"Legendary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Cape York, but more probably were the higher lands of Prince of Wales Island. In all likelihood he saw enough of the natives of the Straits to convince him that no such rich pickings were to be had, as had fallen to the lot of the lucky conquerors of Mexico and Peru. He came across none of the legendary canoes from the land of gold, deep laden with the precious metal, nor sandy beaches strewn with jewels, to be had for the gathering. He puts on record what he thought of the islanders in the few terse words, that they were "black, naked and corpulent," beyond ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... his trade, an ashamed, but unrepentant rascal. He had two immense erect ears, and in his boisterous position had suffered a loss of hair, wearing nothing save an impudent scalp-lock. A very grotesque personage. Was he the guardian imp, the legendary Eft of Katahdin, scoffing already at us as verdant, and warning that he would make us unhappy, if we essayed to appear in demon realms and on Brocken ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... and her unspeakable telegram to him, hugging close a terrific grievance. Only from pique against Marguerite had he accepted Lucas's invitation. The adventure in Piccadilly Circus had somewhat enlivened him, and now the fluttering prospect of acquaintance with the legendary Irene Wheeler pushed Marguerite into the background of his mind, and excitement became quite pleasant. "And ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... back next term every one will have to write an essay, describing some one place they have been to during the holidays. I tell you now, that you may try to find out all you can of the real interest of the place; its historical, or legendary, or literary associations, or its ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... but from an insignificant place Bath has risen to the highest point of popularity as a fashionable watering-place and in architectural magnificence through the genius of Architect Wood and Master-of-Ceremonies Beau Nash. The legendary king Bladud is said to have first discovered the Bath waters twenty-seven hundred years ago, and to have built a town there and dedicated the medicinal springs to Minerva, so that "Bladud's Well" has passed into a proverb of sparkling inexhaustibility. The Romans, passionately attached ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... wool basket of flowers, in which real wool flowers grew out of a wool basket which you held by an over-arching wool handle, the whole worked with undeniable but how forlorn ingenuity,—a prehistoric relic of Mrs. Talbot's legendary school-days: survivals from a period which is best summed up in the one wonderful word "antimacassar," a period when for some unrecorded reason men and women had to protect their furniture against their oleaginous selves, and beautiful ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... a genuine nickname, but Roland's ivory horn was also called by this name, and the surname may go back to some legendary connection of the same kind. Bear is not uncommon, captive bears being familiar to a period in which the title ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... invented that branch of the service anew, as Gilmore reinvented gunnery. Sheridan's first famous ride was on a barebacked, bridleless horse which he mounted in the pasture where it was feeding, and clung to with his knees and elbows in its long flight down the highway. No poet has yet put this legendary feat into verse, but all my readers know the poem which celebrates Sheridan's ride from Winchester to Cedar Creek. This ride not only saved the day, but it stamped with the fiery little man's character the history of the whole campaign in the Valley of the Shenandoah; ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... feelings belongs to its most beautiful adornments; if the faithful direction of the heart to the invisible and eternal is the ground on which at all times the most lovely flowers of poetry have sprouted forth, these legendary poems of early Germany, in their lovely heartiness, in their unambitious limitation, and their pious sense, deserve a friendly acknowledgment. What man has considered the pious images in the prayer-books of the Middle Ages, the unadorned innocence, the piety and purity, the patience of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... that everybody was warning her against him, she had been told that he was an extremely dangerous man, she was really a little afraid of him; but a certain slight shiver in the presence of a handsome monster was a new and strangely delightful feeling. There was no doubt that his legendary adventures had exerted the customary bewitching influence upon her imagination. The daughter of Eve felt the irresistible hereditary attraction toward the serpent which had already talked so many feebly resisting hands into plucking the fatal apple. Hitherto, ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... this I may quote from Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art (ed. 1857, p. 159): "He (St. John) bears in his hand the sacramental cup, from which a serpent is seen to issue. St. Isidore relates that at Rome an attempt was made to poison St. John in the cup of the sacrament; he drank ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... by repute, precisely as the least among us knows Mr. Carnegie, though perhaps more intimately. The tales of his orgies, of his ladies, of that divorce case and of the yacht scandal which burst like a starball, tales Victorian and now legendary, have, in their mere recital, made many an old reprobate's mouth champagne. But latterly, during the present generation that is, the ineffable Paliser—M. P. for short—who, with claret liveries and a yard of brass behind him had tooled his four-in-hand, or else, in his superb ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... the upper Thames was thus easy to cross where individuals only or small groups of cattle were concerned, the marshes on either side always made it difficult for an army. The records of early fighting are meagre, and often legendary, but such as they are you do not find the upper Thames crossed and recrossed as are the upper Severn or the upper Trent. There are two points of passage: Cricklade and Oxford, nor can the passage from Oxford be made westward over the marshes. It is ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... from our feet that we may not inhale its perfumes and press our brows against its sod whenever we wish. It is not cant, I hope, to say that Eden is not lost entirely. There stands no angel at its gates with naming sword; nor did it fade away with all its legendary beauties, drop its leaves into the melancholy streams, leaving no trace behind of its glades and winding alleys, its stretches of flowery mead, its sunny hill-sides, and valleys of happiness and peace. But Eden still blooms wherever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... book is intended as a companion volume to "Child-Life in Art," and is a study of Madonna art as a revelation of motherhood. With the historical and legendary incidents in the life of the Virgin it has nothing to do. These subjects have been discussed comprehensively and finally in Mrs. Jameson's splendid work on the "Legends of the Madonna." Out of the great mass of Madonna subjects are selected, here, only the idealized ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... rain, the blood-red figures of the coachmen and footmen gowned from head to foot in their ensanguined colors, with the black-gleaming body of the coach between them, and the horses trampling heraldically before out of the legendary past. The want of definition in the fact, which I beheld in softly blurred outline, enhanced its value, which was so supreme that I could not perhaps do justice to the vague splendors of inferior courtward equipages, as my cab flashed by them, moving ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... of drawing such support from the very fountain heads of military history, in the remote and even legendary past, is given by Captain Clark in a letter replying to ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... Series of Sketches. Descriptive and Pictorial, of the entire Course of the Severn, containing Notices of its Topographical, Industrial, and Geological Features, with Glances at its Historical and Legendary ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... the imitation was not haphazard or indiscriminate is obvious. Thus, though we have some, we have not very many representatives of the class which was the most numerous of all in France—the chansons de geste or stories of French legendary history, national or family. Except as far as the Saracens are concerned, they would naturally have less interest for English hearers. The Matiere de Rome, again—the legends of antiquity—though represented, is not very abundant outside ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the practical workings of the mind of the great strategist, they will also see in his marvellous career much which savors of romance as well as reality, appeals to the imagination and excites the fancy. They will picture him as a legendary knight moving at the head of conquering columns, whose marches were measured not by single miles, but by thousands; as a general who could make a Christmas gift to his President of a great seaboard city; as a chieftain whose field ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... that the air is filled with a swarm of malignant little devils, who are always watching their chance to do us an ill turn. We don't in the least know the conditions under which they can bring it off; but it's legendary that if we wear opals, or sit thirteen at table, or start an enterprise on Friday, or what not, we somehow give them their opportunity. And one naturally wishes to be ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... astonished,—as who would not have been?—that for an appreciable space of time I was practically in a state of stupefaction. I could do nothing but stare. I was acquainted with the legendary transmigrations of Isis, and with the story of the beetle which issues from the woman's womb through all eternity, and with the other pretty tales, but this, of which I was an actual spectator, was something new, even in legends, If the man, with ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... originally written for the Vontadour Theatre, devoted to comic opera; but the company were found unable to sing the difficult music. Meyerbeer was inspired by Weber's "Der Freischtitz" to attempt a romantic, semi-fantastic legendary opera, and trod very closely in the footsteps of his model. It was determined to so alter the libretto and extend and elaborate the music as to fit it for the stage of the Grand Opera. MM. Scribe and Delavigne, the librettists, and Meyerbeer, devoted ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... was the question, and it was a most serious one. But the answer came not from the federal government, as some expected—that source from which so many had looked to get the mythical "mule" and the legendary "forty acres"—it came from the South, from the wasted resources of the former master. History furnishes no precedent as it affords no parallel to the action of the ex-slaveholders—a dominant race—in entering at once—before any opportunity had been afforded for recuperation ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... cobra. The story of the slaying of the dragon is a much distorted rumour of this incident; and in the process of elaboration the incidents were subjected to every kind of interpretation and also confusion with the legendary account of the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... empty bucket, which is not to be filled during his stay in this world, if it shall ever be! Nor are these all the hard things which Deists ask me to believe. He wishes me to believe that the history of the Nazarene is legendary, that he was a fanatical enthusiast. Some Deists have refused to believe so hard ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... lying between London and the English Channel is one of the most varied and diversified in all England. The "men of Kent" and the "Kentish men" have gone down in history in legendary fashion. The Roman influences and remains are perhaps more vivid here to-day than elsewhere, while Chaucer has done perhaps more than all others to give the first impetus to our acquaintanceship with the pleasures ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... politicians of the About type. The reader will not need to be reminded that there is no country in the world so favorable to the growth of "legend" as France: the petite bourgeoisie of Paris, as I found by personal experience, has already fabricated a complete legendary history of the Commune, and there is no subject on which the average Frenchman is so ignorant, and on which his ignorance is so precious to him, as the real character of the Great Revolution. As France is the guide of nations; as it represents, and always has represented, the summit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... humiliate a sister-in-law and show the bride to be a person of importance, was not intolerably requited by three months of wretched misery; after so much she is suffered to escape. From Edgar Linton, as we have seen, Heathcliff's blows fell aside unharming, as the executioner's strokes from a legendary martyr. He never learnt how secondary a place he held in his wife's heart, he never knew the misery of his only daughter—misery soon to be turned into joy. He lived and died, patient, happy, trustful, unvisited ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... erupt in some surprising way is the process manifest. The best of these sources are autobiographies, and of these only few are full of the details of this stage. Just as in the mythic prehistoric stage of many nations there is a body of legendary matter, which often reappears in somewhat different form, so there is a floating plankton-like mass of tradition and storiology that seems to attach to eminence wherever it emerges and is repeated over and over again, concerning the youth ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... The legendary character of Irving's sources, as traced in German folk-lore, does not come within the scope of this introduction. The first record of a play is Thomas Flynn's appearance as Rip in a dramatization made by ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... the Occidental Republic, she is the only one who has kept in my memory the aspect of continued life. Antonia the Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of the People are the artisans of the New Era, the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is: the only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... back as the February of that year an "unknown bull" had been making his presence felt on the floor of the Board of Trade. By the middle of March the commercial reports of the daily press had begun to speak of "the powerful bull clique"; a few weeks later that legendary condition of affairs implied and epitomized in the magic words "Dollar Wheat" had been attained, and by the first of April, when the price had been boosted to one dollar and ten cents a bushel, Hornung had disclosed his ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... not wanting those who affirm that the hapless Florinda lent a yielding ear to the solicitations of the monarch, and her name has been treated with opprobrium in several of the ancient chronicles and legendary ballads that have transmitted, from generation to generation, the story of the woes of Spain. In very truth, however, she appears to have been a guiltless victim, resisting, as far as helpless female could resist, the arts and intrigues of a powerful ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... characteristic of the crusading spirit of the age that Prince Henry's first ventures down the African coast were in pursuance of a vague plan to ascend one of the African rivers and unite with the legendary Christian monarch Prester John (Presbyter or Bishop John, whose realm was then supposed to be located in Abyssinia) in a campaign against the Turk. But crusading zeal changed to dreams of wealth ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... of the descendants from its primitive settlers. His historical researches, however, did not lie so much among books as among men; for the former are lamentably scanty on his favorite topics; whereas he found the old burghers, and still more their wives, rich in that legendary lore, so invaluable to true history. Whenever, therefore, he happened upon a genuine Dutch family, snugly shut up in its low-roofed farmhouse, under a spreading sycamore, he looked upon it as a little ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... look at is always the brightest," said the farmer. "However, I think the clams is the best thing at table—or near the best," with a slight glance towards Squire Deacon and the dish at the 'well end.'"I've a legendary attachment to beauty, sir; my father married the three prettiest ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... of the doings of Endicott in Massachusetts. Like those of all strong men, his deeds were often embellished with legendary ornaments, but the exaggerations, if such there be, are colored by a true conception of his character. At the time of his advent, there was at Merrymount, or Mount Walloston, now within the boundaries of Quincy, near Boston, a colony which was ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... writers, coincided with the latter part of the twelfth century: and the curious outburst of Pantheism which connects itself on the one hand with the little-known teaching of Amaury de Bene and David of Dinant, on the other with the almost legendary "Eternal Gospel" of Joachim of Flora, occurred almost exactly at the junction of the twelfth and thirteenth. As for the writers of the thirteenth century itself, that great period holds in this as in other departments ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... (Seven Kingdoms). The resistance of the Britons to the Anglo-Saxon advance was often brave and sometimes temporarily successful. Early in the sixth century, for example, they won at Mount Badon in the south a great victory, later connected in tradition with the legendary name of King Arthur, which for many years gave them security from further aggressions. But in the long run their racial defects proved fatal; they were unable to combine in permanent and steady union, and tribe by tribe the newcomers drove them slowly back; ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... those who owned the copyright of these stories. Lady Wilde has kindly granted me the use of her effective version of "The Horned Women;" and I have specially to thank Messrs. Macmillan for right to use Kennedy's "Legendary Fictions," and Messrs. Sampson Low & Co., for the use ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... version, may be found in W. J. Rees's "Lives of the Cambro-British Saints" (Llandovery, 1853), pp. 251, 575. The account of Brandan in the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists may be found under May 16, the work being arranged under saints' days. This account excludes the more legendary elements. The best sketch of the supposed island appears in the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages for 1845 (p. 293), by D'Avezac. Professor O'Curry places the date of the alleged voyage or voyages at about the year 560 ("Lectures on the Manuscript Materials for Irish History," ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... weekly newspaper published in that town. His death took place at Ayr on the 6th January 1843, in his 58th year. Much esteemed for his hearty, social nature, with a ready and pungent wit, and much dramatic power as a relater of legendary narrative, he was possessed of strong intellectual capacities, and considerable taste as a poet. His second son, Mr William Crawford, has attained ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... chapter I will treat of another phase of legendary lore, which, although highly imaginative, seems to intimate that the people who transmitted these tales had some knowledge, though an exaggerated one, of a people and system ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... poetic saying," replied Mrs. Clayton. "But a legendary sentiment of this kind often hides a deeper meaning. For those who are devoted to the Blessed Virgin, there is never a day so dark but that the love of Our Lady shines through the gloom like a sunbeam, changing to the rosy and golden tints of hope the leaden clouds ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... condition of barbarism; but the degraded descendants of a civilized people usually retain traditional recollections of their ancestors, or some traces of the lost civilization, perceptible in their customs and their legendary lore. The barbarism of the wild Indians of North America had nothing of this kind. It was original barbarism. There was nothing to indicate that either the Indians inhabiting our part of the continent, or their ancestors near or remote, had ever ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... "Handbook of Legendary and Mythological Art," "Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, Architects and Their Works," "Artists of the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... though he was only identified as a "Jew" in the 17th century—students at Geneva College (now Hobart College) applied the name to a supposedly unsinkable floating log in Lake Seneca, identified as the legendary "Chief Agayentha"; Jefferson I have been unable to locate any "Jefferson" ...
— The Lake Gun • James Fenimore Cooper
... Jamaica, Macneill had commenced a poem, founded on a Highland tradition; and to the completion of this production he assiduously devoted himself during his homeward voyage. It was published at Edinburgh in 1789, under the title of "The Harp, a Legendary Tale." In the previous year, he published a pamphlet in vindication of slavery, entitled, "On the Treatment of the Negroes in Jamaica." This pamphlet, written to gratify the wishes of an interested friend, rather than as the result ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... like," I said blankly. Little Fyne had never interested me so much since the beginning of the de Barral-Anthony affair when I first perceived possibilities in him. The possibilities of dull men are exciting because when they happen they suggest legendary cases of "possession," not exactly by the devil but, ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... Steelyard (Stahlhof), or "Stilyard," as it is often called in early dramatists, go far back to the legendary centuries of English history. From before the time of Alfred the Great, traders from Germany had clustered together on the bank of the Thames, close to where Cannon Street Station now stands. Amalgamation with the Hanseatic League, and the necessities and gratitude ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... brains"; so that "it is no wonder that they do not spare to wade in all the deepest mysteries that belong to the persons or the state of Kinges and Princes, that are gods upon earth." King James's attitude to Free Thought reminds one of the legendary contention between Canute and the sea. No one has ever repeated the latter experiment, but how many thousands still disquiet themselves, as James did, about or against the progress ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... it. And being feeble and credulous, partly by reason of his simple wits, and partly by reason of the sad condition a froward youth had reduced him to, he accepts the whole book—from Apple to Vials—for truth. In fact, 'he ate the little book,' as one of the legendary kings it ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... a fierce struggle with his pride, but he forced himself to think the problem out in all its bearings, and the folly of adopting the legendary policy of the chased ostrich became manifest. What, then, should he do? He thought, at first, of invoking the aid of a barrister friend, who could watch ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... upon the main issues of this great attack. But for the mist the German onslaught, delivered in the preponderance of four to one, would hardly have achieved the same historical result. The Battalion had stood in the forefront of the greatest battle of the war. Accounts, already growing legendary, tell how our men acquitted themselves that day. Some posts fought on till all were killed or wounded. There were few stragglers. Of B Company, only one man returned from the front line. It is said of A Company that, when surrounded by the enemy, Brown formed the men into a circle, ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... Chinese, the Burmese, and the Siamese taking it into their lands disfigured it, and spoilt it with heresies. We cannot forget that, persecuted by conquer-ing Brahmans, and expelled from India, it found, at last, a shelter in Ceylon where it still flourishes like the legendary aloe, which is said to blossom once in its lifetime and then to die, as the root is killed by the exuberance of blossom, and the seeds cannot produce anything but weeds. All this we may overlook, as I said before. ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... being simply to present the poetic essence of the saga as handed down by Tschudi. And he succeeded admirably. So far as the Swiss people are concerned, he well deserves the memorial they have placed in his honor upon the Mythenstein, near the legendary birth-place of their ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... screen against the deep blue sky, with the little cross and the sculptured porch casting a clear-cut shadow on the bricks, it seems to have even more than a Roman desolation, it confusedly suggests Spain and Africa—lands with no latent risorgimenti, with absolutely nothing but a fatal past. The legendary wolf of Rome has lately been accommodated with a little artificial grotto, among the cacti and the palms, in the fantastic triangular garden squeezed between the steps of the church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she holds a perpetual levee and "draws" ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... national noisiness was harmonized somewhat by innumerable bands and orchestras. Public balls seemed to have become the order of the night, and the famous forests by day were filled by echoes of the horns of the bloody chase—the cors de chasse of the legendary Roland and knights of the Nibelungen. Humble civilians grew fonder of the habit of donning their military or hunting uniforms and big marching boots, and sticking cock's feathers in their hats at rakish ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... Little Girl among the Old Masters. Being her own Compositions and Inventions in Sacred and Legendary Art. With Introduction and Commentary by W.D. Howells. Oblong. ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... for a curious prying fellow; derived from an old legendary tale, told of a taylor of Coventry, who, when Godiva countess of Chester rode at noon quite naked through that town, in order to procure certain immunities for the inhabitants, (notwithstanding the rest of the people shut up their houses) shly peeped out of his window, for which ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... last company embarked for Halifax, it carried the last British flag ever unfurled by a military organization on Massachusetts soil. That was the end of foreign domination in Massachusetts. And by a happy coincidence this is the legendary anniversary of the birth of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, whose memory has been an inspiration in the struggle of ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... work is from Origen, his opponent. The venerable fathers, who employed themselves in erasing the best works of the most eminent Greek or Latin authors, in order to transcribe the lives of saints or legendary tales upon the obliterated vellum, possible mistook these lamentable depredations for works of piety. The ancient fragment of the 91st book of Livy, discovered by Mr. Bruns, in the Vatican, in 1772, was much defaced by the pious labours of some well-intentioned divine. The Monks ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... came to an end; save that, on one side of the little entry where it terminated, a flight of a dozen steps gave access to the roof of the tower and the legendary shrine. On the other side was a door, at which Miriam knocked, but rather as a friendly announcement of her presence than with any doubt of hospitable welcome; for, awaiting no response, she lifted the ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in one of the high-lying inland valleys of Norway, a fiddler, who has become in some degree a legendary personage. Of the tunes and marches ascribed to him, some are said to have been inspired by the Trolls, one he heard from the devil himself, another he made to save his life, &c., &c. But the most famous of all is a Bridal March; ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... a legendary figure among them, beautiful and godlike. She shone in the reflected glory of him for weeks. His experiences and adventures were added to ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... of district. Population 64,869, of which 16,274 in Cantonment. A very old place connected with the legendary history of Raja Salivahan and his two sons Puran and Raja Rasalu. (See also page 165.) The Cantonment is about a mile and a half from the town. Sialkot is an active trade centre. Its hand-made paper was once well known, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... fifth century A.D., and the first quarter of the sixth. He was growing to manhood, when Theodoric, the famous Ostrogoth, crossed the Alps and made himself master of Italy. Boethius belonged to an ancient family, which boasted a connection with the legendary glories of the Republic, and was still among the foremost in wealth and dignity in the days of Rome's abasement. His parents dying early, he was brought up by Symmachus, whom the age agreed to regard as of almost saintly character, and afterwards became his son-in-law. His varied gifts, ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... was the son of Venus and Butes, Aeneas son of Venus and Anchises, hence they are called brothers here. Eryx is the legendary founder of the town of that name on the west coast of ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... collecting from the present inhabitants of the region legendary information bearing upon ruins and in observing the snake-dances, adescription of which was prepared ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... Even in legendary days there is a pretty story that Mercury fell in love with Rhea (or the Earth), and wishing to do her a favor, gambled with the Moon, and won from her every seventieth part of the time she illumined the horizon, all of ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... present activity of business as the result of his lifelong example of untiring energy, and generally laid the foundation of a belief, which thereafter obtained, that he died comfortably in the bosom of his family, surrounded by disconsolate friends. The history of all pioneer settlements has this legendary basis, and M'liss may live to see the day when her father's connection with the origin of the settlement shall become apocryphal, and contested like that of Romulus and Remus and their ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... elliptic method as the book you have been reading and admiring.' I was here brought up with a reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel shows, I failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton, and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and legendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the very title-page; and this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any chance I could hit upon some similar belief to be the centre-piece of my own meditated fiction. In the course of this vain search there cropped up in my memory ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all the beautiful Old World associations, poetical and legendary, that cluster about the holly at Christmas time, although our native tree furnishes most of our holiday decorations. So far back as Pliny's day, the European holly had all manner of supernatural qualities attributed to it: its insignificant little flowers caused water to ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... motley compositions were priests, not laymen. A few short extracts from Konrad's "Roland" and Lamprecht's "Alexander" are sufficient to mark this period of transition. Like Charlemagne, who had been changed into a legendary hero by French poets before he became again the subject of German poetry, another German worthy returned at the same time to his native home, though but slightly changed by his foreign travels, "Reinhard the Fox." The ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... four civilizations, and probably five, have dominated Italy; together they cover a period of more than 3,000 years—Pelasgian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Italian. Of these the Pelasgian is, in the main, legendary. Next came the Etruscan. How old that civilization is no man knows, but its beginnings date from at least 1000 B.C.—that is, earlier than Homer's writings, and earlier by nearly three centuries than the wall built by Romulus around Rome. The Etruscan state was a federation of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... commotion had they found the girl enclosed in the solid rock, like one of those antediluvian creatures who have occasionally been released by a stroke of the pickax from their stony prison. Nell became a fashionable wonder without knowing it. Superstitious folks made her story a new subject for legendary marvels, and were inclined to think, as Jack Ryan told Harry, that Nell was the ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... Victorian Jubliee; not particularly beautiful and leading one to speculate upon its permanence. A cutting in the chalk would probably recommend itself to the pious care of coming ages when the personage commemorated had either been entirely forgotten or had developed into a legendary heroine of fictitious character. That even cuttings are not always permanent is proved close by, for only occasionally can the cross cut to commemorate the great battle of Lewes be seen; the turf shows but a different shade ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... life; and not even, perhaps, in Shakespeare, such novelty and variety of milieu. There is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern world which he has not touched, always with the same vital and instinctive sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge. Passing by the legendary and remote ages and civilisations of East and West, he has painted the first dawn of the modern spirit in the Athens of Socrates and Euripides, revealed the whole temper and tendency of the twilight age between Paganism ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... however, he entertained the King, the two Queens, and the principal nobility at one of those elaborate fetes which have now become merely legendary; and which combined a comedy, a concert, and a ballet, with other incidental amusements, sufficient, as it would appear in these days, to have afforded occupation for a week even to the most dissipated pleasure-seekers; but which ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... waving their tails;" but their appearance was to "try," and not to attack him; and when they saw him resolute, they "drooped their heads, put down their tails, and prostrated themselves before him." This of course is not an historical account, but a legendary tribute to his ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... men striving against both wind and tide, who distinguish themselves by their desperate exertions of strength, and their persevering endurance of toil, but without being able to advance themselves upon their course by either vigour or resolution. They pretend to trace this fatality to a legendary history, which I may tell you at a less ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... were to be found in the library below, and I courageously resolved that I too would read them all and try to understand life as he did. I did in fact later begin a course of reading in the early morning hours, but I was caught by some fantastic notion of chronological order and early legendary form. Pope's translation of the "Iliad," even followed by Dryden's "Virgil," did not leave behind the residuum of wisdom for which I longed, and I finally gave them up for a thick book entitled "The History of the World" as affording a shorter and ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... me as a painful yet necessary duty to topple from its pedestal one of the most popular idols of legendary lore. I refer, I regret to say, to the widely famous ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... "good sport" and he was hail-fellow-well-met; but, I do not know why, I felt that he was cunning and shifty. He talked a great deal in a raucous voice, and he and Chaplin capped one another's stories of beanos which had become legendary, stories of "wet" nights at the English Club, of shooting expeditions where an incredible amount of whisky had been consumed, and of jaunts to Sydney of which their pride was that they could remember nothing from the time they landed till the time they sailed. A pair of drunken swine. But even in ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... poetical William has devoted a series of his versifyings to the naming of places. Which has the right of it, let us not undertake to pronounce without consideration. England herself has long ago determined the question. As Mr. Emerson says of English names,—"They are an atmosphere of legendary melody spread over the land; older than all epics and histories which clothe a nation, this undershirt sits close to the body." Dean Trench, who handles words as a numismatist his coins, has said substantially the same thing. And it is true not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... care to state that his essay, though published only in 1788, had been written in 1784. In that essay he endeavored to show that there existed an intimate connection, not only between the mythology of India and that of Greece and Italy, but likewise between the legendary stories of the Brahmans and the accounts of certain historical events as recorded in the Old Testament. No doubt, the temptation was great. No one could look down for a moment into the rich mine ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... winged. So HESIOD drew The legendary Harpy crew, The "Spoilers" of old fable; Maidens, yet monsters, woman-faced, With iron hearts that had disgraced The slaughterer ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... opposite direction for him to reach the outer world beyond the wall and gain his freedom. Here again is one in whom we shall seek in vain for any indication of reflection. Like the rest, in spite of his legendary renown, he has no guide but ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... the Giant Gog, 'that is the league between us who guard this city, by day in spirit, and by night in body also; and never on ancient holidays have its conduits run wine more merrily than we will pour forth our legendary lore. We are old chroniclers from this time hence. The crumbled walls encircle us once more, the postern-gates are closed, the drawbridge is up, and pent in its narrow den beneath, the water foams and struggles with the sunken starlings. Jerkins and quarter-staves are in the streets ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, through the flat medium of Mr. Hoole's translation. But above all, I then first became acquainted with Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry. As I had been from infancy devoted to legendary lore of this nature, and only reluctantly withdrew my attention, from the {p.032} scarcity of materials and the rudeness of those which I possessed, it may be imagined, but cannot be described, with what delight I saw pieces of the same kind which had amused my childhood, and still continued ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... must, however, in some degree, be ranked as historical; for although surrounded with rich fiction, as is always the case in Calderon, they nevertheless in general express the character of Biblical or legendary story with great fidelity. They are distinguished, however, from the other historical pieces by the frequent prominency of a significant allegory, and by the religious enthusiasm with which the poet, in the spiritual acts ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... turn from the legendary to the historic Attila, we see clearly that he was not one of the vulgar herd of barbaric conquerors. Consummate military skill may be traced in his campaigns; and he relied far less on the brute force of ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... temple than usual was reached, and near it was a house, at which the party stopped, and were treated with fruit and other provisions, while an old priest made a long speech. These temples at the cross roads remind us of the shrines set up to legendary ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... still bookless, yet beginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of accessible garden peaches in a liberal backward territory that was still almost part of a country town; tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strange legendary domestics, inveterately but archaically Irish, and whose familiar remarks and "criticism of life" were handed down, as well as of dim family ramifications and local allusions—mystifications always—that flowered into anecdote ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... modern age are far more exact and exacting. When they hear such an opening to a story, they are at once critical and suspicious. They apply the searchlight of science to its legendary haze and ask: ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... French and are far closer to their Northern brethren than to the French whose language they use. Charles de Coster, who may be considered as the father of this particular branch of the school, published in 1868 the Legend of Ulenspiegel, which is nothing but a prose epic in which the legendary character of Owliglass is identified with one of the heroes of the sixteenth century revolution against Spain. Camille Lemonnier (1844-1913), in his best novels, deals with the manners and customs of the Flemish ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... abruptness, "and spoke seriously too. Tell me more about that, if you will." He sought to lead the talk away from himself, since he did not intend to be fully drawn. "You said something about the theory that the Earth is alive, a living being, and that the early legendary forms of life may have been emanations—projections of herself—detached portions of her consciousness—or something of the sort. Tell me about that theory. Can there be really men who are thus children of the earth, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... wonder, blooming one moment before admiring eyes, and next lying dried and shrivelled in a tomb-like box, is not without its legendary interest, though the odor of its oriental history has, by this time, been nearly blown away by that sharp simoom of investigation, which has already whirled so many pretty ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, altho veiled in much legendary and mythical lore, tells, nevertheless, in its actual history of the progress of civilization and of the enlightenment of the human mind. Sigberet, King of the East Angles, is said to have founded ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... controlling the Turkish Straits (Bosporus, Sea of Marmara, Dardanelles) that link Black and Aegean Seas; Mount Ararat, the legendary landing place of Noah's Ark, is in the far eastern portion of ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Roman father—Lucius Junius Brutus, legendary founder of the Roman republic, was said to have passed sentence of death on his two sons for ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... ancient Hawaiian; it was to him in place of our concert-hall and lecture-room, our opera and theater, and thus became one of his chief means of social enjoyment. Besides this, it kept the communal imagination in living touch with the nation's legendary past. The hula had songs proper to itself, but it found a mine of inexhaustible wealth in the epics and wonder-myths that celebrated the doings of the volcano goddess Pele and her compeers. Thus in the cantillations of the old-time ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... had any use for it, he daily produced large quantities. From Naples the family moved to Sorrento, where S'or Riccardo and S'or Edwardo, as the Italians called them, surrendered themselves to the natural and legendary influences of the neighbourhood and to reading. The promontory on which Sorrento stands is barren enough, but southward rise pleasant cliffs viridescent with samphire, and beyond them purple hills dotted with white spots of houses. At no great distance, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... legendary hero of the American Air Force—who had shot down, so latest rumors said, fifty Slav planes—was far above him. "I'll never reach Hay's record, Wells. I'll be doing pretty well if I bag half as many!" Then, seeing Ranth, the orderly, followed by ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... became more and more sought after; by means of forced domestic issues a certain amount of cash was obtained, but the country lived from hand to mouth and everybody was unhappy. Added to this by March the formidable insurrection of the "White Wolf" bandits in Central China—under the legendary leadership of a man who was said to be invulnerable—necessitated the mobilization of a fresh army which ran into scores of battalions and which was vainly engaged for nearly half a year in rounding-up this replica of the Mexican Villa. So demoralized had the army become from long license ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... five legendary Emperors, some 2700 years B.C., the historian begins by giving the annals of each reign under the various more or less legendary dynasties which succeeded, and thence onward right down to his own times, the last five or six hundred years, i.e. from about 700 B.C., belonging to a genuinely historical ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... good children with gifts.[148-A] But to celebrate the day quietly was altogether a different thing from introducing to the American public the character of Santa Claus, who has become in his mythical entity as well known to every American as that other Dutch legendary personage, Rip ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... find in them the personification of all aspirations toward the elegant and the ideal. Alcibiades, Buckingham, the Duc de Richelieu, Lord Seymour, Comte d'Orsay, Brummel, Grammont-Caderousse, shared this favor, and have remained legendary characters, to whom their disdain for everything vulgar, their worship of their own persons, and many costly follies gave an ephemeral empire. Their power was the more arbitrary and despotic in that it was only nominal and undefined, allowing them to rule over the ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... Mr. Reade, "White Lies," although somewhat crude, otherwise ranks with his best. The action is uninterrupted and swift, the characters sharply defined, if legendary, the dialogue always sparkling, the plot cleanly executed, the whole full of humor and seasoned with wit. So well has it caught the spirit of the scene that it reads like a translation, and, lest we should mistake the locale, everybody in the book lies abominably from beginning ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... make out, despite the corrosion of the salt water, human features worn by the passing centuries. They were curious relics of days of storm; suggestions of the great secret of the sea, which had come to light after being hidden thousands of years; confused and legendary history returned by the restless waves to the shores of these islands, which had been the refuge in ancient times of Phoenicians and Carthaginians, of Arabs and Normans. Tio Ventolera told of silver coins, thin as wafers, found by boys at play on the beach. His grandfather remembered ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... possessed. I had met with the word Daimon and Daimones in Plato; Socrates urges that by daemons the Gods, or the children of the Gods, were meant. I felt as though I, too, were one of the children of the Gods. In all the great legendary figures of the middle ages I detected the feature of divine possession, especially in the two who had completely fascinated the poets of the nineteenth century, Don Juan and Faust. The first was the symbol of magic ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... centred in God. With a remarkable fertility of composition he possesses an uncommon smoothness of versification, combined with a power, so successful in his age, of illustration from history or romance, from the sacred writings or the legendary lore of the people. The work was received in those days of trouble with unbounded enthusiasm. Brabant was thought to have given birth to a new Homer. His praises resounded in verse and song, and the young girls of Brussels ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of this century, at the same era vitamins and other basic aspects of nutrition were being discovered, a few farsighted medical explorers sought out these hard-to-reach places with their legendarily healthy peoples to see what caused the legendary well-being they'd heard of. Enough evidence was collected and analyzed to ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... still, the keys being worn into holes. We wonder whether Rosa Bud and Helena Landless ever played on them! Looking round, we half expect to witness the famous courting scene in Edwin Drood, and afterwards "the matronly Tisher to heave in sight, rustling through the room like the legendary ghost of a dowager in silken skirts, [with her] 'I trust I disturb no one; but there was a paper-knife—Oh, thank you, I am sure!'" An excellent local institution, called "The Rochester Men's Institute," has its home here. The house has been immortalized ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes |
