"Metamorphosis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disagreeable one, for, though the Emperor's remark that he had yielded to the rare charm of this woman was not true, his kindly heart had become warmly attached to Barbara. For the first time he saw in her the suffering which often causes a metamorphosis in certain traits in a sick person's character extend their transforming power to the entire nature. Passionate love for her art gave her the ability to maintain with punctilious exactness the silence which he had been compelled ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... by repeating their arguments, to destroy the effect of the prophetic warning to which the king had just listened. They succeeded but too well. "That instant," says Henry of Anjou, "we perceived a sudden change, a strange and wonderful metamorphosis in the king. He placed himself on our side, and adopted our opinion, going much beyond us and to more criminal lengths; since, whereas before it was difficult to persuade him, now we had to restrain him. For, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... and sceptre borne before her, in signe that the administration of iustice was in her power: I am assuredlie persuaded, I say, that suche a sight shulde so astonishe them, that they shuld iudge the hole worlde to be transformed into Amazones[5], and that suche a metamorphosis and change was made of all the men of that countrie, as poetes do feyn was made of the companyons of Vlisses, or at least, that albeit the owtwarde form of men remained, yet shuld they iudge that their hartes were changed frome the wisdome, vnderstanding, and courage of men, to the foolishe ...
— The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment - of Women • John Knox
... Saturn within these few days, I found it solitary, without the assistance of its accustomed stars, and in short perfectly round and defined, like Jupiter, and such it still remains. Now what can be said of so strange a metamorphosis? Are perhaps the two smaller stars consumed like spots on the sun? Have they suddenly vanished and fled? Or has Saturn devoured his own children? Or was the appearance indeed fraud and illusion, with which the glasses have so long time mocked me and so many others who have so often observed ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... him, sword in hand. "Come, come," said Andrea, "sheathe your sword, my fine fellow; there is no occasion to make such a fuss, since I give myself up;" and he held out his hands to be manacled. The girls looked with horror upon this shameful metamorphosis, the man of the world shaking off his covering and appearing as a galley-slave. Andrea turned towards them, and with an impertinent smile asked,—"Have you any message for your father, Mademoiselle Danglars, for in all probability I ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the Dunciad" already mentioned ran through three editions in competition with an authorized key. "The Popiad" and "The Curliad" were rapidly huddled together and placed upon the market. Close upon the heels of these publications came "The Female Dunciad," containing beside the "Metamorphosis of P. into a Stinging Nettle" by Mr. Foxton, a novel called "Irish Artifice; or, the History of Clarina" by Mrs. Eliza Haywood. In a short introduction to the piece, Curll explained how it happened ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... be demonstrated that the geological record must be incomplete, that it can only preserve remains found in certain favourable localities and under particular conditions; that it must be destroyed by processes of denudation, and obliterated by processes of metamorphosis. Beds of rock of any thickness, crammed full of organic remains, may yet, either by the percolation of water through them, or by the influence of subterranean heat, lose all trace of these remains, and present the appearance of beds of rock formed under conditions in which living forms ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and had risen through his favor. Struck in the dark, Mr. Bayard stood at the ticker and watched his fortune of eight millions bleed away; when he dropped the tape he was two millions worse than bankrupt. It was that case-hardening experience which had worked the callous metamorphosis. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... wings to his shoulders—one of the aldermen found himself with a naiad's tail, and he fell flat on the terrace, with great violence; all of them, men and women, were transformed into some shape or another—and the more strange the metamorphosis, the louder they all laughed and shouted. Some indeed were very much alarmed; particularly one little woman, who whispered to her neighbour, that she believed ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... contagion or electricity, was no less from the first interview wholly in love with her.... He is a glorious fellow! Oh, I forgot to say that the soi-disante invalid, once emancipated from the paternal despotism, has had a wondrous revival, or rather, a complete metamorphosis; walks, rides, eats, and drinks like a young and healthy woman,—in fact, is a healthy woman of, I believe, some five and thirty. But one word covers all; they are in Love, who lends his own youth ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... generally had succumbed to the rage for improvement, as they called it. There was a general remodelling and modernizing of houses, and, where nothing more expensive could be afforded, the paint-brush wrought its cheap metamorphosis. "You wouldn't know Hilton was the same place," was the complacent verdict of her neighbours, to which Miss ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... board on the understanding that some of us should accompany him to Tassai, where, he explained, there would be plenty of dancing and eating, enumerating pigs, dogs, yams, and coconuts, as the component parts of the feast. He was taken down to the wardroom, and shortly underwent a complete metamorphosis, effected by means of a regatta shirt of gaudy pattern, red neckcloth, flannel trousers, a faded drab Taglioni of fashionable cut buttoned up to the throat, and an old black hat stuck on one side of his ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... now got rid of red heels and embroidery; and walked about our streets in plain cloth, short thick shoes, and with knotty cudgels in their hands. Many humiliating scrapes were the consequence of this metamorphosis. Bearing no mark to distinguish them from the common herd, some of the lowest classes got into quarrels with them, in which the nobles had not always the best of it.—MONTJOIE, "History ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... always thought that directly you were married, you felt quite different, but no wonderful metamorphosis had come about so far. She felt just herself, save for a dull ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... affairs in England must have come as somewhat of a shock. To those whose knowledge of Mr. Belloc's writings was confined to The Path to Rome or the Cautionary Tales, who thought of him as essayist or poet, this must have seemed a strange metamorphosis indeed. Even those who were conversant with his study of the military aspects of the Revolution and had noticed the careful attention paid by Mr. Belloc to military matters in various books could scarcely have been prepared for such an avalanche of highly-specialized ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... hair instead of fur: he gives a curious account of a cat from Algoa Bay, which had been kept for some time on board and could be identified with certainty; this animal was left for only eight weeks at Mombas, but during that short period it "underwent a complete metamorphosis, having parted with its sandy-coloured fur." A cat from the Cape of Good Hope has been described by Desmarest as remarkable from a red stripe extending along the whole length of its back. Throughout an immense area, namely, the Malayan ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... just because the metamorphosis had been so complete, and the growth had been so rapid, that his education was by no means finished. It had only ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... which it comes to us, and which alter it more or less. A ray of heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ has been broken into a thousand rainbow colors, and carried in a thousand directions. It is the historical task of Christianity to assume with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to be forever spiritualizing more and more her understanding of the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... change the name of one of its vessels, the schooner Ella, odorous of fresh lumber or raw rubber, as the case might be, dingy gray in color, with slovenly decks on which lines of seamen's clothing were generally hanging to dry, remained, in her metamorphosis, still the Ella. ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... rails which, in the hands of the Chinese coolies, was transformed into gun-barrels, ammunition and shells in the most marvelous manner. "Le pavilion couvre la marchandise, especially under the Union Jack," said Hornberg sarcastically, as he watched this metamorphosis, but the captain only looked ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... unknown. But grief seldom kills. Sometimes it hardens. Always it works a change, a greater or less revamping of the spirit. It was so with Stella Fyfe, although she was not keenly aware of any forthright metamorphosis. She was, for the present, too actively ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... commander of the Orient was secretly amazed by the metamorphosis effected in Robert's appearance since he scrutinized him through his glasses. Iris, too, unaccustomed to the constraint of high-heeled shoes, clung to the nondescript's arm in a manner that shook the sailor's faith in Lord Ventnor's pretensions ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... to be effaced! On examining her, she proved, with the exception of four barrels of quicksilver, to have no cargo of any value. I really was so disappointed that I was ashamed to return on board, and when I did, and made my report, there was a complete metamorphosis of faces. Those that were naturally short became a fathom in length, and those that were long frightful to behold. The order was given to burn her and take out the seven Spaniards who composed her crew. On interrogating the patroon, or ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... bent contributed the main elements of my personality. I was a countryman dyed in the wool, yea, more than that, born and bred in the bone, and my character is fundamentally reverent and religious. The religion of my fathers underwent in me a kind of metamorphosis and became something which would indeed have appeared like rank atheism to them, but which was nevertheless full of the very essence of true religion—love, reverence, wonder, unworldliness, and devotion to ideal truth—but in no way identified ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... through endless ages, Of star-dust, and star-pilgrimages, Of rounded worlds, of space and time, Of the old flood's subsiding slime, Of chemic matter, force and form, Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm: The rushing metamorphosis Dissolving all that fixture is, Melts things that be to things that seem, And solid nature to a dream. O, listen to the undersong, The ever old, the ever young; And, far within those cadent pauses, The chorus of the ancient Causes! Delights the dreadful Destiny To fling his voice into ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... returned to Paris, it was impossible to recognize the frivolous, intriguing, and dissipated woman she had formerly been. The metamorphosis was as complete as it was extraordinary and even startling. Saint-Dizier House, heretofore open to the banquets and festivals of every kind of pleasure, became gloomily silent and austere. Instead of the world of elegance and fashion, the princess ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... that the charming woman before him exercising so cleverly all the arts of society, as if born to the purple, and the light-headed, frivolous, little wife of the Central's engineer were one and the same person? The metamorphosis seemed incredible. ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... see," quoth Baba; while Don Juan, turning to his comrade, who Though somewhat grieved, could scarce forbear a smile Upon the metamorphosis in view,— "Farewell!" they mutually exclaimed: "this soil Seems fertile in adventures strange and new; One's turned half Mussulman, and one a maid, By this old black enchanter's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... self-protection, and the re-establishment of peace, and order, and security, the revival of business and trade, and the restoration of the Southern States on the basis of loyalty and equal justice to all, will be the happy results of this astonishing metamorphosis, provided the party which has inaugurated this policy remains in power ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... she has been much noticed and indulged: and being the housekeeper's niece, she has held an equivocal station between a servant and a companion. She has learnt something of fashions and notions among the young ladies, which have effected quite a metamorphosis; insomuch that her finery at church on Sundays has given mortal offence to her former intimates in the village. This has occasioned the misrepresentations which have awakened the implacable family pride of Dame Tibbets. But what is worse, Phoebe, having a spice of coquetry in her disposition, ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... with war conducted for its own sake, with a model army, as efficient as an imaginative training can make it, and with a model organization for warfare of the State behind it, and then the experience of the confused modern social organism as it is impelled, in an uncongenial metamorphosis, towards this imperative and finally unavoidable efficient state, will come most easily within the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... genuine romantic love does not undergo a metamorphosis in marriage is the first of five mistakes I have undertaken to correct in this chapter. The second is summed up in Westermarck's assertion (359-60) ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the subject of his retirement from public life. We were wondering whether he had hung himself, or thrown himself off a bridge—whether he really was dead or had only been arrested—when our conjectures were suddenly set at rest by the entry of the man himself. He had undergone some strange metamorphosis, and walked up the centre of the room with an air which showed he was fully conscious of the improvement in his appearance. It was very odd. His clothes were a fine, deep, glossy black; and yet they looked ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... be whispered about. Sagacious persons opined that Vassily Ivanovitch had till then been crushed under the weight of some secret trouble, that he saw chances of returning to the capital... but the true cause of Vassily Ivanovitch's metamorphosis was guessed ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... a month Jordantown had not undergone so great a metamorphosis as fifty years would make, but it was in the throes of a frightful evolution. The changes already wrought were so amazing that the author may be excused if this record fails to convince the reader of their reality. At least ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... certain species of moth mines leaves, and eating away the cellular structures, causes them to twist irregularly, and eventually spins on the spot a cocoon of green silk in which it undergoes metamorphosis. A local caterpillar, too, converts the tough harsh leaves of a fig-tree (FICUS FASCICULATA) into a close and perfect scroll by an elaborate system of haulage, spinning silken strands as required, having primarily rendered the leaf the more easy to ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... was the play over, and well over, than the choleric and arbitrary M. Paul underwent a metamorphosis. His hour of managerial responsibility past, he at once laid aside his magisterial austerity; in a moment he stood amongst us, vivacious, kind, and social, shook hands with us all round, thanked us separately, and announced his determination ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... firmness of surface which does not let the glamour rub off; but stories in which there is a hint of the beauty just beyond the palpable—or of a dignity suggestive of developed literature—are sorely hurt in their metamorphosis, and should be protected from it. They are for ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... are shaded like those of a partridge, brown and yellow brown. These three kinds of flies lay their eggs in the water, which produce larvae that remain in the state of worms, feeding and breathing in the water till they are prepared for their metamorphosis, and quit the bottoms of the rivers, and the mud and stones, for the surface, and light and air. The brown fly usually disappears before the end of April, likewise the grannam; but of the blue dun there is a succession of different tints, or species, or varieties, which appear in the middle of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... devoid of scales, with naked skin, laying numerous eggs, but hatching their young in an imperfect state, and the Scaly Reptiles, which lay comparatively few eggs, but whose young, when hatched, are completely developed, and undergo no subsequent metamorphosis. Yet, notwithstanding this difference in essential features of structure, and in the mode of reproduction and development, there is such an external resemblance between certain animals belonging to the two groups that they were associated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... skin, which makes them look like fish; when the time of their metamorphosis arrives, this skin will split all down their back, and a little frog will come out of it. Look at this tadpole I have just caught; you can see the feet through its transparent skin. To-day it is a fish, that is to say, it ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... brought face to face with the false assertions of a hysterical girl, and of two ignorant and deceitful peasants. If there is any one thing we know, it is that there can be no force without the metamorphosis of matter of some kind. Here was a girl maintaining her weight—actually growing—her animal heat kept at its due standard, her mind active, her heart beating, her lungs respiring, her skin exhaling, her limbs moving whenever she wished them to ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... alteration, transition, mutation, transposition, conversion, metamorphosis, innovation, transfiguration, permutation, transference, reversion, reaction, transmutation; substitution, commutation; variety, novelty, vicissitude. Associated word: mutanda. Antonyms: continuation, stability, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the sheer power of what she, with fair accuracy, called nonsense. So now they were ready to see her, at any juncture the twins or accident might spring, show the same method and win an even more lustrous triumph in keeping with her own metamorphosis. Nay, they were more than ready to lend a hand toward such an outcome. Like Watson, they had sentimentally matched Hugh and Ramsey, prospectively, in their desire, and saw that such a union must sooner or later be, if it was not already, a paramount issue ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... Beauties. Ask Belinda what it is a Clock, and she is at a stand whether so great a Beauty should answer you. In a Word, I think, instead of offering to administer Consolation to Parthenissa, I should congratulate her Metamorphosis; and however she thinks she was not in the least insolent in the Prosperity of her Charms, she was enough so to find she may make her self a much more agreeable Creature in her present Adversity. The Endeavour to please is highly promoted by a Consciousness that the Approbation ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... features, during the first three centuries. Beginning with the apostolic view of the human Messiah sent to deliver Judaism from its spiritual torpor, and prepare it for the millennial kingdom, we shall briefly trace the progressive metamorphosis of this conception until it completely loses its identity in the Athanasian theory, according to which Jesus was God himself, the Creator of the universe, incarnate in ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... even robber, had his abode therein; the hut was empty, but clean and compact, and it was with no little pleasure that the Assessor took possession of it, and seated himself with Petrea on the only bench which it possessed. Petrea sighed. What a miserable metamorphosis of her glorious castle in ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... the planet, he found to his infinite amazement not a trace of the companion planets could be seen; there in the field of view of his telescope was the golden-tinted disc of the planet as smoothly rounded as the disc of Mars or Jupiter. 'What,' he wrote, 'is to be said concerning so strange a metamorphosis? Are the two lesser stars consumed after the manner of the solar spots? Have they vanished or suddenly fled? Has Saturn, perhaps, devoured his children? Or were the appearances, indeed, illusion or fraud with which the glasses have so long deceived me as well as many others to whom I have shown ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... needing no cement but the fitting of facets; while the associative work of immodest men is all jointless, and astir with wormy ambition; putridly dissolute, and forever on the crawl: so that if it come together for a time, it can only be by metamorphosis through a flash of volcanic fire out of the vale of Siddim, vitrifying the clay of it, and fastening the slime, only to end in wilder scattering; according to the fate of those oldest, mightiest, immodestest of builders, of whom it is told in scorn, ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... "If Diderot was as far as possible from being a dramatic poet, if he was destitute of that supreme creative power which involves the transformation of an author's own personality, he possessed, on the other hand, in the highest degree, that faculty of demi-metamorphosis which is the exercise and the triumph of criticism, and which consists in putting one's self in the the place of the author, occupying the point of view to the subject under examination, and reading every writing in the spirit by which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... a metamorphosis in the bearing of the outer man, as a sudden change of fortune. The anemone of the garden differs scarcely more from its unpretending prototype of the woods, than Robert M'Corkindale, Esq., Secretary and Projector of the Glenmutchkin Railway, differed from Bob ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... been sixteen we had been just of an age and contemporaries altogether. Now we were a year and three-quarters older, and she—her metamorphosis was almost complete, and I was still only at the beginning of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... say that he could see how much of the theology of the day would fall before the standard of him who had got even the insects. And let any one set about studying these creatures carefully, and he will see the force of the remark. We learn the tremendous doctrine of metamorphosis from the insect world; and have not the bee and the ant taught man wisdom from the first? I was highly edified the past summer by observing the ways and doings of a colony of black hornets that established themselves under one of the projecting gables of my house. This ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... that the brutality Heppner displayed at home he could successfully repress when on duty. But the most remarkable thing about this man, who behaved like a brute to his wife, and had no affection for his comrades, was the metamorphosis he underwent if the horses were in question. Towards those beautiful animals he showed an almost womanly tenderness. They all knew him, and he loved them all, though naturally he had his favourites among them. There was Udo, a light-brown gelding, ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... island of the group, Kauai, is as often pronounced as if it began with a T, and Kalo is usually Taro. It is a very musical language. Each syllable and word ends with a vowel, and there are none of our rasping and sibilant consonants. In their soft phraseology our hard rough surnames undergo a metamorphosis, as Fisk into Filikina, Wilson into Wilikina. Each vowel is distinctly pronounced, and usually with the Italian sound. The volcano is pronounced as if spelt Keel-ah-wee-ah, and Kauai as if Kah-wye-ee. The name Owhyhee for Hawaii had its origin in a mistake, for the island was ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... it enough; if the bargain can be annulled, in the name of—" He shook his head—looked at me with a dark frown. I began again: "I will sell you nothing more of my possessions, though you may offer as high a price as for my shadow; and I will sign nothing. Hence you may conclude that the metamorphosis to which you invite me would perhaps be more agreeable to you than to me. Forgive me, but it cannot ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... stages of many an insect are often far greater than those which separate kind from kind.' And so this Proteus of a Church, which has changed its form so completely since the Gospel was first preached in the subterranean galleries of Rome, may undergo another equally startling metamorphosis and come to believe in a God who never intervenes in history. We may here remind our readers of Newman's tests of true development, and mark the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the blood of the victim. Once inside the stomach they soon free themselves from the inclosing sheath and make their way through the walls of the stomach and enter the muscular tissue, particularly the thoracic muscles. Here they undergo a metamorphosis and increase enormously in size, some attaining one-sixteenth of an ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... the fact that philosophers use the word development to designate a definite sequence of ideas, i.e., in a logical order. "Metamorphosis, says Hegel, belongs to the Idea as such since its variation alone is development. Rational speculation must get rid of such nebulous concepts as the evolution of the more highly developed animal organisms from the ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... from her chair with great swiftness, and was already in retreat towards the dairy with a sort of waddling run, and an amount of fat on the nape of her neck which made her look like the metamorphosis of a white ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... a deserter transformed into a district magistrate, collector, or military commander of a populous province, without any other counsellor than his own crude understanding, or any other guide than his passion. Such a metamorphosis would excite laughter in a comedy or farce; but, realized in the theatre of human life, it must give rise to sensations of a very different nature. Who is there that does not feel horror-struck, and tremble for the innocent, when he sees a being of this kind transferred ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... broken off, but absorbed; the heart adds to its cells; the fish becomes a reptile as the tadpole changes to a frog. The same process we observe in toads; and it is also the same in our newts, excepting that in newts the tail remains. There is no parallel in nature to this marvelous and instructive metamorphosis. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... wielded them would have dealt the same blows upon the head of the tyrant himself. It was soon reduced to a shapeless mass. Small portions were carried away and preserved for generations in families as heirlooms of hatred. The bulk was melted again and reconverted, by a most natural metamorphosis, into the cannon from which it ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... potency in the brute as in himself: so the Malays still look upon the Uran-utan, or Wood-man, as the possessor of superhuman wisdom. The hunter and the herdsman, who had few other companions, would presently explain the peculiar relations of animals to themselves by material metamorphosis, the bodily transformation of man to brute giving increased powers of working him weal and woe. A more advanced stage would find the step easy to metempsychosis, the beast containing the Ego (alias soul) of the human: such instinctive belief ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... thought occurred to me, Suppose he changes that u to an o, and makes the President capture a moose, what a pickle I shall be in! Is it anything more than ordinary newspaper enterprise to turn a mouse into a moose? But, luckily for me, no such metamorphosis happened to that little mouse. It turned out not to be a new species, as it should have been, but a species ...
— Camping with President Roosevelt • John Burroughs
... wagging his tongue just now) were sworn to reveal nothing; and Fritz went forth to find—not the King, but the unnamed friend of the King, who had lain in Zenda and flashed for a moment before the dazed eyes of Duke Michael's servants on the drawbridge. The metamorphosis had happened; and the King, wounded almost to death by the attacks of the gaolers who guarded his friend, had at last overcome them, and rested now, wounded but alive, in Black Michael's own room in the Castle. There he had been carried, his face covered with ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... claims put forth for alcohol, in that it delays in any of these hypothetical ways, tissue-change, will conclude that it has no such power in a salutary sense, and that it is unwarrantably assumed that to retard tissue metamorphosis (change) is ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... more I said, "Madame, can you understand my language?" Then I received another strange but unmistakable impression which replied: "I can understand your thoughts but not your babble." "Are you able," she continued telepathically, "to give an explanation of this extraordinary metamorphosis?" "The only information I can offer," answered I, "will be cheerfully given. My name is John Convert, late seaman aboard the schooner Brawl, bound from Sydney to London. Last night I was thrown overboard by my shipmates and after floating about the deep for ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... thus entered upon, he entirely abandoned the two first, slightly neglected the third, for the sake of a fourth—diplomacy, and finally left it entirely for a fifth—the naval service. He was destined to die a member of the senate after a sixth metamorphosis. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... pulp, white juice, and makes a white wine. Other varieties have dark purple skins and yield a reddish juice which makes a red wine. The dark varieties are said to be seedlings from the original white variety, and tradition explains the metamorphosis in this way. ...
— The White Doe - The Fate of Virginia Dare • Sallie Southall Cotten
... very very sleepy, and we would lie down in a corner under the trees and cover our heads with our white aprons—we had become cocoons. We remained in this condition for some time, and so thoroughly did we enter into the role of insects in a state of metamorphosis, that any one listening would have heard pass between us, in a tone of the utmost seriousness, ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... itself. Bereft of light, of sound, of speech, it spoke through pains and ominous excrescences. Then happened a new and dreadful thing. The desire put off without being diminished, finds itself stopped short by a cruel enchantment, a shocking metamorphosis.[40] Love was advancing blindly with open arms. It recoils groaning; but in vain would it flee: the fire of the blood keeps raging; the flesh eats itself away in sharp titillations, and sharper within rages the coal of fire, made ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... met with a facetious piece of Sir John Harrington, printed in 1596 (and possibly there may be an earlier Edition), called, The Metamorphosis of Ajax, where I suspect an allusion to the old Play: "Read the booke of Taming a Shrew, which hath made a number of us so perfect, that now every one can rule a Shrew in our Countrey, save he that hath hir."—I am aware, a modern Linguist may object that ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... a veritable territorial metamorphosis of the old Holy Roman Empire, which, except for the development of Prussia, was still in pretty much the same condition as in Luther's time.[417] There was no unoccupied land to give the dispossessed princes; but there were ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... the inhabitants of a star nor of a drop of water ... with our ears that deceive us, for they transmit to us the vibrations of the air in sonorous notes. They are fairies who work the miracle of changing that movement into noise, and by that metamorphosis give birth to music, which makes the mute agitation of nature musical ... with our sense of smell which is smaller than that of a dog ... with our sense of taste which can scarcely distinguish ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... liquid as water, rapid as fire; he is the raging lion, the savage panther, the trembling bough; he is what he will. The legend takes these data, and gives them a supernatural turn,—for mimicry substituting metamorphosis. Our modern pantomimes have the same gift, and Proteus himself sometimes appears as the subject of their rapid transformations. And it may be conjectured that in that versatile lady Empusa we have but another artist of the same kind, ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... townsfolk changed, but the domestic animals—dogs and cats, horses and cows, asses and goats—suffered from this epidemic influence, as if their habitual equilibrium had been changed. The plants themselves were infected by a similar strange metamorphosis. ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... as if Miss Blake and the rest—were demanding of her just such a metamorphosis and she had been trying—she really had—to recast herself in the mold she thought they exacted. And now here came John Gardiner, surely the nicest and most mannerly young fellow she knew, and the one whom even ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... risen betimes. Never a sluggard, he had been up now for some hours, and had effected so great a metamorphosis in the surgery that the doctor himself would hardly have known it again: things in it previously never having been arranged to Jan's satisfaction. And now he was looking at his watch to see whether breakfast time was coming on, ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... collecting some papers, Phil, after moving restlessly about and glancing down at Amzi—he happened just then to be standing on the bank steps talking to an agent of the Comptroller's office who had been dispatched from Washington to observe the metamorphosis of the First National into the Montgomery National,—Phil, with an embarrassment that was new to her relations ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... only the surface to the world. Now and then she would try to rouse herself, try to form some manly resolution; but she was kept in leading strings by the need for money. And so, slowly and in spite of the ambitious protests and grievous recriminations of her own mind, she underwent the provincial metamorphosis here described. Each day took with it a fragment of her spirited determination. She had laid down a rule for the care of her person, which she gradually departed from. Though at first she kept up with the fashions and the little novelties of elegant life, she was obliged to limit her ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... of the most remarkable points about the dinner was the peculiar metamorphosis of Mrs. Pickett from the brooding silent woman he had known to the ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... the visitor to Woodhall Spa sees skirting the railway, has passed through more than one metamorphosis. Now confined by banks, which have been alternately renewed and broken down at different periods, before the drainage of the Fens, it spread over all that level tract of country, meandering by its many islands and through its oozy channels ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... filberts anyhow, the pollinators may be the trap-plants. This is actually the case in the initial plantings. Clean cultivation will also do away with many of the curculios, since they depend on unbroken soil in the fall for their metamorphosis. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... me to your mother," said Arabella. "You are not yet a Swiss peasant. Pending your metamorphosis, be a little more observant of the conventions ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the general governments, those which possess and exert, in one way or another, attributes of sovereignty. First, the various colonial governments have been considered, and some features of their metamorphosis into our modern state governments have been described. In the course of this study, our attention is called to the most original and striking feature of the development of civil government upon American ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... Mind (1589) speaks of "twittle-twattles that I had learned in ale-houses and at the Theatre of Lanham and his fellows." Again, Nash, in Pierce Penniless (1592), writes: "Tarleton at the Theatre made jests of him"; Harrington, in The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596): "Which word was after admitted into the Theatre with great applause, by the mouth of Master Tarleton"; and the author of Tarlton's Newes out of Purgatory (c. 1589) represents Tarleton as connected with the Theatre. Now, unless Lanham, Tarleton, ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... green stand the public buildings of the place. Here is the tavern, a low two-story building, without porch or piazza, and entered by a door in the middle of the longest side. Over the door swings a sign, on which a former likeness of King George has, by a metamorphosis common at this period, been transformed into a soldier of the revolution, in Continental uniform of buff and blue. But just at this time its contemplation does not afford the patriotic tipler as much complacency as formerly, for Burgoyne is thundering at ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... stage with a coat, hat and boots modeled on those of the man on the boulevard. He reproduced the manner of this ragged fashionable, his grotesque calm, his ridiculous dignity; and having induced his fellow-actor, Serres, to get up a like metamorphosis for the part of Bertrand, the piece ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... consent to the proposal, and the chief was so kind as to assist my friend and his family in effecting that very day the desired metamorphosis. My hair was cut off, and my head shaved, with the exception of a spot on the crown, of about twice the diameter of a crown piece. My face was painted with three or four different colours; some parts of it red, and others black. A shirt was provided for me, painted with ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... THE metamorphosis our dame surprised; To give relief her tears but just sufficed; She scarcely spoke; the husband, days remained, Reflecting on the circumstance that pained. Himself a cuckold could he ever make, By mere design a liberty to take? But, horned or not? the question seemed to be, When ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... into the fresh air of the streets. Pascal fixed a penetrating look on the madwoman, and then on his father and uncle. His professional instinct was getting the better of him, and he studied the mother and the sons, with all the keenness of a naturalist observing the metamorphosis of some insect. He pondered over the growth of that family to which he belonged, over the different branches growing from one parent stock, whose sap carried identical germs to the farthest twigs, which bent in divers ways according to the sunshine or shade in which they ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... and boys who were at the place of the little borah escaped the metamorphosis. They waited long for the arrival of the ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... change seemed to proceed from the south. The clouds seemed to lift still higher, and to shrink into small, light, feathery cirrus clouds, silvery on the dark blue sky—resembling white pencil shadings. The light of the moon asserted itself anew. And this metamorphosis also spread upward, till the moon herself looked out again, and it went on spreading northward till it covered the ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... monde, hopeless of success in exhibiting myself in the' costume Franais, I gave over the attempt, and ventured to come forth as a gothic Anglaise, who never heard of, or never heeded the reigning metamorphosis. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the literature of Germany is, that it is philosophical. The philosophers there are poets, and the poets are philosophers. Goethe is to be found no more, or no less, in his 'Theory of Colors' or in his 'Metamorphosis of Plants,' than in his 'Divan' or his 'Faust'; and lyrism, if I may use this trite expression, "is overflowing" in Schleiermacher's theology and in Schelling's philosophy. Is this not perhaps at least ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... mandibles! They are capable of tearing it, but they do not dream of doing so! There can be only one explanation of this suicidal inaction. The insect is well-endowed with tools and instinctive faculties for accomplishing the final act of its metamorphosis, namely, the act of emerging from the cocoon and from the cell. Its mandibles provide it with scissors, file, pick-axe and lever wherewith to cut, gnaw through and demolish either its cocoon and its mortar enclosure or any other not too obstinate barrier substituted ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... The Young Amelia, who was very desirous of retaining amongst his crew a man of Edmond's value, had offered to advance him funds out of his future profits, which Edmond had accepted. His next care on leaving the barber's who had achieved his first metamorphosis was to enter a shop and buy a complete sailor's suit—a garb, as we all know, very simple, and consisting of white trousers, a striped shirt, and a cap. It was in this costume, and bringing back to Jacopo the shirt and ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Moreover, it is said that, when Allah created the empyrean, it was agitated with an exceeding agitation; but He wrote on it, 'Bismillah' and its agitation subsided. When the formula first descended from heaven to the Prophet, he said, 'I am safe from three things, earthquake and metamorphosis and drowning; and indeed its boons are great and its blessings too many to enumerate. It is told of Allah's Apostle that he said, 'There will be brought on the Judgment-day a man with whom He shall reckon and finding no good deed to his account, shall ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... that she was perfect or ever could be, but she might come very close to it if she went on improving as she did every day. As a matter of fact, I found an immense amount of analytical pleasure in studying the changes that attended the metamorphosis. It seemed to my eager imagination that she was being translated before my eyes; developing into a serious, sensible, unselfish person with a soul preparing to mount higher than self. Her voice seemed to be softer, sweeter; ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... short novel, one of the masterpieces of that period. This book, of a dangerous example, was classed with "Adolphe," a dreadful lamentation, the counterpart of which is found in Camille's work. The true secret of her literary metamorphosis and pseudonym has never been fully understood. Some delicate minds have thought it lay in a feminine desire to escape fame and remain obscure, while offering a man's ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... this extraordinary field, that would seem to have been traversed by a giant plow. But he is absorbed to his very vitals in the metamorphosis of the country's face. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse |
