"Vivid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... George and Darrell were conversing in the library; the theme, of course, was Waife; and Darrell listened with vivid interest to George's graphic accounts of the old man's gentle playful humour—with its vague desultory undercurrents of poetic fancy or subtle wisdom. But when George turned to speak of Sophy's endearing, lovely nature, and, though cautiously, to intimate ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... think you might go on now. I have put a little life into the story. It is, perhaps, not quite so vivid as my last work, "The Woman Thou Gavest Me," of which more than a ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... way in a pitiless storm on a black and starless night. Suddenly his horse drew back and refused to take another step. He urged it forward, but it only threw itself back upon its haunches. Just then a vivid flash of lightning revealed a great precipice upon the brink of which he stood. It was but an instant, and then the pitchy blackness hid it again from view. But he turned his horse and anxiously rode away from ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... of the imagination is of great service here. Yes, I say the imagination. I do not mean the revelling of mere fancy in the realm of the unthinkable or the impossible. I mean the vivid realization of facts that lie outside the ordinary rut of thought. So exercised, imagination is one of ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... and not edify if I were to describe all we saw at Jerusalem. I have written of it more fully elsewhere,[1] and I can never hope to convey the remarkably vivid way in which it brought home to me the truth of the Gospel narrative. But I think there are two spots which I ought to describe: one is the Calvary Church, and the other ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... all life, material and spiritual; and it is to the soldier's experience that the spiritual life goes for its most vivid metaphors and its loftiest inspirations. Whatever else the twentieth century may bring us, it will not, from anything now current in the thought of the ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... thick before Mr. Carr's eyes, when he took his accustomed seat at the head of the table. As a sign of devotion, he tried to step on Dorothy's foot under the table, after a pleasing habit of their courtship in the New York boarding-house, but he succeeded only in drawing an unconscious "ouch" and a vivid blush from Miss St. Clair, by which he impressed Dorothy more deeply than he could have hoped ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... is dotted with many lovely islands off Zamboanga. Somber, lowering Basilan guards its secrets to this day; Sacol, home of Dato Mandi, invites and then repels the intruder; tiny clumps of vivid green rise out of the channel in the most unexpected places, as if timidly wishing to investigate before adding their emerald mite to crown the Celebes. The island toward which the Sabah was making her way seemed blacker and denser than its more frivolous ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... perception of non-existent objects, as in insanity or delirium. In the figurative sense, we speak of dreams of fortune, visions of glory, with little difference of meaning except that the vision is thought of as fuller and more vivid. We speak of a trance of delight when the emotion almost sweeps one away from the normal exercise of ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... standing this evening by the grave of one dearly beloved in life, and cherished more fondly now that death has taken her from my embrace, I could not stay the soaring flight of fancy, which would portray to my mind in vivid colors our meeting at the great Resurrection morn; and the thought that that meeting was so near—that in a very little while the grave should lose its power and that she would come forth robed in immortal beauty, filled my soul with transport and almost brought ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... vineyards, and the gardens on the coast, is increased by the prodigious transparency of the atmosphere. Notwithstanding the great distance, we could distinguish not only the houses, the sails of the vessels, and the trunks of the trees, but we could discern the vivid colouring of the vegetation of the plains. These phenomena are owing not only to the height of the site, but to the peculiar modifications of the air in warm climates. In every zone, an object placed on a level with ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... vegetables were perceptible, the melon, the pea, and the bean. The pumpkin lay ripening on its frosted vines, its sunny side already changed to a bright golden color; and the turnip spread out its green mat of leaves in defiance of the season. Everything around realized the vivid picture of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... about her temples, shadowing eyes of fathomless black. The wind had brought to the light and delicate brown of her complexion a trace of color to match her lips, whose scarlet did not fade after the ordinary and imperceptible manner into the tinge of her skin, but continued vivid to the very edge; her eyes were wide and unseeing. One hand rested idly on the breech of an ornamented ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Bab's vivid imagination brought to life the old colonial ladies who had once wandered in this famous garden. She saw their white wigs, their powder and patches and full skirts. So Bab ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... fancy he saw her lurking; even amidst the black, barren tree-trunks down by the river banks. His eyes and ears were ever alert with the half-dread expectation of seeing her or hearing her voice. The scene Victor had described of the white huntress leaning upon her rifle was the most vivid in his imagination, and he told himself that some day, in the chances of the chase, she might visit his ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... focus point of all this natural glory, is scarcely a mile long, and narrow. It may be vivid blue and steel-blue and milky-blue, and half a dozen shades of green and pink all within twice as many minutes, according to the whim of the breeze, the changing atmosphere, and the clouding of the sun. Often it suggests nothing so much as a pool of dull-green paint. Or it may present a reversed ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... a thousand ways, but the picture is so retouched that the portrait is not clear or vivid. He dilates on her mental, moral, spiritual and physical qualities, according to his mood, and the flattery to her was never too fulsome. Possibly she was not fully aware before that she was such a paragon of virtue, but believing in the superior ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... fragments. On a stormy night, when the belated traveller, enveloped in his furry bourka, gazing fearfully around him, travels along the bank which hangs over the torrent of Terek, all is terror such as only a vivid imagination can conceive. With slow steps he winds along, the rain-torrents stream around his feet, and tumble upon his head from the rocks which frown above and threaten his destruction. Suddenly the lightning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... been wrought, and deeds Untold achiev'd, and like a flock of lambs, The adverse hosts been coop'd beneath the walls, Had not the Sire of Gods and men beheld, And with an awful peal of thunder hurl'd His vivid lightning down; the fiery bolt Before Tydides' chariot plough'd the ground. Fierce flash'd the sulph'rous flame, and whirling round Beneath the ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... reminiscent of the Greek Gnomic Poets. Two examples are given of the serious verse of Dafydd ab Gwilym, a contemporary of Chaucer, who though he did not, like Wordsworth, read nature into human life with that spiritual insight for which he was so remarkable, yet as a poet of fancy, the vivid, delicate, sympathetic fancy of the Celt, still remains unmatched. Amongst Dafydd's contemporaries and successors, Iolo Goch's noble poem, "The Labourer," very appropriate to our breadless days, Lewis Glyn Cothi's touching elegy on his little son John, and Dr. ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... book, a narrative of a trip to Cuba made in 1859, and he wrote a few magazine articles. The explanation must be found in the temperament and character of the man. His "Two Years Before the Mast'' is a vivid representation of what he saw and experienced at a most impressionable age. He put his young life into it; he was not thinking of literature when he wrote it, and thus the book takes rank with those books which are bits of life rather than products ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... loved the strong colour, the exultant animation, the devil-may-care character, that marked the gatherings in the bars and the gambling-saloons. He took little active part in the playing and the drinking, but the feverish energy of the men and the stirring scenes provided such vivid contrast to what he had hitherto known and seen of life that his soul was greedy for it all. To Mike these scenes were all familiar; his attitude towards them was one of quiet indifference, and he regarded Jim's rapture with the amused tolerance ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... wilderness was upon Henry, and his eyes glowed as he looked at the vast surrounding forest, the circling wall of deep-toned, vivid colors. For him, danger, if absent, did not exist, and there was inspiration in the crisp breeze that came over a thousand miles of untenanted woods. He sat in the doorway, the door now open, and stretched ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... on the twenty-seventh day of his visit, he was suddenly confronted with the person whom he sought. The first Sunday Kirstie had managed to stay away from kirk on some pretext of indisposition, which was more truly modesty; the pleasure of beholding Archie seeming too sacred, too vivid for that public place. On the two following, Frank had himself been absent on some of his excursions among the neighbouring families. It was not until the fourth, accordingly, that Frank had occasion to set eyes on the enchantress. With the first look, all ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... connect religion and morals. When you call upon one of the old aunties, she talks about getting religion and what a glorious thing it is, and describes visions of heaven and hell to you in the most vivid language: but that doesn't prevent her drinking whiskey or telling lies. I have no doubt, however, that some of the most egregious sins of these old slaves are less in the eyes of God than many of ...
— American Missionary, Vol. 45, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... visiting Europe, the long voyage he has to make is an excellent preparative. The temporary absence of worldly scenes and employments produces a state of mind peculiarly fitted to receive new and vivid impressions. The vast space of waters that separate the hemispheres is like a blank page in existence. There is no gradual transition by which, as in Europe, the features and population of one country blend almost imperceptibly ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... a shock that I had no inclination to talk about it, or to speak about it even to Stewart, but the impression it made upon me was too vivid to be easily forgotten, and so strongly was I affected by it that I have here written down the whole history, with the date, December 19th, and all the particulars, as they are now fresh before me. No doubt I had fallen asleep, and that the appearance presented so distinctly ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... artist, and no doubt gave him recommendations among Anglo-Roman society which laid the foundations of a numerous clientele. It was in the Roman summers that Lear first began to exercise the taste for pictorial wandering which grew into a habit and a passion, to fill vivid and copious note-books as he went, and to illustrate them by spirited and accurate drawings; and his first volume of "Illustrated Excursions in Italy," published in 1846, is gratefully dedicated ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... more than an exposition of some doctrine arranged in mnemonic form, others show eloquence and dramatic skill. Thus the Samannaphala-sutta opens with a vivid description of the visit paid one night by Ajatasattu to the Buddha[646]. We see the royal procession of elephants and share the alarm of the suspicious king at the unearthly stillness of the monastery park, until ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... agent well knew the erratic temperment of his singular friend, but Baker had been so placid and natural up to the present moment, and this excitable outburst was so vivid and unaccountable, that Bart felt sure that there was some important reason for ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... affects your imagination thus, you do wrong to trust yourself here in solitude, and in the night-time, and at all unguarded hours. You are not safe in your chamber. It is but a step or two; and what if a vivid dream should lead you up hither at midnight, and act itself out as ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of stories written, it is said, to amuse Queen Joanna of Naples and her court, during the period when one of the world's greatest plagues swept over Europe in 1348. In these years he rose from the vivid but confused and exaggerated manner of Filocopo to the perfection of polished literary style. The Decameron fully revealed his genius, his ability to weave the tales of all lands and all ages into one ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... of this kind has yet appeared than "A Yeoman's Letters," by P. T. Ross.... Bright, breezy, and vivid are the stories of his adventures.... Corporal Ross not only writes lively prose, but really capital verse. His "Ballad of the Bayonet" is particularly smart. He is also a clever draughtsman, and his rough but effective caricatures form not the least attractive ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... surprise ending like "The Gift of the Magi," a character story with the theme of unselfish love, and its setting in a big city. Again, "John G," the story of adventure with an animal for the hero, might suggest to you an adventuresome incident in your own experience. If you have a vivid imagination, it might be interesting to write a fanciful story like "Feathertop." All of you have heard of true and thrilling incidents of the recent Great War. Try to weave one into a good war story as did Daudet or Mrs. ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... his eyes glowing with vivid lightnings, drew up the wide sinews of his broad back, and with wrathful front leaped towards him who ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... submission comforted his sore heart. Sitting by him, sustaining and sustained, she told the history of the last six months, till just before the sending of the letter. She paused there a moment, then hurried on, gradually losing the consciousness of present emotion in the vivid ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... The ballad of "John Gilpin" originated during one of his illnesses. With the hope of diverting his mind during an unusually severe attack of gloom, Lady Austen related to him the history of the renowned citizen, which she had heard in her childhood. The tale made a vivid impression, and the next morning he told her that the ludicrous incident had convulsed him with laughter during the night, and that he had embodied ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... and as carelessly printed, Weldon's character of James is in parts remarkably vivid. It was reprinted by itself in Morgan's Pboenix Britannicus, 1732, pp. 54-6; and it was incorporated in the edition of Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier published in 1792: see The Retrospective Review, 1821, vol. iii, pt. ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... lighted up by a vivid glare. The ship, now in the far distance, caught fire, blew up and ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... matters; he is much more vivid and human than many a better-known critic. Here, for instance, is an impression of the old Park Theatre, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... and corn, the shining river rolling through it towards the pearly hills beyond; all these were before us, along with a thousand beautiful memories of our youth, beautiful and sad, but as real and vivid in our minds as that fair and always-remembered scene our eyes beheld once more. We forget nothing. The memory sleeps, but awakens again; I often think how it shall be when, after the last sleep of death, the reveille shall arouse us for ever, and the past in one flash of ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... towering, so enduring, that preacher father. Yet when the frail mother went the strong man followed within a year. So then there was nothing to do but go home to Green Valley. He went. And the spirit of the vivid little mother seemed to have come with him. Every day that he spent in the town that had reared her seemed to bring her nearer. He could picture her going about the sunny roads and friendly streets and stopping to chat and neighbor ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... of happy anticipation is in vivid contrast to Jeremiah's sorrowful attitude of retrospection. The picture brings out clearly the fact that the keynote of Daniel's prophecy is hope. Looking into his rapt face, we may imagine that this is ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... was a far more considerable man than Marston, and infinitely above him in genius. Without the poetic nature of Marlowe, or Chapman's somewhat unwieldy vigor of thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, untempered by a solid understanding, made his plays a strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declamation, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, a great dramatist. Shakspeare is the only one of that age. Marlowe had a rare imagination, a delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of Shakspeare ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... itself; it had ended, as all right talk should, in friendship. On this morning of our visit, many a gay one having preceded it, we found our friend arrayed as if for an outing. She had mounted her best coif, and tied across her shrivelled old breast was a vivid purple silk kerchief. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... chaste who allows his imagination to run riot amid scenes of amorous associations. The man whose lips delight in tales of licentiousness, whose eyes feast upon obscene pictures, who is ever ready to pervert the meaning of a harmless word or act into uncleanness, who finds delight in reading vivid portrayals of acts of lewdness,—such a one is not a virtuous man. Though he may never have committed an overt act of unchastity, if he cannot pass a handsome female in the street without, in imagination, approaching the secrets of her person, he ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... she suddenly flushed or paled; it was true that her mind seemed incapable of the slightest consecutive thought; it was true that she seemed to be in a dream, peopled by crazily inconsequent images—she had again and again a vision, startlingly vivid, of the red-twigged osier beside which she had stood; it was true that she had a slight feeling of vertigo when she tried to think ahead of the next moment—but still she was going ahead with her unpacking and ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... ablaze in the morning sun. The air is sharp and keen, not foetid with poisonous lies; the waters are blue and beautiful; there are shining shores about us, and marvels of a new nature on every hand. We who were in the night, and of it, become vivid with the sun. Our atheism banishes the worshipped gods of evil that are no more extant in our dogmatic creed of joy. For Truth and Beauty have guided us hand in hand, and all they ask of us is to throw away ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... of the people. In them the past is potent with life, and for this reason they claim the most careful and patient study. I speak of the most familiar stories that we have regarded as foolish fables. Nowhere else can we gain so clear and vivid a picture of the childhood of civilisation, when women were the transmitters of inheritance ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... little, not much: few things could make her do that now. Once our blushes have been wasted, as hers were on Robert Grame, their vivid freshness has faded for ever and aye. "The song has ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... the heavy German masses were almost upon them, when they were revealed in the glare of the searchlights, sweeping forward in solid masses, and uttering a tremendous hurrah. But the French lights continued to throw an intense vivid white blaze over the advancing columns, broad German faces and stalwart German figures standing out vividly. Officers, reckless of death, waving their swords and shouting the word of ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... impediment to vision. As volition was in abeyance, the balls could not roll in their sockets but all objects within the range of the visual hemisphere were seen with more or less distinctness; the rays which fell upon the external retina, or into the corner of the eye, producing a more vivid effect than those which struck the front or interior surface. Yet, in the former instance, this effect was so far anomalous that I appreciated it only as sound—sound sweet or discordant as the matters presenting themselves at my side were light or dark in shade—curved ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... infrequent, vivid blush. She rose and came behind Mary's chair again, gathering up the abandoned tresses. But before she began to comb and coil she said, "Thanks," leaning forward and, very ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... should aim to reach both their minds and hearts. Solid argument, clear method, and indisputable facts are necessary for the first purpose; vivid imagination, concrete illustration, and animated feeling are ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... the fancy of your vivid imagination. If you exerted the same will to be happy that you do to imagine troubles, our life would be perfect. What matters the storm? and even if you do see an omen in it, what is there so very terrible? Clouds ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the text is not Michael Hacket's, but Irving Bacheller's. The whole book is a vivid and arresting and terrible forth-setting of the impressive words that Barton found ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... the author's vivid imagination are perfectly formed and fittingly clothed, living, moving, feeling, talking, in complete harmony as the development of the great drama goes on to its consummation. The author has evidently made a careful and profound study of the manifold dangers ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... children almost always, when in their ordinary health, have a peculiar patchy condition of the tongue, one part of it being covered with a thin white coating, through which little red points project, while another part is of a vivid red, and looks raw and shining, as though it had been scalded, while the red points, or the papillae, as they are termed, project above its surface like so many pins' heads. Children in whom this condition exists, require much watching and much care. I have ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... the very materials of organization; on the other, he attributes to tendencies revived from all past epochs, which he takes for new, a reality which they do not possess, and misconceives the nature of socialism, which is exclusively critical. M. Blanc, therefore, has given us the spectacle of a vivid imagination ready to confront an impossibility; he has believed in the divination of genius; but he must have perceived that science does not improvise itself, and that, be one's name Adolphe Boyer, Louis Blanc, or J. J. Rousseau, provided there is nothing in experience, there ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... materials for forming any vivid picture of Seneca's childhood; but, from what we gather about the circumstances and the character of his family, we should suppose that he was exceptionally fortunate. The Senecas were wealthy; they held a good position in society; they were a family of cultivated taste, of literary ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... doubtless have as miserable an end as her mother. From this bare abstract, the story does not seem to promise much pleasure to novel-readers, yet it is all alive with the fiery genius of Victor Hugo, and the whole representation is so intense and vivid that it is impossible to escape from the fascination it exerts over the mind. Few who take the book up will leave it until they have read it through. It is morbid to a degree that no eminent English ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and pen are here fired by his vivid imagination of eternal realities. With such burning words, we need no messenger from the invisible world to alarm the consciences of sinners. What angel could arouse more powerfully, alarmingly, convincingly, the poor sinner, than ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... that the infliction of eternal misery is too severe to consist with the goodness of God, Mr. Foster does not at all consider the great ends, or final causes, of penal enactments. He merely dwells upon the terrors of the punishment, and brings these into vivid contrast with the weakness and impotency of man in his mortal state. This, it must be confessed, is a most one-sided and partial view of so profound a subject; much better adapted to work upon the feelings than to enlighten the judgment. All that he seems ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... in his imagination as men, women, cities, landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of allegories. Unlike the Faery Queene, the story of Pilgrim's Progress has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same belief with which they read of Crusoe's cave ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... afternoon when he came to the gentle rise which gave first glint of the little lake so like a blue jewel set in the dusty green of the wooded slopes. As he rose in his stirrups to gaze down a vista through the tree-trunks, he saw the bright, vivid blue of ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... has just published, at Dresden, his Reise nach Istrien Dalmatien und Montenegro. A book of travels in those countries is a novelty, and no explorer could give his reader a more vivid picture of the peculiarities of a nation and its country than Kohl. The book is ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... say, is simply a sarcasm and a piece of homely, practical sagacity, yet, like almost all the sayings in this Book of Ecclesiastes, it has a deeper meaning than appears on the surface; and may be applied in higher and more important directions. It carries with it large truths, and enshrines in a vivid metaphor bitter experiences which, I suppose, we can ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... fascinating course of study I found it. And whatever the Coast may have to say against me—for my continual desire for hair-pins, and other pins, my intolerable habit of getting into water, the abominations full of ants, that I brought into their houses, or things emitting at unexpectedly short notice vivid and awful stenches—they cannot but say that I was a diligent pupil, who honestly tried to learn the lessons they taught me so kindly, though some of those lessons were hard to a person who had never previously been even in a tame bit of tropics, and whose life ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... may well permit to himself other purposes and objects, taking care that they be not too sharply defined, and too obviously meant to contract the Poet into the Lecturer—the Fiction into the Homily. The delight in Shylock is not less vivid for the Humanity it latently but profoundly inculcates; the healthful merriment of the Tartufe is not less enjoyed for the exposure of the Hypocrisy it denounces. We need not demand from Shakespeare or from Moliere other ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... cockle-shell, and his eyes frequently found a resting-place in the depths of hers. The boat was so small that at each return of the sculls, when his hands came forward to begin the pull, they approached so near to her that her vivid imagination began to thrill her with a fancy that he was going to clasp his arms round her. The sensation grew so strong that she could not run the risk of again meeting his eyes at those critical ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... looking with a roguish leer upon his fair neighbour, or the miserable wretch maudlin in his cups; and again on the knave profiting by the recklessness of those around him. The bright blaze of the fire lit up the different countenances with a vivid and lifelike expression; and as Anna gazed, fascinated and spell-bound, her thoughts naturally reverted to what she had heard of the life and character of the last owner of the place. Was that youthful ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... This vivid sight is succeeded, in the ordinary person, by the dreamy, peaceful semi-consciousness spoken of above, as the etheric double floats above the body to which it has belonged, ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... year has always remained vivid in my memory.... I learnt then, from the maids in the servants' room, that Ivan Matveitch Koltovsky was my father, and almost on the same day, my mother, by his command, was married to Mr. Ratsch, who was something ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... departments remain to-day what they were at first—mere administrative divisions which have taken no hold on the feelings and sympathies of the people, while the 'local patriotism' of the provinces is still a vivid reality. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... thing to me is certain, Antiphon; you have conceived so vivid an idea of my life of misery that for yourself you would choose death sooner than live as I do. Suppose now we turn and consider what it is you find so hard in my life. Is it that he who takes payment must as a matter of contract finish the work for which he is paid, whereas I, who do not ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... means of enforcing the recognition of truths often avoided or carefully concealed. Their powerful dramatic character compels the attention of the careless to his pictures. He paints Claudio and Isabella in the prison scene, and it is not merely a vivid rendering of the scene in its external features, but also a true rendering of the character of Claudio and Isabella, of the weakness of the coward, of the strength that dwells with the pure. His Awakened Conscience ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... aroused mood of indignation and defiance, against the "spirit which denies;" the assertion of his manhood against the cowardice which had so long kept him trembling and whimpering before the facts of existence. But from that change of front came presently the vivid apprehension of certain great truths which his former mood had thus far concealed from him; and in these truths he found the secret of that right attitude to life in the discovery of which lay men's only hope of salvation from the unrest ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... one peal of thunder followed another in such quick succession that one would hardly have time to die away before another was upon it; rolling and booming like heavy pieces of artillery. The lightning was so vivid and bright that it made Billy wink at ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... earlier portion of the first scene is not of the same intrinsic quality, nor need it be. We have the setting before our eyes, and the stupendous power of what has just been heard leaves in our minds a vivid impression of what is going on out of doors. Sieglinda comes in, surprised to find a stranger there at all, especially on so wild a night; Siegmund asks for water; she brings it; finding he is likely to fetch trouble on her head, he is for going. But there is sympathy between them, and ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... expedition. We have seen how Scott took the system developed by the Arctic Explorers at the point of development to which it had been brought by Nansen, and applied it for the first time to Antarctic sledge travelling. Scott's Voyage of the Discovery gives a vivid picture of mistakes rectified, and of improvements of every kind. Shackleton applied the knowledge they gained in his first expedition, Scott in this, his second and last. On the whole I believe this expedition was the best equipped there has ever been, when the double purpose, exploratory and scientific, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... grew fiercer, the lightning more vivid, the thunder-crashes louder, and Hiram screamed when there was a tremendous noise of crashing glass. The first story could not withstand the terrible buffeting of the waves. It cracked and crumbled. There was no support left for ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... a vivid recollection of the evening. Prior to that time I had not believed in Senator Douglas; which was only natural, I having been a Whig and an enthusiastic adherent of Lincoln. The duty of introducing Senator Douglas to the joint ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... at least,' we read, 'the world and the individual alike had been divested of all effective purpose. The most vivid of finite objects, the dramatic episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant personalities which had found their parts to play in them, that golden art, surrounding one with an ideal world, beyond which the real ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... long dark curling lashes, to match the finely pencilled brows, brought out each delicate feature of the lovely little face. The father, as he looked down upon her, wondered how it could have been in the heart of any creature, no matter how wicked, to put out this vivid little life. His little Starr, ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... of subjects or borders, the various colours of these pictures were, so to speak, but an accessory crowd, handmaidens whose part it was to set off another colour, namely blue—a glorious, indescribable blue, a vivid sapphire hue of excessive transparency, pale but piercing and sparkling throughout, glittering like the broken glass of a kaleidoscope—in the top-lights, in the roses of the transepts, and in the great west window, where it burned like the blue flame of ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... almost equal to that of the full moon; every star, reflected in the mirror-like deep, gave it the appearance of being spangled and streaked with gold. Suddenly there burst forth over the land so vivid a flash of lightning that rocks and trees and the distant hills for a moment stood out in such bold relief, that Archie could not help fancying that the boat had been carried by some unknown current close to the beach. With a cry of surprise he ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... youth, Foresti imbibed the creative spirit breathed into the social and civic life of Italy by Napoleon's victories and administration; it was at that vivid epoch when the military, political, artistic, and literary talent of the land, so long repressed and thwarted by superstition and despotism, broke forth, that his studies were achieved. We have only to compare what was done, thought, and felt ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... that?" asked Letty. She was awakened to a vivid recognition of something beyond the outer significance of the words. Then she seemed to lay her momentary emotion aside, as if it were something she could cover out of sight. She laughed a little. "Well," she said, "I guess I don't give up much nowadays. I ain't got so ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... (large scarlet).—An enormous-flowered kind, having produced blossoms which measured 10 in. across; petals vivid orange with a tip and central stripe of red; ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... effective. Unnoticed by either the Irishman or Waymark, the door had opened behind them, and there had appeared a little red-faced woman, in slatternly dress. It was Mrs. Tootle. She had overheard almost the whole of O'Gree's vivid comment upon his graphic illustration, in silence, until at length she could hold her peace no longer, and gave utterance to the teacher's name in a voice which trembled with rage ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... before. The men brushed the pine needles and the earth from their coats, and looked at the furrowed ground and at the headless body of the driver with a startled curiosity. There was a sense of a sudden and vivid flash from behind the veil, and they as suddenly perceived that the veil was both cold and dark. This, then, was one of the ways in which death came, shrieking like this, ugly and resistless! The July morning was warm and bright, but more than one of ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... to read the short story written by Paul Laurence Dunbar some years ago, entitled "The Ordeal at Mt. Hope." This story possibly gives one of the most vivid pictures of real, genuine service rendered by a man of splendid parts in a needy section of the South, bearing out the practical demonstration of the power the minister ...
— The Demand and the Supply of Increased Efficiency in the Negro Ministry - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 13 • Jesse E. Moorland
... an opportunity of enforcing the claims of the ceremonial law. Esther had a vivid picture flashed upon her of poor, yellow hook-shaped souls floating sullenly back ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... came on, picking his way through the dense cactus, which lacerated his legs, and sadly tore the remains of his loose canvas. The rain came down in torrents, the thunder growled and crashed as the tropical storm burst over the island; and just as a vivid sheet of forked lightning seemed to stride the crag, and the awful peal that followed shook it to its base, Captain Brand crept for shelter within the cleft of the rock, and sat down to prepare for ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... the monsoon was strongest, the few passengers she carried were not comfortable. On other days, when she found calm weather among the islands, it was very pleasant. She dropped anchor from time to time in little bays bordered with cocoanut tree, and from the bays emerged sampans with vivid painted eyes on their prows, seeking out the steamer and the bales of rice she carried, or the mails. The mails, consisting of half a dozen letters for each port, were tied up in big canvas sacks, sealed with big government seals, and the ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... the same discriminating force which so strongly marks their principals; and that in this manner almost every variety of station and interest, such as existed at the period under review, is successively brought before the mind of the reader in colours vivid as the original. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... strolling slowly toward them with bent head and brooding gaze. Justine's eye had retained a vivid image of the man with whom, scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a moment of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized at once his lean outline, and the keen spring of his features, still veiled by the same look of ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... whom the bloodstain preoccupied as much as it did Zoe, kept studying it in his own despite, as though in its gradual rosy disappearance he would read the number of men that passed. He secretly dreaded it and always stepped over it out of a vivid fear of crushing some live thing, some naked ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... in a voice which must, I thought, betray my emotion. The pirates cheered and welcomed me as a brother among them. At that instant a peal of thunder echoed along the rocks of the shore, and vivid lightning ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... nothing of masculine vigor and modeling; hands that wavered against the blackness, fumbling with the shining nickeled disk of a combination-lock.... The impression had been and remained one extraordinarily vivid. Could her eyes ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... so devout came no more to the church; she who had been so cheerful and companionable grew morose and sour and shut her doors against her friends. She was as one dead to her old world. The one bit of vivid life about her was her lasting hatred of the woman who bore her name. In vain the preacher sought to break down the barrier of her animosity. She had built it of adamant, and his was a losing fight. So for several years the feud went on, and those who had known ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... scheme. Just about the same moment that disclosed to the eyes of Lieutenant Lee the class ring gleaming on the finger of that nattily-dressed young civilian, his comrade, the dozing officer in charge, was started to his feet by a thunder-clap, a vivid flash that lighted up the whole area of barracks, and an explosion that rattled the plaster in the guard-house chimneys. One thing the commandant wouldn't stand was disorder after "taps," and, in ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... the only form in which ancient myths persist. Myths have played their prominent part in the history of religion for the reason that they embody the conception of the tangible supernatural in a vivid and dramatic way. To this personalization and socialization of the supernatural men have continued to cling up to the present time; the mass of men demand not only the presence of the supernatural as protection and ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... character of the thoughts and sights of Rome, "it must be observed," writes Ward, "that even the action of directly religious influences brought out his excessive impressionableness. His own inner life was as vivid a pageant to him as the history of the Church. He was liable at this time to the periods of spiritual exaltation—matched, as we shall see later on, by fits of intense despondency—which marked him ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... carefully along, I suddenly came in contact with an object, which a timely flash of lightning showed me was a column, standing in exactly the opposite direction from my own house. I could now locate myself correctly, and the lightning becoming every moment more vivid, I was enabled to grope my way by slow degrees to the mess, where I expected to find someone to show me my way home, but the servants, who knew from experience the probable effects of a cyclone, had already closed the outside Venetian shutters and barred all ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... connotes at the present day. He accomplishes this result partly through his power of suggesting the real unity of the inner and outer worlds, partly through his skill, resting in a large degree on vivid impressionistic description, in making strange scenes appear actual, in securing from the reader what he himself called 'that willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith.' Almost every one has felt the weird charm of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... to have anything so perfect of its kind as this brief and vivid story. It is doubly a success, being full of human sympathy, as ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... apartment, high above the street and overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades, became a veritable sanctuary from which she dreaded to emerge and to which she clung in a passion of self-preservation. The gray wall of stone across the sparkling stream grew to be, in her vivid fancy, the barrier between the past and future. Against it, unseen, faint, but persistent, beat what once had been—her grim father, her weak, tearful mother, lonely, kindly Master Farwell, and all the lesser ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... men who talk but seldom, he had the gift when he chose to speak of reproducing his experiences in vivid though unpolished language. He told her of the days when he had worked on the banks of the Congo with the coolies, a slave in everything but name, when the sun had burned the brains of men to madness, and the palm wine had turned them into howling devils. He told her of the ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the second thought which I desire to draw from these words. We have here, in a very picturesque and vivid form, the setting forth of the manner in which the Evangelist Zion is to proclaim ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... certain coincidences of qualities not essential to any kind, and sometimes prevailing amongst many different kinds: such as 'Insects of nauseous taste have vivid (warning) colours'; 'White tom-cats with blue eyes are deaf'; 'White spots and patches, when they appear in domestic animals, are most frequent on ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... minds to contemplate with calmness the horrible fate that they knew too well awaited them, while others seemed to forget themselves in their desire to comfort their companions. Among the timid ones was pretty little Ra-Ruth. Perhaps her vivid imagination enabled her to realise more powerfully the terrors of martyrdom. It may be that her delicately-strung nerves shrank more sensitively from the prospect, but in spite of her utmost efforts to be brave she trembled violently and was pale as death. ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... It is a vivid memory of my childhood that (amongst the box-edged gardens of a family of eight), that of my eldest brother was almost inconvenienced by the luck of his fingers. "Survival of the fittest" (if hardiest does mean fittest!) kept the others within bounds; but ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... multitude of things shelter themselves. The other day you told me that circumstances, too long to relate at that moment, had contributed to fix the image of which I was the reflection in your mind, where it has left a vivid memory; was not that ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... great capitalist who had anticipated the brilliant operations of the present time, he expiated his prosperity by poverty, imprisonment, and torture. The obscure points in his career have been elucidated by M. Clement, who has drawn, moreover, a very vivid picture of the corrupt and exhausted state of France during the middle of the fifteenth century. He has shown that the spoliation of the great merchant was a deliberately calculated act, and that the king sacrificed him without scruple or shame to the avidity of a ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James |
