"Imagery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... many years ago, and now nearly forgotten. I heard it by accident recited by one of the coffee-house story-tellers who abound in the Levant, and sing or recite their narratives. The additions and interpolations by the translator will be easily distinguished from the rest, by the want of Eastern imagery; and I regret that my memory has retained so few fragments of the original. For the contents of some of the notes I am indebted partly to D'Herbelot, and partly to that most Eastern, and, as Mr. Weber justly entitles it, "sublime tale," the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... my preconception of her. Slave that I am to traditional imagery, I had figured her as "flaunting," as golden-haired, as haughty to most men, but with a provocative smile across the shoulder for some. Nor, indeed, did her husband's words save me the suspicion that my eyes deceived me when anon ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... service of the Vineyard, is one of the abiding legacies of Mr. Hudson Taylor to the Church. In the power of an evident unction from the Holy One, he has been enabled herein to unfold in simplest language the deep truth of the believer's personal union with The Lord, which under symbol and imagery is the subject of The Song of Songs. And in so doing he has ministered an unfailing guidance to one of the most commonly neglected and misunderstood of the Sacred Scriptures. For how many have said in bewilderment at the richness of language and profusion of figure which both ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor
... premature snow tinging their autumnal tops, he never once alludes to them, so far as we remember, either in his poetry or prose; and that although he spent a part of his youth on the wild smuggling coast of Carrick, he has borrowed little of his imagery from the sea—none, we think, except the two lines ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... which he expects the reader to sympathize. It is the beginning of the epic poem 'Temora.' 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light; the green hills are covered with day; trees shake their dusty heads in the breeze.' And this this gorgeous, yet simple imagery, where all is alive and panting with immortality-this, William Wordsworth, the author of 'Peter Bell,' has selected for his contempt. We shall see what better he, in his own person, has ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... heaven and earth for clever and striking things to say. Instead of learning from the folk-song, Schiller had learned originally from Klopstock; and what he had learned was to pose and philosophize and invest fictitious sentiment with a maze of bewildering and far-fetched imagery. Then he had lost sympathy with Klopstock's religiosity, had acquired a better opinion of the things of sense, and had had his introduction to doubt and disgust and rebellion. When now these moods sought expression in verse, the verse took the form of impassioned rhetoric. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... XXI: 1. The scene is now entirely changed, and the battle diversified with a vast variety of imagery and description. It is worthy of notice, that though the whole war of the Iliad was upon the banks of these rivers, yet Homer has reserved the machinery of the river-gods to aggrandize his hero in this battle. There ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... than of the old Grecian. His beard is close shaved, his hair powdered, and there is even a little rouge on his cheek. To speak more intelligibly, his simple and nervous diction is often wire-drawn into a flashy and feeble paraphrase, and his imagery as well as humour, sometimes annihilated by abbreviation. Nay, to make him the more modish, the good lady is at pains to patch up his style with unnecessary phrases and flourishes in the French taste, which have just such an effect in a translation of Homer, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 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 thoughts they lie but as 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 indeed ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... this in mind, we can easily separate the grain from the chaff; and the grain is emphatically worth storing. Perhaps no poem of Browning's contains so much deep and acute comment on life and conduct: few, such superabounding wealth of thought and imagery. Browning is famed for his elaborate and original similes; but I doubt if he has conceived any with more originality, or worked them out with richer elaboration, than those of the Swimmer, of the ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... the genial, the humorous, the pathetic, the tender, the satiric, the original, the erudite, the creative—the poet, sage, and scholar. But we might exhaust ourselves in expletives, and yet fail to give any idea of his rich imagery, his wonderful power, his natural and tender pathos. Besides, who does not already know him as a really great writer, through the appreciative criticisms of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... addressed. Whether a man or a woman is in the case (for both were probably the objects of his aesthetical admiration), the tone of feeling, the language, and the philosophy do not vary. He uses the same imagery, the same conceits, the same abstract ideas for both sexes, and adapts the leading motive which he had invented for a person of one sex to a person of the other when it suits his purpose. In our absolute incapacity to fix any amative connection upon Michelangelo, or to link his name ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... unquenchable fire. If, in order to escape from these vexing thoughts, he flies to 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 Mountains, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Simon, the son of Yochai, who lived in the second century. The Zohar, it was pretended, had been concealed in a cavern in Galilee for more than a thousand years, and had now been suddenly discovered. The Zohar is, indeed, a work of genius, its spiritual beauty, its fancy, its daring imagery, its depth of devotion, ranking it among the great books of the world. Its literary style, however, is less meritorious; it is difficult and involved. As Chatterton clothed his ideas in a pseudo-archaic English, so Moses of Leon used an Aramaic idiom, which he ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... because, had he slighted them unreservedly, he would not have dwelt upon them afterwards, or have troubled himself to recall their circumstances. Here we trace his human weakness. Yet again we are reminded that it was the weakness of Csar; for the dreams were noble in their imagery, and Csarean (so to speak) in their tone of moral feeling. Thus, for example, the night before he was assassinated, he dreamt at intervals that he was soaring above the clouds on wings, and that he placed his hand within the right hand of Jove. It would seem that perhaps ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Lincoln during this term in Congress was that of July 27, 1848, when he took for his subject the very comprehensive one of "The Presidency and General Politics." It was a piece of sound and forcible argumentation, relieved by strong and effective imagery and quiet humor. A considerable portion of it was occupied with an exposure of the weaknesses of General Cass, the Presidential candidate opposed to General Taylor. Lincoln ridiculed Cass with all the wit at his command. An extract from ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... and everyone. The ingenuousness of his nature was 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
... to have received any preliminary training for the ministry, or any orthodox qualification to practise it. "We're all working in the claim of the Lord," he remarked one day, "and it don't matter a cent whether we're hired for the job or whether we waltzes in on our own account," a piece of rough imagery which appealed directly to the instincts of Jackman's Gulch. It is quite certain that during the first few months his presence had a marked effect in diminishing the excessive use both of strong drinks and of stronger adjectives ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... generalship. Horse, foot, and artillery; it's all vanguard. Right, left, and centre—but all vanguard. At the first glimpse, pioneers and scouts, rank and file, sappers and miners, sutlers and supernumeraries, all come thundering down like a thousand of brick, and gleaming in the purple and gold of imagery, to rout, disperse, and confound their obstacle; even if it's only a ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... mind. Examples are akin to analogies, and have a reflex influence on thought; they people the vacant mind, and may often originate new directions of enquiry. Plato seems to be conscious of the suggestiveness of imagery; the general analogy of the arts is constantly employed by him as well as the comparison of particular arts—weaving, the refining of gold, the learning to read, music, statuary, painting, medicine, the art of the ...
— Statesman • Plato
... days ago. It really cheered me up for half an hour. Send me a screed, Ned, as often as you can, if you love me. Anything will do. Write me more about that little girl in the hammock. That was very pretty, all that about the Dresden china shepherdess and the pond-lily; the imagery a little mixed, perhaps, but very pretty. I didn't suppose you had so much sentimental furniture in your upper story. It shows how one may be familiar for years with the reception-room of his neighbor, and never ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... expression and illustration. At least a third of his myriad metaphors are derived from it. It would indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his dramas, nay, in some of them, a single scene, the diction and imagery of which is not colored by it. Much of his law may have been acquired from three books easily accessible to him, namely Tottell's Precedents (1572), Pulton's Statutes (1578), and Fraunce's Lawier's Logike (1588), works with which he certainly seems ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... unlike most Methodist children, she regarded it more as a poetical than an ethical work. When she was only twelve, the sixty-eighth Psalm thrilled her as with the sound of a trumpet; and she was completely carried away by the glorious imagery of the Book of Isaiah, even when she did not in the least understand its meaning. But her favourite book was the Book of Ruth; for was not Ruth's devotion to Naomi the exact counterpart of hers to Cousin Anne? And she used to make up long stories ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... caught up and borne swiftly away by this strong-winged spirit; he had followed the course of its flight from beginning to end. He understood to the fullest extent the imagery of that burning symphony; for him the chords reached deep and far. For him, as for the sister, the poem meant future, present, and past. Is not music, and even opera music, a sort of text, which a susceptible or poetic temper, or a sore and stricken ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... in council, as they were wont to their lost chief, whose death song they have sung amidst the wail of the squaws. Yet Whirlwind does not grieve. He has found another squaw, fleeter than the antelope, more graceful than the fawn, whose voice is like the singing birds, and face fairer than imagery of the spirit land. Let my brother go to his home, but Whirlwind's home is where the antelope is, he will live ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... so unusual. It combines Hebrew thought and Greek speech. It is as though a Hebrew soul were living in a Greek body, and the soul has so dominated the body as to make decided changes in it. The thought and imagery, and the very words are largely taken over from the Old Testament, much of it not being found elsewhere in the New Testament. It is as though the Old Testament reaches clear over the intervening space and writes the last book of the New as an ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... followed, Irene. "The Resurrection Day" became in my mind's eye something more and something—something more complex. The little round plinth on which your figure stood erect and solitary—it no longer afforded room for all the imagery ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... gain from it, and a part to take in this feast of attractive instruction that you have prepared for them. What ingenious traits, what living touches, what well-dealt blows, what new and judiciously adapted imagery should I not have to quote, were I to enter in detail into your pages, so different from what one usually reads on similar subjects! In your arguments, and in the intrinsic and extrinsic proofs you adduce, what weight—without heaviness, what solidity—without ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... from which it is plain how great is the virulence of Lee.' Among the contributors was Sapidus, head master of the famous school at Schlettstadt, which was one of the first Latin schools of the age. His letter to Lee concludes with a disgusting piece of imagery, which would shock one if it proceeded from the most unpleasantly minded schoolboy. One cannot conceive a Head Master of Rugby appearing in print ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... anchor" and securing it afterwards is unduly prolonged, and made a weariness to the chief mate. He is the man who watches the growth of the cable—a sailor's phrase which has all the force, precision, and imagery of technical language that, created by simple men with keen eyes for the real aspect of the things they see in their trade, achieves the just expression seizing upon the essential, which is the ambition of the artist in words. Therefore the sailor will never say, "cast anchor," ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... 