"Vivid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Above the cliffs, white and sharp and fantastic in their outline, snowy mountain summits showed clear against the deep blue sky. Between them, imperceptibly moving on its secular way, hung the glacier, a track of vivid ultramarine and green, looking like a giant pathway to the stars. Mildred guessed she was in Switzerland. She knew that it should be easy to get back to England, yet for her with her peculiar inexperience of life, it would not be ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... calls three on The Dutchman. His badge number was 11,785. Yes, that's the bet; I remember Billy Cass takin' it. You see," he continued, explanatory of his vivid memory, "he's gen'rally a piker—plays a long shot—an' his limit's twenty dollars; so, when he comes next a favorite that day with a cool thou' it give me stoppage of the heart. Damn'd if I didn't get cold feet. Bet yer life it wasn't Billy's ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... her leaving Egypt would be to her arrival in the country! How flattened out and disillusioned she would feel! What an ordinary, everyday ending to her vivid romance in the Valley! When she thought of the little hut, almost hidden in one of the many wrinkles of the hills, she smiled. Her senses glowed; she visualized the arid scene, suddenly transformed into an Eden with Love's passion-flowers. No garden ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... kept silent as to that strange condition of affairs which has tortured me in my sleep for the past year and a half; no one but myself has until this writing known that for that period of time I have had a continuous, logical dream-life; a life so vivid and so dreadfully real to me that I have found myself at times wondering which of the two lives I was living and which I was dreaming; a life in which that other wicked self has dominated, and forced me to a career of shame and ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... brought out its distinctive features with singular distinctness against a background of olive-green wall and velvet curtain. Its covering of glossy white damask, its ornaments of Venetian glass, the delicate yet vivid colours of the hothouse flowers and fruit in the dishes, the gem-like tints of the wines, the very texture and the hues of the Bulgarian embroidery upon the d'oyleys, formed a study in colour which an artist would have loved to ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... his words, for just then that swooping air-demon turned to vivid fire, lightning playing back and forth, from side to side, in every conceivable direction, until in spite of the broad daylight its glory pained those ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... by Luchaire in his scholarly study of French Society in the time of Philip Augustus. She was, he tells us, as indeed she had been in the preceding feudal centuries, often what we should nowadays call a virago, of violent temperament, with vivid passions, broken in from childhood to all physical exercises, sharing the pleasures and dangers of the knights around her. Feudal life, fertile in surprises and in risks, demanded even in women a vigorous temper of soul and body, a masculine ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... smoke and brimstone, to taste the bitterness of tears and of the worm of conscience and to feel the burnings of the unquenchable fire. In like manner in the other weeks he was to try to picture to himself in as vivid a manner as possible all the events brought before his mind, whether terrible or glorious. The end of all this discipline was to be the complete subjection of the man to the church. The Jesuit was ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... and have no interest in painting my picture in too vivid colours, and in these remarks I have transgressed against some of the ordinary colonial views on the subject; but I have done so with intention, because I consider them not entirely in the right. The colonist says—we don't want gentlemen here, we want ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... was nothing for it but cold beef, cold ham, or an amalgamation carefully doled forth. Many a night, seated at the little table that still remains in this outer room, I have watched Wright prepare my sumptuous repast. He was even then short-sighted, and to this day I have vivid recollection of the concern with which I saw his nose approach to dangerous contiguity of the round of beef as he leaned over it to cut ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... young men of British birth who first responded in large numbers to the recruiting officer's appeal. A military background, vivid home memories, the enlistment of kinsmen or friends overseas, the frequent slightness of local ties, sent them forth in splendid and steady array. Then the call came home to the native-born, and particularly to Canadians of English speech. Few of them had dreamed of war, few had been trained ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... cocked hats; they were lyrical upon the highways; along the prosaic sidewalks by twos and threes they sang together. It is no great thing, a hat of any quality; but a small thing may ring dramatic on the right metal, and in the vivid idea of Lorne Murchison and his sister Advena a Robin Hood walked in every Independent Forester, especially in the procession. Which shows the risks you run if you, a person of honest livelihood and solicited vote, adopt any portion ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... above the noise. She shifted the wheel to bring the boat head-on to the waves, and this made her ride on a more even keel. Then, with a downpour, accompanied by terrific thunder and vivid lightning, the storm broke. Betty bravely stood to her post, the others offering to relieve her, but she would not give up the wheel, and remained there until the little dock was reached. Then, making snug their craft, they raced for the tent. It had stood up well, ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake • Laura Lee Hope
... me; without that I would have collapsed before now; but I was almost ready to drop. I had my eyes fixed on the lift door; each step, inch by inch, was an almost unbearable effort. With only a few feet to go, my knees gave; I went down on all fours. Another batch of needles sang around me, and vivid pain seared my left arm. It helped. The pain cleared my head, spurred me. I rose ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... talismanic charm of 'Englishmen' did wonders. It was 4.30 a.m. before I tumbled into an extremely comfortable bed, and had barely laid my head upon the pillow—so it seemed—when a great knocking at the door aroused me with a start from vivid dreams of home, as an orderly entered the room with the alarming statement that the column was moving off in ten minutes. It was seven o'clock, and I felt inclined for another twelve hours in bed; there were no ablutions that morning. A ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... So vivid seemed the picture that the listener's brow grew moist, and he turned shuddering away, to see that Peter was watching him curiously; and both lads started now as a wild cry of horror and despair arose from the rough pallet on which the ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... bronze—the unabated force good for other chapters of history. It would be extremely interesting to report the talk of the Admiral; but there were two things about him that reminded me of James G. Blaine, something of the vivid personality of the loved and lost leader; something in his eye and his manner, more in the startling candor with which he spoke of things it would be premature to give the world, and, above all, the absence of all alarm about being reported—the unconscious consciousness that one must know ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... sucked its fill. Under a bank by the roadside a couple of men employed in carting stone for road-mending are sitting on a sack eating their dinner. The roof of the barn beyond them is brilliant with moss and lichens; it has not been so vivid since last February. It is a delightful time. No demand is made for ecstatic admiration; everything is at rest, nature has nothing to do but to sleep ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... Rokoff dead she would fall into hands no better than his and to a fate probably even worse than he alone could have imagined. The memory of the two brutes who stood and laughed as Rokoff struck her was still vivid. ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that in recalling those experiences of ours you should have omitted the one that is most vivid and most delightful to me. Can it be that you have forgotten the little house we built under the old chestnut-tree, where you prepared the supper on your best doll's china for the weary hunter who used to return laden with green apples, currants, strawberries, and other wild beasts, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... Richmond upon earth can exhibit. The crowds on those green velvet meadows and on the shores, the yachts, barges, pleasure and small boats, and the windows and gardens lined with spectators, were so delightful, that when I came home from that vivid show, I thought Strawberry looked as dull and solitary as a hermitage. At night there was a ball at the Castle, and illuminations, with the Duke's cipher, etc. in coloured lamps, as were the houses of his Royal Highness's tradesmen. I went ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... on the bundle in her arms, and again her face was irradiated by a vivid tenderness, almost as if she had been ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... from the strong and vivid phosphorescence excited by his rapid motion through the sleeping waters of the dark creek, which lit up his jaws, and head, and whole body; his eyes were especially luminous, while a long wake of sparkles streamed away astern of him from the lashing of his tail. As the boats lost their speed, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... a moment. Sonia, too, seemed suddenly to have awakened into a state of tense and vivid emotion. The cigarette burned away between her fingers. Her great eyes were fixed upon Lutchester. There was something almost like fear in their ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... seem to be these, "a good ear, a voice capable of inflexion, an understanding of, and taste for, the beauties of the author." Added to this, there must be, of course, a feeling, an ardour, an enthusiasm sufficient at all times to ensure their rapid and vivid manifestation. Richly endowed in this way, however, though Henderson was, his gifts were weighted, as we have seen were those also of Betterton, by a variety of physical defects, some of which were ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... vivid, but his sympathies were also very quick and easily aroused. It was scarcely safe to read to him a pathetic tale, his tears were so certain to flow. The story of Gellert's hound, faithful unto death, well-nigh broke his heart, and that perfect pearl, "Rab and His Friends," bedewed ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... vivid do these scenes and people become when the vague and irrecoverable boy who walks among them carries a rod over his shoulder, and you detect the soft bulginess of wet fish about his clothing, and perhaps the tail of a big one emerging ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... afterward act like drunken men in the presence of those beautiful ladies, who, far from being offended at it, appear on the contrary to be amused by it." And out of it all, out of these conditions forming so vivid a contrast to the average life of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, grew this final dark picture—one that could not have been tolerated in the Anglo-Saxon colonies of the North: "The most remarkable, as well as the most pathetic result of that gangrenous ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... is God's, and not man's. He has a work to do in us by means of it, while it also helps our feelings, fixes them, makes them vivid, and imposes solemn obligations upon us by its signified vow. So it is with the Lord's Supper. In each case it is God's memorial, and not ours; and its benefit does not consist so much in showing forth the state of our hearts at the time of administration, as ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... features of the carnival was the procession of each booth to the center of the immense stage where the spot-light was turned on. It was a most admirable detail. It looked like a long caravan of the past sweeping onward through the vivid light of the present. The intense light revealed the endless variety and marvellous beauty of the costumes. It was understood that the same pageant would be repeated each night so the people came early to witness the procession ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... night. There was a clearness in the still frosty air which gave to the starry host a vivid luminosity, and seemed to reveal an infinite variety of deep distances instead of the usual aspect of bright spots on a black surface. Besides the light they shed, the aurora was shooting up into ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... matrons of those days. With these for the leading figures, I remember how seven brothers and sisters were grouped around, and how the old house dog had a place in the corner, and how lovingly the cat nestled between his feet. Cherished memories are these pleasant visions and they come to me often, vivid as realities. But the dream vanishes, the vision fades away, and I think of the six pale, still faces as I saw them last, and of the names that are chiseled upon the cold marble that stands through the sunny spring-time, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... writing, Dickens' "Pictures from Italy" still holds a high and distinctive position. That the descriptions, whether of places and works of art, or of life's pageantry, and what may be called the social picturesque, should be graphic, vivid, animated, was almost a matter of course. But a priori, I think one might have feared lest he should "chaff" the place and its inhabitants overmuch, and yield to the temptation of making merriment over matters which ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... forms at the first mention of his name. Dorax, to whom he is so admirable a contrast, is one of those characters whom the strong hand of adversity has wrested from their natural bias; and perhaps no equally vivid picture can be found, of a subject so awfully interesting. Born with a strong tendency to all that was honourable and virtuous, the very excess of his virtues became vice, when his own ill fate, and Sebastian's injustice, had driven him ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... acquaintance with the sights of the heavens gives a grasp on astronomical problems that can not be acquired in any other way. The person who has been in Rome, though he may be no archaeologist, gets a far more vivid conception of a new discovery in the Forum than does the reader who has never seen the city of the Seven Hills; and the amateur who has looked at Jupiter with a telescope, though he may be no astronomer, finds that the announcement of some change among the wonderful belts ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... dwelling by a covered way. The aspect of the house was westerly, and the front windows looked on to an expanse of park-like land, heavily timbered with oaks of large size, some of them pollards that might have pushed their first leaves in the time of William the Conqueror. In spring their vivid green was diversified by the reddish brown of a double line of noble walnut-trees, a full half mile in length, marking the track of the carriage-drive that ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... rejoiced over his cradle, remains fresh; he cannot 'any more hear the voice of the singing men and women,' but he can hear the tones, clear over all these years, of the dear ones whom he first learned to love. The furthest past is fresh and vivid, and his heart and memory are true to it. Also he looks forward familiarly and calmly to the very near end, and lives with the thought of death. He keeps house with it now. It is nearer to him than the world of living men. In memory is half of his being, and in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of affection, she assured herself repeatedly; and then turned and tossed upon her pillows as vivid recollection painted each happy hour ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... degree little thought of when these varieties are grown separately. Purple and the other yellows (Faerie Queene and Monarch) also make a pleasing bed. Fire King and Orange Bedder should be grown in masses, separately or together, and when seen in the late afternoon or early evening their vivid and gorgeous colouring is almost unsurpassed by any other flower. The early-flowering Wallflowers will, in mild winters, bloom from January till April, or even as ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... deceived, and reason may succeed in suggesting some probable source of the illusion by which we have been alarmed. But when the eye in solitude sees before it the forms of life, fresh in their colours and vivid in their outline; when distant or departed friends are suddenly presented to its view; when visible bodies disappear and reappear without any intelligible cause; and when it beholds objects, whether real or imaginary, for whose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... The cemeteries near Scutari are immense, owing to the predilection which the Turks of Europe preserve for being buried in Asia—that quarter of the world in which are situated the holy cities, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and Damascus. The author of Anastasius gives the following vivid description of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... seems to lack the gift of searching analysis of individual character. It is hardly fair to reckon it as a shortcoming in the poet and apostle of Provence that he presents only what is most beautiful in the life about him. The novelist offers us a faithful and vivid image of the men of his own day. The poet glorifies the past, clings to tradition, and exhorts his countrymen to return ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... taken from a different order. As regards elegance of costume, the Banded Epeira[6] is the most highly favoured of our Spiders. On the upper surface of her corpulent belly alternate, in transversal bands, bright black, a vivid yellow like that of yolk of egg and a dazzling white like that of snow. The black and yellow also show underneath, but arranged differently. The yellow, in particular, forms two longitudinal ribbons, ending in orange-red on either side of the spinnerets. A ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... a command of that unhackneyed vitality of phrase that most people call by the name of realism. Whether it is scenery or character or incident that he wishes to depict, the touch is ever so dramatic and vivid that the reader is conscious of a picture and impression that has no parallel save in the records of actual sight ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... altogether youthful: it was naive, almost chaste, purged by the ingenuous ardor of pleasure. Although Ada was not, by a long way, so ignorant as Christophe, yet she had still the divine privilege of youth of soul and body, that freshness of the senses, limpid and vivid as a running stream, which almost gives the illusion of purity and through life is never replaced. Egoistic, commonplace, insincere in her ordinary life,—love made her simple, true, almost good: she understood in love the joy that is to be found in self-forgetfulness. ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... scene of vivid contrasts, on one side house and barn and yard, and on the other the rolling fields and massive forest, Cameron stood looking in the early light of his first morning on the farm, with mingled feelings of disgust and pleasure. In a few moments, however, the loveliness of the ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... to say against me—for my continual desire for hair-pins, and other pins, my intolerable habit of getting into water, the abominations full of ants, that I brought into their houses, or things emitting at unexpectedly short notice vivid and awful stenches—they cannot but say that I was a diligent pupil, who honestly tried to learn the lessons they taught me so kindly, though some of those lessons were hard to a person who had never previously been ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... in beauty, and after some months had gained strength sufficient to allow of her being brought back to Alencon. Her memory of this short but happy time spent with her sainted Mother in the Rue St. Blaise was extraordinarily vivid. To-day a tablet on the balcony of No. 42 informs the passers-by that here was born a certain Carmelite, by name, Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. Fifteen years have gone since the meeting in Heaven of Madame Martin and her Carmelite child, and if ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... an untempered sun. Shadeless, grassless, it had been an abomination of desolution and a rallying-place for mosquitoes. Then had come the hand of man. First, the Royal Palm Hotel had sprung into stately existence, out of nothingness. Then other caravansaries. Palm and pine and vivid lawn-grass had followed. The mosquitoes had fled far back to the mangrove swamps. And a rarely beautiful White City ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... the understanding employed in observing natural effects; and till women have more understanding, it is vain to expect them to possess domestic taste. Their lively senses will ever be at work to harden their hearts, and the emotions struck out of them will continue to be vivid and transitory, unless a proper education ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... imagination is of great service here. Yes, I say the imagination. I do not mean the revelling of mere fancy in the realm of the unthinkable or the impossible. I mean the vivid realization of facts that lie outside the ordinary rut of thought. So exercised, imagination is one of our ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... as unusually fair. The pack had now got up, and Mr. Worcester began his issue. At his feet stood a little lassie, whom he overlooked, and whose countenance, as she saw the red cloth diminishing and likewise her chances, displayed the most vivid play of emotion. Finally, when the last yard of the stuff had been given out and she had got none of it, two large tears formed and ran down her cheeks. Poor little thing, but ten minutes ago she had braved it with the best of them, but her skirt had ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... assembly. So vivid was description, so unearthly her look, so inspired her manner, that what she described seemed actually to have taken place then and there. They noticed, also, that the bridegroom hid his face in ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... Her soft white hat was pulled low, so that it almost hid her eyes, but through the veil he could see that they were softly shining. Her lips were red, and her cheeks touched by the wind with vivid color. ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... particular, vivid, concrete instances that specially move men to action were hidden from them. Only a small number of people were acquainted with such particular truths. But that small number knew very well that we were thus in reality governed by men responsible to no one, and hidden from public blame. The ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... reader who has been on the spot the poet's words will paint a vivid picture of the scene; for the reader who has not been there, so much the worse; he should lose no time in going, and drinking a cup of the local wine at a table of the restaurant now in possession of Mr. Gray's point of view. I do not ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... that, at any rate at this season of the year, the first rays of the risen orb struck full upon its point. Thus it came about that, as she stood there waiting, Benita of a sudden found herself suffused in light so vivid and intense that, clothed as she was in a dress which had once been white, it must have caused her to shine like a silver image. For several minutes, indeed, this golden spear of fire blinded her so that she could see nothing, but stood quite still, afraid ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... paragraph has been censured for its too florid style. It may be rather gorgeous and rhetorical when considered as part of an argument, yet it is very characteristic of Burke as a writer. In no other passage of the speech is there such vivid clear-cut imagery. Note the picturesque quality of the lines and detect if you can ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... species was known to the ancients, and it is often represented in Egyptian sculptures, while mummies of it have been found in the catacombs. The largest and most remarkable of all the baboons is the mandrill of West Africa, whose swollen and hog-like face is ornamented with stripes of vivid blue and scarlet. This animal has a tail scarcely two inches long, while in size and strength it is not much inferior to the gorilla. The large baboons go in bands, and are said to be a match for any other animals in the African forests, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... has been read or heard, while the fact that it has been read or heard is half forgotten or has sunk into the subconsciousness. Only the sensation has remained, not the recollection that it was read, etc. Another part of this phenomenon may possibly be explained by vivid dreams, which also leave strong impressions without leaving the memory of their having been dreams. Whoever is in the habit of dreaming vividly will know how it is possible to have for days a clear or cloudy feeling of the discovery of something excellent or disturbing, only to find ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... to explaining what the writer means by civilization, does not raise so vivid a conception of it as the single expression, that Civilization is a different thing from Cultivation; the compactness of that brief designation for the contrasted quality being an equivalent for a long discussion. So, if we would impress forcibly upon the understanding and memory ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... his work is almost or quite as excellent in a somewhat more restricted range. In verse he is probably the best artist in American letters. Here his sole pursuit was beauty, both of form and thought; he is vivid and apt, intensely lyrical but without much range of thought. He has deep intuitions but ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... storm. The children tumbled into the drawing-room, the smaller ones huddling in a frightened heap in the middle of the floor, until the fury of the storm was over. There was nothing to do but wait with bated breath after each vivid flash of lightning for the terrific crash that always followed, and listen to the wind outside as it fought with the sturdy tree-tops. Now and then a limb snapped in the fierce struggle, and fell to the ground with a ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the woods; an expectant stillness brooded upon the sultry world; an angry storm was in the air. The first vivid flash and simultaneous peal burst from the sky as he reached the passage ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... the mellow tints I pause Of her, whose vivid touch shames not her sire; Bold Genius in his pride Has marked her as his bride, On his bright pinions bids her soul aspire, Nor pay the tribute due by ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... Josiah to come on, I knowed they would rather have our room than our company. For I remembered I wuz onmarried myself once, and though my sperit wuz never incarnated in the personality of a Blandina, yet I had a vivid remembrance of the time when Love first laid holt on me, and I well remembered the feelin's I felt at the ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... of half a century since, the north—from a southern point of view—confiscated property when the slaves were freed. But from the northern point of view the slave was not property at all. This is a very vivid instance of change of opinion on property rights. Such "rights" are wholly of our own making; and change from ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... an interval, made him turn and glance at her. He usually found that if she was looking at the picture still, she was not seeing it. Her eyes were fixed, but her thoughts were wandering, and an image more vivid than any that Raphael or Titian had drawn had superposed itself upon the canvas. She asked fewer questions than before, and seemed to have lost heart for consulting guide-books and encyclopaedias. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... national temperament is plain in Chaucer and the ballads of Robin Hood; in spite of deep and sometimes disastrous changes of national policy, that note is still unmistakable in Shakespeare, in Johnson and his friends, in Cobbett, in Dickens. It is vain to dream of defining such vivid things; a national soul is as indefinable as a smell, and as unmistakable. I remember a friend who tried impatiently to explain the word "mistletoe" to a German, and cried at last, despairing, "Well, you know holly—mistletoe's the opposite!" I do not commend this logical method in the comparison ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... to John that the heavy German masses were almost upon them, when they were revealed in the glare of the searchlights, sweeping forward in solid masses, and uttering a tremendous hurrah. But the French lights continued to throw an intense vivid white blaze over the advancing columns, broad German faces and stalwart German figures standing out vividly. Officers, reckless of death, waving their swords and shouting the word ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... believe in you. You are making an odd yet vivid impression on me. I believe you will face danger just as you did Mr. Lanniere, in a half-nonchalant and a half-satirical mood, while all the time there will be an undercurrent of downright earnestness and heroism in you, which you will hide as if you were ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... those terrible days in Ireland is a fascinating if often gruesome study, and may be recommended as a vivid, if not perhaps calmly impartial, portrayal by an eye-witness of ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... occurred to myself! It is one of those early events of which I still retain, have ever retained, a vivid recollection. Though little more than an infant at the time, well do I recollect to have been taken in this manner to a jeweller's, and the delight I felt at recovering my mother's picture, that which is now lost, after it had not been seen ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... from the keen and cutting air would indeed have been a blessing—a blessing that was about to be realized in strange places. Turning sharply up a side street, we walked a short distance and stopped at a certain house. A gentle tap, tap at the door. It was opened by a woman, and we entered. It was a vivid picture—a picture ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... was the vivid green of the Wisconsin landscape; the slopes were like carefully tended lawns, without stumps or stones; the groves rose up the hills, pink and gray and green in softly rounded billows of cherry bloom and tender oak and elm ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... shorn; bare legs and throats are to be seen; little straw hats of every shape, with ribbons that descend even on the backs of the wearers; shirts and neckties of every hue; all the little children with something red or blue about them, a facing, a border, a tassel, a scrap of some vivid color tacked on somewhere by the mother, so that even the poorest may make a good figure; and many come to school without any hats, as though they had run away from home. Some wear the white gymnasium ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... that it had begun to snow outside. In the lobby it was warm and bright and vivid with jostling life; the music of a stringed orchestra somewhere back of him was calling well-dressed men and women in to dinner. All of them seemed happy, hopeful, purposeful. He noted, furthermore, that three days without food makes a man cold, even in a warm place, and light-headed, too. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... passed over the Jura mountains, over Switzerland and over Savoy. From all sides flash upon flash of lightning, clap upon clap of thunder, which rolled continuously many minutes. At times the lightning was vivid as sunshine, and you could distinguish the grape vines; then all became black again in the dark night. The lightning formed knots, ties, zigzags, complicated figures; it struck in the lake, so that it lit it up on all sides; whilst ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... him a quick look, and then his eyes travelled lovingly over the wide, fair scene, to the purple shadows and curling mists of the valley, the dark mysterious woods in front, the clear, vivid sunlight on the mountain tops, and the serried battlements of the castle, now rising into larger proportions as the boys dropped down the hillside towards the postern door, which led out upon the wild fell. There was something of mute wistfulness in ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... had exaggerated the change absurdly. Nevertheless, that a change had taken place was palpable. The arresting radiance, the vivid physical perfection of her, had gone. She was thin, and with the thinness had come lines—lines of fatigue, and other, more lasting lines born of endurance and self-control. The pliant symmetry of her figure, too, was marred. She stooped a little; the gay, free carriage of her shoulders was gone. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... a vivid memory of one of my early Needless Knocks as I say that. It was back at the time when I was trying to run our home to suit myself. I sat in the highest chair in the family circle. I was three years old and ready ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... Springs, twenty miles to the southward, And when, later that summer Foster went to round them up, he found the nine indeed, but with them and guarding them with an air of more than mere comradeship was a coal-black stallion, prancing around and rounding up the bunch like an expert, his jet-black coat a vivid contrast to the golden hides ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Rev. Samuel J. May, of Syracuse, in the chair.[123] After thanking the Convention for the honor conferred, he ran the parallel between the laws for married women and the slaves on the Southern plantation, and then introduced Ernestine L. Rose, to paint in more vivid colors the picture he ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Virtues:—Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice, Temperance, Prudence, Humility (the Venetian antiquaries call it Humanity!), and Fortitude. The Virtues of the fourteenth century are somewhat hard-featured; with vivid and living expression, and plain every-day clothes of the time. Charity has her lap full of apples (perhaps loaves), and is giving one to a little child, who stretches his arm for it across a gap in the leafage of the capital. Fortitude tears open a lion's jaws; Faith lays her hand ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... lady may be she has seen a great deal of the world,' said Mr. Doncastle blandly, 'and puts her experience of the comedy of its emotions, and of its method of showing them, in a very vivid light.' ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... happiness would weave radiant pictures before his eyes, and he would describe these to Ellen. She listened to him proudly, and with her beloved eyes upon him he would venture upon stronger expression and more vivid pictures, as was really natural to him. When at last he was silent she would remain quietly gazing at him with those dark eyes of hers that always seemed to be looking at something in him of ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... career reserved for him, it wants too obviously the elevation of a Montesquieu, the philosophy of a Bolingbroke, or the comprehensive profundity of a Burke. It is a work of genius, but by a partisan, an advocate, a man of powerful emotion and vivid conception, having a strong will, a high purpose, and an enduring conviction. With a great, sometimes an inapt parade of erudition, and an occasional loss of time in inflated and declamatory commonplaces, there is yet, as a general rule, work, rather than literature, in his ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... exhibition hall on two benches drawn close together, and as he awoke, he found himself staring at a most marvellous painting that occupied the full height and nearly the entire width of the stage at the farther end of the hall. It was a lurid scene, but so filled with black shadows that to a vivid imagination it might represent any one of many things. While the boy was wondering if the young woman in yellow who appeared in the upper corner of the picture, with outstretched arms and dishevelled ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... about a month before, and had actually stated that he carried a tinder-box about with him to light his pipe. Here, surely, was a clue to be followed out. And as memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile, Mr. Snell gradually recovered a vivid impression of the effect produced on him by the pedlar's countenance and conversation. He had a "look with his eye" which fell unpleasantly on Mr. Snell's sensitive organism. To be sure, he didn't say anything particular—no, ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... this report gives an extremely vivid and generally accurate account of the great shock. Other observers in Charleston concur in dividing the movement into five phases. The preliminary tremors and murmuring sound lasted about twelve seconds, and, although they increased in strength, they were succeeded somewhat suddenly ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... the promise which common-sense finds incredible. It came from Elisha when all seemed desperate. The wonderfully vivid narrative in the previous chapter tells a pitiful tale of women boiling their children, of unclean food worth more than its weight in silver, of a king worked up to a pitch of frenzy and murderous designs, and renouncing his allegiance to Jehovah. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... June roses on the morning of this June anniversary. While he was in India the custom was remitted to the old head gardener, who always received, however, from the absent son the appropriate letter or message to be attached to the flowers. And one of the most vivid memories Lady William retained of her son's boyhood showed her the half-open door of an inn bedroom at Domodossola, and Edward's handsome face—the face of a lad of eleven—looking in, eyes shining, white teeth grinning, as ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her face was the face of Lilith. The screaming lovely witches capered in fantastic spirals, each sporting a lighted candle. It was the diabolic Circus of the Candles, the infernal circus of the Witches' Sabbath. Rooted to the ground, Baldur realized with fresh amazement and vivid pain the fair beauty of Adam's prehistoric wife, her luxurious blond hair, her shapely shoulders, her stature of a goddess—he trembled, for she had turned her mordant gaze in his direction. And he strove ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... work in connecting many vessels of this class is a not inconsiderable of itself. The romance of the armed merchantmen affords material for many a vivid page, and when in its proper place in this volume it is set forth somewhat in detail the reader will grasp—if he has not already done so through perusal of the daily press—the fact that all the glory of naval service in this war has not resided within the turrets ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... our guide told us graphically how that, a few weeks ago, both a horse and its rider had fallen down the one hundred feet into the river below. The path was very narrow, and he strongly advised us in passing to take care, which remark seemed slightly superfluous after the vivid description with which he had ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... captain; and the ready huzza which went up, amid the waving of sundry flannel shirts, old boots, and forsaken tarpaulins, which had been caught up by the unshorn tars, as the sound of their near proximity to home aroused them from the dreamy visions thereof to the vivid realities, were borne over the waters which separated them from thence, deceiving the red-combed heralds of the day into the belief of an early dawn, judging from the signs of recognition which met their approach, as the first tinge of red lit ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... were no habitations, except towards the eastern point. We found a path, which led through a variety of bushes upon the flat hills. In our way to it, we crossed some glades, or meadows, enclosed in woods on all sides, and covered with a very rich herbage of the most vivid green. We passed through a little airy grove, into several extensive plantations of bananos, yams, eddoes, and fig-trees, which were in some places enclosed in fences of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... of me and rude, too," he said compunctiously. "Something that he was playing called up so vivid a ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... admire the view of the Tsaritsino lakes. They stretched one behind the other for several miles, overshadowed by thick woods. The bright green grass, which covered the hill sloping down to the largest lake, gave the water itself an extraordinarily vivid emerald colour. Even at the water's edge not a ripple stirred the smooth surface. One might fancy it a solid mass of glass lying heavy and shining in a huge font; the sky seemed to drop into its depths, while the leafy trees gazed motionless into its transparent bosom. ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... if recalling the vivid picture, and added, somewhat irrelevantly, "I remember that one man had ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes, abound the more richly in its special sense—the sense of having been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes breed, ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... paints in vivid colours the manners, customs and ideas of the wild mountain tribes which inhabited Kishkindhya or the southern hills of the Deccan, of the people whom the poem calls monkeys, tribes altogether different in origin and civilization from ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... into my clothes in a moment, and hastened on deck. The sky overhead was as black as pitch, and looked as if it was coming down to crush the vessel between it and the ocean, and every now and then vivid flashes of lightning darted forth from it, playing round the rigging and showing the huge black seas as they came rolling up like walls capped with white foaming tops, with a loud rushing roar, as if they were ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... forest-crowned heights, the fair yellow plain cheerful with crops and corn, the shining river rolling through it towards the pearly hills beyond; all these were before us, along with a thousand beautiful memories of our youth, beautiful and sad, but as real and vivid in our minds as that fair and always-remembered scene our eyes beheld once more. We forget nothing. The memory sleeps, but awakens again; I often think how it shall be when, after the last sleep of death, the reveille shall arouse us for ever, and the past in one flash of self-consciousness ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Though taking a vivid interest in the electioneering, owing to the large distillation of the essence of human nature it afforded, as neither of the candidates had a practical grip of public business, I cared not which should poll highest; but now I resolved to procure ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... pleasant place. Your stay here, too, has been quite an episode in winter quarters. We cannot thank you too much for the enlivening influence of your presence among us. I, for one, will ever carry with me a vivid recollection of it." ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... cheeks, and a perfect mouth, whose glowing, fever-rouged lips were curved in a shadowy smile, as she muttered incoherently of incidents, connected with the life of a poverty-stricken adventuress? Was friendly fate flying danger signals by arranging and accentuating this vivid contrast, in order to recall his vagrant wits, to cement ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... steered clear of the castle, the exciting memories of the previous evening being too vivid in Mrs Gilmour's mind to allow the boys to go near the treacherous footing of the ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... curiously convincing. The characters, too are peculiarly real.... Each and every one stands out with vivid distinction, and is not soon to be forgotten.... The portrayal of local life, particularly that appertaining to operatic circles, is full of freshness and interest.... It is well written, it is nobly felt, it is altogether ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... sure-enough good actor, and that if they were not dead next to him and his particular weakness, they would swallow his yarn whole—whatever it was. A blood-red glow was in the sky to the west, and it lighted Andy's face queerly, like a vivid blush on ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... Maggiore and the vivid green of Lugano, comes the violet-blue of Como, with its luminous landscape, its banks covered with olives, Roman ruins, and modern villas. Never have I felt the air so clear. Here for the first time I said to myself: "This is the spot where I would choose to dwell." ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... their prerogatives and their functions, and indicated their form," would not, of course, be accepted in a literal sense by any modern mythologist. But it is nevertheless true that the clear and vivid personality and individuality given to the gods by the epic poets affects all later poetry and all Greek art. The imagination of the poets could not, as we have already noticed, have had so deep and wide an influence unless it had been based upon popular beliefs and conceptions. ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner |
