"Imagery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... progress of Humanity seems to us to have been derived from the Christian belief in the coming of the Kingdom of God through the extension of the Church, and to that final triumph of good over evil foretold in the imagery of the Apocalypse. At least the founders of the Religion of Humanity will admit that the Christian Church is the matrix of theirs so much their very nomenclature proves and we would fain ask them to review the process of disengagement ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... point. The vividness, magnitude, and violence of the imagery in some of these passages are characteristic of Macbeth almost throughout; and their influence contributes to form its atmosphere. Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast and dashed to death; of pouring the sweet milk of concord ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... swore to me: and in all honesty he swore to the car. For this, since Ping and Pong were duplicates, he may be forgiven. He described the morning's incident with a wealth of picturesque detail and an abundance of vivid imagery, while an astute cross-examination only served to adorn ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... persons, and those of the most insignificant sort; the other is directed chiefly to things, such as faults of education, false habits, and false taste. In polished and pointed satire, in richness of versification and imagery, and in the happy introduction of characters, speeches, figures, and every sort of poetical ornament adapted to the subject, this Book yields, in my opinion, to none of Pope's writings of the same kind." Excellently well said. But what inconsistency ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... humorous, the pathetic, the tender, the satiric, the original, the erudite, the creative—the poet, sage, and scholar. But we might exhaust ourselves in expletives, and yet fail to give any idea of his rich imagery, his wonderful power, his natural and tender pathos. Besides, who does not already know him as a really great writer, through the appreciative criticisms ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... were "barren of imagination and invention," offered in their insipid artificialities nothing but "rhetoric, bombast, fleurs de college, and Latin-verse poetry," clothed "borrowed ideas in trumpery imagery," and presented themselves with a "conventional elegance and noblesse than which there was nothing more common." On the other hand, the works of the master-minds of England, Germany, Spain, and Italy, which were more and more translated ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... full or so interesting as that of Godwin or even Morley. In no life that I have read are the mental characteristics of our poet so ably drawn,—"his practical good sense," his love of books, his still deeper love of nature, his naivete, the readiness of his description, the brightness of his imagery, the easy flow of his diction, the vividness with which he describes character; his inventiveness, his readiness of illustration, his musical rhythm, his gaiety and cheerfulness, his vivacity and joyousness, his pathos and tenderness, his keen sense of the ridiculous and power of satire, without ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... incorporated into a story, uniting narrative and dialogue so as to be more attractive to the young. John Bunyan was the first to adopt this style, and his inimitable Pilgrim's Progress charms the young reader, not only by its graphic imagery, but also by its alternation of narrative and dialogue. Since his day, others have adopted a similar style, particularly in works of fiction, with success. Why may not truth appear in such a dress as successfully as fiction? Why may not actual lives be presented in this manner as vividly ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... old Lower dialect, of course does not occur, as there are no means of indicating it in the Cherokee syllabary. Those who are accustomed to look to the Bible for all beauty in sacred expression will be surprised to find that these formulas abound in the loftiest nights of poetic imagery. This is especially true of the prayers used to win the love of a woman or to destroy the life of an enemy, in which we find such expressions as—"Now your soul fades away—your spirit shall grow less ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... Imagery is confined to actual figures; and it is this measure and this form which give power to the creations of the mind. The imaginative writer should possess a rich store of perceptive observations, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... to have been the work of his boyhood. And I have met with no conjecture on the point that bears greater likelihoods of truth, than that another three, far different in merit, were addressed, much later in life, to the same object. The prevailing tone and imagery of them are such as he would hardly have used but with a woman in his thoughts; they are full-fraught with deep personal feeling, as distinguished from exercises of fancy; and they speak, with unsurpassable tenderness, of frequent absences, such as, before ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... seeth how they look when they are turned into words; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself, and that more by an hour's discourse than by a day's meditation. It was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, 'That speech was like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in figure; whereas in thought they lie in packs.' Neither is this second fruit of friendship, in opening the understanding, restrained only to such friends as are able to give a man counsel. (They are, indeed, best.) But even without that, a man learneth of himself, and bringeth his ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... contended that two very potent influences must be taken into account which will explain this difference. In the first place, the subjects of the two books stand widely apart. The apocalyptic purport of the one book necessarily tinges its diction and imagery with a very strong Hebraic colouring, which we should not expect to find in a historical narrative. Secondly, a wide interval of time separates the two works. The Apocalypse was written, according to the view which our author represents 'as universally accepted by all competent ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... guard upon the door, of the cherubs in the corners, of the scapegoat gargoyles, or the quaint and spirited relief, where St. Michael (the artist's patron) makes short work of a protesting Lucifer. We were never weary of viewing the imagery, so innocent, sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense—in the sense of inventive gusto and expression—so artistic. I know not whether it was more strange to find a building of such merit in a corner of a barbarous isle, or to see a building so ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... strangers attending his meetings, that this John the Baptist, mighty preacher though he be, was but the herald of one much greater than he, who should follow—that he was the forerunner of the Master, according to the Oriental imagery which pictured the forerunner of the great dignitaries, running ahead of the chariot of his master, crying aloud to all people gathered on the road that they must make way for the approaching great man, shouting constantly, "Make ye a way! make ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Limits of Seas and Oceans, revised January 1958, published by the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center (ACIC), United States Air Force; note - ACIC is now part of the National Imagery and ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... a small thing, and the world and the systems of worlds, and the infinite stretches of illimitable space, are so wide for a child's soul to wander in, that, sane as we may be, stolid as we may try to be, we think in imagery, and the figure of little feet setting off on the far track to the end of things, hunting God, wrings our heart-strings and makes our throats grip and our ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... of manner, no pretty posture or habit, but the simplicity of poetry and the simplicity of Nature, something on the yonder side of imagery. It is to be noted that this noble passage is from Tennyson's generally weakest kind of work—blank verse; and should thus be a sign that the laxity of so many parts of the "Idylls" and other blank verse poems was a quite unnecessary ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... impressing it upon the mind, like a text which gathers atmosphere and discloses significance under the special treatment of the preacher. It is said that he had, artistically, the allegorizing temperament, and he in fact did use all those forms of imagery—the fable, apologue, parable—which belong to this mode of presentation; but in his most effective work the allegory is more subtly embodied,—it exists in suggestion, and its appeal is as much emotional as didactic. ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... spoke as though his mind were coming back from a distance. "I," he said, "dreamed a poem in India. It has never been written down, but I still can remember every line of it. Listen." The poem, which was full of vague Oriental imagery, was perfectly intelligible, and throbbed with a certain sonority like that of distant gongs; but no sane man would have written it in his waking moments. In that fact lay its charm. The author's voice, naturally low and musical, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... flourishes of cypress, palms, and olive, and the mystical figures of peacocks, doves, and cocks; but iterately affecting the portraits of Enoch, Lazarus, Jonas, and the vision of Ezekiel, as hopeful draughts, and hinting imagery of the resurrection, which is the life of the grave, and sweetens our habitations in the land ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... magnanimity, Rinaldo by his vehemence, Ricciardetto by his amours, Astolfo by an ostentatious rashness and self-committal; but in all these respects they appear to have been made to the author's hand. Neither does the poem exhibit any prevailing force of imagery, or of expression, apart from popular idiomatic phraseology; still less, though it has plenty of infernal magic, does it present us with any magical enchantments of the alluring order, as in Ariosto; or with love-stories as good as Boiardo's, or even with any of the luxuries ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... almost warrant a belief that this piece of imagery may have emanated from the same brain and been executed by the same hands as are accountable for the two which we have seen seven miles away, but the workmanship is really not in the least alike, and I have learnt almost to discard in this connection the theory of local idiosyncrasies. ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... made the acquaintance of some literature with which I am not familiar; she has also found in books printed in raised letters, in the reading of which I have been unable to follow her, much material for the cultivation of the taste she possesses for poetical imagery. The pages of the book she reads become to her like paintings, to which her imaginative powers give life and colour. She is at once transported into the midst of the events portrayed in the story she reads or is told, and the characters and descriptions become real to her; ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... and rendering more shadowy the names and memories of heroes,—obliterating even its own ruin;—set aside this oblivion of Time, still there would be hieroglyphics,—still to us all that comes from this abyss of Time behind us, or from the abyss of Space around us, must be but dim and evanescent imagery and empty reverberation of sound, except as, becoming a part of our own life, by a new birth, it receives shape and significance. Nothing can be unveiled to us till it is born of us. Thus the epoptae are both ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony.—In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... due in part to an idealizing dissatisfaction with the crudeness of their actual life (as well as to frequent inability to enter into the realm of deeper and finer thought without the aid of somewhat mechanical imagery); and no doubt it was greatly furthered also by the medieval passion for translating into elaborate and fantastic symbolism all the details of the Bible narratives. But from whatever cause, the tendency hardened into a ruling convention; thousands upon thousands ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... characteristics, we felt obliged to attribute great importance to the habits of eye and hand suggested and confirmed by the cutting and painting of the hieroglyphs. In their monumental inscriptions, if nowhere else, the symbols of the Egyptian system retained their concrete imagery to the end; and the images, though abridged and simplified, never lost their resemblance;[46] and if it is necessary to know something more than the particular animal or thing which they represent before we can get at their meaning, that is only because in most cases ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... fact that it was not imitated as the most meaningless sort of modern vulgarity is imitated. King Richard's great red hat embroidered with beasts and birds has not overshadowed the earth so much as the billycock, which no one has yet thought of embroidering with any such natural and universal imagery. The cockney tourist is not only more likely to set out with the intention of knocking them, but he has actually knocked them; and Orientals are imitating the tweeds of the tourist more than they imitated the stripes of the squire. It is a curious and perhaps melancholy truth ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... and workmaster, that laboureth night and day: and they that cut and grave seals, and are diligent to make great variety, and give themselves to counterfeit imagery, and ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... the volume was of Roman Catholic origin, creed was conspicuously subordinated to the needs of the class it aimed to reach. A confession of faith, quite simple, in one God, a Saviour, a Mother of Heaven; a number of Biblical extracts rich in imagery and applicability to the experience of a woods-dweller; a dozen simple prayers of the kind the natural man would oftenest find occasion to express—a prayer for sickness, for bounty, for fair weather, for ease of travel, for the smiling face of Providence; and then some hymns. To me ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... make great havoc of both hero and heroine. They give way to melancholy, indulge in amorous rhapsodies, and become very emaciated. So far the story is decidedly dull, and its pathos, notwithstanding the occasional grandeur and beauty of imagery, often verges on the ridiculous. But, by way of relief, an element of life is generally introduced in the character of the Vidushaka, or Jester, who is the constant companion of the hero; and in the young maidens, who are confidential friends of the heroine, and soon become ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... subject could not well admit of it. The description of Asiatic magnificence, and manners, is a subject as yet unattempted amongst us, and I believe, capable of furnishing a great variety of poetical imagery. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... you teach me better I shall continue to think that the passage in your speech of yesterday which began with, 'Our strength lies in this twisted and tangled mass of isolated principles, the hair of the half-sleeping giant of Party,' is both for language and imagery quite equal to anything ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... with which he greeted the regiment held the happy mean between theatrical gush and a sermon. It was adorned with pompous imagery, and contained numerous eulogiums of the reigning family. "Christian humility" and "God's assistance" played a great part therein, and it dealt rude thrusts at those who waged war in secret upon the sup-porters of throne ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... not mean to inflict. But how utterly this seems to me opposed to the gospel of Christ! All Christ's references to eternal punishment may be resolved into references to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery; with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a moral amendment beyond the grave. I speak of the unselfish desire of Dives to save his brothers. The more I see of the controversy, the more baseless does the eternal ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... like an anaconda absorbing an unwashed goat; who makes no attempt to separate the essential from the accidental—the utterance of inspiration from the garrulity of hopeless nescience; who forgets that it is half an epic poem filled with the gorgeous imagery of the Orient, may, like the ass which Balaam rode, open its mouth and speak; but he never saw the Angel of the Lord; he utters the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... books in all languages continued to sell in cheap editions and the interpreters of dreams made a decent or, at any rate, a comfortable living out of the poorer classes. But the psychologist rarely paid attention to dreams except incidentally in his study of imagery, association and the speed of thought. But now a change has come over the spirit of the times. The subject of the significance of dreams, so long ignored, has suddenly become a matter of energetic study and of fiery controversy the ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... in it? I don't think the rarity of such a sight would make you feel it to be beautiful; on the contrary, if you think over the matter, you will find that you actually do owe, and ought to owe, a great part of your pleasure in all cottage scenery, and in all the inexhaustible imagery of literature which is founded upon it, to the conspicuousness of the cottage roof—to the subordination of the cottage itself to its covering, which leaves, in nine cases out of ten, really more roof than anything else. It is, indeed, not so much the whitewashed walls—nor the flowery garden—nor ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... have lately been making large quotations from the poems of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. They might, if they had been so minded, have laid under similar contribution the Revelation of St. John the Divine. There, too, with all the imagery usual in Apocalyptic literature, is to be found a description of vague and confused fighting, when most of the Kings of the earth come together to fight a last and desperate battle. The Seven Angels go forth, each armed with a vial, the first poisoning the earth, the second the sea, ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... but with a rich, sad undertone that brought tears. Then, timidly and still softly, it elaborated the theme, weaving in and out through the original three the glitter and shimmer of a splendid web of sound, spreading before the awakened imagination a broad river of woods-imagery that reflected on its surface all the subtler moods of the forest. The pine shadows, the calls of the wild creatures, the flow of the brook, the splashes of sunlight through the trees, the sigh ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... material for the ontological question, the first and the last problem of philosophy. God and the world, at first dimly conceived and scarcely differentiated, gradually separate and take shape in the mind as distinct entities. The concepts become principles, fixed by language and mental imagery. The gulf between them widens until they stand at opposite poles of thought. In their isolation they constitute a standing challenge to the mind of man. If he thinks the world in terms of time, he must postulate a creator. If he thinks ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... such as baffled his best skill, Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received Into the bosom of the steady lake. This boy was taken from his mates, and died In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old. Pre-eminent in beauty is the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... that society, as distinct from the individuals who compose it, has no apparatus for feeling pain or pleasure. There are no social sensations. Perceptions and mental imagery are individual and not social phenomena. Society lives, so to speak, only in its separate organs or members, and each of these organs has its own brain and organ of control which gives it, among other things, the power of independent ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... untrodden vale at Tempe where On the clear river's marge Narcissus lies, The tangle of the forest in his hair, The silence of the woodland in his eyes, Wooing that drifting imagery which is No sooner kissed than broken; memories ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... would have found imagery by which to improve his description of the abode of Vulcan; for how feeble must have been the objects of this nature, which a poet could view on the shores of the Mediterranean, compared with the gigantic machinery of an English iron-foundry. The application of ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... as well as majestic and impressive, in the teaching of our Lord. The Sermon on the Mount is a most pleasing specimen of His method of conveying instruction. Whilst He gives utterance to sentiments of exalted wisdom, He employs language so simple, and imagery so chaste and natural, that even a child takes a pleasure in perusing His address. There is reason to think that He did not begin to speak in parables until a considerable time after He had entered upon His ministry. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the royal anger of Elizabeth, sure to be aroused by the preference of any beauty to her own. To deceive the Queen,—to whom, in gratitude for past favors, and, mayhap, with a lively appreciation of others yet to come, he is offering up homage,—he describes her Majesty by the very same imagery he had elsewhere employed to depict his lady-love; and ostensibly applies to the royal Elizabeth the amatory terms which are covertly meant for an Elizabeth of his own,—between whom and her royal type he either saw or affected to see a personal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... must not imagine that he is to find in it wisdom, brilliancy, fertility of invention, ingenuity of construction, excellence of form, purity of style, perfection of imagery, truth to nature, clearness of statement, humanly possible situations, humanly possible people, fluent narrative, connected sequence of events—or philosophy, or logic, or sense. No; the rich, deep, beguiling charm of the book lies in the total and miraculous ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... represent earlier stages of amalgamation in which Hindu and aboriginal ideas are already compounded. When the smallpox goddess is identified with Kali, the procedure is correct, for some popular forms of Kali are little more than an aboriginal deity of pestilence draped with Hindu imagery and philosophy. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... until original form is lost beneath a weight of accretion, like the thick moss blurring the chiselled outlines of some carven monument. After careful scrutiny of the miniature temple which suggests so many interpretations of symbolic imagery, we return to the little presbytery to hear of the subsiding river, and the good priest, announcing that the raft can now be safely negotiated, accompanies us to the tottering structure, a straw matting laid over three crazy boats punted across the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... particularly with the children: he was obliged to maintain an endless hypocrisy about the miracles, the dogmas and affairs, of Sunday school and the church. As a child he had been so filled with a literal Presbyterian imagery that, when a degree of reason discarded figures of speech seen as concrete actualities, nothing had been left. With the lapse of a purely pictorial heaven and hell, the loss of eternal white choirs and caldrons of the ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the ministry, or any orthodox qualification to practise it. "We're all working in the claim of the Lord," he remarked one day, "and it don't matter a cent whether we're hired for the job or whether we waltzes in on our own account," a piece of rough imagery which appealed directly to the instincts of Jackman's Gulch. It is quite certain that during the first few months his presence had a marked effect in diminishing the excessive use both of strong drinks and of stronger adjectives which had been characteristic of the little mining settlement. ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... imagery the seer of old likened the mind unto a tree. The tree shakes down its fruits, and the mind sheds forth its thoughts. The boughs of the one will cover the land with forests; the faculties of the ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... appears very frequently in the scriptures as a type of the highest human good. All of the most joyous emotions of the mental and physical natures of man are described in the imagery of light. Throughout the Book it is used to typify the true ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... marble warrior, fully armed. In the centre of the apartment was a mystical altar, composed of emeralds, and inlaid with diamonds, and upon this stood a crystal globe, encircled with a wreath of coral. Kneeling within the circle was a youthful maiden, surpassing in loveliness the brightest imagery of Eastern poets. ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... by combining certain real circumstances, but which do not in fact concurrently happen, completes and extends the work of nature. Thus the object of poetry is not to represent what is true, but to adorn it, and to present to the mind some loftier imagery. Verse, regarded as the ideal beauty of language, may be eminently poetical; but verse does not, of itself, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... degenerated into a gross superstition. But traces still remained, even down to the times of Christian ascendency, of the deep, philosophical spirit in which it had been originally conceived; and through its homely imagery there ran a vein of tender humour, such as still characterises the warm-hearted, laughter-loving northern races. Of this mixture of philosophy and fun, the following story is no bad specimen. [Footnote: The story of Thor's journey has been translated ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... friends was his choice of language, the felicity of his turns of expression, his imagery, the terseness of his unadorned English, and his simple directness of manner, which none will ever be able to reproduce, however many notes they may have taken. His dignity and repose of manner, his low musical voice, and the power of his magnetic dark ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... that was created by this meeting of old Maisie and old Phoebe, each of whom for nearly half a century had thought the other dead. It is forced to appeal to its reader to make an effort to help its feeble presentations by its own powers of imagery. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... tinging their autumnal tops, he never once alludes to them, so far as we remember, either in his poetry or prose; and that although he spent a part of his youth on the wild smuggling coast of Carrick, he has borrowed little of his imagery from the sea—none, we think, except the two ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... firmament, who commanded the morning and caused the day-spring to know its place, who answered out of the whirlwind, and whose envoys were the four winds, the four cherubim described with such wealth of imagery in the introduction to the book of Ezekiel. The Mahometan adores "the clement and merciful Lord of the Daybreak," whose star is in the east, who rides on the storm, and whose breath is the wind. The primitive man in the New ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... Not unnaturally, therefore, we find in the mythology of our race, in our dreams and in the speech of our insane patients, a frequent correlation of these two ideas, whether it comes in the crude imagery of physical rebirth or projected in fantasies of destruction and rebuilding of the world. Many of our psychotic patients achieve in fancy that for which ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... it; and one of them says—"It is rich in figurative modes of expression; and I am convinced that a nearer acquaintance with it would place it on a level with the most distinguished for boldness and power of imagery." ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... Given his premises it is not surprising that Ogilvie often emphasizes ornamentation or imagistic display and supports his position by conceiving of the modern lyric as descended from the religiously consecrated ode. The sublime and exuberant imagery of the latter exists reductively as an important virtue of the ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... ancients, are the essentials of our modern oratory. Many able men have achieved success under these conditions as forcible and convincing speakers. But the grand eloquence of modern times is distinguished by the bursts of feeling, of imagery or of invective, joined with convincing argument. This combination is rare, and whenever we find a man who possesses it we may be sure that, in greater or less degree, he is one of the great masters of eloquence as we understand it. The names of those who in debate or to a ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... us one of the greatest advantages that can befall a poet, to be drawn out of his study, and still more out of the chamber of imagery in his own thoughts, to behold and speculate upon the embodiment of Divine thoughts and purposes in men and their affairs around him. Now Shakspere had no public appointment, but he reaped all the advantage which such could ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... describing his voyage from Philadelphia to London in 1772. Friend Woolman, like the sturdy Quaker that he was, was horrified (when he went to have a look at the ship Mary and Elizabeth) to find "sundry sorts of carved work and imagery" on that part of the vessel where the cabins were; and in the cabins themselves he observed "some superfluity of workmanship of several sorts." This subjected his mind to "a deep exercise," and he decided that he would have to take passage in the steerage instead of the ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... God is revealed in these touching words: "How often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings." The imagery is homely, but oh! so impressively sublime. I can not do better than to use here the words of another. "Was ever imagery so homely invested with such grace and such sublimity as this at our Lord's touch? And yet how exquisite the figure itself of protection, ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... he had discovered four separate interpretations for every suggestion of Sacred Writ. For some of the pregnant utterances of the prophets he found hundreds, pouring forth metaphor and illustration in wild and dazzling profusion of audacious, uncouth imagery. The flame which began to smoulder in him at San Gemignano burst forth into a blaze at Brescia, in 1486. Savonarola was now aged thirty-four. 'Midway upon the path of life' he opened the Book of Revelation: he figured to the people of Brescia the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... by name; the poetry of political polemics, shut out from the Roman stage, was the true element and life-breath of the Lucilian poems, which by the power of the most pungent wit illustrated with the richest imagery—a power which still entrances us even in the remains that survive—pierce and crush their adversary "as by a drawn sword." In this—in the moral ascendency and the proud sense of freedom of the poet of Suessa—lies the reason why the refined Venusian, who in the Alexandrian ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... slender share: nor among great poets is he much distinguished for depth or fineness of pathos. But what gives him a place of his own, and the loftiest of its kind, is the vastness and intense vigour of his mind; the splendour of his thoughts and imagery, and the bold vehemence of his passion for the true and the sublime, under all their various forms. He does not thrill, but he exalts us. His genius is impetuous, exuberant, majestic; and a heavenly fire gleams ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... what is recondite and remote. In his best work—in Old Souls, for instance, and Old Morality—the quaintness is merely decorative: the essentials are sound and human enough to be of lasting interest and to have a capacity of common application. Elsewhere his imagery is apt to become strange and unaffecting, his fancy to work in curious and desolate ways, his message to sound abstruse and strange; and these effects too are deepened by the qualities and the merits of his style. It is peculiarly his own, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... which all the resources of popular theology were employed to awaken and maintain their audiences in a state of frenzy and religious delirium, during which conviction of sin was supposed to enter the heart more effectually. The tortures of hell alternated with the delights of heaven, in imagery calculated to drive the timid and conscientious young folks to insanity, at these meetings, to which, once awakened, the subject of conviction went three times a day, until the hysteria, the prolonged excitement so produced, came as a sign of acceptance. As each new convert rose on the "anxious ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... takes high rank among the modern poets, many of his admirers holding him to be the greatest one alive, he is a far greater orator. His diction is perfect, his wealth of imagery exhaustless; I have seen him sway a vast audience as a wheat-field is swayed by the wind. His life he values not at all; the four rows of ribbons which on the breast of his uniform make a splotch of color were not won ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... which must have been shaken by his execution and descent into Sheol, received welcome confirmation by the springing up of the belief that he had been again seen upon the face of the earth. Applying the imagery of Daniel, it became a logical conclusion that he must have ascended into the sky, whence he might shortly be expected to make his appearance, to enact the scenes foretold in prophecy. That such was the actual process of inference is shown by the legend ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... what is going on up here, after his back is turned, maybe we shall have day after day to push our logs in ahead of all the others," explained the riverman. "They will be days worth much." Then with the imagery of his race he added, "Those days will be gold beads on our rosary, mam'selle!" He smiled into her eyes, from which the fires were departing. "Please wait here ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... objections aside—though they are important, as demonstrating the limited amount of Peele's widely praised dramatic verse—we may offer one general criticism of the verse of both plays. The best lines and passages charm us by their exquisite finish, their seductive rhythm and imagery, not by their thought. Sometimes the warm glow of his patriotism, which was his most sincere emotion, inspired verses that move us; noble lines will be found in Edward the First and The Battle of Alcazar, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... covered in the same manner, you reach the top and passing a great gate, enter at once this sad but imposing theatre of Gaudama's glory. One's first impressions are, what terrible grandeur; what sickening magnificence; what absurd imagery; what extravagant expenditure; what long successions of devotees to procure this throng of buildings of such various dates; what a poor religion which makes such labors its chief meritoriousness! Before you, stands the huge Shoodagon, its top among the clouds, ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... calenture &c. (delirium) 503[obs3]; reverie, trance; day dream, golden dream; somnambulism. conception, Vorstellung[Ger], excogitation[obs3], "a fine frenzy"; cloudland[obs3], dreamland; flight of fancy, fumes of fancy; "thick coming fancies" [Macbeth]; creation of the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey[obs3], whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest[obs3], geste[obs3], extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... could. It was of his own making, and he ought to bear it. But first he resolved to register an oath, a greater oath than he had ever sworn before: and to do it properly he required a fit place and imagery; for there was something ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... Strong enough to clothe the ideas and emotions of a common poet, it was plainly inadequate to embody the vast, half-formed conceptions which gasped for expression in his soul in its moments of poetic exaltation. Often we feel his meaning, rather than apprehend it. The imagery has the indefiniteness of distant objects seen by moonlight. There are whole passages in his works in which he seems engaged in expressing Chapman to Chapman, like the deaf egotist who only placed his trumpet to his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... would be poetical even if narrated in the plainest prose. How surpassingly beautiful is it, then, worked out with all the richness of that sweetest poet, who, in intricate verbal music and dreamy imagery, ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... especially in dealing with problems concerning objects in space, as in playing chess blindfold, inventing a machine, planning a tour on an imagined map. Most people draw many simple inferences by means of perceptions, or of mental imagery. On the other hand, some men think a good deal without any continuum of words and without any imagery, or with none that seems relevant to the purpose. Still the more elaborate sort of thinking, the grouping and concatenation ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the impulses to see recurred so continually, in spite of the crowded imagery that kept passing through my mind, that they formed too nearly a continuous chain, for the hope that any one of them would succeed as a surprise. But as I persisted in banishing them, they recurred less and less often; and after two or three, at considerable intervals, had come ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... a person lying in a state of profound sleep—the body slightly curved upon itself; the limbs relaxed; the head reclining on its pillow; and eyelids closed—it is wonderful to think what strange and startling imagery may be passing through the brain of that apparently unconscious being. The events of his whole life may hurry past him in dim obscurity; he may be revisited by the dead; he may be transported into regions he never ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... of the features which gives a peculiar character to this cathedral. In the wealth of imagery on the projecting screen which forms the lowest stage of the front it is second only to Wells amongst English cathedrals. The actual west wall of the church is the work of Bishop Grandisson, who formed on the south side of the central doorway the small chapel of St. Radegunde as a burial ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... called him uncle, and said that she had been obliged to decide to quit Verona on account of her husband, to whom the excessive heat was unendurable. Her husband, in the same breath, protested that the heat killed him. He adorned the statement with all kinds of domestic and subterranean imagery, and laughed faintly, saying that after the fifteenth—on which night his wife insisted upon going to the Opera at Milan to hear a new singer and old friend—he should try a week at the Baths of Bormio, and only drop from the mountains when a proper temperature ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the sermon was greatly deepened by the singing, to a weird wailing sort of tune, of the hymn which followed. The hymn, whose majesty of imagery—a majesty derived from the Scriptures themselves—and whose resonant cadence gave it much of the character, in English, of the sublime Dies Irae, ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... him well. Who that has once read or heard his songs, can forget their rich and graceful imagery; the fertile fancy, the touching sentiment, and the "soul reviving" melody, which characterize every line of these delightful lyrics? Well do we remember, too, his "old buff waistcoat," his courteous manner, and his gentlemanly pleasantry, long after this ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... For the rest, what imagery, what exaltation we find in this Appendix! Dazed with imagined beauty we pass from one splendid haunt to another. One of them has three golf-courses of its own; several are replete with every comfort ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... his wings very hard to rise to the idea; but he could feel it enough to make any sacrifice that still remained to be made. As to what such sacrifice was now to be made to, here Newman stopped short before a blank wall over which there sometimes played a shadowy imagery. He had a fancy of carrying out his life as he would have directed it if Madame de Cintre had been left to him—of making it a religion to do nothing that she would have disliked. In this, certainly, there was no sacrifice; but there was a pale, oblique ray of inspiration. ...
— The American • Henry James
... the right, Lady Louvaine," said Mr Marshall. "'He that believeth shall not make haste.' Yet there be sheep—to follow your imagery, or truly that of our Lord—that will lag behind, and never keep pace with ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... had breathed in three weeks. His dreams came back to him. Fancy came out of the darkened room and lured him on, a thing of flaming brightness. His mirror of vision was silver-clear, a flashing, dazzling palimpsest of imagery. Wonder and beauty walked with him, hand in hand, and all power was his. He tried to tell it to Joe, but Joe had visions of his own, infallible schemes whereby he would escape the slavery of laundry-work and become himself the owner ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... lunch King discoursed acridly to Prout of boys with prurient minds, who perverted their few and baleful talents to sap discipline and corrupt their equals, to deal in foul imagery and destroy reverence. ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... nothing can be more important than that faculty of the mind which we call memory. The retentive memory instinctively stores up the facts, ideas, imagery, and often the very language found in books, so clearly that they become available at any moment in after life. The tenacity of this hold upon the intellectual treasures which books contain depends largely upon the strength of the impression ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... is not clear he called these boys his "kings." He probably used it in the sense that they were his lieutenants, and he borrowed his imagery from the "Wangs," or kings of the Taeping ruler. I am told, however, that he really used the word in a spiritual sense, testifying that these boys were as kings in the sight of God. He followed the course of the first voyage of those who went to sea, sticking pins ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... village, and you will find in it, perhaps, some humour, some tenderness, and some sweetness of sound; but you will certainly find bombast, or slander, or coarseness, united in all cases with false rhythm, false rhyme, conceited imagery, black paper, and blotted printing. A high class of ballads would do immense good—the present race demean and mislead the people as much as they stimulate them; for the sale of these ballads is immense, and printers in Dublin, Drogheda, Cork, and Belfast live by ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... kept these little books after all the others had gone back. She had read and reread them—cullings from Chaucer, from Spenser, from the Elizabethan lyrists, the border balladry, fierce, tender, oh, so human—till she knew pages of them by heart, and their vocabulary influenced her own, their imagery tinged all her leisure thoughts. It seemed to her, whenever she debated returning them, that she could not bear it. She would get them out and sit with one of them open in her hands, not reading, but staring at the pages with unseeing eyes, passing her fingers over it, as ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... On one naturally of a melancholy temperament, these oft recurring visits could not fail to produce a deep effect; and insensibly that gloom of disposition, which might have yielded to the influence of years and circumstances, was more and more confirmed by the darkness of the imagery on which it reposed. Had she been permitted to disclose to her kind mother all that she had heard and known on the subject, the reciprocation of their sympathies might have relieved her heart, and partially ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... as the work of Simon, the son of Yochai, who lived in the second century. The Zohar, it was pretended, had been concealed in a cavern in Galilee for more than a thousand years, and had now been suddenly discovered. The Zohar is, indeed, a work of genius, its spiritual beauty, its fancy, its daring imagery, its depth of devotion, ranking it among the great books of the world. Its literary style, however, is less meritorious; it is difficult and involved. As Chatterton clothed his ideas in a pseudo-archaic ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... tranquillity of Autumn, and the horror of Winter, take in their turns possession of the mind. The poet leads us through the appearances of things as they are successively varied by the vicissitudes of the year, and imparts to us so much of his own enthusiasm that our thoughts expand with his imagery and kindle with his sentiments. Nor is the naturalist without his part in the entertainment, for he is assisted to recollect and to combine, to arrange his discoveries, and to amplify the sphere of his contemplation. The great defect of the "Seasons" is want ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... stage with anxious eyes. Brangaene—an ugly, large person in a terra-cotta cheese-cloth peplum—had already warned the desperate pair beneath the trees that dawn and danger were at hand. But the lovers sang of death and love, and love and death; and their sweet, despairing imagery floated on the oily waves of orchestral passion. The eloquence became burning; Tekla had forgotten her tribulations, Calcraft and time and space, when King Marke entered accompanied by ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... speech of your life. It will be filled with magnificent words, many of them, eight or ten syllables long. It will be mellow like the call of a trumpet. It will be armed with force, and it will be beautiful with imagery; it will be suffused and charged with color, it will be the very essence of poetry and power, and as the aged Dagaeoga draws his very last breath so he will speak his very last word, and thus, in a golden cloud, his soul will go away into infinite space, to dwell forever ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to Milton the richest medal in the Temple of the Muses! Not, perhaps, for the elegant diction and sublime imagery of his PARADISE LOST, but for his grand conceptions of Divinity in all its attributes, and of humanity in all its conditions, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Giaour, the first of the flood of verse romances which, during the three succeeding years, he poured forth with impetuous fluency, and which were received with almost unrestrained applause. The plots and sentiments and imagery are similar in them all. The Giaour steals the mistress of Hassan, who revenges his honour by drowning her. The Giaour escapes; returns, kills Hassan, and then goes to a monastery. In the Bride of Abydos, published in the December of the same year, Giaffir wants to ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... to him in council, as they were wont to their lost chief, whose death song they have sung amidst the wail of the squaws. Yet Whirlwind does not grieve. He has found another squaw, fleeter than the antelope, more graceful than the fawn, whose voice is like the singing birds, and face fairer than imagery of the spirit land. Let my brother go to his home, but Whirlwind's home is where the antelope is, he will live and ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... unmanned. A period of violent agitation followed. For a time he seemed completely transformed. The sunny Lincoln, the delight of Clary's Grove, had vanished. In his place was a desolated soul—a brother to dragons, in the terrible imagery of Job—a dweller in the dark places of affliction. It was his mother reborn in him. It was all the shadowiness of his mother's world; all that frantic reveling in the mysteries of woe to which, hitherto, her son had been an alien. To the simple minds of the villagers with their ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... of Little Egypt; and from this fact seems originally to have arisen the notion that they were Egyptians. But this seems less like an assertion of their origin than like a piece of Scriptural phraseology. The Hussites used in that way a Biblical imagery, like the Puritans of a later age. Like the Puritans, they called their opponents Moabites, Amalekites, and so on. With the Puritans, Egypt was always "the house of bondage," and that name was the common designation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... puzzling Hollister for days. At night she would snuggle down beside him, quietly contented, or she would have some story to tell, or some unexpectedness of thought which still surprised him by its clear-cut and vigorous imagery. But by day she grew distrait, as if she retreated into communion with herself, and her look was that of one striving to see something afar, a straining ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... because we ourselves are the wind, or dwell in mid-air with the Aged one of the Hoang-Ho, who lived betwixt Heaven and Earth because he was subject to neither the one nor the other. Even in that grotesque apology for Taoism which we find in China at the present day, we can revel in a wealth of imagery impossible to ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... magnificent. I have put it elsewhere with Wandering Willie's Tale, which it more specially resembles in the way in which the ordinary turns into the extraordinary. It falls short of Scott in vividness, character, manners, and impressiveness, but surpasses him in beauty[90] of style and imagery. In particular, Nodier has here, in a manner which I hardly remember elsewhere, achieved the blending of two kinds of "terror"—the ordinary kind which, as it is trivially called, "frightens" one, and the other[91] terror which accompanies the intenser pleasures of sight and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... patriotism that is a loyalty to a more abstract and more intangible idea, the art by which the idea of country is conveyed would, we should suppose, also become more abstract. Hocking says that it is through symbols that the mind best gropes its way to the realization of ideas. Feeling and imagery, we know, are very susceptible to the influences of the symbol, and also to the phrase which is a lower order of symbol. Dramatic representation, all pageantry, pictorial art, music, even the art of the poster artist ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... light sinking down through them like falling leaves, the ringing of the thin currents among the shallows, the flash and the cloud of the cascade, the earthquake and foam-fire of the cataract, the long lines of alternate mirror and mist that lull the imagery of the hills reversed in the blue of morning,—all these things belong to those hills ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... of sight, her cry of distracted alarm was irrepressible. Carried round again and again, on a wheel that to her was far more like Ixion's than that of the spheres, she never cleared her perceptions as to where he was, and only was half-maddened by the fantastic whirl of incongruous imagery, while she barely sat out Mercury's lengthy harangue; and when her wheel stood still, and she was released, she could not stand, and was indebted to Charon and one of her fellow-nymphs for supporting ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the fair, sweet face and cultured voice fascinated and held her, much as she had fancied in her earlier days would be the case. She frowned when she heard the request to reporters to "lay aside their pencils." She had meant to earn laurels by reporting this delicious bit of imagery, set in between the graver sermons and lectures; but, after all, it was a rest to give herself up to the uninterrupted enjoyment of taking in every word and tone—taking it in for her own private benefit. "The Parish ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... Temple of Fame, an immense cage, sixty miles long, and its inhabitants the great writers of classic times, and is chiefly valuable as showing the estimation in which the classic writers were held in that day. This is also in octosyllabic verses, and is further remarkable for the opulence of its imagery and its variety of description. The poet is carried in the claws of a great eagle into this house, and sees its distinguished occupants standing upon columns of different kinds of metal, according to their merits. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... notions of what are the fit and adequate manner and circumstances of divine communion. It is felt that the divinity must be of a peculiarly serene and leisurely habit of life. And whenever his local habitation is pictured in poetic imagery, for edification or in appeal to the devout fancy, the devout word-painter, as a matter of course, brings out before his auditors' imagination a throne with a profusion of the insignia of opulence and power, and surrounded ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... to escape from these vexing thoughts, he flies to amusement or to licentious indulgence, the delusive relief only makes his misery darker and more hopeless. At length a turn takes place. He is reconciled to his offended Maker. To borrow the fine imagery of one who had himself been thus tried, he emerges from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, from the dark land of gins and snares, of quagmires and precipices, of evil spirits and ravenous beasts. The sunshine is on his path. He ascends the Delectable Mountains, and catches ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... imagery. It constantly delighted him. "Yes, that's good," she declared. "Up like a diver, Harry. Not with goggles and a helmet and all that, but shot up like a flash, all shining and glistening and triumphant ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... a Supreme Force, and of the origin and progress of the visible world. With like ability Gotama deals with his inquiry into the nature of man. With Oriental imagery he bids us consider what becomes of a grain of salt thrown into the sea; but, lest we should be deceived herein, he tells us that there is no such thing as individuality or personality—that the Ego is altogether a ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper |
