stipulated that he shall serve on probation for ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... them in a lingua franca to which these mighty puppets moved obediently, weaving English history as upon a tapestry swiftly, continuously unrolled. "Which things," quoted Copas mischievously, "are an allegory, Philip." ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Birds is "the everlasting allegory of foolish sham and flimsy ambition." It was aimed particularly at the ambitious Sicilian schemes of Alcibiades; for at the time the play appeared, the Athenian army was before Syracuse, and elated by good news ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... caught. The Raven, also, has consistent qualities which even an expert must admire. In no other of its author's poems is the motive more palpably defined. "The Haunted Palace" is just as definite to the select reader, but Poe scarcely would have taken that subtle allegory for bald analysis. The Raven is wholly occupied with the author's typical theme—the irretrievable loss of an idolized and beautiful woman; but on other grounds, also, the public instinct is correct in thinking it ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... and inclined to value oneself at nothing, and to account oneself lower than a dishclout; but this merely arises from the fact that at the time one is feeling harassed and depressed, like the poor boy who today asked of me alms. Let me tell you an allegory, dearest, and do you hearken to it. Often, as I hasten to the office in the morning, I look around me at the city—I watch it awaking, getting out of bed, lighting its fires, cooking its breakfast, and becoming vocal; and ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... am apprehensive, appear dim and fantastic, but in reading Bartram's Travels I could not help transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of Wordsworth's intellect and genius.—"The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... allegory—an allegory of English and American life. I am quite aware that with you the sexes have reversed positions, that the man has sunk into a money-making machine, who slaves so that his wife may spend, while the woman devotes her whole life ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... rather confused allegory, Mr. Kornicker, by way of farther consolation, drew out his snuff-box, and stretching out as far as was possible without falling from his chair, tendered it to the stranger, who in return leaning so far forward as slightly to raise his person ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... consists of four main sections. a) After the prelude, which Pausanias failed to find in the ancient copy engraved on lead seen by him on Mt. Helicon, comes a general exhortation to industry. It begins with the allegory of the two Strifes, who stand for wholesome Emulation and Quarrelsomeness respectively. Then by means of the Myth of Pandora the poet shows how evil and the need for work first arose, and goes on to describe the Five Ages of the World, tracing the gradual increase in evil, and emphasizing the present ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... promised to do the errand, but he demanded explanations. "What does the hedgehog mean? What is the meaning of such a present?" Aglaya replied that it was none of his business. "I am sure that there is some allegory about it," Colia persisted. Aglaya grew angry, and called him "a silly boy." "If I did not respect all women in your person," replied Colia, "and if my own principles would permit it, I would soon prove to you, that I know how to answer such an insult!" But, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the people, who have ever delighted in the marvellous. As the magnificent, the vast, the sublime, which was seen in Nature, impressed itself on the imagination of the Orientals and ended in legends, so did allegory in process of time multiply fictions and fables to an indefinite extent; and what were symbols among Eastern nations became impersonations in the poetry of Greece. Grecian mythology was a vast system of impersonated forces, beginning with the legends of heroes and ending with the personification ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... proof or confirmation, but as symbol and prophecy. Secondly, the use of any thing as an illustration does by no means imply that it is commonly believed as a fact. For instance, we are told in the ninth chapter of the Book of Judges that Jotham related an allegory to the people as an illustration of their conduct in choosing a king, saying, "The trees once on a time went forth to anoint a king over them; and they said to the olive tree, Come thou and reign over us;" and so on. Does it follow that at that time it was a common belief that the trees actually ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... have realised Shakespeare; and yet I am baffled. But I seem to trace in the later and what some would call the commonplace features of the man's life, a desire to live and be; to taste life itself, not merely to write of what life seemed to be, and of what lay behind it. I am sure that some such allegory was in his mind when he wrote of Prospero, who so willingly gave up the isle full of noises, the power over the dreaming, sexless spirits of air and wood, to go back to his tiresome dukedom, and his petty court, and all the dull ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... so, and the most rational religion of all. All that we read about religion that does not seem expressly to agree with it, you may consider as an allegory." ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... very picturesque," Maggie said coldly, "but I do not follow your allegory. What I want to know is why you lied to me, why you sent me to that ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... outside steps of the vast edifice beetling like a granite crag above them, with the stone groups of an allegory of life-insurance foreshortened in the bas-relief overhead. March absently lifted his eyes to it. It was suddenly strange after so many years' familiarity, and so was the well-known street in its Saturday-evening solitude. He asked himself, with prophetic ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fragments bore testimony not so much to the wasting power of time as to the rude hand of popular violence; while, rearing themselves up into a higher atmosphere, the temples of the gods of Rome stood beautiful and perfect, bathed in the glowing light of a morning sun. The allegory was plain and obvious enough. There was little attractive, save the wonderful art with which it was done. This riveted the eye; and that being gained, the bitter and triumphant bigotry of the ideas set forth had time to make its way ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... James IV. in some Court and political matters. His chief poems are The Thrissil and the Rois (The Thistle and the Rose) (1503), The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, a powerful satire, The Golden Targe, an allegory, and The Lament for the Makaris (poets) (c. 1507). In all these there is a vein of true poetry. In his allegorical poems he follows Chaucer in his setting, and is thus more or less imitative and ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Alexandrine method of interpreting Scripture. Think of Philo and what he says of the teaching of his Gnostic Therapeuts. Think of Clement, and of Origen with his "Eternal Gospel." This quickening of the intuition into knowledge of itself and God, through allegory and symbol based on philosophy, was the ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... it, just as if he had stepped out of the room. The queen's apartments were very elegantly plain, and her oratory is as pretty a little thing as you can imagine. In all these apartments are fine pictures, and one is superbly frescoed with allegory and history. The room in which the Queen of England and Prince Albert lodged, in 1845, was shown us, and the state bed was still in it. The dining hall was finely ornamented with carvings, old armor, &c. But a room devoted to antiquities pleased us the best of all. Here were cups, ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... to that genius. The Sonnets, if nothing else, may show us how easy it was to Shakespeare's mind to move in a world of 'Platonic' ideas;[142] and, while it would be going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious symbolism or allegory in King Lear, it does appear to disclose a mode of imagination not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... live after AGAMEMNON? "Evidence from extraneous sources of connection between title of Anax andron and great Egyptian Empire." Aha! I may yet have to play the Anax andron in Egypt as before. Allegory—I mean Anax andron on banks of Nile! Good—and not a Malapropism, whatever WOLSELEY may say. "Title of Anax andron descendible" (good word, "descendible") "from father to son, and accorded in the poems to personages altogether secondary, viz., EUMELOS and EUPHETES." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... comparison with which I might indicate the glory of the morning star, while yet the dark night hides in the hollows. The lamb is born in the fold. The morning star glitters in the sky. The bud is alive in its sheath; the green corn under the snow; the lark twitters as he passes. Now these to me are the allegory of winter. ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... like an allegory or a prophecy. In the person of the little maid, oppressed and enslaved Africa comes to the good Doctor for protection; instinctively she knows she may trust him; his heart opens at once, his ingenuity contrives a way of protection ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... card-castle or a rabbit-hutch. All is part of the training. God looks at the ideal man to which all tends. The popular idea of the fall is to me a very absurd one. There was never an ideal state in the past, but there will be in the future. The Genesis allegory simply typifies the first awakening of consciousness of good and evil—of two wills in a mind hitherto ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... of the special myth was transformed into poetry by the interweaving, collection, and fusion with other myths, and in the minds of a higher order it was resolved into an allegory or symbol of the forces of nature, into providential laws or ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... that the priests practiced centered about what are known as the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries. These consisted of representations by means of symbol and allegory, under conditions and amid surroundings the most awe-inspiring, of those great truths concerning man's nature, origin and destiny of which the priests—in reality a brotherhood of initiates and their pupils—were the custodians. These ceremonies ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... a small boat seen in the distance; another is supporting a sailor who appears in a drowning state. There is also a female holding a child in her arms, the sea having a stormy appearance. The group forms a most interesting allegory. On the obverse side is a large profile of Her Majesty, the border bearing ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... piazza, representative of the Maremma and Family returning thanks to the Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany for his goodness in causing her swamps to be drained. The Maremma and her children are arrayed in the scant draperies of Allegory, but the Grand Duke is fully dressed, and is shown looking down with some surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt of the propriety of their public ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... substance, preferably wood or some sort of upholstery. When, however, his hero first stood in Broadway, he seems to have found no fabric of the looms, no variety of plumage, no sort of precious wood or dye-stuff equal to the allegory, and he wreaks himself in the following ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... us Homer, however, and on the rank and file of facts they may do their worst; we can be indifferent to, or even thankful for, what slaughter they may make. In the legends of the Theogonia, in that of Zeus and Cronus, for instance, there is evidently a metaphysical allegory; in the legends of Persephone, or of the Dioscuri, a physical one; in that of Athene, a profoundly philosophical one; and fused as the entire system was in the intensely poetical conception of the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Timothy, Sylvanus, Tychicus, were represented by Constantine and his fellow-laborers: the names of the apostolic churches were applied to the congregations which they assembled in Armenia and Cappadocia; and this innocent allegory revived the example and memory of the first ages. In the Gospel, and the Epistles of St. Paul, his faithful follower investigated the Creed of primitive Christianity; and, whatever might be the success, a Protestant reader ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... man, you have much to learn in your profession. Laws are made for lawyers, and are the tools of our trade. If the world does not see fit to use those tools, it is our business to make them, and as for justice, that is an allegory, useful in addressing a jury, but considered a fable by the judge. Laws are useful to oppose other laws with, and various decisions are only good in so far as they help your ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... extraordinary abuse of analogy and comparison in their various forms (allegory, parable, etc.)—a natural consequence of a mode of thinking that proceeds by means of symbols, not concepts. It has been said, and rightly, that "the only force that makes the vast field of mysticism fruitful is analogy."[100] ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... white Muse" could not object, For mine is white, and awfully chaste. Now ALGERNON has no respect For purity and public taste. EDWIN is given to allegory. Whilst ALFRED ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... usually bored by the undergraduate periodical—even though he may, once upon a time, have edited it himself. The shades of the prison-house make a poor light for the Gothic print of adolescence. But the historian, if we may trust allegory, bears a torch. For him no chronicle, whether compiled by twelfth-century monk or twentieth-century collegian, can be too remote, too dull, to reflect the gleam. And some chronicles, like the Wellesley one, are more ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... Their moral philosophy affected the world through Roman law, the great masters of which were brought up under its influence. So all pervasive indeed was this moral philosophy of the Stoics that it was read by the Jews of Alexandria into Moses under the veil of allegory and was declared to be the inner meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures. If the Stoics then did not add much to the body of Philosophy, they did a great work in popularising it and bringing it to bear ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... the heart, like a storm over the chords of an Tolian harp, and extorts from it those magic melodies to which a poor, troubled, and frightened woman listens with remorse and despair; but to which she listens, and with which at last she is intoxicated, for the allegory of Eve is an immortal myth, that repeats itself, through every century and in ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... compleat, so also in the heavens perfection is ascended unto by degrees, and the Moone being the lowest, must be the least pure, and therefore Philo the Jew[2] interpreting Iacobs dreame concerning the ladder, doth in an allegory shew, how that in the fabricke of the world, all things grow perfecter as they grow higher, and this is the reason (saith hee) why the Moone doth not consist of any pure simple matter, but is mixed with aire, which shewes so ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... plain man is wofully puzzled. The theologian writes a philosophy which seems to tell us that the New Testament is a system of psychology; and the philosopher writes a Christianity which is utterly unintelligible as to the question whether the Resurrection be a fact or a transcendental allegory. What between the theologian who assents to the Athanasian denunciation in what seems the sense of no denunciation, and the philosopher who parades a Christianity which looks like no revelation, there is a maze which threatens to have the only possible clue in ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... the allegory. How shall it be with you? There are many Thomsons among our scholars. There may be some such among you. When you pass from the world of thought you will find yourself in the world of action. The conditions are not changed, but they ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... allegorical figures whose attitude of turning suggests some vague waltz-measure—a total effect of equilibrium well conveying the illusion of the sweeping onward of the earth; and there are arms raised to give the signal, bodies heroically risen, containing an allegory, a symbol which stamps them with death and immortality, secures to them a place in history, in legend, in that ideal world of museums which is visited by the curiosity or the admiration of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... you have entertained no such prejudices: but if you have, I feel assured, that you brought them no further than the threshold of the court:—at that door they fell from you, like the burthen from the pilgrim (in the beautiful allegory) on his reaching the cross; and you stand there with your minds unbiassed, free and pure, to decide between the crown and the defendant in this cause. But it is not only my duty, gentlemen, to clear the defendant, but to extricate the counsel from every unfavourable suspicion, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... sometimes rough, alike chivalrous and holy, generally bearing on the inheritance and the anointing of the Dauphin and the confounding of the English. This was the language of her Voices, her own, her soul's language. The other, more subtle, flavoured with allegory and flowers of speech, critical with scholastic grace, bearing on the Church, suggesting the clerk and betraying some outside influence. The words she uttered to Sire Robert touching the children she should bear are of the second sort. They are an allegory. Her triple birth signifies that the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... practical philosophy, not merely in that grave department of learning in which it comes to us professionally as philosophy, but in that not less important department of learning in which it comes to us in the disguise of amusement,—in the form of fable and allegory and parable,—the proposition is, that this Elizabethan philosophy is, in these two forms of it,—not two philosophies,—not two Elizabethan philosophies, not two new and wondrous philosophies of nature and practice, not two new Inductive philosophies, but one,—one and the same: ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... visibly in size. His magnificent chest was gone. He was shrivelling into a tattered heap. He appeared as he lay there, a very allegory and illustration of Prussian Furchtbarkeit with the ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... literally answering these difficult questions, it may be resolved into a good argument, as an excellent allegory to represent the struggle in the mind of man between good and evil inclinations. But to take them as they actually are, and merely to talk by way of natural consequence—for to argue from nature is certainly the best way ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... nature to excite M. Gerard's sympathy in favor of his neighbor, for the coup d'etat and the proclamation of the Empire had irritated him very much. Had it not been his melancholy duty to engrave, the day after the second of December—he must feed his family first of all—a Bonapartist allegory entitled, "The Uncle and the Nephew," where one saw France extending its hand to Napoleon I and Prince Louis, while soaring above the group was an eagle with spreading wings, holding in one of his claws the cross of the ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... commonplace in Dano-Norwegian literature. Even the mediocre could attempt it with reasonable assurance of success. The Coriolanus of 1818 is fairly correct, but its lumbering verse reveals plainly that the translator had trouble with his metre. Two or three examples will illustrate. First, the famous allegory of Menenius:[10] ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... rest and recreation. If one has taught school all day, or set type, or managed a home, or read history, or labored in the field, or been shopping, heavy, solid reading may be out of the question, while under such circumstances one would really enjoy a striking allegory or a well-written novel. Or, if one is limited in knowledge, or deficient in literary taste so that he may find no interest in history, science, philosophy, or religion, still he may enjoy thrilling books of travel, of biography, or of entertaining story. In this way all may enjoy reading. "Of all ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... meeting it with a bold denial, as in the case of the resurrection of the body. And the way has been too well prepared for this condition of things, by much of the teaching of popular orthodoxy, which turns the early records of the Bible into childish allegory, perverts the true doctrine of the coming and kingdom of Christ, and denies the resurrection of the dead, by destroying its necessity through the immortality of the soul. On the vital point of the resurrection, Dr. ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... involuntarily lead me to moral conclusions—there is a fine picture—Nature blowing Bubbles for her Children, from the pencil of Hilton; in which is united the simplicity of art with allegory, the seriousness of moral instruction and satire with the charms of female and infantine beauty; the graces of form, action, colour and beauty of parts, with those of collective groups; and the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of the piece by a person called the Doctor. {7} Much that has been said about the moralities holds good with respect to the interludes. Indeed, for some time dramatic pieces were called moralities and interludes indifferently. In both there is a mixture of allegory and reality. The latter interludes, however, display more of every-day life than was ever observable in the moralities; and more closely approximate to modern plays. Several writers of genius have written interludes, amongst whom are the English Skelton and the Scottish Lindsay, the latter of whom ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... the Epistola Hortatoria de Capessenda Republica, from Petrarch to Nicholas Rienzi, (Opp. p. 535—540,) and the vth eclogue or pastoral, a perpetual and obscure allegory.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... like finding truth at last," she answered, speaking as much to herself as to him. "Why, one might make an allegory out of it. We wander in mist and darkness shaping a vague course for home. And then suddenly the mists are blown away, glory fills the air, and there is no more doubt, only before us is a splendour ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... the play opens when Pillage is at the zenith of his power; a stage direction orders that "The Levee enters, and range themselves to a ridiculous tune"; a partition of places ensues under the allegory of the business arrangements of a theatrical manager; and the author explains that by this levee scene he hopes that persons greater than author-managers may learn to despise sycophants. Close on the heels of the levee comes ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... his Pretiosa Margarita the following allegory. In the palace sits the king decorated with the diadem and in his hand the scepter of the whole world. Before him appears his son with five servants and falling at his feet implores him to give the kingdom to him and the servants. [The author takes the thing wrong ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... is made of medicine that cures all leprous diseases. This passage, some authors suppose, to have given the first hint of the matter, though Geber himself, perhaps, meant no such thing; for, by attending to the Arabic style and diction of this author, which abounds in allegory, it is highly probable that by man he means gold, and by leprous, or other diseases, the other metals, which, with relation to gold, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... the table for supper with dried fish and punch). The younger generation have a keener sense of humour than we elder ones, HAUSTUS, and perhaps, after all, she was only a perplexing sort of allegory. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... Allen wuz. If he hadn't boasted so over its bein' gin to him on account of his bein' so smart and popular and etcetery, he wouldn't have felt so cut up. But as it was, it bowed down his bald head into the dust (allegory). ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... with the object; and I have often thought within the last five or six years, that if ever I should feel once again the genial warmth and stir of the poetic impulse, and refer to my own experiences, I should venture on a yet stranger and wilder allegory than of yore—that I would allegorize myself as a rock, with its summit just raised above the surface of some bay or strait in the Arctic Sea, 'while yet the stern and solitary night brooked no alternate sway'—all around me fixed and firm, methought, as my own substance, and ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... in Christmas week, and I have read for the tenth time "A Christmas Carol," by Dickens, that amazing allegory in which the hard, bitter facts of life are involved in a beautiful myth, that wizard's caldron in which humor bubbles and from which rise phantom figures of religion and poetry. Can any one doubt that if this story were read by every man, woman, and child in the world, ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... of progress. The picture's an allegory, of course, an allegory of the spiritual progress of the world, and of each one of us. I remember telling Isaacson how firmly I believed in the triumph of good in ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... trying to form an idea of the life and work of ancient Israel from the Kings and the Chronicles, without the Psalms and the Prophets. The true character of the English Revolution, especially upon its religious side, must be sought in the magnificent Epic of Milton and the unequalled Allegory of Bunyan. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Great Cyrus, and principally her Clelia, are representations of what then passed at the court of France. The Map of the Kingdom of Tenderness, in Clelia, appeared, at the time, as one of the happiest inventions. This once celebrated map is an allegory which distinguishes the different kinds of TENDERNESS, which are reduced to Esteem, Gratitude, and Inclination. The map represents three rivers, which have these three names, and on which are situated three ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the symbolic way of a people much given to proverbial wisdom and the dark uses of allegory. He might have meant much or nothing. As it happened, the Count de Sarrion meant nothing; for ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... many heroes of adventure, before him and after him, have made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... out of darkness; giving each planet its place in the solar system; oceans and lands their limits,—wholly inconsistent with a petty surgical operation to find material for the mother of the race. It is in this allegory that all the enemies of woman rest their battering-rams, to prove her inferiority. Accepting the view that man was prior in the creation, some Scriptural writers say that, as the woman was of the man, therefore her position should ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... necessary data to psychology. No labor can be more fruitless than the search in mythology for true philosophy; and the efforts to build up from the terminology and narratives of mythologies an occult symbolism and system of allegory is but to create a new and fictitious body ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... those fearful aneurisms that lie close to the heart, showing no outward sign of giving way in a moment, had been detected a good time since by Dr. Bryerly. My father knew what must happen, and that it could not be long deferred. He feared to tell me that he was soon to die. He hinted it only in the allegory of his journey, and left in that sad enigma some words of true consolation that remained with me ever after. Under his rugged ways was hidden a wonderful tenderness. I could not believe that he was actually dead. Most people for a minute or two, in the ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... was as true as it seemed novel. LYDGATE'S "Fall of Princes," says Mr. Campbell, "probably suggested to Lord SACKVILLE the idea of his 'Mirror for Magistrates'." The "Mirror for Magistrates" again gave hints to SPENSER in allegory, and may also "have possibly suggested to SHAKSPEARE the idea of his historical plays." When indeed we find that that great original, HOGARTH, adopted the idea of his "Idle and Industrious Apprentice," from the old comedy ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Henry More brings this charge against the Quakers. There are, he says, many good and wholesome things in their teaching, but they mingle with them a "slighting of the history of Christ, and making a mere allegory of it—tending to the utter overthrow of that warrantable, though more external frame of Christianity, which Scripture itself points out to us" (Mastix, his letter to ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... the young queen in a low tone of voice, without venturing to examine into the allegory ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... but the herbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in ourselves. Nay, further, we are what we all abhor, anthropophagi, and cannibals, devourers not only of men, but of ourselves; and that not in an allegory but a positive truth: for all this mass of flesh which we be- hold, came in at our mouths: this frame we look upon, hath been upon our trenchers; in brief, we have devoured ourselves. I cannot believe the wisdom of Pythagoras did ever positively, and in a literal sense, affirm his metempsychosis, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... heading of the poem." The possible allegorical signification of the poem has been the subject of much, and often of singularly futile discussion. Dr. Furnivall said he had asked Browning if it was an allegory, and in answer had on three separate occasions received an emphatic statement that it was simply a dramatic creation called forth by a line of Shakspere's. (Porter-Clarke, Study Programmes, p. 406.) Yet allegorical interpretations continue to be made. According ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... which they allow of figurative language, a result of their total want of terms expressive of abstract, and purely spiritual ideas. To clothe these in words, they must have recourse to figures, chiefly metaphor and allegory, hence arises so much of what an American writer calls "the picturesque brilliancy" of the savage tongues. To express the term "prosperity," for example, the Indian will employ the image of a bright sun, a cloudless sky, or a calm river. "To make peace," will be ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... Little Faith, though he gets to heaven at last, is given to understand that it served him right to be mobbed by the brothers Faint Heart, Mistrust, and Guilt, all three recognized members of respectable society and veritable pillars of the law. The whole allegory is a consistent attack on morality and respectability, without a word that one can remember against vice and crime. Exactly what is complained of in Nietzsche and Ibsen, is it not? And also exactly what would be complained of in all the literature which is great enough and old ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... There is the lesson of "Cinderella," which is the same as that of the Magnificat— EXALTAVIT HUMILES. There is the great lesson of "Beauty and the Beast"; that a thing must be loved BEFORE it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the "Sleeping Beauty," which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep. But I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but with ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the Athenians were bound to deliver to him, every single year, fifty virgins; you will perhaps escape the error of good M. Chompre, who saw in the labyrinth nothing but an English garden; and you will recognize in this ingenious fable a refined allegory, or we may better say a faithful and fearful image of the dangers of marriage. The paintings recently discovered at Herculaneum have served to confirm this opinion. And, as a matter of fact, learned men have for a long time believed, in accordance with the writings of certain authors, that the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... of Giotto look almost as if they were his predecessors, for the simple reason that, being unable to advance, they were forced to retrograde. The limited amount of artistic realization required to present to the mind of the spectator a situation or an allegory had been obtained by Giotto himself, and bequeathed by him to his followers, who, finding it more than sufficient for their purposes, and having no incentive to further acquisition in the love of form and reality for their own sake, worked on with their master's ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... in with great eagerness, not for the sake of the meaning (which is no doubt an allegory), but for the power and richness, and softness of the singing, which seemed to me better than we ever had even in Oare church. But all the time I kept myself in a black niche of the rock, where the fall of the water began, lest the sweet singer (espying me) should ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... influenced, in spite of prejudice and disillusioning experience, by respect for her ideals. There she loomed, seeming monolithic in her solidity, a part of the rock on which she was built, her windows sending out shafts of light into the surrounding darkness, an allegory in stone. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... discourse into which the Great Teacher poured the most burning convictions of His life, He gives to this doctrine an ever increasing emphasis. No words could be more solemn or arresting than the sentence in the last great allegory devoted to this theme, "As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more can ye except ye abide in Me." The word here, it will be observed again, is cannot. It is the imperative ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... is an allegory with the avowed moral purpose of fashioning "a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." Spenser says: "I labour to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was King, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... unconsidered inroads; but if he supplied the seed it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn's business to see to the raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed indeed to throw his own reasonableness into distincter relief: so that they might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... attributes such things to Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a shadowing-forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visual form, of what such poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe. Which agrees, add they, with a primary law of human nature, still everywhere ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... abstract ideas by modern painters or sculptors, of wealth, of commerce, of health, for instance, shocks, in most cases, the aesthetic sense, as something conventional or rhetorical, as a mere transparent allegory, or figure of speech, which could please almost no one. On the other hand, such symbolical representations, under the form of human persons, as Giotto's Virtues and Vices at Padua, or his Saint Poverty at Assisi, or the series of the planets in certain early ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... complaints, flatulencies, and all other symptoms of indigestion; which more frequently proceed from intemperance in eating and drinking than any other cause. The benefits arising from temperance are set in a striking light in the following allegory, which may ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.
... an idea that gives us pause. It is one of those suggestions, like Lord Brougham's of the "unknown public," which, in a single phrase, and a sentence or two of explanation, tell a whole history. This is the class John Bunyan wrote for before the bishops had his Allegory in presentable calf and gold-leaf,—before England knew that her poor tinker had shaped a pictured urn for her full of such visions as no dreamer had seen since Dante. This is the class that believes in John Bright and Richard Cobden and all the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... Europe, suddenly brought to a whirl by such changes of the music]; a new arena (CARRIERE) came to open itself,—and one must have been either without address, or else buried in stupid somnolence (ENGOURDISSEMENT), not to profit by an opportunity so advantageous. I had read Bojardo's fine Allegory: [Signifies only, "seize opportunity;" but here is the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the Commonwealth, he was imprisoned for twelve years "on account of non-conformity to the established worship." It was during this dreary confinement that he wrote his "Pilgrim's Progress," the most admirable allegory in ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... of man, his soul and his belief, those ancient ministers of God were inspired with the grandest thought that ever exalted mortals. From the revolutions of the stars, from the seasons of the earth, from the round and unvarying circle of human destinies, they devised an august allegory; they made it gross and palpable to the vulgar by the signs of gods and goddesses, and that which in reality was Government they named Religion. Isis is a fable—start not!—that for which Isis is a type is a reality, an immortal being; Isis is nothing. Nature, which she represents, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... systems of Brahmanic philosophy, and more particularly from the Sankhya system. The reputed founder of that system is Kapila, and we saw before how Professor Wilson actually changed the name of Kapilavastu, the birthplace of Buddha, into a mere allegory:—Kapilavastu meaning, according to him, the substance of Kapila or of the Sankhya philosophy. This is not all. Mr. Spence Hardy (p. 132) quotes a legend in which it is said that Buddha was in a former existence the ascetic Kapila, that the Sakya princes came to his hermitage, and that ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... of prayer, for the Minstrel's foreboding was no idle one. Ere London knew it the Plague was at her gates; yet the King, undeterred, came to spend Christmas at Westminster; but Martin was not in his train. Men's mirth waxed hot by reason of the terror they would not recognise. Banquet and revel, allegory and miracle play; pageant of beautiful women and brave men; junketing, ay, and rioting—thus they flung a defiance at the enemy; and then fled: for across the clash of the feast bells sounded the mournful note of funeral ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... 26—An Allegory on the Dispute respecting Precedency between the Belles Lettres and the Fine Arts. By Mr. Klopstock. Trans. ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... road begins to climb the southern hill, out into the open air. I managed to maintain an uneasy silence. From her grimly dispassionate reiterations I had attained to a clear idea, even to a visualisation, of her fantastic conception—allegory, madness, or whatever it was. She certainly forced it home. The Dimensionists were to come in swarms, to materialise, to devour like locusts, to be all the more irresistible because indistinguishable. They were to come like snow in the night: in the morning one ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... real, as it stood related to something that was higher and permanent. Hence the idea of Fate, of a higher power unseen—that shadow, as of an eagle circling to its swoop, which flits stealthily and swiftly across the windy plains of Troy. In the "Odyssey" we find pure allegory. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... He slowly went up to the statue, lifted the wreath and handed it to Delfina. In the exaltation of their spirits, this simple little episode had all the mysterious significance of an allegory—was in some way symbolical. One of his own lines ran ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... "It's an allegory," said Clarence. "Man captures the beautiful princess of his dream, and sets her to drudging in his kitchen. I think there is something sad but sweet, as Shaw ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... art should be based on the dream of life as it should be, not as it is; that enduring literature is not "reportorial work"; that there is vital falsity in being true to life because "facts out of relation to the rest of life become lies," and that art therefore "must become more or less an allegory." ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... in Nature and in Art were but transitory reflexions of the real and eternal. 'Alles vergaengliche ist nur ein Gleichnis'—all things transitory are but a parable, an allegory of truth and reality—such are some of the last words of his great Poem; and thus too he regarded his own poetry. 'I have,' he said, 'always regarded all that I have produced as merely symbolic, and I did not much care whether ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... all, the Resurrection, stands entirely by itself. Every attempt to resolve it into a natural event, a delusion or hallucination in the minds of the disciples, the eye-witnesses and death-defying witnesses to its truth, or to treat it as an allegory or figure of speech, is to me a signal failure. It must be accepted as the keystone—for such it is—and seal to the great Christian doctrine of a future life, as a historical fact, or rejected ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... been said. What I did feel was that you saved your critic from the charge of malice by convicting him of the unpardonable crime of lack of literary instinct. I still feel that. To call my book an ineffective attempt at allegory, that in the hands of Mr. Anstey might have been made striking, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... find also the idea, which is probably the earlier of the two, that the prophets and teachers, as the commissioned preachers of the word, are the priests. The hesitancy in applying this important allegory must have been brought to an end by the disappearance of the latter view. But it must have been still more important that the bishops, or bishop, in taking over the functions of the old [Greek: lalountes ton logon], who were not Church officials, took over also the profound veneration with which ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... OBSERVER.—"An allegory of love's meaning, clear as a pool in the sunshine. It was written, we are told, twenty-five years ago.... Even then Mr. Tagore had that calm intensity of vision which we have all come to love in his later work. We find in him that for which Arjuna groped ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... that allegory is thrown away upon her, and proposes to take her into the Hall and show her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... made of this admirable plastic tradition by that puerile gospel of literary pretentiousness called Pre-Raphaelism. Towards these mournful quags and quicksands, with their dead-sea flora of anecdote and allegory, the best part of the little talent we produce seems irresistibly to be drawn: by these at last it is sucked down. That, at any rate, is the way that most of those English artists who ten or a dozen years ago gave such good promise have gone. Let us ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... uprising of the peasantry, under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. This state of things is reflected in the Vision of Piers Plowman, written as early as 1362, by William Langland, a tonsured clerk of the west country. It is in form an allegory, and bears some resemblance to the later and more famous allegory of the Pilgrim's Progress. The poet falls asleep on the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and has a vision of a "fair field full of folk," representing the world with its various ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... passed and died, and butchered here in vain. But to manufacture European iron into pikes and helmets was a waste of metal: in the shape of piston-rods and furnace-pokers it is irresistible; and I think an allegory might be made showing how much stronger commerce is than chivalry, and finishing with a grand image of Mahomet's crescent being extinguished ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... into an Eden of innocence, and is tempted by that wily serpent, the sophistical understanding, and is betrayed by desire, his Eve, and goes out of his garden of childhood, where all life proceeds spontaneously and by impulse, into a world of work and labor. If it be such an allegory as that, it teaches us quite as much as if ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... understood, because he felt, the power of the ocean tides; and, flitting to and fro through the tenderer regions of his extended Self, danced the fragrance of all the wild flowers that ever blew. That strange allegory of man, the microcosm, and earth, the macrocosm, became a sudden blazing reality. The feverish distress, unrest, and vanity of modern life was due to the distance men had traveled from the soul of the world, away from ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... state. But he had already done enough to earn himself a lasting name amongst the improvers of poetry in England. In tragedy he gave the first regular model; in personification he advanced far beyond all his predecessors, and furnished a prototype to that master of allegory, Spenser. A greater than Spenser has also been indebted to him; as will be evident, I think, to all who compare the description of the figures on the shield of war in his Induction, and especially those of them which relate to the siege of Troy, with ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... pastoral writers, but coming ultimately from Vergil, and Edward Kirke furnished it with an elaborate prose commentary. Spenser took the same liberties with the pastoral form as did Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a vehicle for satire and allegory, made it carry political and social allusions, and planted in it references to his friends. By its publication Spenser became the first poet of the day. It was followed by some of his finest and most beautiful things—by the Platonic hymns, by the Amoretti, a series of sonnets ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... was the figure of childhood; Tierce of youth; Sext the full vigour of age; None the approaches of old age, while Vespers were an allegory of decrepitude. They belonged, moreover, to the Nocturns, and were sung about six o'clock in the evening, at that hour when, at the time of the Equinoxes, the sun sets in the red cinder of the clouds. As for Compline, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... a more beautiful, nor a more frequently applicable allegory than that of the famous Amreeta Cup—I know not whether devised by Southey, or borrowed by him from the rich store of instructive fable hidden in oriental tradition. It is long, long, since I read it; ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... under the constraint of evil, and acts in bondage under external control. So that this commandment of God to Adam comprehends the whole Divine natural law, and absolutely agrees with the dictates of the light of nature; nay, it would be easy to explain on this basis the whole history or allegory of the first man. But I prefer to pass over the subject in silence, because, in the first place, I cannot be absolutely certain that my explanation would be in accordance with the intention of the sacred writer; and, secondly, because many do not admit that this history is an allegory, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... some antient Amonian records, which had been preserved in the innermost part of a temple, and known to very few. Upon this discovery he applied himself with great diligence to make himself master of the contents: and having, by divesting them of the fable and allegory with which they were obscured, obtained his purpose, he brought ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... bluntly, 'there is that about you which would make me sorry to find you a Pharisee or a hypocrite. Therefore, if you please, we will stop religion and allegory, and come to plain matter-of-fact. When I knew you in Samoa, you were a ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... the reaction in England at least stopped short of the scaffold. At Vienna and Naples fear was more cruel. The men who either were, or affected to be, in such fear of revolution that they discovered a Jacobinical allegory in Mozart's last opera, [45] did not spare life when the threads of anything like a real conspiracy were placed in their hands. At Vienna terror was employed to crush the constitutional opposition of Hungary to the Austrian Court. In ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... still unmarried, and still the fashion. There was a sort of allegory of real life, in the manner in which, at certain epochs, our Idealist was brought into contact with the fair actress of ideal creations. There was, in short, something of a moral in the way these two streams of existence—the one belonging to the Actual, the other ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a landscape drawn, now from the vales round Syracuse, now from the poet's own district round Mantua; playful contests between rural bards interspersed with panegyrics on Julius Caesar and the patrons or benefactors of the poet; a continual mingling of allegory with fiction, of genuine rusticity with assumed courtliness; such are the incongruities which lie on the very surface of the Eclogues. Add to these the continual imitations, sometimes sinning against the rules of scholarship, [25] which make them, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... continued his allegory—"I've studied weather-cocks. I take note that when one of them so-called fickle-minded inanimates goes jerking around the four cardinal points and feeling of what's between, it's just responding to the fore-running snorts ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... is nothing academic to be found in his groups; no mysterious allegory; no theatrical display of the passions; very little of what is more talked of than understood, the beau-ideal. Nevertheless, he is always original, and never vulgar; his drawing is nearly faultless; his compositions are instantly ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... inspired writing and most marvellous orchestration; but it is too long and too diffuse. The plot also is strangely confused and uninteresting, and fails alike as a story and as a vehicle of theories, morals, or religion. "Parsifal," with its sacred allegory, its lofty nobility of tone, and its pure mysticism, stands on a platform by itself, and is almost above criticism, or praise, or blame. The libretto alone might have won Wagner immortality, so original ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... approve my orthodoxy, and I had as little respect for its heterodoxy, and the upshot of it was that I quit—cold." He laughed grimly as he finished the recital. "But," he went on gravely, "I now see that it was due simply to my desire to progress beyond the acceptance of tradition and allegory as truth, and to find some better foundation upon which to build than the undemonstrable articles of faith embraced in the Westminster Confession. To me, that confession of faith had become a confession of ignorance." He turned his shrewd eyes upon Jose. "I was in somewhat the same mental state ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the Euphrates, or not at all? The whole inquiry seems to have been one in which a vast cloud of learned dust has been raised by speculators, who began their inquiry without clearly determining, to start with, what was the point at issue. Either the description in Gen. ii. 3-14 is meant for allegory, or geographical fact: this question must first be settled; and if the latter is agreed to, then it is quite inconceivable that the words should imply any very extensive region, or any fancied realm extending ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... turbulent greatness, an affected resignation. The enemies which he enters lists to combat, "Despair and mighty Grief and sharp Impatience," and the forces which he brings to vanquish them, "cornets of horse," &c., are in the boldest style of allegory. They are such a "race of mourners" as the "infection of sorrows loud" in the intellect might beget on some "pregnant cloud" in the imagination. The prologue to the second part, for its passionate earnestness, and for ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Cione, for Orcagna was an abbreviation of Arcagnolo, flourished in the middle of the fourteenth century. Among his best-known works in painting are the Dantesque frescoes in the Strozzi chapel at S. Maria Novella, and that terrible allegory of Death and Judgment in the Campo Santo at Pisa, in which the gay riding party come upon the three open graves. Orcagna put all his strength into the tabernacle of Or San Michele, which is a most sumptuous, beautiful and thoughtful shrine, yet owing to the darkness of the church ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... everywhere in the City. Many of the electrical amusements provided appear grander from the contrast with the darkness they are made to displace—a contrast scarcely greater than that depicted by our "Nature Delineators" when, in allegory, they paint the present contrasted with past times; the later years of my ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... which the Celt is capable when his abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent for some seconds, and then stepped back with an ironical bow. "Not literally true, of course," he said; "only really true. An allegory, shall ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... terra-cotta images of Spain! What a climax of absurdity teases the eye in the monstrosities in stone which draw travellers in Sicily to the eccentric nobleman's villa, near Palermo! Who does not shrink from the French allegory and horrible melodrama of Roubillac's monument to Miss Nightingale, in Westminster Abbey? How like Horace Walpole to dote on Ann Conway's canine groups! We actually feel sleepy, as we examine the little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... him retorting, as he assisted me to doff my doublet. "Do I jest? Diable! you Gascons are a slow-witted folk! I have a taste for allegory, my friend, but that never yet was accounted so ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... profoundly individual, tormented, combating, suffering, and who throughout his real life shares with environing Nature, and receives from every side the reflection of her colors. Sculpture, generalizing, raises itself to the dignity of allegory—painting, individualizing, descends to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various |
