"Fable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Irish Saints contain an immense quantity of material of first rate importance for the historian of the Celtic church. Underneath the later concoction of fable is a solid substratum of fact which no serious student can ignore. Even where the narrative is otherwise plainly myth or fiction it sheds many a useful sidelight on ancient manners, customs and laws as well as on the curious ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... In its only foreign language translation, the Letter, somewhat abbreviated, is appended to the German translation of The Fable of the Bees by Otto Bobertag, Mandevilles Bienenfabel, Munich, 1914, ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... the Siren who sang and slew is now The fable outworn of an age remote, And the women to whom to-day we bow Have long abjured her sinister note; She heals, she helps, she follows the plough, And her song has fairly ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... be a poor tinker," said I; "but I may never have undergone what you have. You remember, perhaps, the fable of the fox who had lost ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... a more lively illustration of the principle here insisted upon, if I recall to the reader's recollection the legend of the Seven Sleepers. The scene of that popular fable was placed in the two centuries which elapsed between the reign of the emperor Decius and the death of Theodosius the younger. In that interval of time (between the years 249 and 450 of our era) the union of the Roman empire had been ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... restless heart and fevered brain, Unquiet and unstable, That holy well of Loch Maree Is more than idle fable! ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... for the whole household, could we reasonably expect the girl to announce the fact, in the parlor above, in the same tone in which she ordinarily states that the butcher has called for his orders? Aesop, in his very first fable, (as arranged by good Archdeacon Croxall,) has inculcated but a mean opinion of the cock who forbore to crow lustily when he turned up a jewel of surpassing richness, in the course of his ordinary scratching, and under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... doubtful and useless opinion, and was at length rejected as the absurd invention of heresy and fanaticism." The Millennium is stigmatised, in what once stood as the forty-first Article of the English Church, as "a fable of Jewish dotage." We wonder whether the plain-spoken divines who drew up that article included Jesus Christ, St. Paul, and St. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... often that they have become fables. "Not all lies, nor all true, all foolishness, nor all sense; so much have the storytellers told, and so much have the makers of fables fabled to embellish their stories that they have made all seem fable." [4] He omits the prophecies of Merlin from his narrative, because he does not understand them. "I am not willing to translate his book, because I do not know how to interpret it. I would say nothing that was not exactly as I said." [5] To this scrupulous regard for ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... on one common errand bound, One common fate o'erwhelms; and so, me-seems, A fable have we of our daily round, Who in these groves of learning here are found Climbing Parnassus' slopes. Our aim is one, And one the path by which we strive to soar; Yet, truer still, or ere the prize be won, A common ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... a wondrous House of Sorrow, And Happiness therein a lying Fable. When first they mix'd the Clay of Man, and cloth'd His Spirit in the Robe of Perfect Beauty, For Forty Mornings did an Evil Cloud Rain Sorrows over him from Head to Foot; And when the Forty Mornings pass'd to Night, Then ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... rabbis of the time were on the one hand developing by dialectic discussion the oral tradition into a vast system of religious ritual and legal jurisprudence; on the other, weaving around the law, by way of adornment to it, a variegated fabric of philosophy, fable, allegory, and legend. Simultaneously the Alexandrian preachers—they were never quite the same as the rabbis—were emphasizing for the outer world as well as their own people the spiritual side of the religion, elaborating a theology that should satisfy the reason, and seeking ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... fixed upon as one to work me this unmitigated evil. I do not know her, and I believe I do not care to know her, and I am thirsting for the hour to come when I shall study her. Is not this to have the poison of a bite in one's blood? The wrath of Venus is not a fable. I was a hard reader and I despised the sex in my youth, before the family estates fell to me; since when I have playfully admired the sex; I have dallied with a passion, and not read at all, save for diversion: her anger is not a fable. You may interpret ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... whose mysterious flight has long been known in Russia. And Catharine will have her tracked in all countries and upon all routes. Therefore, save Natalie, by seeming to give her up. Return home and relate to them a fable of a false princess by whom you had been deceived, and whom you abandoned as soon as you discovered the deception. They will everywhere lend you a believing ear, as people gladly believe what they wish, and by this means only can you assure the ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... seize this famous robber? First of all, she kept on asking her husband about it, and he replied that the whole story about Fatia Negra was only a Wallachian fable. It was true that robberies were committed by men who regularly wore black masks, but it was never one and the same man who was guilty of these misdeeds. Nevertheless the name had won a sort of nimbus of notoriety among the common people, many had made use of it as ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... so much of fable mingled with the traditionary biography of this "Devonshire worthy," that most persons probably will dismiss the claim altogether. He became weary of his life, and, being determined to rid himself from the direful apprehensions of dangerous ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... Bobadil[361] who trained up a hundred gentlemen to fight very nearly, if not altogether, as well as myself. And so far I am convinced of this, that I believe were I to publish the Canongate Chronicles without my name (nom de guerre, I mean) the event would be a corollary to the fable of the peasant who made the real pig squeak against the imitator, while the sapient audience hissed the poor grunter as if inferior to the biped in his own language. The peasant could, indeed, confute the long-eared ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... Legislature compels the closing of the shutters. He is never intoxicated—it is simply a habit, a sort of fuel to feed the low cunning in which his soul delights. So far from intoxication is he, that there is a fable of some hard knocks and ill usage, and even of a thick head being beaten against the harder stones of the courtyard behind, when the said thick head was helpless from much ale. Such matters are hushed up in the dark places of the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... true Church. They told us that our delusion, as they called our Church, was dead; that the Presbyterians and Fifth Monarchy men and all their rabble had stifled the last remnant of life that had been left in her; that the Episcopacy, even if we scouted the Nag's Head fable, was perishing away, and that England was like Holland or the Palatinate. But Eustace smiled gravely at them, and asked whether the Church had been dead when the Roman Emperors, or the heretic Arians, persecuted her, and said that he knew that, even if he never should see ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of this reptile have probably given occasion to a fable, which says that cocks can lay eggs, but that these always produce serpents; and that though the cock does not hatch them, the warmth of the sand and atmosphere answers the purposes of incubation. The eggs of the tzepho, of which she lays eighteen or twenty, are equal to those of a pigeon, while ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... perfect and sinless, therefore the sympathy of Christ was deeper than any human sympathy, howsoever tender it may be; for what unfits us to feel compassion is our absorption with ourselves. That makes our hearts hard and insensitive, and is the true, 'witches' mark'—to recur to the old fable—the spot where no external pressure can produce sensation. The ossified heart of the selfish man is closed against divine compassion. Since Jesus Christ forgot Himself in pitying men, and Himself 'took our infirmities and bare ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... railroad, and become the carriers to a great extent for Europe. But this is but a portion of the advantage of this work. Our western mountains are almost literally mountains of gold and silver. In them the Arabian fable of Aladdin is realized.... Let the road be completed, and the comforts as well as the necessaries furnished by Asia, the manufactures of Europe, and the productions of the States can be brought by the iron horse almost to the miner's door; and in the production and possession ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... slapped him encouragingly on the back. "You'll blunder right ahead to glory, same as you always do. You'll make hard work of it and all that, but you'll get there. Don, you're exactly like the porpoise—no, the tortoise in the fable. You don't look fast, old man, but you keep on moving ahead and saying nothing and when the hares arrive you're curled up on the finish line fast asleep. Tortoises can't curl up, though, can they? And, say, what the dickens is a tortoise, anyway? ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... been born of mortal parents. His body was bare, but round his neck was a glistening chain of marvellously wrought gold, fastened to which was this gem lying on his breast. This was doubtless the origin of the Hebrew fable of the finding of Moses, who, as all scholars know, was not a Hebrew, but an Egyptian priest in the ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... but whose name is not now remembered. Those days are fast becoming to our younger race almost mythical, so that every living word from the actors in them is of use in vivifying scenes that else would seem dim fable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... Aesop's fable about the mountain which gave birth to a mouse may be a relic of Totemism; so also may be the mountain symbols on the standards of Egyptian ships which appear on pre-dynastic pottery; the black dwarfs of Teutonic mythology ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... purpose, coupled with an undaunted and fearless perseverance, have given issue time and again to achievements even greater, though still less promising, than the undertaking of the little mouse in the fable, but for those who can yet take heart, in the face of possible failure, I think half ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... a camp; this evening loud with life, to-morrow all struck and vanished, 'a few earth-pits and heaps of straw!' For here, as always, it continues true, that the deepest force is the stillest; that, as in the fable, the mild shining of the sun shall accomplish what the fierce blustering of the tempest has in vain essayed. Above all, it is ever to be kept in mind, that not by material but by mental power, are men and their ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... prunes; cover them, and let them swell in the hot water till they are soft. Then drain them, and extract the stones; spread the prunes on a large dish, and dredge them with flour. Take one jill or eight large fable-spoonfuls from a quart of rich milk, and stir into it, gradually, eight spoonfuls of sifted flour. Mix it to a smooth batter, pressing out all the lumps with the back of the spoon. Beat six eggs very light, and stir them, by degrees, into the remainder ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... own inclination to make exaggerated statements for the purpose of causing a sensation. "I told another little boy," he writes in his autobiography, "that I could produce variously-colored polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain colored fluids, which was, of course, a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me. I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... Cecilia's Day' Pope is generally confessed to have miscarried; yet he has miscarried only as compared with Dryden, for he has far outgone other competitors. Dryden's plan is better chosen; history will always take stronger hold of the passions than fable: the passions excited by Dryden are the pleasures and pains of real life; the scene of Pope is laid in imaginary existence; Pope is read with calm acquiescence, Dryden with turbulent delight; Pope hangs upon the ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... whose fathers they have descended to us. From these, and from no other source, we have obtained all that is known of God and divine works, from the beginning of the world. Even among the Turks and the heathen, all their knowledge of God—excepting what is manifestly fable and fiction—came from the Scriptures. And our knowledge is confirmed and proven by great miracles, even to the present day. These Scriptures declare, concerning this article, that there is no God or divine being save this one alone. They not only manifest him to us from ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... connection with it, the secretary of the Birkenhead Docks fainting away during the proceedings. Mr. Hope-Scott is said to have received a fee of 10,000l.; but a friend, likely to be well informed, thinks this is a fable. ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... impenetrable and freeze curiosity) that Clotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartar trained in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at the Hungarian Baths on the borders of the Styrian highlands. The scene at all events is pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floating threads. A stranger to the Baths, dressed in white and scarlet, sprang from his carriage into a group of musical gypsies round an inn at the arch of the chestnut avenue, after pulling up to listen to them for a while. The music had seized him. He snatched bow and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank down into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might save the situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... even in his own heaven, so he had to sin on earth, but no one was betrayed by him! The nymph who ravished Hylas would have controlled her passion had she thought Hercules was coming to forbid it. Apollo recalled the spirit of a boy in the form of a flower, and all the lovers of Fable enjoyed Love's embraces without a rival, but I took as a comrade a friend more cruel than Lycurgus!" But at that very instant, as I was telling my troubles to the winds, a white-haired old man entered the picture-gallery; his face was care-worn, and he seemed, I know not why, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... Chaldæa, it is now impossible to know. But the Hebrews received the Mysteries from the Egyptians; and of course were familiar with their legend,—known as it was to those Egyptian Initiates, Joseph and Moses. It was the fable (or rather the truth clothed in allegory and figures) of OSIRIS, the Sun, Source of Light and Principle of Good, and TYPHON, the Principle of Darkness and Evil. In all the histories of the Gods and Heroes lay couched and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... of Jenny's unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A caricature of himself, reading (the book was upside-down). In the background a dancing couple, recognisable as Gombauld and Anne. Beneath, the legend: "Fable of the Wallflower and the Sour Grapes." Fascinated and horrified, Denis pored over the drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious Rouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The expression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered by a feeble envy; the attitude ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... Was inly wroth, and could no longer hold: To the relater of that history He turned; and, "Many things we have been told" (Exclaimed that ancient) "wherein truth is none, And of such matters is thy fable one. ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the collection was that of three portraits belonging to the pre-historical age, and, according to mythical tradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher, whose origin and attributes were as much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of an Indian Budh or ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... clad, of watchet steele, full grim, Fring'd round about the sides, with twisted gold, Spotted with shining stars vnto the brim, Which seem'd to burn the spheare which did th[e] hold: His bright sword drawn, of temper good and old, A full moone in a fable night he bore, On painted shield, which much adorned him, With this short ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... illustration of his argument—but never for the mere sake of provoking merriment. In this respect he had the wonderful aptness of Franklin. He often taught a great truth with the felicitous brevity of an Aesop fable. His words did not flow in an impetuous torrent, as did those of Douglas; but they were always well chosen, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... high, in high relief, and supporting a rich cornice. These are male, as Caryatides are female statues placed to perform the office of pillars. By the Greeks they were named Atlantes, from the well-known fable of Atlas supporting the heavens. Here they are made of terra-cotta, or baked clay, incrusted with the finest marble stucco. Their only covering is a girdle round the loins; they have been painted flesh-color, with black hair and beards; the moulding of the pedestal and the baskets on their heads ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... year of my authorship, and completed in the fourth. It was, therefore, composed almost simultaneously with Eugene Aram, and afforded to me at least some relief from the gloom of that village tragedy. It is needless to observe how dissimilar in point of scene, character, and fable, the one is from the other; yet they are alike in this—that both attempt to deal with one of the most striking problems in the spiritual history of man, viz., the frustration or abuse of power in a superior intellect originally inclined to good. Perhaps there ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a fable," exclaimed Madame Brandt, laughing. "The prince is as poor as Job, and for some time past has been literally ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... mistaken, then. We meet again and part again forever to-night, for the last time in this lower world, or that upper one either, in which you believe, and which I know to be a very pretty little fable." ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... the curiosity to seek him out, examine, question, and discourse with him; and, after some reflection, accepted Christian baptism from the venerable man. In Snorro the story is involved in miracle, rumor, and fable; but the fact itself seems certain, and is very interesting; the great, wild, noble soul of fierce Olaf opening to this wonderful gospel of tidings from beyond the world, tidings which infinitely transcended all else he had ever heard or dreamt of! It seems certain he was baptized here; date not ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... since that long-gone day have the dead of this fabled land been carried to the Carrion Caves, that in death and decay they might serve their country and warn away invading enemies. Here, too, is brought, so the fable runs, all the waste stuff of the nation—everything that is subject to rot, and that can add to the foul stench that ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in progressive skill, or often, as the mere consequence of the transition from wood to stone, (a figure carved out of one wooden log must have necessarily its feet near each other, and hands at its sides,) these literal changes are as nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the bestowing of apparent life. The figures of monstrous gods on Indian temples have their legs separate enough; but they are infinitely more dead than the rude figures at Branchidae sitting with their hands on their knees. And, briefly, the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... truth and honour, failing to make Paullus happy, you do fail me! Fail me, and nothing, in the world's history or fable, shall match the greatness ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... truths that God is really the Maker and Author of all things, and that man has a spiritual being, and so forth, surely gain nothing from being conveyed to the world in the folds of a fable. And when it is not in a confessed fable, but a fable put forth as fact—"God said," "God created," "it was so"—not only is there no gain, but our sense of fitness and of truth receive a shock. A parable is always discernible as a parable, a vision as a vision. ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... for them. I am not in this like many other Publishers, who make the Works of other People their own, without acknowledging the Piracy they are guilty of, or so much as paying the least Complement to the Authors of their Wisdom: No, Gentlemen and Ladies, I am not the Daw in the Fable, that would vaunt and strut in your Plumes. And besides, I know very well you might have me upon the Hank according to Law, and treat me as a Highwayman or Robber; for you might safely swear upon your Honours, ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]
... All that they fable lovers feel of anguish and despite, I in myself comprise, and so my strength is crushed outright; And if thou seekst a watering-place, see, from my streaming eyes, Rivers of tears for those who thirst run ever day and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... cage in which Bajazet was imprisoned by Tamerlane, so long and so often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected as a fable by the modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity. [46] They appeal with confidence to the Persian history of Sherefeddin Ali, which has been given to our curiosity in a French version, and from which I shall ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... 'Le siege d'Ostende fut, pendant ces trois ans, la fable et la nouvelle de l'Europe; on ne se lassait pas d'en parler. Des princes, des etrangers de toutes les nations venaient y assister.'—L'Abbe Nameche, ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... is first in the adjustment of the harmony of the individual stanza as a verse paragraph, and secondly in the management of their fable. Spenser has everywhere a certain romance-interest both of story and character which carries off in its steady current, where carrying off is needed, both his allegorising and his long descriptions. The Fletchers, unable to impart this interest, or ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... "vegetable wool" into Europe. The fable of the "vegetable lamb of Tartary" persisted almost down to modern times. The Moors cultivated cotton in Spain on an extensive scale, but after their expulsion the industry languished. The East India Company imported cotton fabrics ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... a-sayin', I reckon I've had 'bout enuf of 'em, an' I'd like to be home where I can be down onto the flat groun' an' not like to what's his name's coffin, what I heerd the boys speakin' about, what got hitched half way up to heaven an' stuck there. He's a fable feller, ov course; Mahomet, that's his name; there ain't never been no such doin's sence miracle days 'cept in the theayters an' them places. An' t'other night Miss Dodge, she asked me would I go ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... But the Bishop of Lucon, within whose diocese the sacred mountain stands, appears to have been unwilling to relinquish the advantage which he expected to result from a wide-spread belief in this infamous fable. Accordingly, in July, 1852, it was again reported that no less than three miracles were wrought there by the Holy Virgin. ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... naked legend of the negro's origin, one of those nursery tales in which the ignorant of Christendom still believe But the deduction from the fable and the testimony to the negro's lack of intelligence, though unpleasant to our ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... necessarily concerned only with those who are equal in birth and in power; and that for men of pre-eminent virtue there is no law—they are themselves a law. Anyone would be ridiculous who attempted to make laws for them: they would probably retort what, in the fable of Antisthenes, the lions said to the hares—'where are your claws?'—when in the council of the beasts the latter began haranguing and claiming equality for all. And for this reason democratic States have instituted ostracism; equality is above all things their aim, and therefore ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... maturity and education at which it is able to produce a true philosophy on the one hand, and accept it on the other. Simplex sigillum veri: the naked truth must be so simple and comprehensible that one can impart it to all in its true form without any admixture of myth and fable (a pack of lies)—in other words, without masking ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... heart of others, and when she considered the mystery of the hawk feathers she was troubled with a great horror. He called her to him when the assembly was over and told her of her beauty, and praised her simply and frankly as though she were a fable of the bards; and he asked her humbly to give him her love, for he was only subtle in his dreams. Overwhelmed with his greatness, she half consented, and yet half refused, for she longed to marry some warrior who could carry her over ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... the moral fable, To youth ingenuous, profitable. Nobility, like beauty's youth, May seldom hear the voice of truth; Or mark and learn the fact betimes That flattery is the nurse of crimes. Friendship, which seldom nears ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... reade Ionas frutefully & not as a poetis fable/ but as an obligacon betwene God and thy soule/ as an ernist peny geuen [the] of God/ [that] he wil helpe [the] in time of nede/ if thou turne to him and as the word of god [the] only fode and life of thy soule/ ...
— The prophete Ionas with an introduccion • William Tyndale
... time been writing some little Dramas on classical subjects, one of which was the Rape of Proserpine, a very graceful composition which she has never published. Shelley contributed to this the exquisite fable of Arethusa and the Invocation to Ceres.—Among the Nymphs gathering flowers on Enna were two whom she called Ino and Uno, names which I remember in the Dialogue were irresistibly ludicrous. She also ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... founded on the Icelandic Sagas. "What is a saga?" "Is it a fable or a true story?" The answer is not altogether simple. For such sagas as those of Burnt Njal and Grettir the Strong partake both of truth and fiction: historians dispute as to the proportions. This was the manner of the saga's growth: ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... and mulatto faces. Herodotus, in an incontrovertible passage, alludes to the Egyptians as "black and curly-haired"[4]—a peculiarly significant statement from one used to the brunette Mediterranean type; in another passage, concerning the fable of the Dodonian Oracle, he again alludes to the swarthy color of the Egyptians as exceedingly dark and even black. AEschylus, mentioning a boat seen from the shore, declares that its crew are Egyptians, because of ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... fable or romance of Uther's son, Begirt with British and Armoric knights; And all who since, baptized or infidel, Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... are likely to be different by October 1. I would have the dupes of pacifism read carefully the following extract from his speech; if they remain deaf to its meaning, it can only be because, like the man in the fable, they do not wish ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... disappointments, and coldness, and disaffection. "The servant is not greater than his lord." All true; he had preached that doctrine to himself for twenty years, and earnestly strove to live by it. I do not say that he sunk under the humiliation; only, don't you remember the fable of the last straw that broke the camel's back? What I do say is, that he had borne hundreds and thousands of "straws." Also, remember it was the Lord who called him from work. Assuredly he did not call himself. I think ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... calm set in round the negro minstrel. Orpheus was no fable: the animals obeyed this new enchantment; and when Dick, on recovering from his terror, was unable to understand what was going on around him, he saw himself surrounded by an audience a hundred fold more attentive to the charms of music than any which had hitherto ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... itself does not go on growing. It is not that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by God and then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control it, and then it gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and from ...
— Progress and History • Various
... human mind, that, having built his castle with so little view to durability, Walpole entailed the perishable possession with a degree of strictness, which would have been more fitting for a baronial estate. And that, too, after having written a fable entitled "The Entail," in consequence, of some one having asked him whether he did not intend to entail Strawberry Hill, and in ridicule ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... how can I! I hate talking about it, it sounds so pharisaical, but my father wanted me to be a Christian, and you know what Christianity meant to him. As I have said again and again, it comes to this—either war is wrong and hellish, or Christianity is a fable. Both cannot be right. And if I went as a soldier I should have to renounce my Christianity—at least that is how it seems, to me. If I went to a recruiting station I should have to go there over Calvary; ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... tte—tte with him; his recitations from Shakespeare, and his ingenious etymologies and dissertations on the roots of the English language were a high treat." And another declares that nothing "came amiss to his memory; he would set a child right in his twopenny fable-book, repeat the whole of the moral tale of the Dean of Badajos, or a page of Athenus on cups, or Eustathius on Homer." One anecdote tells of his repeating the "Rape of the Lock," making observations as he went on, and noting the various readings. And an intimate ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... Centuriators, Heylin, and others, mention a forged letter, under the name of Udalrirus, said to be written to pope Nicholas, concerning the heads of children found by St. Gregory in a pond. But a smore ridiculous fable was never invented, as is demonstrated from many inconsistencies of that forged letter: and St. Gregory in his epistles everywhere mentions the law of the celibacy of the clergy as ancient and inviolable. Nor was any pope Nicholas contemporary with St. Udalricus. See Baronius and Dom de {Sainte} ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... refined perceptions, assisted by careful cultivation. Narrow indeed is the boundary which divides unfeminine flippancy from the graceful nonsense which good authority and our own feelings pronounce to be "exquisite."[85] The unsuccessful attempt at its imitation always reminds me of Pilpay's fable of the Donkey and the Lapdog:—The poor donkey, who had been going on very usefully in its own drudging way, began to envy the lap-dog the caresses it received, and fancied that it would receive the same if it jumped upon its master as the lap-dog did: how awkwardly and unnaturally its ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... none of his business. But he was half an Englishman by birth and altogether one by bringing up, and he therefore could not admit that she should be apparently enjoying herself, while he was gloomily brooding over the misfortunes that put her beyond his reach. The fable of the Dog in the Manger must have been composed to describe us Anglo-Saxons. It is sufficient that we be hindered from getting what we want, even by our own sense of honour; we are forthwith ready to sacrifice life and limb to prevent any other man from getting it. The magnanimity ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... head, "you've got the Golden Bride! Keep her if you can. That's a pretty fable of your father's. I gave him the idea, though. Austin filches a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... good people of Boston and Plymouth! And thus it was that Morton's fabricated tale of the Weymouth hanging passed into genuine history along with the "blue laws" of Connecticut. One cannot help believing that the mischievous perpetrator of the fable laughed up his sleeve at its result, and one cannot resist the thought that he was probably delighted to have the scandal attached to those righteous neighbors of his who had run him ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... students of history which was, in its way, unique. He showed them a great historian at work. In his comparison of authorities, in his references to and fro, in his appeal to every source of illustration, from fable to architecture, from poetry to charters, he made us familiar not only with his results, but with his methods of working. It was a priceless experience. Year after year he continued these lectures, informal, chatty, but always ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... over the boy. He began to weary of fable and cry out for fact. He had just entered his fourteenth year. He was growing fast; and, but for that dwarfing deformity, would have been unusually tall, graceful and well-proportioned. But along with this increase of stature had come a listlessness and languor which troubled Lady Calmady. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the fable, Overflow'd a farmer's barn and stable; Whole ricks of hay and sacks of corn Were down the sudden current borne; While things of heterogeneous kind Together float with tide and wind. The generous wheat forgot its pride, And sail'd with litter ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... vermiculate cares and pains was this human heart of ours! Oh, surely it needed some refuge! If no saviour had yet come, the tortured world of human hearts cried aloud for one with unutterable groaning! What would Bascombe do if he had committed a murder? Or what could he do for one who had? If fable it were, it was at least a need—invented one—that of a Saviour to whom anyone might go, at any moment, without a journey, without letters or commendations or credentials! And yet no: if it had been invented, it could hardly be by any one in the need, for such even now could hardly be ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... of that city. He traveled widely in the Greek world and in the East, as a preparation for his great task of writing an account of the rise of the Oriental nations and the struggle between Greece and Persia. Herodotus was not a critical historian, diligently sifting truth from fable. Where he can he gives us facts. Where facts are lacking, he tells interesting stories in a most winning style. A much more scientific writer was Thucydides, an Athenian who lived during the epoch of the Peloponnesian ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... A legendary king of Ethiopia, who was slain at Troy by Achilles—a fable, says Rawlinson, which is "one of those in which it is difficult to determine any germs of truth." His name was given by the Greeks to one of the Colossi at Thebes in Egypt, from which, when touched ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... all which antiquity believed, whether of reality or fable, on the subject of that magnificent warrior, who was the proudest boast of Europe and their chivalry, and with whose dreadful name the Saracens, according to a historian of their own country, were wont to rebuke their startled ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... that a large portion of his countrymen still think it unjustifiable. The civil war, indeed, has been more discussed, and is less understood, than any event in English history. The friends of liberty labored under the disadvantage of which the lion in the fable complained so bitterly. Though they were the conquerors, their enemies were the painters. As a body, the Roundheads had done their utmost to decry and ruin literature; and literature was even with them, as, in the long run, it ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... meaning founded in the deepest laws of life, and that all were curiously connected and mutually reflected in one vast system. It would be worth while to know, not only that dove and goblet, flower and ring were each the 'motive' of a graceful fable, but also that this fable was something more than merely fanciful or graceful—that it had a deep meaning, and that each and all were essential parts of one vast whole. And it would be pleasant, I presume, to see these myths and meanings somewhat illustrated ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... it! The Poet knows the truth,—but what are Poets? Only the Prophets and Seers! Only the Eyes of Time, which clearly behold Heaven's Fact beyond this world's Fable. Let them sing if they choose, and we will hear them in our idle hours,—we will give them a little of our gold,—a little of our grudging praise, together with much of our private practical contempt and misprisal! ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of to-day has neither recognized nor worked up to it; and the Theology of to-day covers it with fable, mystery, and miracle ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... disclosed in the following certificate, cannot fail to remind one of the fable of the "Country maid, and ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector
... march. She, too, had begun to doubt. Here, in the desert, the buried treasure was an intangible thing. In England, the promises of the Greek's dying message were satisfying by their very vagueness. In Africa, face to face with the tremendous solitude, they became unbelievable, a dim fable akin to the legends of vanished islands and those mysterious races to be found only in unknown lands, which have tickled the imaginations of mankind, ever since the dawn of human intelligence. So, a live millionaire being a more definite asset than the hoard of a forgotten city, she had coolly ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... whole of the Old Testament the vine is represented as one of the most precious blessings bestowed by the Creator upon man. In the incomparable fable of Jotham, when he lifted up his voice on the summit of Mount Gerizim, and cried to the men of Shechem, 'Hearken unto me, ye men of Shechem, that God may hearken unto you,' he told them that when the trees of the forest went forth to anoint them ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... which was lost in the Middle Ages) all have the same general character, with the single exception of the Amphitruo. This is more of a burlesque than a comedy, and is full of humour. It is founded on the well- worn fable of Jupiter and Alcmena, and has been imitated by Moliere and Dryden. Its source is uncertain; but it is probably from Archippus, a writer of the old comedy (415 B.C.). Its form suggests rather a development of the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... said the musician; "yet let me say for myself, that I will not yield to the king of minstrels, Geoffrey Rudel, though the King of England hath given him four manors for one song. I would be willing to contend with him in romance, lay, or fable, were the judge to ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... has been remarked that the Goddess is made to command nature—the breeze, the sleep of the Suitors. It is the method of fable thus to portray intelligence, whose function is to take control of nature and make her subserve its purpose. The breeze blows and drives the ship; it is the divine instrument for bringing Telemachus to Pylos, a part of the world-order, especially upon the present ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... is an ancient fable—a critic picked out all the faults of a great poet and presented them to Apollo. The god received the gift graciously and set a bag of wheat before the critic with the command that he separate the chaff from the kernels. The critic ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... he lifted in sport, And, believe me, I tell you no fable, A gallon he drank from the quart And planted it down on the table. 'A miracle!' every one cried, And they all took a pull at the stingo. They were capital hands at the trade, And they drank till they fell; yet, by jingo! The pot still frothed over ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... impossible that something similar to what they related to me really happened when the early Portuguese discoverers first came to Aru, and has formed the foundation for a continually increasing accumulation of legend and fable. I have no doubt that to the next generation, or even before, I myself shall be transformed into a magician or a demigod, a worker of miracles, and a being of supernatural knowledge. They already believe that all the animals I preserve ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... contemptuous perfection of feature and dress, of the French aristocracy of the old regime. The very chair on the back of which his hand rested seemed a part of the type—one of those beautiful white chairs of the period, on which, on snowy, glittering tapestry, was woven a Fable of Lafontaine in ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... to Samos, and bought by Iadmon, one of the geomori, or landed aristocracy of the island. The little girl grew day by day more beautiful, graceful and clever, and was soon an object of love and admiration to all who knew her. AEsop, the fable-writer, who was at that time also in bondage to Iadmon, took an especial pleasure in the growing amiability and talent of the child, taught her and cared for her in the same way as the tutors whom we keep to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... as defiance in her voice—scorn because he stood before her so silently; scorn because the fierce torrent of her anger had flowed unchecked. She had only to stand up to him, it seemed, and like the giant of the fable he dwindled to a pigmy. She was no longer hurt by his passivity. ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain. Copper-colored men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion and patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that "Don Quixote" was an African fable on the lines of "Uncle Remus." I have never heard that the heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro ancestry. In the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognize the resurrection of a Christian and cultured nation after its age of bondage. But Russia ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... through the nerves of an entomologist when he puts his hand on a specimen unknown, undescribed. The hunter trembles when he espies in the thicket the royal hart whose existence has been called a fable. My emotion was all of this, intensified; nearer, perhaps, to the feeling of the elected mortal who has discovered a new continent. For I had ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... Secretary and Mr. Provost, with whom I did not drink, nor yet was bidden, and on the morrow departed from thence, thinking more than I did say, and being glad that I was out of the court, where many men, as I did both hear and perceive, did wonder at me. And here shall be an end for this time of this fable. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... behindhand with the earth, yielded up her mighty whales, that Mr. Gathergold might sell their oil, and make a profit on it. Be the original commodity what it might, it was gold within his grasp. It might be said of him, as of Midas in the fable, that whatever he touched with his finger immediately glistened, and grew yellow, and was changed at once into sterling metal, or, which suited him still better, into piles of coin. And, when Mr. Gathergold had become so very rich that it would ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... are intermixed with fable; as, that the Hellusii and Oxionae [276] have human faces, with the bodies and limbs of wild beasts. These unauthenticated reports I ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... out the meaning of this fable, we regard the account of Varro, we shall find, that by Juno was signified the earth; by Jupiter, the heavens; but if we believe the Stoics, by Juno is meant the air and its properties, and by Jupiter the ether: hence Homer supposes she was nourished by Oce{)a}nus and Tethys: that is, by the ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... from an amber moon Illumines footing on forbidden wall; Where, 'stead of pursy jeweler's display, Parading peacocks brave the passer-by, And swans like angels in an azure sky Wing swift and silent on unchallenged way. No land of fable! Of the Hills I sing, Whose royal women tread with conscious grace The peace-filled gardens of a warrior race, Each maiden fit for wedlock with a king, And every Rajput son so royal born And conscious of his age-long ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... instinct? A mother is as cunning to get at her children as a girl can be in the conduct of a love intrigue. If your Marquise really wanted to give her children food and clothes, the Devil himself would not have hindered her, heh? That is rather too big a fable for an old ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... proceed to a regular examination of the tragedy before us, in which I shall treat separately of the Fable, the Moral, the Characters, the Sentiments, and the Diction. And first ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... cordially that the whole story is a lie; and he may rely upon my support at all times to the extent of denying that any vestige of truth probably lay at the foundations of his ingenious apologue. And what I say of the English fable, I am willing to say of the French one. Both, I dare say, were the rankest fictions. But next, what, after all, if they were not? For, in the rear of all discussion upon anecdotes, considered simply as true or not true, comes finally a valuation of those anecdotes in their moral ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... and quick to the last degree; sometimes it is remarkable for rotundity and mellowness. I can easily conceive that two people who had seen him on different days might dispute about him as the travellers in the fable ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... "Is this a fable or the posy of a ring, Sir Dragon?" she said, sharply. "Do you come to try or tempt me, or is this perchance but some part of my Lord of Misrule's Yule-tide mumming? 'Sblood, sir; only cravens sneak behind ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... elaborate compositions were proposed. He felt capable of achieving so much, his mind teemed with so many panoramic and single conceptions,—historical, allegorical, ideal, and illustrative of standard literature or classical fable,—that only time and expense presented obstacles to unlimited invention. Perhaps no one can conceive this peculiar creativeness of his fancy and aptitude of hand, who has not had occasion to talk with Crawford of some projected monument or statue. No sooner was he possessed of the idea to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... every nation on earth has some particular traditions regarding the dog. The Esquimaux, a nation inhabiting the polar regions, have a singular fable amongst them respecting the origin of the Dog-Rib Indians, a tribe which inhabits the northern confines of the American continent. It is thus detailed in Captain Franklin's "Second Journey ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... Sisenna, the friend of Atticus, and they had a great success at Rome. Plutarch, in his life of Crassus, tells us that after the defeat of Carhes (Carrhae?) some Milesiacs were found in the baggage of the Roman prisoners. The Greek text; and the Latin translation have long been lost. The only surviving fable is the tale of Cupid and Psyche,[FN1] which Apuleius calls 'Milesius sermo,' and it makes us deeply regret the disappearance of the others." Besides this there are the remains of Apollodorus and Conon, and a few traces to be found in Pausanias, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... I look down towards his feet; but that's a Fable, If that thou bee'st a Diuell, I cannot ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... being driven by the wind was anchored in a marshy place, when St. Mark, snatched into ecstasy, heard the voice of an angel saying to him: 'Peace be to thee, Mark; here shall thy body rest.'" The angel goes on to foretell the building of "una stupenda, ne pi veduta Citt;" but the fable is hardly ingenious enough ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... great many men, dear CONTINENTAL, who quite unwittingly are ever crying aloud, 'Look at me, chickens.' After all, 'tis only the old fable of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... or some other reasons Egypt has been occupied by man from the most remote antiquity. The oldest records of the human race, made three thousand years ago, speak of Egypt as ancient then, when they were written. Not only is Tradition silent, but even Fable herself does not attempt to tell the story of the origin of her population. Here stand the oldest and most enduring monuments that human power has ever been able to raise. It is, however, somewhat humiliating to the pride of the race to ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... at his resemblance with the demi-god, to whom fable itself ascribes no more generous devotion!" cried the young lady, with ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... The fable about the hippopotamus destroying its father and violating its mother, cited before from Damascius, is to be found in Plutarch, De Solert. Anim., c. 4. Pausan. (viii. 46. Sec. 4.) mentions a Greek statue, in which the face was made of the teeth of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... extremity, and about 2 feet in thickness. A more brilliant scene perhaps never presented itself to the human eye, nor was it easy for us to divest ourselves of the idea that we actually beheld one of the fairy scenes depicted in Eastern fable. The light of the torches rendered it ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... come so far to preach to me the fear of the gods. We Cyclops care not for your Jove, whom you fable to be nursed by a goat, nor any of your blessed ones. We are stronger than they, and dare bid open battle to Jove himself, though you and all your fellows of the earth join with him." And he bade them tell him where their ship ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... it, and found that his hard cash had changed to withered leaves. Precisely such a transformation had overtaken that eight thousand pounds, at the moment when it had fallen from the hands of a man who might have made an honest use of it. The fable was, and was not, true, so far as he remembered, and his fancy dwelt curiously about the history. There was no possibility of turning back the withered leaves to gold, and making them jingle and glitter again as only one's own ready money can jingle and glitter. ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... are assigned to a Being, I have called the result 'Religion;' where the same Being acts like Zeus in Greek fable, plays silly or obscene tricks, is lustful and false, I have spoken of 'Myth.'[3] These distinctions of Myth and Religion may be, and indeed are, called arbitrary. The whole complex set of statements about the Being, good or bad, sublime ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... my harts, for the honour of England and our brave General the Earle of Pembrooke! [Exeunt soldiers.] So I have discharg'd my selfe of these. Hot shot![121] now to my love. Some may say the tale of Venus loving Mars is a fable, but he that is a true soldier and a Gent. as Dick Bowyer is, & he do not love some varlet or other, zounds he is worse then a gaping Oyster without liquor. There's a pretty sweet fac't mother[122] that waits on the ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... Wash far away,—where'er thy bones are hurl'd; Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides Where thou perhaps, under the whelming tide Visitest the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great Vision of the guarded mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold, —Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth: —And, O ye dolphins, waft ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of Evangeline and her lover," he there says, "is as poetical as the fable of the Odyssey, besides that it comes to the heart as a fact that has actually taken place in human life." He speaks of "its pathos all illuminated with beauty,——so that the impression of the poem is nowhere dismal nor despondent, and glows ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... be found who had seen the corn removed;—not one. In fact people who had not seen, as the bailiff had, the corn covering the broad field one day, and the same field bare the next, began to think that the fact was not so; and that the miraculous night's work was a fable. It was certain that the bailiff had been deterred from entering on the ground, but it was also certain that nothing but words had been used to deter him; he had not been struck or even pushed; he had only been frightened; ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... Burton slowly. "I may be a bit tired of Singapore. It's a queer thing, though, that you fellows have drifted back here again. The call of the East is no fable. It's a call that ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... had been received there upon this matter, which was regarded at the prefecture as a fable. The invention of this fable ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... saying, "Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and Rowena, Arthur and Mordred, are mythical persons, whose very existence may be questioned, and whose adventures must be classed with those of Hercules and Romulus." It is difficult to write of a period of which the same writer has said, "an age of fable completely separates two ages of truth." Yet no one knew better than this accomplished historian himself that an age of fable and an age of truth cannot be distinguished with absolute precision. It is not that what is presented ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... fully, meets satisfactorily—the need. Now none will deny that this need is deep,—real. Hence it can be no mere sentiment, no airy speculation, no poetical imagination, no cunningly devised fable that can meet that need. The remedy must be as real as the disease, or it avails nothing. No phantom key may loosen so hard-closed a lock as this: it must be real, and be made for it. For suppose ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... members of the Nichiren sect, Namu-my[o]-ho-ren-ge-ky[o]—"O, the Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law."[20] His history, full of amazing activity and of romantic adventure, is surrounded by a perfect sunrise splendor, or, shall we say, sunset gorgeousness, of mythology and fable. The scenes of his life are mostly laid in the region of the modern T[o]ki[o], and to the cultivated traveller, its story lends fascinating charms to the landscape in the region of Yedo Bay. Nichiren was a fiery patriot, and ultra-democratic ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... husband goes to bed, taking the baby with him, and thus receives the neighbours' compliments." "It has been found also in Navarre, and on the French side of the Pyrenees. Legrand d'Aussy mentions that in an old French fable the king of Torelose is 'au lit et en couche' when Aucassin arrives and takes a stick to him and makes him promise to abolish the custom in his realm. The same author goes on to state that the practice is said still to exist in some cantons of Bearn, where it is called 'faire la couvade.' ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... said on this Subject is, and that the Story you have given us is not quite two thousand Years Old, I cannot but think it a Piece of Presumption to dispute with you: But your Quotations put me in Mind of the Fable of the Lion and the Man. The Man walking with that noble Animal, showed him, in the Ostentation of Human Superiority, a Sign of a Man killing a Lion. Upon which the Lion said very justly, We Lions are none of us Painters, else we could show a hundred ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Piedmont was not quite seven years old, when his preceptor, Cardinal (then Father) Glendel, explained to him the fable of Pandora's Box. He told him that all evils which afflict the human race were shut up in that fatal box; which Pandora, tempted by Curiosity, opened, when they immediately flew out, and spread themselves over the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... the harmless folly of the time! We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty. Our life is short, and our days run As fast away as does the sun. And, as a vapour or a drop of rain, Once lost, can ne'er be found again, So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade, All love, all liking, all delight Lies drown'd with us in endless night. Then, while time serves, and we are but decaying, Come, my Corinna, come, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... out of this simple plot I might weave something attractive; because the reign of James I., in which George Heriot flourished, gave unbounded scope to invention in the fable, while at the same time it afforded greater variety and discrimination of character than could, with historical consistency, have been introduced, if the scene had been laid a century earlier. Lady Mary Wortley Montague has said, with equal truth and taste, that the most romantic region of every ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... mouth, and when he saw his shadder in the water, made a spring at it and dropped the meat which he held in his mouth, and it was at once carried away by the current." "Well," said the teacher, "as you remember the story so well, you can perhaps tell me what lesson we can learn from this fable." "I thought," replied the boy, "when I read the story, that the best way is to hold on to what we are sure of, and not grab after a shadder and lose the whole." "Your idea is certainly a correct one," ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... breath so long that I could not help thinking of the frog in the fable, that wanted to swell itself as big as the ox. Then I looked into his face earnestly. Slap went the lid of his right eye; down went my head, and up went my heels. We shot through the passage like an arrow, and rose to the surface of the ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... the celebrity of the Cigale, of whose misfortunes he has babbled during his first lessons in recitation. It is he who will preserve for future generations the absurd nonsense of which the body of the fable is constructed; the Cigale will always be hungry when the cold comes, although there were never Cigales in winter; she will always beg alms in the shape of a few grains of wheat, a diet absolutely incompatible with her delicate capillary "tongue"; and in desperation ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... Lessing, aged twenty-nine, returned to his old work in Berlin. Again he translated, edited, criticised. He wrote a tragedy, "Philotas," and began a "Faust." He especially employed his critical power in "Letters upon the Latest Literature," known as his Literatur briefe. Dissertations upon fable, led also to Lessing's "Fables," produced in ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... my guard against them." Thereat they laughed the more, and answered him, "Oh, foolish traveler, your head is certainly full of dreams! There are no such things as sirens; all that is an old Greek fable, a fairy tale with no meaning except for old Greeks and modern babies! You will never meet with any sirens or harpies, nor will you ever see again the Princess of whom you talk, unless, indeed, in your dreams. It is this country that is the only real one, there is nothing at all beyond the sunset." ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... from a beginning to a well-defined conclusion, and is full of striking episodes that suggest the culmination. It seems to me to be to a certain extent allegorical, albeit such an interpretation may be unreasonable. At least it is a fable thoroughly characteristic of the negro; and it needs no scientific investigation to show why he selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... vague that its originals are not recognized. Bradley, in short, repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its image in the water. With a world of particulars, given in loveliest union, in conjunction definitely various, and variously definite, the 'how' of which you 'understand' as soon as you see the fact of them,[1] for there is no how except the constitution ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James |
