"Fanciful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... notes present a point of view which ought to be known, if only for the purpose of showing the other side of the shield—and of checking, to some extent, the nursery tales in regard to personal atrocities, which become more fanciful the farther they are told from the scene of reported occurrence. After the horrible Lusitania crime and other evidences of German Schrecklichkeit for which there can be no justification, it is hard for Americans to reason fairly in questions involving Teutonic methods ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... that this prince could not escape Mayenne. Already a host of idle and credulous women had been at the pains of engaging windows, which they let very dear, and which they had fitted up magnificently, to see the passage of that fanciful triumph for which their mad hopes had caused them to make every preparation—before the victory." Henry left some of his lieutenants to carry on the war in the environs of Paris, and himself repaired, on ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... little fanciful," he said grudgingly; and then recognised frankly the justness of its application. "Yet it's true—a European changing into an Oriental! Yes, it just ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... and family, he abjured the world and went into exile, as he termed it. While we were in Smithland, Kentucky, to which place our father had been ordered from Nashville, he stopped with us on his way to the wilderness, and excited our childish admiration by his fanciful hunter's garb and the romance which surrounded him. I remember, too, that he begged a fine greyhound and a pointer from my brother, who gave them up, but not without a great struggle with himself, for he loved them,—little thinking then, dear boy, that this man, fantastically ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... idealize nature!" she said. "You make every object suggest something fanciful, beautiful, or entertaining. How have you ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... it was not particularly fanciful or costly;—no detriment to its beauty. But as to the beauty of these costumes depending on the beauty of the women who wear them, and their unsuitableness to the needs of women who are without beauty,—It is undeniably ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Cadillac seems to have so termed Villebon's fort because the Micmacs of eastern New Brunswick and Nova Scotia often made it a rendezvous; perhaps also it was a fanciful distinction by way of comparison with the Maliseet ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... in New England; but its internal economy was somewhat nautical, containing numerous "lockers" and "store-rooms." Its front gate-posts were composed of the two jaw-bones of an enormous whale; the fence was of a most fanciful Chinese pattern; and directly in front of the house was erected that never-failing ornament of a sailor's dwelling, a tall flag-staff, with cap, cross-trees, and topmast, complete; the last, always being kept "housed," except upon the 4th of July, 22d of February, &c. At the foot of the ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... and threw it on the floor. I picked it up, and may communicate it to you, for it contains no secrets." All the generals stretched out their hands. Constant handed the paper to Marshal Marmont. The sheet contained nothing but large capital letters, joined with fanciful flourishes. [Footnote: Constant, "Memoires," vol. v., p. 269.] The generals gazed at each other with bewildered eyes. Those capital letters, this work of a child, was the day's labor which the energetic emperor had performed! The letters, ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... prefixed to their edition of the Sturlunga Saga, Oxford). The case for Norway and Greenland is argued by Dr. Finnur Jonsson (Den oldnorsk og oldislandske Literaturs-Historie, Copenhagen). The cases for both British and Norwegian origin are based chiefly on rather fanciful arguments from supposed local colour. The theory of the Corpus Poeticum editors that many of the poems were composed in the Scottish isles is discredited by the absence of Gaelic words or traces of Gaelic legend. Professor Bugge's North of England theory is slightly ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... and more heroic proportions, but also loses in distinctness of outline and feature. This is indeed the common lot of popular heroes; but the Lincoln legend will be more than ordinarily apt to become fanciful, as his individuality, assembling seemingly incongruous qualities and forces in a character at the same time grand and most lovable, was so unique, and his career so abounding in startling contrasts. As the state of society in which Abraham Lincoln grew up passes away, the world will read with ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... Sir Thomas himself, poor blinkered creature, was full of the most aristocratical and wealthy fancies, and only yearned to inspect the acres of his future honourable grand-children. He was, from these fanciful causes, unusually affable and indulgent to Maria; spoke so kindly always that she was all but dissolving thrice a-day; and, from his constant reveries about the countess, appeared perpetually to be brooding over dear ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... mare under an arch of scarlet leaves which curved over her head. Turning at their approach, she started at a brisk canter up the road, and as Virginia followed her, the sound of the horn floated, now loud, now faint, out of the pale mist that spun fanciful silken webs over ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... condition to your cousin and your grandfather. Your lucid period in the woods just before you reached the deserted house and went to sleep showed that your exercise was overcoming the effect of the drug. That moment, you'll remember, was coloured by the fanciful ideas such a ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... Gloucestershire? His additions to Sir Robert Atkyns make it the most sensible history of a county that we have had yet; for his descriptions of the scite, soil, products, and prospects of each parish are extremely good and picturesque; and he treats fanciful prejudices, and Saxon etymologies, when unfounded, and traditions, with ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... manuscript of 'Peter Wilkins,' by the author, 'Robert Pultock of Clement's Inn' to Dodsley, was discovered. From this document it appears that Mr. Pultock received twenty pounds, twelve copies of the work, and 'the cuts of the first impression,' that is, a set of proof impressions of the fanciful engravings that professed to illustrate the first edition, as the price of the entire copyright. This curious document was sold to John Wilks, Esq., M.P. on the 17th ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... A fanciful man once called himself the Emperor of the Sahara: the German Kaiser has stolen into a fair land and holds with weakening hands a land of craters and weed, and wire and wild cabbages and old ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... later portions, rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with rusticated work at the corners, and, on the blank spaces between the windows, quaint allegorical frescoes, faded, half washed-out. And then there were entirely modern-looking portions, of gleaming marble, with numberless fanciful carvings, spires, pinnacles, reliefs—wonderfully light, gay, habitable, and (Peter thought) beautiful, in the clear Italian atmosphere, against the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... when the winds came booming over the lake. As if too eager to permit anything within their fangs to escape, they brought with them a wild, dull light, which filled while it clouded the atmosphere, and which, it was scarcely fanciful to imagine, had been hurried down, in their vortex, from those chill glaciers, where they had so long been condensing their forces for the present descent. The waves were not increased, but depressed by the pressure of this atmospheric column, though it took up hogshead, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... narrating the foundation of each separate colony, render any substantial novelty of plan in a history of the United States impossible, except upon some scheme where fitness should be sacrificed to fanciful strangeness. Mr. Hildreth has judiciously refrained from attempting any thing of the kind: but perhaps he has pushed the mere chronological arrangement to an excess, and given undue prominence to the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... gave to those figures. Of these there are some drawings in our book, done in red chalk by his hand, with some very beautiful borders of little boys, and other borders drawn in that work by way of ornament, with various fanciful scenes of sacrifices in the ancient manner. And in truth, if Antonio had not brought his works to that perfection which is seen in them, his drawings (although they show excellence of manner, and the charm and practised ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... Nilakantha as 'I stand near these distressed brothers of mine' (for whose sake only I am for accepting sovereignty). This is certainly very fanciful. The plain meaning is, 'I am about to lay down ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... question of literary immortality, it is easy to recognise that the literary reputation of Robert Louis Stevenson is made of good stuff. His fame has spread, as lasting fame is wont to do, from the few to the many. Fifteen years ago his essays and fanciful books of travel were treasured by a small and discerning company of admirers; long before he chanced to fell the British public with Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde he had shown himself ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... Hymnorum (in the Franciscan Monastery, Dublin) contains a number of hymns associated with the names of Irish saints. The ornamentation consists of colored initials, designed with a striking use of fanciful animal figures interlaced and twined with delightful freedom around the main ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... called "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," was a woman of rare gifts. The chief poem known to be hers is called Our Saviour's Passion. It is full of the faults of the age. Sir Philip's sport with words is so graceful and ordered as to subserve the utterance of the thought: his sister's fanciful convolutions appear to be there for their own sake—certainly are there to the obscuration of the sense. The difficulty of the poem arises in part, I believe, from corruption, but chiefly from a certain fantastic way of dealing with thought as well as word of which I ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... death-watch, our snails, and many other insects, have all been the subjects of man's fears, but the dread excited in England by the appearance, noises, or increase of insects, are petty apprehensions compared with the horror that the presence of this Acherontia occasions to some of the more fanciful and superstitious natives of northern Europe, maintainers of the wildest conceptions. A letter is now before me from a correspondent in German Poland, where this insect is a common creature, and so abounded in 1824 that my informant collected fifty of them ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... your contemporaries had cultivated the subject of animal magnetism. It had occurred to me as just conceivable that you might be in a trance, and that the secret of your bodily integrity after so long a time was not the craft of an embalmer, but life. So extremely fanciful did this idea seem, even to me, that I did not risk the ridicule of my fellow physicians by mentioning it, but gave some other reason for postponing their experiments. No sooner, however, had they left me, than I set on foot a systematic attempt at resuscitation, of which ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... a trifle fanciful. But romance gathers round an old story like lichen on an old branch. And the story of Martin Pippin in the Apple-Orchard is so old now—some say a year old, some say even two. How can the ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... difficulty encountered by the politicians of that day seems to have been purely fanciful. Strictly speaking, the government did not have a policy. It went into operation with the impression that it would be persistently resisted, that its success was doubtful, and that any considerable popular disaffection ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... Socrates, that he must be a good orator because he had learnt of Aspasia, is not coarse, as Schleiermacher supposes, but is rather to be regarded as fanciful. Nor can we say that the offer of Socrates to dance naked out of love for Menexenus, is any more un-Platonic than the threat of physical force which Phaedrus uses towards Socrates. Nor is there any real vulgarity in the fear which Socrates expresses that he will get a beating from his mistress, ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... "and, behold it was a dream." But it was not one of those fanciful dreams, that come and go, and mean nothing. It was a dream from God, a great reality, as he was ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... her head toward the strange lady. "There is little to tell," said Bero, in a quiet tone. "Her brother is well known in Rome as an artist. He lives there with his sister and an old duenna. She wears this mysterious veil constantly, and some fanciful people see just as mysterious a cloud resting about her life. I only know she is strange and beautiful, and that her ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... Learned men have found it exceedingly difficult to give anything like an intelligible account of the Trinity of the Athenian philosopher, [457:1] and it seems to have had only a metaphysical existence. It certainly had nothing more than a fanciful and verbal resemblance to the Trinity of Christianity. Had the doctrine of the Church been derived from the writings of the Grecian sage, it would not have been inculcated with so much zeal and unanimity by the early fathers. Some of them were bitterly opposed to Platonism, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Convent, except upon circumstances as urgent as that which has conducted me to your door, I should be frequently summoned upon insignificant occasions: That time would be engrossed by the Curious, the Unoccupied, and the fanciful, which I now pass at the Bedside of the Sick, in comforting the expiring Penitent, and clearing the passage to Eternity ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the recent storms of tribulation which have beat upon those fairy islands of fashion may scatter this frail and fanciful population, and send them by shiploads on missions of civilization to our shores; in which case, the bustle and animation and the brilliant display on the old turnpike, spoken of familiarly as the "broad road," will ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was planted at Baltimore the first American congregation of that organization of disciples of Emanuel Swedenborg which had been begun in London nine years before and called by the appropriately fanciful name of "the Church of the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... if any, of heraldic blazonry. Though repudiated and unrecognised by the strict herald, they are now generally considered to be the particular property and distinguishing ensign of certain surnames and families, and as hereditary as the quaint and fanciful charges and quarterings ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... real Atman and the real external objects. This (error) may be compared with one diseased[FN363] in the eye, who imagines that he sees various things (floating in the air) on account of his illness; or with a dreamer[FN364] whose fanciful thoughts assume various forms of external objects, and present themselves before him. While in the dream he fancies that there exist external objects in reality, but on awakening he finds that they are nothing other than the transformation of ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... extravagantly, jealously. But she would have none of the plain or biblical names her husband suggested. She laughed at them with her bright humor and made merry amusement over them, calling the child by endearing and fanciful appellations. To-day she was one kind of a flower, to-morrow another, and Rosebud a great deal of ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... difficulty. Plato was no doubt satirising the misuse of the new philosophy which was becoming so popular with young men. When nothing means anything, laughter is the only human language left. The Cratylus is a similarly conceived diversion. Most of it is occupied with fanciful derivations and linguistic discussions of all kinds. It is difficult to say how far Plato is serious. Perhaps the feats of Euthydemus in stripping words of all meaning urged him to some constructive work—for Plato's system is essentially ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... circles round it—-without ever being observed to alight on the water. and continues its flight, apparently untired, in tempestuous as well as in moderate weather. It has even been said to sleep on the wing, and Moore alludes to this fanciful "cloud-rocked slumbering'' in his Fire Worshippers. It feeds on small fish and on the animal refuse that floats on the sea, eating to such excess at times that it is unable to fiy and rests helplessly on the water. The colour of the bird is white, the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... marred the sanded paths where pebbles and seashells lay in fanciful designs. Every window shutter was tightly closed as though air and sunshine were poison, and the massive front doors were never opened except on the occasion of a wedding, ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... A jutting cape, which, when the Northmen spied, A fanciful resemblance they descried To human features; so they gave a name To mark that cape, and ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... confess, in that first tumult of my thoughts, there appeared a disorderly kind of beauty in some of them; which gave me hope, something worthy of my Lord of ORRERY might be drawn from them: but I was then, in that eagerness of Imagination, which, by over pleasing Fanciful Men, flatters them into the danger of writing; so that, when I had moulded it to that shape it now bears, I looked with such disgust upon it, that the censures of our severest critics are charitable to what I thought, and ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... the moon and saw in it a face, a woman's face. She began to scorn the country in the fanciful intoxication of the drug. That face swung in the sky; then it sang, it sang with a well-known ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... twenty, had entered their dining-room together and seen me standing leaning against the mantel-shelf. They were both hard-headed Scotchmen engaged in business in Edinburgh, and certainly not the sort of people to conjure up fanciful imaginings, nor is it likely that the same fancy should have occurred to both of them; and therefore I can only suppose that they actually saw what they said they did. Now I myself was in London at the time of this appearance in Edinburgh, of which I had no consciousness whatever; ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... awe described in the market reports as 'firm' or 'weak,' 'receding' or 'steady') it forms the main or only export of many Oceanic islands, and is largely imported into this realm of England, where the thicker portion is called stearine, and used for making sundry candles with fanciful names, while the clear oil is employed for burning in ordinary lamps. In the process of purification, it yields glycerine; and it enters largely into the manufacture of most better-class soaps. The fibre that surrounds the nut makes up the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... vignettes everywhere grouped round the mighty central triumph of the adventures of Piper Steenie,—who but Scott has done such things? He never put so much again in a single book. There is something in it which it is hardly fanciful to take as a 'note of finishing,' as the last piece of the work, that, gigantic as it was, was not exactly collar work, not sheer hewing of wood and drawing of water for the taskmasters. And it was fitting that the book, so varied, so fresh, so gracious and kindly, so magnificent in part, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... what you'd call a fanciful sort of person," went on Sir John, with obvious veracity. "Regular habits—rise early and to bed early; never a day's trouble with my digestion; off to sleep as soon as my head touches the pillow. You can't call my dream a nightmare, and yet ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... he can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as the most probable particular explication. Call that fanciful,—it matters not; the connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... corrupting influence on the purity of the Mosaic doctrines, and on the laws. The original writings discovered by Hilkiah, were retrenched, added to, and the order of the events displaced. From the long residence amongst, and a great intercourse with strange people, all the frightful prejudices, all the fanciful dreams of our rabbins, were introduced into the sacred books. We learn from the second book of Chronicles, chap. xxxvi. verse 17, "that the king slew the young men with the sword in the house of the sanctuary, and had no compassion upon young man or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... is now-a-days a strong feeling among some persons about capital punishment; that there are those who will move heaven and earth to interfere with the course of justice, and beg off the worst of murderers, on any grounds, however unreasonable, fanciful, even unfair; simply because they have a dislike to human beings being hanged. I believe, from long consideration, that these persons' strange dislike proceeds from their not believing sufficiently that man ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... with beaux and admirers. I have, in vain, endeavored to escape from their fascinating diplomas, but they have followed me, and continued to prosecute me with their adorous intentions. None of them could ever touch my fanciful disposition, which has exalted an intrinsic and lofty beau—idle to itself. I always had to reply, when they got down upon their knees to me, and squeezed my hands, that I could not force my sensations; ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... are stories in verse about historic events, falsified and fanciful, and love tragedies full of wonderful events mixed with divine prodigies and diabolical magics—all lengthy, exaggerated, puerile, and absurd in the extreme. None of the characters is native. All are Turks, Arabs, knights, errants, ambassadors, ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... glassy water had merely started into being a slight, fanciful curiosity. The women of that coast did not commonly swim at dusk in their bays; such simplicity obtained now only in the reaches of the highest civilization. There were, he knew, no hunting camps here, and the local ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... leaves rose graduated alabaster columns, the inner stalks of the banana-plants, and on them were fastened flowers and ornaments, fanciful creations of the hands of Tahitian women, fashioned of brilliant leaves and of bamboo-fiber and the glossy white arrowroot-fiber. From the top of each column floated the silken film of the snowy reva-reva, the exquisite component of the interior of young cocoa-palm-leaves, a ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... suspended. This has been long observed by, and passes for a settled point amongst Seamen. The Reason of it however cannot be so easily assigned, at least a satisfactory Reason, for as to Suppositions, every fanciful Man can furnish them ...
— The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years' Experience • John Claridge
... fatness and warm ferments of the Var Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate. The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by their surroundings. July passed over their heads and the weather which came in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state of hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... has often been made to carry the origin of the electric telegraph back to a very remote epoch by a reliance on those more or less fanciful descriptions of modes of communication based upon the properties ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... the mess-room with a feeling that it was a dream,—so bright, so beautiful a day,—we so well, so late from land, and so near to death! "Bah!" I said to myself. "They are fanciful; the cliffs are still a couple of miles away, and something will come to avert the wreck." I went down to the stateroom; Laura and the boy were unable to raise their heads from extreme sea-sickness, but baby Lisa was swinging on the edge of her berth, delighted with the motion, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... and stupid, this corrupted and despised convict, has merited his fate. But what shall he then deserve who, intelligent, rich, educated, surrounded by the esteem of all, clothed with an official character, will steal—not to eat, but to satisfy some fanciful caprice, or to try the chance of stock-jobbing? Will steal, not a hundred francs, but a hundred thousand francs—a million? Will steal, not at night, at the peril of his life, but tranquilly, quite at his ease, in the sight of all? Will steal, not from an unknown who has ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... looking-glass as he wrote; and as for Charles Lamb, do not suppose that he did anything but hide in his clouds of ink. Sir Sidney Colvin thinks that Keats revealed himself in his letters, but I cannot agree with him. Keats is one of the best letter-writers we have; he can be merry, fanciful, witty, thoughtful, even profound. He has a sardonic turn of language hardly to be equalled outside Shakespeare. "Were it in my device, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation—on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers?" Where will you match that ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... "Don't be fanciful, Miss Saunders. You will have to look deeper than that for the spell which has been cast over my wife. Olympia afraid of creaks and groans? Olympia seeing sights? She's much too practical by nature, Miss Saunders, to say nothing of the ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... many-jointed, thick rootstock a single graceful curved stem arises each spring, withers after fruiting, and leaves a round scar, whose outlines suggested to the fanciful man who named the genus the seal of Israel's wise king. Thus one may know the age of a root by its seals, as one tells that of a tree by the ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... conventional—are his strength, though they also imply his weakness. Fielding, in fact, is the ideal John Bull; the 'good buffalo,' as Taine calls him, the big, full-blooded, vigorous mass of roast-beef who will stand no nonsense, and whose contempt for the fanciful and arbitrary tends towards the coarse and materialistic. That corresponds to the contrast between Richardson and Fielding; and may help to explain why the sentimentalism which Fielding despised yet ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... Involuntarily you compared yourself with the swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and metaphysical, for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he extended to your garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He would trim a hedge, throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile section of the garden with a vegetable that ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... does he now exist? Is this gentle and lovely being lost forever? Has this mind, so replete with ideas, imaginations fanciful and magnificent, which formed a world, whose existence depended on the life of its creator;—has this mind perished? Does it now only exist in my memory? No, it is not thus; your form so divinely wrought, and beaming with beauty, has decayed, but your spirit ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... battle. Chopin always shrank from the display of his powers as a mere executant. To exhibit his talents to the public was an offense to him, and he only cared for his remarkable technical skill as a means of placing his fanciful original poems in tone rightly before the public. It was with the greatest difficulty that his intimate friends, Liszt, Meyerbeer, Nourrit, Delacroix, Heine, Mme. George Sand, Countess D'Agoult, and others, could persuade him ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... extraordinary physical strength and extraordinary moral weakness, whose patriotic virtues and pathetic end have kept his memory alive through the ages? Have a hundred generations of men to whom the story of Herakles has appeared to be only a fanciful romance, the product of that imagination heightened by religion which led the Greeks to exalt their supreme heroes to the extent of deification, persisted in hearing and telling the story of Samson with a sympathetic interest which betrays at least a sub-conscious belief in ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... long a time I never got any closer than that. It was very hard, I thought, with the land so near to me now, and I unable to reach it, strive how I may! Perhaps, I fancied, those trees are a mere fanciful dream like the fairy-like mirage of the desert that tortures poor lost wanderers with pictures of cool lakes and rivers, while they are really in the middle of burning sandy plains. I began to doubt ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... our imagination as by our judgment. Hence some great characters have come down to us spotted with the taints of indelible wit; and a satirist of this class, sporting with distant resemblances and fanciful analogies, has made the fictitious accompany for ever the real character. Piqued with Akenside for some reflections against Scotland, Smollett has exhibited a man of great genius and virtue as a most ludicrous personage; and who can discriminate, in the ridiculous physician in "Peregrine ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... am fanciful. Do not heed what I have said. But such crimes are surely not common in Florence? I have always heard my father and godfather say so. Have they ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... forth a savory odor. And here and there, wistfully regarding this active scene, amid the green shrubbery, stands a sentinel before his sentry-box, built of spruce boughs, wrought into a mimic military temple, and fanciful enough, too, for a garden of roses. And look you now! If here be not Die Vernon, with "habit, hat, and feather," cantering gayly down the road between the tents, and behind her a stately groom in gold-lace band, top-boots, and buck-skins. ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... on a par with the ordinary medium. He was unquestionably a man of gigantic intellect, and he was unquestionably inspired, if by inspiration be understood the gift of combining subliminal with supraliminal powers to a degree granted to few of those whom the world counts truly great. If his fanciful and fantastic pictures of life in heaven and hell and in our neighboring planets welled up from the depths of his inmost mind, far more did the noble truths to which he gave expression. It is by these he should be judged; it ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... the dispute to that sad issue of a final separation. The establishment would have been well content to stop short of that consummation: and temperaments might have been found, compromises both safe and honourable, had the minority built less of their reversionary hopes upon the policy of a fanciful martyrdom. Martyrs they insisted upon becoming: and that they might be martyrs, it was necessary for them to secede. That Europe thinks at present with less reverence of Protestant institutions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... good repute, A. Fornander, chief of them, are severe with Captain Cook on account of his alleged greed, not paying enough for the red feathers woven into fanciful forms. Perhaps that is a common fault in the transactions of civilized men with barbarians. William Penn is the only man with a great reputation for dealing fairly with American Red Men, and he was not impoverished by it. Cook ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... must never tread! They are for men, and symbolical of manly virtues. There are dolls of all sizes, and a play travois leans against the white wall of the miniature lodge. Even the pet pup is called in to complete the fanciful home of the ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... began to ask one another in what guise the Maid should travel; for it was obvious that her cumbrous peasant garb was little suited for the work she had in hand, and we made many fanciful plans of robing her after the fashion of some old-time queen, such as Boadicea or Semiramis, and wondered whether we could afford to purchase some rich clothing and a noble charger, and so convey her to the King in something ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Baron Ricasoli, and had a long and most interesting conversation with him as to the conditions—of course political—on which he would consent to support Italian unity. These must have been done in pure levity; they were imaginative excursions, thrown off in the spirit of those fanciful variations great violinists will now and then indulge in, as though to say, "Is there a path too intricate for me to thread, is there a pinnacle too fine for me to ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... Pitt commenced it by describing the execution of the King of France as an event which outraged every sentiment of religion, justice, and humanity; and as the effect of principles which started by dissolving all the bonds of society, and which, relying on fanciful theories, rejected not only the experience of past ages, but likewise the sacred instructions of revelation. Pitt stated that the British government had from the commencement adopted a system of neutrality; that they had declined taking any part ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... very usual thing for fanciful theories to have their turn amidst the eccentricities of the human mind, and then to be heard of no more. But it is perhaps no ill occupation, now and then, for an impartial observer, to analyse these theories, and attempt to blow away ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... regarded as a fanciful figure: it is not a nebulous hope which is to be realised at some indefinitely remote period, thousands of years hence; nor is it a new species (in the Darwinian sense) of which we can know nothing, and which it would therefore be ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... her little black notebook to record these things, however. Instead, she picked up a number of the London Magazine and looked at the title of an article pencil-marked on the pale green cover. It was Janet Cardiff's article, and Lady Halifax had marked it. Elfrida had read it before. It was a fanciful recreation of the conditions of verse-making when Herrick wrote, very pleasurably ironical in its bearing upon more modern poetry-making. It had quite deserved the praise she gave it in the corner which the Age reserved for magazines. "I want you to understand," she said slowly, "that ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... artist with intellectual curiosity; and just as he lacked the depth of a philosopher so he wanted the vision of a poet. That he possessed genius will not be denied; but his art is fanciful rather than imaginative and of creative power he had next to none. His life was neither a mission nor a miracle. But he was blessed with that keen delight in his own sensations which makes a world full of beautiful and amusing things, charming people, wine, and warm sunshine seem, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... lines of her swan-like neck are fully displayed in all their splendor. Her form is lithe and supple, and its graceful contour is modestly marked by a snowy dress. As she lifts her head and gazes at the sky, a poet might easily fancy her to be some fanciful "being of the air," and convert her into the fairy ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... general interest; and they are composed in a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness checkered by gleams of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched with cross-lights of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described, whether men, or things, or usages; and in the rear of all this, the constant recurrence to ancient recollections ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the essential fact is that the science, the value, and the possibilities of flight have been proved in a thousand different ways. Vistas of travel and experience have been opened up which but a few months ago would have seemed fanciful. Everywhere men are dreaming dreams of the future which challenge one's deepest imagination. Already Caproni, the great Italian inventor, has signed a contract to carry mails from Genoa ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... was content to omit facts with which the Christians around him were well acquainted, than by the hypothesis that he was a spiritualistic writer of the 2nd century who wished to make his Gospel fit some fanciful theory of his own. In fact, the latter hypothesis has proved a signal failure. The critics who say that the writer omitted the story of our Lord's painful temptation as incompatible with the majesty of the Divine Word, may be asked {31} why the writer gives no fuller account of ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... is a deeper thought here. I wonder if it is fanciful to see in the text one of the very numerous allusions in this epistle to the events in our Lord's Passion. You remember that Jesus laid aside His garments, and took a towel, and girded Himself, and washed the disciples' feet, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... paid," returning the other way with a thousand dollars; coming again to the manager with: "Madame has one slipper on, but will not put on the other till she has her fee"—and so on. Doubtless apocryphal and yet only a bit fanciful and exaggerated. Yet it was known in the inner operatic circles in 1885 that Colonel Mapleson had succeeded in getting himself pretty deeply into her debt. How he did it the anecdotes of the reception and Mme. Patti's interview serve to indicate. In sooth, the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... put back the notes at once, without a second glance at them, and then sat looking thoughtfully at the lock of hair as it lay on her lap. "You are better than nothing," she said, speaking to it with a girl's fanciful tenderness. "I can sit and look at you sometimes, till I almost think I am looking at Frank. Oh, my darling! my darling!" Her voice faltered softly, and she put the lock of hair, with a languid gentleness, to her lips. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... of noble feeling, my poor Perdita (for this was the fanciful name my sister had received from her dying parent), was not altogether saintly in her disposition. Her manners were cold and repulsive. If she had been nurtured by those who had regarded her with affection, she might have been different; but unloved and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... this delicate nature we ought to avoid two opposite extremes. If we indulge a fanciful imagination, and build worlds of our own, we must not wonder at our going wide from the path of truth and nature. On the other hand, if we add observation to observation without attempting to draw not only certain conclusions but also ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... workers, and make their individual character the guide, and not the slave, of this machinery. Such a direction is already indicated by one of our few original and popular forms of art: the picture-book and the poster, which, by the new processes of our colour printing, have placed some of the most fanciful and delicate of our artists—men like Caldecott and Walter Crane, like Cheret and Boutet de Monvel, at the service of everyone equally. Moreover, it is probable that long before machinery is so perfected as to demand individual guidance, preference and therefore ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... passage of the parson was hailed by a grumbling undertone of blasphemy. It was considered fashionable to grunt when the hammer came in contact with the stone, and under cover of this mock exclamation of fatigue, it was convenient to launch an oath. A fanciful visitor, seeing the irregularly rising hammers along the line, might have likened the shed to the interior of some vast piano, whose notes an unseen hand was erratically fingering. Rufus Dawes was seated last on the line—his back to the cells, his face ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... romantic things to be found among help-wanted "ads" as there are in the most romantic romances. Now, lest it may be thought that some of the help-wanted "ads" which I have written right out of my head to illustrate the type of each are somewhat fanciful, I will copy out of yesterday's paper an advertisement which "Robinson Crusoe" hasn't anything on, to put it ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... very comfortably, I assure you, uncle Oliver," Clarissa replied. "No one was in the least rude or unpleasant. And I am so glad to come home—I can scarcely tell you how glad—though, as I came nearer and nearer, I began to have all kinds of fanciful anxieties. I hope that all is well—that ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... begging? And yet the description which I have read is a description of England, by Sir Thomas More—a description of the England of his day.[200] And lest it should be considered highly coloured or fanciful, let it be recollected that there are accounts written by magistrates, in which it is stated that in every county there were 200 or 300 persons who lived by thieving—who went about, say the contemporary chroniclers, by sixty at a time—who ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... That nothing might mar the harmony of this fete, the prince and his wife had placed themselves on an equal footing with their guests; the princess had declined any conspicuous role, and was to appear in the simple but charming costume of a wood-nymph, while the prince had selected an ideal and fanciful hunter's costume. Even in the selection of huts the Princess Wilhelmina had refused to make any choice, and had drawn her number as the others did, even refusing a glimpse of it ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... a Hope That lighted my days with a fanciful glow, In her hand is the rope That strangled her life out. Hope ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... fanciful mood, Inspired by the time and the solitude, The Lady Lorraine, In whimsical vein, Said, "On Christmas eve, 'neath this mistletoe bough, I'll solemnly make an immutable vow." With a glance at the portraits that hung on the wall, She said, "I adjure ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... were soon thronging in. By half-past eight the performers were all in the back parlor, and there was a brilliant army of actors and actresses in varied and fanciful costume, many coming to the house dressed for their parts. There were gods and goddesses, shepherds and shepherdesses, angels, crusaders, who would take leave of languishing ladies, living statuary, and tableaux of all sorts. Dennis was much shocked at the manner in which ladies exposed ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... I determined to write some fairy tales because my mind was full of them. I set to work, and in course of time produced several which were printed. These were constructed according to my own ideas. I caused the fanciful creatures who inhabited the world of fairy-land to act, as far as possible for them to do so, as if they were inhabitants of the real world. I did not dispense with monsters and enchanters, or talking beasts and birds, but I obliged these creatures ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... tenth of the Muses, To Mirth rears a fanciful dome, We mark, while delight she infuses, The Graces find beauty at home. In her eye such vivacity glitters, To her voice such perfections belong, That care and the life it embitters, Find balm in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... a cave such as one might read of in a story of fanciful adventure. It is in a rock beside the Dordogne, where, the river rests in a deep pool. The entrance is under water, and it can only be reached with safety by a good diver when, the sun shining at a certain hour, and the light striking in a particular way, the passage into the cavern is ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... oaks; with it was mingled the scent of a bird; and a white feather, caught by a puff of wind, fluttered in the grass: young Reynard, boldest of an early family in the "earth," had stolen a fowl from a neighbouring farmyard near the river, and had carried it—not slung over his shoulders, as fanciful writers declare, but with its tail almost touching the soil—into the thicket beyond the wood. Rabbits had wandered in the undergrowth; and, near a large warren, the stale, peculiar odour of a stoat that had evidently prowled ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... feats in the combats of half a century ago, that we associate with the cavalry only ideas of splendor and glory, of wild freedom and dashing gallantry. But the cavalry service is far different from such vague and fanciful imaginations. Instead of ease, there is constant labor; instead of freedom, there is a difficult system of discipline and tactics; and instead of frequent opportunities for glorious charges, there is a constant routine of toilsome duty in scouting ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Grattan was a disappointed man—disappointed not so much because his proposals were not adopted, as because his own followers were slipping away from him. They had begun to realize that he was an orator but not a statesman; his ideas were wild, fanciful dreams. Whilst vehemently upholding the English connection he was playing into the hands of England's opponents by reminding them that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity; whilst hating the very idea of a Union, he was making the existing system impossible by preventing ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... uniformity does not proceed from an opinion, that particular combinations of letters have much influence on human happiness; or that truth may not be successfully taught by modes of spelling fanciful and erroneous: I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... of letters of larger sizes to mark these divisions. These, especially the paragraph initials, afforded an endless field for his ingenuity and the exercise of his artistic ability. A great initial letter might be made in any fanciful shape of which he could think. It might become a part of a beautifully executed miniature. It might be surrounded by a mass of gorgeous ornamentation extending to the bottom or the other margin ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... said Eliza. "I always was fanciful from a child dreaming of the pearly gates and them little angels with nothing on only their heads and wings so cheap to dress, I always think, compared ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... with the plan eagerly and one of them agreed to pay the expenses of a hall any time we wished to use one for campaign purposes. At first our efforts passed unnoticed by either political party. It was thought to be just another fanciful civic dream. We were glad of it. It gave us time to perfect our organization ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... the dexterous contrivances of Rascal, succeeded in doing wonders in the trifling space of time. It is really astonishing how richly and beautifully everything was arranged in so short a period. Such pomp and superfluity were exhibited there, and the richly-fanciful illuminations were so admirably managed, that I felt quite at ease; I had nothing to find fault with, and I could not but praise the diligence ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... history is full of the errors of states and princes.... The best public measures are seldom adopted from previous wisdom but forc'd by the occasion." But this sketch of what might have been sounds over-fanciful, and the English were probably right in thinking that a strong military union, with home taxation, involved more of danger than of safety for the future connection between the colonies ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... the night to that beautiful Ally Hook," grumbled Master Cheese. "It's a shame, sir, folks are saying, for him to give his time to her. I had to leave my warm bed and march out to that fanciful Mother Ellis, through it, who's always getting the spasms. And I had about forty poor here this morning, and couldn't get a bit of comfortable breakfast for 'em. Miss Deb, she never kept my bacon warm, or anything; and somebody had eaten the meat out of ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... houses! Why! They are stone-faced, white as a curd; there's something to take the eye! Houses in four straight lines, not a single front awry; You watch who crosses and gossips, who saunters, who hurries by; Green blinds, as a matter of course, to draw when the sun gets high; And the shops with fanciful ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... take the lead it will inevitably destroy the poetical—which lies at the exact medium between the ideal and the sensible. But man is so constituted that he is ever impatient to pass from what is fanciful to what is common; and reflection must, therefore, have its place even in tragedy. But to merit this place it must, by means of delivery, recover what it wants in actual life; for if the two elements of poetry, the ideal and the sensible, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... The abolitionists, on the contrary, think that slavery is from hell—that slaveholders are the worst of robbers—and that their slaves are the wretched victims of unsurpassed cruelties. Now, how do abolitionists propose to settle the points at issue?—by fanciful pictures of the abominations of slavery to countervail the like pictures of its blessedness?—by mere assertions against slavery, to balance mere assertions in its favor? No—but by the perfectly reasonable and fair means of examining slavery ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Jaggers would be found to be "at," I replied in the affirmative. We dived into the City, and came up in a crowded police-court, where a blood-relation (in the murderous sense) of the deceased, with the fanciful taste in brooches, was standing at the bar, uncomfortably chewing something; while my guardian had a woman under examination or cross-examination,—I don't know which,—and was striking her, and the bench, and everybody present, with awe. If anybody, of whatsoever ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... for any person who had long resided in New Andalusia, or in Lower Peru, to deny that there exists some connection between these phenomena: in another part, however he seems to think the connection fanciful. At Guayaquil it is said that a heavy shower in the dry season is invariably followed by an earthquake. In Northern Chile, from the extreme infrequency of rain, or even of weather foreboding rain, the probability of accidental coincidences becomes ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... disguised that what to the ordinary mortal are unexpected dangers, temptations and enemies also beset the way of the neophyte. And that for no fanciful cause, but the simple reason that he is, in fact, acquiring new senses, has yet no practice in their use, and has never before seen the things he sees. A man born blind suddenly endowed with vision would not at once master the meaning of perspective, but ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... years, for obeying God, only solaced with his Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs. Yet he made discoveries relative to the creation, which have been very recently again published by a learned philosopher, who surprised and puzzled the world with his vestiges of creation. Omitting the fanciful theories of the vestige philosopher, his two great facts, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... manner of the Queen Anne men, and Hazlitt is always best when he imitates nobody. "Hot and Cold" (which might have been more intelligibly called "North and South") is distinctly curious, bringing out again what may be called Hazlitt's fanciful observation; and it may generally be said that, however alarming and however suggestive of commonplace the titles "On Respectable People," "On People of Sense," "On Novelty and Familiarity," may be, Hazlitt may almost invariably be trusted ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury |
