"Visionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Wyclif, who sees a vision and quietly goes to work, in ways that men understand, to make the present world a little more like the ideal one which he sees in his vision. The third, who appears in many forms,—as visionary, enthusiast, radical, anarchist, revolutionary, call him what you will,—sees a vision and straightway begins to tear down all human institutions, which have been built up by the slow toil of centuries, simply because they seem to stand in the way of his dream. To the latter class belongs Shelley, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... said, "coming down to hard facts and cutting out all this visionary stuff about vibrating tails and what not, the salient point that emerges is that you are booked to appear at a fancy-dress ball. And I tell you out of my riper knowledge of fancy-dress balls, Gussie, that you won't ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... convention of all the States, and who promised as the speedy result of a debauch of talk a carnival of bright eyes glistening with the tears of revived affection. With these strange people in 1863 there combined a number of different types: the still stranger, still less creditable visionary, of whom much hereafter; the avowed friends of the principle of state rights; all those who distrusted the Government because of its anti-slavery sympathies; Quakers and others with moral scruples against ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... expansion of the Nation, which occurred in the latter half of the fifth decade of the century, turned all eyes toward the fertile valleys and the mountains of fabulous wealth on the Pacific Coast. Even before the acquisition of this territory some visionary minds had pictured it bound to the United States, if not by political ties, at least by bonds of steel.[119] The Oregon treaty of 1846 brought part of the coveted land under the jurisdiction of the ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... largely misunderstood. Admitting myself to be of those who fail to understand much of his philosophy, I do not therefore condemn it as worthless, for in other fields of his thought events have proved that he was not visionary, but merely ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... but the point of it would be misunderstood if it were construed as depreciation of Scott. What may be considered merely memory in contrast to Shakespeare's imagination is regarded by Hazlitt as a limitless source of visionary life when compared with the ideas of self-centred authors like Byron. This is what Hazlitt says in another essay of ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... till about the middle of the play, and after a narcotic had been administered to him, that Anthony got there; but we were in Wonderland almost from the start, without the aid of drugs. For we were asked to believe that Mr. CHARLES HAWTREY was a visionary, amorous of an ideal which no earthly woman could realise for him. Occasionally he had caught a glimpse of it in the creations of Art—at the Tate Gallery or Madame TUSSAUD'S or the cinema; but ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... principle is to the carrying out either of a visionary or a predatory foreign policy in Europe, it does not imply any similar hostility to a certain measure of colonial expansion. In this, as in many other important respects, the constructive national democrat must necessarily differ from ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... you may bear the glad tidings to your trembling mother." O, Aaron, how I thank thee! Love in all its delirium hovers about me; like opium, it lulls me to soft repose! Sweet serenity speaks, 'tis my Aaron's spirit presides. Surrounding objects check my visionary charm. I fly to my room and give the day ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... not too visionary a hope, for Nat's designs grew prettier and prettier, and the agent bought all I carried him. One week I remember he paid me thirty dollars; and as he handed it to me, seeing how pleased I looked, ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... He lifted his starry eyes with their mystic, visionary rapture fully on the young physician. "And yet I remember how George Eliot prayed that when her troubles came she might get along without being drugged by that stuff—meaning the Christian religion, sir—and I guess I'd kind o' like that me and ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... and commissioned by Christ Himself "to feed" with sound doctrine, both "the lambs and the sheep"; and faithfully has he discharged that duty. "The Pope," writes Cardinal Newman, "is no recluse, no solitary student, no dreamer about the past, no doter upon the dead and gone, no projector of the visionary. He, for eighteen hundred years, has lived in the world; he has seen all fortunes, he has encountered all adversaries, he has shaped himself for all emergencies. If ever there was a power on earth who had an eye for the times, who has confined himself ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... never rid myself for one moment of the idea that an engine really works, with weary, reluctant strength like a genii slave, waiting vengefully for the time of retaliation, which sooner or later is sure to come; or of the visionary notion that a graceful, gliding ship, with all sails set, receives the same pleasure from its own motion and beauty that a snow-white swan must do "as down she bears before the gale," with her ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... matter, may not agree in an unqualified way with all the above statements. But we claim that they show vision in a branch of war which, on account of its scientific basis, may, more than any other, speedily prove the visionary ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... the proprietor of the Baltimore Saturday Visitor, of two prizes, one for the best tale and one for the best poem, induced him to submit the pieces entitled "MS. Found in a Bottle," "Lionizing," "The Visionary," and three others, with "The Coliseum," a poem, to the committee, which consisted of Mr. John P. Kennedy, the author of "Horse-Shoe Robinson;" Mr. J.H.B. Latrobe, and Dr. James H. Miller. Such matters are usually disposed of in a very ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... he had just seen for the first time. His name was strange, his conversation was unusual, his eyes were most disagreeable, and yet oddly fascinating. Greif thought about him and was not satisfied with his short interview. The man's remark about the future was either that of a visionary, or of an absent-minded person who did not always know what he was saying. Greif himself could hardly understand how he had been led, in a first meeting with one who was altogether a stranger, to speak so plainly of what disturbed him. It was not his custom to make acquaintances at ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... admirable, instincts so delicate, would make expression of their tenderness! To live with Sidwell—to breathe the fragrance of that flower of womanhood in wedded intimacy—to prove the devotion of a nature so profoundly chaste! The visionary transport was too poignant; in the end it drove him to a fierce outbreak of despairing wrath. How could he dream that such bliss would be the reward of despicable artifice, of calculated dishonour? Born a rebel, how could ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Germans under Arminius (Hermann), completed the humiliation of Augustus, for, in this defeat, he must have foreseen the future victories of the barbarians. All ideas of extending the empire beyond the Rhine were now visionary, and that river was henceforth to remain its boundary on the north. New levies were indeed dispatched to the Rhine, and Tiberius