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 ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... of his predecessors, for by the time that he had become famous the art of parliamentary reporting had attained almost to its present perfection; and there are none which more amply repay critical study. Second only to Burke in the grandeur and richness of his imagery, he greatly excelled him in readiness, in tact, and in those adventitious advantages which go so far to make an orator. Mr. Gladstone remembered the "light and music" of the eloquence with which he had fascinated Liverpool seventy years before. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of subjects and ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... hardly another American woman-poet whose poetry is generally known and loved like that of Sara Teasdale. 'Rivers to the Sea', her latest volume of lyrics, possesses the delicacy of imagery, the inward illumination, the high vision that characterize the poetry that will endure the test of time."—'Review ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... Amen thinks the world of him. Amen ought to have been a Tutonian soldier. He says the best imagery of religion comes from war. I told him I had an article written about a fight which said that our men 'fought like demons' and 'yelled like fiends,' and I would change it to read that they fought like seraphs and yelled like cherubim, but he didn't ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... Doddridge—theologians and scholars, Broad Churchmen and Nonjurors, preachers and essayists, Churchmen and Nonconformists—expressed themselves far more unreservedly than is at all usual in our age, even among those who, in theory, interpret Scripture in the same sense. The hideous imagery depicted by the graphic pencil of Orcagna on the walls of the Campo Santo was reproduced no less vividly in the prose works of Bunyan, and with equal vigour, if not with equal force of imagination, by almost all who sought to kindle by impassioned pulpit appeals the conscience of their hearers. ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... 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 eagerness ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... haps, and townward him to lead; For on Ascanius well beloved was all his father's thought: And therewithal gifts good to give from Ilium's ruin caught He bade him bring: a cope all stiff with golden imagery; With saffron soft acanthus twine a veil made fair to see; The Argive Helen's braveries, brought from Mycenae erst, 650 When she was seeking Pergamos and wedding all accursed: Her mother Leda gave her these and marvellous they ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... east"—for these were the only bed-curtains Shan More and his companions ever had—they stretched themselves and yawned, and felt very thirsty, for they had all been blind drunk the night before, be it remembered; and Shan More, to use his own expressive and poetic imagery, swore that his tongue was "as rough as a rat's back," while his companions went no further than saying theirs were as "dry as a lime-burner's wig." We should not be so particular in those minute details ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... lovers' nuptials. The result of this too easily ordered union of souls and bodies, unhappily for this otherwise charming poem, is an insufficiency of conflict. Aside from the poem's un-Marlovian insistence on matrimony, its most notable feature is its skillful and sustained use of light and dark imagery, recalling Chapman's much less extensive treatment of such imagery in his conclusion of Marlowe's poem and in Ovid's ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... hear Mr. Grey's answer: 'All religions are true, and all 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 ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... experience that it represents. Not one, but perhaps fifty or a hundred, inspired souls, laymen, prophets, priests, sages, kings, and warriors, have each clothed the divine truth that came to them or to their generation in exquisite language and imagery, and given it thus to their race and humanity. Successive editors have collected and combined the noblest of these psalms, and the Psalter is the result. The exact date of each psalmist and editor is comparatively unimportant, for though differing widely in origin and theme, ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... Bosom," their name for the state of the faithful departed immediately after death. And He says, Lazarus "was carried by the angels." If anybody else but Jesus had said it, we might pass this over as a piece of poetic imagery. But it was Jesus who said it. He says so much about the angels. He says that there are guardian angels of the children. He says that the angels rejoice over one sinner that repenteth. He would not say this about Lazarus carried by the ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... then to a sewing machine that she uses, then by analogy to an organ that he sees on the street adorned with a monkey, then to his toys representing animals.[47] We have elsewhere given more similar cases, where we perceive the fundamental difference between thought by imagery ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... metaphor is derived from a torrent-bed, which, when dried up, serves for a sandy or shingly path."—Note by H. F. Tozer, Childe Harold, 1885, p. 257. Or, perhaps, the imagery has been suggested by the action of a flood, which ploughs a channel for itself through fruitful soil, and, when the waters are spent, leaves behind it "a sterile track," which does, indeed, permit the traveller to survey the desolation, but serves no other purpose ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... has been the cause of more philosophical discussions than any other man, with the exception of Simmias the Theban (Phaedrus); of Aristophanes, who disguises under comic imagery a serious purpose; of Agathon, who in later life is satirized by Aristophanes in the Thesmophoriazusae, for his effeminate manners and the feeble rhythms of his verse; of Alcibiades, who is the same strange contrast of great powers ...
— Symposium • Plato
... Practyse of Prelates, 1530, relates the wild legend of Charlemagne's dotage:—"And beyond all that, the saying is that in his old age a whore had so bewitched him with a ring and a pearl in it and I wot not what imagery graven therein, that he went a salt after her as a dog after a bitch and the dotehead was beside himself and whole out of his mind: insomuch that when the whore was dead he could not depart from the dead corpse but ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... this moment, if ever in our national life, we must be content to "walk by faith and not by sight." This chapter began with imagery, and with imagery it shall end. "I have often stood on some mountain peak, some Cumbrian or Alpine hill, over which the dim mists rolled; and suddenly, through one mighty rent in that cloudy curtain, I have seen the blue ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Crabbe, has introduced the figure of a Devonshire pack-horse bending under the 'swagging load' of the high-piled crooks as an emblem of care toiling along the narrow and rugged path of life. The force and point of the imagery must be lost to those who have never seen (and, as in an instance which came under my own knowledge, never heard of) this unique specimen of provincial agricultural machinery. The crooks are formed of two poles,*[11] about ten feet long, bent, ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... four years of age, and published poems at ten. Her first effusions appeared in a local paper at Reading, Pa. Being a born poetess, her success as a writer was assured from the first, and her warmth of expression and richness of imagery, combined with a curious quaintness, the outgrowth of the deep vein of mysticism that pervades her nature, soon attracted the attention of the literati of this country, one of the most distinguished of whom, the late George D. Prentice, did not hesitate to pronounce ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... of the present century. Dream books in all languages continued to sell in cheap editions and the interpreters of dreams made a decent or, at any rate, a comfortable living out of the poorer classes. But the psychologist rarely paid attention to dreams except incidentally in his study of imagery, association and the speed of thought. But now a change has come over the spirit of the times. The subject of the significance of dreams, so long ignored, has suddenly become a matter of energetic study and of fiery ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... of narcotic smoke. They lull the brain as in a dream, and form themselves gradually into visions of a land more beautiful than any land that has ever existed anywhere, a country of vivid rice plains and sudden hills, of gracious forests and red temple gateways, of wise priests and folk-lore imagery, of a simple-hearted smiling people with children bright as flowers laughing and playing in unfailing sunlight, a country where everything is kind, gentle, small, neat, artistic, and spotlessly clean, where men become gods not by sudden apotheosis ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... modern verse writers call "imagery," is not the product of imagination, but a restless pursuit of comparison, and a lax use of language. Instead of presenting us with an image of the object, they present us with something which they tell us is like the object—-which it rarely is. The thing itself ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... the Elizabethan Poets seems to have fallen on Mr. Stephens, for we have scarcely ever met with, in the works of modern dramatists, the truthful delineations of human passion, the chaste and splendid imagery, and continuous strain of fine poetry to be found ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... in those old chimneys, the fleeting sparks, the curling smoke, and glowing coals, all may have inspired their fancies. There is a strong tinge of household coloring in many parts of Shakspeare, imagery that could only have come from such habits of quiet, household contemplation. See, for example, this description of the stillness of the house, after all are ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... is as much loved and admired by Hindoos as by Muhammadans; and from boyhood to old age he continues the idol of the imaginations of both. The boy of ten, and the old man of seventy, alike delight to read and quote him for the music of his verses, and the beauty of his sentiments, precepts, and imagery.[31] ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... some terraces, covered in the same manner, you reach the top and passing a great gate, enter at once this sad but imposing theatre of Gaudama's glory. One's first impressions are, what terrible grandeur; what sickening magnificence; what absurd imagery; what extravagant expenditure; what long successions of devotees to procure this throng of buildings of such various dates; what a poor religion which makes such labors its chief meritoriousness! Before you, stands the huge Shoodagon, its top among the clouds, and its golden ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... result, until they began to bring the 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 as were nearest at hand, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... and Lamb is Thomas de Quincey. He wrote both for Blackwood's and for the London Magazine, in the latter of which appeared in 1821 his best known work, the Confessions of an English Opium Eater. He excelled in what was the dominant characteristic of English prose of this period, in imagery, a quality which is conspicuous in the light fancy of Coleridge's most famous poems, and which gives life to an author so uniformly in dead earnest as Macaulay. Viewed historically, this taste for imagery ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... a speculum reflecting life as the keenest eyes have seen it. All its forms and imagery are of value only as this. Taken by themselves, 'the best in this kind are but shadows.' We have to 'piece out their imperfections, with our thoughts;' 'imagination has to amend them,' and 'it must be our imagination, not theirs.'[23] ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... dream 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
... vicissitudes, changes, and restorations. It has fared ill on many occasions; perhaps the greatest defilement being that which befell it during the Revolution, when it was not only foully desecrated, its statues and other imagery despoiled, but the edifice was actually doomed to destruction. This fortunately was spared to it, but in the same year (1793) it became a "Temple of Reason," one of those fanatical exploits of a set of madmen who are periodically let ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... with a rude shock that, unlike my Indian friends, I was an alien, a stranger in my native land; its fauna and flora had no fond, familiar place amid my mental imagery, nor did any thoughts of human aspiration or love give to its hills and valleys the charm of personal companionship. I was alone, even ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... gardens; again, they are fine and fantastic, like Venetian glass; and they are all curiously flooded with the moonlight of dreams. . . . Miss Lowell has a remarkable gift of what one might call the dramatic-decorative. Her decorative imagery is intensely dramatic, and her dramatic pictures are in themselves vivid and fantastic decorations." — Richard Le Gallienne, 'New York Times ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... the symbol had borne for all men skilled in her traditions: to the schools of craftsmen the sign meant further their craft's noblesse, and pure descent from the divinely-terrestrial skill of Daedalus, the labyrinth-builder, and the first sculptor of imagery pathetic[48] ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... I use on this occasion the words of a better Critick, who yet was not willing to carry the illiteracy of our Poet too far:—"They who are in such astonishment at the learning of Shakespeare, forget that the Pagan Imagery was familiar to all the Poets of his time; and that abundance of this sort of learning was to be picked up from almost every English book that he could take into his hands." For not to insist upon Stephen Bateman's Golden booke ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... imagery, however, form but a small part of the characteristics by which a literary faction is to be distinguished. The subject and object of their compositions, and the principles and opinions they are calculated to support, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Kuyper's Transvaal lioness is to take her stand, in order to carry out Krueger's programme "Africa for the Afrikanders, from the Zambesi to Simon's Bay." But the poor animal would not be long on that height, before she would die of cold and hunger. This concluding imagery well reflects the spirit of Dr. Kuyper's essay; it demonstrates to perfection the rapacious and megalomaniac ideal of the Boers; and in his grandiloquence the author contrives to express exactly the ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... sicken'd) 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 Single State comes back again To the lone man who, reft of wife, Thenceforward ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... student 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— And converse hold with the gifted dead,— Old climes of historic fame ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... are not seldom with the dead, must have felt both these conditions; how, in certain passive, tranquil states, there comes up into the darkened chamber of the mind, its "chamber of imagery"—uncalled, as if it blossomed out of space, exact, absolute, consummate, vivid, speaking, not darkly as in a glass, but face to face, and "moving delicate"—this "idea of his life;" and then how an effort to prolong and perpetuate ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... nations who do not know him, the true God. It had been prophesied before that the heathen nations would come to Mount Zion to ask counsel of the God of Judah, and that Jehovah should become law-giver and judge over them. The Unknown enlarges on this theme with splendid imagery, and strives to persuade the people to make this cause their own, and to rise to the responsibility it involves. Israel is to be a prince, a leader and commander, of the peoples. The Gentiles are to come from far ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... 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 to take ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... labor," and armed to the teeth with mighty argument, hurled himself upon me with the fury of a lion. His blows descended like thunderbolts, and the welkin rang with cheers when his lance went shivering to the center. His logic was appalling, his imagery was sublime. His tropes and similes flashed like the drawn blades of charging cavalry, and with a flourish of trumpets, his grand effort culminated in a splendid tribute to the Republic, crowned ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... intolerance and bigotry under their influence; nor can we ever have that joy in heavenly hope that belongs to those whose hearts cleave to all that is pure and true, and whose souls are therefore filled with the imagery of virtue. ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... 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 of ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... less dazzled after dreaming of visible objects. 6. Reverie, belief. 7. How we distinguish ideas from perceptions. 8. Variety of scenery in dreams, excellence of the sense of vision. 9. Novelty of combination in dreams. 10. Distinctness of imagery in dreams. 11. Rapidity of transaction in dreams. 12. Of measuring time. Of dramatic time and place. Why a dull play induces sleep, and an interesting one reverie. 13. Consciousness of our existence and identity in dreams. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Wandsworth, Homer 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
... asked himself why it is that so much of the poetry of the Negro fails to reach the ultimate standards of art? It certainly is not because of lack of imagination, for God has been generous in the imagery with which he has endowed the race. First of all, last of all, is it not the matter of technique? Many booklets of verse that have been issued show that the writers had not mastered even the ordinary fundamentals of English grammar. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... sorrows of men are deeper than the sorrows of children, even though the latter be accompanied by more tears. Those who believe that the master passion of love expresses itself by floods of words or by abominable imagery, will understand Turgenev as little as they understand life. In reading the few pages in which the lovers meet by night in the garden, one feels almost like an intruder—as one feels at the scene of reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia. It ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... could reply the 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 tramp in ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... economy, as he used his money;—with which he could be generous and splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when there was no need to spend it. He never indulges in needless extravagance of rhetoric, lavish epithets, profuse imagery. He lays his opinions before you with a grave simplicity and a perfect neatness." This is quite true of him, and the result is that though you may deny him sincerity, simplicity, humanity, or good taste, you can hardly ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... embellished his subject with the higher ornaments of style, and diffused around the severer sciences the graces and elegancies of taste. For force of expression he might be compared to Chatham, and in splendid imagery he sometimes rivaled Burke. He would, at pleasure, spread a sudden blaze around his subject or diffuse ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... 