"Imagination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... half impatiently as he went back across the rocks. He had sometimes been puzzled, and sometimes amused, by Agatha's confidence, and now Drummond, who had given him no help so far, talked about an elusive clue. It looked as if both allowed their imagination too much rein, and trusted to vague feelings instead of their reasoning powers. Give him a compass bearing, or a definite base-line to calculate an angle from, and he would engage to take the party ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... moment after a long thin body came creeping out from the herbage. But it was neither weasel nor stoat, but a very large snake, which came right across the open space they were in—making Fred turn quite pale, for his imagination immediately whispered to him of poison fangs, rattlesnakes, cobras, and all sorts of venomous brutes. But the snake had no idea of touching the intruders on the silence of the forest, but made directly for a spot upon the ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... this is Tuesday, and yet I have not heard a word from him. God have mercy on me! a poor d—mned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool! The sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing sensibility, and ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... suitable to the divine Being, from whose bounty it is that these creatures have derived their lives, to take pleasure in their deaths, or the offering up their blood. They burn incense and other sweet odours, and have a great number of wax lights during their worship; not out of any imagination that such oblations can add anything to the divine Nature, which even prayers cannot do; but as it is a harmless and pure way of worshipping God, so they think those sweet savours and lights, together with some other ceremonies, by a secret and unaccountable ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... to own, the main struggle for the Charter was over. Justice and good government were secured. The personal despotism which John had striven to build up, the imperial autocracy which had haunted the imagination of Henry the Third, were alike set aside. The rule of Edward, vigorous and effective as it was, was a rule of law, and of law enacted not by the royal will, but by the common council of the realm. Never had English ruler reached a greater height of power, nor was there any sign to warn the king ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... and food, or lie down to die. He fell down now, often; stumbling over the slightest obstacle. He had passed the cattle pastures; he was among the black-faced sheep; and they, too, ceased nibbling, and looked after him, and somehow, in his poor wandering imagination, their silly faces turned to likenesses of Monkshaven people—people who ought to be far, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... to put oneself in the place of another is very good training for the imagination. It also teaches us to be more kind to others and to all living creatures. We learn that most persons are striving to do better and to be better, and we grow in understanding ...
— Dramatic Reader for Lower Grades • Florence Holbrook
... those very first days together, isolated in their eyrie of the mountains, Hermione had let herself go—as she herself would have said. In her perfect happiness she felt that her mind was on fire because her heart was at peace. Wakeful, but not anxious, love woke imagination. The stirring of spring in this delicious land stirred all her eager faculties, and almost as naturally as a bird pours forth its treasure of music she poured forth her treasure, not only of love but of thought. For in such ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... matters worse. Designed as security for the planters, it proved a powerful instrument in their undoing. Slavery five hundred miles away on a Louisiana plantation was so remote from the North that only the strongest imagination could maintain a constant rage against it. "Slave catching," "man hunting" by federal officers on the streets of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, or Milwaukee and in the hamlets and villages of the wide-stretching farm lands of the North ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... the most complimentary things about yours truly, and how I was staying at my bungalow on the beach; and then she mentioned you, too, and told about you being in the 'Rest Haven' bungalow. It struck me that our young lady sort of pricked up her ears at that (though it may have been only imagination). But she just said 'How-de-do,' rather carelessly—didn't offer to shake ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... was a repetition of the preceding. My time was passed in keeping a regular journal; mapping; and in writing letters to friends in England, although there was no communication. This task afforded the greatest pleasure, as I could thus converse in imagination with those far away. The thought frequently occurred to me that they might no longer exist, and that the separation of years might be the parting forever; nevertheless there was a melancholy satisfaction at thus blankly ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... lad would have gone forward and entered the College; but on the threshold he felt how unfit he was to meet his fellows' eyes, and he turned and hastened as fast as his trembling limbs would carry him towards his home. The streets, to his excited imagination, were full of spies; he fancied his every movement watched, his footsteps counted. If he lingered they might suppose him lukewarm, if he paused they might think him ill-affected. His speed must show his zeal. His poor little heart beat ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... necessary effect on man; also April 17, 1778. In the Life of Milton (Works. vii. 102), he writes:—'this dependence of the soul upon the seasons, those temporary and periodical ebbs and flows of intellect, may, I suppose, justly be derided as the fumes of vain imagination. Sapiens dominabitur astro. The author that thinks himself weather-bound will find, with a little help from hellebore, that he is only idle or exhausted. But while this notion has possession of the head, it produces ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... you think, sir—was my later suspicion founded on anything like fact, or did I allow my imagination to have too big a grip on me when I peeped through that little hole and saw that look on his face?" asked ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... the Mission did not touch the imagination of the boys, yet, on the other hand, it became a very well-managed parish, with ample resources to draw upon; and it certainly attracted the services of a number of old Etonians, who had reached a stage ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... readily learning the certain sounds of the trumpet, and becoming masters of motions and dispositions required of them. Like all other apprentices, of course, we occasionally indulge in the reveries of imagination, and we think we are laying the foundation of a career which is destined to be important and glorious. Be this as it may, we do not mean to be outstripped by any one in our knowledge and practice of cavalry tactics, and of the general manoeuvrings ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... to dawn on Martin's Imagination that the overseer must be an eccentric individual, who found pleasure in taking his visitors by surprise. But although this seemed a possible solution of the difficulty, he did not feel satisfied with it. He could with difficulty resist ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... on such a day, a solemn and an awful service. The Epistle for the day, that mournful and merciful appeal to the conscience, the Penitential Psalms, which seem to embody the very cry of a bruised and overwhelmed heart, everything struck the same chord, spoke the same language; to my excited imagination, every word that was uttered seemed as if it was addressed to me alone, of all that assembled congregation. Every moment my head was getting more confused, and my soul grew faint within me. And then, when I was not in the least expecting ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... L'IMAGINATION, 'Soil my thoughts.' Marivaux has very consistently preserved the character of the high-born lady that Silvia is, in the remarks he puts into her mouth. It is impossible for her to forget her real ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... island of Zipangu (Japan), that Columbus sought to reach by sailing westward, penetrated as he was by his intense conviction of the smallness of the earth, and of the vast extension of Asia eastward; and to the day of his death he was full of the imagination of the proximity of the domain of the great khan to the islands and coasts which he had discovered. And such imaginations are curiously embodied in some of the maps of the early 16th century, which intermingle on the same coast-line the new discoveries from Labrador ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... boat had advanced about a hundred yards a cry of distress was heard, but the noise of wind and waves was so great that they thought it might have been mere imagination. Nevertheless, so much were they impressed, that the coxswain put about and returned towards the wreck. Too soon they discovered that it had been the death-cry of those who were left behind, for not a vestige of the "Trident" remained! ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... admitted, and the British blockade raised. Through that portal and Lisbon might flow a golden tide for American farmers and shipmen. The town meetings of New England again displayed the power for prompt political agitation which so impressed the imagination of Jefferson. The Governor of Connecticut refused, on constitutional grounds, to comply with the President's request to detail officers of militia, to whom collectors could apply when needing assistance to enforce the laws. The attitude of the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... with the loudest acclamations by the spectators. Her former occupation was even denied: she was no longer the servant of an inn. She was converted into a shepherdess, an employment much more agreeable to the imagination. To render her still more interesting, near ten years were subtracted from her age; and all the sentiments of love and of chivalry were thus united to those of enthusiasm, in order to inflame the fond fancy of the people ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... however, in 1662 he was ejected with the two thousand ministers who refused to conform. His after years were passed among old friends and in quiet meditation at Preston. He died of apoplexy about the 20th of January 1663/4. As a religious writer Ambrose has a vividness and freshness of imagination possessed by scarcely any of the Puritan Nonconformists. Many who have no love for Puritan doctrine, nor sympathy with Puritan experience, have appreciated the pathos and beauty of his writings, and his Looking to Jesus long held its own in popular appreciation ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... must know that a good hour or more before the appointed time, our gentle damsel, with her women and her husband, had withdrawn to her chamber after supper; nor was her imagination idle, but she studied with all her mind how she could keep her promise to her lover. Now she thought of one means, now of another, but nothing occurred to her by which she could get rid of her cursed husband; and all the time the wished-for hour ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... when young and ardent, with the fire of generosity and imagination in the soul, has not written at least one such letter, casting reserve and prudence to the winds, and placing the writer absolutely at the mercy of the man or woman ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... thinking that the fault of Mr. Keats's poems was a deficiency in masculine energy of style. He had beauty, tenderness, delicacy, in an uncommon degree, but there was a want of strength and substance. His Endymion is a very delightful description of the illusions of a youthful imagination given up to airy dreams—we have flowers, clouds, rainbows, moonlight, all sweet sounds and smells, and Oreads and Dryads flitting by—but there is nothing tangible in it, nothing marked or palpable—we ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... a revery, with certain tableaux glowing along its perspectives which poor little Susan Posey would have shivered to look upon, if they could have been transferred from the purple clouds of Myrtle's imagination to the pale silvery mists of Susan's pretty fancies. She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her, her eyes fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beautiful ancestress, but on that other canvas where the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... simultaneously. But the truth written in a book being not fluctuating, but permanent, shows itself openly to the sight passing through the spiritual ways of the eyes, as the porches and halls of common sense and imagination; it enters the chamber of intellect, reposes itself upon the couch of memory, and there congenerates the eternal truth of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... Was it his imagination, or had the purplish ink begun to fade? He ran a length of it through his fingers, and then he saw that in places there were gaps where the writing had disappeared altogether. He glanced up at the altimeter needle, which was sliding ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... be,—for the case as put by Pascal requires this,—I shall merely observe that a person who elects to believe in God, as the best chance of gain, is not one who, according to Pascal's creed, or any other worth naming, will really secure that gain. I wonder whether Pascal's curious imagination ever presented to him in sleep his convert, in the future state, shaken out of a red-hot dice-box upon a red-hot hazard-table, as perhaps he might have been, if Dante had been the later of the two. The original idea is due ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... editor has well said, "When a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence." Emily Dickinson had more than a message, more than the charm of unexpectedness, more than the gift of phrase,—she had (and of how many Americans can this be said?) an intense imagination. ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... it express the soul of America. Whenever an American is at the seat of his Government, however traveled and cultured he may be, he ought to find a city of stately proportion, symmetrically laid out and adorned with the best that there is in architecture, which would arouse his imagination and stir his patriotic pride. In the coming years Washington should be not only the art center of our own country but the art center of the world. Around it should center all that is best in science, in learning, in letters, and in art. These are the results that justify the creation ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... focused and then said, very slowly, "That was my imagination. Please tell me it was my imagination before I ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... attentions, although he tried hard to put up with them. She was the lady of his dreams, for Pearl's imagination had clothed her with all the ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... imagine how many adventures, how many tragedies, lie buried away out of sight in that Dolorous City; how much horror and beauty lurks there. No imagination can reach the Truth, no one can go down into that city to make discoveries; for one must needs descend too low into its depths to see the wonderful scenes of tragedy or comedy enacted there, the masterpieces brought ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... qualified to second the prudent plans of my father for her welfare. If she had causes of complaint, (and that she had, there is too much reason to think, for who has ever escaped them?) they were concealed, with female fidelity, in the sacred repository of her own heart; and if truant imagination sometimes dimly drew an outline of married happiness different from the fact that stood in dull reality before her eyes, the picture was merely commented on by a sigh, and consigned to a cabinet whose key none ever touched ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... notice that Caesar says not a word of the scythe-blades with which popular imagination pictures the wheels of the British chariots to have been armed. Such devices were in use amongst the Persians, and figure at Cunaxa and Arbela. But there the chariots were themselves projectiles, as it were, to break the hostile ranks; and even for this purpose the scythes ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... classes of that Institution, and there, in the "splendid museum of Physical Science Instruments," he drew his early inspirations in Physics from that remarkable educationist and brilliant experimentalist, the Rev. Father E. Lefont, S.J., C.I.E., M.I.E.E., who had the rare gift of enkindling the imagination of his pupils. He passed the First Examination in Arts, in 1877, in the Second Division and the B.A. Examination by the B. Course (Science Course), in 1880, in the Second Division. "It is the paramount duty ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... child, raised like myself in solitude, uncultivated, and from character and taste a dreamer? Such a creature must indeed be strange to a Parisian. Perhaps, though you do not wish me thus to speak to you, such a creature has made a deeper impression on your imagination than on your heart. The terrible circumstances of our meeting also, the romantic origin of our acquaintance, may lead you into error in relation to sentiments which perhaps would be impotent, both against the enticements of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... is most imperfect; but in so short a space I cannot make it better. Your imagination must fill ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... the wife of a respectable, solid, eminently British, close-fisted Borough tradesman. Nevertheless she had a huge appetite, and always had ham or sausages for tea. Giacomo she despised, on the ground that his occupation was so limited, that it contracted the imagination, and that he did not "live in the metropolis, but vegetated in a country town." She consequently very seldom visited Cowfold, and very seldom wrote to her brother. Giacomo, however, thought it his duty to tell his sister of his approaching ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... silence for a little time, and then Angus Og spoke again "The Divine Imagination may only be known through the thoughts of His creatures. A man has said Commonsense and a woman has said Happiness are the greatest things in the world. These things are male and female, for Commonsense is Thought and Happiness ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... produce conviction as well as to create confidence. Not every one is a genius in the handling of words, but every writer of a letter that is to bristle with conviction must use his imagination. He must put himself mentally in the place of the typical customer he is addressing and use the arguments and facts that would convince him. The writer should try to see himself enjoying the foods or service—picture his satisfaction. ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... organ lessons from Farmer, and as I liked him extremely, I was continually at his house. I enjoyed seeing him covering sheets of music paper with rapid notation, and then humming the newly born product of his musical imagination. As I had a fairly good treble voice, and could read a part easily, Farmer often selected me to try one of his new compositions at "house-singing," where the boys formed an exceedingly critical audience. Either the new song was approved of, or it was received in chilling ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... the war of Troy. Painters, as well as poets, found in this event a vast field to exercise their talents and their imagination. The principal actors in this memorable drama appear on the vases. The principal scenes of the Trojan war are depicted; but we must remark, that the historical subjects do not extend to a later period ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... torment the demon held her suspended. She shrieked aloud in her agony, and, shaking off the oppression, rejoiced to find the vision had been caused by her own distempered imagination. ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... fact was, Colin inherited his mother's, and not his father's temperament. The late Lady Crawford had been the daughter of a Zetland Udaller, a pure Scandinavian, a descendant of the old Vikings, and she inherited from them a poetic imagination and a nature dreamy and inert, though capable of rousing itself into fits of courage that could dare the impossible. Colin would have led a forlorn hope or stormed a battery; but the bare ugliness and monotony of his life at the works fretted ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... we should have to surrender all for its sake and suffer all things possible for a human being to suffer. But the human heart cannot grasp the greatness of the honor and glory to which we shall be exalted with Christ. It is altogether above our comprehension or imagination. This Paul declares in what follows, in verse 18, where he says: "I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us-ward," as we have heard in the text for the fifth Sunday ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... to me to be the right epithet for Darwin's intellect. He had a clear rapid intelligence, a great memory, a vivid imagination, and what made his greatness was the strict subordination of all these to ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... the Greeks, and Tsepha (cockatrice) of the Hebrews), a name given by the ancients to a horrid monster of their own imagination, to which they attributed the most malignant powers and an equally fiendish appearance. The term is now applied, owing to a certain fanciful resemblance, to a genus of lizards belonging to the family ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... occasionally reflected against the sun. The train was long and imposing, for there were about two hundred and fifty horse upon the march, and the glancing of the swords and waving of their banners, joined to the clang of their trumpets and kettle-drums, had at once a lively and awful effect upon the imagination. As they advanced still nearer and nearer, they could distinctly see the files of those chosen troops following each other in long succession, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... as delicate and fanciful as Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, Bill Nye, James Whitcomb Riley, Opie Read, or Bret Harte in their happiest moods. Within him ran a poetic vein, capable of being worked in any direction, and from which he could, at will, extract that which his imagination saw and felt most. That he occasionally left the child-world, in which he longed to linger, to wander among the older children of men, where intuitively the hungry listener follows him into his Temple of Mirth, all should rejoice, for those ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... valley of the Stour is beyond, unaccountable stream, dirty at Blandford, pure at Wimborne—the Stour, sliding out of fat fields, to marry the Avon beneath the tower of Christchurch. The valley of the Avon—invisible, but far to the north the trained eye may see Clearbury Ring that guards it, and the imagination may leap beyond that on to Salisbury Plain itself, and beyond the Plain to all the glorious downs of Central England. Nor is Suburbia absent. Bournemouth's ignoble coast cowers to the right, heralding the pine-trees that mean, for all their beauty, red houses, and ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... sort of trees, for divers miles in circuit (as in those delicious groves of them, belonging to the Honourable, my noble friend, the late Sir Adam Brown of Bech-worth-Castle, from Box-hill) might without the least violence to his imagination, easily fancy himself transported into some new or enchanted country; for, if ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... evening I had the good fortune to meet the Baron Rudolph von Blitzenberg—as perhaps you may remember. In my own defence, Baron, I may fairly plead that since I could remember nothing about my past career, I was entitled to supply the details from my imagination. After all, I have no proof that some of my stories may not have been correct. I used this privilege freely in Clankwood, and, in a word, since I couldn't tell the truth if I wanted to, I ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... Zulma and Cary met nearly every day, sometimes more than once a day. It was impossible that it should be otherwise. There is no power on this earth that can restrain two youthful hearts thrilling and surging with the first impulses of love. When the imagination is all aglow with the purple pictures of destiny; when the soul throbs with the unspeakably delicious sentiments of an affection that is requited; when the nerves are in tension and quiver like the strings of a harp; when the hot blood runs ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... nature comes out strongly here. And it is this touch of nature appearing always in the Old Testament stories which gives to them their reality. The writer of ordinary histories has for the most part his favourites. These are the heroes of his imagination, and the history of their doings is unconsciously tempered by this partiality. And there are others whom he holds in disfavour. And the figure of these on his page is darkened accordingly. And the book of another historian passes ...
— Is The Young Man Absalom Safe? • David Wright
... impossible, and the drama, like other arts, has its conventions. But conventions change, and new ones are evolved, as new problems in art and other things—even morality itself—come in with each new tide of the human imagination. The "well-made play" of the day before yesterday is not a canon for all time, even ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... related so much without circumstances and causes, that the most profound or most eloquent writer must despair of rendering them either instructive or entertaining to the reader. Even the great learning and vigorous imagination of Milton sunk under the weight; and this author scruples not to declare, that the skirmishes of kites or crows as much merited a particular narrative, as the confused transactions and battles of the Saxon Heptarchy [e]. In order, however, to connect ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... and possibly answering the question, how it ever came to be where it is. While occupied with museums and picture-galleries, he may well fail "totam aestimare Romam."[1] Assuming that the reader has never been in Rome, I wish to transport him thither in imagination, and with the help of the map, by an entirely different route. But first let him take up the eighth book of the Aeneid, and read afresh the oldest and most picturesque of all stories of arrival at Rome;[2] let him dismiss all handbooks from his mind, and concentrate it on Aeneas and his ships ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... of the girl so deeply intrigued his imagination that it was only with difficulty that he concocted a non-committal telegram to Roddy's friend in the Prefecture—that imposing personage who had watched with the man from Scotland Yard at the platform gates in ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... himself in a certain street; he found the shop, he flew to his cousin. "How is my mother? Come, let us go at once! Let us go at once!" They hurried on together; they ascended a staircase; a door opened. And here his mute soliloquy came to an end; his imagination was swallowed up in a feeling of inexpressible tenderness, which made him secretly pull forth a little medal that he wore on his neck, and murmur his prayers ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... physical agents—climate, food, soil, geographical conditions, and active physical phenomena. In the earliest civilisations nature is more prominent than man, and the imagination is more stimulated than the understanding. In the European civilisations man is the more prominent, and the understanding is more stimulated than the imagination. Hence the advance of European civilisation is characterised by a diminishing influence ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... until Owen's thoughts went back to Evelyn, and looking from the portrait by Ingres to the drawing by Boucher he seemed suddenly to lose control; tears rose to his eyes, and Harding watched him, wondering whither Owen's imagination carried him. "Is he far away in Paris, hearing her sing for the first time to Madame Savelli? Or is he standing with her looking over the bulwarks of the Medusa, seeing the shape of some Greek island dying in the twilight?" And Harding did not speak, ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... marriage with a disgraced adventurer—but at Mrs. Aylett, the chatelaine of Ridgeley, the wife whose serene purity had never been blemished by a doubting breath; chaste and polished matron; the admired copy for younger and less discreet, but not more beautiful women. He surveyed her boldly—if the imagination had not seemed preposterous—Mr. Aylett would have said scornfully, as he might study the face and figure of some abandoned wretch who had accosted him in the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... of the popular author, and is a beautiful setting of all the sparkling diamonds that have been found clinging to the "rolling stone" of a great life as it washed with the ebb and flow of the seething tide of thought and imagination. ...
— Lee's Last Campaign • John C. Gorman
... my new friend. For several years more, I did not fully understand how and why this was; viz. that my religion had always been Pauline. Christ was to me the ideal of glorified human nature: but I needed some dimness in the portrait to give play to my imagination: if drawn too sharply historical, it sank into something not superhuman, and caused a revulsion of feeling. As all paintings of the miraculous used to displease and even disgust me from a boy by the unbelief ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... sunset upon the loftiest range of snow-clad mountains on the globe. As we rounded the bluff already spoken of, there burst upon our sight, for a few moments, a complete view of the range, lying under a clear sky and warm glow of sunlight, so entrancing as almost to take away one's breath. The imagination had never before depicted anything so grand and inspiring. Our little party could only point at it, and look into each other's eyes. Words would have jarred like a discord upon the ear. What the Bernese Oberland ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... following lines, the poet has endeavoured to reproduce the impressions made upon his mind by the mountain scenery of the Caucasus; scenery which he had visited with such rapture, and to which his imagination returned with undiminished delight. It has been our aim to endeavour, in our translation, to give an echo, however feeble and imperfect, of the wild and airy freedom of the versification which distinguishes these spirited stanzas. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... embrace the unseen vortex. One tree, and one only, disturbed the sky line. Stark and twisted into an unusual shape from the steady blowing of the prevalent east winds, it imprinted itself at once upon the eye and unconsciously upon the imagination. To some it was the keeper of that hell-gate; the contorted sentinel of bygone woes and long-buried horrors, if not the gnomish genius of others yet to come. To-day it was the sign-post to a strange deed—the courting of an uncanny death that one of the many secrets ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... agony of disappointment endured by poor Betsy when she found that Waroonga was not among them? the droop of the spirits, the collapse of the coal-scuttle! Language is impotent. We leave it to imagination, merely remarking that she soon recovered on the faith of the happiness which was yet in store ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... postmaster of Brevard, Transylvania County, North Carolina, and in 1868 member of the State Constitutional Convention, in his letter of June 24, 1890, says: "I have not forgotten those things of which you speak. I can almost see you (even in imagination) standing at the fire when I drove up to the gate and went into the house and asked you, 'Have I ever seen you before?' Just then I observed your uniform. 'Oh, yes,' said I; 'I know who it is now.' ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... being put on the car, together with the rugs and macintoshes, the matron's cheek grows pale, and her lips quiver as she bids farewell to the beloved ones, whom she may never see "safe home" again. This is no picture drawn by the imagination, with which flattering critics are pleased ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... that no man, retaining reason was ever able soon to forget any enormity, which he knew himself guilty. The remembrance always haunts the imagination, and conscience goads the mind with a thousand stings. The delinquent hath not power to prevent it. He cannot drive away thought, and turn off his ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... as a disease. Imagination has invented many causes of this evil. Some suppose it to be produced by small insects; others that it is in the seed. Again, it is ascribed to the atmosphere. It has been supposed to be propagated in many ways—by trimming a healthy tree with a knife that had been used on ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... The spirit of Henry VIII. was rising from the grave to scatter his work to all the winds; while he, the champion of Heaven, the destroyer of heresy, was lying himself under a charge of the same crime, with the pope for his accuser. Without straining too far the licence of imagination, we may believe that the disease which was destroying him was chiefly a broken heart. But it was painful to him to lie under the ill opinion of the person who was so soon to be on the throne of England; and possibly he wished to leave her, as a legacy, the warning ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... this, and many another passage as true and tender, might surely have been famous in fiction, if he had turned his powers that way. He had imagination, humour, pathos; he was always studying and observing life; his last volume, especially, is like a collection of fragments that might have gone toward making a work, in some ways not inferior to the romances of Scott. When the third volume of Essays ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... one of your great flour mills and to one of your great refrigerating plants. I viewed the myriad industries that surround the harbor, the forests of masts, the thronged steamers. I was interested and amazed. It far exceeded my imagination and suggested an analogy to an incident in my past life. It was my fortune in the year when the war broke out between Prussia and France, to be travelling in Germany. Immediately upon the announcement of the war, maps of the seat of war were ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... accept the love and friendship of my inferiors—abandoned to the dangerous inspirations of solitude, and with no other consolation than my books—books which had been chosen for me by my mother's confessor, and which were calculated to fill my imagination with visionary and romantic fancies. The only conversation I heard dealt with the means of leaving all the family fortune to my brother, so that he might uphold the splendor of the name, and with the necessity of marrying ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... listened with pleasure to the soft-voiced child whose blue eyes grew more and more tender as she talked on about her brother. As for Nora, she did not lose a word of it all, and evidently lived it over in imagination with the deepest interest, ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... into school work, so there is a way of interesting the factory and office worker in his job. However mechanical work may be, there is always the interest in becoming the most efficient worker in a room or a trade. Routine—accurate and detailed work—does not mean the stultification of the imagination. It takes more imagination to see the interesting things in statistical or record work than to write a novel. Therefore employers should make it a point to help their employees to realize the significance of the perfection of each detail and the importance of ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... to you, in very bald outline, some of the conceptions of God that have been held in the past. What is our God to-day? The heart, the life, the soul, of this infinite universe; justice that means justice; power that means power; love that surpasses all our imagination of love; a God who is eternal goodness; who from the beginning has folded his child man to his heart, whispering all of truth that he could understand, breathing into him all of life that he could contain, ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... learned that in the many combinations in which he found them they spoke in a silent language, spoke in a strange tongue, spoke of wonderful things which a little ape-boy could not by any chance fully understand, arousing his curiosity, stimulating his imagination and filling his soul with a mighty longing for ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... achievement. They are, almost without exception, entirely objective. Contemporary poetry is, on the other hand, very largely subjective; and even when it deals with events or incidents it invests them to such a degree with personal emotion and imagination, it so modifies and colours them with temperamental effects, that the resulting poem is much more a study of subjective conditions than a picture or drama of objective realities. This projection of the inward upon the outward ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... it, Dick," quoth old Hammond; "it is the child-like part of us that produces works of imagination. When we are children time passes so slow with us that we seem to have time ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... had passed over the trivial matter of the journey, and all such minor details, to the grand result, when she had found their father, and would be living with him in a beautiful place, with all that heart could desire. But Duncan's imagination could put on no such seven-league boots. It stuck fast at the first disagreeable details, and was not even rewarded by the prospect which so delighted Elsie, for his mind could not picture any other ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... to the young Italian's disordered imagination, blurred, as it were, by rankling anger, like the monkey to which his companion had compared him, and his annoyance grew hotter, not only against Rob, but against himself for refusing to shake hands ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... inaniter as in 34, 47, i.e. without the approach of any external object. Cogitatione: the only word in Latin, as [Greek: dianoia] is in Greek, to express our "imagination." Non numquam: so Madv. for MSS. non inquam. Goer. after Manut. wrote non inquiunt with an interrogation at omnino. Veri simile est: so Madv. D.F. III. 58 for sit. The argument has the same purpose as that in ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... one thing; I hadn't time. At the best, it would have taken me three or four years to get straight, and as you haven't much imagination, I suppose you don't realize what Helen's trials would have been in the meanwhile. An engaged girl's situation isn't easy when her lover is away. She stands apart, forbidden much others may enjoy, and Helen would have had to bear her friends' ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... country; the most perfect scene they had ever witnessed. Strange trees, and growth of every description, spread in every direction. When the ship slid into the open, they were beneath one of the domes—enormous beyond their greatest imagination, and ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... Burleigh; but it was of Senator North that she thought most as she half rose in the Victoria and scanned the long sweep. The cleverest of women cannot class with anything like precision the man who has stamped himself into her imagination. Betty knew that there were six men in the Senate who ranked as equals; their quiet epoch gave them little chance to discover latent genius other than for constructive legislation; nevertheless she arbitrarily conceived the Capitol to-day ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... could only do so by a kind of active thought. Their memory, because it is a memory of things, not of purely material images, brings nearer to the thought its proper objects; for the thought, which is above the imagination, requires for its objects things abstracted from those of matter. But notwithstanding that this is the case, the spirits of Mercury excel but little in the faculty of judgment. They take no delight in the things which pertain to judgment and to conclusions ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... "'Pailidula, nudula, rigida,"' he completed the quatrain. "'Ghostpale, stark, and rigid.' He's got a grisly imagination, that pin-operator. I shouldn't care to have him on ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the passionate loyalty of woman to woman, so newly and strangely developed by the Suffrage movement, and Winnington's advancing influence,—the influence of a man equipped surely with all the means of victory—character, strength, charm—over the girl's heart and imagination. ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to admit it, my First Love was a housemaid. So was she known on this dull earth of ours, but in heaven—in the heaven of my imagination, at all events—she was, of course, a goddess. How she managed to keep her disguise I never could understand. To me she was so obviously dea certe. The nimbus was so apparent. Yet no one seemed to see it but me. I have heard her scolded as though she were any ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... Though his glance wandered, for moments, from her countenance to the more intelligible and yet extraordinary charms of Ellen, it did not fail to return promptly to the study of a creature who, in the view of his unpractised eye and untutored imagination, was formed with all that perfection, with which the youthful poet is apt to endow the glowing images of his brain. Nothing so fair, so ideal, so every way worthy to reward the courage and self-devotion of a warrior, had ever ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... butler's name. Whoever it was who gave the information must have been quite confident of Sir Charles's death, had indeed timed it with extraordinary accuracy—or so it seemed to her somewhat stimulated imagination. ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... of enforced idleness his imagination began to retouch the shadowy image of Laura Romeyn with an ideal beauty. In his pain and weakness her character of watcher—in which her self-sacrificing devotion had been so great as to impair her health—was peculiarly attractive. She became to him a pale and lovely saint, too remote and sacred ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... suffering humanity. The vast level, stretching thirty miles from east to west, thirty from north to south:—perhaps the reader may think little of its resources for the seeker after natural beauty, or its capacity to develope the imagination. A world, he may fancy, in which there could be no shadows, at best not too cheerful colours. In truth, it was all accent, so to speak. But then, surely, all the finer influences of every language depend mostly on accent; and he has but to think of it as Gaston ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... who might resort to rudeness on their own account. And Madame, clinging in a paroxysm of terror to her mistress, suggested all manner of horrors, one on top of the other, until she increased her own terror tenfold. And yet, to do her justice, nothing that even her frenzied imagination suggested exceeded the things which the streets of Paris, fruitful mother of horrors, were witnessing at that very ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... could call it mine. And, I 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 my lord of Orrery, might be drawn from them: But I was then in that eagerness of imagination, which, by overpleasing fanciful men, flatters them into the danger of writing; so that, when I had moulded it into that shape it now bears, I looked with such disgust upon it, that the censures of our severest critics ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... into the belief that he, and not Lawry, ought to be captain of the Woodville. She was a family affair, and he could not regard his brother as the actual owner of her. He had imagination enough to understand and appreciate the pleasure of being in command of such a fine craft. His conspiracy had signally failed; in his own choice phrase, Mr. Sherwood "carried too many guns for him," and it was useless to ...
— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic
... that the songs sung as ancient songs may have modern strains in them, but as a general thing I think we can say that they are authentic. I do not think I draw on my imagination when I say that one can detect a general character in them which recalls that of Western Indians. In order to experiment on this, I submitted the records to a person who had heard the songs of the ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... unexplained reason never become (according to Dr. Temple) any part of the Colossal Man at all,—now come in; "Rome to discipline the human will; Greece, the reason and taste; Asia, the spiritual imagination." (p. 19.) The Law and the Prophets had disciplined the Colossal Child's conscience,—with what success we have seen. At all events, Moses and Isaiah are for infants: we have passed the age for such helps as they could supply. In a word,—"The childhood of the world was over when our Lord ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... the Bijou theatre, on Cass street, Wetona, Wisconsin. Any one with a name like Terry Sheehan would, perforce, do well anything she might set out to do. There was nothing of genius in Terry, but there was something of fire, and much that was Irish. The combination makes for what is known as imagination in playing. Which meant that the Watson Team, Eccentric Song and Dance Artists, never needed a rehearsal when they played the Bijou. Ruby Watson used merely to approach Terry before the Monday performance, sheet-music in hand, and say, "Listen, dearie. We've got some new business I want to wise ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... country to another; the same conspicuous personages, almost the same individual armies, perpetually re-appearing in different places, as if a wild phantasmagoria were capriciously repeating itself to bewilder the imagination. Essex, and Vere, and Roger Williams, and Black Norris-Van der Does, and Admiral Nassau, the Meetkerks and Count Philip-Farnese and Mansfeld, George Basti, Arenberg, Berlaymont, La None and Teligny, Aquila and Coloma—were seen alternately fighting, retreating, triumphant, beleaguering, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... once more said, 'Hear, O king, one of the great feats of the illustrious Vasishtha. Once on a time the deities were engaged in performing a sacrifice on the shores of the lake Vaikhanasa. Knowing of his puissance, the sacrificing gods thought of Vasishtha and made him their priest in imagination. Meanwhile, seeing the gods reduced and emaciated in consequence of the Diksha they were undergoing, a race of Danavas, of the name of Khalins, of statures as gigantic as mountains, desired to slay them. Those amongst the Danavas ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and President Lincoln, the popular judgment seemed equally arbitrary. Of course each had his admirers among professed Southern or Northern adherents: it is not in that aspect that I speak of them for the moment, but rather as figures in the popular imagination. As such, Davis was credited with all the qualities of a powerful statesman; while Lincoln showed as a not ill-meaning, but grotesquely inadequate and misplaced oddity, a sort of mere accident of mob-favor, and made abundant mirth for the mirthful: how justly the event has perhaps ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... craggy peaks: For an hour did I gaze upon this incomparable scene, as upon one which the experience of a lifetime can seldom boast, for, though I was prepared by an alpine experience in Europe, and had stretched my imagination to the utmost in my anticipations of what would be the appearance of the highest mountains in the world, I could never have conceived—far less is it possible for me to describe—the scene I beheld from ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... put temptation in his way. Horrid, isn't it, to think there's something in me that appeals to his diseased imagination?" ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair |
