"Legendary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Billy thought it improbable. The verses were very silly; and, recalling the big, blundering boy who had written them, Billy began to wonder—somewhat forlornly—whither he, too, had vanished. He and the girl he had gone mad for both seemed rather mythical—legendary as King Pepin. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... boiled with a few wild herbs, they set out to reach the kingdom of gold. It was truly one of the greatest adventures of the age, and historic, for here we get the word El Dorado, used for the first time in the history of discovery—the legendary land of gold which was never found, but which attracted all the Elizabethan sailors to this romantic country. It would take too long to tell how they had to fight Indian tribes in their progress down the fast-flowing river, how they had to build a new boat, making bellows of their leather buskins ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... location controlling the Turkish Straits (Bosporus, Sea of Marmara, Dardanelles) that link Black and Aegean Seas; Mount Ararat, the legendary landing place of Noah's ark, is in the far ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the centuries, claiming for "the faithful" the honor and glory of the first use of coffee as a beverage. One of these relates how, about 1258 A.D., Sheik Omar, a disciple of Sheik Abou'l hasan Schadheli, patron saint and legendary founder of Mocha, by chance discovered the coffee drink at Ousab in Arabia, whither he had been exiled for a certain ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... agreement about it is come to between the opposing forces, described by a recent American writer as 'the plutocracy at one end and the mobocracy at the other end' of our national legislature. In short, it has now become an 'institution,' and like other institutions it has its legendary hero, in a western legislator who is reputed to have re-elected himself for a number of years by 'putting through' successive appropriations for the 'improvement' of a stream which rose in an inaccessible mountain and emptied ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the almost legendary hero of the American Air Force—who had shot down, so latest rumors said, fifty Slav planes—was far above him. "I'll never reach Hay's record, Wells. I'll be doing pretty well if I bag half as many!" Then, ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... being worn into holes. We wonder whether Rosa Bud and Helena Landless ever played on them! Looking round, we half expect to witness the famous courting scene in Edwin Drood, and afterwards "the matronly Tisher to heave in sight, rustling through the room like the legendary ghost of a dowager in silken skirts, [with her] 'I trust I disturb no one; but there was a paper-knife—Oh, thank you, I am sure!'" An excellent local institution, called "The Rochester Men's Institute," has its home here. The house has been immortalized by Mr. Luke ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... who is mentioned twice, was an English highwayman, 1706-39. There is apparently a legendary ride from London to York that is popularly attributed to him, the idea being that he established an alibi by covering the distance so ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... that one used to be able to walk from one end of North Africa to the other in the shade. Allowing for some exaggeration, this means that either the legendary African forest of the Romans continued to subsist, or that certain bare tracts covered themselves with timber in post-Roman periods of abandonment, before the Arabs and their goats had time—for it must have required time—to change the climate and ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... are wrapped around in cobwebs and the complications of a technical system, frozen into sterility; and they have no more meaning and no more appeal to the audience at whom they are thrown in such profusion than the details of the performance of the Mosaic ritual, or the genealogies of the legendary heroes of the Hebrew Bible. We want neither edifying lessons drawn from the wanderings of Israel or the Book of Joshua; nor brilliant 'word-painting' of some of the scenes described in the Bible with a more appealing ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... But I can't get it out of my head that the air is filled with a swarm of malignant little devils, who are always watching their chance to do us an ill turn. We don't in the least know the conditions under which they can bring it off; but it's legendary that if we wear opals, or sit thirteen at table, or start an enterprise on Friday, or what not, we somehow give them their opportunity. And one naturally wishes to be on ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... in this part of the world where we are, the rifles and the big guns have gone on from morning to night and from night to morning. We are buried deep in an everlasting battlefield; but like the ticking of the clocks at home in the days gone by—in the now almost legendary Past—you only hear the noise ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... shall be destroyed, in the awful manner foretold in the Revelation; but infidelity hath long since, tipped the foundation of catholic religion, being grafted on the ruins of superstition. The absurd doctrines, and legendary tales of popery, may have been credited in the dark ages, when many of the clergy were unable to write their names, or so much as read their alphabet; but the belief of them is utterly inconsistent with the light everywhere diffused ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... 3 CHUAN. Attributed to Huang-shih Kung, a legendary personage who is said to have bestowed it on Chang Liang (d. 187 B.C.) in an interview on a bridge. But here again, the style is not that of works dating from the Ch'in or Han period. The Han Emperor Kuang ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... unsearched into by the curiositie of men's brains"; so that "it is no wonder that they do not spare to wade in all the deepest mysteries that belong to the persons or the state of Kinges and Princes, that are gods upon earth." King James's attitude to Free Thought reminds one of the legendary contention between Canute and the sea. No one has ever repeated the latter experiment, but how many thousands still disquiet themselves, as James did, about or against the progress of ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... the hour and the man came. The story is half legendary—differently told by different authors. Herodotus has one tale, Xenophon another. The first, at least, had ample means of information. Astyages is the old shah of the Median Empire, then at the ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... (Stahlhof), or "Stilyard," as it is often called in early dramatists, go far back to the legendary centuries of English history. From before the time of Alfred the Great, traders from Germany had clustered together on the bank of the Thames, close to where Cannon Street Station now stands. Amalgamation with the Hanseatic League, and the necessities and gratitude of more than one ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... some old stone-work, and dashes its little cascade (about as abundant as one might turn out of a large pitcher) into a pool, whence it steals away towards the lake, which is not far removed. The water is exceedingly cold, and as pure as the legendary Rosamond was not, and is fancied to possess medicinal virtues, like springs at which saints have quenched their thirst. There were two or three old women and some children in attendance with tumblers, which they present to visitors, full ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... loose rock, which Dante compares to the great landslip between Trent and Verona, known as the Slavino di Marco.[28] Virgil explains that this was due to the "rending of the rocks" at the time of the Crucifixion. The descent is guarded by the legendary Minotaur, the Cretan monster, part bull, part man. In this connection it may be noticed that the beings suggested by classical mythology, who are met with in the division of Hell which lies between the ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... lies Mehemet Ali, the prince adventurous and chivalrous as some legendary hero, and withal one of the greatest sovereigns of modern history. There he lies behind a grating of gold, of complicated design, in that Turkish style, already decadent, but still so beautiful, which was ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... on. It did not seem that his audience was greatly impressed. It was bewildered and dazed. But the fire leapt up behind him giving him a legendary splendour, and the whole picture was romantic and unreal like a gaudy painting ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... temporarily eliminated from the old prospector. Two months of fruitless scratching gravel when he had expected to walk without special delay to the great legendary deposit, had taken the sparkle of hope from the blue eyes, and he glanced perfunctorily at the walls of that which had once ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... master of himself. His immense strength not only burst his bonds, but broke prison, and this invincible Samson was once more free in Aberdeen, inspiring that respectable city with a legendary dread. The reward of one hundred pounds was offered in vain. Had he shown himself on the road in broad daylight, none would have dared to arrest him, and it was not until his plans were deliberately laid, that he crossed the sea. The more violent period of his career was ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... and possession of Leon. Sancho having been slain in 1072, while engaged in the siege of Zamora, Alphonso returned from exile and occupied the vacant throne. One of the most striking of the passages in the Cid's legendary history is that wherein he is represented as forcing the new king to swear that he had no part in his brother's death; but there was cause enough without this for Alphonso's animosity against the man who had helped to despoil him of his ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius's enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... overpowered all other sense. The Arguellos, it flashed upon him, were an old Spanish family, former owners of Yerba Buena Island, who had in the last years become extinct. There had been a story that one of them had eloped with an American ship captain's wife at Monterey. The legendary history of early Spanish California was filled with more remarkable incidents, corroborated with little difficulty from Spanish authorities, who, it was alleged, lent themselves readily to any fabrication or forgery. There was no racial pride: on the contrary, they had shown an ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... carpet-merchant, traveller, and explorer in Asia Minor, Egypt, and the Soudan—Benn Claridge of the whimsical speech, the pious life? All this they knew; but none of them, to his or her knowledge, had ever seen David's father. He was legendary; though there was full proof that the girl had been duly married. That had been laid before the Elders by Luke Claridge on an occasion when Benn Claridge, his brother was come among them ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... magnetic compass must be accounted amongst the most tortured of all our efforts to understand the origins of man's important inventions. Ignorance has too often been replaced by conjecture, and conjecture by misquotation and the false authority of "common knowledge" engendered by the repetition of legendary histories from one generation of textbooks to the next. In what follows, I can only hope that the adding of a strong new trail and the eradication of several false and weaker ones will lead us nearer to a balanced and integrated understanding ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... El Dorado, legendary prince of Guiana, 65; supposed lake in heart of Guiana, ib.; efforts of Spaniards and Germans to ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... blooming one moment before admiring eyes, and next lying dried and shrivelled in a tomb-like box, is not without its legendary interest, though the odor of its oriental history has, by this time, been nearly blown away by that sharp simoom of investigation, which has already whirled so many pretty fables and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... curious antique legend he obtained in Egypt, concerning the ring of Polycrates. It is remarkable as having spread into the legendary history of all countries, being still credited by the commonality. We shall have hereafter to note its existence as an old London tradition; but the version of the Greek historian is briefly thus:—Amasis, King of Egypt, conceived an extraordinary friendship for the Greek, Polycrates, ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... of this modern age are far more exact and exacting. When they hear such an opening to a story, they are at once critical and suspicious. They apply the searchlight of science to its legendary ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... the mores. The interest comes under vanity. The sanction of the caste rules is in a boycott by all members of the caste. The rules are often very harmful. "The authority of caste rests partly on written laws, partly on legendary fables or narratives, partly on the injunctions of instructors and priests, partly on custom and usage, and partly on the caprice and convenience of its votaries."[61] The harm of caste rules is so great that of late they have been broken in some cases, especially in regard to travel ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... until the close of the Mesozoic, and do not figure in its characteristic reptile population. We will consider them later. But there was a large group of reptiles in the later Mesozoic seas which more or less correspond to the legendary idea of a sea-serpent. These Dolichosaurs ("long reptiles") appear at the beginning of the Chalk period, and develop into a group, the Mososaurians, which must have added considerably to the terrors of the shore-waters. Their slender ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... pedestals, lay the kings of Castille in their tombs, their effigies crowned, in golden armour, praying, with their swords by their sides. He would stop before the chapel of Santiago, admiring through the railings of its three pointed arches the legendary saint, dressed as a pilgrim, holding his sword on high, and tramping on Mahomedans with his war-horse. Great shells and red shields with a silver moon adorned the white walls, rising up to the vaulting, and this chapel his father, the gardener, regarded as his ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pain that darkened it with ruthless shadows. Impelled by a great curiosity, she sought to come nearer, but the vast figure seemed strangely to dissolve into a cloud; and immediately she felt herself again surrounded by a hurrying throng. Then came all legendary monsters and foul beasts of a madman's fancy; in the darkness she saw enormous toads, with paws pressed to their flanks, and huge limping scarabs, shelled creatures the like of which she had never seen, and noisome brutes with horny scales and round crabs' eyes, uncouth primeval things, and winged ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... or story of the fall of Ilium (Troy), is supposed to have been written by Homer, about the tenth century B. C. The legendary history of Homer represents him as a schoolmaster and poet of Smyrna, who while visiting in Ithaca became blind, and afterwards spent his life travelling from place to place reciting his poems, until he died in Ios. Seven cities, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... belong to modern Ireland. I'm—well, I'm traditional. At least, Great-Grandfather Cartan, who came over to Wisconsin with a company of immigrants, could tell you things about our ancestors that would make you feel as if we came up out of the Irish hills. And great-grandfather, he actually looked legendary himself. Why, do you know, he came over with these ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... by the intimacy into which we are brought with the artist's innermost conception, develops into what, among the masters of the fifteenth century, I should call the imagination of the fairy tale. A small number of scriptural and legendary stories lend themselves quite particularly to the development of such beautiful accessory, which soon becomes the paramount interest, and vests the whole with a totally new character: a romantic, childish charm, the charm of the ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... desire to discredit him in the sight of the ladies of the Chateau de Montalais. Still the attempt so to do had been unmistakable: the Lone Wolf had been lugged into the conversation literally by his legendary ears. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... altar was the great east window of the church, glazed with painted glass; other windows in the church were also thus filled. The subjects pourtrayed on the glass were sometimes scriptural, sometimes legendary. Single figures of saints, distinguished by their peculiar symbols, are common; figures of crowned heads, prelates, and warriors also frequently occur; and on some windows are depicted the arms and sometimes even the portraits of different benefactors ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... Heptarchy' (Seven Kingdoms). The resistance of the Britons to the Anglo-Saxon advance was often brave and sometimes temporarily successful. Early in the sixth century, for example, they won at Mount Badon in the south a great victory, later connected in tradition with the legendary name of King Arthur, which for many years gave them security from further aggressions. But in the long run their racial defects proved fatal; they were unable to combine in permanent and steady union, and tribe ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... impression on the imagination of a boy whose delicate health prevented his rushing into the amusements and society of children of his own age. There are plenty of crones in every village, and one at least in every gentleman's house to watch "the master's children" and pour legendary lore into their willing ears, accompanied by snatches of song and fairy tale. All these were certain to seize upon such an imagination as that of Burke, and lay the foundation of much of that high-souled mental poetry—one of his great characteristics; ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... Of his proper self bereaved, Bacchus, unto thee we rear His brazen image here; We in Syracuse who sojourn, elsewhere born. Thus much we can Do for our countryman, Mindful of the debt we owe him. For, possessing ample store Of legendary lore, Many a wholesome word, to pilot youths and maids thro' life, he spake: We honour him for ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... the February of that year an "unknown bull" had been making his presence felt on the floor of the Board of Trade. By the middle of March the commercial reports of the daily press had begun to speak of "the powerful bull clique"; a few weeks later that legendary condition of affairs implied and epitomized in the magic words "Dollar Wheat" had been attained, and by the first of April, when the price had been boosted to one dollar and ten cents a bushel, Hornung had disclosed his hand, and in place of mere rumours, the definite ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... insignificant place Bath has risen to the highest point of popularity as a fashionable watering-place and in architectural magnificence through the genius of Architect Wood and Master-of-Ceremonies Beau Nash. The legendary king Bladud is said to have first discovered the Bath waters twenty-seven hundred years ago, and to have built a town there and dedicated the medicinal springs to Minerva, so that "Bladud's Well" has passed into a proverb of sparkling ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... back from historical to legendary Greece, we find a picture the reverse of what has been here sketched. We discern a government in which there is little or no scheme or system, still less any idea of responsibility to the governed, but in which the mainspring of obedience on the part ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... readers and correspondents, versed in "legendary lore," reconcile the two different tales of which "Roland the Brave" is the hero? The one related in Mrs. Hemans's beautiful ballad describes him as reported dead, and that his fair one too rashly took the veil in "Nonnenwerder's cloister pale," ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... seem to be in a high degree improbable that two such accounts as those of the Birth of Jesus Christ which we have in these two Gospels should be the work of forgers; and this improbability is further heightened when we compare them with the legendary accounts of His infancy which were actually ...
— The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord - A paper read (in substance) before the confraternity of the Holy - Trinity at Cambridge • B. W. Randolph
... great rivers Apure, Arauca, and Meta were scarcely known in Europe: certainly less than they had been in the two preceding centuries, when the valiant Felipe de Urre and the conquerors of Tocuyo traversed the Llanos, to seek, beyond the Apure, the great legendary city of El Dorado, and the rich country of the Omeguas, the Timbuctoo of the New Continent. Such daring expeditions could not be carried out without all the apparatus of war; and the weapons, which had been destined for the defence of ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... go back of a certain point. I draw the line at the legendary period when the heroes have names, and more or less coherent stories are told of their exploits, People who had a local habitation, but not a name, seem to belong to Geology only. For all their flint arrow-heads, or bronze instruments, ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... grander poetry, and it is often urged that the features of Nature in America must seem tame because they have no legendary wreaths to decorate them. It is perhaps hard for those of us who are untravelled to appreciate how densely even the ruralities of Europe are overgrown with this ivy of associations. Thus, it is fascinating to hear that the great French forests of Fontainebleau and St. Germain are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... minutely described by Poggius, one of the first who raised his eyes from the monuments of legendary, to those of classic, superstition. [5] 1.Besides a bridge, an arch, a sepulchre, and the pyramid of Cestius, he could discern, of the age of the republic, a double row of vaults, in the salt-office of the Capitol, which were inscribed with the name and munificence of Catulus. 2. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... have only been enabled to do this by the courtesy of those who owned the copyright of these stories. Lady Wilde has kindly granted me the use of her effective version of "The Horned Women;" and I have specially to thank Messrs. Macmillan for right to use Kennedy's "Legendary Fictions," and Messrs. Sampson Low & Co., for the use of ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... largely subterranean. Only when the feelings erupt in some surprising way is the process manifest. The best of these sources are autobiographies, and of these only few are full of the details of this stage. Just as in the mythic prehistoric stage of many nations there is a body of legendary matter, which often reappears in somewhat different form, so there is a floating plankton-like mass of tradition and storiology that seems to attach to eminence wherever it emerges and is repeated ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Kuen-Lun Mountains, but one and all firmly believe in Scham-bha-la, and speak of it as a fertile fairy-like land once an island, now an oasis of incomparable beauty, the place of meeting of the inheritors of the esoteric wisdom of the god-like inhabitants of the legendary island. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... founded on a Highland tradition; and to the completion of this production he assiduously devoted himself during his homeward voyage. It was published at Edinburgh in 1789, under the title of "The Harp, a Legendary Tale." In the previous year, he published a pamphlet in vindication of slavery, entitled, "On the Treatment of the Negroes in Jamaica." This pamphlet, written to gratify the wishes of an interested friend, rather than as the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to discern their features, holding torches to their faces by night and by storm. The wooing of those days was prompt and practical. There was no time for the gradual approaches of an idler and more conventional age. It is related of one Stout, one of the legendary Nimrods of Illinois, who was well and frequently married, that he had one unfailing formula of courtship. He always promised the ladies whose hearts he was besieging that "they should live in the timber where they could ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... upholding and supporting its pomp, that official persons should preside in this cultus: that constituted the duty of the priest. Beyond this ritual of public worship, there was nothing at all; nothing to believe, nothing to understand. A set of legendary tales undoubtedly there was, connected with the mythologic history of each separate deity. But in what sense you understood these, or whether you were at all acquainted with them, was a matter of indifference to the priests; since many of these legends were variously related, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... legendary lore The cow was wont to soar With Daedalean art above the moon; But ah! the cardboard cows That by the railroad browse To no elopement prompt the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... expression it must be of a national feeling that has for ages been struggling against absorption. Since ancient times Bohemia has been part of a Teutonic empire. The story of its purely native kings is not much more than legendary. Nor has it shared the harder fate of other small nations; for the Teuton rule at ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... very spirit of everything that goes to make Dalmatia delightful. Story, anecdote—ancient or legendary—beautiful cities, old churches, countless architectural and other ancient treasures, etc., etc., pervade its ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... Lamas of Tibet, the Chinese, the Burmese, and the Siamese taking it into their lands disfigured it, and spoilt it with heresies. We cannot forget that, persecuted by conquer-ing Brahmans, and expelled from India, it found, at last, a shelter in Ceylon where it still flourishes like the legendary aloe, which is said to blossom once in its lifetime and then to die, as the root is killed by the exuberance of blossom, and the seeds cannot produce anything but weeds. All this we may overlook, as I said before. ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... The legendary character of Irving's sources, as traced in German folk-lore, does not come within the scope of this introduction. The first record of a play is Thomas Flynn's appearance as Rip in a dramatization made by an unnamed Albanian, at the South Pearl Street Theatre, Albany, N. Y., May 26, 1828. It ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... summoning Bodhisattvas or deities is specially meant) and with the worship of Amitabha. His teacher Saraha, a foreigner, is said to have been the first who taught this worship in India. In this there may be a kernel of truth but otherwise the extant accounts of Nagarjuna are too legendary to permit of historical deductions. He was perhaps the first eminent exponent of Mahayanist metaphysics, but the train of thought was not new: it was the result of applying to the external world the same destructive logic ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... CALLER IN THE NIGHT by Burton Kline (The Stratford Journal). I believe that Mr. Kline has completely realized in this story a fine imaginative situation and has presented a folk story with a significant legendary quality. It is in the tradition of Hawthorne, but the substance with which Mr. Kline deals is the substance of his own people, and consequently that in which his creative impulse has found the freest scope. It may be compared to its own advantage with "The Lost Phoebe" by Theodore ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... visited Weimar, Berlin, and then went to Paris; he was meditating a tour in Russia. Pressing invitations reached him from St. Petersburg and Moscow. The most fabulous accounts of his virtuosity had raised expectation to its highest pitch. He was as legendary even among the common people as Paganini. His first concert at St. Petersburg realized the then unheard-of sum of L2,000. The roads were crowded to see him pass, and the corridors and approaches to the Grand Opera blocked to catch a glimpse of him. The same scenes were repeated at ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Christian origins, the question takes on quite a different complexion. And from Strauss onwards a growingly influential and learned body of critics is inclined to regard the whole story of the Gospels as LEGENDARY. Arthur Drews, for instance, a professor at Karlsruhe, in his celebrated book The Christ-Myth, (1) places David F. Strauss as first in the myth field—though he allows that Dupuis in L'origine de tous les cultes (1795) had given the clue to the whole idea. He then mentions Bruno Bauer ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... inseparably bound up with the details already given. And I am unable to discover any justification for arbitrarily picking out some of these and dubbing them historical verities, while rejecting the rest as legendary fictions. They stand ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... it will be said that this is a scientific age, the world is so full of necessitous life that it is waste of time for young Ireland to brood upon tales of legendary heroes, who fought with enchanters, who harnessed wild fairy horses to magic chariots and who talked with the ancient gods, and that it would be much better for youth to be scientific and practical. Do not believe it, dear Irish boy, dear Irish girl. I know as well as any ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... simply a wretched village, stretching along a narrow valley, shut in by dreary-looking rocks crowned by forts, to which you climb by staircases counting six hundred steps. The country around Plantation House, the Governor's residence, the valley of the Tomb, the Tomb itself with the legendary willows, and Longwood, the prison house, all are equally gloomy, and equally calculated to kill the great genius ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... the introduction and early progress of Christianity in Russia is involved in obscurity and overlaid with legendary stories. There is little doubt that it came from Constantinople, and was not only rapidly spread, but firmly established in the country within a short space of time. The date most generally accepted is that of the reign of Vladimir, the great prince of Kief, grandson of ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... its own chieftains and warriors, has really interwoven in his work some part of the songs and Sagas which were still current among the older men who had shared the wanderings of Theodoric. This legendary portion, which Cassiodorus himself perhaps half despised, as being gathered not from books but from the lips of rude minstrels, is in fact the only part of his work ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... and occupied his thoughtful leisure on the balcony; and at last it seemed to him that he had detected the error of his method. "This," he reflected, "is an age of generous display: the age of the sandwich-man, of Griffiths, of Pears' legendary soap, and of Eno's fruit salt which, by sheer brass and notoriety, and the most disgusting pictures I ever remember to have seen, has overlaid that comforter of my childhood, Lamplough's pyretic saline. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Wynns, the 3rd Baron Newborough, was, at his wish, buried here. The archaeology and history of the isle are voluminous. Lady Guest's Mabinogion translation (i. p. 115, ed. of 1838) gives an account of the (legendary) Bardsey House of Glass, into which Merlin (Myrddin) took a magic ring, originally kept ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... went by train to Nottingham, where they spent a short time in exploring. The present town is much like others, except in its legendary connection with Robin Hood. All visitors might not find it as fascinating as did Mrs. Pitt and the young people, who knew it as the abode of the disagreeable Sheriff whom Robin Hood heartily hated, and upon whom he continually played so many tricks, always evading punishment ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... legendary figure of a snow-covered bogie, who comes down to the villages at Christmas-time and ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... cell at Worcester the monk Florence strives to palliate by excuses of treason or the weakness of rulers the defeats of Englishmen by the Danes. AElfred, the great name of the English past, gathers round him a legendary worship, and the "Sayings of AElfred" embody the ideal of an English king. We see the new vigour drawn from this deeper consciousness of national unity in a national action which began as soon as ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... legendary to the historic Attila, we see clearly that he was not one of the vulgar herd of barbaric conquerors. Consummate military skill may be traced in his campaigns; and he relied far less on the brute force of armies for the aggrandizement of his empire than on the unbounded ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... urged, that the hostility of this tribe to foreigners, and the hereditary feuds they carry on against their fellow-islanders beyond the mountains, are facts which contradict me. Not so; these apparent discrepancies are easily reconciled. By many a legendary tale of violence and wrong, as well as by events which have passed before their eyes, these people have been taught to look upon white men with abhorrence. The cruel invasion of their country by Porter has alone furnished them ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... penetrated with it; if the simple representation of unartificial, true, and glowing feelings belongs to its most beautiful adornments; if the faithful direction of the heart to the invisible and eternal is the ground on which at all times the most lovely flowers of poetry have sprouted forth, these legendary poems of early Germany, in their lovely heartiness, in their unambitious limitation, and their pious sense, deserve a friendly acknowledgment. What man has considered the pious images in the prayer-books of the Middle Ages, the unadorned innocence, the piety and purity, the patience of the martyrs, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... important changes, or, at least, the changes whose story will be most instructive to you, came in a time of great intellectual activity. Of the earlier days the history is unfortunately less complete, and still further back the records become uncertain and many are merely legendary. ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... five times as great as that of any English cathedral, so much as it is the enormous amount of artistic work that has been expended upon it. Each of these five terraces has sculptured upon its side walls some representation in bas-relief of the legendary incidents of Buddha's existence, not only in the present state, but in his previous states of being. You walk, as it were, through a picture-gallery of the life of Buddha. The bas-reliefs are wrought out with such delicacy as to suggest the influence of Greek art upon the multitude of artists ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... the magnanimous, now to stand here upon my hind-legs, and now to crouch quietly down, like a pet kitten over-fed with new milk,—any state roguery is passed off as the greatest piece of single-minded honesty upon the mere strength of my character—if I may so say it, upon my legendary reputation. Now, as for you, though you are a lie, you are nevertheless not a bad-looking lie. You have a nice head, clean legs, and—though I think it a little impertinent that you should wear that tuft at the end of your tail—are altogether ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... "Dad," the last of the Jocelyns,—I knew also that not far off from their graves, the mortal remains of the faithful Priscilla were also resting in peace—and I felt, with a heavy sadness at my heart, that the fame of the old house was wearing out and that presently its tradition, like many legendary and romantic things, would soon be forgotten. But just at the turn of a path, where a low stile gives access to the road, I saw a man standing, his arms folded and leaning on the topmost bar of the stile—a man neither old nor young, with a strong quiet face, and almost snow-white hair—a man ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... the domestics. The remaining hours were devoted to singing, if such can be termed the monotonous drawl which constitutes the music of the country. In this one of the brothers was considered very proficient: the subjects of the songs are generally legendary feats of Christians against the conquering Turks, which, however little they may have conduced to bar the progress of the invaders, sound remarkably well in verse. Sometimes, as in the present case, ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... teeming with the recollections and visions of the past, he traversed the places hallowed by his early affections with the fondness of a lover who returns to the home of his bliss, of a mature man who revisits the scenes of his infancy. He cared not to enquire what was true or what was legendary in these time-hallowed traditions; he gladly accepted them as they stood, and studiously averted all enquiry into the foundation on which they rested. He wandered over the Peloponnesus or Judea with the fond ardour of an English ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... brief account given here of the Roman tenure of land, and the nature of the agrarian laws, will be found sufficient for all practical purposes. After all the researches that have been made, the true origin of the Latin people, and even of the Roman city, is involved in impenetrable obscurity; the legendary traditions collected by the historians are, however, the best guides that we can now follow; but it would be absurd to bestow implicit credit on all the accounts they have given, and the editor has, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... was so great that it had to be performed twice a day, that the prices of nearly all the places were raised (See Note 7, page xxv.), and that it ran for four months together. We have referred in our prefatory memoir of Moliere to some of the legendary anecdotes ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... Occidental Republic, she is the only one who has kept in my memory the aspect of continued life. Antonia the Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of the People are the artisans of the New Era, the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is: the only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... on me as a painful yet necessary duty to topple from its pedestal one of the most popular idols of legendary lore. I refer, I regret to say, to the widely famous ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... two best known are Balder Dead (1855), an incursion into the field of Norse mythology which is suggestive of Gray, and Sohrab and Rustum (1853), which takes us into the field of legendary Persian history. The theme of the latter poem is taken from the Shah- Namah (Book of Kings) of the Persian poet Firdausi, who lived and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... claymore in his behalf. But the eloquence and the determination of the young prince won over Clanranald and the Macdonalds of {205} Kinloch-Moidart; Charles disembarked and took up his headquarters at Borrodaile farm in Inverness-shire. A kind of legendary fame attaches to the little handful of men who formed his immediate following. [Sidenote: 1745—The Seven Men of Moidart] The Seven Men of Moidart are as familiar in Scottish Jacobite legend as the Seven Champions of Christendom are to childhood. Tullibardine; Sir ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... pearl that dazzles us here? The monastery of Antoorskov has vanished, even the last solitary remaining wing, though one old relic still exists—renovated and renovated again—a wooden cross upon the heights above, where, in legendary lore, it is said that HOLY ANDERS, the warrior priest, woke up, borne thither in one night ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... Indians, Discovery by Fremont, Legendary Lore, Various Namings, Physical Characteristics, Glacial Phenomena, Geology, Single Outlet, Automobile Routes, Historic Towns, Early Mining Excitements, Steamer Ride, Mineral Springs, Mountain and Lake ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... is the historical, traditional, or legendary allusion in this epithet, bestowed by Milton on ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... prayers of the Divine Office were not all contained in one book, as they are now in the Breviary, which is an abridgment or compendium of several books. The recitation of the Office required the Psaltery, the Lectionary, the Book of Homilies, the Legendary, the Antiphonarium, the Hymnal, the Book of Collects, the Martyrology, the Rubrics. The Psaltery contained the psalms; the Lectionary (thirteenth century) contained the lessons of the first and second nocturn; the Book of ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... martyrdom of Saint Dodekamus, patron of Nepenthe, we possess hardly any information of a trustworthy nature. It is with his career as with that of other saints: they become overlaid—encrusted, as it were—with extraneous legendary material in the course of ages, even as a downward-rolling avalanche gathers snow. The nucleus is hard to find. What is incontestably true may be summed up almost in ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... in the opposite direction for him to reach the outer world beyond the wall and gain his freedom. Here again is one in whom we shall seek in vain for any indication of reflection. Like the rest, in spite of his legendary renown, he has no guide but the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... traditions, illustrated by elaborate notices of their peculiar customs and manners, would be both instructive and amusing, I set myself down to the reading of the books which should add to the fund of legendary lore I had acquired by my residence among them. In all my travels, and these have been through every state but one in the American Union, and the "territories," with the exception of Michigan and the "North Western," my inquiries have been for "Indians," and respecting "Indian traditions." ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... cave, also, Zeus grown to maturity, was united to Europa, the daughter of man, in the sacred marriage from which sprang Minos, the great legendary figure of Crete. And to Crete the island god returned to close his divine life. Primitive legend asserted that his tomb was on Mount Juktas, the conical hill which overlooks the ruins of the city of Minos, his son, his friend, and his ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... pasture them on the scanty herbage of a new social soil, the atmosphere of the old house was full of floating nourishment. In the compressed perspective of Paulina's outlook it stood for a monument of ruined civilizations, and its white portico opened on legendary distances. Its very aspect was impressive to eyes that had first surveyed life from the jig-saw "residence" of a raw-edged Western town. The high-ceilinged rooms, with their panelled walls, their polished mahogany, their portraits of triple-stocked ancestors and of ringleted ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... fells the great glaciers—unchanging, almost, as the "everlasting hills"—gleamed in the sunlight against the azure sky, and sent floods of water down into the brimming rivers. The scalds ceased, to some extent, those wild legendary songs and tales with which they had beguiled the winter nights, and joined the Norsemen in their operations on the farms and on the fiords. Men began to grow weary of smoked rafters and frequent festivities, and to long for the free, fresh air of heaven. Some went off to drive ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... lime, the West Indian guava (Psidium pyriferum), and the guava of Florida, with its boxwood leaves; the tamarisk, with its spreading minute foliage, and splendid panicles of pale rose-coloured flowers; the pomegranate, symbol of democracy—"the queen who carries her crown upon her bosom"—and the legendary but flowerless fig-tree, here not supported against the wall, but rising as a standard to the height ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... years, apparently so void, were screening a strange and undreamed-of part for him to play. The Spaniards, a vague, almost legendary people, as remote from Raymond's life as the Assamese or the cliff-dwellers of New Mexico, began to take on a concrete character, and were suddenly discovered to be the enemies of the human race. Raymond ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... more momentous than any other through which she has ever passed, but still very brief when compared with all those other periods of Indian history which modern research has only recently rescued from the legendary obscurity ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... obliged to any one who will explain to me the figures on the cover, which, doubtless, have some legendary or symbolic meaning; and also give me any notes or references concerning either of the former possessors of the book, both of whom have, I believe, enriched ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... showing larger than human, through a thin rain, the blood-red figures of the coachmen and footmen gowned from head to foot in their ensanguined colors, with the black-gleaming body of the coach between them, and the horses trampling heraldically before out of the legendary past. The want of definition in the fact, which I beheld in softly blurred outline, enhanced its value, which was so supreme that I could not perhaps do justice to the vague splendors of inferior courtward equipages, as my cab flashed by them, moving in a slow ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... my original intention to let you off so easily. I started with the idea of giving you a rapid but glowing and eloquent word-picture of the valley of the Rhine from Cologne to Mayence. For background, I thought I would sketch in the historical and legendary events connected with the district, and against this, for a foreground, I would draw, in vivid colours, the modern aspect of the scene, ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... time when old age had laid a freezing hand upon the energy which he would once have put forth in defending himself. He was the Voltaire of Germany, and very much more than the Voltaire; for his romantic and legendary poems are above the level of Voltaire. But, on the other hand, he was a Voltaire in sensual impurity. To work, to carry on a plot, to affect his readers by voluptuous impressions,—these were the unworthy aims of Wieland; and though a good-natured critic would not refuse to make some allowance ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... left end of the facade is also a copy, the original by Donatello being in the Bargello, close by; but the pedestal is Donatello's original. This lion is the Marzocco, the legendary guardian of the Florentine republic, and it stood here for four centuries and more, superseding one which was kissed as a sign of submission by thousands of Pisan prisoners in 1364. The Florentine fleur-de-lis on the pediment is very beautiful. The same ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... the legendary side, which is always in evidence in the case of a celebrated man,—that gossip, for example, which avers that Maupassant was a high liver and a worldling. The very number of his volumes is a protest to the contrary. One could not write so large a number of pages in so small a ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... from his tomb, Think ye that he would mark with soul elate A kingless people, a schismatic State, Nor on his work invoke perpetual doom? Though the whole Sacred College o'er and o'er Pronounce him sainted, prophet was he none Who to Cathaia's legendary shore Deemed that his bark a path had won. In sooth, our Western pioneer Was all as prescient as he Who cried, "The desert shall exult, The wild shall blossom as the rose," And to a passing rich result Through summer heats and winter snows Toiling to prove himself a seer, ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... plant must have been analogous to that of other plants. Wheat-growers must necessarily have been people who stayed long in one place. Wandering tribes could not till and sow the fields. The origin of wheat furnished a legendary theme for many races, and mythology contained tales of wheat-gods favoring chosen peoples. Ancient China raised wheat twenty-seven centuries before Christ; grains of wheat had been found in prehistoric ruins; the dwellers along the Nile were not blind to the fertility of ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... and so little is there attractive in the legends of British history, that I need not attempt to dwell upon any of the alleged facts. But I wish before passing from this part of my subject, briefly to examine the curious tenacity with which the belief in this legendary literature was once held, and to show that it was not relinquished until a more critical standard of historic belief was adopted, and scientific investigation took the place of uninquiring and passive credulity. It has been said that no man, before ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin |