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 by Rioja and Consuelo he is entitled to be judged. They will ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... 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 ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... produces arguments "wide in range, of profound significance and infinite ingenuity," to defend and justify immoral intercourse with a gipsy trull. The poem consists of the speculations of a libertine, who coerces into his service truth and sophistry, and "a superabounding wealth of thought and imagery," and with no further purpose on the poet's part than the dramatic delineation of character. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is spoken of in a similar manner as the justification, by reference to the deepest principles of morality, of compromise, hypocrisy, lying, and ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... friend, and therefore, I must put in a word or two for him. Yes, he is a splendid writer. Again and again I assert that he writes magnificently. I do not agree with you about his works, and never shall. He writes too ornately, too laconically, with too great a wealth of imagery and imagination. Perhaps you have read him without insight, Barbara? Or perhaps you were out of spirits at the time, or angry with Thedora about something, or worried about some mischance? Ah, but you should read him sympathetically, and, best of all, at ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... garden of Eternal Youth had already become clouded in its imagery. The girl-figure who walked in it was still distinctly and unchangingly herself, but her companion was more blurred and undefined, as a picture that has been superimposed ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... the description to a time of more leisure and better accommodation. He who has not made the experiment or is not accustomed to require vigorous accuracy from himself, will scarcely believe how much a few hours take from certainty of knowledge and distinctness of imagery; how the succession of objects will be broken, how separate parts will be confused, and how many practical features and discriminations will be found compressed and conglobated into one gross and general idea." [530] "Brave words," comments Burton, "somewhat pompous ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... Representative from Mississippi, was the most eloquent speaker that I have ever heard. The lame and lisping boy from Maine had ripened, under the Southern sun, into a master orator. The original, ever-varying, and beautiful imagery with which he illustrated and enforced his arguments impressed Webster, Clay, Everett, and even John Quincy Adams. But his forte lay in arraigning his political opponents, when his oratory was "terrible as an army with banners;" nothing could stand against ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... his "History of Art," says: "The fine arts, in their rise and decadence, may be likened unto great rivers which, at the point of fullest greatness, break up into innumerable tiny streams and are lost in the sands." Still following this imagery, he compares "Egyptian art to a fine tree whose growth is stopped by a sting; Etruscan art to a torrent; Greek art to ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... natural sights and sounds—the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of [98] "Resolution and Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve." To read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a day spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with its precise ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... their nature and history. An observation which he made, not without a certain flash in his light eyes and a transient uncovering of the teeth, on the Irish type of female beauty suddenly suggested to me a stanza of an ancient Polish ballad, very full of milk-and-blood imagery, of alternating ferocity and voluptuousness. This I quoted to the astounded foreigner in the vernacular, and this it was that metamorphosed his mere perfection of civility into sudden warmth, and, in fact, procured me the invitation ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... principles that lie beneath its phenomena, his sympathy with all men's more generous emotions—and still I have a store of satisfactory illustrations at hand for the mere trouble of turning the leaves. Consider, for instance, the imagery in his description of the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the truth without falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of the world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use of personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into imagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up his view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent upon expressing any other man's experiences but his own ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... natural garb in the short and expressive phraseology of those old English writers of whom he manifests on all occasions so thorough an appreciation. As a sweet specimen, although a careless one, of his power of combining deep feeling with the most picturesque imagery, we select one of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... conscientious to make errour permanent and pernicious, by deliberately writing it. He was conscious of his superiority. He loved praise when it was brought to him; but was too proud to seek for it. He was somewhat susceptible of flattery[25]. His mind was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet. It has been often remarked, that in his poetical pieces, which it is to be regretted are so few, because so excellent, his style is easier than in his prose. There is deception in this: it ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... ceiling. Through the leaded panes of the windows he saw a rich glow of sunlight, green lawns, and against the deepest and most radiant of all blue skies the wonderful far-lifted towers of a vast, Gothic cathedral—mystic, rich with imagery. ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... matter-of-fact minds; and then, when the emotion is cooled down, and the fluent fancies are reduced to stiff, hard prose, say—"there, that is the exact meaning of this language!" Fancy Shakespeare's impetuous, tumultuous riotous imagery treated ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... pleasures not upon that side that is next the sun, or where they look beauteously, that is, as they come towards you to be enjoyed, for then they paint and smile, and dress themselves up in tinsel, and glass gems, and counterfeit imagery.—Jeremy Taylor. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... He was not to be represented by any image, or any graven form. And, since, in every thing here below, we see the resultant of two opposing forces, under him were two coequal and coeternal principles, represented by the imagery of Light and Darkness. These principles are in never-ending conflict. The world is their battle-ground, man is ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... undressed and got into bed, where he tried to read "Thus spake Zarathustra" which he had found among Lida's books. But the first few pages were enough to irritate him. Such inflated imagery left him unmoved. He spat, flung the volume aside, and soon fell ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... furnished by Sir William Jones, that of the Persian Hafiz, the early ballads of the Arabians, Moors and Spaniards, the poems of Ossian, besides the primitive Saxon ballads, and the triads of Wales, all indicate the extravagant imagery and rude license of poetry in the early ages of society. The history of those several nations also attests the magical influence of their early poetry upon the peoples. We find that Tallifer the Norman trouvere, who accompanied William ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... is not for him to exhibit the true excellency of speech, because he cannot feel its power. It is not for him, whatever be the theme, to convince the judgement with deductions of reason, to fire the imagination with glowing imagery, or win with graceful words the willing ear of taste. His wisdom shall be silence, when men are present; for the soul of manly language, is the soul that thinks and feels as ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... path, whereas the scientific man must not neglect. The imagination of the poet has to be unrestricted. The intuitions of emotion cannot be established by rigid proof. He has, therefore, to use the language of imagery, adding constantly the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... preaching before "the Men" who were appointed to judge of his qualifications. Right in front of him, on a low bench, sat the awful Three, silent, stolid, and stern. His best rounded periods, his neatest imagery, his aptest quotations, brought no light into their vacant gray eyes: perhaps they were looking beyond all these, straight at the doctrine. The breeze blew freshly from the German Ocean, over the purple hills; but it brought no coolness to that miserable Boanerges. How he did perspire! ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... Ptolemaist; for him the sun still rises and the earth stands still. Tennyson really worked the essence of modern science into his poetical constitution, so that its appalling birds and frightful flowers were really part of his literary imagery. To him blind and brutal monsters, the products of the wild babyhood of the Universe, were as the daisies and the nightingales were to Keats; he absolutely realised the great literary paradox mentioned in the Book of Job: "He saw Behemoth, ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... is there of the strangeness and yearning of the poor human soul in this earthly pilgrimage. The poetical "Life 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 foot-print on a rock from which he sprang into heaven. The legend, of course, rose ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... part of this intelligence has been derived to us from the Poets; by which means it has been rendered still more extravagant, and strange. We find the whole, like a grotesque picture, blazoned high, and glaring with colours, and filled with groups of fantastic imagery, such as we see upon an Indian screen; where the eye is painfully amused; but whence little can be obtained, which is satisfactory, and of service. We must, however, make this distinction, that ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... spoke dreamily, resting against the stone beside him, seemingly little conscious of the words that fell in oriental imagery from his lips. In other days Unorna had heard him speak like this to her, and she had loved the speech, though not the man, and sometimes for its sake she had wished her heart could find its fellow in his. And even now, the tone and the words had a momentary ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... notes faintly, like an echo, but with a rich, sad undertone that brought tears. Then, timidly and still softly, it elaborated the theme, weaving in and out through the original three the glitter and shimmer of a splendid web of sound, spreading before the awakened imagination a broad river of woods-imagery that reflected on its surface all the subtler moods of the forest. The pine shadows, the calls of the wild creatures, the flow of the brook, the splashes of sunlight through the trees, the sigh of ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... created by this meeting of old Maisie and old Phoebe, each of whom for nearly half a century had thought the other dead. It is forced to appeal to its reader to make an effort to help its feeble presentations by its own powers of imagery. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the Uruvilva desert, sympathising with him in the austerities he endured, and hoping that they would issue in his Buddhaship. They were not aware that that issue had come; which may show us that all the accounts in the thirty-first chapter are merely descriptions, by means of external imagery, of what had taken place internally. The kingdom of nirvana had come without observation. These friends knew it not; and they were offended by what they considered Sakyamuni's failure, and the course ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... but to flout, the ruins grey. When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruin'd central tower; When buttress and buttress, alternately, Seem framed of ebon and ivory; When silver edges the imagery. And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die; When distant Tweed is heard to rave, And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave, Then go—but go alone the while— Then view St. David's ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... notice that the lavish and bold imagery of Ezekiel effectually served the immediate purpose for which it was employed; it attracted the people's regard, explained the prophecy to their understandings, and fixed the lessons in their memories. It is ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... observe another point. The vividness, magnitude, and violence of the imagery in some of these passages are characteristic of Macbeth almost throughout; and their influence contributes to form its atmosphere. Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast and dashed to death; of ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Lady Louvaine," said Mr Marshall. "'He that believeth shall not make haste.' Yet there be sheep—to follow your imagery, or truly that of our Lord—that will lag behind, and never ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... your heart?" said Mirah, eagerly. "I 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
... the habit 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
... 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 the solidity of their ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the Old Testament severity of this one. There was no compromise with human desires in it, not a touch of color except the brown that time gives unpainted wood, not an effort anywhere to appeal to the imagination or suggest holy imagery. Only the semicircular altar rail about the narrow box pulpit suggested human frailty, prayer and repentance. On the men's side—for the law of sex was observed to the point of segregation in all our churches—there was a ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... they parted. All their air castles and beautiful chambers of imagery, blown to the ground by one sad cyclone of fate. In the city of A.P., a resting place was found for the stranger who had suddenly dashed from their lips the scarcely tasted cup of happiness. Mr. Luzerne employed for her the best ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... sincere was the enthusiasm of the Renaissance for Greek ideals as well as for modes of expression, how classicism had come to be understood as a synonym for perfection in form whether in literature or the plastic arts,—all the pretty imagery of the Golden Age and its demigods becomes as natural a poetic rendering of sincere feeling as the equally formal restrictions of the measure of the sonnet or the rules which govern the composition of a concerto. Having once learned its technique genius ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... to believe that Byron had not read, and more or less consciously turned to account, the imagery of this novel; but it is needless to add that any charge of plagiarism falls to the ground. Thanks to a sensitive and appreciative ear and a retentive memory, Byron's verse is interfused with manifold strains, but, so far as Darkness is concerned, his debt ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... his family and himself, particularly with the children: he was obliged to maintain an endless hypocrisy about the miracles, the dogmas and affairs, of Sunday school and the church. As a child he had been so filled with a literal Presbyterian imagery that, when a degree of reason discarded figures of speech seen as concrete actualities, nothing had been left. With the lapse of a purely pictorial heaven and hell, the loss of eternal white choirs and caldrons of the unrepentant, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... untrodden mountains; and lo a noble house, And a hall with great craft fashioned, and made full glorious; But night on the earth was falling; so scantly might they see The wealth of its smooth-wrought stonework and its world of imagery: Then Loki bade turn thither since day was at an end, And into that noble dwelling the lords of God-home wend; And the porch was fair and mighty, and so smooth-wrought was its gold, That the mirrored ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... the procession, in which marched the Duke of Alva, the Prince of Orange, and other great personages, carrying the sword, the globe, the sceptre, and the "crown imperial," contained no emblems or imagery worthy of being recorded. The next day the King, dressed in mourning and attended by a solemn train of high officers and nobles, went again to the church. A contemporary letter mentions a somewhat singular incident as forming the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... he had produced, out of many strange elements, something which has a place apart in English poetry. Death's Jest-Book is perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a page without its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A slave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parable ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... sacrifices her capital; she carries it with her from England to France in her speech, and recognises no channel passage. In fact," and Carmichael plunged into new imagery, "a man's progress is after the manner of a mole, while a woman flits from branch ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... Indifference to woman is but included in a much more general indifference to mankind. The fact becomes all the more evident when we descend from sex to gender. That Father Ocean does not, in their verbal imagery, embrace Mother Earth, with that subtle suggestion of humanity which in Aryan speech the gender of the nouns hints without expressing, is not due to any lack of poesy in the Far Oriental speaker, but to the essential impersonality of his mind, embodied now in the very character of ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... a gesture expressive of the motion of a night bird beating its wings, and, lapsing into silence, stood smiling at Pierre, who was bewildered. Beauclair had told him all that beforehand, using almost the same words and the same imagery. Point by point, his prognostics were realised, there was nothing more in the case than natural ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... expressive eyes looked repose or shot fiery tumult into theirs who listened, while his own face glowed, or was changeless in pallor, as his imagination quickened his blood or drew it back frozen to his heart. His imagery was from the worlds which no mortals can see but with the vision of genius. Suddenly starting from a proposition, exactly and sharply defined, in terms of utmost simplicity and clearness, he rejected the forms of customary logic, and by a crystalline process of accretion, built up his ocular ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