and Germanicus led the forces. But the princes returned to Rome ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... "Chorus from Euripides," which might as well have slept in quiet with the rest of the author's school-exercises, we come to "the Visionary," which we gladly extract as a very elegant ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... with some confusion and Dismay, the usual consequence of dreams Of the unpleasant kind, with none at hand To expound their vain and visionary gleams. I 've known some odd ones which seem'd really plann'd Prophetically, or that which one deems A 'strange coincidence,' to use a phrase By which ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... with a knife. He missed: but the next instant, these two fond friends, whose friendship had fenced us others off almost as strangers, were wallowing and knifing one another on the bottom-boards,—all over the visionary legacy of a Jew, thousands of miles away, whose picking of their pockets had been their common reminiscence and their standing joke through days of horror! And political economists used to tell us that money is a medium and ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Too much a visionary and a poet to be an impartial historian, it is hardly astonishing to note the judgment he passes on his own work, during that same year, 1834: "My history of Little Russia's past is an extraordinarily made thing, and it could not ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... elements, elementary qualities, his eight complexions, his harmonies and discords. Nor shall I expatiate on the alkahest of that mad scoundrel, Paracelsus, with which he pretended to reduce flints into salt; nor archaeus or spiritus rector of that visionary Van Helmont, his simple, elementary water, his gas, ferments, and transmutations; nor shall I enlarge upon the salt, sulphur, and oil, the acidum vagum, the mercury of metals, and the volatilised vitriol of other modern chemists, a pack of ignorant, conceited, knavish rascals, that puzzle your ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... may be disposed to regard the above statements concerning the "planes of being" as somewhat visionary, theoretical, or imaginary, we would say: "Go to modern science, and verify this statement." The following quotation from a writer on the subject will serve to illustrate this fact, viz.: "We are apt to think that we are familiar with every kind of matter in existence, but ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... Reed, as though it quite suited him to go back, "was a stranger to me, a friend of the lady whom my brother Wolcott afterward married. Indeed, Kate formed his acquaintance while visiting at this lady's home in New York. He was a fascinating, handsome man, of a visionary turn, and with extravagant tastes,—but without a ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... "resources" of Alaska, the imported reindeer, at first decried and ridiculed, has now become the slender foundation for extravagant speculations of prosperity. The "millions of acres waiting for the plough" in the interior have lately been supplemented in this visionary treasury by the capitalisation of the vast tundras of the coast, the golden wheat-fields of the one finding counterpart in the multitudinous herds of the other. The growing dearth of cattle-range in the United States offers, it seems, ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled into one. Foolish and fruitless as it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets on the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind assumption to accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, that he too like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, and like other poets found them or made them fruitful as ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Theory. The system is a combination of socialism and Islam derived in part from tribal practices and is supposed to be implemented by the Libyan people themselves in a unique form of "direct democracy." QADHAFI has always seen himself as a revolutionary and visionary leader. He used oil funds during the 1970s and 1980s to promote his ideology outside Libya, supporting subversives and terrorists abroad to hasten the end of Marxism and capitalism. In addition, beginning in ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... the Socialist Party is the slave of obvious success. It boasts that it has ceased to be "visionary" and has become "practical." Votes, winning campaigns, putting through reform measures seem a great achievement. It forgets the difference between voting the Socialist ticket and understanding Socialism. The vote is the tangible thing, and for that these Socialist ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... I am no visionary—no dreamer; and yet my life has been a ceaseless struggle between the realities of everyday care, and a myriad of shadowy phantoms which ever haunt me. In the crowded and thronged city; in the green walks and sunny forests of my native hills; on the broad and boundless prairie, carpeted ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... to leave the World to him that made it, and Kingdoms to those he has appointed to govern them? These high flown Whims of yours, are just as practicable, as Archimedes his moving the Earth out of its Place, and it provokes me to hear such impossible Projects declaim'd on by such a Visionary, such a Stockjobber ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... was Mrs. Barnes' only near relative, a brother. Always a visionary, easy-going, impractical little man, he had never been willing to stick at steady employment, but was always chasing rainbows and depending upon his sister for a home and means of existence. When the Klondike gold fever ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... in this error in Parleyings with Certain People, in which book, with the exception of the visionary landscapes in Gerard de Lairesse, and some few passages in Francis Furini and Charles Avison, imagination, such as belongs to a poet, has deserted Browning. He feels himself as if this might be said of him; and he asks ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... black Care sits behind you, and with his ceaseless gloomy croaking drowns the voice of all more cheerful companions. Happy he whose fortune has placed him where there is calm and plenty, and who has the wisdom not to give up his quiet in quest of visionary gain. ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... saved; and I feel assured that if the British public will continue their earnest support to our great National Institution, this death-roll must continue to be diminished. My friends sometimes tell me that I am a visionary—that many of my opinions are ridiculous. Is it ridiculous that I should regard the annual loss of nearly 600 lives, and above two millions of money, as being worthy of the serious attention of ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... complete independence such as that of the Free State. Some ardent spirits dreamt of a Dutch South African Republic with Pretoria for its future capital; and there were probably a few men of the same visionary type in the Colony and the Free State who talked in the same wild way, especially after the Jameson invasion had stirred Dutch feeling to its depths. But from such dreams and such talk it is a long step to a "conspiracy of ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... severities I have met with from some critics, the cruellest for an old man is, that they will not let me be at quiet in my bed, but pursue me to my very dreams. I must not dream but when they please, nor upon long continued subjects, however visionary in their own natures; because there is a manifest moral quite through them, which to produce as a dream is improbable and unnatural. The pain I might have had from this objection, is prevented by considering they have missed another, against which I should have been at a loss ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... such lengths that he followed thieves in order to give them good flour in place of the bad that they had stolen from him by mistake—this simple-minded being, whose only desire was to suffer for the "truth," possessed without doubt the soul of a saint and a visionary. ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... the epicure, so of Haggis too, as of all earthly delights, cometh satiety at last. And yet what a glorious Haggis it is—the more emphatically rustic and even Fescennine part of your verse! We have had many a rural bard since Theocritus "watched the visionary flocks," but you are the only one of them all who has spoken the sincere Doric. Yours is the talk of the byre and the plough-tail; yours is that large utterance of the early hinds. Even Theocritus minces matters, save where ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... grew up in my heart a deep yearning to know Christ in a more real way, for he seemed so unreal, so far away and visionary. One night when still quite young I remember going out under the trees in my parents' garden and, looking up into the starlit heavens, I longed with intense longing to feel Christ near me. As I knelt down there on the grass, alone with God, Job's cry became mine, "Oh, that ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... he was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. He was indeed always cheerful, though I thought I could see in his eyes (swift as the eyes of a rabbit, when they peered out of their wrinkled holes) a melancholy which was well-nigh a portion of their joy; the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... trains of thought and these plans. He would repair and put in order implements of hunting, or any thing else which might be deemed to have some relation to war. He would make bows and arrows in the chimney corner—lost, all the time, in melancholy reveries, or in wild and visionary schemes ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... admiration to the account which he gave of his voyage, while Columbus enjoyed the satisfaction of being able to prove the solidity of his schemes to those very persons who had with disgraceful ignorance rejected them as the projects of a visionary adventurer. ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... the inexperience of thy brethren—stoop thyself in turn to their derision—tell what they may not believe—affirm that which they will ascribe to idle fear, or perhaps to idle falsehood—sustain the disgrace of a silly visionary, or a wilful deceiver.—Be it so, I will do my duty, and make ample confession to my Superior. If the discharge of this duty destroys my usefulness in this house, God and Our Lady will send me where ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... task which is given to the Neophyte. Mystics have always been sneered at, and seers disbelieved; those who have had the added power of intellect have left for posterity their written record, which to most men appears unmeaning and visionary, even when the authors have the advantage of speaking from a far-off past. The disciple who undertakes the task, secretly hoping for fame or success, to appear as a teacher and apostle before the world, ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... Visionary!" It was the epithet usually applied to Everett Gray by his friends and neighbors. It expresses very well the estimation in which he was held by nineteen-twentieths of his world. People couldn't help feeling affection for him, considerably leavened by a half-pitying, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... Paris in 1686. He does it in a very serious style, and shows himself a mathematician. And yet in the year in which, in the Phil. Trans., he was a geometer, and one who rebukes his squarer for quoting Matthew xi. 25, in that very year he was the visionary who, in the Leipzig Acts, professed to build a world resembling the divine mind by multiplying together 1, 2, 3, 4, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... carrying him forward, which had now for so many hours showered its surprises on Gwynplaine, and which had transported him to Windsor, transferred him again to London. Visionary realities succeeded each other without a moment's intermission. He could not escape from their influence. Freed from one he met another. He had scarcely time to breathe. Any one who has seen a juggler throwing ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... a task which it could easily accomplish, if not prevented by our common masters, the Congress of the United States. It was said of Mr. Buckner that before I appeared before the committee, he regarded me as a visionary enthusiast, who had undertaken to do what was impossible to be done, that after the first day of the examination he came to the conclusion that I was honest in my belief that resumption was possible, but he did not believe in my ability to do what was proposed; at the end ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... ocean of the earth about an average of five hundred million millions of blows per second, for each of the seven colors, or luminous notes, not to speak of the achromatic vibrations, whose effects are other than vision or visionary. The arial ocean is such open-work, that these infinitesimal billows are not much, though somewhat, broken by it; but when they reach the terraqueous globe itself, they dash into foam which goes whirling and eddying down into solids ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... husband may be the greatest of patriots in spirit and intention, but nevertheless he is one of the criminal and visionary teachers of this unhappy time who are deluding the ignorant crowd with promises that can never be realised. Anarchy, chaos, the uprooting of religion and morality, of justice, human dignity, and the purity of domestic life—these are the only ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... Rich—the ill-bred but by no means breadless. (That's my own and not very funny, by the way.) Did I tell you, Denis, that Leslie is going to begin educating the People in Appreciation of Objects of Art? Isn't it a nice idea? I'm to help. Leslie's a visionary, you know. I believe plutocrats often are. They've so much money and are so comfortable that they stop wanting material things and begin dreaming dreams. I should dream dreams if I was a plutocrat. As it is my mind ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... with the fortunes of that earlier Louise Loisson. And yet, he acknowledged the growing feeling that in this matter there was coming to be for him something more than a professional interest. This thought he put away as best he could, chiding himself as perpetually visionary, though old enough ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... presence of sundry Bulgarian komitadjis in Albania, Finzi declared that the Italian Government would satisfy the Croats and give them Rieka as soon as Croatia had achieved her independence and a less visionary promise was made of disturbances in Rieka. On March 1 the two Italian officers left for Triest and on March 3 Rieka was confronted with another coup d'etat. The fascisti of Triest and of Gulia Venetia descended on the town in two special trains ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... thought over all manner of plans for removing both children from the influence of their wretched home and drunken parents; but most of these were pronounced by the more experienced to be visionary and not feasible. So they still continued to return to them at night, although, "weather fair or weather foul, weather wet or weather dry," they never failed to be present at their post as early as possible in ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... the first time Bienville the man, Bienville the visionary, Bienville the enthusiast, the dreamer of dreams and the builder of castles. ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... young man I found the writings of Emerson unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible. I was concerned with physical science, and with routine teaching and discipline; and Emerson's thinking seemed to me speculative and visionary. In regard to religious belief, I was brought up in the old-fashioned Unitarian conservatism of Boston, which was rudely shocked by Emerson's excursions beyond its well-fenced precincts. But when I had got at what proved to be my lifework ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... impressed upon us, and which one motion of the head on the pillow may dissolve, or deepen into more oppressive delight! In some such dreaming state of mind are we now; and, gentle reader, if thou art broad awake, lay aside the visionary volume, or read a little longer, and likely enough is it that thou too mayest fall half asleep. If so, let thy drowsy eyes still pursue the glimmering paragraphs—and wafted away wilt thou feel thyself to be into the heart of a Highland ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... raised the poor tortured body with a patient caution which spared it pain, and put the glass to her aunt's lips. She drank the lemonade to the last drop. Refreshed for the moment, she spoke again—spoke to the visionary servant of her delirious fancy, while she rested ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... but a hopeful fool, while Jock had penetrated the fulness of despair, and dismissed all illusion from his youthful bosom. The boy turned his head away, and the voice which he had made so gruff quavered at the end. He felt in himself at that moment all the depths of profound and visionary passion, something more than any man ever was conscious of who had an object and a hope. The boy had neither; he neither hoped to marry her nor to get a hearing, nor even to be taken seriously. Not even the ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... emblem of fire and sword; the blackness of the other betokened the mourning that attends them. In his train were wild figures in the Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model, giving the whole march a visionary air, as if a dream had broken forth from some feverish brain, and were sweeping visibly through the midnight streets. A mass of people, inactive, except as applauding spectators, hemmed the procession in; and several ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of the faith and practice of Christian life. And here it is necessary to guard against what is childish, visionary, and exuberant, against things that only feed the fancy or excite the imagination, against practices which are adapted to other races than ours, but with us are liable to become unreal and irreverent, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... convinced he acted wrong To hide her from the world so long, And in dull studies to engage One of her tender sex and age; That every nymph with envy own'd, How she might shine in the grand monde: And every shepherd was undone To see her cloister'd like a nun. This was a visionary scheme: He waked, and found it but a dream; A project far above his skill: For nature must be nature still. If he were bolder than became A scholar to a courtly dame, She might excuse a man of letters; Thus tutors often treat their better; ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... was set on marrying her daughters "advantageously," and she gave all of her narrow mind to that thankless department. Josephine insisted on a romantic attachment, and pursued a visionary spouse with all the ardor and obstinacy of first-rate stupidity. Adelaide had the weakness to hate Josephine, the shrewdness to fear Madeline, and the viciousness to despise her mother; she skilfully and diligently devoted herself to the thwarting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... forget-me-nots, and many more, and these looked up at her with the happy faces of little children who were innocent and knew no care; and over whole acres lay the bloom of the ling, and nothing more lovely grows on earthly hills. Through breaks in the woodland she saw afar the Alpine heights, and the bright visionary peaks of snow floating in the blue air like ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... [369] {599}[Bolotoo is a visionary island to the north westward, the home of the Gods. The souls of chieftains, priests, and, possibly, the gentry, ascend to Bolotoo after death; but the souls of the lower classes "come to dust" with their bodies.—An Account, etc., 1817, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... contempt justly merited by such consummate vanity and unblushing pedantry. Fortunately for those who employ our language as their vehicle of mental conference, custom will not yield to the speculative theories of the visionary. If it would, improvement in English literature would soon be at an end, and we should be tamely conducted back ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... been friends?" the young girl asked with the look of a visionary suddenly springing up in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the warm sunny shower The visionary boy from shelter fly; For now the storm of summer rain is o'er, And cool, and fresh, and fragrant is the sky. And, lo! in the dark east, expanded high, The rainbow brightens to the setting Sun! Fond fool, that deem'st the streaming glory nigh, How vain the chase thine ardour has begun! 'Tis ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... terms they could for themselves." To his dismay, however, and to the extreme annoyance of the admiral, General Dundas, commanding the army, refused to move against Bastia, condemning the attempt as visionary and rash. Meantime the French, unmolested except by the desultory efforts of the insurgent Corsicans, were each day strengthening their works, and converting the possibilities Nelson saw into the impossibilities ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... itself. Can we say that at the instant of laughter we regard not that something is wrong, but that the reverse of it is right? When humour is brought before us, do we feel in any way instructed? This rebirth from a negation must seem somewhat visionary. What, for instance, is the truth to be gathered from the following. "I wish," said a philanthropic orator, "to be a friend to the friendless, a father to the fatherless, and a ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... her further, it appeared that he was possessed only by the delirium of excessive grief. This old man, tottering on the edge of the grave, and prolonging his prospect through millions of calculated years,—this visionary who had not seen starvation in the wasted forms of his wife and children, or plague in the horrible sights and sounds that surrounded him—this astronomer, apparently dead on earth, and living only in the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... most precious gifts for the purifying and elevation of humanity. These conceptions he owed, not to Kant, to whom he had listened in Koenigsberg, but to a less systematic teacher, J.G. Hamann, whose eccentric character and visionary speculations had gained for him the designation of the "Magus of the North." Goethe came to be acquainted with the writings of Hamann, and had a genuine admiration of him as a seer struggling with visions to which he was unable to give adequate utterance.[75] ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... instinct, with plays "for marionettes," and, having discovered a forgotten secret, grew tired of limiting himself within its narrow circle, and came outside his magic. "Monna Vanna" is an attempt to be broadly human on the part of a man whose gift is of another kind: a visionary of the moods. His later speech, like his later dramatic material, is diluted; he becomes, in the conventional sense, eloquent, which poetry never is. But he has brought back mystery to the stage, which has been banished, or retained in exile, among phantasmagoric Faust-lights. ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Professor Meiser, one of the least visionary men of the age, was persuaded that science could put a living being to sleep and wake him up again at the end of an infinite number of years—arrest all the functions of the system, suspend life itself, protect an individual against the action of time for a century or two, ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... mother I was apprenticed. To a joiner. That was a splendid time. Only I read a great deal too much to please the master—all sorts of things, and dreamed about them. And I didn't wish to do anything wrong, at least so I imagined. The master called me a stupid visionary, and gave me the sack. Then came a period of wandering—Munich, Cologne, Hamburg. I was two years with a master at Cologne. If only I had stayed with him! He didn't want to let me go—and there was a daughter. Then to Hamburg. ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... dreamer, Brandt,' he said. 'But I do not reject you on that account. Dreams sometimes come true, when an army follows the visionary. But who is going ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... know, Buck," he murmured to his companion, "that the sight of all these strange new things makes the whole affair very visionary to me?" ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... passed the convention for issuing a "Commission for the examination of monuments." Mercier was appointed one of the thirty-three members of which the commission was composed, and the famous Barrere was also of the number. Barrere, fertile in projects however visionary and destructive, proposed to Mercier, as a bright thought, "to make a short extract from every book in the national library: to have these extracts superbly printed by Didot;—and to ... BURN ALL THE BOOKS FROM WHICH THEY WERE TAKEN!" It never occurred to this revolutionising idiot that ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... San Pedro, California, Mr. Dana, lying in his berth, "vowed that, if God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that class of beings with whom my lot has been so long cast.'' This vow he carried out in no visionary scheme of mutiny or foolish "paying back'' to the captain, but by awakening a "strong sympathy'' for the sailors "by a voice from the forecastle,'' in his "Two ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... become cultivated, but scarcely in the direction I had chosen. What would he say if he knew of my determination; and was it filial and just to let him remain in ignorance of it? Yet I reasoned that after all I had made no final decision. I was attracted, it is true, by what might be called a visionary theory; but when I had given the principles of moderation further thought, I might conclude not to devote myself to them. It would be time enough later to speak of the subject. At present I was only too ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... brain sick frenzy in its feverish mood. Fills the light air with visionary terrors And shapeless forms ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... pay the original price and leave them where they are, than be encumbered with them. My house is already a stone-cutter's shop, nor do I know what to do with what I have got. But this is not what vexes me, but your desiring me to traffic with Carter, and showing me that you are still open to any visionary project! Do you think I can turn broker and factor, and- I don't know what? And at your time of life, do you expect to make a fortune by becoming a granite-merchant? There must be great demand for a ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the train and strode across the park, his imagination playing happy, visionary tunes. He would drop in to-morrow at St. Isidore's on his way back from White and Einstein's. He must see more of those fellows at Henry's clinic; they seemed a good set. And he was not sure that he should answer the Baltimore man so flatly. He would write for further ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... deep voice of the maid of the long trail speaking of the streams and the waving grass of that visionary Land of the ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... He was constructing what seemed to be some kind of a frail mechanical toy; and was apparently very much interested in his work. He was a white-headed man, now, but otherwise he was as young, alert, buoyant, visionary and enterprising as ever. His loving old wife sat near by, contentedly knitting and thinking, with a cat asleep in her lap. The room was large, light, and had a comfortable look, in fact a home-like look, though the furniture was of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... (the pagans) have had no other law than the caprice of their chiefs, nor other justice than oppression by the strong, nor other customs than an amorphous mass of practices that are at once repulsive and opposed to the natural law. Their guides and their teachers have been augurs or visionary women who, in connivance with the chief, sometimes make them abandon the territory in which they live for fear of some invisible deity, sometimes make them launch themselves on neighboring peolpe[sic] in order ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... pianist; told him that this blow was intended as a lesson in self-control; that he must not be downcast, but turn to his music as a consolation; and a whole string of such platitudes. When he left me I asked myself if Ellenora was not right, after all. Could she have reached that visionary rim of finer issues—of which she always prated—with this man, talented though he was, yet a slender reed shaken by the wind of her will? Besides, his ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... entreated not to be left out from the benevolent operations which Mrs. Fry now commenced. The officers of Newgate despaired of any good result; the people who associated with Mrs. Fry, charitable as they were, viewed her plans as Utopian and visionary, while she herself almost quailed at their very contemplation. It also placed a great strain upon her nervous system to attend women condemned to death. She wrote: "I have suffered much about the ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... her trust, and my first duty was to speak her name with pride. But I had had that brief glimpse of Penelope Blight, the companion of my boyhood; I had walked with her, grown lovelier than my dreams, through visionary woods and fields. She was before me, a dainty woman of the world; behind her the firelight fanned the leaves carved for her long ago by the old Italian artist; from above Reynolds's majestic lady looked down at her ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... director rebuked her for indulging silly fancies; the Mother Superior asserted that if God granted her request, it would be only as a punishment for her presumption; others, whose judgment she equally deferred to, pronounced the project visionary and delusive, yet her great courage never failed, for it was founded on a perfect confidence that in His own time, God would do His own work, using her as his instrument, all unworthy though she was. In two letters, she fully explained ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... be regarded, either in part or altogether, as the physiological cause of the phenomenon. This is clearly the case when, on the subjective side, the hallucination answers to a preceding energetic activity of the imagination, as in the case of the visionary and the monomaniac. Sometimes, however, as we have seen, the hallucinatory percept answers to previous prolonged acts of perception, leaving a kind of reverberation in the structures concerned; and in this ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... visionary, wrote The Life of the Virgin. She informs us that she resisted the commands of God and the holy Mary till the year 1637, when she began to compose this curious rhapsody. When she had finished this original production, her confessor ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... hinges open flew; And forth the Spirit issued,—yet around It turn'd as if its follower's fears it knew, And once more beckoning, pointed to the mound, The antique Keep, on which the bright moon threw With such effulgence her mild silvery gleam, The visionary form seem'd ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... ideals should be. The Past was rich in advice, experience; the Present in hope, faith, courage. Youth, the citizen of to-morrow, had a thousand theories for righting the nation's faults; and some of these theories were not wholly visionary. ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... the scene would have been dull and insipid: the participation of it with her gave it relish. Let the gloomy monk, sequestered from the world, seek unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell! Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness, while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly: and they mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain. Had they ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Yet not so glorious, Segismund, if you Your visionary honour wore so ill As to work murder and revenge on those ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... procession of persons seems to pass before one's eyes—Moses, Archimedes, Achilles, Job, Hector and Charles the Fifth, Cardan and Alaric, Gordianus, and Pilate, and Homer, and Cambyses, and the Canaanitish woman. Among them, one visionary figure flits with a mysterious pre-eminence, flickering over every page, like a familiar and ghostly flame. It is Methuselah; and, in Browne's scheme, the remote, almost infinite, and almost ridiculous patriarch is—who can doubt?—the only possible centre and symbol of all the rest. But it ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... motive than yourself would easily carry me thither; and such credentials also of who, and what I am, as, I flatter myself, would not appear contemptible in the eyes of your friends:—the prospect therefore is not so visionary as you seem to think, provided I have ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... and as the baron, with a low bow, assented, the Emperor continued: "Then it is scarcely an intrigue, at any rate a successful one, unless he is unlike the usual stamp. But no! I noticed the man. There is something visionary about him, like most of the Germans. But I ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was reticent about was the story of his uncle. Poor, crack-brained visionary, he had gone to his account now, and what need was there to ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... as a wholesome complement to the ardors of marriage. She knew that her husband differed from the legendary bohemian in having a strictly upright code in money matters, but she wished it could be less visionary. He mentally oscillated between pauperism and riches. Let him fail to sell a picture and he offered to pawn his coat; but the picture sold, he aspired to hire a mansion. In a word, she began to see that he was incapable either of foresight or moderation. Could she alone, she wondered, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... conveniently remote. I do not say this as desiring for one moment to suggest that he purposely selected those objects, and not others which might be more readily examined. He certainly believed in the reality of the communications he described. But possibly there is some law in things visionary, corresponding to the law of mental operation with regard to scientific theories; and as the mind theorises freely about a subject little understood, but cautiously where many facts have been ascertained, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... set Israel on high over all his foes. To the rest of the people, however, the method of the consummation was not so clear, and they were ready to leave God to work out his purpose in his own way, longing meanwhile for the fulfilment of his promise. One class in particular gave themselves to visionary representations of the promised redemption. They differed from the Zealots in that they saw with unwelcome clearness the futility of physical attack upon their enemies; but their faith was strong, and at the moment when outward conditions ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... who have advocated my cause with other nations, the present volume will give satisfaction, as affording additional proof that their advocacy rested upon no visionary basis. To the members of the press, who have adopted the same views, this exposition will be equally satisfactory. To all these I owe the thanks of recognising in me, a love for that service, from which—for a time I was unjustly expelled. It is my intention, if God ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... not for what the building was intended—whether for church, school, or parsonage, rum was the grand master of ceremonies, the indispensable celebrant at the various stages of its completion. The party who dug the parson out after a snow-storm, verily got their reward, a sort of prelibation of the visionary sweets of that land, flowing not, according to the Jewish notion, with milk and honey, but according to the revised version of Yankeedom, with milk and rum. Rum was, forsooth, a very decent devil, if judged by the exalted character of the company it kept. It stood high ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... Were they competent as men? that is, were they men of sober judgment, able correctly to see and record the facts that came under their observation, and not visionary enthusiasts who mistook dreams for realities? This question admits of a short and satisfactory answer. No proof whatever exists that they were visionary men, but abundant proof to the contrary. Their narratives are calm, unimpassioned, and straightforward, without expatiation on the greatness ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the Romans, beautiful and significant names were studied. The sublime Plato himself has noticed the present topic; his visionary ear was sensible to the delicacy of a name; and his exalted fancy was delighted with beautiful names, as well as every other species of beauty. In his Cratylus he is solicitous that persons should ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... voice in all St. Antipas that Sabbath upon the proposal that this powerful young preacher be called to its pulpit. The few who warily suggested that he might be too visionary, not sufficiently in touch with the present day, were quieted the following Sabbath by a very different sermon on certain ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... due observance to geographical propriety, within the Highland line, a guest disturbs a convivial meeting at Blair-Athol by exclaiming that he beholds a dirk sticking in the breast of their entertainer. That night he is stabbed to the heart; and even while the seer beheld the visionary dagger, a bare-legged gilly was watching outside to execute a long-cherished Highland vengeance. The Marquess of Argyle, who was afterwards beheaded, was playing with some of his clan at bowls, or bullets, as Wodrow calls them, for he was not learned in the nomenclature ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Who knows not what odd notions many men's heads are filled with, and what strange ideas all men's brains are capable of? But if we rest here, we know the truth of nothing by this rule, but of the visionary words in our own imaginations; nor have other truth, but what as much concerns harpies and centaurs, as men and horses. For those, and the like, may be ideas in our heads, and have their agreement or disagreement there, as well as the ideas of real beings, and so have as true propositions made ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... propounding another—"Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee concerning Me?" The purport of this question seems to have been to probe Pilate's conscience, and make him aware of his own growing consciousness that this prisoner was too royal in mien to be an ordinary Jewish visionary. It was as though He said: "Dost thou use the term in the common sense, or as a soul confronted by a greater than thyself? Do you speak by hearsay or by conviction? Is it because the Jews have so taught thee, or because thou recognizest ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... hand to each of the dolls, and walked slowly round and round the miserable room, pointing out visionary persons of distinction and objects of interest. "Here's the queen, my dears, in her gilt coach, drawn by six horses. Do you see her scepter poking out of the carriage window? She governs the nation with that. Bow to the queen. And now look at the beautiful bright water. ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... little unsteadily. The light of battle flashed from his eyes, meeting and beating down what he took, erroneously, to be the glare of a hostile mob. (As a matter of fact no one noticed him any more). Stumbling, white-faced, with set lips and the face of a visionary, he gained the turnstile. This, this, was victory! One against so many! He had proved himself. He ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 16, 1914 • Various
... have had his sympathies. Instead of finding material, like Wagner, in the excitement of that time for impassioned compositions, he worked at L'Enfance du Christ. He affected absolute indifference—he who was so little made for indifference. He approved the State's action, and despised its visionary hopes.] What ingratitude! He owed to these revolutions, to these democratic storms, to these human tempests, the best of all his genius—and he disowned it all. This musician of a new era took refuge ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... Germany, Switzerland, and Iceland. A mineral collection he made, is in the University Museum, Edinburgh. His excursions in South Australia were intrepid, and extended far: he carried a wallet and a hammer, and subsisted during his wandering on gum. His conversation was visionary; and his predictions, at the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... querulous eloquence, aided by the arbitrary dominion he assumes over fact, is capable of exhibiting. Had he attributed our misfortunes to their true cause, the injudicious tampering of bold, improvident, and visionary ministers at one period, or to their supine negligence and traitorous dissensions at another, the complaint had been just, and might have been useful. But far the greater and much the worst part of the state which he exhibits ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... ideals of the purest and highest sort of either passion, and seemed to find satisfaction enough in the endeavor to embody such in his verse, without even imagining himself in communication with any visionary public. The era had not yet dawned when every scribbler is consumed with the vain ambition of being recognized, not, indeed, as what he is, but as what he pictures himself in his secret sessions of thought. That disease could ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... leaps up on his mother's arm;— I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!— But there's a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have looked upon,— Both of them speak of something that is gone; The pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat. Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... I have had report of him. He is a visionary. There is no sedition in him. He affirms ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... dog shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a wren find an apology for breakfast."] miles— northwards for six hundred; and the sympathy of our Lombard Street friends at parting is exalted a hundredfold by a sort of visionary sympathy with the yet slumbering sympathies which in so vast a succession ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... key-note of Schumann's deepest nature. But these feelings could only find their fullest outlet in the musical form expressly suited to subjective emotion. Accordingly, the "Sturm and Drang" epoch of his life, when all his thoughts and conceptions were most unsettled and visionary, was most fruitful in lyric song. In Heinrich Heine he found a fitting poetical co-worker, in whose moods he seemed to see a perfect reflection of his own—Heine, in whom the bitterest irony was wedded to the deepest pathos, "the spoiled favorite ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... for men who believe in preternatural communications, in modern times, to satisfy those who are of a different opinion, they may easily refute the doctrine of their opponents, who impute a belief in second sight to superstition. To entertain a visionary notion that one sees a distant or future event, may be called superstition: but the correspondence of the fact or event with such an impression on the fancy, though certainly very wonderful, if proved, has no more connection with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the weak farrago of those men Who fabricate such visionary schemes, As if the night-mare rode upon their pen, And trouble'd all their ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... knocked the little china dog, and looked down earnestly at her, as she sat on the chintz-covered sofa behind the tea-table. At her back was the long casement window, and the last gleams of the wintry sun caught her hair. To the man's visionary fancy they ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... in its natural grace! To Marius, at a later time, he counted for as it were an epitome of the whole pagan world, the depth of its corruption, and its perfection of form. And still, in his mobility, his animation, in his eager capacity for various life, he was so real an object, after that visionary idealism of the villa. His voice, his glance, were like the breaking in of the solid world upon one, amid the flimsy fictions of a dream. A shadow, handling all things as shadows, had felt a sudden real and poignant ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... than anybody else. The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her. They are the merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile, the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan. These impossible contradictions war ceaselessly in their blood. When I look at Celia, I seem to see in my mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... years rolled by amidst the jargon of sectional and local contentions, "the half-starved government," as Washington depicted it, "limped along on crutches, tottering at every step." And while monarchical Europe with saturnine face declared that the American hope of union was the wild and visionary notion of romance, and predicted that we would be to the end of time a disunited people, suspicious and distrustful of each other, divided and subdivided into petty commonwealths and principalities, lo! the very earth yawned under the feet of America, and in that very region ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... exactly between his thumbs, the general had received letters advising him of the shipment of a whole cargo of as good vagabonds as were to be had in the New York market. In truth it was wonderful a see how credulous this opulent merchant was; and how readily he fell into all the visionary schemes for overthrowing governments that had their origin in the disordered brain of my hero. As for generals, the large-eyed merchant had consigned my hero no less than a whole mob, no two of whom could be found to agree on a single subject, if you except emptying ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... there have been visionary theorists or 'cranks' in all ages, and there must have been some basis for this almost universal erroneous opinion in the South that the people of the North advocated social equality or social intercourse between the white and colored races; and yet ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... passion I at length worked out my reward. My dream became more palpable; I spoke with it; I knelt to it; my lips were pressed to its own; we exchanged the vows of love, and morning only separated us with the certainty that at night we should meet again. Thus then," continued my visionary, "I commenced a history utterly separate from the history of the world, and it went on alternately with my harsh and chilling history of the day, equally regular and equally continuous. And what, ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that roaring of the sea and the wind how could any such message be delivered? And already the steamer was away from the land, standing out to the lonely plain of waters, and the sound of the engines had ceased, and the figures on the deck had grown faint and visionary. But still there was that one speck of white visible; and the man knew that a pair of eyes that had many a time looked into his own—as if with a faith that such intercommunion could never be broken—were now trying, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... voice—it went on and on—sounded, at such close quarters, both harsh and rasping. Mrs. Shepherd was mending a stole; Isabella stooped over the sermon, which she was writing like copperplate. Laura sat in a corner with her hands before her: she had finished her book, but her eyes were still visionary. When any of the three spoke, it was in ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... and Gerritt Smith and Dr. S. G. Howe gave countenance and aid to Brown's project. Before history's bar, their responsibility seems heavier than his; they, educated, intelligent, trained in public service; he an untaught, ill-balanced visionary, who at least staked his life on his faith. Their complicity in his plot illustrates how in some moral enthusiasts the hostility to slavery had distorted their perception of reality. Such men saw the Southern communities through the medium ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... dedication. In that case, all the people about him would know that he desired that the saints should go there. If a glimmering of secular sense led him to be a little suspicious about the real cause of the unanimity of the visionary beings who manifested themselves to his entourage in favour of moving on, he ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... throne in the bank of the forest. M'liss was not there. He sat down on the trunk of the tree, and for a few moments gave himself up to the associations it suggested. What would become of M'liss after he was gone? But he quickly dropped the subject as one too visionary and sentimental for his then fiercely practical consideration, and, to prevent the recurrence of such distracting fancies, began to retrace his steps toward the settlement. At the edge of the woods, at a point where the trail forked toward the old site of Smith's Pocket, he saw M'liss coming ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... work on my vanity, calls me "Pasha Effendi." Finding that toward their entreaties I give but the same reply, one of the younger men coolly advocates the use of force to coerce me into giving them an exhibition of my skill on the araba. As far as I am able to interpret, this bold visionary's argument is: "Behold, we are seven; Effendi is only one; we are good Mussulmans - peace be with us - he is but a Frank - ashes on his head- let us make ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... opinions as deserving to be punished because heretical. Nor does he approve the course of those who endanger the peace and quiet of great nations, and the best interest of their own race by indulging in a chimerical and visionary philanthropy—a luxury which chiefly consists in drawing their robes around them to avoid contact with their fellows, and proclaiming themselves holier ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... "the index of his fortune." Upon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled, but at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity—to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary, by ocular demonstration, of the fallacy ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... sleep myself with an easy conscience, confident that a noisy wind, or a hooting owl, was the sum and substance of all the trouble. But Bill Coombs was a very different proposition. He was of the hard-headed kind, not to be easily alarmed by visionary terrors, and yet he was manifestly afraid to sleep in the house. I was sufficiently acquainted with his type to comprehend there must be some real cause driving him to retreat to the negro cabins for rest. ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... wreathe around him—he shall breathe My life instead of air; In glowing sunbeams o'er his head My visionary hands I'll spread, And kiss his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... type of establishment. The thing must come; it is as logical as one, two, three. There are some, perhaps, who remember the roars of derision which went up when the first automobile garage was established in their town. Such a thing was visionary-there would never be enough machines ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... the salvation that Christ brings. That is our first thought. We often have very vague,—I might also say visionary—ideas of what Christ is; we love the person of Christ, but that which makes up Christ, which actually constitutes Him the Christ, that we do not know or love. If we love Christ above everything, we must love humility above everything, for humility is the very essence of His life and glory, and ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... could not possibly give New York honest government. Mr. Seth Low has been declared to be such an autocrat that he would rule the city according to his own ideas, were they good or bad. Mr. George was called a visionary person, who would turn the world upside down if ever he came into power. These were, of course, the opinions of the candidates' enemies. To their friends each of them was felt to be the one man for whom the city had been waiting, and whose election would insure the best ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 54, November 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... which was designed to a great extent by the first earl, with the assistance of Pope, has been entirely thrown open to the people of Cirencester; and "the future and as yet visionary beauties of the noble scenes, openings, and avenues" which that great poet used to delight in dwelling upon have become accomplished facts. The "ten rides"—lengthy avenues of fine trees radiating in all directions ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs |
