"Imagery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... love-story. It may be argued, with Scott, that when a writer of fiction takes in hand a distant age or country, he is obliged to translate ideas and their expression into forms with which his readers are, to some extent, familiar. Byron seasoned his Oriental tales with phrases and imagery borrowed from the East; but whatever scenic or characteristic effects might have thus been produced are seriously marred by the explanatory notices and erudite references to authorities that are ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature, only this gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as well as in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of feeling and imagery that takes me by surprise. And then besides, and most of all, I am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy confidence in me. Perhaps I owe it to my ——— Well, no matter! How one must love the editor who first ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... sometimes lift his head with so much dignity, as if to assert his metal should any other man assail him, that men of honor were moved at the sight like artists before a glorious picture; for noble sentiments ring as loudly in the soul from living incarnations as from the imagery of art. ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... is from the Book of Daniel, a Book which takes us into a world of visions and trances and mystical imagery. There is a world within the world; a life beyond life. That world is not only the sphere of God, but of recognizable beings, meditating presences subject to rule, with organization and degrees, activities and authorities. It is a ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... Its style is conversational; or the soliloquy rather of a man convincing and amusing himself as he proceeds, without reverence for others' faith, or lenity towards others' prejudices. It is a real book, not a sham; it equals Anastasius, rivals 'Vathek;' its terseness, vigour, bold imagery, recall the grand style of Fuller and of South, to which the author adds a spirit, freshness, delicacy, all his own." Kinglake, in turn, reviewed "The Crescent and the Cross" in an article called "The French Lake." From a ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... the story will convince the reader that, as the Reviewer states, "the tragedy is alive from the beginning to the end;" and our extracts will we trust show the language to be bold and vigorous; the imagery sweetly poetical; and the workings of the passions which actuate the personages to be evidently of high promise if ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... pecuniary interest; we talk anything that comes uppermost for talking's sake, and without expecting to be believed; we have no nature, no simplicity, no picturesqueness: everything about us is as artificial and as complicated as our steam-machinery: our poetry is a kaleidoscope of false imagery, expressing no real feeling, portraying no real existence. I do not see any compensation for the poetry of the ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... "He is not a good mimic." One of the company added, "A merry-andrew, a buffoon." Johnson. "But he has wit too, and is not deficient in ideas, or in fertility and variety of imagery, and not empty of reading; he has knowledge enough to fill up his part. One species of wit he has in an eminent degree, that of escape. You drive him into a corner with both hands; but he is gone, Sir, when you ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... itself in their rude and thoroughly original sculpture. Hence, while there is in them no indication of the symbolism of the coming ogival Gothic, there is no trace either of the symbolism belonging to Byzantine buildings. None of the Gothic imagery testifying faith and joy in God and His creatures; no effigies of saints; at most only of the particular building's patron; no Madonnas, infant Christs, burning cherubim, singing and playing angels, armed romantic St. Michael or St. George; none of those goodly rows of kings and queens ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... and looser Pre-Raphaelite School in poetry and prose. The word "looser" will not be found unfair if we remember how Swinburne and all the wildest friends of the Rossettis carried this movement forward. They used the mediaeval imagery to blaspheme the mediaeval religion. Ruskin's dark and doubtful decision to accept Catholic art but not Catholic ethics had borne rapid or even flagrant fruit by the time that Swinburne, writing about a harlot, composed a learned and sympathetic and indecent ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... called the ore in their language of imagery "the tears wept by the sun;" and these tears they toiled to gather, and their artificers worked them up with a cunning skill under the direction of the priests; and, as if to complete the wonders of the temple, and to give it adornments that ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... perceive he was secretly pleased to find so much of the fruit of his mind preserved; and as he had been used to imagine and say that he always laboured when he said a good thing[751]—it delighted him, on a review, to find that his conversation teemed with point and imagery[752]. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... capable of carefully collecting those statistics also; and doubtless there are scientific social reformers capable of legislating on the basis of them. They would probably argue from the elephantine imagery of the London street that such and such a percentage of the householders were megalomaniacs and required medical care and police coercion. And doubtless their calculations, like nearly all such calculations, would leave out the only important point; as that the street was in the immediate ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... the lazar-house in the eleventh book of the Paradise Lost with the last ward of Malebolge in Dante. Milton avoids the loathsome details, and takes refuge in indistinct but solemn and tremendous imagery—Despair hurrying from couch to couch to mock the wretches with his attendance, Death shaking his dart over them, but, in spite of supplications, delaying to strike. What says Dante? "There was such a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Chart of Limits of Seas and Oceans, revised January 1958, published by the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center (ACIC), United States Air Force; note - ACIC is now part of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... visible: 'How great Was he, our Founder! In that ample brow, What brooding weight of genius! In his eye, How strangely was the pathos edged with light! How oft, his churches roaming, flashed its beam From pillar on to pillar, resting long On carven imagery of flower or fruit, Or deep-dyed window whence the heavenly choirs Gave joy to men below! With what a zeal He drew the cunningest craftsmen from all climes To express his thoughts in form; while yet his hand, Like meanest hand among us, patient toiled In garden and in bakehouse, ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... According to Warton, Barclay's are the first 'Eclogues' that appeared in the English language. "They are like Petrarch's," he says, "and Mantuans of the moral and satirical kind; and contain but few touches of moral description and bucolic imagery." Two shepherds meet to talk about the pleasures and crosses of rustic life and life at court. The hoary locks of the one show that he is old. His suit of Kendal green is threadbare, his rough boots are patched, and the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... was sometimes wonderfully and fearfully put together. But the girl saw the pictures. The imagery was familiar to her race and faith. She was weeping softly, with almost a little break of joy among the tears. For she saw the man, whom she had loved in spite of what he was, lifted now out of the weaknesses and sins of life. And her love leaped up quickly to the ideal ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... fear. In Coleridge's Ancient Manner the skeleton-ship with its ghastly crew—the spectre-woman and her deathmate—the sensations of the mariner, alone on a wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination with irresistible power. The very substance of the poem is woven of the supernatural. The dream imagery is thrown into relief by occasional touches of reality—the lighthouse, the church on the cliff, the glimpses of the wedding, the quiet song of the hidden brook in the leafy month of June. We, like the mariner, after loneliness ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Classic Poets, p. 182, seq.) has diligently compared this with the description of the shield of Hercules by Hesiod. He remarks that, "with two or three exceptions, the imagery differs in little more than the names and arrangements; and the difference of arrangement in the Shield of Hercules is altogether for the worse. The natural consecution of the Homeric images needs no exposition: it constitutes ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... thought, and buried her head on his shoulder. Through that morning he struggled on, faltering, lurching, resting a little, girding himself against the death now so surely at hand. In his mind thought had ceased to be coherent; his starved body, whipped by the cold, was beginning to play with the imagery. ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... disciple of Calderon. He has the familiar Calderonian limitations; the substitution of types for characters, of eloquence for vital dialogue. Nor can he equal the sublime lyrism of his model; but he is little inferior in poetic conception, in dignified idealization, and in picturesque imagery. And it may be fairly claimed for him that in El Tejado de Vidrio and El Tanto par Ciento he displays a very exceptional combination of satiric intention with romantic inspiration. By these plays and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Spanish Shakespeare." "The Spanish Ben Jonson" would be a happier title, if one feels obliged to compare everything with something else. But Calderon is as far above Ben Jonson in splendor of imagery as he is below Shakespeare in his knowledge of the heart, and in that vitality which makes Hamlet and Orlando, Lady Macbeth and Perdita, men and women of all time. They live; Calderon's people, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... where blood-cored carnations stood She fancied richer hues might be, Scents rarer than the purple hood Curled over in the fleur-de-lis. Small skill in learned names had she, Yet whatso wealth of land or sea Had ever stored her memory, She decked its varied imagery Where, in the highest of the row Upon a sill more white than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... Ruskin's "Seven Lamps of Architecture":—"They are but the rests and monotones of the art; it is to its far happier, far higher, exaltation that we owe those fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever filled the depths of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates, trellised with close leaves; those window-labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... 503 [Obs.]; reverie, trance; day dream, golden dream; somnambulism. conception, Vorstellung [G.], excogitation^, a fine frenzy; cloudland^, dreamland; flight of fancy, fumes of fancy; thick coming fancies [Macbeth]; creation of the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey^, whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest^, geste^, extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... all their original fire? Yes, I was confident I had; and I had no doubt that the public would say so. And then, with respect to Ab Gwilym, had I not done as much justice to him as to the Danish ballads; not only rendering faithfully his thoughts, imagery, and phraseology, but even preserving in my translation the alliterative euphony which constitutes one of the most remarkable features of Welsh prosody? Yes, I had accomplished all this; and I doubted not that the public would receive my translations from Ab Gwilym with quite as much ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... that stand guard upon the door, of the cherubs in the corners, of the scapegoat gargoyles, or the quaint and spirited relief, where St. Michael (the artist's patron) makes short work of a protesting Lucifer. We were never weary of viewing the imagery, so innocent, sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense—in the sense of inventive gusto and expression—so artistic. I know not whether it was more strange to find a building of such merit in a corner of a barbarous isle, or to see a building so antique ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... originally published three years after his death under the title of "Country Rhymes for Children," there is no question. The internal evidence confirms the external. The book is thoroughly in Bunyan's vein, and in its homely naturalness of imagery recalls the similitudes of the "Interpreter's House," especially those expounded to Christiana and her boys. As in that "house of imagery" things of the most common sort, the sweeping of a room, the ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... amusement or to licentious indulgence, the delusive relief only makes his misery darker and more hopeless. At length a turn takes place. He is reconciled to his offended Maker. To borrow the fine imagery of one who had himself been thus tried, he emerges from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, from the dark land of gins and snares, of quagmires and precipices, of evil spirits and ravenous beasts. The sunshine is on his path. He ascends the Delectable ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be owned, are not very local; for the pastoral subject could not well admit of it. The description of Asiatic magnificence, and manners, is a subject as yet unattempted amongst us, and I believe, capable of furnishing a great variety of poetical imagery. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... succeeded, after the long balmy night, by a sunrise which repeats the colours of the sunset, but this time gaudy, dazzling, triumphant, as befits the season of faith and hope. Such imagery, it may be said, is hackneyed now, and trite even to impertinence. It might be so at home; but here, in presence of the magnificent pageant of tropic sunlight, it is natural, almost inevitable; and the old myth of the daily birth and death of Helios, and the bridal joys and widowed tears of ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... "Irish Melodies," 1834; a "Life of Lord Byron," and "The Epicurean, an Eastern Tale." "Moore's excellencies," says Dr. Angus, "consist in the gracefulness of his thoughts, the wit and fancy of his allusions and imagery, and the music ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... it is in the midst of the arts, and under an auspicious sky that this melodious, and highly-coloured language has been formed. It is therefore more easy in Italy than any where else, to seduce with words, without profundity of thought or novelty of imagery. Poetry, like all the fine arts, captivates the senses, as much as the intellect. I dare venture to say, however, that I have never improvised without feeling myself animated by some real emotion, some idea which I believed new, therefore ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... *Yale University Library's master plan to convert microfilm to digital imagery (POB) * The place of electronic tools in the library of the future * The uses of images and an image library * Primary input from preservation microfilm * Features distinguishing POB from CXP and key hypotheses guiding POB * Use of vendor selection process to facilitate organizational ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... a well-used metaphor is that it should completely fulfil this function: there should be no by-products of imagery which distract from the poet's aim, and vitiate and weaken the ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... hour before sunset he saw something white and gay gleaming through the boles of the oak-trees, and presently there was clear before him a most goodly house builded of white marble, carved all about with knots and imagery, and the carven folk were all painted of their lively colours, whether it were their raiment or their flesh, and the housings wherein they stood all done with gold and fair hues. Gay were the windows of the house; and there ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... age" is published every week; "genius" springs up like mullein, wherever the soil is thin enough; the yearly catch of "weird imagination," "thrilling pathos," "splendid description," and "sublime imagery" does not fall short of an ordinary mackerel-crop; and "profound originality" is so plenty that one not in the secret would be apt to take it for commonplace. Now Tithonus, whom, as the oldest inhabitant, we have engaged to oversee the criticism of the "Atlantic," has a prodigiously ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... world, and becomes manifest to the (object) world outside ourselves principally through combined and ordered sounds. If, therefore, I would image forth anything correctly, I must know the real nature of the original object. The theme of our imagery and representation, the outside world, contains objects, therefore I must have a definite form, a definite succession of sounds, a definite word to express each object. The objects have qualities, therefore our language must contain adjectives expressing these qualities. The qualities ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... so kindly sent to me from Norwich. Each one of them tells me something. Its device, its general character, its heraldry, its inscription, are all highly instructive. For the collector there are opportunities for the study of the historical allusions, the emblematology and imagery, the hagiology, the biographical and topographical episodes, and the other peculiarities and idiosyncrasies in all ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... everlastingly. Even as I walked homeward to my lunch, I read. I ate with the book beside my plate. I neglected my classes that afternoon, and as soon as I had absorbed this volume I secured the other and devoted myself to it with almost equal intensity. The stately diction, the rich and glowing imagery, the mystical radiance, and the aloofness of the author's personality all united to create in me a worshipful admiration which made all other interests pale and faint. It was my first profound literary passion and I was dazzled by ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... seated above the firmament, who commanded the morning and caused the day-spring to know its place, who answered out of the whirlwind, and whose envoys were the four winds, the four cherubim described with such wealth of imagery in the introduction to the book of Ezekiel. The Mahometan adores "the clement and merciful Lord of the Daybreak," whose star is in the east, who rides on the storm, and whose breath is the wind. The primitive man in the New World also associated these physical phenomena ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... Armenians persisted in singing some of their heathen ballads as late as the twelfth century. Curiously enough, we owe the fragments we possess of early Armenian poetry to these same ecclesiastical critics. These fragments suggest a popular poesy, stirring and full of powerful imagery, employed mostly in celebrating royal marriages, religious feasts, and containing dirges for the dead, and ballads of customs—not a wide field, but one invaluable to the philologist ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... story in the world. Even in later years, when his intelligence had ripened and his sphere of reading expanded, he looked upon the passion of a Romeo or an Othello as a conventional peg on which the poet hung his imagery, but having no more relation to real life as it is lived by human beings than the blood-lust of the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, or the uncomfortable riding conversation of ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... abstract personification and veiled meanings. No doubt this tendency was due in part to an idealizing dissatisfaction with the crudeness of their actual life (as well as to frequent inability to enter into the realm of deeper and finer thought without the aid of somewhat mechanical imagery); and no doubt it was greatly furthered also by the medieval passion for translating into elaborate and fantastic symbolism all the details of the Bible narratives. But from whatever cause, the tendency hardened ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... saint Of the town. The imagery and carved work on the front of the cathedral was much injured in 1641. The cross upon the west window is said to have been frequently aimed at ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... The steamboat hands had begun lifting the hawsers from the wharf piles and her time was short. She was not going to be pitied by the opulent persons on the excursion. Getting as it were into her stride, she took a bolder line of imagery. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of pious souls to attempt to understand and describe this life, and many are the volumes which proceed upon the literalness of the Bible descriptions. I suppose there are phases of faith which can not reach beyond literalness, and hence do not rightly interpret the splendid imagery of St. John. Such we must leave to the blessed surprise ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... mortified if they cannot tell just where every line of poetry that happens to be quoted can be found, but who thinks of being ashamed because they cannot tell the author of the matchless poems in the Old Testament? I do think there are no poems like Isaiah's and Jeremiah's and the Psalms. For imagery and pathos and sweetness all other poems are tame in comparison. Do we want works of power? He says, 'My word is as the fire and the hammer.' Is it tragedy that our souls delight in? There is the divine tragedy: ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... Letters' of Eric Mackay are the handiwork of a brilliant metrical artist and poet born.... A beautiful and passionate work; its beauty that of construction, language, imagery,—its passion, characteristic of the artistic nature, and, while intensely human, free from any taint of vulgar coarseness.... The poem is quite original, its manner Elizabethan.... Eric Mackay is a lyrist with a singing faculty and a novel metrical form such as few lyrists have at command. ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... with mosaics. We may imagine that such external decorations of the churches, where a few solemn figures told almost as shadows on the golden background brightly reflecting the sun, must have been even more glorious than the imagery of their interiors. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... cannot, however, refrain from giving a passage from Shakespeare, even though it should appear trite, which illustrates the emblematical meaning often conveyed in these floral tributes, and at the same time possesses that magic of language and appositeness of imagery ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... magnificent. I have put it elsewhere with Wandering Willie's Tale, which it more specially resembles in the way in which the ordinary turns into the extraordinary. It falls short of Scott in vividness, character, manners, and impressiveness, but surpasses him in beauty[90] of style and imagery. In particular, Nodier has here, in a manner which I hardly remember elsewhere, achieved the blending of two kinds of "terror"—the ordinary kind which, as it is trivially called, "frightens" one, and the other[91] terror which accompanies the intenser pleasures of sight and sound and feeling, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... their country, and cramming into a tract or sermon as much hard-thinking as the Bramah-pressure of hydrostatic intellects can condense into the iron paragraphs, they leave no room for such delicate materials as fancy or feeling, illustration, imagery, or affectionate appeal; {6} whilst Irish authors and pulpit- orators are so surcharged with their own exuberant enthusiasm, that their main hope of making you think as they think, is to make you feel as they feel. The heart ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... the real foretaste of heaven, far removed from the sensuous imagery of some modern hymns. "Be thou ruler," there is the supreme ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... for picturesque and appropriate imagery, for keen and faithful portraiture Mr. McGaffey has no superior. And there will be many to say that this book entitles him to recognition as the ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... diluted and beaten thin; cry out against a style within the reach of any intellect, for any one can commence author at small expense in a way of literature, which you can nickname the 'literature of imagery.' ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Philadelphia to London in 1772. Friend Woolman, like the sturdy Quaker that he was, was horrified (when he went to have a look at the ship Mary and Elizabeth) to find "sundry sorts of carved work and imagery" on that part of the vessel where the cabins were; and in the cabins themselves he observed "some superfluity of workmanship of several sorts." This subjected his mind to "a deep exercise," and he decided that he would have ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... of wonderful imagery!" Chrysophrasia was saying to Professor Cutter as the pair came in. "It is delightful to hear them talk,—so different from an ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... say that if He does not, He places a book in their hands which threatens what He does not mean to inflict. But how utterly this seems to me opposed to the gospel of Christ! All Christ's references to eternal punishment may be resolved into references to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery; with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a moral amendment beyond the grave. I speak of the unselfish desire of Dives to save his brothers. The more I see of the controversy, the more baseless does the eternal punishment theory ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... quite unmanned. A period of violent agitation followed. For a time he seemed completely transformed. The sunny Lincoln, the delight of Clary's Grove, had vanished. In his place was a desolated soul—a brother to dragons, in the terrible imagery of Job—a dweller in the dark places of affliction. It was his mother reborn in him. It was all the shadowiness of his mother's world; all that frantic reveling in the mysteries of woe to which, hitherto, her son had been ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... and above her floated the German man-of-war's flag. A boat had just been lowered, and I could see it moving toward us filled with officers and men. The cruiser lay dead ahead. "My," I thought, "what a wonderful targ—" I stopped even thinking, so surprised and shocked was I by the boldness of my imagery. The girl was just below me. I looked down on her wistfully. Could I trust her? Why had she released me at this moment? I must! I must! There was no other way. I dropped back below. "Ask Olson to step down here, ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... supernatural was not made out. And this he did not after the first-class fashion in the study or in octavo volumes, but in the street. His audiences were not Mr. Mudie's subscribers, but men and women earning weekly wages. The coarseness of his language, the offensiveness of his imagery, have been greatly exaggerated. It is now a good many years since I heard him lecture in a northern town on the Bible to an audience almost wholly composed of artisans. He was bitter and aggressive, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... thousands of years of experiment. {FN35-20} It was the commentaries of Lahiri Mahasaya which brought to light, clear of allegories, the very science of religion that had been so cleverly put out of sight in the riddle of scriptural letters and imagery. No longer a mere unintelligible jugglery of words, the otherwise unmeaning formulas of Vedic worship have been proved by the master to be full of scientific ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... poetry of the time. It generally affected the prose style of eighteenth century romance, and was a direct antidote to Johnsonianism in the imaginative literature. In our own century it bent the genius of Scott to the Highlands, and moulded the dramas of Byron, and the often vague imagery of Shelley; it appears in the style of Kingsley's Hereward, and directly or indirectly it is responsible for the pioneering efforts of Walt Whitman in prose poetry and for the rapid growth of poetic prose through De Quincey, Bulwer Lytton, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... of Revelation is full of strange imagery; and ever since it was written, men learned and unlearned have tried to turn its impassioned verses into real historical scenes, past or to come. Above all, this figure of a dragon, a monster part man, part brute, puzzled people, and they have all sorts ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... a new year. The sacrifice of the Lamb, and its blood, were to be the promise of redemption. The door-frames of the houses—symbols of the entrance into a new life—were to be sprinkled with blood. (3) Later, the imagery of the saving power of the blood of the Lamb became more popular, more highly colored. (See St. Paul's epistles, and the early Fathers.) And we have the expression "washed in the blood of the Lamb" adopted into ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... John Filson, and published in 1784. Some writers have censured this production as inflated and bombastic. To us it seems simple and natural; and we have no doubt that the very words of Boone are given for the most part. The use of glowing imagery and strong figures is by no means confined to highly-educated persons. Those who are illiterate, as Boone certainly was, often indulge in this style. Even the Indians are remarkably fond of bold metaphors and other rhetorical ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... are false. In them all, more or less visibly, man grasps at the one thing needful—self forsaken, God laid hold of. The spirit in them all is the same, answers eternally to reality; it is but the letter, the fashion, the imagery, that are relative ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... style could the magic of Shakespeare's "little touches" be drawn, or the high melancholy of Milton's imagery be led, without producing a frightful sense of the incongruous? He can quote them both—or any other great old master—and if it were not for the "inverted commas" we should not be ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... and PICTURESQUE sounds, if such an expression may be allowed—the matin-bell of a distant convent, the faint murmur of the sea-waves, the song of birds, and the far-off low of cattle, which she saw coming slowly on between the trunks of trees. Struck with the circumstances of imagery around her, she indulged the pensive tranquillity which they inspired; and while she leaned on her window, waiting till St. Aubert should descend to breakfast, her ideas arranged themselves in the ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... of Description.—Description is primarily of two kinds, that which is to give accurate information, and that which is to produce a definite impression not necessarily involving exactness of imagery. The first of these forms is useful simply in the way of explanation, serving the first purpose indicated in paragraph four. The second is useful for other purposes than that of exposition, often appealing incidentally to our sense ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... against the books success was its style. It lacked what has been described as the poetic ecstacy or sentimental verdure of the age. Trope, imagery, mawkishness, were all absent, for Borrow had gone back to his masters, at whose head stood the glorious Defoe. Borrow's style was as individual as the man himself. By a curious contradiction, the tendency is to overlook literary lapses in the very man towards whom so little latitude ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... prophetic teachings. He employed the old phraseology and imagery, but he was conscious that he used them in a new sense, and that he preached a new gospel of great joy. Jesus was not a historian, a critic or a theologian. He used the words of common men in the sense in which common men understood ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... more permanent part of the mental substratum than any formal logical presentation of ideas. How much more will this be the case with the child who feels more than he reasons, who delights in cadence and rhythm, and who loves a world of imagery! ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... love songs to Christ or the Virgin, composed in the warm language of earthly passion. The sentiment of chivalry united with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had produced Mariolatry and the imagery of the Song of Solomon, in which Christ wooes the soul, had made this feeling of divine love familiar. Toward the end of the 13th century a collection of lives of saints, a sort of English Golden Legend, was prepared at the great abbey of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... may weave his wreath of victory for the conqueror; the historian, with all the pomp of splendid imagery, may describe the heroism of the day of slaughter; but, after all, and none know this better than the men most familiar with it, a great battle is the most hateful and hellish sight that the sun looks on in all ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Fillmore started his study of the folk lore of Eastern Europe, he tapped a mine of treasure for children. The gorgeousness of the imagery in the stories, their rollicking humor, the adventures, were entirely new to child and adult readers. The stories in this third volume reflect the folk lore of many races, for the country now known as Jugoslavia has been one of the great highways and battlefields of the world where Orient and Occident, ...
— The Laughing Prince - Jugoslav Folk and Fairy Tales • Parker Fillmore
... of two curious facts relating to this order of composition. Both facts are exemplified in the history and in the texts of my collection,—though I cannot hope, in my renderings, to reproduce the original effect, whether of imagery ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... you paint your picture, twice show truth, Beyond mere imagery on the wall,— So note by note bring music from your mind Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,— So write a book shall mean beyond the facts, Suffice the eye and save the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... of some writers, that to the African is reserved, in the later and palmier days of the earth, the full and harmonious development of the religious element in man. The African seems to seize on the tropical fervor and luxuriance of Scripture imagery as something native; he appears to feel himself to be of the same blood with those old burning, simple souls, the patriarchs, prophets, and seers, whose impassioned words seem only grafted as foreign plants on the cooler stock ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... is told with the simplicity and wonder of imagery always characteristic of Rabindranath ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... only in a fanciless way of thinking, to which everything appears unnatural that does not suit its own tame insipidity. Hence, an idea has been formed of simple and natural pathos, which consists in exclamations destitute of imagery, and nowise elevated above every-day life. But energetical passions electrify the whole of the mental powers, and will, consequently, in highly favoured natures, express themselves in an ingenious and figurative manner. It has been often remarked, that indignation gives wit; and, as despair ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... thought none but our people would feel that. I thought it was all shut away like a river in a deep valley, where only heaven saw—I mean—-" she hesitated feeling that she could not disentangle her thought from its imagery. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... That should thy little limbs have quicken'd? Limbs so firm, they seem'd to assure Life of health, and days mature: Woman's self in miniature! Limbs so fair, they might supply (Themselves now but cold imagery) The sculptor to make Beauty by. Or did the stern-eyed Fate descry That babe or mother, one must die; So in mercy left the stock And cut the branch; to save the shock Of young years widow'd, and the pain When ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... About the dais behind the thwart-table were now stuck for adornment leavy boughs of oak now just beginning to turn with the first frosts. High up on the gable wall above the tenter-hooks for the hangings were carven fair imagery and knots and twining stems; for there in the hewn atone was set forth that same image with the rayed head that was on the outside wall, and he was smiting the dragon and slaying him; but here inside the house ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... pronouncing dictionaries yet known."—D. H. Barnes cor. "This is the tenth persecution, and, of all the ten the most bloody."—Sammes cor. "The English tongue is the most susceptible of sublime imagery, of all the languages in the world."—Bucke cor. "Of all writers whatever, Homer is universally allowed to have had the greatest Invention."—Pope cor. "In a version of this particular work, which, more than any other, seems to require a venerable, antique ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Edna was inclined to work carelessly, but in general her capacities proved to be decidedly good. She was accustomed to read nothing but the lightest literature and fairy stories and her interests were of the superficial sort. Neither in powers of imagery or imagination, nor by anything else ascertained about her mental abilities did we come to know of any point of ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... Nilghai lifted up his voice with a shout that shook the windows, in 'The Men of the Sea,' that begins, as all know, 'The sea is a wicked old woman,' and after rading through eight lines whose imagery is truthful, ends in a refrain, slow as the clacking of a capstan when the boat comes unwillingly up to the bars where the men sweat and ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... simple and correct survey of the island, coincidences in its geography, in its natural productions, and moral state, before unnoticed. Some will be directly pointed out; the fancy or ingenuity of the reader may be employed in tracing others; the mind familiar with the imagery of the 'Odyssey' will recognise with satisfaction the scenes themselves; and this volume is offered to the public, not entirely without hopes of vindicating the poem of Homer from the scepticism of those critics who imagine that the 'Odyssey' is a mere poetical composition, unsupported ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... of public sentiment, absolutely exiled from all communication with civilized resources, unaided and alone, their orators presented the affairs of the moment to the assembled tribe, swaying the minds and wills of their fellows into concerted and heroic action. The wonderful imagery of the Indian orator—an imagery born of his baptism into the spirit of nature—his love of his kind, and the deathless consciousness of the justice of his cause made his oratory more resistless than the rattle of Gatling guns, and also formed a model for civilized speech. It was ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... fountain on his grandfather's place in Connecticut. This in his opinion was not the way to greet the knight who had come to the rescue of his lady. He had not expected it so to happen. In fact from Athens to this place he had engaged himself with imagery of possible meetings. He was vexed, certainly, but, far beyond that, he knew a deeper adminiration for this girl. To him she represented the sex, and so the sex as embodied in her seemed a mystery to be feared. He wondered if safety came on the morrow he would not surrender to this feminine ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... Greece, 1824. Respecting his celebrated Satire on the poet Rogers, which appears in this collection, we read the following in a London periodical:—"The satire on Rogers, by Lord Byron, is not surpassed for cool malignity, dexterous portraiture, and happy imagery, in the whole compass of the English language. It is said, and by those well informed, that Rogers used to bore Byron while in Italy, by his incessant minute dilettantism, and by visits at hours when Byron did not care to see him. ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... arch into extensive practical service; except only that the Doric capital was spoiled in endeavors to mend it, and the Corinthian much varied and enriched with fanciful, and often very beautiful imagery. And in this state of things came Christianity: seized upon the arch as her own; decorated it, and delighted in it: invented a new Doric capital to replace the spoiled Roman one: and all over the Roman Empire set to work, with such materials ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... the inspiration of another. See what he says in the letter.... 'You may stand quite alone if you will—and I think you will.' That is a noble testimony to a truth. And he discriminates—he understands and discerns—they are not words thrown out into the air. The 'profusion of imagery covering the depth of thought' is a true description. And, in the verses, he lays his finger just on your characteristics—just on those which, when you were only a poet to me, (only a poet: does it sound irreverent? almost, I think!) which, when you were only a poet to me, I used to study, characteristic ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... "distance;" and its sufferings and hardships are certainly more likely to evoke pleasant fancies to him who sits beside a good coal fire, than to one whose lot it is to bear them. Even the (so-called) "varied imagery" of the Indian's eloquence—about which so much nonsense has been written—is, in a far greater measure, the result of the poverty and crude materialism of his language, than of any poetical bias, temperament, or tone of thought. ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... and yet others—a riot of verse. His soul was filled with the music of rhymes and rhythmic measures. He was overjoyed; coming to him thus spontaneously and unexpectedly, this poetic agitation caused him inexpressible happiness. And he gave ear to the music, delighting himself in rich imagery, in rare epithets, in the luminous metaphors, the exquisite harmonies, the subtle refinements which distinguished his metrical style and the mysterious artifices of the endecasyllabic verse learned from the admirable poets of the fourteenth century, and more especially from Petrarch. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... loss of sharpness in the imagery here because of the rhyme and metre? Could any phrase, of any rhythm, however free, render any better and more economically the peculiar noise of a horse turning on a hard drive and starting away in the night, than "the sound of iron ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... "and, perhaps, even in a worldly sense, for those who value the vanities of life; but he is lost to us, for all time, and lost to eternal life forever. Not," he continued in sanctimonious vindictiveness, "but that I often had my doubts of Brother Masterton's steadfastness. He was too much given to imagery and song." ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... stimulated mythology and imagery. In the reliefs of Asoka's time, the image of the Buddha never appears, and, as in the earliest Christian art, the intention of the sculptors is to illustrate an edifying narrative rather than to provide an object of worship. But in the Gandharan sculptures, which are a branch ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... hundred other hymns made thus out of royal imagery. I turn at random to the part headed "General," and find that there is hardly one hymn in which there is not "king," "throne," or some image of homage and flattery. ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... himself. Presently he spoke as though his mind were coming back from a distance. "I," he said, "dreamed a poem in India. It has never been written down, but I still can remember every line of it. Listen." The poem, which was full of vague Oriental imagery, was perfectly intelligible, and throbbed with a certain sonority like that of distant gongs; but no sane man would have written it in his waking moments. In that fact lay its charm. The author's voice, naturally low and musical, acquired new tones as he recited ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... themselves under Nigel Waverley, elder brother of that William whose fate Aunt Rachel commemorated. Through these scenes it was that Edward loved to 'chew the cud of sweet and bitter fancy,' and, like a child among his toys, culled and arranged, from the splendid yet useless imagery and emblems with which his imagination was stored, visions as brilliant and as fading as those of an evening sky. The effect of this indulgence upon his temper and character will appear in the ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... III. But his realism qualified by energetic individual preference along certain well-defined lines 245 IV. Joy in Light and Colour 246 V. Joy in Form. Love of abruptness, of intricacy; clefts and spikes 250 VI. Joy in Power. Violence in imagery and description; in sounds; in words. Grotesqueness. Intensity. Catastrophic action. The pregnant moment 257 VII. Joy in Soul. 1. Limited in Browning on the side of simple human nature; of the family; of the civic community; ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... superstitions. Morality has grown up independently of, and often in spite of, theology. The creeds have been good so far as they have accepted or reflected the moral convictions; but it is an illusion to suppose that they have generated it. They represent the dialect and the imagery by which moral truths have been conveyed to minds at certain stages of thought; but it is a complete inversion of the truth to suppose that the morality sprang out of them. From this point of view we ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... surprised if expressions are occasionally used which we should not ourselves use to-day, if we were writing about the phenomena of nature from a technical point of view. It must further be borne in mind that the astronomical references are not numerous, that they occur mostly in poetic imagery, and that Holy Scripture was not intended to give an account of the scientific achievements, if any, of the Hebrews of old. Its purpose was wholly different: it was religious, not scientific; it was meant to give ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... are to travel,—precludes, on the other hand, every affectation and morbid peculiarity;—the second condition, sensuousness, insures that framework of objectivity, that definiteness and articulation of imagery, and that modification of the images themselves, without which poetry becomes flattened into mere didactics of practice, or evaporated into a hazy, unthoughtful, day-dreaming; and the third condition, passion, provides that neither thought nor imagery shall be simply objective, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... finally, he waxeth wiser than himself, and that more by an hour's discourse than by a day's meditation. It was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, 'That speech was like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in figure; whereas in thought they lie in packs.' Neither is this second fruit of friendship, in opening the understanding, restrained only to such friends as are able to give a man counsel. (They are, indeed, best.) But even without that, a ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... an empyrean flight of poetic imagery to remember his torn and soiled silk polo-shirt with its rolled-up sleeves, his earth-stained cords, girt with a belt of vari-coloured webbing, his muddy leather leggings and boots with their caked and dusty spurs, telling of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... mind. The poet leads us through the appearances of things as they are successively varied by the vicissitudes of the year, and imparts to us so much of his own enthusiasm that our thoughts expand with his imagery and kindle with his sentiments. Nor is the naturalist without his part in the entertainment, for he is assisted to recollect and to combine, to arrange his discoveries, and to amplify the sphere of his contemplation. The great defect of the "Seasons" is want ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... us one of the greatest advantages that can befall a poet, to be drawn out of his study, and still more out of the chamber of imagery in his own thoughts, to behold and speculate upon the embodiment of Divine thoughts and purposes in men and their affairs around him. Now Shakspere had no public appointment, but he reaped all the advantage which such could have given him, and more, from the perfection of his ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... followed in May by the Giaour, the first of the flood of verse romances which, during the three succeeding years, he poured forth with impetuous fluency, and which were received with almost unrestrained applause. The plots and sentiments and imagery are similar in them all. The Giaour steals the mistress of Hassan, who revenges his honour by drowning her. The Giaour escapes; returns, kills Hassan, and then goes to a monastery. In the Bride of Abydos, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... which, aside from its spiritual teaching, contains some of the noblest examples of style in the whole range of human literature: the elemental simplicity of the Books of Moses, the glowing poetry of Job and the Psalms, the sublime imagery of Isaiah, the exquisite tenderness of the Parables, the forged and tempered argument of the Epistles, the gorgeous coloring of the Apocalypse. All these elements entered in some degree into the translation of 1611, and the result was a work of such beauty, strength and simplicity ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of diction, force and felicity of expression, pregnancy of phrase and pliancy of language, what knowledge there is of men—the passions that sway, the impulses that prompt, the motives that move them to action. Clearness of vision and accuracy of observation are evidenced in their vividness of imagery; naturalness and truthfulness—the first essential of all good writing—in their convincing sincerity of sentiment. Wit and humour, play and sparkle of fancy, satire genial or scathing, a boundless love of nature ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... opportunity to win the friendship, admiration, and love of her pupils. The inexperienced teacher who is well-nigh distracted in her efforts to guide forty restless, disorderly pupils through the program of a day's work might charm half her troubles away by the magic of a simple story or by the music and imagery of a juvenile poem. Her story or poem would do more than remove the cause of disorder by giving the pupils relaxation from nerve-straining work: it would help to establish that first essential to all true success in teaching—a relation ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... his statues.[140] Some of the work of Bandinelli and Bronzino had to be removed. What was a rational and healthy protest has survived in grotesque and ill-fitting drapery made of tin—very negation of propriety. Although needed for biblical imagery, the nude in Italy was always exotic; in Greece it was indigenous. From the time of Homer there had been a worship of physical perfection. The Palaestra, the cultivation of athletics in a nation of soldiers, the religions of the country, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... ships—when they are safe. Burrowing continually amongst the bowels of the vessel, Mr. Tooting knew the weak timbers better than the Honourable Hilary Vanes who thought the ship as sound as the day Augustus Flint had launched her. But we have got a long way from Horatius in our imagery. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was born at Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1886. He studied at Andover and at Harvard, and has lived much in London. He has become identified with the Imagists. Personally I wish that Mr. Fletcher would use his remarkable power to create gorgeous imagery in the production of orthodox forms of verse. Free verse ought to be less monotonous than constantly repeated sonnets, quatrains, and stanza-forms; but the fact is just the other way. A volume made up entirely of free verse, unless written by a man of genius, has a capacity to bore the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... imply a belief in the existence of spiritual beings intermediate between God and men, it is probable that many of the details may be regarded merely as symbolic imagery. In Scripture the function of the angel overshadows his personality; the stress is on their ministry; they appear in order to perform ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... child he had been accumulating the knowledge and the thoughts that at last found expression in his work. He had been a teller of stories before he was well in breeches; and had worked hard till middle life in accumulating vast stores of picturesque imagery. The delightful notes to all his books give us some impression of the fulness of mind which poured forth a boundless torrent of anecdote to the guests at Abbotsford. We only repine at the prodigality ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by which he attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse communion with certain orders of society and classes of human creatures. The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he was congenitally melodramatic; and before very long his habit of attributing special catch-words, gestures, and the like to his characters, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... of the language keeps for us the freshness of the imagery—the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole—which has so long become publica materies. It is not withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it is now. The dew is still on ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... the ancients, are the essentials of our modern oratory. Many able men have achieved success under these conditions as forcible and convincing speakers. But the grand eloquence of modern times is distinguished by the bursts of feeling, of imagery or of invective, joined with convincing argument. This combination is rare, and whenever we find a man who possesses it we may be sure that, in greater or less degree, he is one of the great masters of eloquence as ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... of St. Patrick,' too, is full of fine, wild, natural imagery. The boy is described as a shepherd on the hills of Down, and there is a legend, well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and leaving a gigantic footprint on a rock from which he sprang back into heaven. The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Clever imagery, humorous realism, philosophical thoughts, bizarre fancies and strange inventions—it is all vivid, all arresting, all remarkable, but it is only literature! This is a fine original image. That is a fine unexpected thought. Here indeed is a rare ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... thrill to some glowing page of Eastern imagery, when we listen enraptured to some sacred song, some impassioned speech of one filled with religious fervour; when we read of suffering borne patiently, of fortitude unequalled amid awful tribulation, of quiet perseverance conquering difficulty—we recognise the strength of the ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... must except everything pertaining to images. But even here Asiatic influence makes itself felt, not in the form, but in the preservation of the types. The imagery of the Greek school has never gone out of favour in Russia, and it still holds its place there in the representation of holy personages. In this, Russia shows her attachment to tradition, as all the Asiatic races do, and shows how little her ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... The first section (War) contains the gripping narrative poem "Fight: The Tale of a Gunner," and a series of powerful poems dealing with the great struggle in Europe. Few war-poems of the many published in this country and England reveal such sincerity, force and imagery, as these of Mr. MacKaye. Among them are "American Neutrality," "Peace," "Wilson," "Louvain," "Rheims," "The Muffled Drums," "Magna Carta," "France," "A Prayer of the Peoples," etc. The second section (Peace) ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... had inspired and disciplined English genius in the sixties and seventies, was rather nourished than repressed when in the eighties Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar and Sidney's Arcadia made the pastoral imagery a necessity. Cupid and Diana were made very much at home in the golden world of the renaissance Arcadia, and the sonneteer singing the praises of his mistress's eyebrow was not far removed from the lovelorn ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... entangled, beat out. I give you all kinds of forms to be delighted in;—fluttering leaves as well as fair bodies; twisted branches as well as open brows. The leaf and the branch you may beat and drag into their imagery: the body and brow you shall reverently touch into their imagery. And if you choose rightly and work rightly, what you do shall be safe afterwards. Your slender leaves shall not break off in my tenacious iron, though they may be rusted a little ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... favour with the others, were also noticed and applauded. Thus the poets of the earlier part of the seventeenth century may be divided into one class, who sacrificed both sense and sound to the exercise of extravagant, though ingenious, associations of imagery; and a second, who, aiming to distinguish themselves by melody of versification, were satisfied with light and trivial subjects, and too often contented with attaining smoothness of measure, neglected the more essential qualities of poetry. The ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... would have found imagery by which to improve his description of the abode of Vulcan; for how feeble must have been the objects of this nature, which a poet could view on the shores of the Mediterranean, compared with the gigantic ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... same largeness of view and the same perfection of style; no other shows an equal knowledge of the world, or contains more of those thoughts which are new as well as old, and not of one age only but of all. Nowhere in Plato is there a deeper irony or a greater wealth of humour or imagery, or more dramatic power. Nor in any other of his writings is the attempt made to interweave life and speculation, or to connect politics with philosophy. The Republic is the centre around which the other Dialogues may be grouped; here philosophy reaches the highest point (cp, especially ...
— The Republic • Plato
... into several classes. We have the single lyrics, written somewhat in the style of the later seventeenth century. Of these The Humble Bee is the most exquisite, and although its tone and imagery can be traced to various well-known and dainty bits of poetry, it is by no means an imitation, but a masterpiece of fine taste. The Rhodora and Terminus and perhaps a few others belong to that class of poetry which, like Abou Ben Adhem, is poetry because it is the perfection of ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... plan as accepted and taught by the Latter-day Saints is strikingly simple; disappointing in its simplicity, indeed, to the mind that can find satisfaction in mysteries alone, and to him whose love for metaphor, symbolism, and imagery are stronger than his devotion to truth itself, which may or may not be thus embellished. The Church asserts that the wisdom of human learning, while ranking among the choicest of earthly possessions, ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... Seville. The stone and wood of which they are constructed are so well wrought {153} in every part, that nothing could be better done, for the interior of the chapels containing the idols consists of curious imagery, wrought in stone, with plaster ceilings, and woodwork carved in relief, and painted with figures of monsters and other objects. All these towers are the burial places of the nobles, and every chapel of them ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... assumed to be the base of fact, and the legend which has been invested with such poetic grace in Greek story, there is no more than a century or so of re-telling might give to any event among a people so simple and yet so given to imagery. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... pointed out to me numberless faults of style, incoherent and fantastic imagery, sentiment alike exaggerated and a thousand leagues removed from nature. He considered, and still considers, Pierre Corneille to be a blind enthusiast of the ancients, whom we deem great since we do not ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... circumstance in the scanty history of the bard. As the house stood at little more than three miles' distance from Stratford, I resolved to pay it a pedestrian visit, that I might stroll leisurely through some of those scenes from which Shakespeare must have derived his earliest ideas of rural imagery. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... beauteous mystery. Thro' the sweet-coloured plains of Poesy Thou flowest like a sweetly-sounding stream, Here, rushing furious o'er the rocky crags Of wild, original thought, and there, 'neath bowers Of imagery, winding on thy way Peaceful and still towards the fadeless sea Of all enduring immortality. Like lightning flash for which no thunder-roar Makes preparation, from th' astonished mind On an astonished ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... universal banquet, and drank deep of Beauty. Cheek pressed to cheek, arms interlaced, we sighed in the consecrated throes of its reproduction, and in the imagery of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... nothing that is new in the matter of the Mansions; there is nothing that is not found in a far better shape in some of her other books; and one is continually wearied out by her utter inability to handle the imagery which she will not let alone. At the same time, the persevering reader will come continually on characteristic things that are never to be forgotten as he climbs with Teresa from strength to strength on her way to her ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... cries, As he gazes around him with joyful eyes,— "Honor to Labor!—the teeming press Pours forth its treasures the world to bless! From the pictured pages where childhood's eye Findeth a world of bright imagery, To the massive tome 'mid whose treasures vast, Lie the time-dimmed records of ages past, We may wander, and revel, yet ever find Supplies exhaustless for heart and mind We may turn to the Past—to the ages fled— ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... side by side in exhibitions and their names were coupled together in the current talk of the time. Burne-Jones was markedly Celtic in his love of beautiful pattern, in the ghostly refinement of his figures, in the elaborate fancifulness of his imagery. Watts had more of the full-blooded Englishman in his nature, and his art was simpler, grander, more universal. If we may compare them with the great men of the Renaissance, Burne-Jones recalled the grace of Botticelli, Watts the richness ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... each in its way, by a master's hand. "The most pervading merit of the Iliad," says one, "is its fidelity and vividness as a mirror of man, and of the visible sphere in which he lived, with its infinitely varied imagery, both actual and ideal; and the task which the great poet set for himself was perfectly accomplished." "The mind of Homer," says another, "is like an AEolian harp, so finely strung that it answers to the faintest movement of the air by a proportionate vibration. With every ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... men, drawn from the common stock of the Italian people, is seasoned with proverbial sayings, the wisdom of centuries condensed in a few nervous words. When emotion fires their brain, they break into spontaneous eloquence, or suggest the motive of a poem by phrases pregnant with imagery. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... childlike in its unchallenged faith and its tender instincts. His unworldliness was almost legendary in its belief of human nature. I remember he was asked once whether he believed in Santa Claus, and in his own beautiful imagery he said: ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... formerly prevailed in the same country, there is none more calculated to arrest his attention than the correspondence of the shepherds' encampments, scattered on the face of the less cultivated districts, with the settlements of the same kind whose concerns are so frequently brought forward in the imagery of the Iliad and Odyssey. Accordingly, the passage of Homer to which the existing peculiarity above described,' (viz. of pelting off dogs by large jagged stones,) 'affords the-most appropriate commentary, is the scene where Ulysses, disguised as a beggar, in approaching the farm of ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... me what a loathsome agony Is that when selfishness mocks love's delight, Foul as in dreams' most fearful imagery To dally with the mowing dead;—that night All torture, fear, or horror made seem light Which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... and prolific fancy, great humour, brilliant imagery and depth of feeling. Sir Reginald Mohun, in truth, is a production finished of its kind both in style and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... specific. That as M. Angelo's aim was the "destiny of man, simply considered as the subject of religion, faithful or rebellious," admitting only a "general feature of the passions;" so, in the hands of Raffaelle, the subject would have teemed with a choice of imagery to excite our sympathies; "he would have combined all possible emotions with the utmost variety of probable or real character; all domestic, politic, religious relations—whatever is not local in virtue and in vice; and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... several stones or tiers, he supported by square and other kinds of well-polished columns. Also, the walls, the capitals of the columns which supported them, and the arch of the sanctuary, he decorated with historical representations, imagery, and various figures of relief, carved in stone, and painted with a most agreeable variety of colour. The body of the church he compassed about with pentices and porticoes, which, both above and below, he divided with great and inexpressible art, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... to rise to the idea; but he could feel it enough to make any sacrifice that still remained to be made. As to what such sacrifice was now to be made to, here Newman stopped short before a blank wall over which there sometimes played a shadowy imagery. He had a fancy of carrying out his life as he would have directed it if Madame de Cintre had been left to him—of making it a religion to do nothing that she would have disliked. In this, certainly, there was no sacrifice; but there was a pale, ...
— The American • Henry James
... questioned whether the enchantments of your voice were more conspicuous in the intricacies of melody, or the emphasis of rhetoric. I have marked the transitions of your discourse, the felicities of your expression, your refined argumentation, and glowing imagery; and been forced to acknowledge, that all delights were meagre and contemptible, compared with those connected with the audience and sight of you. I have contemplated your principles, and been astonished at ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... a weighty sanction of such temperance, in almost visible symbolism (an outward imagery identifying itself with unseen moralities) that the memory of that night's double experience, the dream of the great sallow snake and the utterance of the young priest, always returned to him, and the contrast therein involved made him revolt with unfaltering instinct from the bare thought ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... company to luncheon. Visitors are as rare as black swans on this Ultima Thule of ours—though, by the way, the black swan, cygnus atratus, is nothing like so rare as the ancients believed. I have shot them myself out in Australia. Still they are rare enough for the purpose of imagery, though really not so rare as a human being one can talk intelligently to on ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne |
