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Portray   Listen
verb
Portray  v. t.  (past & past part. portrayed; pres. part. portraying)  (Written also pourtray)  
1.
To paint or draw the likeness of; as, to portray a king on horseback. "Take a tile, and lay it before thee, and portray upon it the city, even Jerusalem."
2.
Hence, figuratively, to describe in words.
3.
To adorn with pictures. (R.) "Spear and helmets thronged, and shields Various with boastful arguments potrayed."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Portray" Quotes from Famous Books



... which, from the reputation they have had, most persons will be disposed to expect. The sermon may weary, but the speech is always fraught with meaning; and the mixture of sermon and speech together, portray the man with singular distinctness. We see the Puritan divine, the Puritan soldier, becoming the Puritan statesman. His originally powerful mind is excited to fresh exertion by his onerous and exalted position. But he is still constant ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... from his neck, with blazing gems array'd, Thy image, lovely Anna! hung portray'd, Th' unconscious figure, smiling all serene, Suspended in a golden chain was seen,"—S. Barrett's E. Gr., ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... sweep through the rooms where the mirrors portray A slender young thing in a robe of pale gray, And catching quick glimpses, now here and now there, I own with delight she is graceful and fair; I study the creature, and smile as I see How handsome a woman one day she ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart

... rising by the influence of a few good Englishmen from lawless misrule to a settled government, where vice is punished without partiality, is very beautiful to philanthropists, and makes one think better of human nature and its capabilities. I wish I could portray the hilly and thorny road by which this has been attained! It would, methinks, create a new interest in Sarawak, if the past and the present could be fairly set before the discerning world; we should again hear of missionaries longing to help in the improvement of people who have shown themselves ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall

... the original publication of this book, the author has in another work, 'The Lives of Boulton and Watt,' endeavoured to portray in greater detail the character and achievements of these ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... cluster silent and close-packed round the door of the hut; for they are the women whom the thirty-eight Mothers love to possess and to lash into the divine frenzy which only the human form can adequately portray. Govind stirs the incense-heap; the dense smoke rolls forth again and shrouds all; there is a feeling of witchery in the air and in the midst of the smoke-pall one can just descry Rama bending low before the Mother. Now he rises, draws the rattan-canes through his hands, and then leans against ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.

... does not like to know five years have elapsed between one event and the next, even if the story-teller does not try to fill up the interim with matters of no consequence to the narrative. One exception must be made to this rule. In stories whose purpose is to portray a change of character, a long time is necessary; for the transformation is not usually the result of a day's experience, but a gradual process of years. "Silas Marner" and "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" demand time to make naturally the great ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... his rifle afforded, wherewith to sustain the cravings of nature. Travelling night and day, in an incredible short space of time he was in the arms of his friends at Boonesborough, experiencing a reception, after such a long and hopeless absence, as words would in vain attempt to portray. ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint

... Alida de Barberie did not cast a glance behind her, as the party quitted the wharf, in order to see whether the boat that contained the commander of the cruiser followed the example of the others, we shall probably portray the maiden as one that was less subject to the influence of coquetry than the truth would justify. To the great discontent of the Alderman, whatever might have been the feelings of his niece, on the occasion, the barge continued ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper

... must intimate, but not portray, the unutterable horror of the catastrophe. The victims rushed from their cottage and sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot, where, in contemplation of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared. Alas! they had quitted their security and fled right into the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... to portray life on the baronial estate of Sir William Johnson, the first uneasiness concerning the coming trouble, the first discordant note struck in the harmonious councils of the Long House, so, in The Maid-at-Arms, which ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer

... the language, the modes of thought, the taste and temper of the literary school of which he was, and, in so many of his sympathies, is still a pupil, a school which regards M. Zola as one of its leading lights. En Route, and its sequels, portray in the colours of realism, in the language of decadence, the conversion of a realist, nay, of a decadent, to mysticism and faith. "The voice indeed is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau," and according as ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... only when buried in another world, the earth, so now that which the ego brings from the sense-world gradually unfolds itself as a seed under the influence of the spiritual environment in which it has been planted. Occult science can, of course, only portray in pictures what happens in this "spirit-world;" still those pictures present themselves as absolute reality to the clairvoyant's sight, when he investigates invisible happenings, corresponding to those which are visible to the physical eye. Whatever of that world can ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... be difficult to describe the looks or feelings with which the three friends received this information. Ebony's eyes alone would have taken at least half-an-hour of the pencil to portray. ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne

... and despising, degrading and lying, so flashed and fleshed through this vast hanging darkness that the Doer never sees the Deed and the Victim knows not the Victor and Each hates All in wild and bitter ignorance. Listen, O Isles, to these Voices from within the Veil, for they portray the most human hurt of the Twentieth Cycle of that poor Jesus who ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... order to portray the character of the Evangelical School, we shall need to dwell ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... which is their home. As we should expect, they treat chiefly of warlike themes, of the chieftain's doughty deeds, the moss-trooper's daring and skill, of the knight's courtesies and gallant feats of arms, and the feuds of rival clans; in fact, they portray for us vividly the time of which they treat, and in a few graphic touches bring before us the very spirit of the period. In direct and simple phrases the narrative proceeds, giving with rare power just the ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... these remarks more fitting close than by describing briefly the surroundings which set their impress upon the character of the men whose lives I have attempted to portray. The picture is full of meaning, dignity, and simplicity. In this time "Canetuckee" was still a part of Virginia. The grounds on which, as boys, they played were held by their fathers under what is known ...
— Pioneer Surgery in Kentucky - A Sketch • David W. Yandell

... Esseintes read Baudelaire, the more he felt the ineffable charm of this writer who, in an age when verse served only to portray the external semblance of beings and things, had succeeded in expressing the inexpressible in a muscular and brawny language; who, more than any other writer possessed a marvelous power to define with a strange robustness of expression, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... caught up, the wicked fell into pits and have not been seen since. The flames that issued from the rending globe set everything on fire. Who can select language sufficiently graphic to portray such a lurid dissolution of a planet, and the gathering of the faithful, quick ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... them ere he would teach What the prophets portray of Christ's sufferings here. Their souls were enlivened, but soon they would reach The village they sought, ...
— The Mountain Spring And Other Poems • Nannie R. Glass

... words ring like the voice of doom, filled with thunder and lightning, now they become soft and persuasive with smiling mien. With a single cadence, or a play of the facial muscles, or a slight gesture, he can portray a person, a situation, or an object, so that it appears living in the sight of his hearers. And what the word alone cannot do, is accomplished in the most brilliant manner by the virtuosity of his delivery. He does not speak his words, he presents them; they ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne

... still readable, a bold masculine book. It treats everything in a cool, analytic style. The knife of the Socialist is sheathed in vain; no rhapsody can overturn its impassioned teachings. Rhetoric is not needed to embellish the truths he has to portray, for the wild flowers of genius but too frequently hide the yawning chasms in the garden of Logic. It is not to be expected that this book will be read now with the interest with which it was perused two centuries ago; then every statement ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... traversed the passages of our underground railway system without being hurriedly aware in passing of a picture in reds and browns, representing a faun-like figure piping to an audience of three rather self-conscious rabbits. This pleasing group does not portray an actual scene from Autumn (LANE), but is rather to be taken as symbolic of the atmosphere of Miss MURIEL HINE'S latest book. The faun, I imagine, stands for Rollo, the middle-aged lover of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various

... novelty and interest, whose companions were subjects for curious study, speaking in accents the unfamiliar Oriental cadence of which fell pleasantly upon his ear, and who found in every hour some fresh cause for wonder or pleasure. But a pen of marvellous power and pathos must be invoked to portray the mingled emotions that swayed in swift succession the minds of our Boy Slaves! No charm existed for them in the strangeness of desert scenery, Arab comradeship, and the murmur of Eastern tongues; they had long passed the time for that, while their bitter familiarity with all ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid

... doctor of divinity, and have preached Christ and fought His battles for a long time, I know from personal experience how difficult it is to hold fast to the truth. I cannot always shake off Satan. I cannot always apprehend Christ as the Scriptures portray Him. Sometimes the devil distorts Christ to my vision. But thanks be to God, who keeps us in His Word, ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther

... manifestations of the common mind, we may hope for a bolder and more courageous literature: we may hope to see the drama free itself from sensualism and frivolity, and rise to the Shaksperian dignity of true passion; while the romance will learn better its true ground, and will create, rather than portray—delineate, rather than dissect human sentiment ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... indescribably horrible, abysmally atrocious, things. Qualities and quantities and urges and drives that no words in any language could even begin to portray. ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith

... my too irritable nerves would bear." Such was the contemporary estimate of an eye-witness, an officer of tried and singular gallantry and ability, who shared the admiral's perplexities and ambitions, though not his responsibility. His words portray justly the immensity of the burden Nelson bore. That, indeed, is the inevitable penalty of command; but it must be conceded that, when adequately borne, it should convey also an equal measure ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... tale I drew, however, with very little aid from fancy. I would go so far as to say that I took him from the life, if my memory did not confront me with the lamentable inferiority of my picture to the great original it was meant to portray. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... the time of the lawn fete," she said. "That morning a woman begged to see me, sobbing so piteously I could not refuse her an audience. No power of words could portray the sad story of suffering and wrong she poured into my ears, of a niece—beautiful, young, passionate, and willful—and of her prayers and useless expostulations, and of a handsome, dissolute lover to whom the girl was passionately attached, and of elopements she ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey

... the rat tails for the end of the feast, the worst clothes to be found in any book must come last by way of climax. Mr. Dixon, in The Leopard's Spots, has easily outdone every other knight of the pen who has entered the lists to portray women's clothes. Listen to the inspired description of Miss ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed

... variations from the sea pictures were a "crayon-enlarged" portrait of a sturdy man with an abundance of unruly gray hair and a chin beard, and a chromo labeled "Sunset at Niagara Falls." The portrait bore sufficient resemblance to Miss Martha Phipps to warrant Galusha's guess that it was intended to portray her father, the "Cap'n Jim" of whom the doctor had spoken. The chromo of "Sunset at Niagara Falls" was remarkable chiefly for its lack of resemblance either ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... on the terrific evils which would result from disunion to every portion of the Confederacy—to the North, not more than to the South, to the East not more than to the West. These I shall not attempt to portray, because I feel an humble confidence that the kind Providence which inspired our fathers with wisdom to frame the most perfect form of government and union ever devised by man will not suffer it to perish until it shall ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... been remarked that the Goddess is made to command nature—the breeze, the sleep of the Suitors. It is the method of fable thus to portray intelligence, whose function is to take control of nature and make her subserve its purpose. The breeze blows and drives the ship; it is the divine instrument for bringing Telemachus to Pylos, a part of the world-order, especially upon the present occasion. ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... tell whether this babe will unfold into quality of thinker or doer or dreamer. To each Nature whispers: "Unsight, unseen, hold fast what you have." For the soul is shadowless and mysterious. No hand can carve its outline, no brush portray its lineaments. Even the mother embosoming its infancy and carrying its weaknesses, studying it by day and night through years, sees not, she cannot see, knows not, she cannot know, into what splendor of maturity ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... week of misery is so strong upon me even now that my hand trembles almost to preventing me from writing about it. Weak and feeble do the words seem as I look at them, making me wish for the fire and force of Carlyle or Macaulay to portray our unnecessary sufferings. ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... pretty girls who attended the ball was one prettier perhaps than any of her companions; indeed, she was called the belle of Rio Janeiro. I will not attempt to portray her, but I must own she was far too bewitching for the peace of heart of her many admirers, and unhappily she was an unmitigated flirt in every sense of ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha

... miseries, and ask one another what was to be done." Desperate speeches were made, the people "almost threatening violence," but finally adopting a resolution now become so hackneyed as to seem ridiculous after a description intended to portray the misery and the ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... be easy to portray to the reader all the delight which these specks of incipient verdure conveyed to the mind of Mark Woolston. It far exceeded the joy that would be apt to be awakened by a relief from an apprehension of wanting food ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper

... whole of this time the countenance of Mr. Samuel Weller had exhibited an expression of the most overwhelming and absorbing astonishment that the imagination can portray. After looking from Job to Jingle, and from Jingle to Job in profound silence, he softly ejaculated the words, 'Well, I AM damn'd!' which he repeated at least a score of times; after which exertion, he appeared wholly bereft of ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... novels were comparatively unknown. He made romance instructive, rather than merely amusing, and added the charm of life to the dry annals of the past. Cervantes does not portray a single great character known in Spanish history in his "Don Quixote," but he paints life as he has seen it. So does Goldsmith. So does George Eliot in "Silas Marner." She presents life, indeed, in "Romola,"—not, however, as she had personally observed it, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... no description, however minute and glowing, could perfectly represent the life and love of the Redeemer, as displayed in his own person. The imperfection of language rendered it impossible to portray the glorious reality. What inspired or seraphic pen, though dipped in heaven, could display all that was seen when they "beheld his glory?" Had Omnipotence remanded back the flood of ages, and recalled from the invisible state ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox

... justify the Governments of Russia and Austria, and, on the other, by the ignoring of all the reports of the Polish National Government—all its obvious facts, its printed documents, its acts everywhere known and seen, its seizures of papers and documents—and to portray it as a fraud, a myth, a dream of the imagination, a wild hallucination of a disordered brain, it suggests to us the thought that the tardy and present truths here given us of Poland may perhaps have the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... so that I could paint from myself. Singularly enough, I have found this magnetic influence most completely in 'Macbeth'. Do you remember Scene Fourth of the Third Act? That is the situation I have endeavored to portray. Macbeth, wretched criminal, suspects every one of his own dark purposes, or fears their hatred, because he feels himself hateful. He is not a coward, either physically or morally; his fears are all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... them could, like Iphigenia, dwell for years beside the melancholy sea, keeping a true heart for an absent brother? Which of them could raise his fellows nearer to the source of all Deity, as Socrates and Plato had raised men? Who could portray himself as Phidias had portrayed Athene? Could the Muses speak with their own voices as they had spoken by Sappho's? He was especially pleased to see his own moral superiority to Zeus so eloquently enforced by AEschylus, and delighted in criticising the sentiments ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... in early days widely diffused in the Mediterranean and in South Europe. Another hypothesis is that they represent not a truly steatopygous type of women, but only an abnormally fat type. A third suggestion is that they portray the generative aspect of nature in the ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet

... No words can portray the stupefaction and rage of Sir Rudolph when a man who had managed to slip unobserved from the castle at the time of its capture, bore the news to him in the forest. All opposition there had ceased, and the whole of the troops were engaged in aiding the ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty

... man and the poet were a single individuality, we shall also portray the latter when we speak of the former. Irritability and versatility, the accompaniments of poetical and of rhetorical talents, dominated him to a high degree, but an acquired rather than an innate moderation kept ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... the foregoing description, nor yet in that which follows, thus resembling the once pretty woman, who objects to having any wrinkles. The mirror is ever a scapegoat, yet its truths cannot be contested. To portray exactly, constitutes the duty of a historian. The King-at-Arms, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... quite delightful, appearing full of fire and animation, and told some interesting anecdotes connected with his early life in Scotland. I remember his proving himself, what would have been called in the olden times he delighted to portray, "a stout trencher-man." Nor were his attentions confined by any means to the eatables; on the contrary, he showed himself worthy to have made a third in the famous carousal in Ivanhoe, between the Black Knight and the ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow

... surface, and there are springs of everflowing water. The spot is entirely cut off and separated from all [ordinary] means of approach. Around it are many lakes and groves, and flowers in bloom at all seasons of the year; so that the very spot seems to portray the rape of the damsel, with which story, from our very infancy, we have been familiar. Close by, there is a cavern with its face towards the north, of an immense depth, from which they say that father Pluto, in his chariot, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... the most ultra-marine painters. Here and there a green island or a fishing-boat rested upon the surface of the tranquil blue. For miles and miles the eye followed indented grassy slopes, that rolled away on either side of the harbor, and the most delicate pencil could scarcely portray the exquisite line of creamy sand that skirted their edges and melted off in the clear margin of the water. Occasional little cottages nestle among these green banks, not the Acadian houses of the poem, "with thatched ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens

... cover of the general buzz of excited comment aroused by the picture, "mademoiselle, M. Delmotte is destined to a high place among the great men of the world. While to some is given the power to portray famous events, to a very few indeed it is given to create such epochs. Such men are necessarily set apart from their fellows. Despite the promptings of their hearts, they must forego many friendships which would otherwise ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton

... and naturalness of movement supposed to be the gift solely of those wonder-workers who render the "spirit" of an author, while disdaining a "slavish fidelity" to his words,—who as painters would portray a man's expression without troubling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... MAY-FLOWER history and its collaterals had already permitted the author and others to construct mentally, and one which confirms in general the conceptions wrought out by the best artists and students who have attempted to portray the ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames

... nothing to say but 'Gorgon! a girl a Gorgon!' and it struck Woodseer as intensely unreasonable, considering that he had seen the girl whom, in his effort to portray her, he had likened to a beautiful Gorgon. He recounted the scene of the meeting with her, pictured it in effective colours, but his companion gave no response, nor a nod. They ceased to converse, and when ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... pierced the very casemates of the royal palace. New ideas germinated in the youth. The difference of sex was forgotten. Shoulder to shoulder fought the men and the women. The Russian woman! Who shall ever do justice or adequately portray her heroism and self-sacrifice, her loyalty and devotion? Holy, Turgeniev calls her in his great ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... chronicle,[153] let us make effort to capture and portray the spirit of Masonry in American history, if so that all may see how this great order actually presided over the birth of the republic, with whose growth it has had so much to do. For example, no one need be told what patriotic memories cluster about the old Green Dragon Tavern, in Boston, which ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... also of pearls. She has large eyes, a candid expression. Cagnolo da Parma will say of her, when she goes to Ferrara, that she has 'il naso profilato e bello, li capelli aurei, gli occhi bianchi, la bocea alquanto grande con li denti candiaissimi.' Literature will portray this sweet-faced little blond girl as a Messalina, a poisoner, and incestuous with her brothers and her father. At this time Lucrezia had just married Giovanni Sforza, although as a matter of fact the two never lived together. Giovanni Sforza ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja

... over, she rested her head upon her hands, and from her soul went forth a prayer for guidance and protection,—more deep and earnest than words can portray. ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams

... to find any adjective of quality which adequately characterises the peace of which he has been speaking. He falls back upon the expedient which is the confession of the impotence of human speech worthily to portray its subject when he simply says, 'Thou shalt keep in peace, peace ... because he trusteth in Thee.' The reduplication expresses the depth, the completeness of the tranquillity which flows into the heart, Such continuity, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... grounds, where grazed the cattle, and where the bleating sheep followed, step by step, the stately ram with tinkling bell suspended to his neck. How clearly is that scenery pictured in my mind with its lights and shadows! Were I a painter I could even now portray with striking reality the minutest shadings and ...
— Acadian Reminiscences - The True Story of Evangeline • Felix Voorhies

... no mark Though round about us thousand trumpets clang! What moves thee, if the senses stir not? Light Kindled in heav'n, spontaneous, self-inform'd, Or likelier gliding down with swift illapse By will divine. Portray'd before me came The traces of her dire impiety, Whose form was chang'd into the bird, that most Delights itself in song: and here my mind Was inwardly so wrapt, it gave no place To aught that ask'd admittance from without. Next ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... a pen more skilled to portray the workings of the human heart, than mine, to sketch his real feelings, when he received his last month's wages; the last that he felt he would ever earn for his family, and turned his steps homeward. He loved the wife who had forsaken the wealth and comfort ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur

... long the time we shall put our seal to contracts, however long the time brothers shall quarrel with each other, however long the time there shall be hostility between kings, however long the time rivers shall overflow their banks, we shall not be able to portray any image of death. When the spirits salute a man at his birth, then the genii of the earth, the great gods, Mamitu the moulder of destinies, all of them together assign a fate to him, they determine for him his life and death; but the day of his death remains unknown to him." Gilgames thinks, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... is beset with never-resting temptations. He calls himself a fool at times for resisting, and his mind pictures the delights he misses—if not from direct experience, from information he gathers in books and from those who know—and if he yields, then self-reproach embitters him. But correctly to portray the situation is to drop our hypothetical adolescent, for here is where individual reaction and individual situations are too varied to be met with in one case. Some do not inhibit their sex desires at all; others resist now and then, others yield occasionally; ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... was written to express the truth as I see it—to portray life, not as we would like to have it, but as ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... some reason in the nature of things for this choice of two literary forms which, differing widely in other respects, have this in common, that they represent life in action. They are very largely objective; they portray events, conditions, and deeds which have passed beyond the stage of thought and have involved the thinker in the actual historical world of vital relationships and dramatic sequence. The lyric poet may sing, ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... his personal prestige but of what he imagined, or pretended to imagine, were the rights of a small nation, Castro tried throughout to portray the situation in such a light as to induce the other Hispanic republics also to view foreign interference as a dire peril to their own independence and sovereignty; and he further endeavored to involve the United States in a struggle ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... Nothing broke the stillness but the regular click of the matron's knitting-needles. At times, the fire threw out a brief and dusky gleam, which twinkled on the old man's glasses, and hovered doubtfully round our circle, but was far too faint to portray the individuals who composed it. Were we not like ghosts? Dreamy as the scene was, might it not be a type of the mode in which departed people, who had known and loved each other here, would hold communion in eternity? We were ...
— The Vision of the Fountain (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Russian reports of this event, which contain the most heart-rending and revolting details. Books will be written to depict the dreadful scenes of that day; but neither historians, nor painters, nor poets, will find words or colors to portray those ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach

... in any age affect to a great extent the form and structure of the drama; the conscious or unconscious demands of the audience, as we have observed in the preceding chapter, determine for the dramatist the themes he shall portray; and the range or restrictions of his actors have an immediate effect upon the dramatist's great task of character-creation. In fact, so potent is the influence of the actor upon the dramatist that ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... interesting character, but he differs in peculiarities according to his environment of mountain, plain or forest. Occupation also exerts an influence and in time develops distinct types like the trapper, miner, soldier and cowboy, that only the graphic pencil of a Remington can accurately portray. The eccentricities of character which are sometimes met in men who dwell on the frontier are not always due alone to disposition, but are largely the product of the wild life which they live, that inclines them to be restless, ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk

... as the morality goes, I believe that when an artist tries to create an ideal he mixes some truth up with a vast deal of sentimentality, and produces something that is extremely noxious as well as nauseous. I think that no man can consistently portray a probable type of human character without being useful to his readers. When he endeavors to create something higher than that, he plays the fool himself and tempts his readers to folly. He tempts young men and women to try ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... he had engaged to perform. Conrad was by no means a young man of a romantic or sentimental turn, but it is not to be wondered at, that his present occupation should produce a deep effect upon his mind. The form and features he was now endeavouring to portray were certainly the most beautiful he had as yet exercised his art upon—indeed, without exception, the most beautiful he had ever beheld. The melancholy spectacle of youth cut off in the first glow of life's brightest season, and when surrounded by everything that wealth ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various

... descriptions, are all exalted above the level of common converse, as high as the imagination of the poet can carry them, with proportion to verisimility. Tragedy, we know, is wont to image to us the minds and fortunes of noble persons, and to portray these exactly; heroic rhyme is nearest nature, as being the noblest kind ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... canvas, but Turner dashes unnatural vermilion over his scene and the picture is not ridiculous; the effect of noonday heat is somehow produced. Look at those sunsets! In one sense they are failures, every one of them; but what a splendid audacity the man had, and what a genius, to attempt to portray nature in those special moments when it shines with a glory that seems unearthly, and not to have failed more signally! Failures they are, but nobler works than other men's successes. You are perfectly right, Connie, but when you look ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... little tale was to portray the horrors and sin of duelling, and she had written it with great care; but well aware of the vast, powerful current of popular opinion that she was bravely striving to stem, and fully conscious that it would ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... government, both in Spain and the Netherlands. He complained that Hopper had written to Viglius, that "the most severe of the four forms of pardon transmitted had been selected;" the fact being, that the most lenient one had been adopted. If this were so, whose imagination is powerful enough to portray the three which had been burned, and which, although more severe than the fierce document promulgated, were still entitled acts of pardon? The Duke spoke bitterly of the manner in which influential persons in Madrid had openly abominated the cruel form of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... no mastery can save fiction from contempt with those who really think about it. To Balzac it can be forgiven, not only because in his better mood he gave us such biographies as 'Eugenie Grandet,' but because he wrote at a time when fiction was just beginning to verify the externals of life, to portray faithfully the outside of men and things. It was still held that in order to interest the reader the characters must be moved by the old romantic ideals; we were to be taught that "heroes" and "heroines" existed all around us, and that these abnormal beings needed only to be discovered ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... portray my tenderness, my anxieties, my raptures; in so favourable a light did I exhibit her actions and her character, that involuntarily she had to forgive me for my flirtation with ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov

... balm has Love for our sorrows, when its wings are borrowed from the dove! And although the laws of the Eastern life confined to the narrow walls of a harem the sphere of Amine's gentle influence; although, even in romance, THE NATURAL compels us to portray her vivid and rich colours only in a faint and hasty sketch, yet still are left to the outline the loveliest and the noblest features of the sex—the spirit to arouse us to exertion, the softness to console us in ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... sanctifying the soul. For it is the difficulties and the hindrances that men find in their age which give the form to their character and habits, and when mastered become the means of divine grace and their titles to glory. Indicate these, and you portray that type of sanctity in which the life of the Church will find its ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... the reading of the facts disgusting, think how much more disgusting is the reality, and how essential that some one should portray the evil to the public in a manner impressive and ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner

... and a silken voice to cajole, dominate, ridicule, and ignore him. His imploring theatrical appeals to her to come to him are piteously pathetic. The rational parts of his letters are without example in neat concise phrase, and portray a man possessed of great human virtues. It is when the love-storm attacks him that he flies into extravagances, such as when he writes that "she has more than robbed him of his soul," and that "she is devouring his blood." He writes to his brother Joseph that he loves ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... give but a faint idea of these scenes. The pen can but feebly portray the grand and sublime effect produced upon the mind of him who gazes down into the deep valleys, or glances upward to ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid

... profound natural philosopher, an exact observer of nature, he was at the same time a learned statistician, an indefatigable social observer, an unwearied philanthropist, and the most powerful describer of nature that perhaps ever undertook to portray her great and glorious features. It is this extraordinary combination of qualities that render his works so surprising and valuable. The intellectual and imaginative powers rarely coexist in remarkable vigour in the same individual; but when they do, they produce the utmost triumphs of the human ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... own heart, and because he wishes it to move that of others, begs you, dear reader, to pardon him, if he now briefly passes over a considerable space of time, only cursorily mentioning the events that marked it. He knows well that he might portray skilfully, step by step, how Huldbrand's heart began to turn from Undine to Bertalda; how Bertalda more and more responded with ardent affection to the young knight, and how they both looked upon the poor wife as a mysterious being rather ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque

... century. His specialty was the performance of character parts, often dialect roles, either broadly comic or cruel and ironic. The central figure of this, his best comedy, is such a part. It combines those features that the author could portray so effectively, the broad dialect, the callous selfishness, the hypocrisy, the passionate resistance to all appeals to sentiment and the imperviousness to affection. One can detect in the creation strong resemblances to Macklin's interpretation of Shylock, something ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin

... his tale Came, and all stood breathless with hope and fear, Sent round his cap; and he who thrumm'd his wire And sang, with pleading look and plaintive strain Melting the passenger. Thy thousand cries [62], So well portray'd and by a son of thine, Whose voice had swell'd the hubbub in his youth, Were hush'd, BOLOGNA, silence in the streets, The squares, when hark, the clattering of fleet hoofs; And soon a courier, posting as from far, Housing and holster, boot and belted coat And doublet ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron

... wrote it thus, what they wrote endures. They stood upon the heights and saw the struggles of man with himself, with other men, and with nature. This panorama generated thoughts and feelings in them, and these they could not but portray. And so literature and life are identical and not cooerdinates, as some would ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... to what is entertained by one who has dropped from a precipice to the midway ledge over the abyss, where caution of the whole sensitive being is required for simple self-preservation. How could she have been induced to study and portray him! It seemed a form ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... was even more ordinary than Mr. Osborne in manner and appearance. I do not presume to judge his real merits, for I did not notice him sufficiently to properly portray him to you, even if I had the gift of description, which I think you will admit I have not. He lives in my memory only as a something tall, spare, coarse of texture, red, hairy, and redolent ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy

... I will not portray the life we led; how by sheer brute force and will power I fought my way up until I was next in power to the captain himself. I could fill a volume in narrating the battles we fought and the hair-breadth escapes we had, but whoever reads these ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking

... then another, flapped towards it, and commenced their horrid meal. In a few moments they were crowding over the body, hissing like geese, striking at each other with wings, beak, and claws, and altogether exhibiting such a scene of ravenous hunger and angry passion as would be difficult to portray. They soon got in among the entrails of the animal, and commenced dragging them forth. Sometimes two of them would seize a long string of these, and each swallowing from opposite ends, would meet each other ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid

... already, the mosaics on the vaults and lunettes of the arches in the outer narthex of the church portray scenes from the life of Christ, as recorded in the canonical and the apocryphal Gospels, while on the faces and soffits of the arches are depicted the figures of saints 'who desired to look into these things.' Scenes from the Saviour's life are also ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... to delineate the effects of ardent spirit upon man, and more especially to portray its influence on his moral, intellectual, and physical powers. And now let me mention a few things which MUST BE DONE in order that the ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... side, or to poverty, undue timidity, or lack of high pressure on the part of the gentleman. I have christened the heroines of this volume "Ladies-in-Waiting," and that no mental picture may be formed of Queen and Court and Maids of Honor I have asked the artist to portray for the frontispiece a marriageable maiden seated pensively upon a hillside. Her attitude is plainly one of suspended animation while the new moon above her shoulders suggests to the reader that she will not ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... and thanks another for a present of bottle-stands. From beginning to end, save in those periods of aberration, there is no more resemblance to Cowper in the picture that certain narrow-minded people have desired to portray than there is in these same people's conception of Martin Luther. The real Luther, who loved dancing and mirth and the joy of living as much as did any of the men he so courageously opposed, was not more remote from a conception of him once current in this country ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter

... portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... 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 took it did not think highly of it and considered ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower

... pleasant to read books amid the scenery in which they were conceived, and among the people they portray. Those who spend their holidays at Cullen would act wisely in reading George Macdonald's novels there. No one has drawn the character of the Moray Firth fisherman so lovingly, beautifully, and sympathetically ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... his confidence in God. Then a tone-picture is given of the encounter; the heavy tread of the Philistine is heard in the bass, while semiquaver passages, evolved from a figure in the preceding movement, evidently portray the spirited youth. One realistic bar scarcely needs the explanation given by Kuhnau that it is the slinging of the stone which smote the Philistine in his forehead; and the same may be said of the "Goliath ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock

... the poem is Spenser explains in a prefatory letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. The whole is a vast epic allegory, aiming, in the first place, to portray the virtues which make up the character of a perfect knight; an ideal embodiment, seen through Renaissance conceptions, of the best in the chivalrous system which in Spenser's time had passed away, but to which some choice spirits still looked ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... contradictory to all the logarithms of probability, this tissue of unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad from the heart of Europe was integrated into the greatest living master of those who in our tongue strive to portray the riddles of the human heart—such is the kind of calculus that makes "A Personal Record" unique among textbooks of the soul. It is as impossible to describe as any dear friend. Setting out only with the intention to "present faithfully the feelings and sensations connected with the writing of ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... would have sensed a warning; but Calmar Bye, one time writer, paid no heed. An instinct of his life, one he had thought suppressed, a necessity imperative as hunger, was gathering upon him strongly—the overwhelming instinct to portray the unusual. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... reproductions called ex-votos of literally every portion of the body—feet, hands, limbs, heads, all portions—the ceiling space is completely covered with these uncanny figures. The wall is hung with pictures, which portray all sorts of scenes, such as a man in shipwreck, a carpenter falling down a ladder, a child falling out of a second-story window, death chambers of various people, etc. These figures and pictures are intended to represent miracles. When these people were in ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray

... for him to portray a Gretchen. All his pictures were Phryne,—Phryne in triumph, in ruin, in a palace, in a poor-house, on a bed of roses, on a hospital mattress; Phryne laughing with a belt of jewels about her supple waist; Phryne lying with the stones of the dead-house ...
— Bebee • Ouida

... was clearly visible for a one-mile radius around the Nautilus. What a sight! What pen could describe it? Who could portray the effects of this light through these translucent sheets of water, the subtlety of its progressive shadings into the ocean's upper ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... scrupulous observance of nature, and that every writer should draw as close to it as possible, but only in order to interpret it, to reveal it with a true feeling, yet without a too intimate analysis, and that no one should attempt to portray it exactly or servilely copy it. "Of what use is art," he says, "if it is only a reduplication of existence? We see around us only too much of the sadness and disenchantment of reality." The three novels that compose the volume 'Servitude ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... descriptive writer has 'distinction' of style, or is admirable only for his vivacity: but he rarely goes to the individual heart of any of the subjects of his criticism; he finds their style and class, but not their personality in that class; he ranks his men, but does not portray them; hardly even seems to find much interest in the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... was the rock bottom of the character of the soldier of France after three and a half years of war: "Will always on the stretch, anguish conquered, melancholy transformed into nobility of soul—as long as literature does not portray these essential traits of the soldier," says one of our best author-combatants, "all it creates will only be artificial and ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... through about seven centuries of authentic history. In succeeding chapters it will be our pleasanter task to trace the more brilliant and worthy fortunes of the artistic and intellectual life of Hellas,—to portray, though necessarily in scanty outline, the achievements of that wonderful genius which enabled her, "captured, ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... picked up the rags that fell from the coats of other people of the country and sewed them on their own garments, taking great pleasure in these, as though it were matter of some greater perfection."[1] These few broad strokes would portray with equally happy precision a myriad other black servants born centuries after the writer's death and dwelling in a continent of whose existence he never dreamed. Azurara wrote further that while some of the captives were not ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... in the background, nor is it an effort to apotheosize the American who stands first in our history next to Washington. The writers knew Lincoln intimately. Their book is the result of unreserved association. There is no attempt to portray the man as other than he really was, and on this account their frank testimony must be accepted, and their biography must take permanent rank as the best and most illuminating study of Lincoln's character and personality. Their story, simply told, relieved ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright

... 1876, from which not a man escaped to tell the tale, and you may form some conception of the hardships, suffering, and cruelties inflicted on the early pioneer. It was left for the resourceful Remington to vividly portray life and scenes of those days, perpetuating their memory on canvas and bronze for all time. The name of Frederick Remington should not only go down in history as the greatest living artist of those scenes, but his bust in bronze should be given a place ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young

... thus caught in its meshes to realize its horrors so as to seek its destruction but one course is possible; namely, To study the evil. Let the teacher tell of its ravages; let the minister proclaim its curses; let the poet sing it; the painter paint it; the editor report it; the novelist portray it; the scientist describe it; the philosopher decry it; the sisters and wives and mothers denounce it—until all shall unite in smiting ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... in the opinion of others. Such persons consequently do not give themselves out for what they actually are; their secret escapes from them unwittingly, or against their will. Rightly, therefore, to portray such characters, the poet must lend us his own peculiar talent for observation, that we may fully understand them. His art consists in making the character appear through slight hints and stolen glimpses, and in so placing the spectator, that whatever delicacy ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... in her soul a sense of delicacy mingled with that rarest of qualities in woman—a sense of humor," writes Richard Grant White in "The Fate of Mansfield Humphreys." I have noticed that when a novelist sets out to portray an uncommonly fine type of heroine, he invariably adds to her other intellectual and moral graces the above-mentioned "rarest of qualities." I may be over-sanguine, but I anticipate that some sagacious genius will discover that woman as well as man has been endowed ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn

... She had no notion of drawing, not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover's profile, that she might be detected in the design. There she fell miserably short of the true heroic height. At present she did not know her own poverty, for she had no lover to portray. There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no, not even a baronet! There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door; no, not one young man whose ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... exactly the incomparable impression the exposition effected upon its visitors, but, it is safe to say, without even faintly describing it; for, can language convey to a blind man what "color" means, or to a deaf person the meaning of music?—No more can the pen of the most gifted author adequately portray the World's Columbian Exposition. If one would give to each building a volume; a shelf to the Midway Plaisance; and to the exhibitions a whole library in way of description, yet half of its beauties and wonders ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler

... David Malo.[395] It was marked by strenuous bodily action, gestures with feet and hands, and that vigorous exercise of the pelvis and body termed ami, the chief feature of which was a rotation of the pelvis in circles and ellipses, which is not to be regarded as an effort to portray sexual attitudes. It was a performance in which the whole company stood and chanted the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... of Johnston, the return of peace, and the fact of their immediate march towards the homes from which they had been so long absent, cannot be written. It caused a thrill of emotions in every heart beyond the reach of the pen to portray. ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear

... Bice is a goddess, this one a saint. Bice is Artemis, or one of the Muses; this one is Holy Agnes or Saint Cecilia. There is in that sweet and holy face the same depth of devotion which our painters portray on the face of the Madonna. This little family group stand amidst all the other passengers, separated by the wide gulf of superior rank, for they are manifestly from among the upper classes, but still more so by the solemn ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... we have been born heir and to use but half our faculties. We have all had longings for a fuller life which should include the use of these faculties. These longings are the physical complement of the "Intimations of Immortality," on which no ode has yet been written. To portray these would be the work of a poet, and it is hazardous for any but ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... believed at that time, the attitude in many of these poems is quite different from the attitude he expressed in his many Christian books from the 1930s on. Attempts in movies and on stage plays to portray Lewis as a sheltered professor who knew little about pain until the death of his wife late in life, have to deal not only with the many tragedies he experienced from a boy on, but also with the disturbing issues he faced in many ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis

... of which Pantomime was deemed to be one, owing to the bad odour in which this form of entertainment had got to during the last days of the Empire. Notwithstanding this the church was only too glad to avail itself of Pantomime as a vehicle to portray before the world at large, and in order to turn attention to the great moral truths to be deduced from the death of Him on Calvary Hill. These exhibitions of religious subjects, in the form of tableaux ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent

... Professor in the School of Western Railroading, and himself a keen observer, in situ, of the conditions which I have herein sought to portray, this book is ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... Willy's possessions was a Japanese figure carved in wood not more than a foot high, a woman selling oysters. Each least detail was most precisely rendered. It was the attempt of a more recent Japanese master to portray feminine beauty. In this one rare instance he had succeeded, having produced one of those precious objects adapted to make thieves of ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... I will set forth more amply in the notice which I will give to the reader the motive that induced me to put my hand to the work of the present author, who has no need of trumpet and herald to exalt and magnify her(1) greatness, inasmuch as there is no human eloquence that could portray her more forcibly than she has portrayed herself by the celestial strokes of her own brush; I mean by her other writings, in which she has so well expressed the sincerity of her doctrines, the vivacity of her faith, and the uprightness of her morals, ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... who have followed him through his boyhood and traced his character need no description of his feelings. We know the intensity of his earthly affections, the strength and force of his every emotion, the depth and holiness of his spiritual sentiments, and vain then would be the attempt to portray his private moments in this dread trial: yet before his family he was calm, before his Mary cheerful. She felt her prayers were heard, he was, he would be yet more supported, and her last pang ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar

... watch at the second mate's door, went upon deck to light another lamp at the binnacle, it having been again accidentally extinguished. He was there asked by his terrified brother, whose agony of mind we will not attempt to portray, if he intended to hurt Smith, the other boat-steerer. He replied that he did; and inquired where he was. George fearing that Smith would be immediately pursued, said he had not seen him.—Comstock then perceiving his ...
— A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824 • William Lay

... less need to apologize for now essaying to portray sundry scenes of which I was not an actual witness, in that the reader must by this time be heartily disposed to welcome an escape from my wearisome ego, at any expense whatsoever of historical accuracy. Nor is it essential to set forth in this place the means by which I later ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... have followed his example if I could, but it was impossible. My stubborn constitution seemed to defy the destructive wear and tear of prolonged hunger and thirst; but my sufferings were beyond the power of language to portray; my craving hunger was so intense that I believe I could have eaten and enjoyed any food, however revolting, could I but have obtained it; while my thirst was so overpowering that it was with the utmost difficulty I combated the temptation to open a vein and ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood

... death. Such food as the rest had was freely given to him, but it did not is satisfy the demands of his nature. Quietly, uncomplainingly, he had borne the pangs of famine, and when the company first realized his dreadful condition, he was in the delirium which preceded death. What words can portray the emotions of the starving emigrants, when they saw one of their number actually perish of hunger before their eyes! Williams died in the Graves cabin, and was buried near the house by W. C. Graves and ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan

... Alone on the upper bridge stood the Monarch, attired in full military uniform, with white coat and tight breeches, high top boots, shining silver breastplate and silver helmet, surmounted by an eagle, the dress of the Prussian Guard Regiment so dear to those who portray romantic and kingly roles upon the stage, a figure on whom all eyes were fixed, as splendid as that of Lohengrin, drawn by his fairy swan, coming to rescue the unjustly accused Princess. And, alas, the Germans like all this pomp and splendour. It appeals to something in the German heart and seems ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... that which, to my mind, was necessary and inseparable from the perfect state and from social order, I inquired whether it would not be possible to realise all this with a king at the head, and entered so deeply into the matter as to portray the king in such a fashion, that he seemed even more anxious than any one else that his state should be organised on genuinely republican lines, in order that he might attain to the fulfilment of his own highest aims. I must own, however, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... Albert Duerer's bust over the door! Our best knowledge of Alexander Hamilton's aspect is obtained from the expressive marble head of him by that ardent republican sculptor, Ceracchi. It was appropriate for Mrs. Darner, the daughter of a gallant field-marshal, to portray in marble, as heroic idols, Fox, Nelson, and Napoleon. We were never more convinced of the intrinsic grace and solemnity of this form of "counterfeit presentment" than when exploring the Bacioechi palazzo at Bologna. In the centre of a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... are ten shells, thirteen inches in diameter, rising high in air. There are handfuls of smoke flecking the sky, and a prolonged, indescribable crashing, rolling, and rumbling. You have seen battle-pieces by the great painters; but the highest artistic skill cannot portray the scene. It is a vernal day, as beautiful as ever dawned. The gunboats are enveloped in flame and smoke. The unfolding clouds are slowly wafted away by the gentle breeze. Huge columns rise majestically from the mortars. ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin

... among men; as Amitabha, his metaphysical existence in Nirvana; as Avalokitesvara, his reflex in the world of forms, his spiritual son, generated to propagate the religion established by him during his earthly career. Or once again, these three images may portray the Buddhas of the Past, Present, and Future:—Gautama who was, the historic founder of Buddhism; Kwannon, or Avalokitesvara, the head of the present Buddhist hierarchy, the Buddha who is; and Maitreya, or Meroku, the deliverer ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.

... Notary's fair sweetheart, Telimena, was spreading abroad the gleams of her beauty and of her toilet, from top to toe of the very latest style. What manner of gown she wore, and what her coiffure was like, it were vain to write, for the pen could never express it; only the pencil could portray those tulles, muslins, laces, cashmeres, pearls and precious stones—and her ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... undertaken to describe some very difficult things, but I would not attempt to portray my feelings, and three days later there was no change. It was in the height of my season of field work, and I had several extremely interesting series of bird studies on hand, and many miscellaneous subjects. In those days some pictures were secured that I then thought, and ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... the reader the materials from which he will be enabled in some measure to judge what Mr. Hope-Scott was, and how he appeared to those around him. But to all beauty of character there belongs a lustre, outside of and beyond it, which genius alone can portray. This task has fortunately been performed by two of his most intimate friends, of whose genius it is needless to say a word—Cardinal Newman and Mr. Gladstone—by whose kind permission their respective papers ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby

... unimaginable confidences she was making him about herself, her family, the staff of 'Every Other Week,' Mrs. Mandel, and the kind of life they had all led before she came to them. He was not a blind devotee of art for art's sake, and though he felt that if one could portray Mela just as she was she would be the richest possible material, he was rather ashamed to know some of the things she told him; and he kept looking anxiously about for a chance of escape. The company ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... nuances and by describing in his romance different kinds of love. Side by side with Gynecia's passion, he has set himself to paint the love of an old man in Basilius, of a young man in Pyrocles, of a young girl in Pamela. This last study led him to portray a scene which was to be represented again by one of the great novelists of the eighteenth century. Richardson borrowed from Sidney, with the name of Pamela, the idea of the adventure that shows her a prisoner of her enemies, imploring heaven that her virtue may be preserved. The wicked Cecropia ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand

... task, and how shall I find words to describe the passion of grief and apprehension with which I set about it? It must go undescribed, for there are certain emotions of the human heart and mind which mere words are powerless to portray. Perhaps it is well that this should be the case, for no one who has not passed through such an experience as mine could possibly understand what I endured as I made my slow way toward the ruined house, subconsciously noting, as I went, the evidences which met me on every ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood

... as yet undertaken the task of compiling a full and authentic biography of Lord Viscount Dundee. His memory has consequently been left at the mercy of misrepresentation and malignity; and the pen of romance has been freely employed to portray, as a bloody assassin, one of the most accomplished men and ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun

... drawing to go from school to school to teach those elegant arts, but have had none to teach the art of health. Accordingly, the pupils have exhibited more complex curves in their spines than they could possibly portray on the blackboard, and acquired such discords in their nervous systems as would have utterly disgraced their singing. It is something to have got beyond the period when active sports were actually prohibited. I remember when there was but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... truly horrible, so that the closing winter months of 1854 were such as tried the fortitude of the British troops and their hardihood of endurance to the uttermost. It would be in vain to attempt to portray, upon these pages, sufferings which excited the wonder and sympathy of all nations, or to depict the patriotism and enduring devotion to duty by which such protracted miseries were sustained. Great ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... first essential of a great dramatic director—a psychologic mind in the study of the various human natures of his actors and of the ideas they attempted to portray. ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... curling in light spiral ringlets so as to drop profusely on her bosom, had been richly powdered with gold-dust for this occasion, and glistened like the sunlight, or, to fall in my comparison, the tresses of Lucretia Borgia, as her historians portray them. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield



Words linked to "Portray" :   portrayal, limn, portraying, depict, artistic creation, play, interpret, portrayer, act, impersonate, portraiture, artistic production, portrait



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