"Vividness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very mercifully awoke, and lay, for a while, blinking in the ghostly radiance of the moon, which was flooding in at the window directly upon me. Now whether it was owing to the vividness of my dream, I know not, but as I lay, there leapt up within me a sudden conviction that somebody was indeed standing outside in the lane, staring up at my window. So firmly was I convinced of this that, moved by a sudden impulse, I rose, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... sticks came crashing down for the last time on to the two heads with a thud as of enormous mallets falling upon oaken beams, and the pair lay prone upon the ground. At that instant appeared in all its vividness the suggestion that the two artists had gradually driven into the imagination of the spectators: "We are about to become ...we have now become ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... verse—those have already been discussed—but rather its sources of incremental beauty, of richness and, subtle power. To draw an illustration from another art, they add light and shadow, fullness, roundness, depth of perspective, vividness, to what would else ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... resurrection; the sudden change from it to His asking for Mary; Martha's return to the house and whispering in her sister's ear, "The Master is come and calleth for thee;" the hurried obedience to the call—all these incidents are recorded by John with the particularity and vividness ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... mainly struck me at the time, and which I still vividly remember, was the Colonel's composure throughout all this debate. Vehement he was—because he could not describe even a butterfly without vividness which easily passed into vehemence- -but he was in no sense mentally overwrought; nor did he continually return to one subject like a man with an obsession. His humor flashed out, even at his own expense, but he had throughout the underlying gravity of one who knows that he is ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... from Nature amid merrymaking and philosophical discourses are not as other beams and slabs and flooring boards. They are old friends and fellow-adventurers, with many a good tale to tell, recalling comical situations in their reminiscences with a vividness that ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... of how far he had come on the road to recovery that he was able, when he woke in his bed at the Britania, to allow full play to the suggestion that he had experienced nothing more than the natural reversion of age to the bright vividness of the past. "Though I didn't expect," he admitted as he lay fronting in the wide old mirrors, interminable reflections of a pillow dinted by his too-early whitened head, "I really did not expect to have it begin at forty-two." Having made this concession to his acceptance of himself as a man ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... the soul, fury raged uncontrolled. For all the desolate calm of outer seeming, the tragedy of her fate was being acted with frightful vividness there in memory. In that dreadful remembrance, her spirit was rent asunder anew by realization of that which had become her portion.... It was then, as once again the horrible injustice of her fate racked consciousness ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... is one point in which you could aid those who understand you and your books in bringing over general readers to your side. I was myself acquainted with many of the persons you have sketched in your Lavengro, and I can testify to the extraordinary vividness and accuracy of the portraits. What I have seen, again, of yourself tells me that romantic adventures are your natural element, and I should a priori expect that much of your history would be stranger than fiction. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... the awareness of our bodily tensions; and that it is just this elimination of all incompatible qualities which allows us to attribute activities to those two-dimensional shapes, and to feel these activities, with a vividness undiminished by the thought ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... him, wondering, as she had often wondered, at the impossibility of guessing, even vaguely, what was really going on behind that large brow. And he looked back observantly, but not expressively, at her. She was a slim, fair, pretty woman, with more vividness and character than usually goes with her type. Like the boy, she had long-lashed grey eyes, and blond-cendre hair: her mouth and chin were of the Burne-Jones order, and her charm, which was great but unintentional, and generally unconscious, appealed partly to the senses and ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... green hill which rises by the side of the fall; and, as the spray is whirled up in greater or less abundance, it perpetually and rapidly changes its colours, now disappearing altogether, and now beaming with the utmost vividness. The man told me that at night the moon forms a white rainbow on the hill. There is a delicious but dangerous coolness all about the cascade. All the scenery about is as beautiful as possible. Just above the great fall is the Velinus tearing along in the same channel, which was ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... to choose weapons that his antagonist could handle better than he; and partly reliance on God, which told him that he was safer with no armour but his shepherd's dress and with only his sling in his hand. So there he stands, drawn for us with wonderful vividness, in one hand his staff, in the other his sling, both familiar and often used, and by his side the simple wallet which had held his frugal meal, and now received the smooth pebbles that he picked up as he passed the gulley to the Philistine side of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... him, a little startled at his directly addressing her, not hearing a word of what he said in the vividness of her first-hand impression of his personality, his brilliant blue eyes, his full, very red lips, his boldly handsome face and carriage, his air of confidence. In spite of his verbal agreement with her opinion, his look crossed hers dashingly, like a challenge, a novelty in the amicable harmony ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... was gone at intervals, but would rally feebly: and with his consciousness returned his love, his simplicity, his sweetness. He would talk French with Madame de Florac; at which time his memory appeared to awaken with surprizing vividness, his cheek flushed, and he was a youth again—a youth all love and hope—a stricken old man, with a beard as white as snow covering the noble careworn face. At such times he called her by her Christian name of Leonore; he addrest ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... is hard, elaborate, polished to brilliance. Its difficult labor recalls Thucydides. In effect it charms at first by its accuracy and vividness: but with continuous perusal it begins to weigh upon the reader, who feels the strain, the unsparing effort that this glittering fabric must have cost the builder, and at length ceases to sympathize with the story and begins to sympathize with the author. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "Pompilia," are incomparable in their impressiveness and beauty, and must live so long as poetry is enshrined in life. The vital drama, the splendor of movement, the color, the impassioned exaltation of feeling, the pictorial vividness that are in these poems grouped under "Dramatic Romances" and "Dramatis Personae," give them claim to the first rank in the poet's creations. Curiously, during this period, the change in Browning's habits of work, which his wife used to urge upon him, seemed to gradually take possession ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... me again, and thousands from the ten years she lived before me. What took place from early girlhood to her coming of age principally lives again (every important thing and every trifle) in her brain with the vividness of real presence. For twelve hours incessantly she will pour out without intermission all her past life, forgetting nothing, pouring out name after name to the Waldens as a dream; sense and nonsense; truths and errors huddled together; ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... dream then that he should remember an apple tree his whole life, that an apple tree, and one apple tree in particular, should always call to his mind a tremendous event, losing nothing of its intensity and vividness with the passing years. But all that was in the future, and when he joined his comrades on the ground he made good work with the biggest and ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... up in the order of 'sensations,' and this is the 'general law of association of ideas.'[517] The synchronous sensations produce synchronous ideas and the successive sensations successive ideas. Finally, the strength of the association between the ideas depends upon 'the vividness of the associated feelings, and the frequency of the association.'[518] Hume had said that association depended upon three principles, 'contiguity in time and place,' 'causation,' and 'resemblance.' Contiguity in time corresponds ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... pages contain translations of the first two of these works. The "Germany," the full title of which is "Concerning the situation, manners and inhabitants of Germany," contains little of value from a historical standpoint. It describes with vividness the fierce and independent spirit of the German nations, with many suggestions as to the dangers in which the empire stood of these people. The "Agricola" is a biographical sketch of the writer's father-in-law, who, as has been said, was a ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... had to stop at Queant on the way. Our journey lay through the area over which we had just made the great advance. Strange thoughts and memories ran through my mind. Faces of men that had gone and incidents that I had forgotten came back to me with great vividness. Should I ever again see the splendid battalions and the glad and eager lives pressing on continuously to Victory? Partly from shell holes, and partly from the wear of heavy traffic, the road was very bumpy. The man above me was in terrible agony, and every fresh jolt made him ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... lay nearly stress enough in your articles on what you admit in your letters: viz., "there seems to be some production of vividness...of colour in the male independent of protection." This I am making a chief point; and have come to your conclusion so far that I believe that intense colouring in the female sex is often ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... have had a SNAP if we'd gone on, and let these fellows back here in the trees close up behind us!" Andy Green exclaimed suddenly, with a vividness of gesture that made Happy Jack try to swallow his Adam's apple. "By gracious, it would have been a regular rabbit-drive business. They could set in the shade and pick us off just as they ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... it was that his hair and beard whitened, nor when the hollows deepened to stay beneath his eyes. All I remember for certain was the changeless spirit of him, and the unconquerable courage he showed about getting ready to put off his mortality and the definite curious vividness with which ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... vividness and intensity of 'The Seats of the Mighty' has never come from the pen of an American. Mr. Parker's latest work may, without hesitation, be set down as the best he has done. From the first chapter to the last word interest in the book never wanes; one finds it difficult to interrupt the narrative ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... answer. He strove to dispel the cloud-pageantry which had sailed above him in shapeless beauty. He walked up and down the chamber, paused, threw open the window, and looked upon the street below. I felt that every petty detail of man's daily craft struck outlines of painful vividness upon the morbid sensibility of his condition. Finally he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... never asked himself. There was one situation in particular to which his mind frequently reverted, as it did now. He had known worse women than the one who had figured in it, but for some reason this single scene was impressed upon his mind with a vividness which ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... had been brought back to him with painful acuteness and vividness. The streets of the town, the people in the street, Billy, the mean scoundrel, who could not leave him alone in the grave of obscurity, Kathleen—Fairing. The voice of the child—with her voice—was in his ears. A child! If he had had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... actions, in regard to which it is undeniable, and universally admitted, that they took place internally only. For the inward action, being narrated and committed to writing, retained the advantage of vividness and impressiveness over the naked representation of the same truth. Sometimes, in the case of actions concentrated into a single moment, this advantage may be still further increased by the inward transaction being represented outwardly also. But, here, just the [Pg 187] opposite would take place. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... with now and again a general ripple of laughter at some pleasantry accessible to the German mind; but these were much outdone in heartiness by the applause which frequently interrupted Richter when speaking. There is a massiveness about this scene which rises up in memory with a vividness greater, if possible, than the reality made on our excited and wearied endurance during the hours we spent there. Later, Windhorst, the leader of the Roman Catholic party, made a memorable speech. The dozen great electric lights depending from the ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... corroded his natural sleep; it blackened the colour of his thoughts; it shut out, as with an impenetrable wall, the wholesome energies and enjoyments and objects of living men; and, taking from him all the vividness of the present, all the tenderness of the past, constrained his heart to dwell forever and forever amidst the dim and shadowy chimeras of a future he was ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... warning it was dark again, and from the skies fell a deluge of rain. In a minute the burning creepers were quenched, and the whole world was one pit of ink, with the roar as of a thousand torrents about our ears. As the vividness of the lightning, so was the weight of the rain. Ringan cried to us to stand to our places, for now was the likely occasion for attack; but no human being could have fought in such weather. Indeed, we could not hear him, and he had to stagger round and shout his command into each several ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... garden walls, and vines were yellowing beneath the autumn sky. Her sensitive perception of beauty and grandeur was so much greater than her power of grasping and comprehending them, that her poor little mind became oppressed and bewildered by the disproportion between the vividness with which she received new impressions, and her ability ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... the pupils to appreciate the thrilling pictures and to understand the means by which the author has produced this vividness. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Startled by the vividness of the murder, Jim looked up from the book, thinking that he had heard indeed the shrieks of Charity in a death-agony. The walls seemed to quiver ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... of the scepters, and halos, and capes showed up dazzlingly against this background. The scarlets, and pinks, and blues, and whites of the robes appeared doubly bright. The whole made a picture that struck and held you by its vividness and contrast. ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... the responses, 'as the voice of many waters,' and the chanted Psalms, the beautiful songs of degrees of the 27th of the month, rise with new fulness and vividness of meaning among the tall trees and sunlit foliage. One lesson alone is read, in Charlecote Raymond's fine, powerful voice, and many an eye is filled with tears at the words, 'One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... plucked up courage and made bold to express to him the surprise I had felt, not only at the marvellous vividness with which the actions had been repeated before my eyes, like life itself in form and in color and in motion, but also at the startling fact that some of the things I had been shown were true and some were false. Some of them had happened actually ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... whether soldiers, statesman, men of letters, theatrical people, or those whose birth and fortune—rather, perhaps, than their virtues or talents—have caused them to be conspicuous in society at home or abroad. Nature having endowed me with a strong memory, I can recall with all their original vividness scenes that took place fifty years ago, and distinctly recollect the face, walk, and voice, as well as the dress and general manner, of everyone whom I have known. I have frequently repeated to my friends what I have seen and heard since the year that I joined the ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... of the document do not succeed in stifling the vividness and colour of this crowded scene. Through the piety of the formal cries, it is easy to see that Augustin's hearers were hard to manage. This flock, which he loved and scolded so much, was no easier to lead now than ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... not to be so easily consoled. He lay awake that night, a prey to poignant self-disgust, remembering in turn his happy childhood at the Mission, his love for the Sitt Hilda, and his recent frowardness, each with a vividness that hurt his brain. Even the patronage of a great Emir seemed nothing worth as compared with the affection of those who had brought him up. The Emir spoke lightly of religion; he despised the missionaries; ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... the whole of sensuous nature, and to preserve in it the freedom of the soul, a faculty of resistance is required infinitely superior to the act of natural force. Accordingly it will not be possible to represent moral freedom, except by expressing passion, or suffering nature, with the greatest vividness; and the hero of tragedy must first have justified his claim to be a sensuous being before aspiring to our homage as a reasonable being, and making us believe in his strength ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of faith in the dogmatic part of Christianity. People do not believe in the fall, the atonement, the resurrection, and a future state of reward and punishment at all, or do not believe in them with the certainty and vividness which are needed to make faith a constant influence on man's daily life. They do not believe they will be damned for sin with the assurance they once did, and they are consequently indifferent to most of what is said to them of the need of repentance. They do not believe ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... imply and to produce, an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a correspondent difference of language, as truly, though not perhaps in as marked a degree, as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The vividness of the descriptions or declamations in DONNE or DRYDEN is as much and as often derived from the force and fervour of the describer, as from the reflections, forms or incidents, which constitute their subject ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... of ennobling suggestions to lift his calling into a kind of epic dignity. As a book for the generality of readers, it far exceeds any previous work of the author in force, naturalness, and beauty, in vividness of description and richness of style, and in that indefinable element of genius which envelops the most prosaic details in an atmosphere of refinement ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... remembered that her mother had never seemed young to her, not even in her earliest childhood; and she understood now why this had been so, why the deeper experiences of life rob the smaller ones of all vividness, of all poignancy. It had been so easy for her mother to give up little things, to deny herself, to do without, to make no further demands on life after the great demands had been granted her. How often had she said unthinkingly ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the probable cause of every death in her family for the past thirty-five years. Miss Carmichael felt an especial interest in an Uncle Henry who "died of a Friday along of eating clams." He stood out with such refreshing vividness against a background of neutralities who succumbed to consumption, bile colic, and other more familiar ailments of the patent-medicine litany. But loquacity, apparently, like virtue, is its own reward, for the landlady scarce ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Hungarian novel, in which the extraordinary dramatic and descriptive powers of the great Magyar writer have full play. As a picture of feudal life in Hungary it has never been surpassed for fidelity and vividness. The translation is ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... round his head. He struck at it with his hand, and turning his head saw two men approaching him. One was the village doctor. It occurred to Hapley that this was lucky. Then it came into his mind, with extraordinary vividness, that no one would ever be able to see the strange moth except himself, and that it behoved him to ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... friend, William Bodham Donne, in "Tait's Edinburgh Magazine," explained how "Lavengro" was "not exactly what the public had been expecting." Another friend, Whitwell Elwin, in the "Quarterly Review," reviewing "Lavengro" and its continuation, "The Romany Rye," not only praised the truth and vividness of the descriptions, but said that "various portions of the history are known to be a faithful narrative of Mr. Borrow's career, while we ourselves can testify, as to many other parts of his volumes, that nothing can ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... after dinner. All the things I have done in my life that I should not have done recurred to me with painful vividness. (There seemed to be a goodish number of them, too.) I thought of all the disappointments and reverses I had experienced during my career; of all the injustice that I had suffered, and of all the unkind things that had been said and done ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... memory to any period of their lives which the doctor chooses to ask for, and can be made not only to remember vaguely a few incidents which occurred at the time but actually to re-live the whole period in the fullest possible detail, feeling over again with hallucinatory vividness all the emotions ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... of those early conditions with the startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was. It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures. It was true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater artist disregards ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Bright, flashing, vivid faces and bare shoulders, arms and breasts appeared above the short bodices of the girls. Few of them were gowned in white. The colors seemed too garish for anything but musical comedy. But the freshness, the vividness of these girls seemed exhilarating. The murmur, the merriment touched a forgotten chord in Lane's heart. For a moment it seemed sweet to be there, once more in a gathering where pleasure was the pursuit. It breathed of what seemed long ago, in ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... inclines us at least to some appreciation of the principle laid down by Baron von Huegel in "Eternal Life"—namely, that "souls who live an heroic spiritual life within great religious traditions and institutions, attain to a rare volume and vividness of religious insight, conviction and reality"[122]—seldom within reach of the contemplative, however ardent, who walks ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... clouds that as usual had gathered over Tarrangolle came circling around us, and presently formed so dense a canopy that the darkness was like a partial eclipse. The thunder warned us with tremendous explosions just above us, while the lightning flashed almost at our feet with blinding vividness. A cold wind suddenly rushed through the hitherto calm air; this is the certain precursor of rain in hot climates, the heavier cold air of the rain-cloud falling into the stratum of warmer and ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... if I had told them, because the sleeping-cars are much safer in case of accidents. Oh, how I hated to say anything about it! You can't imagine. I wonder how Berta would express it with literary vividness. Maybe she might say that she "shrank in every fibre." But it was worse than that—I just didn't ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... in better tone, to that extent the retentive power present is put in better working order. Every one knows how lack of sleep and illness is often accompanied by loss in memory. Repetition, attention, interest, vividness of impression, all appeal primarily to this so-called "brute memory," or retentive power. Pleasurable results seem not to be quite so important, and repetition to be more so when the connections are between mental states instead of between mental states and motor responses. An ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... at that moment belonged to the order of the communicative, but perhaps the vividness with which the waiter placed this exhibition of it before the young lady is better explained by the fact that her lover slipped a five-franc piece into his hand. She at any rate entered his place of patience sooner than Gaston had ventured to hope, though ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... story is a plainly told incident, (carefully observing the unities,) which the child's fancy can embellish for itself, and the whole has an additional charm from the gorgeous coloring of an accompanying picture. The vividness is good, and is the only thing that is good. Why, then, should this one merit be omitted, as our children grow a little older? A lifeless moral will not school a child into propriety. If a twig be unreasonably bent, it is very likely to struggle in quite a different direction, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... left such memories with the Duchess that the poor boy's disastrous end had been to her also a fearful blow. All night Diane had seen visions of the beautiful youth, so charming, so poetical, who had been so delightful a lover—painted as Leontine depicted him, with the vividness of wild delirium. She had letters from Lucien that she had kept, intoxicating letters worthy to compare with Mirabeau's to Sophie, but more literary, more elaborate, for Lucien's letters had been dictated by the most powerful of passions—Vanity. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... desperation and, as she was afterward to call it to herself, the fascination of the abyss. She didn't know, couldn't have said at the time, why his projected benevolence should have had most so the virtue to scare her: he would patronize her, as an effect of her vividness, if not of her charm, and would do this with all high intention, finding her case, or rather their case, their funny old case, taking on of a sudden such refreshing and edifying life, to the last degree curious and even important; but there were gaps of connection between this ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... if we will allow her time enough, after giving mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian's life as that of a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the verge of self-murder,—painted it with an originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank him with the great authors of all time,—kind Nature, after this gift, sent as his counterpoise the inspired ploughman, whose songs have done more to humanize the hard theology ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... paper on "The Physics of Arctic Ice," by Dr. Robert Brown of Campster, published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, June, 1870. This article is so remarkable, not only for its sound scientific matter, but for the vividness and poetic beauty of its descriptions, that I must express a hope that the learned author will some day enlarge it, and publish ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... fixing in very perfect form what is commonly so inexpressible because so impalpable and evanescent in emotion and expression; a power of catching and rendering the charm of nature with a fidelity and vividness which resemble magic; and lastly, unrivalled skill in choosing, repolishing and remounting the gems which are our common inheritance from the past: these are the gifts which will secure permanence for his work as long as ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... scepticism or coolness in the minds of their authors. The positive habit of mind in the Icelanders is enough to secure them against a good deal of the conventional dulness of the Middle Ages. It made them dissatisfied with anything that seemed wanting in vividness or immediate force; it led them to select, in their histories, such things as were interesting in themselves, and to present them definitely, without any drawling commonplaces, or any makeshift rhetorical substitutes for ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... new generation, and would be valued by a very great class of readers;—and there has seemed to be great danger that the time would be allowed to pass when it would be possible to give to such a work the vividness and accuracy that come from personal recollection. These facts led to the conception of ...
— Chancellorsville and Gettysburg - Campaigns of the Civil War - VI • Abner Doubleday
... at the church and in the surrounding woods, nor did any one describe the murder with the vividness he achieved in his description of it. The minister's narrative was pale and colorless by comparison, and those who came from a distance went away convinced that they had talked with an eyewitness to the tragedy and esteemed themselves ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... meal of many eaten together along the river bank in the course of our long journey, yet the recollection of that scene rises before my memory now with peculiar vividness. It was a bright, glorious morning, the arching sky blue overhead, and the air soft with early autumn. Our temporary camp was at the edge of a grove, and below us swept the broad river, a gleaming highway of silvery water without speck upon its ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... he had expressed his composition. What he had not revealed—that very vividness of sense of what was right (and what was wrong) in his conduct forbidding it—was the corroding struggle to preserve the path of his duty. Because of that struggle he kept locked the refuge that Nona was to him in his dismays. He ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... on, the dark, lowering clouds that had been gathering overhead, broke into a terrific storm of rain; the wind whistled and howled through the valleys, and from the mountain gorges the lightning flashed with a vividness almost appalling; but, undismayed by the storm and the tempest, which seemed at that time to accord with the emotions of his own wicked heart, Nat continued on his way, which lay past the unpretending, but comfortable farm-house, where, in the peace and ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... and individually, were sick and tired of all motion pictures that did not portray with vividness the beauty or the talents of themselves, or the faults of their acquaintances. No Acme people, save Lenore Honiwell and Tracy Gray Joyce and a phlegmatic character woman, were in this picture at all. The camera man who ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... "Tannhaeuser" and "Lohengrin" does not seem quite as long a one to-day as once it did. Indeed, there are moments when one wonders whether "Lohengrin" is really a step beyond "Euryanthe," and whether the increase of power and vividness and imagination has not been made at the expense of style. Moreover, in much of what is actually progress in Wagner the influence of Weber is clearly discernible. The sinister passages seem but developments of moments in "Der Freischuetz"; ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... shorter time; but if his mind be vigorous and lively, and more especially if he can be made repeatedly to reiterate the same idea in his mind at intervals, he will on that account, retain it much more tenaciously, and will have it at the command of the will more readily. Hence the vividness with which the scenes and the circumstances of youth arise upon the mind, and the tenacity with which the memory holds them. These scenes were of daily occurrence; and the small number of remarkable circumstances connected ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... Here it must suffice, to select the most essential or interesting matters, and to present them with such vividness as the necessary brevity will permit. Very little preliminary knowledge will be taken for granted; the use of Latin or technical terms will be shunned, and every topic will be dealt with, as far as possible, in the ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Wife,' in virtue of its vividness of presentation and real literary skill, may be regarded as in some degree a representative example of the work of a literary school that has of late years attracted to itself a ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... the air, glitters in the sun, but we wait in vain to hear of its arrival in the destined harbour. Mr. Godwin, with less variety and vividness, with less subtlety and susceptibility both of thought and feeling, has had firmer nerves, a more determined purpose, a more comprehensive grasp of his subject, and the results are as we find them. Each has met with his reward: for justice has, after all, been done to ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... valuable portions of the book are those which relate to the scientific and practical observations made in the course of the expedition, and the descriptions of scenery and incidents of arctic travel. Many of the latter possess considerable literary merit, and all are impressed with the vividness of fresh observation. From the variety of the materials, and the novelty of the scenes and incidents to which they refer, no less than the interest which attaches to all that relates to the probable safety of Sir John Franklin and his companions, ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... in the "Observations on Man" of that acute observer and thinker, David Hartley. "An impression made on the right eye alone by a single object may propagate itself into the left, and there raise up an image almost equal in vividness to itself; and consequently when we see with one eye only, we may, however, have pictures in both eyes." Hartley, in 1784, had anticipated many of the doctrines which have since been systematized into the theory of reflex actions, and with which I have attempted to associate ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... we were off! the last adieus were said, the last looks given, the last words spoken. We were off! The die is cast, and it seemed strange to me that now and only now did fearful doubts, and vain regrets, and sad forebodings oppress my heart, and take possession of my mind. With striking vividness I recalled how, mainly to please myself and amuse my mind, I had projected and finally carried out this expedition; how I had covered my own private wishes and thoughts under the plea of the good it would ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... sleeps either dreamlessly, or dreams with a vividness greater than that characterising the dreams of normal slumber. Dr. Cairn dreamt a ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... been his motives, Floyd stated with vividness the significance of western advance in relation to the Pacific coast. He showed that, while in 1755, nearly a hundred and fifty years after the foundation of Jamestown, the population of Virginia had spread but three hundred miles into the interior of the country, during ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... Easy and unstudied as his writing seems, it was, as we have seen, the result of unintermitted trouble and varied modes of working. He was quite as much a talker as a writer, and beat out his thoughts into shape in talking. In the essay on Friendship he describes the process with a vividness which ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... thoroughly frightened by this time, and heat and faintness were alike forgotten. Incredible as was the story to which she had listened, there was about it a vividness that made it terrifying. ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... TO GAIN COHERENCE. Where vividness or some other quality does not gain coherence in the sentence, it is usually gained by the use of words or phrases which refer to or help to keep in mind the effect of the preceding sentences, or which show the bearing of the sentence on the paragraph topic. These words may be of ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... I wanted no formal application now to give me the clue to her strange preference for the accident ward and her hitherto inexplicable fondness for "railway cases." Poor thing, with what inexpressible vividness must the circumstances in which this New Year's night was passing with her have recalled the sad remembrances of that other New Year's night the narrative of which she had just given me! Presently she recovered her voice, and briefly ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... "Ah, but just this one picture," he would say, "it will only take a few minutes. I want you to see this. It is a great work and something may happen. I may forget to bring you again." Then we would walk in and out of the cold and gloom of the church after having stared the picture into vividness. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... directions of the moral feelings which cannot be mistaken or depreciated, I will relate what took place in the year 1785, when Mr. Perry, the steward, died. I must be pardoned for taking my instances from my own times. Indeed, the vividness of my recollections, while I am upon this subject, almost bring back those times; they are present to me still. But I believe that in the years which have elapsed since the period which I speak of, the character of the Christ's Hospital boy is very little changed. Their situation ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... time a spell of fine weather, very bright and serene, had been brooding over Lisconnel. It was the early spring of autumn, when leaves and berries here and there were taking a blossom-like vividness; the frost-touched brier-sprays seemed to have found and dipped in the same red that had dyed the young buds and shoots of April. The air was so still that the seeded dandelions stood day after day with their fairy globes unbereft of a single downy dart, like ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... popularity, says Southey, is that he taxes the imagination as little as the understanding. "The vividness of his own, which, as history shows, sometimes could not distinguish ideal impressions from actual ones, occasioned this. He saw the things of which he was writing as distinctly with his mind's eye as if they were, indeed, passing before him in ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... bold strokes and with a sufficiently scholarly atmosphere to make the picture life like. There is wisdom too, in the attitude of the author toward his characters; and the entire atmosphere of the book is of fine quality. The general accuracy and vividness of the portraiture are likely to impress everyone. * * * It contains passages and characterizations that some readers will find it ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... consciousness the flashing face of Ellen Jorth, the way she had looked at him, the things she had said. "Reckon I was a fool," he soliloquized, with an acute sense of humiliation. "She never saw how much in earnest I was." And Jean began to remember the circumstances with a vividness that disturbed ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... some hours to night; and at the moment when Bell Crawford entered the inner room of the sorceress the gathering thunder-storm burst in fury. The thunder was not as yet peculiarly heavy, and the flashes of lightning had often been surpassed in vividness; but the rain poured down in torrents and the gust of wind, which swept through the streets set windows rattling and doors and shutters banging at a rate which promised work for the carpenters. The ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... spectacles which brand themselves so ineffaceably upon memory, that time has no power to impair their vividness; and of such were some of the scenes witnessed by ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Yet, though he differed so essentially from the divine poet, he understood the greatness of Shelley at a glance, and preserved for us a record of his friend's early days, which is incomparable for the vividness of its portraiture. The pages which narrate Shelley's course of life at Oxford have all the charm of a romance. No novel indeed is half so delightful as that picture, at once affectionate and satirical, tender and humorous, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... away, and the essences of the whole are supposed to be embodied in the original nucleus. So the perfect epigram, at which Pope is constantly aiming, should be the quintessence of a whole volume of reflection. Such literary cookery, however, implies not only labour, but an unwearied vividness of thought and feeling. The poet must put his soul into the work as well as his artistic power. Thus, if we may take Pope's most vigorous expressions as an indication of his strongest convictions, and check their conclusions by his personal history and by the general ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... coaches, and highwaymen, and when high seas meant post-captains, frigates, privateers, and smugglers; and the hero—a boy who has some remarkable experiences upon both—tells his story with no less humour than vividness. He shows incidentally how little real courage and romance there frequently was about the favourite law-breakers of fiction, but how they might give rise to the need of the highest courage in others and lead to romantic adventures of an exceedingly exciting kind. A certain piquancy is given ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... example, as cigars, printed books, and chronometers—is the amount of manual labour, estimated in terms of time, which is on an average necessary to the production of each of them. His meaning in this respect is illustrated with pictorial vividness by his teaching with regard to the form in which the measure of exchange should embody itself. This, he said, ought not to be gold or silver, but "labour-certificates," which would indicate that whoever possessed them had laboured ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... past, and this was the second time she had visited it since the day that consigned her to the poor-house; for it was impossible for her to look at the pond without recollecting one dark passage in her life, known only to God and herself. To-day she recalled, with startling vividness a dusky, starlit June evening, when, maddened by an unmerited and unusually severe punishment inflicted by her father, she had resolved to drown herself, and find peace in the mud at the bottom of the mill-pond. Placing ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... think there were that we have now. Suppose—what no one can deny possible—an intelligence without the help of external bodies, to be affected with the same train of sensations or ideas that you are, imprinted in the same order and with like vividness in his mind. I ask whether that intelligence has not all the reason to believe the existence of corporeal substances, represented by his ideas, and exciting them in his mind, that you can possibly have for ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... would perhaps show as many points of contrast as of similarity, but there is a strong superficial resemblance between them. They both possessed an inexhaustible supply of broad humour and an imagination of singular vividness. Both had the power of seeing the ridiculous side of common things, and the talent of producing caricatures that had a wonderful semblance of reality. A little calm reflection would suffice to show that the characters presented are for the most part psychological impossibilities; but on ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... person felt sure that this same letter went to ten-thousand other men, there would be an individuality about it, a vividness that makes the strongest kind ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... a story consists in the eloquence, vividness, and sincerity with which a given problem in human life or character is presented. Human nature is made up of all sorts of traits—selfishness, cupidity, self-sacrifice, courage, loyalty. All life is made up ... of a compromise between elements ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... it less, I must add, was an odd recollection which gathered vividness as I listened to it—a mental association evoked by the name of Mr. Porterfield. Surely I had a personal impression, over- smeared and confused, of the gentleman who was waiting at Liverpool, or who presently would be, for ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... knew that, impressed upon her childish recollection by terror, that scene had never been entirely forgotten. Having no clue to its reality, she had always supposed it to be a dream; but now as it came back with some degree of vividness, she saw plainly the face which was neither that of the likeness nor that of her assailant, but might well be a link between the two—the same face ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... the train was not yet in sight. It was pleasant to Volodya to sit still without moving, and to watch the evening coming little by little. The darkness of the arbour, the footsteps, the smell of the bath-house, the laughter, and the waist—all these rose with amazing vividness before his imagination, and all this was no longer so terrible and important ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... really great writer will hesitate to appropriate and plagiarise the materials his predecessor has collected. There are books of great research and erudition which one would have wished to have been all re-written by some writer of real genius who could have given order, meaning and vividness to a mere chaos of accurate and laboriously sifted learning. The great prominence which it is now the fashion to ascribe to the study of diplomatic documents, is very apt to destroy the true value and perspective of history. It is always the temptation of those who are dealing with ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... career. She was not an inviting auditor for those somewhat pachydermatous philanthropists who dwell complacently upon 'cases' and statistics which represent appalling depths of individual suffering. Her imagination realized these facts with a vividness that was physically unbearable, and unless she could give substantial help, she avoided the fruitless agitation. At the same time, her interest in all rational good works was of the warmest, and she was inclined to exaggerate rather than undervalue ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... that warm, alive, expectant quality, Mark reflected, that revealed that Allison Clyde was neither wife nor mother. She had turned, no doubt, to other interests with her unquenchable vividness, and so could still look out upon the world ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... is preserved. It is by giving up these identities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels as compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat board on to which the novelist throws everything. And from this there results for him a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in his power over the subject; so that he can now subordinate one thing to another in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was before impossible. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... consistency of characterization for surprise. Characterization tends to become typical, and motives tend to be based on fixed conventions, such as the code of honor might dictate to a seventeenth-century gentleman; but the lack of individuality in character is counterbalanced by the vividness with which the lovers, tyrants, faithful friends, evil women, and sentimental heroines are presented, and by the fluent and lucid style which varies to any emotional requirement and rises to the demands ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... only answer, but presently he conceived a mental image which was remarkable for its vividness. But the image was of nothing he had ever seen before—of thousands upon thousands of miniature beings, utterly alien to man; they resembled amphibious insects, with thin, elongated heads, large eyes, and antennae set upon a scaled, four-legged body, with rudimentary beetle-like wings. ...
— McIlvaine's Star • August Derleth
... of fresh listeners he brightened up wonderfully. Here were two people who had not heard any of his stories. He was full of reminiscences of strange weddings that he had been at or had heard of. One in particular, which came back to him now with great vividness, was when his friend, Ned Mullins, married the Spain girl ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... degree, when the silver sheen of the moon makes a broad path on the water; or when a meteor leaves a glowing track across the sky; while a still more familiar instance is seen in the powerful attraction on the sight of glowing embers in a darkened room. The mere brightness, or vividness of the contrast, fascinates the mind; but the effect on man is comparatively weak, owing to his fiery education and to his familiarity with brilliant dyes artificially obtained from nature. How strong this ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... reading of an experiment with frogs which recalled the distinctive odor of slimy water. Mr. James Sully, in "Illusions," says, "Stories are told of portrait painters who could summon visual images of their sitters with a vividness equal to that of reality, and serving all the purposes of their art." The same writer says again, and this is peculiarly significant, that "the physiologist Gruithuisen had a dream in which the principal feature was a violet flame, and which left ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... father had been very fond. She remembered that there were Sisters of Charity there, who used to go about nursing the sick. She remembered the physician under whose care her father was. She remembered all these things with a startling vividness in the twinkling of an eye, before the echoes of the steam-engine's whistle had died away on the air. She was almost paralyzed by the suddenness and the clearness with which she was impressed that she must go to St. Mary's. ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... in 1662 he was ejected with the two thousand ministers who refused to conform. His after years were passed among old friends and in quiet meditation at Preston. He died of apoplexy about the 20th of January 1663/4. As a religious writer Ambrose has a vividness and freshness of imagination possessed by scarcely any of the Puritan Nonconformists. Many who have no love for Puritan doctrine, nor sympathy with Puritan experience, have appreciated the pathos and beauty of his writings, and his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... abstract thinking. But is that consciousness of the early man more vivid, or less vivid, than yours? Certainly you will say, it is less vivid. You have largely transcended his powers of consciousness. Your consciousness is astral rather than physical, but has thereby increased its vividness. AS the Self withdraws himself from sheath after sheath, he realises himself more and more, not less and less; Self-realisation becomes more intense, as sheath after sheath is cast aside. The centre grows more powerful as the circumference becomes ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... Through her mind meanwhile there passed a whirling phantasmagoria, an interminable procession of figures, of memories, real yet unreal, convincing yet unconvincing. When she did at last lose all awareness of reality the effect was merely to enhance the vividness of those phantoms, to lend substance to her vaporous visions. Constant brooding over the treasure had long since affected Dona Isabel's brain, and as a consequence she often dreamed about it. She dreamed about it again to-night, and, strangely enough, her dreams were pleasant. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... In this article, written with a servile pen, the poet-statesman attacked the character of the people of the United States, and brought out Napoleon's motives in his attempt to obtain, not for France alone, but for Europe at large, a foothold upon the American continent. With a vividness likely to impress his readers with the greatness of the conception as a theory, he showed how the establishment of a European monarchy in Mexico must insure to European nations a share in the commerce of the New World. The new continent, ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... on the vividness and beauty of that metaphor. These encircling flames will consume all antagonism, and defy all approach. But let me remind you that the conditional promise was intended for Judaea and Jerusalem, and was fulfilled in literal fact. So ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... mutually independent Moorish states. Sixty years later there were no less than twenty- three of them. By the middle of the following century the enthusiasm that had followed the first successful blows struck against the Moor had waned, and with it the vividness of their ...
— The Lay of the Cid • R. Selden Rose and Leonard Bacon
... much, even in our days, dreams are much more real than to those who are continuously exercising the imagination. If you use your imagination all day you will not fear it at night. Since I have been occupied with literature my dreams have lost all vividness and are less real than the shadows of trees, they do not deceive me even in my sleep. At every hour of the day I am accustomed to call up figures at will before my eyes, which stand out well defined and coloured to the very hue of their faces. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... thing; I gathered from the hotel-keepers of the Bay an account of the wreck on the beach that lacked nothing in vividness, thanks to their laudable desire not to see an enterprising reporter cheated out of his rightful "space." Then I hired a sleigh and drove home through the storm, wet through—"I can hear the water yet running out of your boots," says my wife—wet through and nearly ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... we ever to find each other again? A horrible picture presented itself to my mind of our both wandering distractedly up and down Europe, perhaps for years, vainly seeking each other. The touching story of Evangeline recurred to me with terrible vividness. ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... there until July, 1885. During the rest of his life he made his home in London. His foreign residence is disclosed in a number of prose sketches and tales and in one or two poems; but life abroad never dimmed the vividness of the impressions made on him by the experience of his early manhood when he partook of the elixir vitae of California, and the stories which from year to year flowed from an apparently inexhaustible fountain glittered with the gold washed down ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... the sea to hiss as though each individual drop of rain were red-hot, and starting us to work at once in both boats with the balers, to save our provisions from being ruined. I happened to be looking away in a westerly direction when the flash came, and despite its dazzling vividness I caught a momentary glimpse of the pirate brig in that direction, and not more than a mile distant from us. None of the others in the boats appeared to have seen her, for no one said a word; and I only hoped that no eye on board her had happened to be turned toward us at the moment, or ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... few days, in moments snatched whenever there was opportunity, Philip's acquaintance with the journalist increased. Thorpe Athelny was a good talker. He did not say brilliant things, but he talked inspiringly, with an eager vividness which fired the imagination; Philip, living so much in a world of make-believe, found his fancy teeming with new pictures. Athelny had very good manners. He knew much more than Philip, both of the world and ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican. He remembered a hornbill, which was simply a huge yellow beak with a small bird tied on behind it. The whole gave him a sensation, the vividness of which he could not explain, that Nature was always making quite mysterious jokes. Sunday had told them that they would understand him when they had understood the stars. He wondered whether even ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... after is far more vague to me. Compared with the vividness of that one initial Picture, the events of the next few months have only the blurred indistinctness of all childish memories. For I was a child once more, in all save stature, and had to learn to remember ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams or in the hidden country within his mind. The sombre arch of the sky, the glimmer of lights far away, the clustering shadows against the white field of snow, the vague ghostly shapes of the sycamores—all these things ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... beneath a radiant light, and he saw many which to others would have been invisible. Nor, was his grasp of them less accurate, because he strained his eye most earnestly for what was most beautiful. The romantic element in his outlook gave colour, vividness, meaning to the unconsidered trifles—in fine, you had ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... these, among other descriptions, occurred was closed with the following: "Passing out of the slums into the streets of the town, only a few steps separating the horror and the beauty, I felt, with a vividness more intense than ever, the fearful contrasts between the lots of men; and with more pressing urgency the question seemed to ring in my ears, 'Is there no remedy? Must there always be rich and poor?' Some say ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... the genesis of this great epic, the "Shah Nameh"; far more than we know about the make-up of the other great epics in the world's literature. Firdusi worked from written materials; but he produced no mere labored mosaic. Into it all he has breathed a spirit of freshness and vividness: whether it be the romance of Alexander the Great and the exploits of Rustem, or the love scenes of Zal and Rodhale, of Bezhan and Manezhe, of Gushtasp and Kitayim. That he was also an excellent lyric poet, Firdusi shows in the beautiful elegy upon the death of his only son; a curious intermingling ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... heroic preoccupation with the revolutionary struggle passed to the question of their relationship. He began to question her. She told him of the days before his awakening, spoke with a brief vividness of the girlish dreams that had given a bias to her life, of the incredulous emotions his awakening had aroused. She told him too of a tragic circumstance of her girlhood that had darkened her life, quickened her sense of injustice and opened her heart prematurely to the wider sorrows of ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... sense of something almost supernatural, beyond the human and the finite. Skeptic and faint believer, sinner, Christian and scoffer, they were all alike now in the presence of a faith whose evidence was before them in harrowing vividness, in the torment and agony of a fellow creature who sought again through faith a restoration to the image of his kind. There was no creed, no school of ethical belief, no conflicting orthodoxy to quibble over, no ground on which atheist and theologian ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... literary efforts were some peasant tales, whose freshness and vividness made an immediate and remarkable impression and practically ensured his future as a writer, while their success inspired him with the desire to create a kind of peasant "saga." He wrote of what he knew, and ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... meagre possession of books to find food for the mouth of his brother Louis, and went without himself. To his intimate friends he was accustomed to relate the story, not in a whining manner, but with a vividness and pathos that brought tears to the eyes of ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... thunder, in rapid heavy peals, roared and rattled again and again till the very trees of the forest seemed to shake with the concussion. Far away out of the forest arose a black cone-shaped column, which soon joined itself to the mass of clouds overhead, the lightening flashing with greater vividness and rapidity, the thunder becoming more deafening than ever. The sound increased to a dreadful roar, coming nearer and nearer. He had no doubt that it was indeed a whirlwind sweeping through the forest, he could ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... window toward the west, and the glow on the vast plain's rim seized her attention. The sunset flush had faded, but the sky shone a transcendent green. The air was very clear; every wavy line of bluff was picked out in a wonderful deep blue. Muriel thought she had never seen such strength and vividness of color. Then she glanced round the long car. It was comfortable except for the jolting; the silvery gray of its cane-backed seats contrasted with the paneling of deep brown. The big lamps and ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... praised his descriptions "as accurate as they are picturesque. They abound in dramatic and delicate strokes of nature, of which no extracts give an adequate idea, and are painted with a force that brings men, events and prospects before the eye with the vividness of reality. In this power of verbal delineation Mr. Borrow has never been outdone. . . . His descriptions of scenery have a peculiar sublimity and grace." A little later, W. Bodham Donne, a Norfolk man and acute critic, said, ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... equal vividness hearing Lowell read some of his Biglow Papers in the drawing-room of my valued friend Arthur Dexter, of Boston, when there were no others present save him and his mother and my wife and myself. And that also ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... and like a prison the long, narrow streets seemed to her! How weary the street-noises made her! It was foolish, she knew, and so she told herself often, to vex herself with idle fancies. But sometimes there came back to her, with a vividness which for the moment was like reality, the memory of familiar sights and sounds. Sometimes it was the wind waving the trees, or the ripple of the brook over the stepping-stones; sometimes it was the bleating of the young lambs in the pastures far-away. She caught glimpses of familiar ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... her mother instantaneously restored Venetia to herself. Her mind was in a moment cleared and settled. Her past and peculiar life, and all its incidents, recurred to her with their accustomed order, vividness, and truth. She thoroughly comprehended her present situation. Actuated by long-cherished feelings and the necessity of the occasion, she rose and threw herself at her mother's feet and exclaimed, 'O mother! he ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... the voyage from Falmouth to Lisbon he has described with terrifying vividness; {185a} how the engines broke down and the vessel was being driven on to Cape Finisterre; how all hope had been abandoned, and the Captain had told the passengers of their impending fate; how the wind suddenly "VEERED RIGHT ABOUT, and pushed us from the horrible coast faster than it had ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... taking Julia home. She allowed it in spite of herself; yet was angry with them both for the circumstance which brought them together close, which enclosed them in a privacy which made her remember, with a vividness which disturbed her, the sensations of that first and only kiss. He was ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... was for a time, drew in its train results the most happy, revealing with unprecedented vividness to most, both the original nature of the Constitution as not a compact, and also the might which national sentiment had attained since the War of 1812. The doctrine of state rights was seen to have gradually lost, over the greater part of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... many years he sat still, motionless, silent, while thought succeeded thought, and passion passion, with indescribable rapidity and vividness. ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... romance turned into stone. The still air, the hot sunshine, the white beach curving around the deserted sheet of water, the sombre green of the hills, had the motionlessness of things petrified, the vividness of things painted, the sadness of things abandoned, desecrated. And, as if alone intrusted with the guardianship of life's sacred fire, I was moving amongst them, nursing my love for Sera-phina. The words of Carlos were like oil upon a flame; ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... opening at once all the gateways of knowledge, we shall ensure the association of the doctrines of science with those elementary sensations which form the obscure background of all our conscious thoughts, and which lend a vividness and relief to ideas, which, when presented as mere abstract terms, are apt to fade entirely from ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... windy day, and the clouds were drifting swiftly across the heavens, with glimpses of blue between. I don't know how it was, but as I stood looking through the grimy panes in the empty rooms a sudden sense of my own individuality and of my responsibility to some higher power came upon me, with a vividness which was overpowering. Here was a new chapter of my life about to be opened. What was to be the end of it? I had strength, I had gifts. What was I going to do with them? All the world, the street, the cabs, ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... America had been somewhat cold and vague. It was his native land; but abstract patriotism is, after all, rather chilly diet for a human being to feed his heart upon. The unexpected apparition of Mary Leithe had provided just that vividness and particularity that were wanting. Insensibly Drayton bestowed upon her all the essence of the love of country which he had cherished untainted throughout his long exile. It was so much easier and simpler a thing to know and appreciate her than to ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... dangers of the campaigns with the French army had roused the sleeping lion in him, and made him as fine a soldier as ever ranged under any flag. He had suffered, braved, resented, fought, loved, hated, endured, and even enjoyed, here in Africa, with a force and a vividness that he had never dreamed possible in his calm, passionless, insouciant world of other days. It developed him into a magnificent soldier—too true a soldier not to make thoroughly his the service he had adopted; not to, oftentimes, almost forget that he had ever lived under any other flag ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... passes, without the loss of a tittle, through ours. All that could actually take place, and all that is only pos-sible to be conceived, what was said and what was done, the workings of passion, the spells of magic, are brought before us with the same absolute truth and vividness.-Shakespeare excelled in the openings of his plays: that of Macbeth is the most striking of any. The wildness of the scenery, the sudden shifting of the situations and characters, the bustle, the expectations excited, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... that conviction; the battle against that same conviction that he must give up sin and surrender to the Christ; and a terrific battle it is, and a terrific description of that battle Masefield gives us, lightninglike in its vividness until there comes the little woman of God, Miss Bourne (a deaconess, if you please), who has always known the better man in Saul, who has followed him with her Christly love like "The Hound of Heaven." And how tenderly, yet ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... important than the plot. A shepherd falls asleep in the shade by a cool fountain, just as he would do in Southern Italy to-day, for his rest after the midday meal. Suddenly a snake, the horrors of which are described with a vividness that is truly Virgilian, appears upon the scene and prepares to strike the shepherd. A passing gnat, the hero of the poem, sees the danger, and wakes the shepherd by stinging him in the eye. He springs ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley |
