"Metaphorical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in a very elastic manner. The term of widest connotation is PARIN IGAT, which is equivalent to our cousin used in the wider or Scotch sense; it is applied to all blood relatives of the same generation, and is sometimes used in a metaphorical sense much as we use the term brother. There are no words corresponding to our words son and daughter, ANAK meaning merely child of either sex. There are no words corresponding to brother and sister; both are spoken of as PARIN, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... are made free of a city, or state, they are enrolled in the archives of the community—Thence probably the metaphorical language of the text, and similar scriptures: For we often find matters which are determined in the divine councils represented as written in celestial records—Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another, ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... growth of figurative words and phrases, and of their transfer from one language to another. The word anchor, for instance, was one of the earliest among the Greeks, a marine people, to take on a metaphorical sense. We see this even in Pindar, who speaks of his heroes as casting anchor on the summit of happiness. M. Planche follows this typical use of the word in Virgil, in Ovid, and in Racine, the last of whom says in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the cupboard close at hand, to get the something, which would almost certainly have taken the form of brandy. But Aunt M'riar she said never mind her!—she would be all right in a minute. And in a metaphorical minute she pulled herself together, and went on clearing off the supper-table. Suggestions of remedies or assistance seemed alike distasteful to her, whether from Mrs. Burr or the two men, and there was no doubt she was in earnest in preferring to be left to herself. So Mrs. Burr she went ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... sovereign, lordly, magisterial power over the Church. But the keys, &c. i.e. a stewardly, ministerial power, and their acts, binding and loosing, i.e. retaining and remitting sins on earth, (as in John it is explained;) opening and shutting are proper acts of keys; binding and loosing but metaphorical, viz. a speech borrowed from bonds or chains wherewith men's bodies are bound in prison or in captivity, or from which the body is loosed: we are naturally all under sin, Rom. v. 12, and therefore liable to death, Rom. vi. 23. Now ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... "somebody" some day. He had got to the top of the local grammar school, and tasted the delights of success, and he determined that he would continue them in a larger sphere. It is not always easy to draw the line between conspicuousness and distinction. Pateley, who went along the path of life like a metaphorical fire-engine, had very early become conspicuous; he had gone steadily on, calling to his fellow-creatures to get out of his way, until now, as steerer of the Arbiter, a dashing little paper that under his guidance had made a sudden leap ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... is either current, or strange, or metaphorical, or ornamental, or newly-coined, or ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... Strong is modest in his preface about his collection of verse,[32] although he is rather too elaborately metaphorical in his way of blushing properly. He says, as to the flaws in his poems, that he "has a reasonable confidence that they will not all be discovered by any one reader." This may be true from the probable fact that no one reader will read ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... occasionally preserve the memory of a disused custom; but we cannot safely argue from them about right and wrong, matter and mind, freedom and necessity, or the other problems of moral and metaphysical philosophy. For the use of words on such subjects may often be metaphorical, accidental, derived from other languages, and may have no relation to the contemporary state of thought and feeling. Nor in any case is the invention of them the result of philosophical reflection; they have been commonly transferred from matter to mind, and their ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... BELT. A metaphorical term in geography for long and proportionally narrow encircling strips of land having any particular feature; as a belt of sand, a belt of hills, &c. It is, in use, nearly synonymous with zone. Also, to beat with a colt or ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... matters important to a pastoral race are well nigh innumerable. Poetry has seized upon the material terms and has converted them into a host of metaphors; for "the genius of the Arabic language, like that of the Hebrew, is to form new ideas by giving a metaphorical signification to material objects (e.g. 'Azud, lit. the upper arm; met. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... about this time, too, that I first saw the teeth and the claws of our metaphorical man-eater. That was during the conflict between Governor Waite and the Fire and Police Board of Denver. He had the appointment and removal of the members of this Board, under the law, and when they refused to close the public gambling houses and otherwise enforce the laws against vice in ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... says he. 'First, a leeteral trumpet; second, a heestorical trumpet; third, a metaphorical ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or deity, but who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of planets? Every one knows what is meant by such metaphorical expressions, and they are almost necessary for brevity: so, again, it is difficult to avoid personifying the word 'Nature.' But I mean by Nature the aggregate action and product of many laws, and by laws the sequence of events ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... fragments, Euripides, and Homer too (once!). Again, "identities of sentiment under similar circumstances" are not to be cited; two pages ARE cited; and "similarities, however striking they may be in metaphorical expression," cannot safely be used; ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... general ground that such an organization could hardly be purposeless. Yet, while such expressions were natural, if not unavoidable, they generally were used by those familiar with the facts in a half-serious, half-metaphorical sense. Thanks to Mr. Darwin's investigations, they may now be used in simplicity ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... into deep water, and when an old gentleman hasn't opened a book of philosophy for nearly thirty years, he may be well excused for a certain timidity in approaching these deep questions. But, "keep to the metaphorical" has always been a great rule of mine, which never ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... the proper steps taken for learning the truth of the accusation, seemed to be possessed with the same infatuation as Pizarro; and he bade the governor be under no apprehension, "for no harm should come to him, while the rod of justice," not a metaphorical badge of authority in Castile, "was in his hands." 12 Still, to obviate every possibility of danger, it was deemed prudent for Pizarro to abstain from going to mass on Sunday, and to remain at home on ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... them. They were, moreover, in the present case, embittered with certain circumstances, which being mixed with sweeter ingredients, tended altogether to compose a draught that might be termed bitter-sweet; than which, as nothing can be more disagreeable to the palate, so nothing, in the metaphorical sense, can be ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... The metaphorical use of the word is equally expressive of its literal meaning, for it is applied to the production of new dispositions of mind and soul utterly opposite to those previously existing. "Create in me a clean heart;" which God thus explains: "A new heart will I give you, and a new spirit ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... as it escapes the preacher. After a very long, and a very tediously sung psalm, M. Rollin commenced his discourse. He is an extemporaneous preacher. His voice is sweet and clear, rather than sonorous and impressive; and he is perhaps, occasionally, too metaphorical in his composition. For the first time I heard the words "Oh Dieu!" pronounced with great effect: but the sermon was made up of better things than mere exclamations. M. Rollin was frequently ingenious; logical, and convincing; and his address to the young communicants, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... tell where London is on the map so long as they can tell where Brixton is on the way home. I do not even mind whether they can put two and two together in the mathematical sense; I am content if they can put two and two together in the metaphorical sense. But all this longer statement of an obvious view comes back to the metaphor I have employed. I do not care a dump whether they know the alphabet, so long as ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... principle on which it has been executed, that of investing with an ideal magnitude, the proportions of nature, is plainly, from what we observe in heroic poetry, painting, and sculpture, the soul itself of the superhuman and sublime. Of the justness of the metaphorical compliment implied in the delineation of the head, it is not for the author to speak; of its exquisiteness and delicacy, his sense is too strong for expression. The habitual pensiveness of the elevated eyebrows, mingled with ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... but the most confirmed writer suffered to spin out volume after volume in complacent ignorance of his readers' state of mind, for these victims of eye-strain and nerves turn upon the newest book, the metaphorical last straw on the camel's load, with the exasperated cry, Why? Why? ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... found that the great magnetic waves which cover immense distances, work even more powerfully in the light than in the dark. May it not be that these things show, that there is more than a merely metaphorical use of words, when the Bible tells us of the power of Light to dissipate, and bring to naught, the powers of Darkness, while the Light itself is the Great Power, using the forces of the universe on the widest scale? Perhaps it is ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... This metaphorical black dog meant a bad humor. Eyebright had waked up cross and irritable. What made her wake up cross I am not wise enough to explain. The old-fashioned doctors would probably have ascribed it to indigestion, the new-fashioned ones to nerves or malaria or a "febrile tendency"; ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... metaphorically in one and the same man there is said to be justice in so far as the reason commands the irascible and concupiscible, and these obey reason; and in general in so far as to each part of man is ascribed what is becoming to it. Hence the Philosopher (Ethic. v, 11) calls this "metaphorical justice." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... comprehensive than any one of the sister arts. If any one should be inclined to doubt that it is indeed a resume of them all, let him consider that in its prosodial flow, measured pauses, metrical lines, varied cadences, stirring or soothing rhythms, sweet or rugged rhymes,—it is music: in its metaphorical diction, descriptive imagery, succession of shifting pictures, diversified illustration, and vivid coloring,—it is painting; while in its organic development and arrangement of parts, its complicated structure, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... any appropriate metaphorical description of it one has to change the terminology altogether. In a very great line Mr. Kipling has spoken ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... without the formality of a lecture, or the apparatus of a chemist. In all your attempts to instruct him in chemistry, the greatest care should be taken that he should completely understand one experiment, before you proceed to another. The common metaphorical expression, that the mind should have time to digest the food which it receives, is founded upon ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... apprized, that the words strength and debility, when applied to animal motions, may properly express the quantity of resistance such motions may overcome; but that, when they are applied to mean the susceptibility or insusceptibility of animal fibres to motion, they become metaphorical terms; as in Sect. XII. 2. 1. and would be better expressed by ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... that was only a part of my delusion, not yours! But why did you not rescue me from these delusions? Are they not more terrible than the beasts at Ephesus? Really I know not which of us has showed less wisdom,—you who stayed to slay a metaphorical witch created of your own heated imagination, or I, with all my hopes unfulfilled, turning aside to follow one whose prophecies carry him out of the world rather than into it. And I do not know what has been the result of your mistake, but with me it has been war. I have been like a small ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... women and boys were searched to ascertain whether there were any styluses in their pen cases. Stabbing with the pen, therefore, is not merely a metaphorical expression. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... conceiving as belonging to the nature of man. Not only the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutest particles of which our nature is composed;[Footnote: These words are ineffectual and metaphorical. Most words are so—No help!] a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness; a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise, which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overleap. To this we eagerly ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the incognito goddess—and tracing in all his fine expressions one paramount idea of his anxiety to make himself master of a perfect paragon of beauty and romance, she could not avoid coming to the conclusion, that these were all metaphorical declarations of attachment to herself. And, on the following day, her manner had derived so much empressement from these cogitations, that all the efforts of Monimia on the imperturbable Frank were cast into the shade by the extraordinary evolutions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... metaphorical if we choose to be captious. Scratch the simplest expressions, and you will find the metaphor. Written words are handage, inkage and paperage; it is only by metaphor, or substitution and transposition of ideas, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... the unconscious, and resultant behaviour is the fact that the nerves and nerve cells of the vegetative apparatus, the nerves leading to the viscera and the endocrine glands, like the solar plexus, are affected by stimuli of lower value than those which arouse the brain cells. In the metaphorical language of the old psychology, the threshold value, that is the strength or loudness of stimulus sufficient to make itself felt or heard, is less for the vegetative apparatus than for the brain. So we begin to glimpse why ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... very easy for Montague to imagine a tigress in Mrs. Winnie's conservatory; unless, indeed, one were willing to take the proposition in a metaphorical sense. There are wild creatures which sleep in the heart of man, and which growl now and then, and stir their tawny limbs, and cause one to start and turn cold. Mrs. Winnie wore a dress of filmy softness, trimmed with red flowers which paled beside her own intenser ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... science would lose its philosophical and its only true meaning if it were to be used in its narrow sense only—that of a struggle between separate individuals for the sheer means of existence. And at the very beginning of his memorable work he insisted upon the term being taken in its "large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... plausibly asserted that his earlier manner of writing, as in Schiller, under the influence of Jeffrey, was not in his natural voice. "They forget," he said, referring to his critics, "that the style is the skin of the writer, not a coat: and the public is an old woman." Erratic, metaphorical, elliptical to excess, and therefore a dangerous model, "the mature oaken Carlylese style," with its freaks, "nodosities and angularities," is as set and engrained in his nature as the Birthmark in Hawthorne's romance. To recast ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... neither required nor endured any addition, and who strained their fancies in expressing the transcendency of the books of Moses, in aid of their opinion—that the founders of the doctrine borrowed their notions and phrases respecting the Bible throughout. Remove the metaphorical drapery from the doctrine of the Cabbalists, and it will be found to contain the only intelligible and consistent idea of that plenary inspiration, which later divines extend to all the canonical books; as thus:- "The Pentateuch is but ONE WORD, even the Word of God; and the letters and articulate ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... swamp lot.' It required a lengthy series of geological arguments, with practical illustrations, to convince 'Squire Witherpee that the soil of East Hampton was somewhat feeble in the production of the precious metals—except, perhaps, in a metaphorical sense. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... be as if I've never been up. It matters very much to me what the world is like. I can't answer your questions about it; and that's no loss to you, but so much the worse for me. And then you've got a house—not a metaphorical one, but a house with father and sisters. I haven't, and never shall have. There'll never again be a home for me like Cambridge. I shall only look at the outside of homes. According to your metaphor, I shall live in the street, and it matters very much to me what ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... unhappy pessimist and the still more unhappy optimist. As I am here only concerned with their particular problem, I shall indicate only briefly this great metaphysical suggestion. All descriptions of the creating or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical, because they must be verbal. Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of God in all things as if he were in a box. Thus the evolutionist has, in his very name, the idea of being unrolled like a carpet. All terms, religious and irreligious, are open to this charge. The ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... anything more than transform Scrapefoot into his naughty old woman, who in her turn has been transformed by popular tradition into the naughty girl Silver-hair. Mr. Nutt ingeniously suggests that Southey heard the story told of an old vixen, and mistook the rustic name of a female fox for the metaphorical application to women of fox-like temper. Mrs. H.'s version to my mind has all the marks of priority. It is throughout an animal tale, the touch at the end of the shaking the paws and the name Scrapefoot are too volkstuemlich to have been conscious variations on Southey's tale. In introducing ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... satisfactory. Lunch, too, was all that could be desired. Mrs. Polkington's manners were always gracious, and to-day she had a charming air of taking Richard into the family—after having shut all the doors, actual and metaphorical, which led to anything real and personal. The Captain was rather twittery at lunch, at times inclined to talk too much, at times heavily silent and always obviously submissive to his wife. Yesterday's excitement was not enough to account for this in Julia's opinion. ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... pilgrim had, no doubt, his own good qualities; but, at pure and downright believing—at taking God at His bare and simple word—Mr. Ready-to-halt beat them all. All that flashes in upon us from one shining word that stands on the margin of our so metaphorical author. This single word, the "promises," hangs like a key of gold beside the first mention of Mr. Ready-to-halt's crutches—a key such that in a moment it throws open the whole of Mr. Ready-to-halt's otherwise lockfast and secret and ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... father. It will, no doubt, soon supersede sire, which is at present the poetical equivalent for the name of the author of one's existence. See all the poets, passim. 9. "Said as how he'd never fight," the thing was out of the question; a metaphorical phrase, though certainly, at present, a vulgar one. 10. "Snooze," slumber personified, like "Morpheus," or "Somnus." 11. "Daddle."—Q. from daktulos, a finger—pars pro toto!—Hand, the only synonym for ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... of elementary ideas may be called metaphorical terms in the sense in which every abstract term is metaphorical. The characteristic of a truly scientific system of metaphors is that each term in its metaphorical use retains all the formal relations ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... London streets, and especially a wet Boxing-day, can scarcely fail to afford us some tableaux vivants illustrative of English metropolitan life. In a metaphorical and technical sense, Boxing-day is always more or less "wet"—generally more, and not less; but this year the expression is used climatically, and in its first intention. Christmas-eve of the year about which I write was bright and springlike; Christmas-day dismal, dark, and un-Christmas-like; ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... metaphorical to say that every minute seemed an hour; but so tardy did the time appear that I began to wonder why the awful event was so long delayed. Perhaps, thought I, the powder may be far down, covered over with other things—such as boxes and bales—and the fire has not yet been able ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... the word, now, from its vulgar use. You may have another if you choose, a metaphorical one,—close enough it seems to Christianity, and yet still absolutely distinct from it,—[Greek: *christos*]. Suppose, as you watch the white bloom of the olives of Val d'Arno and Val di Nievole, which modern piety and economy suppose were grown by God only ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... but the company of his friends exorcised the imp of irritation, and he felt only the mellow gloom of the evening and the sweet scents of the moor. In such weather he had a trick of walking with his head high and his nostrils wide, sniffing the air like the wild ass of the desert with which the metaphorical George had erstwhile compared him. That young man meanwhile was occupied with his own reflections. His good nature had been victimized, he had been made to fetch and carry continually, and the result was that he had scarcely ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... STAPYLTON is over-run with the love of poetry and romance, and delights in flowery language and metaphorical flourishes: is about eighteen, wants not either sense or politeness; and has read herself into a vein, more amorous (that was Mrs. Towers's word) than discreet. Has extraordinary notions of a first sight love; and gives herself greater liberties, with a pair of fine ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... days of summer, and by that means the sensorial power was previously diminished, we see the cause why the cold bath gives such present strength; namely, by stopping the unnecessary activity of the subcutaneous vessels, and thus preventing the too great exhaustion of sensorial power; which, in metaphorical language, has been called bracing the system: which is, however, a mechanical term, only applicable to drums, or musical strings: as on the contrary the word relaxation, when applied to living animal bodies, can only mean too small a quantity of stimulus, or too small a quantity of sensorial ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... despairing gesture. "Oh," he murmured wearily, "a fellow has to be so careful what he says to you! The next time I make a metaphorical remark in your presence, I'll draw a diagram to go ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... words, they are equipped for the pretty and delicate game of talk. But a rare admixture of qualities is needed, and a subtle conversational effect, a sudden fancy, that throws a charming or a bizarre light on a subject, a power of pleasing metaphorical expression, the communication of an imaginative interest to a familiar topic—all these things are of the nature of instinctive art. I have heard well-informed and sensible people talk of a subject in ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... expression natural selection must be always more or less objectionable, as too highly charged with metaphor for purposes of science, there is nevertheless a natural selection which is open to no other objection than this, and which, when its metaphorical character is borne well in mind, may be used without serious risk of error, whereas natural selection from variations that are mainly fortuitous is chimerical as well as metaphorical. Both writers speak of natural selection as though there could not possibly be any ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... teaching that Christ's mission on earth was to give men Life. "I am come," He said, "that ye might have Life, and that ye might have it more abundantly." And that He meant literal Life, literal spiritual and Eternal Life, is clear from the whole course of His teaching and acting. To impose a metaphorical meaning on the commonest word of the New Testament is to violate every canon of interpretation, and at the same time to charge the greatest of teachers with persistently mystifying His hearers by an unusual use of so exact a vehicle for ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... work. From the time of Irenaeus and Origen down to the present day, there has not been a single generation in which great divines have not been led into the most absurd expositions of Scripture, by mere incapacity to distinguish analogies proper, to use the scholastic phrase, from analogies metaphorical. [See some interesting remarks on this subject in Bishop Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, Dialogue iv.] It is curious that Bacon has himself mentioned this very kind of delusion among the idola specus; and has mentioned ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... on the evolutionary hypothesis. "The affinity of different groups, the unity of types of structure, the representative forms through which foetus passes, the metamorphosis of organs, the abortion of others, cease to be metaphorical expressions and become intelligible ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... is often driven out of use by their metaphorical acceptations, yet must be inserted for the sake of a regular origination. Thus I know not whether ardour is used for material heat, or whether flagrant, in English, ever signifies the same with burning; yet such are the ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... so very hot, that not to have answered at length would have bordered on the miraculous. The persevering governess was not displeased at this, for she would not have lost the opportunity of displaying her own skill in metaphorical illustration, for a great deal, I am very sure. The clock struck eight; there was a general movement. The three sisters folded their work, and lodged it carefully in separate drawers. The eldest then produced the table-cloth, knives, forks, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... fatigue,—from weariness as great men have been aroused by the inspiring call of a trusted chief,—but the guiding head of the body was dazed and incapacitated; that was gone which alone could sustain energy and give unity to movement. Although Nelson indulged in no metaphorical allusions, he had this figure of the head clearly enough in his mind, when he wrote four weeks later to Lord Minto: "I regret that one escaped, and I think, if it had pleased God that I had not been wounded, not a boat would have escaped to have told the tale; ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... an ironical nod and disappeared, doubtless to join the countesses of my preface and all the metaphorical creatures, so often employed by romance-writers as agents for the recovery or composition ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... I, "English, but metaphorical; what an odd language! So you would like to have a Bible,—shall I buy ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... opportunity of displaying his powers. When Andrei, who is still unenlightened, proposes that they should drink another glass of vodka, he replies that the Tsar, together with the nobles and traders, bars the way to the throat. As his companion does not understand this metaphorical language, he explains that if there were no Tsars, nobles, or traders, he could get five glasses of vodka for the sum that he now pays for one glass. This naturally suggests wider topics, and Stepan gives something like a lecture. The common people, he explains, pay by far the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... to invest capital in the manufacture. This implies that industry can not be employed to any greater extent than there is capital to invest. The proposition, indeed, must be assented to as soon as it is distinctly apprehended. The expression "applying capital" is of course metaphorical: what is really applied is labor; capital being an indispensable condition. The food of laborers and the materials of production have no productive power; but labor can not exert its productive power unless ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... imagination is another matter. It raises the issue concerning the judgment of truth implied in religion, and this is the topic of the next chapter. At any rate the religious experience may be realized by virtue of the metaphorical or poetical representation of a situation as one of intercommunication between persons, where reflective definition at the same time denies it. The human worshipper may supply the personality of God from himself, viewing ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... eloquence of Burke, beyond that of all other orators and statesmen which Great Britain has produced, is featured with expressions, and characterised by qualities, as peculiar as they are immortal. So far as invention, imagination, moral fervour, and metaphorical richness of illustration, combined with that intense "pathos and ethos," which the Roman critic describes ("Huc igitur incumbat orator: hoc opus ejus, hic labor est; sine quo caetera nuda, jejuna, infirma, ingrata ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... comparison between things essentially different, but having some common quality. Metaphor is by far the most common figure of speech; indeed, so common is it that figurative language is often called metaphorical. ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... face under the double pain of heart and body caused at the same moment by the material or martial, and the metaphorical or erotic arrow, of which the latter was thus barbed by a declaration more candid than flattering; but he did not choose to put in any such claim to the lady's gratitude as would bar all hopes of her love: he therefore remained silent; and the lady and ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... supposed, Mr. Taylor's poetry is written under the excitement of passion, and does not proceed from that laborious process of constructing effects, to which a large number of poets owe their success. The consequence is that his language is vividly metaphorical, only dealing in similes when in a comparative repose, and never going out of the way to hunt up one of those eternal likes, which have emasculated our poetic style, and are fast becoming a leading characteristic in American ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... our language; for some of them are naturalized and incorporated; but others still continue aliens, and are rather auxiliaries than subjects. This naturalization is produced either by an admission into common speech, in some metaphorical signification, which is the acquisition of a kind of property among us; as we say, the zenith of advancement, the meridian of life, the cynosure[2] of neighbouring eyes; or it is the consequence of long intermixture and frequent use, by which the ear is accustomed ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... use this term in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals, in a time of dearth, may be ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... every day more and more an affair of chemistry. Science has now found what bids fair to be a very "glass of fashion"—not a metaphorical, but a literal glass, at least for lean people. The chemical properties of each color in the solar spectrum have long been known, and of late years it has also been discovered that plants may be made to thrive wonderfully ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... which I mean grace, delicacy, and expression. To gain this nothing is better than to accompany his sisters. A boy who always is first fiddle is in danger of artistic faults parallel to those which are implied in the metaphorical sense of the words. When he comes back I think he has had enough of the music-master, and I shall try to make him turn his thoughts to a higher school of music than is suitable to a beginner, but I ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... what is the point of one passage, not being contradicted by another directly, but only by implication, if the implication is clear, and the nature and context of the passage preclude metaphorical interpretation? (50) There are many such instances in the Bible, as we saw in Chap. II. (where we pointed out that the prophets held different and contradictory opinions), and also in Chaps. IX. and X., where we drew attention to the contradictions in the historical narratives. ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... frost and snow is not cold in Ireland." He was quite serious—intended no joke. He evidently used the term "cold," not only in reference to temperature, but also to the amount of discomfort usually suffered from it. And that it may sometimes be used in a metaphorical sense is evident from our expressions "a cold ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... these two metaphorical expressions there lies one simple condition. I put it into three words, which, for the sake of being easily remembered, I cast into an alliterative form: approach Christ, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... of metaphorical language have the same purpose: by substituting for a more abstract, conceptual mode of expression a more sensuous and imaginative one, to vivify the emotional quality of the situation. When ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... were recognised merely as one figure. Metaphor was not allowed in the motto: a device faulty in this respect, represented a ball of crystal, the motto, from Plautus, Intus et in cute (The same within and without); crystal being devoid of skin (cutis), the expression was metaphorical. The introduction of negatives into the motto was considered good: as a sundial, with Ne aspiciatur non aspicitur (Unless looked upon—by the sun—it is not esteemed, or is of no use), a good device for a king's favourite; a flame of fire, with Nunquam deorsum (Never downwards); a gourd ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... are to be assigned to them. We literally interpret all those images of unquenchable fire and the undying worm, borrowed from the constant conflagrations and corruptions of the offal and carcases of dead animals in the valley of Hinnom, (or Gaienna,) near Jerusalem, and also the obviously metaphorical language used in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, as if necessarily teaching that worms or fire would be employed to torture for all eternity the immortal bodies of the lost. But what if there is to be no such bodily ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... hardly escaped him when a wreath of metaphorical smoke, and fire, and no mean report, startled the company of supping gentlemen. At the pitch of his voice, Mr. Sullivan Smith denounced Mr. Malkin in presence for a cur ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... answered the Indian, in that somewhat obscure and metaphorical manner peculiar to his race. "He sleeps not soundly on the war-path. He shuts not his eyes when he enters the den of the wolf. He saw ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... was timorous as a chicken. The metaphor is entirely metaphorical. Jones had no faith in the wanton. He believed in regular hours, in silence and no interruptions. No intrusions of any kind. A letter was an intrusion, so also was the news of the day. These things he considered, when he did consider them, after ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... punishments, I can only say, that there are many passages in Scripture, and these not metaphorical, which declare that all flesh shall be finally saved; that the word aionios is indeed used sometimes when eternity must be meant, but so is the word 'Ancient of Days,' yet it would be strange reasoning to affirm, that ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... come back. He is a king now, but he is the master still, and he wants to know what has become of the money that was left in the servants' hands. Now, that is but a metaphorical way of bringing to our minds that which we cannot conceive of without metaphor—viz., the retribution that lies beyond the grave for us all. Although we cannot conceive it without metaphor, we may reach, through the metaphor to some apprehension, at any rate, of the facts that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... there by the edge of a star. Many a time we crawled stealthily through tangled vines and shrubs to the skirt of a wood, and across a fallen log sighted the Yankee picket whose bayonet point glimmered now and then far off in the moonlight. We spent a great many hours around the camp-fire counting our metaphorical scalps. ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 'salvation,' which we all take it for granted that we understand, and which, like a well-worn coin, has been so passed from hand to hand that it scarcely remains legible—that well-worn word 'salvation' starts from a double metaphorical meaning. It means either—and is used for both—being healed or being made safe. In the one sense it is often employed in the Gospel narratives of our Lord's miracles, and it involves the metaphor ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... fought. On one side one of the mightiest powers on earth, with endless stores of men and money at its beck,—and on the other a handful of outcasts fighting for their homes, and the liberties, in no metaphorical sense, of themselves, their wives, and their children, and protracting the fight for as many years as the American ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety that subtlety, which in its original import means exility of particles, is taken in its metaphorical meaning for nicety of distinction. Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation. Their attempts were always analytic; they broke every image into fragments: and could ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... series of metamorphoses of which our present universe is only the last stage, are alternatives, neither of which is scientifically untenable, and neither scientifically demonstrable. But science knows nothing of any stage in which the universe could be said, in other than a metaphorical and popular sense, to be formless or empty; or in any respect less the seat of law and order than it is now. One might as well talk of a fresh-laid hen's egg being "without form and void," because the chick therein is potential and not actual, as apply such terms ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... common belief in an external world was reasonable. Brown in his lectures ridiculed Reid's claim. This 'mighty achievement,' the 'supposed overthrow of a great system,' was 'nothing more than the proof that certain phrases are metaphorical, which were intended by their authors to be understood only as metaphors.'[480] The theory was dead before Reid slew it, though the phrases were still used as a mere 'relic,' or survival of an obsolete doctrine.[481] The impossibility ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... sir, we must either suppose that passage to be metaphorical, or hold with many divines, and all purgatorians, that departed souls do not all at once arrive at the utmost perfection ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... a kitten—a soft, purry kitten." Hall was heartily metaphorical, as he opened his pocket knife mechanically. "If you want to feel my claws, just ask me to vote for that damn thief! You'll think that I live in four different atmospheres. You and Bob Burroughs may be able to buy the rest of the Legislature, but you can't buy me—so don't ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... sense; that is why the word here already assumes a slight tinge of the comic. But let us go further still, and suppose that our attention is attracted to the material side of the metaphor by the choice of a relationship which is incompatible with the gender of the two words composing the metaphorical expression: we get a laughable result. Such is the well-known saying, also attributed to M. Prudhomme, "Tous les arts (masculine) sont soeurs (feminine)." "He is always running after a joke," was said in Boufflers' presence ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... are of a highly metaphorical and imaginative character, but they admit of being brought down to very plain facts, and they tell us the results in heart and mind of true faith ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... appear in the printed editions of his History and in the "Ypodigma Neustriae,"[300] will be found at the foot of the page.[301] The following is probably (p. 317) as close a rendering of the original, as the strangely metaphorical, and in some cases the obscure expressions of Walsingham will bear. "On which day [of Henry's coronation] there was a very severe storm of snow, all persons marvelling at the roughness of the weather. Some considered the disturbance of the atmosphere as portending the new King's ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... full of this kind of speaking and writing, which is called "metaphorical." The word metaphor comes from two Greek words meaning "to carry over." In "metaphorical" speech a name or description of one thing is transferred to another thing to which it could not apply in ordinary ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... used to signify a loose horse tied abreast of another in the shaft, and is technically termed "the outrigger." The metaphorical application of it to Pylades, who voluntarily attached himself to the misfortunes of his friend, ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... object is controlled, and of every intelligent being, with regard to the exercise of his will toward or upon outward objects or his fellow-beings. Fitness and unfitness are the ultimate ideas that are involved in the terms right and wrong. These last are metaphorical terms,—right (Latin, rectus), straight, upright, according to rule, and therefore fit; wrong, wrung, distorted, deflected, twisted out of place, contrary to rule, and therefore unfit. We are so constituted ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... debility of the small vessels, whereby they do not afford sufficient resistance to the propelling force, and therefore become morbidly distended, or inflamed, as it is termed, though this term is certainly improper, even in a metaphorical view: but a stimulant application to the part excites the debilitated vessels to action; their contraction diminishes the morbid quantity of blood; and the balance between the propelling and resisting ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... gave him would have caused a less determined man to quail. It was her way of closing an argument, no matter whether it was with her butcher, her grocer, of the bishop himself. Such a look is best described as imperious, although one less reserved than I but perhaps more potently metaphorical would say that she simply looked a hole through you, seeing beyond you as if you were not there at all. She had found it especially efficacious in dealing with the butcher and even the bishop, to say nothing of ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... as a sort of setting of the pace, or a metaphorical shaking of a bony fist in the face of the day, as much as to say, 'If I admit you here you'll have to ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... instruction to you in that single sentence in which he says, 'Mr. God's-peace was not a native of the town.' John Bunyan has gathered up many gospel Scriptures into that single allegorical sentence. He has made many old and familiar passages fresh and full of life again in that one metaphorical sentence. It is the work of genius to set forth the wont and the well known in a clear, simple, and at the same time surprising, light like that. There is a peace that is native and natural to the town of Mansoul, and to understand that peace, its nature, its grounds, its extent, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... the Fathers, and the Church speak literally, without the use of metaphors, they invariably apply the term "grace" to these vital acts themselves and ascribe their supernatural character to an immediate act of God.(74) In perfect conformity with this teaching St. Augustine explains such metaphorical terms as vocare and tangere in the sense of credere and fides.(75) God employs no "fluent qualities" or "non-vital entities" in the dispensation of His grace, but effects the supernatural elevation of the ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... her very much disordered by this mischance, insisted upon her drinking a large glass of canary, to quiet the perturbation of her spirits. This is a season, which of all others is most propitious to the attempts of an artful lover; and justifies the metaphorical maxim of fishing in troubled waters. There is an affinity and short transition betwixt all the violent passions that agitate the human mind. They are all false perspectives, which, though they magnify, yet perplex and render indistinct every object which they represent. And flattery is never so ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... leglin-girth is the lowest hoop upon a leglin, or milk- pail. Allan Ramsay applies the phrase in the same metaphorical sense. ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... power and widening aim were but the expression and verification of the growth of God within. Then we would bear children for finer ends than the blood and mud of battlefields. Life would tower up like a great flame. By faith we reached forward to that. The vision grew more splendid as it grew more metaphorical. And the price one paid for that; one gave sham dignities, false honour, a Levitical righteousness, immediate peace, one bartered kings and churches for God.... He looked at the mean, poverty-struck room, he marked the dinginess and tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid evidences ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... pain; and perhaps she also knew that he would dislike to show the pain: but she had not the presence of mind or ready wit to give a skilful turn to the conversation. All this annoyed Roger, he could hardly tell why. He determined to take the metaphorical bull by the horns. Until that was done, his footing with Molly would always be insecure; as it always is between two friends, who mutually avoid a subject to which their ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... evidently in the hands of individuals of less wrongheadedness and acrimony of feeling than the Parisian Printer. Mons. Crapelet has prefixed a Preface to his labours, in which he tells the world, that, using my more favourite metaphorical style of expression, "a CRUSADE has risen ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the conqueror of half the world, offers some curious particulars as to Gypsy life in the East at a remote period, will scarcely be considered out of place if reproduced here, and the following is as close a translation of it as the metaphorical style of the original ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... said I; 'the three first words are metaphorical, and the fourth, lagg'd, is the old genuine Norse term, lagda, which signifies laid, whether in durance, or in bed has nothing to do with the matter. What you have told me confirms me in an opinion which I have long entertained, that thieves' Latin is a strange mysterious speech, formed ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... metaphorical representation of Soul out- side the body, giving existence and intelligence to the 510:18 universe. Love alone can impart the limit- less idea of infinite Mind. Geology has never explained the earth's formations; it cannot explain them. 510:21 ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... and procession really had a good deal in it. I had been in New York, and knew the length of Broadway; and at the recollection, felt flattered by the thought of being conveyed in an open chariot drawn by four or even eight horses, with nodding plumes, (literal ones for the horses,—only metaphorical ones for me,) past those stately buildings fluttering with handkerchiefs, and through streets black with people thronging to see the man who had solved the riddle of Africa. And then it would be pleasant, too, to make a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... observed a twinkle in the boy's eye; saw through him; in a metaphorical sense, and treated him ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... canal. The public prison of the city forms the other side of this canal, eloquently proclaiming the nature of the government by the close approximation of the powers of legislation and of punishment. The famous Bridge of Sighs is the material, and we might add the metaphorical, link between the two. The latter edifice stands on the quay, also, and though less lofty and spacious, in point of architectural beauty it is the superior structure, though the quaintness and unusual style of the palace are ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... one or two more. In the twenty-first stanza, I prefer {p.236} Buerger's trampling the corn into chaff and dust, to your more metaphorical, and therefore less picturesque, "destructive sweep the field along." In the thirtieth, "On whirlwind's pinions swiftly borne," to me seems less striking than the still disapparition of the tumult and bustle—the earth has opened, and he is sinking with his evil genius to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... a metaphorical application of the word, is not in the least the same thing as Goodness, any more than beauty (despite Keats' famous assertion) is the same thing as Truth. These three objects of the soul's pursuit have different natures, different laws, and fundamentally different origins. But the energies ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... his technical knowledge may be so great as to debar him from meeting other men in conversation on equal grounds; but his reading of the Bible gives his speech or writing a background, a colour, a metaphorical strength, which illuminate even the commonplace. Strike the Bible from the sphere of any man's experience and he is in a measure left out of much of that conversation which helps ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... Whereat Carlotta laughed, and bent forward to get a view of the victim. I austerely directed her attention to the stage. It was a metaphorical fly whose buzzing I ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... or who is Himself the door of the Father (Ad Philad. c. ix). In regard to the first of these especially, it is doubtless true that Philo also has 'the eternal Word,' which is even the 'Son' of God; but the idea is much more consciously metaphorical, and not only did the incarnation of the Logos in a historical person never enter into Philo's mind, but 'there is no room for it ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... him, but it serves him to make a point; whereas theoretical philosophy serves as an easy butt. Thus the contrast between the two acquires a certain dramatic charm. The reader feels moved and excited by the subject before him, and forgets the scientific question. His fancy is caught by a kind of metaphorical imagery, and his understanding surrenders what is due to it.... What is Mr. Macaulay's meaning in rejecting theoretical philosophy, because philosophy is here the object, and man the means; whereas he adopts practical philosophy, because man is here the object, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... 'natural selection,' do not express a cause in the physical sense." "Kindred objections," he continues, "may be urged against the expression into which I was led when seeking to present the phenomena in literal terms rather than metaphorical terms—'the survival of the fittest.' In the working together of those many actions, internal and external, which determine the lives and deaths of organisms, we see nothing to which the words 'fitness' and 'unfitness' are applicable in the physical sense." ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... with his great russet woolly bear comfortably nestling upon a green cabbage leaf, and asks you in a voice of triumphant demonstration, where is the trace of concealment or disguise in that amiable but very inedible insect? Go to, Sir Critic, I will have none of you; I only use you for a metaphorical marionette to set up and knock down again, as Mr. Punch in the street show knocks down the policeman who comes to arrest him, and the grimy black personage of sulphurous antecedents who pops up with a fizz through the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... (31-37) explains how some metaphorical expressions, seemingly implying that there is something different from Brahman, have to be ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... was a reminiscence of that metaphorical proverb which tells us that "truth lies at the bottom of a well." Perhaps these people thought that the only way to find truth in the well was to drown oneself. But on whatever thin theoretic basis, ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... and planois had not been used, the line might have been explained in a metaphorical instead of an absolute sense, as we say "WAYS and means," and "wanderings" for error and confusion. But they meant literally paths or roads, such as we tread with our feet; and wanderings, such as a man makes when he loses himself in a desert, or roams from city ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... experiences of the writer's soul. And what wild adventures those were every reader of Grace Abounding knows. There were terrific contests with the Devil, who could never charm John Bunyan as he charmed Eve. To Bunyan these contests were not metaphorical battles, but were as struggles with flesh and blood. "He pulled, and I pulled," he wrote in one place; "but, God be praised, I overcame him—I got sweetness from it." And the Devil not only fought him openly, but made more subtle attempts to entice him to sin. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... is here metaphorical, and expresses, in its primary use, the breaking of a spear against ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... stifling: partly literal, since the widow's weed is close-wrapping and voluminous—partly metaphorical, since the ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... or lords of speech; and their poetry generally contains strong and lively images, bold figures, frequent allusions and similitudes, new and forcible expressions, and possesses the power of exciting sensibility. It is every where animated and metaphorical, and allegory is its very soul and essence. Their verses are mostly composed in stanzas of eight or eleven syllables, and are for the most part blank, yet rhyme is occasionally introduced, according to the taste or caprice of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... This trait is, however, in no case more strikingly exemplified than in the curious antique work of Kienuka. The term "Kienuka," means the stronghold or fort; but the original name of this fort is Gau-strau-yea, which means bark laid down; this has a metaphorical meaning, in the similitude of a freshly peeled slippery elm bark, the size of the fort and laid at the bottom as a flooring, so that if any person or persons go in they must be circumspect, and act according to the laws of the fort, or else ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... this doctrine, but to have received it from the Egyptians, by whose priesthood there is little doubt that it was generally promulgated. Some writers have suggested that this transmigration was only taught by Pythagoras in a metaphorical sense; as, for instance, when he said that the souls of men were transferred to beasts, it was only to teach us that irregular passions render us brutes; on examination, however, we shall find that there ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... from the Quest article) remarks, "As the last line of our quotation gives us quite plainly to understand, a number of words which we have italicized are obviously used in an unusual, metaphorical, sense, that is to say as terms of the Christian Mystery language." While Harnack, admitting that the Christian character of the text is indisputable, adds significantly: "aber das Christentum der Grosskirche ist ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... if possible, butter wherewith to flavour it. Like Britons in general, from Dick Whittington downwards, he thinks that the capital is the place in which to seek one's fortune, and to find it. He had not expected streets paved with gold, nor yet with the metaphorical plenty of penny loaves; but an indefinite disappointment weighs upon him as he passes through quarters fully as dingy and poverty-stricken as those in ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... an eye, Miss Higglesby-Browne, fallen forever from her high estate, was strewn in metaphorical fragments at our feet. I turned away, feeling it time to draw the veil of charity upon the scene. Not so Slinker. He looked about him carefully ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... is quaint and attractive in appearance. The youthful editor has provided himself with a series of cuts of the metaphorical "Bruin" in various attitudes and various employments, these clever little pictures lending a pleasing novelty to the cover and the margins. Judiciously distributed red ink, also, aids in producing a Christmas number of truly festive quality. Mr. Dowdell's ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Being to this Passion, are full of these metaphorical Deaths. Heroes and Heroines, Knights, Squires, and Damsels, are all of them in a dying Condition. There is the same kind of Mortality in our Modern Tragedies, where every one gasps, faints, bleeds and dies. Many of the Poets, to describe the Execution which is done by this Passion, represent ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... employed here is very significant. In its literal force it really means to 'flee to a refuge.' And that the literal signification has not altogether been lost in the spiritual and metaphorical use of it, as a term expressive of religious experience, is quite plain from many of the cases in which it occurs. Let me just repeat one of them to you. 'Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful to me, for my soul trusteth in Thee; yea, in the shadow of Thy ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... statement of the essence of Mysticism is followed by a hostile criticism. Professor Seth considers quietism the true conclusion from the mystic's premisses. "It is characteristic of Mysticism, that it does not distinguish between what is metaphorical and what is susceptible of a literal interpretation. Hence it is prone to treat a relation of ethical harmony as if it were one of substantial identity or chemical fusion; and, taking the sensuous language of religious feeling literally, it bids the individual aim at nothing less than an interpenetration ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... than that. For, brethren, do not forget—if you do, you will be hopelessly at sea as to large tracts of blessed Christian truth—that by faith in Jesus Christ we are brought into such a true deep union with Him as that, in no mere metaphorical or analogous sense, but in most blessed reality, there comes into the believing heart a spark of the life that is Christ's own, so that with Him we do live, and from Him we do live a life cognate with His, who, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... widely from the Indo-European in reference to their grammar, vocabulary, and idioms. On account of the great preponderance of the pictorial element in them, they may be called the metaphorical languages, while the Indo-European, from the prevailing style of their higher literature, may be called the philosophical languages. The Semitic nations also differ from the Indo-European in their national characteristics; while they have lived with remarkable uniformity ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... eye of the tired magazine reader resting for a critical second on the above title will judge it to be merely metaphorical. Stories about the cup and the lip and the bad penny and the new broom rarely have anything to do with cups and lips and pennies and brooms. This story is the great exception. It has to do with an actual, material, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... owned a daughter, or had the one appertaining to him been plain instead of charming, young Professor Morgan would never have broken a metaphorical lance with the crusty senior educator. But Professor Macadam did have a daughter, Lee—odd name for a girl—and she was about as pretty as a girl may grow to be, and sometimes they grow that way amazingly. She was clever, too, and good, and Professor Morgan had not known her for half a year ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... other and more general departments of natural history would rise greatly in interest. The terms used by naturalists—such terms as affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and abortive organs, etc.—would cease to be metaphorical, and would have a plain signification. "When," he wrote, "we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a long history; when we contemplate every complex structure ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... effort he now feels it vital to make, he puts them under voluntary control and makes each separate inspiration by an effort as conscious as working a bellows. I doubt not that many men have died just at this place through absolute lack of will to continue such effort. Then the metaphorical paralysis of fear is seconded by the simulation of a literal one, extending through the limbs of one side or both; the sufferer reels, feeling one foot fail him—tries to revolve one arm like a windmill, that he may restore his circulation, and that arm for some instants hangs powerless. ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... when he performs it. We can imagine motives only as existing in a man's mind, and in the form of vague interior representations, analogous to those which we have of our own inward states; we can express them only by words, generally metaphorical. Here we have psychic facts, generally called feelings and ideas. Documents exhibit three kinds of such facts: (a) motives and conceptions in the authors' minds and expressed by them; (b) motives ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... see Rome, "it would give him talk for a lifetime." The utmost stretch of his longing is to pass "four months on classic ground," after which he will come back to Auchinleck uti conciva satur,—a condition in which we fear the poor fellow returned thither only too often, though unhappily in no metaphorical sense. We rather think, that, apart from the pleasure of saying he had been there, Boswell was really drawn to Italy by the fact that it was classic ground, and this not so much by its association with great events as with great men, for whom, with all his weaknesses, he had an invincible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... II and III are both common, but not essential; particularly group III, which represents, in effect, a psychological and formal confusion of types II and IV or of types I and IV, is an avoidable class of concepts. Logically there is an impassable gulf between I and IV, but the illogical, metaphorical genius of speech has wilfully spanned the gulf and set up a continuous gamut of concepts and forms that leads imperceptibly from the crudest of materialities ("house" or "John Smith") to the most subtle of relations. It is particularly significant ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... grown to regard as his future and hers, as the basis, the condition, the circumstances, of her life and of his. An old thought of her own came to her, back from the dim region of ante-marriage days, the idea to which the Henstead doctor had given a terse, if metaphorical, expression. Quisante was their race-horse, their money was on him, they wanted a win for the stable. If this or more than this were true, then there would be no win for the stable; the horse was a grand horse, but he wouldn't stand training. What was left then? An ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... this, and accused them all of indolence and stupidity, in his own quaint, metaphorical style. Then he said, "And ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pompous old pump, that buckled-up basha, lets the Major know that he caught poor old Pegg in my room to-day, I'm sure to get a lecture about making too free with the men instead of going about amongst them perched up upon metaphorical stilts. Well, whatever he wants to see me about, it can't be for a wigging, or else he wouldn't have summoned me just ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... hardly lead one far in training that useful beast. O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being "the freshest modern" instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor,—that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... distorted by corruption, and these are the most difficult to trace: to which may be added, that the terms we now employ to express our feelings and passions, and all that depicts mind and its operations, are of a figurative or metaphorical origin. Instead of any word being insignificant, there is no one but may become the keystone in a sentence; and therefore a word blotted out in a perspicuous, that is, a properly constructed sentence, would render it unintelligible. To the composition of a sentence, whatever ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... could not be buried; his bones were thrown into a box which was bandied about the world till it came to a button-manufacturer; and now Paine is travelling round the world in the form of buttons!" This variant of the Wandering Jew myth may now be regarded as unconscious homage to the author whose metaphorical bones may be recognized in buttons now fashionable, and some even found useful in holding clerical ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Him,'" and, like his own Christian in the dark valley, he could not determine whether they were suggestions of the Wicked One, or came from his own heart. The agony was so intense, while, for hours together, he struggled with the temptation, that his whole body was convulsed by it. It was no metaphorical, but an actual, wrestling with a tangible enemy. He "pushed and thrust with his hands and elbows," and kept still answering, as fast as the destroyer said "sell Him," "No, I will not, I will not, I will not! not for thousands, thousands, thousands of worlds!" at least twenty times ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... could have extracted such a doctrine out of 'the oracles of the Lord,' the difficulty is explained by the parallel case of Hymenaeus and Philetus, who taught that 'the resurrection had already taken place,' [120:2] or in other words, that all such terms must be understood in a metaphorical sense as applying to the spiritual change, the new birth or resuscitation of the believer in the present world'. Thus everything hangs together. But such teaching is altogether foreign to Marcion. He did indeed deny the resurrection of the ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... more than mere fine writing. It is a metaphorical representation of the incident he has previously described. In that incident he was particular struck by the actions of the lady. The young man turned his horse out of the path of the coach, but some part of the coach struck one ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody |
