"Legend" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... uselessness of further words. How expect understanding of a common human hurt from this being, who alternately appeared in the guise of a god and a gamin? She remembered the old tale of the maiden wedded to the beautiful and strange elf-king. Was the legend symbolic of that mysterious thread—call it genius or what you will—that runs its erratic course through humanity's woof, marring yet illuminating the staid design, never straightened with its fellow-threads, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... trying to run away—the position given to her legs is used in early Greek sculpture and vase-painting to signify rapid motion—but is overtaken by her pursuer. From the blood of Medusa sprang, according to the legend, the winged horse, Pegasus; and the artist, wishing to tell as much of the story as possible, has introduced Pegasus into his composition, but has been forced to reduce him to miniature size. The goddess Athena, the protectress of Perseus, occupies ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... acknowledge the solemn influences of the hills; but for the erring modes or forms of thought, it is human wilfulness, sin, and false teaching, that are answerable. We are not to deny the nobleness of the imagination because its direction is illegitimate, nor the pathos of the legend because its circumstances are groundless; the ardor and abstraction of the spiritual life are to be honored in themselves, though the one may be misguided and the other deceived; and the deserts of Osma, Assisi, and Monte Viso are still to be thanked for the zeal they ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... like the aged ivy to its crumbling walls, clung many a fateful legend—nestled under the precipitous woods in the valley. Time, taking advantage of neglect, had made a wilderness of the gardens, the lawns, and the orchards, which, less than a century ago, surrounded with quiet beauty this home of ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... they are seen by Mommsen or Gibbon or Macaulay or Froude. Meanwhile the student of literature sees incidentally, but, so far as he goes, more vividly, into the actual life of breathing men through the legend of Beowulf or the Vision of Piers Plowman, through Chaucer or the Spectator, through Ben Jonson's Humours or Horace Walpole's Letters, through Clarissa Harlowe or ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... legend that the Empress Si-ling-chi[235] (2600 B.C.) had the happy inspiration to invent the unwinding of the cocoon before the insect cut the threads; and for this discovery she was ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... which the whole assembly joined amid the singing of national hymns. Thus the important event had taken place which again summoned the German Empire to life, and made over the imperial crown with renewed splendor to another royal house. Barbarossa's old legend, that the dominion of the empire was, after long tribulation, to pass from the Hohenstaufen to the Hohenzollern, was now fulfilled; the dream long aspired after by German youth had now become a ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... and the presbytery may have belonged to the original church, but of that which is visible above ground the oldest part was due to Flambard, of whom more hereafter. When the first church was founded we cannot tell. Here, as in many other places, the origin is lost in the haze of antiquity and legend. Here, as at many other places, we find the original builders choosing one site, and the stones that they had laid during the day being removed by night by unseen, and therefore angelic, hands to another. It was on the heights of St Catharine, about a mile and a half away from the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... made by Samuel Minott, who worked in Boston from about 1765 to 1803, can be accurately placed by the account of ownership thoughtfully inscribed on its base by one of its later owners. The legend reads: ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... any other infamy when attributed to the Jews. There is not, and there cannot be, any assurance that in the soil thus prepared by these papers, others more ignorant or less scrupulous will not successfully plant belief in the ancient legend of sacrificial murders committed by Jews. And even if this never happens at all, the fact remains that in charging that the horrors of Bolshevism were deliberately instigated by Jews, British and American anti-Semites have appealed to the same unreasoning, instinctive, ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... we limped into the Golden Gate and cast anchor off the "Front" our crew went ashore as soon as discharged, and in half a dozen hours the legend was in every sailors' boarding-house and in every seaman's dive, from Barbary Coast to ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... inquiries, he flatly refused to give any account of himself, they by common consent voted him a spy and a public menace, telling each other that he was undoubtedly engaged in drawing plans of the coast in order to facilitate' the landing of some enemy; for did not the legend run:— ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... dismounted to ask his way. An old, old man lived in this hut, and after he had directed the Prince as to the best way back, the young man pointed to a thick wood ahead, and asked what lay beyond it. Then the old man told him that there was a legend that beyond the wood was an enchanted palace where a beautiful Princess had lain sleeping for a hundred years, and whom a Prince was ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... was his sublime disregard of syntax when attempting Anglo-Saxon, notwithstanding the fact that he tried to better his linguistic efforts by shouting out each English sentence like a phonograph gone mad. It was from him we first heard the legend of the Santo Nino—how it was an idol in the old days, worshipped by savage Visayans, and how, after the advent of the Spaniards with Magellan, there was a great fire in the town, everything in one populous section ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... a funny, not over-reverent, legend afloat in Trier to account for the queer dwarf bottles of Mosel wine used there: it refers to a trick of Saint Peter, who is supposed to have been travelling in these parts with the Saviour, and when sent to bring wine to the latter drank half ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... small tin case or canister, of oblong shape, and measured some four inches by two. It was perhaps two inches in depth. On the cover was a label, and on the label the legend— ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... rectitude; and by the strict observance of exactly what is necessary and no more, I am enabled to hold my head up in the world. The person who lives in me has only four thousand two hundred and fifty-five pounds each year, after allowing for the income tax." Such seemed the legend of these houses. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ecstacy in that wonderful chapter where Red Hugh, escaping from the Pale, rides through the Mountain Gates of Ulster, and sees high above him Slieve Mullion, a mountain of the Gods, the birthplace of legend "more mythic than Avernus" and O'Grady evokes for us and his hero the legendary past, and the great hill seems to be like Mount Sinai, thronged with immortals, and it lives and speaks to the fugitive boy, "the last great secular champion of ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... the mists of legend clear away we see a community which, if we do not take slaves into account, consisted of two parts—the governing body, or patres, to whom alone the term Populus Romanus strictly applied, and who constituted the Roman State, and the governed class, or clientes, who were outside its pale. ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... the laugh on him so that they'll vote two apiece. They'll send him to Congress. They'll never forget his barn party, or us. They'll always remember us as we're dancing together now. We're making a legend. Where's my waltz, boys?" he called as ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... on wheels, sent out a column of smoke from its stovepipe chimney; and when he raised the lids of the shining cans, a fragrant steam rose on the air. The cart, painted modestly in red, bore a strange legend in yellow letters on ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... Court-House Square, a great crowd had collected, black, white, and yellow, about a high platform, upon which four glaring torches lighted up the novel scene, and those who could read might decipher this legend on a standard at the back of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the deed but took shame in it thereafter, however clear it might be that Sakr-el-Bahr had brought it all upon himself. But, at least, it was understood that he had not fallen in battle, and hence it was assumed that he was still alive. Upon that presumption there was built up a sort of legend that he would one day come back; and redeemed captives returning a half-century later related how in Algiers to that day the coming of Sakr-el-Bahr was still confidently expected and looked for by ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... Mr. Dent, 1877-78. The monopolies of the first Europeans ruined trade: better prospect now opening. United States connection with Borneo. Population. Malays, their Mongolian origin. Traces of a Caucasic race, termed Indonesians. Buludupih legend. Names of aboriginal ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... young In dead Sir Egbert's empty coat-of-mail; The griffon dropped from off the blazoned shield; The stables rotted; and a poisonous vine Stretched its rank nets across the lonely lawn. For no one went there,—'t was a haunted spot. A legend killed it for a kindly home,— A grim estate, which every heir in turn Left to the orgies of the wind and rain, The newt, the toad, the spider, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Anteoni and the priest made an impression on Domini. She was conscious of how the outside world would be likely to regard her acquaintance with Androvsky. Suddenly she saw Androvsky as some strange and ghastly figure of legend; as the wandering Jew met by a traveller at cross roads, and distinguished for an instant by an oblique flash of lightning; as the shrouded Arab of the Eastern tale, who announces coming disaster to the wanderers in the desert by beating a death-roll ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Wholesale and thorough, but not enough for its purpose. It failed like all the others; did more, perhaps, than any other to bind Ireland to the Catholic Church, and to alienate Irishmen from the English rule. On the Irish race it has left undying memories and a legend of tyranny which is summed up in the peasants' saying of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... was, that the magistrates only got for their trouble a new legend added to so many others—a legend which would be perpetuated by the remembrance of the catastrophe of the MOTALA, and indisputably confirm the truth of the apparition of ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... draw,' 'a stalemate.' Only a few newspapers, to which belong those of the Hearst Syndicate, confess to the belief in 'a stalemate, or a victory of the Teutonic Allies.' How those newspapers which are at the service of our enemies, and which still hold to the legend of a miscarried German war of aggression, really judge the situation is only seen occasionally from incidental statements like the following confession of the New York Tribune, which preaches against a peace on the basis of the ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... woman! Beat that essence of charm and purity, God's best gift to man, redeeming him from his own grossness! Could such things be? John Lefolle would as soon have credited the French legend that English wives are sold in Smithfield. No! it could not be real that this flower-like figure ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... now but a ragged canvas, had been removed, and in its place was a beautiful painting. It represented the Lord Jesus, sitting with a glory round His benign countenance, welcoming a penitent, weary pilgrim from afar, who knelt to receive His blessing. Below was the legend, "Him that cometh to Me I will ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... Legend has its truth. Legendary truth is of a different nature from historic truth. Legendary truth is invention with reality for result. For the rest, history and legend have the same aim—to paint under the man of a day eternal humanity." ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... what this child has been telling me, my lord! A perfect legend of the Rhine. He says that this pool, whose depth is unknown, extends six or eight miles under the mountain, and a fairy, half woman half serpent, dwells here. Calm summer nights she glides over the surface of water calling to the shepherds of the mountains, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... worked by horses, and would doubtless be considered by modern engineers as a rude and feeble machine. The pieces which it produced, however, were among the best in Europe. It was not easy to counterfeit them; and, as their shape was exactly circular, and their edges were inscribed with a legend, clipping was not to be apprehended. [630] The hammered coins and the milled coins were current together. They were received without distinction in public, and consequently in private, payments. The financiers of that age seem to have expected that the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... allowable to add a few words about the Zulu mysticism, magic, and superstition, to which there is some allusion in this romance. It has been little if at all exaggerated. Thus the writer well remembers hearing a legend how the Guardian Spirit of the Ama-Zulu was seen riding down the storm. Here is what Mr. Fynney says of her in the pamphlet to which reference has been made: "The natives have a spirit which they call Nomkubulwana, or the Inkosazana-ye-Zulu (the Princess of Heaven). She ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... birth of Hamnet and Judith are a blank in Shakespeare's biography. He disappeared even from the reach of rumor and tradition. One hundred and fifty years after his death Oldys, the antiquarian, exhumed an ancient legend, to the effect that he fled to London to avoid the consequences of lampooning a neighboring nobleman who had prosecuted him for killing a deer in his park, and sought employment at the theatre. Unsupported anecdotes ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... that adorn certain localities. Some of the legends are mythological. Of such sort is that which gives such vivid interest to lonely Cape Reinga; the place where the spirits of dead Maori take their plunge into the sea, on their way from earth to the next world. Such, too, is the dragon legend, the tale of the Taniwha, which graces the volcanic country in ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... daughter of Legend. In the world of creatures, as in the world of men, the story precedes and outlives history. There are many instances of the fact that if an insect attract our attention for this reason or that, it is given a place in ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... foster-father, that of Son of Man. Teaching that they continued to make intercession for sin, after their ascension to the right hand of the Father, they were also called Intercessors, Mediators or Advocates with the Father. From teaching their appearance every 600 years originated the Egyptian legend of the Phoenix, a bird said to descend from the sun at these intervals, and, after being consumed upon the altar in the temple of On, or city of the sun—called Heliopolis by the Greeks—would rise from its ashes ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... do, but I know you write poetry," retorted Yaspard; and then Fred said, "Yes; and do you know he has been impudent enough to compose a ballad about a legend of your family, boy? Think of that! I liked the ballad so well that I asked Garth to bring it along and give us all the benefit; so you are to hear the story of your own great-granduncle, whose namesake you are, done into verse, with all the Viking ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... be hard to say why Hsieh is here called 'the dark king.' There may be an allusion to the legend about the connexion of the swallow,—'the dark bird,'—with his birth, He never was 'a king;' but his descendants here represented ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... required half the court of Edward the Fourth to frame a consistent legend Let us state this in a manner that must strike our apprehension. The late princess royal was married out of England, before any of the children of the late prince of Wales were born. She lived no farther than the Hague; and yet who thinks that she could have instructed a Dutch lad in so ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... up courage and made the best fight they could. They were naturally a brave people (SS2, 18). The fact that it took the Saxons more than a hundred years to get a firm grip on the island shows that fact. The legend of King Arthur's exploits also illustrates the valor of the race to which he belonged. According to tradtion this British Prince, who had become a convert to Christianity (S25), met and checked the invaders in their isolent march of triumph. The battle, it is said, was fought at Mount Badon ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... in which the paternal hamlet of Somersby lies, "a land of quiet villages, large fields, grey hillsides, and noble tall-towered churches, on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold," does not appear to have been rich in romantic legend and tradition. The folk-lore of Lincolnshire, of which examples have been published, does seem to have a peculiar poetry of its own, but it was rather the humorous than the poetical aspect of the country-people that Tennyson appears to have known. In brief, we have nothing to inform us as ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... the revolver, and as good a rifle shot as would often be found. It made no difference to him whether or not a man was running, for part of his pistol practice was in shooting at a bottle swinging in the wind from the bough of a tree. Legend goes that Tumlinson killed his wife and then shot himself dead, taking many secrets with him. ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... arose to tuck him up on the sofa. A sound of the slow turning of large pages guided him to the corner by the bay window where some bookcases, standing back to back, made a sort of alcove. There was Ian, flat upon his stomach, while before him the "Wandering Jew" legend, with the Dore pictures, lay open at the final scene—The Last Judgment—where the Jew, his journey over, looks up at the angels coming to greet him, while little devils pull vainly at his tattered boots. ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... a drawing in the possession of Charles Aders, Esq., in which is represented the legend of a poor female Saint; who, having spun past midnight, to maintain a bedrid mother, has fallen asleep from fatigue, and Angels are finishing her work. In another part of the chamber, an angel is tending a ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations—the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... trial, his friends did their utmost to save him. The noble old giant with flowing white beard, who had always been more or less of a legend, now to them assumed heroic proportions. His calmness, his steadfastness in what he believed to be right ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... last enables us to present our readers, (almost entire) the following Legend respecting the house and ancestry of the heroine of Sir Walter Scott's forthcoming Novel—Anne of Geierstein. The tale is entitled Donnerhugel's Narrative, and was told by a remarkable Swiss to the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XIII, No. 370, Saturday, May 16, 1829. • Various
... his wisdom; the contact with Larry Rivers; the forced marriage and the determined effort to live up to a bargain made in the dark, endured in the dark. It came to Northrup, drifting as he was, that a man or woman can go through slime and torment and really escape harm. The old, fiery furnace legend was based on an eternal truth; that and the lions' den! It put a new light on that peculiar quality of Mary-Clare. She had never been burnt or wounded—not the real woman of her. That explained the maddening thing about her—her aloofness. What ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... castes, and Brahmans sometimes consent to take water from them. The Dangis of Saugor appear to be the descendants of a set of freebooters in the Vindhyan hills, much like the Gujars in northern India. The legend of their origin is given in Sir B. Robertson's Census Report of 1891: "The chief of Garhpahra or old Saugor detained the palanquins of twenty-two married women and kept them as his wives. The issue of the illicit ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... troops went into winter quarters about Falmouth, where, on the opposite shore of the Rappahannock, within full view of the sentries, stood a row of finger-posts, on which the Confederate soldiers had painted the taunting legend, "This way ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... your readers inform me what legend (if any) John Keats the poet refers to in his beautiful poem of St. Agnes' Eve, st. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... enemies. Meanwhile the Voices came more frequently, urging Joan to go into France and help her country. She asked how she, a girl, who could not ride or use sword and lance, could be of any help? At the same time she was encouraged by one of the vague old prophecies which were common in France. A legend ran that France was to be saved by a Maiden from the Oak Wood, and there was an Oak Wood (le bois chenu) near Domremy. Some such prophecy had an influence on Joan, and probably helped people to believe in her. The Voices often commanded her to go to Vaucouleurs, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... good; and what is this ancient famous action of which Critias spoke, not as a mere legend, but as a veritable action of the Athenian State, ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... This is the legend illustrated in our picture. Under the spreading branches of a great tree, Mary has found a comfortable seat on a grassy bank, and Joseph rests behind her. The little child stands on his mother's knee, clinging to her dress for support, while her arms hold him firm. A band of infant ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... the greatest of the Greek lyric poets, died according to legend as here described. He is justly famous for his majestic odes, and Platen revered ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... Satan in Paradise Lost, "the quarters of the north." The old legend that Milton followed placed Satan in the north parts of heaven, following the passage in Isaiah concerning Babylon on which that legend was constructed (Isa. xiv. 12-15), "Thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... Nevertheless, this legend has not been undertaken to furnish materials for future biographies of Don Juan; it is intended to prove to honest folk that Belvidero did not die in a duel with stone, as some ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... excitement.] Oh, no, it shall be no pillar of metal or stone. And no one shall be suffered to carve any scornful legend on the monument I shall raise. There shall be, as it were, a quickset hedge of trees and bushes, close, close around your tomb. They shall hide away all the darkness that has been. The eyes of men and the thoughts of ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... a turn of fashion in England can silence so much mountain merriment in France. The lace-makers themselves have not entirely forgiven our countrywomen; and I think they take a special pleasure in the legend of the northern quarter of the town, called L'Anglade, because there the English free-lances were arrested and driven back by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lay an immense number of castles and abbeys between Windeck and Cleves, for every one of which the guide-books have a legend and a ghost, who might, with the commonest stretch of ingenuity, be made to waylay our adventurers on the road; yet, as the journey would be thus almost interminable, let us cut it short by saying that the travellers reached Cleves ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... spirit, and were notable for beauty. I imagine that the mother of Lord Cloncurry was descended from the Hackets. It may well be that all through these stories the name of Kirwan has taken the place of the older name. Legend mixes everything together in ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... let me in! Hinc illae lachrymae!" This legend was accompanied by a chalk picture of himself shedding large tear-drops into ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... title of Koempeviser, there is one called "The King of England's Son." He likewise sailed in a costly ship; its anchor was inlaid with pure gold, and every rope was of twisted silk. Every one who saw the Spanish vessel must have remembered the ship in this legend, for there was the same pageantry, the same thoughts ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... old admirals and buccaneers, that set the legend afloat, were so absurd as to call a cabbage, and your shipmates may have eaten for one, is nothing on earth but the last ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... rather enjoyed the fright of Pomposo. As he rolled along at my side, with a gait not unlike a drunken sailor, I discovered that his long hair concealed a leather collar around his neck, which bore for its legend the single word "Baby!" I recalled the mysterious suggestion of the two miners. This, then, was the "baby" with whom ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... see how he gets out of it," I said, remembering the odd Texas legend. (The traveller read the bill-of-fare, you know, and called for a vol-au-vent. And the proprietor looked at the traveller, and running a pistol into his ear, observed, "You'll take hash.") I was thinking of this ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... rough-handed folks of that place. Then he came back to Squaw Gulch, so named from that day, and discovered the Bully Boy. Jim humbly regarded this piece of luck as interposed for his reward, and I for one believed him. If it had been in mediaeval times you would have had a legend or a ballad. Bret Harte would have given you a tale. You see in me a mere recorder, for I know what is best for you; you shall blow out this bubble from ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... as a testimony to the early independence of the Forest Cantons, the Magna Charta of Switzerland." The formation of this confederacy may be regarded as the first combined preparation of the Swiss for that great struggle in defence of their liberties, in the history of which fact and legend, as shown in Baker's discriminating narrative, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... legend arises from the appearance of the rocks. The bare floor of nearly white sandstone, upon which the butte stands, is stained in gory streaks and blotches by the action of an iron constituent in the rocks of another portion of the adjoining ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... gift, O winds, that ye have brought? O, sun, what legend shines your arch above? Ah, they are one, and all things else are naught, Take them, beloved—they are ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... in a fog, over Queen's Ferry to Dunfirmline in the Kingdom of Fife. It was true that a false step or a slip of the foot would have dashed them to pieces on the rocks below. A gentleman of the party scouted the legend. Only a fox or an Alpine chamois could make that ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... voice, and long, drawling cadence, seated sideways on his mule, who seems to listen with infinite gravity, and to keep time, with his paces, to the tune. The couplets thus chanted, are often old traditional romances about the Moors, or some legend of a saint, or some love-ditty; or what is still more frequent, some ballad about a bold contrabandista, or hardy bandolero, for the smuggler and the robber are poetical heroes among the common people of Spain. Often the song of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 547, May 19, 1832 • Various
... is a spring which rises at the foot of a steep hill out of a rock, and is formed into a beautiful polygonal well, covered with a rich arch supported by pillars; the roof exquisitely carved in stone; over the fountain is the legend of St Wenefrid on a pendent projection, with the arms of England at the bottom. Numbers of fine ribs secure the arch, whose intersections are coupled with some sculpture. To this place the resort of pilgrims ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... served every purpose of genuine history. Our fathers accepted it in as good faith as any Christian ever believed in the gospel of Christ, and so it had a similar influence in moulding the social, religious, political and literary life of our ancestors. We become interested in this legend as much as if it were genuine history, on account of the influence it wielded upon the minds and hearts of a race destined to act so great a part in the social, religious and political drama of Europe. We look into this and other ancestral myths, and see mirrored in them all that we afterward find ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... in oaths and legend, and her father taught her to ride, to swim, to shoot and to fish, her moral and literal education were entrusted to Mr. Considine. Physically Mr. Considine was of a type that does not change much ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... legend which describes how a certain woodman, a widower, gave shelter to a strangely fascinating dame, and falling in love with her, incontinently made his guest lawful mistress of hearth and home; how, notwithstanding ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... of the fountain. Then he made her peep through the windows of the library, which filled one side of the building. There she saw black-robed students poring over the books. 'Melanchthon lectured there,' he said; 'Erasmus was here, and the learned Dr. Faustus of Maulbronn came and studied here, so legend says.' ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... the seas of two continents in cockle-shell ships,—planks lashed with deer thongs, calked with moss,—rapacious in their deep-sea plunderings as beasts of prey, fearless as the very spirit of the storm itself. The adventures of the North Pacific Vikings read more like some old legend of the sea than sober truth; and the wild strain had its fountain-head in the most tempestuous hero and beastlike man that ever ascended ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... be baptized of thee," said John; but Jesus insisted, and the rite was administered. John's awe must have been deepened by what now took place. Jesus looked up in earnest prayer, and then from the open heaven a white dove descended, resting on the head of the Holy One. An ancient legend tells that from the shining light the whole valley of the Jordan was illuminated. A divine voice was heard also, declaring that this Jesus was the ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... march. It is in this also that he rises out of himself into the higher spheres of art. So, in the ballade by which he is best known, he rings the changes on names that once stood for beautiful and queenly women, and are now no more than letters and a legend. "Where are the snows of yester year?" runs the burden. And so, in another not so famous, he passes in review the different degrees of bygone men, from the holy Apostles and the golden Emperor of the East, down to the heralds, pursuivants, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is sad with silver and the day is glad with gold, And the woodland silence listens to a legend never old, Of the Lady of the Fountain, whom the faery people know, With her limbs of samite whiteness and her hair of golden glow, Whom the boyish South Wind seeks for and the girlish-stepping Rain; Whom the sleepy leaves still whisper men ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... of having played him an unpleasant trick. He answered little to the questions of Hudson, and returning to his bed, heard, in silence, a long studied oration on the merits of Saint Bridget, which comprehended the greater part of her long-winded legend, and concluded with the assurance, that, from all accounts preserved of her, that holy saint was the least of all possible women, except those of ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... it with the town; fortified the palace and the line of houses occupied by his troops; and in this position he remained for several weeks, defending himself against the whole power of Egypt. Of the time in which legend describes him as abandoned to his love for Cleopatra, there was hardly an hour of either day or night in which he was not fighting for his very life. The Alexandrians were ingenious and indefatigable. They pumped the sea into the conduits which supplied his quarters ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... thinking of a legend," he said. "I don't remember whether I have read it somewhere or heard it, but it is a strange and almost grotesque legend. To begin with, it is somewhat obscure. A thousand years ago a monk, dressed in black, wandered ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and to retain at the same time all the unobjectionable personal colour and all the graphic traits that can help to give that model a persuasive vitality. This poetic process is all the more successful for being automatic. It is in this way that heroes and gods have been created. A legend or fable lying in the mind and continually repeated gained insensibly at each recurrence some new eloquence, some fresh congruity with the emotion it had already awakened, and was destined to awake again. To measure the importance of this truth the reader need ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... legend in our town that Major Appleby Cartwright once went over to Savannah on a festive occasion and was there joyously entertained by the honorable the Chatham Artillery. The Chatham Artillery brews a Punch; insidious, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... autobiographic sketches are so many leaves from the life of the ingenious author. We hope to introduce a few of the notes of the Series; but content ourselves for the present with the following: being the original of the legend ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various
... with millions and hundreds of trees, and first you come to the Figs, but you scorn to loiter there, for the Figs is the resort of superior little persons, who are forbidden to mix with the commonalty, and is so named, according to legend, because they dress in full fig. These dainty ones are themselves contemptuously called Figs by David and other heroes, and you have a key to the manners and customs of this dandiacal section of the Gardens when I tell you that cricket is called crickets here. Occasionally ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... always out for the apprehension of ideas, and their mouths always open for their reception. Walter Scott was engaged in the active duties of the legal profession when writing his novels, and there was not a legend of Scotland, nor a bit of history or gossip, nor an old story-teller that lived within fifty miles of him, that he did not lay under tribute for mental food. It is declared, to the everlasting disgrace of Goethe, that he practiced upon the affections of women, even to old age, that he might ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... Earth—has tried in turn. And were the Lily and her lover to be more fortunate than all those millions? For a long time, it seemed not so. The dismal shape of the old lunatic still glided behind them; and for every spot that looked lovely in their eyes, he had some legend of human wrong or suffering, so miserably sad, that his auditors could never afterwards connect the idea of joy with the place where it had happened. Here, a heart-broken woman, kneeling to her child, had been spurned from his feet; ...
— The Lily's Quest (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Latin of the Chroniclers, the Fredegaires and Paul Diacres, and the poems contained in the Bangor antiphonary which he sometimes read for the alphabetical and mono-rhymed hymn sung in honor of Saint Comgill, the literature limited itself almost exclusively to biographies of saints, to the legend of Saint Columban, written by the monk, Jonas, and to that of the blessed Cuthbert, written by the Venerable Bede from the notes of an anonymous monk of Lindisfarn, he contented himself with glancing over, in his moments ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... I do not believe that Communism can be realized immediately by the spread of Bolshevism, I do believe that, if Bolshevism falls, it will have contributed a legend and a heroic attempt without which ultimate success might never have come. A fundamental economic reconstruction, bringing with it very far-reaching changes in ways of thinking and feeling, in philosophy and art and private relations, seems absolutely ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... to Euripides; he clearly states the problem in a prologue, solving it in an appearance of Artemis by the device known as the Deus ex machina. It is sometimes said this trick is a confession of the dramatist's inability to untie the knot he has twisted. Rather it is an indication that the legend he was compelled to follow was at variance with the inevitable end of human action. The tragedies of Euripides which contain the Deus ex machina gain enormously if the last scene is left out; it was added ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... fascinated reluctance to tales of supernatural wonders, in most of which the narrators had themselves been actors, or derived their information from persons, whose veracity it would be a sin to doubt. Among them was a legend told by Gladding, of a murdered fisherman, whose ghost he had seen himself, and which was said still to haunt the banks of the Severn, and never was seen without bringing ill-luck. It is the only one with which we will trouble our renders, and ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... studies of Scotch character which are the strength of his genius. The reader feels a lack of reality in the conclusion, the fatal encounter of the father and the lost son, an incident as old as the legend of Odysseus. But this is more than atoned for by the admirable part of Madge Wildfire, flitting like a feu follet up and down among the douce Scotch, and the dour rioters. Madge Wildfire is no repetition of Meg Merrilies, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... unimpeded, might not a revolution from above, a gradual rationalisation, have transformed the church? Its dogma might have been insensibly understood to be nothing but myth, its miracles nothing but legend, its sacraments mere symbols, its Bible pure literature, its liturgy just poetry, its hierarchy an administrative convenience, its ethics an historical accident, and its whole function simply to lend a warm mystical aureole to human culture and ignorance. The Reformation ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the legend of the Golden Fleece, in quest of which Jason and his valiant crew sailed in the ship 'Argo.' In the autumn, Andromeda is situated above Aries, and would seem to be borne by the latter, which accounts for Milton's ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... Cape two days afterwards, our fifty- sixth from England, in 37 degrees south latitude—the meridian of the "Flying Dutchman's fortress," as Table Mountain has been termed by those who once believed in the Vanderdecken legend, being a little ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... masques. The Phi Sigma Society gives its masque—sometimes an original one—on alternate years just before the Christmas vacation; and Zeta Alpha alternates with the Classical Society at Commencement. The Zeta Alpha Masque of 1913, a charming dramatization in verse of an old Hindu legend by Elizabeth McClellan of the class of 1913, was one of the notable events of Commencement time, a pageant of poetic beauty and oriental dignity; and in 1915 Florence Wilkinson Evans's adaptation of the lovely old poem "Aucassin and Nicolette", was ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... were increased by the pity which Edith's pale face aroused. The guests of the night before gave their version of what had happened, omitting none of the impressive details; and a legend formed straightway around the fair-haired Englishwoman, a legend that assumed a really tragic character, owing to the popular story ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... the Law, and of the Lord A voice made free. If there be time enough To live, I may have more to tell you then Of western matters. I go now to Rome, Where Caesar waits for me, and I shall wait, And Caesar knows how long. In Caesarea There was a legend of Agrippa saying In a light way to Festus, having heard My deposition, that I might be free, Had I stayed free of Caesar; but the word Of God would have it as you see it is — And here I am. The cup that I shall drink Is mine to drink — the moment or the place Not ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... beauty of God's working—to startle its lethargy with a deep and pure agitation of astonishment—are their higher missions. They are as a great and noble architecture, first giving shelter, comfort, and rest; and covered also with mighty sculpture and painted legend." ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... two half-seen figures within. As it did so, a wanton breeze from off the Island flapped back the lapel of his jumper. In that brief instant one might have seen a button pinned upon his blue flannel shirt—clasped hands, surrounded by the legend: "Workers ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... had stained not only the Confederate flag, but a gold medal found under his uniform, bearing the legend: "Non solum nobis, sed pro patria"; "Not for ourselves ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... deepe: will that humor passe? Fal. Now, the report goes, she has all the rule of her husbands Purse: he hath a legend of Angels ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... legend of a great earthquake in 286 B.C., when Mount Fuji rose from the bottom of the sea in a single night. This is the highest and most famous mountain of the country. It rises more than 12,000 feet above the water level, and is in shape like a cone; ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... the cards and looked at them. They were two in number; one was a man's card, one a woman's. The man's card bore the legend 'Sir Rupert Langley,' the woman's was merely inscribed 'Helena Langley.' The address was a ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... ropes of fibre, glistened like ligamented bones heaped in the dead valley. Masts, spars, fragments of shell-encrusted boats, binnacles, round-houses and galleys, and part of the after-deck of a coasting schooner, had ceased their wanderings and found rest in this vast cemetery of the sea. The legend on a wheel-house, the lettering on a stern or bow, served for mortuary inscription. Wailed over by the trade winds, mourned by lamenting sea-birds, once every year the tide visited its lost dead and left them ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... of Jewish legend, and Greek speculation, and medieval scholasticism; moving simply and divinely among the ways of His Jewish world, a man among men. We can watch, dimly indeed by comparison with our living scrutiny of living men, but still more clearly than any generation ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
