"Imaginative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lots of time—whenever I see anything royally beautiful. But they shouldn't call that lovely place the Avenue. There is no meaning in a name like that. They should call it—let me see—the White Way of Delight. Isn't that a nice imaginative name? When I don't like the name of a place or a person I always imagine a new one and always think of them so. There was a girl at the asylum whose name was Hepzibah Jenkins, but I always imagined her as Rosalia DeVere. Other people may call that place the Avenue, but I shall always ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to count. The desire for knowledge, I had almost added the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play; and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... introduce a note of grave warning in connection with this subject. This special artifice can only be used by such narrators as have special aptitude and gifts in this direction. There are many people with good imaginative power but who are wholly lacking in the power of mimicry, and their efforts in this direction, however painstaking, remain grotesque and therefore ineffective. When listening to such performances, of which ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... that his unusual fit of petulance with his housekeeper had only convinced her that the story was true. It would die away in time, as other similar stories had died, he thought. Valley View gossip was imaginative. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... more imaginative, remained awake. Presently he saw a figure moving near the churchyard. It was white—at least the upper half ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... one of the few cases in which Tabachetti has left us a piece of portrait work, pure and simple, and that his treatment of the head and figure in pure portraiture, would naturally differ from that adopted in an ideal and imaginative work. ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... the enlarged succulent pedicel. This is the poor little fruit of which so much has been written in English descriptions of the peculiarities of the Australian flora. It has been likened to a cherry with the stone outside (hence the vernacular name) by some imaginative person." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... in the bud, and an imaginative and humorous view of things encouraged. The child must be taught to keep the passions under control, and to face pain (that great educator which neurotic natures feel with exaggerated keenness) ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... he has apparently sought to make selections from it and thus put his favorite passages together in a compact and convenient form. Certain it is, at least, that to the Greeks, masters in all great arts, we owe this habit. They made such collections and named them, after their pleasant imaginative fashion, a gathering of flowers, or what we, borrowing their word, call an anthology. So to those austere souls who regard anthologies as a labor-saving contrivance for the benefit of persons who like a smattering of knowledge and are never really learned, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... without enthusiasm, without passion, and without the 'fine madness' which, as Drayton says, should possess a poet's brain. Wit takes precedence of imagination, nature is concealed by artifice, and the delight afforded by these writers is not due to imaginative sensibility. Not even in the consummate genius of Pope is there aught of the magical charm which fascinates us in a Wordsworth and a Keats, in a Coleridge and a Shelley. The prose of the age, masterly though it be, stands also on a comparatively low level. There is much in it to attract, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... English Protestant may have his poetical side, may be capable of feeling poetry that is frankly avowed to be such—may read Tennyson's "Eve of St. Agnes" or Scott's "Hymn to the Virgin" with almost complete imaginative sympathy; but he expects to believe his religion as firmly as he believes in the existence of the British Islands. Such, at least, was the matter-of-fact temper that belonged to Protestantism in those days. In more recent times a more hazy ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... you are altogether too imaginative," said she. "His orders are absurd. If I go through that gate, you shall ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... pay a small tribute to my father by way of personal gratitude for this, his first prose work, which was published nearly fifty years ago. Though unknown to many lovers of his greater writings, none of these has exceeded it in imaginative insight and power of expression. To me it rings with the dominant chord of ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... further ceremony. As they walked through the hall and down the corridors side by side, an imaginative person might have felt that perhaps the eyes of an ancient darkling portrait or so looked down at the pair curiously: the long, loosely built New Yorker rather slouching along by the soldierly, almost ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the tale gained picturesqueness and circumstantial weight. To the New York episode the widow contributed the imaginative touch of a baffled detective, while Mrs. Bowers's shots in the stilly night passed into the province of undisputed fact. The circumstance that the widow had only that morning seen the destroyer of homes walking ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... venality, and were indignant with those who had exposed it. See Adams.]; but Livingston, and those he represented, soon realized that it was Napoleon himself who alone deserved serious consideration. Through Napoleon's character, and helping to make it great, there ran an imaginative vein which at times bordered on the fantastic; and this joined with his imperious self-will, brutality, and energy to make him eager to embark on a scheme which, when he had thought it over in cold blood, he was equally eager to abandon. For some time ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... work of any importance, and perhaps his best, is The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, described in a series of letters descriptive of this amusing imaginative journey. Mrs. Winifred, Tabitha, and, best of all, Lismahago, are rare characters, and in all respects, except its vulgarity, it was the prototype of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... poem then known to modern Europe, and the most imaginative ever written. Thus the Italian sky was blazing with splendor, while the West was still in the morning twilight. The Divina Commedia was written half a ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... country. They are tales of India, descriptive of Indian scenery, and marked by many traits both of custom and of feeling that are characteristic of India.... These tales—tales of woman's constancy and woman's heroism—are pleasing in themselves; and the language in which they are told is simple, imaginative, and marked by a well-sustained melody. The tales are dedicated to Lord Tennyson by "His Lordship's ardent admirer in the Far East"; and certainly they move in the atmosphere of the Tennysonian idyll.—Madras Christian ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna
... them. Olga, for all the various charms of her face, had never thus affected him. But then, he had known her a few years ago, when, as something between child and woman, she had little power to interest an imaginative boy, whose ideal was some actress seen only in a photograph, or some great lady on her travels glimpsed as he strayed about Geneva. She, in turn, regarded him with the coolest friendliness, her own imagination busy with far other figures than that ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... delusion must be firmly established to have caused this young creature to seclude herself from general society for so long a period. The facts of her parentage must have been imprudently confided to her when young, and an imaginative temperament had done the rest. The secresy with which she guarded these ideas served to strengthen them. He could only hope that the life she was now leading would diminish their influence, or perhaps totally destroy her singular belief. Maurice ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... among the French, so numerous, and have been of late years (in the shape of Newspaper Companies, Bitumen Companies, Galvanized-Iron Companies, Railroad Companies, &c.) pursued with such a blind FUROR and lust of gain, by that easily excited and imaginative people, that, as may be imagined, the satirist has found plenty of occasion for remark, and M. Macaire and his friend innumerable opportunities ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you thought of," exclaimed Ethel Blue, who was so imaginative and sympathetic that she sometimes had an almost uncanny way of reading peoples' thoughts. "You wanted to bring some of those poor women out into the country so that the children could get well, and you told ...
— Ethel Morton at Rose House • Mabell S. C. Smith
... who had thought themselves still to be living in the old New England tradition, he was the genius of an evil dream. Hard on his heels came a nightmare troop, whose coming brought to the remembrance of the imaginative the old nursery rhyme:—"Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark, The beggars are ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... cynically observed, "struggle long enough to win their place in the market; once the sale of their productions is assured, they quickly go backward." There is as yet no sign that he himself is fulfilling this prediction; for his most recent published performance,[4] the superbly fantastic and imaginative La Mer—completed three years after the production of Pelleas—is charged to the brim with his peculiar ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... the top of her voice, stern, preposterous Carson, boozy Bandershoot and artful Taper, wily Asquith, the eloquent yet unsubstantial George, and the immobile Grey, vanished out of his mind; all those representative exponents of the way things are done in Great Britain faded in the glow of his imaginative effort; he forgot the dreary debates, the floundering newspapers, the "bluffs," the intrigues, the sly bargains of the week-end party, the "schoolboy honour" of grown men, the universal weak dishonesty ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... ten stand among children and their parents of this generation where the books of Louisa May Alcott stood in former days. The haps and mishaps of this inimitable pair of twins, their many adventures and experiences are a source of keen delight to imaginative children everywhere. ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... desire) in his wish of sharing his meals and keeping the same hours. All this indulgence did not render Owen unamiable, but it made him wilful, and not a happy child. He had a thoughtful look, not common to the face of a young boy. He knew no games, no merry sports; his information was of an imaginative and speculative character. His father delighted to interest him in his own studies, without considering how far they were healthy for ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... be scarcely visible. We considered that we had here found one of Nature's artists, who would probably have made a name for himself if given the advantages so many have who lack the ability, for he certainly possessed both the imaginative faculty and no small degree of dexterity in execution. He pointed out to us the house of a farmer over the way who slept in the Parish of Wick and took his meals in that of Canisbay, the boundary being marked by a chimney ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... then happily mingling with their Roman conquerors, the Celtic people were transformed into a Romand race, similar in speech and origin to the French. In the heart of this Romand country was an ancient principality where the essential qualities of the beauty loving and imaginative races, Roman and Celtic, expressed themselves uniquely. A fountain of Celtic song and legend, a centre of chivalry and warlike power, this principality is known only to the outer world by the pastoral product which ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... characteristics, physical and mental, are well displayed: sanity of mind—that is, clearness, shrewdness, courage, kindliness, the contentment which makes the best of good and evil fortune, are, to the imaginative mind, written in the face, as presented in his picture, of this great man. His greatness fell short of genius, for it was the effect of ordinary qualities, rarely combined and tempered into one character; but more effective for useful work ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... before he had the fever. Somewhere in his dreamy, imaginative boyhood he had read the Song of Hiawatha, and his glowing fancy had immediately fastened upon the lines which described the Indian girl, Minnehaha, Laughing Water, daughter of the old arrow-maker in the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... railway on entering the town is, as it has been called by some imaginative Frenchman, "but the hors d'oeuvre of the architectural feast to follow," and on drawing still closer, it composes grandly with the swift-flowing little river lined with the tall slim trees which are so distinguished a feature ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... who knows. This Polonaise is not as feverish and as exalted as the previous one. It is, as Kleczynski writes, "the type of a war song." Named the Heroique, one hears in it Ehlert's "ring of damascene blade and silver spur." There is imaginative splendor in this thrilling work, with its thunder of horses' hoofs and fierce challengings. What fire, what sword thrusts and smoke and clash of mortal conflict! Here is no psychical presentation, but an objective picture of battle, of concrete contours, and with a cleaving brilliancy ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... continents became interested in the stories that came out of the wild about the hardships of the Hubbard expedition. Wallace's story and record—they are inseparable—possesses in its naked truth more of human interest than scores of volumes of imaginative adventure and romance of ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... several tribes of Indian auxiliaries, whose aid the British Government had been at some pains to secure—a policy denounced by Chatham in a powerful and much-quoted speech. Burgoyne was a clever and imaginative though not a successful soldier. He conceived and suggested to his Government a plan of campaign which was sound in strategic principle, which might well have succeeded, and which, if it had succeeded, would have dealt a heavy and perhaps a decisive blow to American hopes. How far its ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... in vain that Ormond assured his good old imaginative friend that he was upon a wrong scent. Cornelius stopped to humour him; but was convinced that he was right: then turned to the still smoking Father Jos, and went on asking ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... hiding the memorials, which are mostly of brown sandstone or gray slate. It lies in deep shadow under cypress and willow. It is very still under the gloom of its careless growths—a place not reassuring to the imaginative. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... an imaginative race are we; but we have the roots of poetry in us, and the roots of other arts, for we have reverence for what is above and beyond us. Custom, too, we worship, and decency and order. We fight unwillingly, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... off, according to the leaning of the mind of which it is the more vivid and, so to speak, passionate expression. And as it may easily exaggerate on one side, so it may just as easily do the same on the other. Every one is familiar with that imaginative exaggeration which fills the world with miracles. But there is another form of imagination, not so distinctly recognised, which is oppressed by the presence of unchanging succession and visible uniformity, which cannot shake off the yoke of custom or allow anything different ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... Pascal. Both had that peculiarly bright, brilliant, sharp-cutting intellect which passes with ease through the coverings and disguises which veil realities from men. Both had mathematical powers of unusual originality and clearness; both had the same imaginative faculty; both had the same keen interest in practical problems of science; both felt and followed the attraction of deeper and more awful interests. Both had the same love of beauty; both suppressed it. Both had the same want ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... mystery that Naychure gives me; I am no servile copyist. And I claim to leave an impression on the minds of the beholders of my works. Why, even Caper, I believe, can see what I wish to tell, and read my poems on canvas. Tell me, Caper, what idea does even that rough sketch of Venice awake in your imaginative ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the Tartars; but that the eyes of the latter were set diagonally, whereas the American Indians had theirs parallel. In other respects, he saw great resemblances. He expressed himself as greatly interested in the discovery of an oral literature among the Indians, in the form of imaginative legends. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... be carried on with the elements of their several intellectual powers. Milton, austere, condensed, imaginative, supporting his truth by direct enunciation of lofty moral sentiment and by distinct visual representations, and in 405 the same spirit overwhelming what he deemed falsehood by moral denunciation and a succession of pictures appalling or repulsive. In his prose, so many metaphors, so many ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... himself, her accuser, who is very nearly always to blame. His intelligence as compared with her own, is clumsy: (it is the difference between the dog and the cat:) he does not realise the unfathomable gulf that divides her nature from his own, and for lack of imaginative tact, judging her by himself, he enormously overestimates the part played by reason in her behaviour. Hence when, as she is always doing, she lets him down, he breaks out, (obtusely) into denunciation and reproach, taking it for granted, that what she did, she did, deliberately. But that ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... you would probably at once fall to considering whether you are capable of taking wild flights into impossible realms of thought and evolving unrealities out of airy nothings. You would compare yourself with great imaginative writers, such as Stevenson, Poe, De Quincey, and judge your power of imagination by your ability to produce such tales as ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... birch-tree Horace Pendyce had stood and kissed his wife the very day he brought her home to Worsted Skeynes, and though he did not see the parallel between her and the birch-tree that some poor imaginative creature might have drawn, yet was he thinking of that long past afternoon. But the spaniel John was not thinking of it; his recollection was too dim, for he had been at that time twenty-eight years ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... second is needed for sensation to be transformed into ideation, proving that in these special dreams there can have been no more than an instantaneous, mass impression of all the elements of the dream upon the brain,[7] and that the dream itself has been produced by the imaginative action of the soul in the astral body, an extremely subtle one, whose vibratory power is such as to transform altogether our ordinary ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Sheikh Zowaid near by, were fruit trees and cactus hedged enclosures well covered with fresh grass; while to the south of us were some big areas of young crops. The effect of this change was immediate, and the least poetical and imaginative among us felt a thrill of joy in the relief from the desolation of eternal sand. To the north a high barrier of sand hills hid the sea, a barrier which runs right along the coast as far as Jaffa and beyond. But in the distance it was beautiful enough, and served ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... of my studies and experiences I have found that in literature and journalism, as well as in art, one can make a true picture only of what one has seen. Imagination is all very well, often grand and beautiful; but imaginative authors show us their inner selves and not our outer world; there is to-day a demand for the real, and it is a demand which will be satisfied with nothing but the truth. I have determined, as far as in me lies, to endeavour ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... the temporary possession of the Milanese. It led to a reconciliation with the Pope, and to a stately interview in the city of Bologna. All that was magnificent and captivating to the senses had been studied to dazzle the eyes of a young and imaginative prince; for Leo the Tenth, patron of the arts and of artists, was an adept in scenic effects. Certainly never did pomp and ceremony more easily effect the object for which they were employed. The interview of Bologna paved ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... may answer my question, who can say? A man in his short life can see but a little way ahead, and even in mine wonderful and unexpected things have come to pass. I must needs say that therein lies my hope rather than in all I see going on round about us. Without disputing that if the imaginative arts perish, some new thing, at present unguessed of, MAY be put forward to supply their loss in men's lives, I cannot feel happy in that prospect, nor can I believe that mankind will endure such a loss for ever: but in the meantime the present state of the arts and their ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... Her imaginative speculations were rudely interrupted by Marguerite bringing in her chocolate. On the tray was a card with a little present for the evening. Esperance read the card, and taking the bouquet looked at it for a long time until tears veiled ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... years of imperialism, these evils have ceased to be imaginative merely, and they have taken a place among the unwelcome realities ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... bar was of pinkish sandstone, smoothed and covered by a coating of plastic. Behind it, instead of less imaginative mirrors or bottle displays, Jorgensen had had some drifter paint a night desert: all dull pink and bronze crags smothering in sand under a black sky. The stars twinkled like glass beads, which they were. Lights ...
— Fee of the Frontier • Horace Brown Fyfe
... advantages of the dramatic treatment of history end with the subject itself. The actors in these historical scenes are, as I have said, expressing their own interpretation of the various parts, and their own perception of the meaning of each episode as a whole. This means that they are training their imaginative sympathy,—a sovereign faculty which of all faculties is perhaps the most emancipative and expansive,—and training it, as I can testify, with striking success; for the dramatic power which they display is remarkable, and can have been generated by nothing less ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... time when other generals were losing it, through his participation in Carleton's successful campaign. But Burgoyne was something more than the professional soldier. His nature was poetic; his temperament imaginative. He did nothing in a commonplace way. Even his orders are far more scholarly than soldier-like. At one time he tells his soldiers that "occasions may occur, when nor difficulty, nor labor, nor life are to be regarded"—as if soldiers, in general, expected ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... scene makes his speech affect their consciences as if they were themselves accusing themselves, and how it drives them into mental disorder. Dr. Bucknill, a specialist in brain disease, who has commented on Shakespeare's knowledge of such maladies, explains that Alonzo's frenzy leads him by an imaginative melancholy to the idea of suicide, while the madness of Antonio and Sebastian expresses itself in the ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... together by the most powerful tie of nature and of law. But it was at the other end of the huge building that there dwelt the solitary offspring of this unnatural union, a boy now in the eleventh year of childhood, companionless, physically inactive, mentally over-quick, perceptive, and quaintly imaginative. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... expects from the imaginative arts a certain emancipation from the bounds of reality: we are willing to give a scope to fancy, and recreate ourselves with the possible. The man who expects it the least will nevertheless forget his ordinary pursuits, his everyday existence and individuality, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... perfection. But so long as two natures are mixed together, and the strange creature which results from the combination is now under one influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of him except from the old-fashioned moral—or, if you please, imaginative—point of view. ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... possession of his soul. He knew a terrific storm was raging round him, but it drew him not from earthly thoughts and earthly feelings, even while it raised his soul in prayer. Very different was the effect of this lonely vigil and awful night on the imaginative spirit of his companion. ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... progress to a pilgrimage—a simile by no means uncommon even in those days. Soon he discovered a number of points which had escaped his predecessors, and countless images began to crowd quickly upon his imaginative brain. Released at last from gaol, he still continued his work, acquainting no one with his labours, and receiving the help of none. The "Pilgrim," on its appearance in 1678, was but a moderate success; but it was not long before its charm made itself felt, and ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... England from the press of panic, Lady Boyle being old and infirm. Ah, but your talking friend would interest you, and you might accept the talk in infinitesimal doses, you know. Lamartine has surely acted down the fallacy of the impractical tendencies of imaginative men. I am full of France just now. Are you all prepared for an outbreak in Ireland? I hope so. My husband has the second edition of his collected poems[174] in the press by this time, by grace of Chapman and Hall, who accept all risks. You speak of Tennyson's vexation ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... has rendered to mankind has been instrumental, as that rendered by Hellenism has been imaginative. Hebraism has put earnestness and urgency into morality, making it a matter of duty, at once private and universal, rather than what paganism had left it, a mass of local allegiances and legal practices. The Jewish system has, in consequence, a tendency to propaganda ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Confucianism. Yet long before the introduction of Buddhism (A.D. 67) with its images and pictures, we find that the two great symbolic figures of the Chinese imagination, the Tiger and the Dragon—typifying the forces of Nature and the power of the Spirit—had been evolved in art; and to imaginative minds the mystic ideas of Lao Tzue and the legends of his hermit followers proved a fruitful field for artistic motives of a kind which Buddhism was still more to enrich and multiply. Early classifications rank Buddhist and Taoist ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Australia from the Red Sea, and the latter contains an equally good harbour in Port Victoria Mahe. The Seychelles are remarkably healthy islands—thirty in number—and Gordon recommended them as a good place for "a man with a little money to settle in." He also advanced the speculative and somewhat imaginative theory that in them was to be found the true site ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... he remarks: "To such beholders it was unreal because they lacked the imaginative faith. Had they been worthy to pass within its portals, they would have recognized the truth that the dominions which the spirit conquers for itself among unrealities become a thousand times more real than the earth whereon they stamp their feet, saying, 'This ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... writes a biographer[3] of St. Ignatius Loyola, "loved the garden and loved the flowers. In the balcony of his study he sat gazing on the stars: it was then Lainez heard him say: 'Oh, how earth grows base to me when I look on Heaven!' . . . The like imaginative strain, so scorned of our petty day, inhered in all the lofty souls of that age. Even the Saints of our day speak a less radiant language: and sanctity shows 'shorn of its rays' through the black fog of universal utilitarianism, ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... Wordsworth, Hume from Hallam. We know them only by those airy creations of the brain which speak to us through the printed page. Solitude, and silence too, are the nurses of deep and strong feeling. That imaginative element which exalts the love of Dante for Beatrice, and of Burns for his "Mary in Heaven," deepens the fervor of admiration with which the pale, enthusiastic scholar, in some lonely farmhouse in New England, hangs over a favorite ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... well as often a loftier tone of moral indignation. This latter feeling is the inspiration of "The Candidate," and of "The Times," which, although coarse in subject, and coarse in style, burns with a fire of righteous indignation, reminding you of Juvenal. The finest display of his imaginative power is in "Gotham," which is throughout a glorious rhapsody, resembling some of the best prose effusions of Christopher North, and abounding ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... "I have heard enough of that 'ne plus ultra' of doll! Indeed, Colin, you have given a great deal of pleasure, where the materials of pleasure are few. No one can guess the delight a doll is to a solitary imaginative child." ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dormer-windows, of gabled roofs, vine-clad walls, and a maze of peach and pear blossoms. This was not precisely the kind of lane through which one hurried. One needed neither to be sixteen nor even in love to find it a delectable path, very agreeable to the eye, very suggestive to the imaginative faculty, exceedingly satisfactory to the most fastidious of all the senses, to that aristocrat of all the five, the sense of smell. Like all entirely perfect experiences in life, the lane ended almost as soon as it began; it ended in a steep pair of steps that ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... sprang to the aid of England in the South African War—this response of English hearts in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere to the drum-beat of the empire was the fulfillment of one of Beaconsfield's imaginative dreams. A writer in the "Spectator" two years earlier had made the prophecy which in the century's end came to ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... be charged in any single instance with neglect of precautions by which the risks of war are diminished. He appears to have thought out and to have foreseen—and here his imaginative power aided him—every combination that could be made against him, and to have provided for every possible emergency. He was never surprised, never disconcerted, never betrayed into a false manoeuvre. Although on some occasions his success fell short of his expectations, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... American is much more likely to devour the ground in five minutes, and then spend an hour or more in lively conversation not wholly pertinent to the matter in hand. The American mind is discursive, open, wide in its interests, alive to suggestion, pliant, emotional, imaginative; the English mind is concentrated, substantial, indifferent to the merely relative, ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... constitution of their nerves, and the temper of their brain; but that it requires nothing except what a little child can do as well as a grown person, a labouring man as well as a divine, a plain farmer as well as the most refined, devout, imaginative lady. ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... tire of the choicest toys; they are to such minds but effigies and delusion, which last, the delight of imaginative infancy, to the cut and dried, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... of battles, of voyages, of invasions, of destructions, of slaughters, of sieges, of tragedies and deaths, of courtships, of military expeditions; and all this strictly historical. For we do not here speak of their "imaginative tales," which give still freer scope to fancy; such as the Fenian and Ossianic poems, which are also founded on facts, but can no more claim the title of history than the novels of ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... sign was sufficient to chase away the imaginative notions that had beset Pen's awakening. His hand went at once to the water-bottle slung to his side, and, as he held the mouth to his comrade's lips and forgot the pain he suffered in his strained and stiffening joints, ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... while undoubtedly they display profounder science and art. That they have nothing in common with the Bible of Gustave Dore is much to their praise; on the other hand, that they lack the inventive fertility and the imaginative flight of the Bible of Julius Schnorr indicates that they fall short of universality. These Gospels, it may also be said, pertain not to the Church militant, but to the Church triumphant; not to the world at large, but to a select ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... of writing merits high praise. He is no "dry" philosopher; he is highly imaginative and picturesque; many of his passages might be styled, like those of Macaulay, "purple," for at times he rises to a high pitch of feeling and oratory. Yet this has been urged against him by some critics. The ironic remark has been repeated, in regard ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... the strenuous efforts needed for discharge of our appointed tasks. The Apostle, like all men of imaginative and sensitive nature, was accustomed to speak in metaphors, which expressed his fervid convictions more adequately than more abstract expressions would have done. That vigorous figure of a 'course' speaks more strongly of the stress of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... the cold. "What," said I to myself with a shiver, "should I do if anything happened that required me to get up and dress again?" It seemed to me I should be capable of letting a man die in the next room for need of succor. Being of an imaginative temperament, not to feel prepared for possible contingencies is for me to feel guilty and miserable. The last thing I remember before dropping off to sleep was solemnly promising my wife never to trust ourselves North another winter. I then ...
— The Cold Snap - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... us the great and serious attempts at reform. The vast projects of M. Turgot, seriously meant and founded on reason, for all their somewhat imaginative range, had become, in M. Necker's hands, financial expedients or necessary remedies, honorably applied to the most salient evils; the future, however, occupied the mind of the minister just fallen; he did not content himself with ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... fullest and most economical use of the allowance, and not wasting the advertisement pages, which contain much readable and stimulating matter, the patent medicine paragraphs especially being rich in the finest imaginative fiction. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... Mabel was imaginative as a girl, and this solitude depressed her; still she moved steadily towards the house, and knocked ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... his childhood was distinguished by any precocity. "Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker, or was marked as a precocious person," says Faraday, when alluding to his early life. "I was a very lively, imaginative person, and could believe in the 'Arabian Nights' as easily as the 'Encyclopaedia,' but facts were important to me, and saved me. I could trust a fact and always cross-examined an assertion. So when ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... is studded with the most poetical imagery, and marked in every part with the happiest graces of expression, while it is calm, chaste, and flowing, and transparent as water. There is a habit among nearly all the writers of imaginative literature, of adulterating the conversations of the poor with barbarisms and grammatical blunders which have no more fidelity than elegance. Hawthorne's integrity as well as his exquisite—taste prevented him from falling into this error. There ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... necessity for it. It was a good thing for the apostles to believe that such an event took place, for it encouraged them. Christ never showed himself to any one after his death, and the belief that he did appear arose purely from the excited nerves, imaginative temperament, and strong desire of his followers to see him. His spirit did not die with his body, but entered upon ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... in fact, would not bear a critical scansion. We have not scrupled to imitate this irregularity, as not inconsistent with the plain, ungrammatical speech of the characters introduced, and the homely air of even the most imaginative passages. The opening poem is a charmingly wayward idyl, called "The Meadow," (Die Wiese,) the name of a mountain-stream, which, rising in the Feldberg, the highest peak of the Black Forest, flows past Hausen, Hebel's early home, on its way to the Rhine. An extract from it will illustrate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... to account for the new Institution!), "the fruitful parent of superstition, afforded the first example of monastic life." Egypt had her superstitions, like other countries; but was so little the parent of superstition that perhaps no faith among the imaginative races of the world has been so feebly missionary as hers. She never prevailed on even the nearest of her neighbours to worship cats or cobras with her; and I am alone, to my belief, among recent scholars, in maintaining Herodotus' statement of her influence ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... afternoons were often free for lonely walks, when Leila went away on her mare and John was at liberty to read or to do as best pleased him. At times Leila bored him, and although with his well-taught courteous ways he was careful not to show impatience, he had the imaginative boy's capacity to enjoy being alone and a long repressed curiosity which now found indulgence among people who liked to answer questions and were pleased when he asked them. Very often, as he came into easier relations with his aunt, ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... for the Arabians, that their literature should be locked up in a character and idiom so difficult of access to European scholars. Their wild, imaginative poetry, scarcely capable of transfusion into a foreign tongue, is made known to us only through the medium of bald prose translation, while their scientific treatises have been done into Latin with an inaccuracy, which, to make use of a pun of Casiri's, merits the name of perversions rather ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... had been the study of the German poets. She had a poetic mind, and had learned to produce good rhymes. The songs of Uhland, Heine, and Schiller delighted her. She had loved to read the strange stories of Hoffman, and the imaginative works of Baron Fouque. She used to aspire to be an author or poet, but these aspirations had received no countenance from Mrs. Woods, and yet the latter seemed rather proud to regard her ward as possessing a ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... The least imaginative reader will perceive from this brief statement that a veritable Napoleon of Commerce has presided over the business side of the war. Where there was every opportunity for colossal waste, there has been the most scientific economy; where ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... Lucretius, was an Atheist, while even "some of our most brilliant notorieties in the modern world of song are not the most notable for piety." But our versatile Professor easily accounts for this by assuming that there "may be an idolatry of the imaginative, as well as of the knowing faculty." Never did natural historian so jauntily provide for every fact contravening his theories. Professor Blackie will never understand Atheism, or write profitably upon it, while he pursues this course. Let him restrain his discursive propensities, and deal ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... a hat which tilted backward and forward and never appeared at the same angle—failed to restore symmetry. Until one dreadful morning, after an imprudent bath, the whole upper structure disappeared, leaving two hideous iron prongs standing erect from the spinal column. Even an imaginative child like Mary could not accept this sort of thing as a head. Later in the day Jack Roper, the blacksmith at the "Crossing," was concerned at the plaintive appearance before his forge of a little girl clad in a bright-blue pinafore of the same color as her eyes, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... gloomy than he had been even when he departed from the ranch that morning. The certainty of Denver that he would find it impossible to stay by his program of honest work had made a strong impression upon his imaginative mind, as though the little safecracker really had the power to look into the future and into the minds of men. Where he should look for work next, he had no idea. And he balanced between a desire to stay near the town and work out his destiny there, or ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... perfect willingness to take any chance. The fact that his bravery led to nothing conventionally noble or moral did not detract from the inherent interest of the tale; on the contrary, the young fellow, being of unusual imaginative reach and freedom, took pleasure in the thought that a man would risk his life again and again merely for the excitement of it. Occasionally he glanced at Judge Crego, to find him looking upon Haney with thoughtful glance. It was a little like listening ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... in the least. It had occasionally occurred to some of the girls to question what would happen when the war was over, but they generally ended by deciding: "He'll have to come and live here, I suppose, and turn the junior room into a smoke-room". Some of the more imaginative had even ventured the suggestion that he might teach drilling and Latin. It never struck any of them that instead of settling down at the school he would want to whisk away his bride to the other side of the world. The unexpected had happened, ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the moody, imaginative Hawthorne of America, was guided and influenced in his literary career by his wife, whose inspiring but practical mind guided his impulsive and impressionable nature ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... important that in this stage also she should not miss a systematic education. If this should be the case, she is defrauded of the key which alone can render intelligible the scattered work of the previous epoch. The work of education in the first, or intuitional epoch is general; in the second, or imaginative, special; and in the third, or logical, returns again to the general; and thus only can it constitute a whole. In the first, the child picks up facts and general principles from them; in the second, the little girl ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... of this finer perception, perhaps with some degree of imaginative exaltation, that he set himself to solving the problem of Elsie's influence to attract and repel those around her. His letter already submitted to the reader hints in what direction his thoughts were disposed to turn. Here was a magnificent organization, superb in vigorous womanhood, with a beauty ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... play, as I read it, is profoundly tragic.... It is a tragedy that does not depress—it arouses and dilates. There is cynicism on the surface, but a depth of ardent sympathy and imaginative feeling below, and vistas of thought are opened up that lead from the West of Ireland shebeen to the stars.... I said to myself when I had read two pages, 'This is literature,' and when I laid down the book at the last line,'This is ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... not so flippantly refer to the body, sewn in a sack and thrown into the river, as just "Eliza." He may argue that he never thought of the corpse as a real one and that the whole thing was merely an experiment in imaginative art; but his details are too well realised for that, and so is his admirable picture of the society of Hammerton Chase, W., a thin disguise for a riverside neighbourhood easy to recognise. I could never get myself quite to believe that Stephen's friend, Egerton, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... deeply bored by his colorless, humdrum existence, so far removed from that other purely imaginative life which rose from the pages of his books and enveloped him with ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... those who were not happy, and for those who did not know they were unhappy, and for those who wasted their one precious life in being wretched when they might have been happy. How little it would need, she thought (for she was young and imaginative), to turn most people's worries and sadness into joy. Such a little difference in Susie's ways and ideas would make them all so happy; such a little change in Peter's habits would make his wife's life radiant. But they all lived ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... trough-like contours. The level strata crop out here and there, giving to the hills the effect of heavy eyebrows. But occasionally it is more than that: in the mountains it is often like a cavernous mouth into which one can retreat several yards, where the imaginative farm boy loves to prowl and linger like the half savage that he is and dream of Indians and the wild, adventurous life. There were a few such cavernous ledges in the woods on my father's farm where one could retreat from a sudden shower, but less than a mile away there ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... was got rid of. And as with religion amongst us at that period, so it was also with letters. A fit prose was a necessity; but it was impossible that a fit prose should establish itself amongst us without some touch of frost to the imaginative life of the soul. The needful qualities for a fit prose are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. The men of letters, whose destiny it may be to bring their nation to the attainment of a fit prose, must of necessity, whether they work in ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... are, and you are you, it's quite probable you'll fail to achieve the triumph of your womanhood." He paused, then added: "You're not one of those who would count the world well lost for love, you know—except on the impulse of an imaginative moment." ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... humiliation and self-reproach: "Caritas erga homines, sicut caritas Dei erga nos."[5] Here was my favorite text, here my sum total of speculative philosophy. I often preached it to others, even to Father Letheby, when he came complaining of the waywardness of this imaginative and fickle people. "If God, from on high, tolerates the unspeakable wickedness of the world,—if He calmly looks down upon the frightful holocaust of iniquity that steams up before His eyes from the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... once that such a scatter-brained party would be certain to miss their train; but Mrs Asplin with her exaggerated ideas of distance, her terror of the sea, her nervous forebodings of evil—how would she endure those long waiting hours? With her imaginative eye, Peggy saw before her the scene in the drawing-room at the vicarage, as the hour of arrival passed by without bringing the return of the travellers; saw the sweet, worn face grow even paler and more strained, the thin hands pressed against the ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... variety and unexpectedness, Arranged architecture substitutes a Euclidian system of straight lines and (for the most part) circular curves, assembled and arranged according to a definite logic of its own. It is created but not creative; it is imagined but not imaginative. Organic architecture is both creative and imaginative. It is non-Euclidian in the sense that it is higher-dimensional—that is, it suggests extension in directions and into regions where the spirit finds itself at home, but of which the ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... we ascended the river they attacked us on the crown of the head—a very unusual thing,—and raised swellings as large as pigeons' eggs. I must have immolated at least five hundred of them upon my bump of benevolence. Whatever people may think, I feel that no one can be very imaginative where these animals are so eternally tormenting them. You meditate under the shady boughs of some forest-king (slap knee, slap cheek), and farewell to anything like concentration of thought; you ponder on the sailing moon (clap again, right and left, above, below), always ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... zoo and considered his animals thoughtfully. The shop-worn brown bear would not do to fill cousin Mike's order; neither would the weather-worn red deer nor the family of variegated tame rabbits. The zoo of Idlewild Park at Franklin was woefully short of dongola goats—in fact, to any but the most imaginative and easily pleased child, it was lacking in nearly every thing that makes a zoo a congress of the world's most rare and thrilling creatures. After all, the nearest thing to a goat was a goat, and ...
— The Water Goats and Other Troubles • Ellis Parker Butler
... one of the kind of yarns,' said the inventor laughing, 'that the reporters have to make up when they run short of news. It was the invention of an imaginative chap who knows I'm a little absent-minded. I never forgot that ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... every face looked encouragement; but at the crucial moment he always held back. So much was at stake, and it was so essential that his first choice should be decisive. He dreaded stupidity, timidity, intolerance. The imaginative eye, the furrowed brow, were what he sought. He must reveal himself only to a heart versed in the tortuous motions of the human will; and he began to hate the dull benevolence of the average face. Once or twice, obscurely, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... is as romantic as any ever wrought into imaginative narrative or incorporated in epic poem. The notorious damsels were daughters of John Gunning of Castle Coote, County Roscommon, Ireland, by the Hon. Bridget Bourke, daughter of Theobald, sixth Viscount Bourke of Mayo, whom ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... to admire Degas, but it is doubtful if he will ever gain the suffrage of the general. He does not retail anecdotes, though to the imaginative every line of his nudes relates their history. His irony is unremitting. It suffuses the ballet-girl series and the nude sets. Irony is an illuminating mode, but it is seldom pleasant; the public is always suspicious of an ironist, particularly ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... strange is the story of this plant as we look back through the centuries and listen to the myths and fables, almost legion, which early historians have handed down to us or imaginative travellers have conceived. There is, however, every reason to believe that in the far distant ages of antiquity this plant was cultivated, and yielded then, as it does now, a fibre from which the inhabitants ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... Westlakes, ordinary seamen of the Boadicea, one—John (I.)—was 'prest,' but was afterwards 'taken out of the ship for a debt of twenty pounds'; which shows that he had preferred to trust himself to the press-gang rather than to his creditors. Without being unduly imaginative, we may suppose that in 1803 there were heroes who preferred being 'carried off' to defend their country afloat to meeting the liabilities of putative ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... long, quiet hall. "Isn't it cave-like to come into an empty house? Oh, I know; see the hall clock has stopped ticking, and when a tick goes out it seems to leave a smoke of silence," she finished. "There, don't you think I have an imaginative brain?" ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... in sheer amazement, but the ground swell of sob could not be controlled. Nuttie was going to lead him away, and console him with more imaginative sympathy than could be expected from the maids, but her father sharply called her back. He wanted her himself, and indeed there was no question which was the worse spoilt child. He might idolise Alwyn, but not so as to clash with his own ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... setting. However, its great height is not apparent, owing largely to its breadth of base. The Sather Campanile in Berkeley looks higher, though it is actually one hundred and thirty-three feet lower. The side towers at the entrances of the Court of Palms and the Court of Flowers, while not so imaginative as the main tower, are far more sky-reaching. As towers go, John Galen Howard's tower at the Buffalo Exposition in 1901 stands unsurpassed in every ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... quiet voice ceased, it was like the sudden cessation of sweet music to the enchanted ears of little Maude. The child was very imaginative, and in her mental eyes the City had grown as she listened, till it now lay spread before her—the streets of gold, and the gates of pearl, and the foundations of precious stones. Of any thing typical ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... abundance; and from the moment I first read him I have wished to have between two covers something of all the moods that do. I believe that I have it in this book, which I have just been reading aloud to an imaginative young girl more French than English, whose understanding, that of a child and of a woman, and expressed not in words but in her face, has doubled my own. Some of my selections, those that I have called 'A Miracle' and 'The Castle of Time' are passages from stories of some length, and I ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... on animals who are not exactly naturalists, nor yet mere fictionists, but who, to a considerable knowledge of animal psychology and extraordinary sympathy with all wildness, unite an imaginative insight which reveals to them much of the inner, the mind life of brutes. No doubt the greatest of these is Charles Roberts, the Canadian, and I only wish it had been he who had discovered the old gorilla skull above the stable door, and that ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... deep-seated problems must be subjected to a stepped-up attack. There is no single easy solution. Rather, there must be a many-sided assault on the stubborn problems of surpluses, prices, costs, and markets; and a steady, persistent, imaginative advance in the relationship between farmers and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... long series of bards, it is inconceivable that his predecessors should have been absolutely unknown. Cicero, indeed, regrets the loss of these rude lays; but it is in the character of an antiquarian and a patriot that he speaks, and not of an appraiser of literary merit. The really imaginative and poetical halo which invests the early legends of Rome must not be attributed to individual genius, but partly to patriotic impulse working among a people for whom their city and her faithful defenders supplied the one material for ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... nature to make Oki much better known to-day than in the medieval period of Japanese history. There are still current among the common people of the west coast extraordinary stories of Oki much like those about that fabulous Isle of Women, which figures so largely in the imaginative literature of various Oriental races. According to these old legends, the moral notions of the people of Oki were extremely fantastic: the most rigid ascetic could not dwell there and maintain his indifference to earthly pleasures; and, however wealthy at his arrival, the visiting stranger ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the inexperienced enthusiast to confuse and frighten himself with thoughts of "literature in all its branches." Experts and pedagogues (chiefly pedagogues) have, for the purpose of convenience, split literature up into divisions and sub-divisions—such as prose and poetry; or imaginative, philosophic, historical; or elegiac, heroic, lyric; or religious and profane, etc., ad infinitum. But the greater truth is that literature is all one—and indivisible. The idea of the unity of literature should be well planted and fostered in the head. All literature is the expression of ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... all its maladies has passed? All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... and romantic movement in life, but the very basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the artist—an intense and flamelike imagination. He realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. He understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich. Some one wrote to me in trouble, 'When you ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... found his companion an interesting study. She was wrapped up in cold propriety; she must have led an uneventful life, looked up to and obeyed by the small community that owned her father's rule. Romance could not have touched her; she was not imaginative; but he thought there were warmth and passion lying dormant somewhere in her nature. She could not have wholly escaped the consequences of ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... of this Department, which has only been in operation for a short time, and that on a limited scale, as a branch of Rescue Work, have been marvellous. No more romantic stories can be found in the pages of our most imaginative writers than those it records. We give three or four illustrative ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... small town in Western New York two sisters had announced that they could hold communication with the spirit-world, and receive messages from the dead. Little raps announced the spirit of your friend or relative. To imaginative people, it was simply wonderful. And now the Misses Fox were ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Whatever poetical or imaginative suggestions might lie in this scene for others, it made no such appeal to Tom Emmet as he strode along, passing belated pedestrians in his course. He had just come from a protracted consultation with his political lieutenants, and ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Scheherzarade, who, by that talent of telling endless feats of fairies and magicians, and kings and queens, was more dear and wonderful to a circle of children than any orator of England or America is now? The more indolent and imaginative complexion of the Eastern nations makes them much more impressible by these appeals to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... all too apparent in the very manner and intensity of expression. The "lads" of Ludlow are so human to him, the hawthorn and broom on the Severn shores are so fragrant with associations, he cannot help but compose under a kind of imaginative wizardry of exultation, even when the immediate subject is grim or grotesque. In many of these brief, tense poems the reader confronts a mask, as it were, with appalling and distorted lineaments; but behind it the poet smiles, ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... and blunted the edge of my enthusiasms. In preparation for the career which I proposed to myself I had, however, been in correspondence with Thomas Cole, then the leading painter of landscape in America, and an artist to this day unrivaled in certain poetic and imaginative gifts by any American painter. He was a curious result of the influence of the old masters on a strongly individual English mind, inclined to nature worship, born in England in the epoch of the poetic English school to which Girtin, Turner, and their colleagues belonged, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... reply. 'I own to thinking,' she writes, 'that your sensitive nature exaggerates or misinterprets the neglect that you experience at the hands of your husband.' There, in that one sentence, is the whole truth! Mrs. Eustace Macallan's nature was the imaginative, self-tormenting nature of a poet. No mortal love could ever have been refined enough for her. Trifles which women of a coarser moral fiber would have passed over without notice, were causes of downright agony to that exquisitely sensitive temperament. There are persons born ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... enjoyed one great advantage over the Greeks. They managed the affairs of their country without making too many speeches. They were less imaginative than the Greeks and they preferred an ounce of action to a pound of words. They understood the tendency of the multitude (the "plebe," as the assemblage of free citizens was called) only too well to waste valuable time upon mere talk. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... make an imaginative atmosphere for little children for this game by telling them of the way doves and hawks are ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... remember when the science of geology was young—and we were young too—we remember how there was a certain romance and fascination about those fearless and richly imaginative theories which explained all the great changes in the crust of the earth by magnificent cataclysms, upheaving, exploding, overwhelming. The crack of doom meant something after all! What had been should ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... abandon the woman who had made confession to her, she formed no conscious resolutions. Far ahead down her journey of the years to come, she did see muffled things she might hope and would strive to do. They were chrysalis shapes. Above all, she flew her blind quickened heart on the wings of an imaginative force; and those of the young who can do that, are in their blood incorruptible by dark knowledge, irradiated under darkness in the mind. Let but the throb be kept for others. That is the one secret, for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... The imaginative reader will lose himself in wonder as he pictures to himself the figure of the pretentious Proconsul, with his assumption of confidence, as he was undergoing the castigation which this great master of obloquy was inflicting upon ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... enough to engage a teacher for him. But Richard would never learn slowly and systematically. His mind shot far ahead, absorbing in one instance the writings of Hoffmann, whose imaginative tales kept the boy's mind in a continual state of nervous excitement. He was not content to climb patiently the mountain; he tried to reach the top at a bound. So he wrote overtures for orchestras, one of which was really performed in Leipsic—a marvelous affair indeed, with ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... younger spirit and less imaginative nature Percival did not comprehend the depth of sadness implied in Helen's answer; taking it literally, he felt as if a load were lifted from his heart, and kissing with rapture the hand he held, he exclaimed: "Yes, this shall soon, oh, soon be mine! ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... she was resolute and determined, and had firmness and courage to bear up against the heaviest afflictions, she had no coldness or insensibility in her temperament, but was endowed with the tenderest and warmest affections. She was not by nature imaginative, but her understanding was excellent and utterly devoid of lumber and affectation. She had the sound practical sense of a vigorous and healthy mind, without a particle of vanity or conceit; she never attempted to plunge out of her depth, or to soar beyond the level of her ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... "Children's Delight," "The Little Red House," "Goose in the Pond," "The House That Jack Built," "Toad in the Puddle," and "Johnny Around the Corner" are some of the old names still in use to-day. Any one of these patterns made up into a quilt was a treasure to imaginative children, and it was doubly so when they could pick out among the tiny blocks bits of colour that were once in their ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... been responded to by that assembly, would never be obliterated from his remembrance. The present testified not only to the work of Sheffield hands, but to the warmth and generosity of Sheffield hearts. It was his earnest desire to do right by his readers, and to leave imaginative and popular literature associated with the private homes and public rights of the people of England. The case of cutlery with which he had been so kindly presented, should be retained as an heirloom ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... himself he worked with unabated ardor, but his work soon grew unsatisfying. The inspiring nature of his surroundings seemed to stimulate him to higher effort and loftier work, which should call into play the imaginative faculties and in which the brain would be free to weave its own creations. Stronger within him grew the desire to write a novel which should have in it something of the power, the force, of the strenuous western life,—something ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... as to develop the powers as they are ready for it, and to cultivate the ability to use them. The plasticity of the child's mind is such that a new impression may be erased quickly by a newer one; his character receives a decided bent only through repeated impressions of the same kind. The imaginative faculty is one of the earliest to appear, and a weakness of our educational systems is the failure to realize its importance and to pay sufficient attention to its development. It is well known that imagination is the creative power of the ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... amusing story, dealing with the adventures of eighteen jovial, big hearted Montana cowboys. Foremost amongst them, we find Ananias Green, known as Andy, whose imaginative powers cause many lively ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... chapter. We delight in the teachings she receives through Chilion and his violin, till on the grave of "one who tried to love his fellow-men" grows up the full white rose-flower of her life. The ease with which she assimilates the city life when in it, making it a part of her imaginative tapestry, is a sign of the power to which ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... falling moon was an act of the prepared imagination, without which the 'laws of Kepler' could never have been traced to their foundations. Out of the facts of chemistry the constructive imagination of Dalton formed the atomic theory. Davy was richly endowed with the imaginative faculty, while with Faraday its exercise was incessant, preceding, accompanying and guiding all his experiments. His strength and fertility as a discoverer is to be referred in great part to the stimulus of his imagination. Scientific men fight shy of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... would, at all events, be little understood. The wild Pantheism of Fichte; the modified Paliggenedia of the Pythagoreans; and, above all, the doctrines of Identity as urged by Schelling, were generally the points of discussion presenting the most of beauty to the imaginative Morella. That identity which is termed personal, Mr. Locke, I think, truly defines to consist in the saneness of rational being. And since by person we understand an intelligent essence having reason, and since there is a consciousness which always accompanies thinking, it is this which makes ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... begins the Other. Did I fall asleep at all? If so, was my first waking a dream-waking, and the real one only when the thing was gone? I'm not an imaginative man; my mind, at home, usually worked with some precision; but this,—there seems to be, you might say, a blur, a—film over my mental retina. You see, I'm not a psychologist, and therefore can't use the big, ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... has ever infused so much imaginative ingenuity into the structure and picture of a play. Even in the reading, its quaint charm is instantly revealed. We quite agree with Winter in saying that the effectiveness of the role of PETER lies in its simplicity. ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco |
