"Vivid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that followed Konrad had a dream, vivid and clear as never dream had been. It was a dark country, and he had lost his way. He wandered about amid cold, damp rocks, and could not find a path. Then his fingers felt a thread; he seized it, and it guided ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... of the aesthetic emotions became dignified with the garb of piety. The picture-galleries of the Louvre, crowded with Madonnas and saints, the Roman Catholic churches with their incense-laden air and exquisite music, brought a new joy into my life, a more vivid colour to my dreams. Insensibly, the colder, cruder Evangelicalism that I had never thoroughly assimilated, grew warmer and more brilliant, and the ideal Divine Prince of my childhood took on the more pathetic lineaments of the Man of Sorrows, the deeper attractiveness of the suffering ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... picture grows upon us, we can almost hear the ringing of the bells. Indeed, to those familiar with such scenes in actual life, the impression is very vivid. The friend to whom Millet first showed his painting immediately exclaimed, "It is the Angelus." "Then you can hear the bells," said the ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... period of its original splendor, when Rameses in triumph returned from his oriental conquests—pictures the pile in all its completeness, the hall of a hundred and thirty columns with its superb roof, glittering in all the vivid beauty of its paintings, thronged with monarchs, and priests, and worshipers, and devoted to splendid ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... varied ramifications, and relieve a famishing family from the jaws of penury and privation. By thus delivering me from an impending impossibility most prejudicial to my purse resources, you will confer on your humble servant a boon which will be always vivid on the tablet of my breast, never to be effaced until the period that I am sojurning on the stage of this sublunary world's theatre." The petition goes on to explain that all the unhappy petitioner's efforts to earn an honest ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... number of other dances—the most usual being the Gavotte, Bourree, Minuet and Passepied. In effect, the Suite was a kind of "international Potpourri" of the dances most in vogue, and affords us a vivid reflection of the manners and customs of the period. Many of the English Suites begin with an elaborate polyphonic Prelude. We shall not give a detailed analysis of all these dance movements; for the main characteristics the tabulated list will suffice, and in the book of Supplementary ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... refuses to see in nature either a symbol or a sermon. Withal his landscapes are poignant in their reality. They are like the grill age one notes in ancient French country houses—little caseate cut in the windows through which you may see in vivid outline a little section of the landscape. Cezanne marvellously renders certain surfaces, china, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... impractical, enormously energetic, a prodigious worker, a conceiver of grandiose projects, and a relentless hunter of patrons. He was at home with his social superiors and had some pretentions to literary culture, he had a coarse gift for the vivid phrase in writing, and his tastes in art ran to the ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... extinction; recalled Crispus Attucks shedding his blood at the beginning of the American Revolution, that white Americans might be free, while black Americans remained in slavery; rehearsed the conduct of the Negroes with Jackson at New Orleans; drew a vivid and pathetic picture of the Southern slaves protecting and supporting the families of their masters while the latter were fighting to perpetuate black slavery; recounted the bravery of coloured troops at Port Hudson and Forts Wagner and Pillow, and praised ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... would have sworn that the 'palladium of justice' and the other 'fixtures' had their salvation staked on the success of his client. And if there was anything he thought himself competent to 'operate largely' on, it was a damage suit. On this occasion, the vivid picture he drew of an unwarrantable intrusion upon this aged and indefatigable servant of the public, the injury inflicted upon his 'valuable health,' and his generous conduct in contenting himself with the paltry sum of eighty dollars by way of damages, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the "one-idea'd man" unfolds his theories to royalty. The land of the Grand Khan, with its untold treasure, the salvation of millions of souls in the Indies, are the vivid points. The earth is a sphere, and a ship may sail straight from Spain to Cipango, urges this man of imagination and faith. The king was not slow to perceive the great advantages which success in such an enterprise would bring ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... written Bill several letters in imagination and enjoyed doing so, but the matter of sending him an actual letter has begun to pall. The thought no longer has the savor and vivid sparkle it had once. When one feels like that it is unwise to write. Letters should be spontaneous outpourings: they should never be undertaken merely from a sense of duty. We know that Bill wouldn't want to get a letter that was dictated ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... some realist philosophers. "For we have no other instance of an unrealized perfection producing such pain and joy, such volitions, such endlessly varied and real results; and all by means of just this vivid and persistent impression that this Becoming is an already realized Perfection."[36] Therefore though the irresistible urge and the effort forward, experienced on highest levels of love and service, are plainly one-half of the life of the ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... humour. The story of the Oak and the Briar, related as his friendly commentator, Kirke, says, "so lively and so feelingly, as if the thing were set forth in some picture before our eyes," for the warning of "disdainful younkers," is a first fruit, and promise of Spenser's skill in vivid narrative. The fable of the Fox and the Kid, a curious illustration of the popular discontent at the negligence of the clergy, and the popular suspicions about the arts of Roman intriguers, is told with great spirit, and with mingled humour and pathos. ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... that understand Italians, there is a certain dignity in its poverty, which used to be in strong contrast with the slipshod publicity of household dirt in the inhabited parts of Monti. The contrast is, in a way, even more vivid now, for Monti, the first Region, has suffered most in the great crisis, and Trastevere least of all. Rome is one of the poorest cities in the civilized world, and when she was trying to seem rich, the element of sham was enormous in everything. In the architecture of the so-called new ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... story. It was vivid, interesting, dramatic. It meant the favour of his editor, a big thing for the Universe, and a fatter lining for his own pocket. He sat down to put his discovery on paper before he attempted anything else, although the impulse to celebrate was ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... period. It was at the time when the discovery of the Pole had just set the whole civilized world by the ears, and the teacher was doing something that many good teachers do on occasions of this sort: she was turning the vivid interest of the moment to educative purposes. The pupils had read Peary's account of his trip and they were discussing its details in class. Now that exercise was vastly more than an interesting information ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... piteous exclamation, almost a sob, was almost more than one could bear. It was probably the first moment since the previous day that he had full, vivid consciousness of all that had happened—and it was followed by complete, humiliating despair that could not be disguised—who knows, in another minute he might have sobbed aloud. For the first moment Stepan Trofimovitch looked wildly at him; then he suddenly bowed his head ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... at their mean and unaccustomed surroundings, and were inclined to hold the Yankees responsible for it all, and they began to curse and swear in rough and bitter speech. Then there came on the most awful thunder storm I ever witnessed. Vivid flashes of lightning kept the whole heavens illuminated with a blaze of light, while a thousand electric lights would not so have turned night into day around our corral of train-wagons. Crashing peals of thunder were in the ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... region of the theatres made a midnight summer in the empty heart of September, and recalled the gayety of the season for the moment to the desolate metropolis. But this splendor was always so massed and so vivid that even in the height of the season it was one of the things that distinguished itself among the various immense impressions. The impressions were all, if I may so try to characterize them, transitory; they were effects of adventitious ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love of Beauty" which is his next subject. There are some touches of description here, vivid, high-colored, not so much pictures as ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... What vivid dreams arise as I dose by the hedge amidst those autumn scenes! Whether clouds bear me company or the moon be my mate, I can't discern. In fairyland I soar, not that I would become a butterfly like Chang. So long I for my old friend T'ao, the magistrate, that I again seek him. In a sound sleep ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... at this flower-bed of human nature, and the reward of happy daring paid by Beauty, has vivid images of Princess Amelia and her Vice-regency of Hanover; bright Princess and Vice-regency, divided from him by bottomless gulfs, which need such a swim as that of Leander across the material Hellespont was but a trifle to!—In ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... and the dead world was shrouded in gloom. But right across the southern horizon was one long vivid scarlet streak, waxing and waning in vivid pulses of life, leaping suddenly to a crimson zenith and then dying down to ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... beauty, half hidden as it was by the exigencies of the costume she had chosen, was so unusual and brilliant that it seemed to create an atmosphere of bewilderment and rapture around her as she came. She was preceded by a small Nubian boy in a costume of vivid scarlet, who, walking backwards humbly, fanned her slowly with a tall fan of peacock's plumes made after the quaint designs of ancient Egypt. The lustre radiating from the peacock's feathers, the light of her golden garments, her jewels and the marvellous black splendor of her ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Most of the elements which are found in the story may likewise be traced in earlier Semitic traditions. The aim of the prophet who has given us the story was, according to the view of certain interpreters, to present in vivid, concrete form the origin, nature, and consequences of sin. This method of teaching was similar to that which Jesus used, for example, in the parable of Dives and Lazarus. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with the command not ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... for any to describe how those few words turned that mourning into joy—into exaltation—into frenzy; and how a storm of huzzas burst out and swept down the streets in every direction and woke those corpse-like multitudes to vivid life and action and turmoil in a moment. The soldiers broke from the crowd and came flocking to our standard, and many of the citizens ran and got pikes and halberds and joined us. As we moved on, our numbers increased steadily, and the hurrahing continued—yes, we moved through a solid cloud of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... grew the intervening gap of dark water. Orme braced himself for the shock. In his left hand was the coiled painter; in his right, the end of the ready noose, which trailed behind him on the decking. It was long since he had thrown a lariat. In a vivid gleam of memory he saw at that moment the hot, dusty New Mexican corral, the low adobe buildings, the lumbering cattle and the galloping horses of the ranch. There he had spent one summer vacation of his college life. It was ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... his eyes glowing with vivid lightnings, drew up the wide sinews of his broad back, and with wrathful front leaped towards him who seemed ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... were making their desperate run for the shelter of the logs on the other side, of the Mississippi, Otto threw back an affrighted look, which gave him such a vivid picture of that particular savage that he felt the memory would remain with him through life. A few minutes after, as my reader will recall, Jack deliberately held fast to the upper edge of the rude fort ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... like ease his vivid lines assume The garb and dignity of ancient Rome.— Let college verse-men trite conceits express, Trick'd out in splendid shreds of Virgil's dress; From playful Ovid cull the tinsel phrase, And vapid notions hitch in pilfer'd lays: Then ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... has given rise to expressions used in Scripture, where afflictions and perils are likened to a cup that intoxicates. This is an apt and vivid figure of speech. So the passion of Christ is called a draught from a brook (Ps 110, 7), meaning that it is a medicinal draught or mixture, which, though bitter, is healing in its bitterness and gives ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... was the impression (a matter for unbounded surprise!) which he produced upon the ladies. Properly to explain this phenomenon I should need to say a great deal about the ladies themselves, and to describe in the most vivid of colours their social intercourse and spiritual qualities. Yet this would be a difficult thing for me to do, since, on the one hand, I should be hampered by my boundless respect for the womenfolk of all Civil Service officials, and, on the other hand—well, simply ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... brought some one in to tell you about it after it was all over... Some one? Whom? Are you not begging the question? I admit there were, that evening in Oxford, many people who, when they went home from the river, gave vivid reports of what they had seen. But among them was none who had seen more than a small portion of the whole affair. Certainly, I might have pieced together a dozen of the various accounts, and put them all into the mouth of one person. But credibility is not enough for ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... glancing up at the clouds, which were getting blacker and blacker, and from which, now and then, vivid flashes of lightning came while low mutterings of thunder rolled nearer and nearer. "Something seemed to be wrong with the carburetor," Tom answered. "I won't try to monkey with it now. Let's hike for that farmhouse. We'll be lucky if we don't get drenched. Are you sure you're ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... reptile on the island is a very vivid and beautiful green snake, which is exceedingly abundant. Yesterday, while catching grasshoppers for fish-bait, I nearly griped one in my hand; indeed, I rather think I did gripe it. The snake was as much startled as myself, and, in its fright, stood an instant ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ancient Africa, and her face was the face of Lilith. The screaming lovely witches capered in fantastic spirals, each sporting a lighted candle. It was the diabolic Circus of the Candles, the infernal circus of the Witches' Sabbath. Rooted to the ground, Baldur realized with fresh amazement and vivid pain the fair beauty of Adam's prehistoric wife, her luxurious blond hair, her shapely shoulders, her stature of a goddess—he trembled, for she had turned her mordant gaze in his direction. And he strove in vain to bring back the comforting vision of the chamber. She smiled, and the odours of ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... battle-scenes, in their voluminous details of movements and vivid descriptions of action, so completely hide the actual feelings of the men engaged that the inexperienced may be pardoned the thought, that, having donned the insignia of a soldier, a man instantly becomes filled with martial ardor, and eager to ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... we had ever been before, but we welcomed the spring with grateful hearts. Only poets can describe the electric, sweet quality of spring, but only the young, as we were young that year, receive the full impact of its beauty. The deep, cloudless blue of western skies, the vivid colors after the dead white of winter, were fresh revelations, as though we had ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... the dreams of life so radiant as in early youth? What pictures are so glowing, so beautiful, so vivid, so real, as those which come to the boy when he stands with his feet on the threshold, and looks far out over the limitless fields which spread before his view? The air "lets finer sunlight through," and the skies are more golden than they can ever ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... as vivid all about him as if caught by the latest instantaneous process made the same comparatively ineffective appeal. The operatic spectacle was still there. The people, with their cloaks statuesquely draped over their left shoulders, moved down the street, or posed in vehement dialogue ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... March, a beautiful bright morning, we had the pleasure to perceive Tahaiti before us, like a light cloud in the clear horizon. All that we had read of its loveliness now rose to our remembrance, heightened by the vivid colouring of the imagination; but seventy miles were yet to be traversed ere we could tread the land of expectation, and a very slow progress, occasioned by a flagging wind, tried our patience. We continued, however, to advance, and the light cloud ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... I have come to the Thing—the thing that makes me happy, with a happiness all the more vivid because it can't last. But even if I fall to the depths of misery once more, I shan't be a coward, and moan to you. It must be horrid to get letter after letter, full of wails! I don't see how Mademoiselle Julie de Lespinasse could write ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... taste impoverishes the initiatory act as well as the initiatory expression, people acting as they write, according to acquired formulas and within a circumscribed circle. Under no consideration can the eccentric, the unforeseen, the spontaneous, vivid inspiration be accepted. Among twenty instances I select the least striking since it merely relates to a simple gesture, and is a measure of other things. Mademoiselle de—obtains, through family influence, a pension for Marcel, a famous ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... negotiations with Spain, and the general distrust of her intentions in regard to the Provinces, were like to have fatal consequences. Both he and Leicester painted the anxiety of the Netherland people as to the intention of her Majesty in vivid colours. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... around me, in fact, are the products of modern civilisation. But in the whole room there are but three things living: myself, my dog, and the fire in my grate. And of these lives the third is very much the most intensely vivid. My dog is descended, doubtless, from prehistoric wolves; but you could hardly decipher his pedigree on his mild, domesticated face. My dog is as tame as his master (in whose veins flows the blood of the old cavemen). But time has not tamed fire. Fire is as wild a thing ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... world of campaigning stories, of which he was generally the hero, and which he would deal forth to his wondering scholars when he ought to have been teaching them their lessons. These travelers' tales had a powerful effect upon the vivid imagination of Goldsmith, and awakened an unconquerable passion for wandering ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... played strange pranks by his buildings and plantations upon Vicar's Island, in Derwent-water, which his admiration, such as it was, of the country, and probably a wish to be a leader in a new fashion, had tempted him to purchase. But what has all this to do with the subject?—Why, to show that a vivid perception of romantic scenery is neither inherent in mankind, nor a necessary consequence of even a comprehensive education. It is benignly ordained that green fields, clear blue skies, running streams of pure water, rich groves and woods, orchards, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... to try and make a sketch of it," said Bet as she flew back to her room for her note book and colors. "But if I painted it that way, no one would believe it. It's too vivid, too spectacular!" she sighed. ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... others, the two would sit near the fire, making a vivid picture. Mary in her plaid cotton gown, bent over her folded arms, swaying to and fro, making few comments but conscious of being understood. Nancy, fair and lovely, speaking more openly to the plain, silent woman near her than she had ever spoken to any earthly being and feeling, under her ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... a wonderful edifice of speculation was built by the credulous and imaginative people of South Norwalk. The romance of their dispositions was stirred to its very depths, and their enthusiastic minds drew a vivid picture, in which the manner and cause of Henry Schulte's death was successfully explained and ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... Grenville Melton. I knew there had been a change for the better as soon as I saw the first number, for these dresses have the stimulating quality of a healthy and vigorous imagination, as well as a vivid decorative value. They are exceedingly smart, of course, or else they would never do for a Broadway revue, but they are also alive, while those of Mr. Melton were invariably sickly. Curiously enough, the name of the new costume designer has a special interest for Chicago. She is Doris ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... bearing off the prize of the tourney. But his exertions caused his wound to reopen; he bled fast, and in this sad state, yet in triumph, they bore him to the palace. The fair Isoude devoted herself to his relief with an interest which grew more vivid day by day; and her skilful care soon restored him ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... the way out through the beautiful Boulogne woods, the birds singing, the sun shining, the soft spring airs blowing, the alders and willows pale pink and yellow in the distance, the great buds of the horse-chestnuts just bursting into leaf and everywhere the vivid green of the fresh turf; my heart beating high with happy excitement to be in beautiful Paris and on my way to historic St. Cloud, where dwelt the most wonderful man of the world; and Fatima prancing ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... and soiled blue jerseys, their swarthy necks girt about by vivid handkerchiefs, and their big-peaked caps pulled well down over their eyes, made their way along the narrow lane that led from Merriton Towers to Saltfleet Bay. At the junction with Saltfleet Road, two other figures slipped by them in the half-mist, ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... the words, simple or complex, produce that effect?) Very often there is not any adjective, sometimes not any qualification at all: often only one subject with its predicate and its statement and its object. There is never any detail of description, but the scene rises, more vivid in colour, more exact in outline, more wonderful in influence, than anything we can see with our eyes, except perhaps those things we see in the few moments of intense emotion which come to us, we know not whence, and expand out into completion and ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... still extended his time-worn orthodox arguments to a wearisome length, usually concluding them with more or less varied and vivid pictures of the doom in store for those who failed at once to repent and believe; but strange to say the sinners who were moved by his eloquence were few and far between. It was known that he was not in sympathy with the great majority of the North, or the principles upon which the war had been ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... reference to their children, than among other classes of society; and when these ebullitions, which are not lasting, are over—their conduct toward their children is most affectionate. The attachment of Gipsy children to their parents is equally vivid and admirable; it grows with their years, and strengthens even as their connections increase. {12} And indeed the affection that sisters and brothers have one for the other is very great. A short time since, the little sister ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... touched his lips so seldom was on them now. He showed no agitation, but the light of his eyes was very vivid as they read her expression. Annabel had stayed her steps; for a moment she looked troubled. His words were not unanticipated, but the answer with which she was prepared was more difficult to utter than she ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... is no less exact than vivid. It was easy for Nero to gain the nearest gate, the Nomentan, from the Esquiline quarter of the palace, without much observation; and on issuing from it (after midnight, it appears), the fugitives would have the pretorian camp so close on their right hand, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... resolution. On the second occasion, I had actually mustered firmness enough to get as far as the railway station; and only at the last moment faltered and hung back. The struggle that it cost me to part for any length of time from Margaret, I had overcome; but the apprehension, as vivid as it was vague, that something—I knew not what—might happen to her in my absence, turned my steps backward at starting. I felt heartily ashamed of my own weakness; but I yielded ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... curiosity—here was certainly a memsahib under the favour of God—and as she stirred it, the shadow that Violet Prendergast had thrown upon her life faded out of her mind in the light that was there. Then she looked up and met that lady's vivid blue eyes. Mrs. Innes's colour had not returned, but there was a recklessness in the lines of her mouth. In the way she held her chin, expressing that she had been reflecting on old scores, and anticipated the worst. Meeting this vigilance ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... full-length portraits, and hardly any sketches. Swift mentions the people he met, but rarely stops to draw a picture of them. But though this is true, the casual remarks which he makes often give a vivid impression of what he thought of the person of whom he is speaking, and in many cases those few words form a chief part of our general estimate of the man. There are but few people of note at the time who are not mentioned in these pages. We see Queen Anne holding ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... of affection, she assured herself repeatedly; and then turned and tossed upon her pillows as vivid recollection painted each happy hour with ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... side would have probably ended the engagement. But the rain was now falling in torrents; heavy peals of thunder, crashing through the forest, drowned the discharges of the two guns which Jackson had brought up through the woods, and the red flash of musketry paled before the vivid lightning. Much of the ammunition was rendered useless, the men were unable to discharge their pieces, and the fierce wind lashed the rain in the faces of the Confederates. The night grew darker and ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... mine with his odd number. No doubt my colleague's idea in having such a variety of nether garments was to use them respectively, on a similar principle to the revolvers, when he rode in hot haste with his vivid account of the latest battle to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... their faces. They seemed shy and taciturn, spoke not, and remained as motionless as stones fixed in the earth. Occasionally, though but seldom, glimpses could be caught of their faces, which were pale and ghastly, even to the hue of death. Their eyes she saw were vivid but sunken, their cheek-bones as prominent as if all flesh had left them, and their whole persons, as far as could be judged, emaciated and fleshless. Seeing that her strange guests, of whom she ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... 'As if I would!' These vivid illuminations of the Colonel's proceedings were a pasture to the rearward groups, composed of two very grand ladies, Caseldy, Mr. Beamish, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... my vivid though short experience of American life and manners, I have experienced not only hospitality, but considerate and thoughtful kindness, for which I must ever be grateful. I can find it in my heart even to forgive the reporters who have ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... and vicinage (who are they now?), and sigh for the queer, old, clumsy reading-desk and pulpit, grown dearer from the long and hopeless separation; and wonder where the tables of the Ten Commandments, in long gold letters of Queen Anne's date, upon a vivid blue ground, arched above, and flanking the communion-table, with its tall thin rails, and fifty other things that appeared to me in my nonage, as stable as the earth, and as sacred as ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... deepened in her thin, oval face, with its straight brows, and large, grey eyes. Her hair, brushed in fine, high curves back from her forehead, was going grey, like his own, and this greyness made the sudden vivid colour in her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the blending of arms with amours in the conventional style of historic fiction. The lowest depth is reached when the reminiscences of an Emperor's valet, to whom he is still a kind of hero, are served up with that succulent dressing of vivid particularity which is swallowed with relish because it brings down a great man to the level of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... a masterly letter-writer this account of him will, I feel, have already suggested. He was vivid, picturesque, and attractive to a high degree. The place he lived in when he was taking a country holiday was always the most wonderful place in the world and the people he met there marvellous and mysterious beyond words. Even if they were bores, they were bores ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... volatile liquid, which appears like a puff of smoke, and is accompanied by a distinct crepitating explosion. It is probably because these insects are mostly nocturnal and predacious that they do not present more vivid hues. They are chiefly remarkable for brilliant metallic tints or dull red patches when they are not wholly black, and are therefore very conspicuous by day, when insect-eaters are kept off by their bad odour and taste, but are sufficiently invisible at night when ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... much. For to all who know anything of Ireland at the present day—and who does not? worse luck!—anything I might write would seem as nihil ad rem, as if I were writing of an island in the Pacific. I remember a very vivid impression that occurred to me on first landing at Kingstown, and accompanied me during the whole of my stay in the island, to the effect, that the striking differences in everything that fell under my observation from what I had left ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... years Of pleasure, and of varied pleasure too, Had worn the soft impression half away. What I once felt, I would recall; the faint Responsive voice grew fainter each reply: Imagination sank amid the scenes It laboured to create; the vivid joy Of fleeting youth I followed, and possessed. 'Tis the first moment of the tenderest hour, 'Tis the first mien on entering new delights, We give our peace, our power, ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... Nights and La Fontaine's Fables, by French and Spanish soldiers marching through his native city, and by listening to the wonderful folk tales of his country. On a toy stage and with toy actors, these vivid impressions took actual form. The world continued a dramatic spectacle to him throughout his existence. His consuming ambition was for the stage, but he had none of the personal graces so necessary for success. He was ungainly and awkward, like ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... oratorical exaggeration, and the reader can nevertheless see, in the light of after occurrences, a vivid and truthful picture of a conspiring cabal, stooping to arts and devices difficult to distinguish from direct personal treachery, flattering, threatening, and coaxing by turns, and finally lulling the fears of the President, through ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... sometimes experienced in the midst of earnest and ardent devotion—what are they but eternity thus manifesting itself through time in the soul? Those who have been rescued from the very jaws of death, frequently tell us that the moment preceding insensibility was crowded and filled with vivid recollections of the whole apparently forgotten past—thus bringing into the soul in the midst of time, a foretaste and interval of eternity! and those prophetic intimations of things yet to be, which frequently break in with startling power upon the human spirit, what indeed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... remark of her son in the Life of his holy Mother, that temptation is among the most efficacious means employed by the Almighty for the purification of His creatures, for as in that state, the soul is pursued by a vivid and constant apprehension of committing sin, she lives in an habitual hatred of, and watchfulness against it, which are but too apt to relax when the presence of evil is less apparent, and the necessity for combating it less urgent. Through this grievous, suffering, ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... country as were brought together by that single advertisement. Every shade of color they were—straw, lemon, orange, brick, Irish-setter, liver, clay; but, as Spaulding said, there were not many who had the real vivid flame-colored tint. When I saw how many were waiting, I would have given it up in despair; but Spaulding would not hear of it. How he did it I could not imagine, but he pushed and pulled and butted until he got me through the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... it is with a full consciousness of what he is doing, of his party, of the situation, of the revolution, while the crude expressions which, in the tones of his bull's voice, he flings out as he passes along, are but a vivid statement of the precise truth "We are the rabble! We spring from the gutters!" With the normal principles of mankind, "we should soon get back into them. We can only rule through fear!"[3153] "The Parisians are so many ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... this volume is the mere prelude of a mind growing in power, we have in it the promise of a fine poet.... In 'The Wandering Soul,' the verse describing Socrates has that highest note of critical poetry, that in it epigram becomes vivid with life, and life reveals its inherent paradox. It would be difficult to describe the famous irony of Socrates in more poetical and more accurate words than by saying that he doubted men's doubts away."—Spectator, February ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... the pen of Harriet Martineau, in regard to the management of the kitchen at Scutari, by Florence Nightingale, is true also of those organized by Miss Gilson in Virginia. The parallel is so close, and the illustration of the daily administration of this department of her work so vivid, that, if the circumstances under which it was written were not known, I should have said it was a faithful picture of our kitchen in the Colored Hospital ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... brought her the consciousness of doing right—of doing what would please Maurice, whose approbation had, all her life, been one of her dearest rewards for "being good;" and she had also the actual enjoyment of these quiet conversations, coming in, as they did, between the more vivid and more troubled delights of feeling herself engrossed by a spell, to whose power she submitted with joy indeed, but also with trembling. Every time she now saw Bella, it appeared to her more entirely incomprehensible ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... seemed really to feel some anxiety about her excitement. But he miscalculated utterly the nature of Hilda, and relied too much on the fact that he had once terrified her. These cool words threw into Hilda a vivid excitement of feeling, which for a time turned all her thoughts upon this man, who under such circumstances dared to resume that tone of impudent superiority which once before he had ventured to adopt. Her strength revived ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... coming serenely down the path from the wooded promontory, a woman undeniably handsome in a cedar-tinted linen dress, exquisitely fashioned, with a touch of vivid scarlet on her hat and a most tantalizing flash of scarlet ankle. It was Flora Desimone, fresh from her morning bath and a substantial breakfast. The errand that had brought her from Aix-les-Bains was confessedly a merciful ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... considerable number of loafers had assembled to see me off, and of these some half-dozen were persevering mendicants. It disappointed me that I saw no interesting costume; all wore the common, colourless garb of our destroying age. The only vivid memory of these people which remains with me is the cadence of their speech. Whilst I was breakfasting, two women stood at gossip on a near balcony, and their utterance was a curious exaggeration of the Neapolitan accent; every ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... the myths he begins with, so as to reach ultimate scientific notions of nature and life, he would still be dealing with vivid feeling and with its imaginative expression. The prosaic landscape before him would still be a work of art, painted on the human brain by human reason. If he found that landscape uninteresting, it would be because he was not really interested in life; if ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... during this period of active service gave vivid reality to the battle-scenes in "War and Peace," and are traceable in the reflections and conversation of the two heroes, Prince Andre and Pierre Besukhov. On the eve of the battle of Borodino, Prince Andre, talking with Pierre in the presence of his devoted ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... in bed for breakfast, as befitted a heroine, and received visitors. All the faculty came in, one after the other, to congratulate her. Miss Crosby's ability as a story-teller had served to picture the events of the night before in vivid colors, and Polly's splendid courage had not lost in ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... melody which Piers wished to hear. He listened with deep pleasure, living again in the years when everything he desired seemed a certainty of the future, depending only on the flight of time, on his becoming "a man." He remembered his vivid joy in the pleasures of the moment, the natural happiness now, and for years, unknown to him. So long ago, it seemed; yet Mrs. Hannaford, sitting at the piano, looked younger to him than in those days. And Olga, whom as a girl of fourteen he had not much liked, thinking her both conceited ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... walked upon the yellow sands close to the softly breaking waves. Inland stretched the marshes, with their patches of vivid green, their clouds of faintly blue wild lavender, their sinuous creeks stealing into the bosom of the land. She climbed on to a grassy knoll, warm with the sun's heat, and threw herself down upon the turf. She turned her back upon the ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in his imagination, was a combination of the same lute and voice by which he had been enchanted on the preceding day. All the dreams of yesterday morning, so much weakened by the agitating circumstances which he had since undergone, again arose more vivid from their slumber, and, planted on the spot where his ear could most conveniently, drink in the sounds, Quentin remained, with his harquebuss shouldered, his mouth half open, ear, eye, and soul directed to the spot, ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... gallery of events—so many pictures faded from her mental walls that the gaps seemed, as it were, to separate her from herself, making of her and that swift-footed girl back there vague strangers. And yet the vivid canvases! A peasant child at a churn, switching her black braids this way and that when they dangled too far over her shoulders; a linnet dead in its cage outside a thatched doorway, and the taste of her first heart ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... this at once by considering the effect of the illuminations of an old missal. In their bold rejection of all principles of perspective, light and shade, and drawing, they are infinitely more ornamental to the page, owing to the vivid opposition of their bright colors and quaint lines, than if they had been drawn by Da Vinci himself: and so the Arena chapel is far more brightly decorated by the archaic frescoes of Giotti, than the Stanze of the Vatican are by those of Raffaelle. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... fiction,[2] and he often wrote reviews of contemporary literature, but on the whole the literature with which he dealt critically was representative of those periods of time which he chose to portray in novel and poem. This evidently implies great breadth of scope. Yet Scott's vivid sense of the past had its bounds, as Professor Masson pointed out.[3] It was the "Gothic" past that he venerated. The field of his studies, chronologically considered, included the period between his own time and the crusades; and geographically, was in general confined ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... it is remembered for nothing else, will be remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the end of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of the dome they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... their definitive regime. In this way, all the great existing churches of the Catholic universe are the work of the Pope, his latest work, his own creation attested by a positive act of contiguous date, and of which the souvenir is vivid: he has not recognized them—he has made them; he has given them their external form and their internal structure; no one of them can look within itself without finding in its laws the fresh imprint of the sovereign hand which has fashioned ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... felt with almost febrile acuteness. Records of sight and touch and smell crowd every line of his work; the scenery of a garden in Hampstead becomes like a landscape in the tropics, so extraordinary vivid and detailed is his apprehension and enjoyment of what it has to give him. The luxuriance of his sensations is matched by the luxuriance of his powers of expression. Adjectives heavily charged with messages for the senses, crowd every line of his work, and in his earlier poems ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... incident or expression, are indeed frequent enough in the sagas, though the main attraction may consist, as has been said, in the wild interest of the story and the vivid individuality of the characters. The slaying of Gunnar of Lithend in Njala, when his false wife refuses him a tress of hair to twist for his stringless bow, has rightly attracted the admiration of the best critics; as has the dauntless resignation of Njal himself ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... filled with delphiniums and madonna lilies is backed by sombre yews, while the thick foliage of elm or chestnut quiets harmoniously the farther distance. See how the spires of blue—now declaring themselves for Oxford, now for Cambridge—are twice as vivid for the contrast, and how the lilies shine against the deep dark green, like fairest maidens round some black panelled hall! Or see again the monthly roses, blushing at intervals along an old grey wall: how tenderly are their hues enhanced by ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... writes: "He was so kind and gentle in word and deed to all about him that all loved him. He had always words of sympathy at command, and was ready to perform acts of sympathy for those who were suffering." The Rev. G.D. Watt, a brother Scotchman, who went as a missionary to India, has a vivid remembrance of Livingstone's mode of discussion; he showed great simplicity of view, along with a certain roughness or bluntness of manner; great kindliness, and yet great persistence in holding ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... press poems and romances,—'The Giaour,' 'The Bride of Abydos,' 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' the 'Hebrew Melodies,' 'The Siege of Corinth,' and 'Parisina.' Some of the 'Hebrew Melodies' are unequaled in lyric fire. The romances are all taking narratives, full of Oriental passion, vivid descriptions of scenery, and portraitures of female loveliness and dark-browed heroes, often full of melody, but melodramatic; and in substance do not bear analysis. But they still impress with their flow of vitality, their ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the water being very clear round the edges, a new creation, as it was to us, but imitative of the old, was there presented to our view. We had wheat sheaves, mushrooms, stags horns, cabbage leaves, and a variety of other forms, glowing under water with vivid tints of every shade betwixt green, purple, brown, and white; equalling in beauty and excelling in grandeur the most favourite parterre of the curious florist. These were different species of coral and fungus, growing, as it were, out of the solid rock, and each had its peculiar form ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... a vivid memory of one of my early Needless Knocks as I say that. It was back at the time when I was trying to run our home to suit myself. I sat in the highest chair in the family circle. I was three years old ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... rough-looking man about 40 years of age, with a blunt red moustache, and the distant eyes which one sees in sailors. He looked at me, stared at me as at a person from a different country. He grew wakeful and vivid. ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... imperfectly, so it became with me. Like most children, I had my own rather vivid idea of the day of judgment. The thought of death was familiar to me. (It is seldom, I think, a painful one in childhood.) I fully realized the couplet which concluded a certain quaint old rhyme in honour of the four Evangelists which Nurse ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... labor, in the short, scorching summer, and the bitter cold of the long winter, for at that time the church was not heated. Never did these children of toil miss that bent and venerable form, absorbed in prayer before the hidden Jesus, of whose august presence he had such a vivid realization. ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... interesting and charming of all autobiographies. Suso's literary gift is very remarkable. Unlike most ecstatic mystics, who declare on each occasion that "tongue cannot utter" their experiences, Suso's store of glowing and vivid language never fails. The hunger and thirst of the soul for God, and the answering love of Christ manifested in the inner man, have never found a more pure and beautiful expression. In the hope of inducing more readers to become ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... finding her own feet. Her children were all married and reasonably happy, except the youngest, who was unreasonably happy; but time would make that all right. The Emma really began to enjoy life. Her health was good; she'd kept her looks wonderfully; and all the vivid interests of her girlhood cropped up again. She began to study things; to go to lectures and courses of lectures; to travel every year to a new place; to see her old friends and make new ones. She ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Virgin! a most vivid dream. How she held her arms out to me, yet her lips were mute. Aye, and the eyes—the dumb horror written in them, as if beholding a specter which blanched the face and fettered the limbs. I believe," he added with a sudden resolution, "'tis a woman's trick, but ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... spoken, and the hymn of exultation which Elisabeth's salutation heartened her to pour forth. Surely that narrative could have come from none but her meek and faithful lips? The two accounts beautifully supplement each other, and give two vivid pictures of these two devout souls, each sharply tried in a different fashion, each richly blessed by variously moulded obedience. Joseph took up his burden, and Mary hers, because God ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of Jerom on an event so striking, and redounding so much to the honor of Christianity, is of considerable weight. M. Beugnot would ascribe the whole scene to the poetic imagination of Prudentius; but I must observe, that, however Prudentius is sometimes elevated by the grandeur of his subject to vivid and eloquent language, this flight of invention would be so much bolder and more vigorous than usual with this poet, that I cannot but suppose there must have been some foundation for the story, though it may have been exaggerated by the poet, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... other gratification of the morning, pleased the party the most. The vivid tints of the various well-executed landscapes had a pleasing effect, and wore more the appearance of nature than any similar display of the fascinating art ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... poetical labours equal to those of his prose."—Johnson's Life of Goldsmith. "We will follow that which we found our fathers practice."—Sale's Koran, i, 28. "And I would deeply regret having published them."—Infant School Gram., p. vii. "Figures exhibit ideas in a manner more vivid and impressive, than could be done by plain language."—Kirkham's Gram., p. 222. "The allegory is finely drawn, only the heads various."—Spect., No. 540. "I should not have thought it worthy a place here."—Crombie's Treatise, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown |
