"Romancer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... instant, upon the point of divulging all. Perhaps, if Mrs. Peyton had shown more confidence, he would have done so, and materially altered the evolution of this story. But, happily, it is upon these slight human weaknesses that your romancer depends, and Clarence, with no other reason than the instinctive sympathy of youth with youth in its opposition to wisdom and experience, let the opportunity pass, and took the responsibility of it out of the hands ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... of the modern tendency, as compared with the main stream of scepticism which was destroying democracy. Evolution became more and more a vision of the break-up of our brotherhood, till by the end of the nineteenth century the genius of its greatest scientific romancer saw it end in the anthropophagous antics of the Time Machine. So far from evolution lifting us above the idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at least with a logical and potential argument for eating them. In the case of the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... so annoying to me, personally, as the romancer speaking of his chief puppets as "our friends." This LAWRENCE FLETCHER is perpetually doing. Now his heroes are not "my friends," for, when I read, I am strictly impartial, at all events, through two-thirds of the book, and, if I learn to love any one or two ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... tales—improbable, but told in terms of the real. For my part, I often find them too real, with their lusty wenches and heroes smelling of the slaughter-house. Turn now to Flaubert, master of all the moderns; you may trace the romancer dear to the heart of Hugo, or the psychologist in Madame Bovary, the archaeological novel in Salammbo, or cold, grey realism as in L'Education Sentimentale, while his very style, with its sumptuous verbal echoes, its resonant, rhythmic periods—is not all this the beginning ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... anticipate. (I take that expression out of a lot of romances I bought for her. I never opened a single one of 'em—and I have opened many—but I found the romancer saying "let me not anticipate." Which being so, I wonder why he did anticipate, or who asked him to it.) Let me not, I say, anticipate. This same book took up all my spare time. It was no play to get the other articles together in the general miscellaneous lot, but when it come to my own article! ...
— Doctor Marigold • Charles Dickens
... relate some of the stories recorded of this animal I might get accused, if not of being a romancer myself, at all events of being a too credulous propagator of other people's romances. It is told of it that it will discover hidden stores, and, digging them up out of the snow, carefully smooth the surface over again; that it will avoid every trap set for itself, and, going ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... believing, Caleb had had gradually lengthening moments of doubt in which he admitted to himself that his sister was right in her chafing analysis of him, her brother. Before morning came he had told himself a dozen times that he was nothing more than a sentimental old romancer, who saw in every beggar a worthy spirit bewitched by Destiny, and a Circumstance-enchanted fairy-prince in every ragamuffin who chanced to have big eyes. Merely because they had so persistently denied him sleep—those thoughts of Old Tom and his ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... Archibald Roylance did not altogether believe Dickson's tale; it may be that he considered him an agreeable romancer, or a little mad, or no more than a relief to the tedium of a wet Sunday morning. But his incredulity did not survive one glance at Saskia as she stood in that bleak drawing-room among Victorian water-colours and ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... suppose this curious narrative to be merely an invention of some desperate romancer, it may be proper to state, that the facts are literally true. The hero of the adventure, when a young man, about the close of the last century, was driven abroad by political persecution, and not only realised a fortune, but acquired most of the continental languages. On ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... this work that Dickens makes his defence of the rather exaggerated situations in some of his books, for in this book Dickens proves that his greatest romance is based on the experiences of his own life. 'David Copperfield is the great answer of a romancer to the realists. David says in effect, "What! you say that the Dickens tales are too purple really to have happened. Why, this is what happened to me, and it seemed the most purple of all. You say that the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... organized machinery, and a weak, solitary individual; we have no hopes, no fears—only certainty. But if the materials of pursuit and evasion, as long as the chase is confined to England, are taken away from the store-house of the romancer, at any rate we can no more be haunted by the idea of the possibility of mysterious disappearances; and any one who has associated much with those who were alive at the end of the last century, can testify that there was some ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... the people and events. A corner is devoted to children, another to women, another to religious Americans, and a little sermon is preached. Then there are suggestive pictures for the man about town, recipes for the cook, weather reports for the traveler, a story for the romancer, perhaps a poem, and an editorial page, where ideas and theories are promulgated and opinions manufactured on all subjects, ready made for adoption by the reader, who in many instances has his thinking done for him. I made a test of this, and asked a number of men for their opinion on a ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... therefore, that I, too, am a God-romancer. And what objection can you raise against it? You are of opinion that to love God and your neighbour is equivalent to being good, and are evidently very proud of your discovery that there is no distinction ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... which yielded such good material to the poet and romancer, was no doubt essential to the growth of civilization, but it must have been an unhappy period for legitimate business. How could trade, commerce, or even the professions, arts, or sciences, flourish ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... a singular chance of life that had transformed the recluse romancer of the silent Herbert Street house, where for all the years of early manhood he had lived unnoticed and almost unknown, into the high business official of the Custom House, the lofty neighbor of that humble dwelling, on whose wide granite steps, columned ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... strife is all a sham, you Know as well as I which wins; Second, waking sins will damn you, Never mind your sleeping sins; Both your questions thus I answer; Listen, ere you seek or shun: I at least am no romancer, What you long for may be won. Turn again and travel Rhineward, Tread ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... mischievous and prosaic people who carp and calculate at every detail of the romancer, and want to know, for instance, how, when the characters in the 'Critic' are at a dead lock with their daggers at each other's throats, they are to be got out of that murderous complication of circumstances, may be induced to ask how it was possible in a set of ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... powers and his industry alike join in claiming for him, must learn to cast 'as rubbish to the void' many a painfully acquired bit of knowledge. To be an antiquary is one thing, and to be an antiquarian romancer is another. Dr. Doyle has aimed at being both one and the other in the same pages. A true analogy may be taken from the stage, where the supernumeraries are not allowed to obscure the leading lady and gentleman ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... whole world, I would seek out new worlds to pass through, rather than break them: and (he adds,) that you may give credit to this my exaggeration, behold at least he that promiseth you this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name hath come to your hearing." Illustrious Romancer! were the "fine frenzies," which possessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this Second Part, to be exposed to the jeers of Duennas and Serving Men? to be monstered, and shown up at the heartless banquets of great men? Was ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... laws; and I am now reading Aristotle's Politics; after which I shall go through Plato's two treatises again. I every now and then read one of Plutarch's Lives on an idle afternoon; and in this way I have got through a dozen of them. I like him prodigiously. He is inaccurate, to be sure, and a romancer; but he tells a story delightfully, and his illustrations and sketches of character are as good as anything in ancient eloquence. I have never, till now, rated ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... memorable—and would remain so in Louise's mind for weeks. Lawford Tapp, too, quite gave himself up to the charm of the old romancer. To watch Cap'n Amazon's dark intent face and his glowing eyes, while he told of these wonders of sea and land, would have thrilled the ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... there has been no thorough investigation or complete analysis of the history of the witch persecutions. The true story has been distorted by partisanship and ignorance, and left to exploitation by the romancer, ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... a figure out of Dumas, and indeed did service as a model to that delightful romancer, had come from Orleans to escort Jeanne upon her way, and Dunois met her as she approached the town. There could not be found more unlikely companions than these two, to conduct to a great battle the country maid who was to carry the honours of the day from them both, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... the stupendous drama of the skies. The human interest connected with the mountains and the mesas of New Mexico and Arizona is not very great. No mediaeval mystery haunts these castles sculptured by the hand of Nature. No famous romancer has lighted on their cliffs the torch of his poetic fancy. No poet has yet peopled them with creatures of his imagination. We can, unfortunately, conjure up from their majestic background no more romantic picture than that of some Pueblo Indian wooing his dusky bride. Yet they are not without some ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... that Theydon was a romancer, an idealist. The "lounge suit" of the modern tailor hampers the play of such qualities no more than the beaten armor of the age ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... it—preventing the execution of the order, but costing the high-souled chief his own command, forcing him to seek other fields of enterprise, and with an organization of conscripts and absentees win fights that a romancer would not dare to imagine. He speaks, too, of unhappy dissensions among officers which added to the discouraging condition ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... to his treacherous mistress. The friendly arts of Merlin are succeeded by the machinations of the malicious fairy Morgana, and the watchful care of the the Lady of the Lake. To excite the childlike wonder of his readers, the romancer turns knights to stone, or makes them invisible; he introduces enchanted castles, vessels that steer themselves, and the miraculous properties of the Saint Greal, Arthur and Tristram fight with dragons and giants. The loves ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... "little square" described by Goldoni[42] in his comedy The Coffee House, where the combined barber-shop and gambling house was located, Don Marzio, that marvelous type of slanderous old romancer, is shown as one typical of the period, for Goldoni was a satirist. The other characters of the play were also drawn from the types then to be seen every day in the coffee houses ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... satirical smile. "What a romancer you are, Lucia." Then, with a laugh: "I'm taking myself ridiculously seriously today. Temper—giving way to temper—is a sure sign of defective intelligence or ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... a page or two, and instantly my mental horizon widened. When I had finished the Artist of the Beautiful, the great Puritan romancer had laid his spell upon me everlastingly. Even as I walked homeward to my lunch, I read. I ate with the book beside my plate. I neglected my classes that afternoon, and as soon as I had absorbed this volume I ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... had repeatedly before led her to infer that marriage was not my object. I never dreamed she could have been so foolish as to have mistaken me, little provoking romancer though she be! So I naturally wished her to know what a sacrifice of prejudice, of—of myself, in short, I was willing to make for her sake; yet I don't think she was aware of it after all. I believe I might have any lady in Manchester if I liked, and yet I was willing and ready to marry a poor dressmaker. ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... strike a blow: the novel is relaxed and at careless ease, like the club-man after lighting his pipe. The latter does not bear the burden of severe responsibility, but is a thing of holidays and reactions. Still, as of old, it answers to the contemplative castellar cry,—"Hail, romancer! come and divert me,—make me merry! I wish to be occupied, but not employed,—to muse passively, not actively. Therefore, hail! tell me a story,—sing me a song! If I were now in the van of an army and civilization, higher thoughts would engross me. But I am unstrung, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... was Aaron's candid reply; "but in a tight pinch a man turns romancer sometimes. I don't know, though, what fables we can invent to keep the young lady here over to-morrow. You think up something, brother; don't let me go to perdition all alone for the lot of yarns I've been reeling ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... of his mother's elopement. It had been the one hard point to get over in his conception of his father, but he could never have explained it by such a scene as this. It would have hampered him terribly in his tale had he dreamed of it. He passed over the unfortunate incident with a romancer's touch, and dwelt upon his grandfather's bitter resentment which he resented as the son of his mother's choice. The Van Eltens and Brodericks all fared hardly at the ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... conducted so many criminals to suicide or the gallows. If the fellow-traveller of Mr. Clerk be not allowed this degree of credit, he must at least be admitted to have displayed a singular talent for the composition of the horrible in fiction. The tale, properly detailed, might have made the fortune of a romancer. ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... nightfall. What next? He turned and looked at the soldier, a figure out of Hogarth, which even dust and travel left unspoiled. It was certain that the two should meet where John Osgood, squatter and romancer, should be prompter, orchestra, and audience, and he ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... arrangements of booksellers, leaves some change out of a sovereign, and which will about half fill the ordinary bag used for briefs and dynamite. It is not a large literary baggage, and it does not attempt any very varied literary kinds. If not exactly a novelist in any one of his books, Borrow is a romancer, in the true and not the ironic sense of the word, in all of them. He has not been approached in merit by any romancer who has published books in our days, except Charles Kingsley; and his work, if less varied in range and charm than Kingsley's, has a much stronger and more concentrated ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... "Send? What an imaginative romancer you are! He went where his duty called him, no doubt. I do not remember that I was responsible. And your choice of him shows you are at least not worldly in your selections, for he was a reckless sort of ranger, I believe, with his sword and ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... would have thought himself extremely lucky to secure such a man as myself permanently for his enterprise. At this announcement my family was overcome with joy, and their feelings were all the more justified seeing that, as they all knew, Bierey was by no means an amiable romancer, but a practical musician well seasoned by ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... a covert sneer in his voice: "Yes, but Flammarion has always had the reputation of being more of the romancer than of the astronomer." ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... characters and incidents, than Jane Eyre or James's "last," for, in truth, it requires a mind of large scope to imagine as great things as many men, in every country, have really performed. The History of Louisiana affords a rich field to the poet and romancer, who is content simply to reproduce in their original life some of its actual scenes and characters; and Mr. Gayarre has, to a considerable extent, succeeded in this difficult and delicate task. The work evinces a mind full of the subject; ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... push the comparison even into foreign countries; but it is well to observe limits. Let us be content with holding that in England at least, without prejudice to anything further, Fielding was the first to display the qualities of the perfect novelist as distinguished from the romancer. ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound—the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek as described by the romancer. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... professes to delineate the scenery, sentiments, and incidents of shepherd life,[1] is, like most other literary forms, Greek in origin. It goes back at least to the "Daphnis and Chloe" of Longus, the Byzantine romancer of the fifth century A.D. Longus represents the romantic spirit in expiring classicism, the longing of a highly artificial society for primitive simplicity, and the endeavor to create a corresponding ideal. Indeed the pastoral has always been a product of a highly ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... introduced, with the highest eulogium, M. Toepffer to the wide and fastidious world of French letters. Thus did the greatest genius of Germany, the most celebrated modern romancer of Northern Italy, and one of the first writers of France stand godfathers to M. Toepffer. Their judgment did not misguide them; for, though Toepffer was not a litterateur by profession, his few volumes stand out in French literature like those gigantic Alpine summits whose snow-white ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... daughters enjoy their mother fully as much as I do, for is she not the most fascinating romancer they ever knew? Now that they are all of an age to be attending school and looking out for themselves, after the manner of independent young Americans, they require from her nothing but sympathy, for their grandmother sews their buttons on. ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... good fourteen days of sitting together on deck in pleasant summer weather, and having time enough and to spare. Hawthorne and his family also concluded to join the party. Mrs. Hawthorne, who was always the romancer in conversation, filled the evening hours by weaving magic webs of her fancies, until we looked upon her as a second Scheherazade, and the day the head was to be cut off was the day we should come ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... days. Be that as it may, one can accept the statement for dramatic purposes; and the story of the early inventor's struggles and his servant's "resources" is promising enough to leave but one regret—that the master-romancer did not make a novel instead of a play out of the material. Though this is called a comedy, it contains more than one element of tragedy in it, and the tone is moody and satirical. The climax, with its abortive love episode, ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... parts of Scott's literary work is exemplified by the subjects he treated, for as a critic he touched many portions of the field, which in his capacity of poet and novelist he occupied in a different way. He was a historical critic no less than a historical romancer. A larger proportion of his criticism concerns itself with the eighteenth century, perhaps, than of his 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 ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... man was powerful and inexhaustible; he could go on relating and composing all day, from morning to night, without once repeating what he had said before. In his expression you sometimes saw the poet gone astray, sometimes the romancer, and he always succeeded in making his tales realistic by the effective and powerful words in which he ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... the mayor. "I know I've got them. All the reformers in the world can't spoil my thrill then. They're mine. I guess old Napoleon knew that thrill. I guess he was the greatest romancer the world ever knew. When he marched over the mountains with his starving bunch—and looked back and saw them in rags and suffering—for him—well I reckon old Nap was as close to romance then as any man ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... the MONA CAIRD lay, eh, my lady?" Jest then, mate, I looks And sees male-looking things by the dozen: but then they turned out to be spooks. There was TOLSTOI the Rooshian romancer, a grim-looking son of a gun, Welting into young Cupid like scissors, and ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... perhaps especially of Salem's colonial history, as Hawthorne turns them. This is the dank effluence that, mingling with the sweeter and freer air of his own reveries, has made so many people shudder on entering the great romancer's shadowy but ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... would almost prefer to give up all the romances rather than the letters. For they feel that in this correspondence, besides finding the qualities which distinguish the other works, they have met face to face and known personally the romancer, the essayist, the poet, and above all the man who, ridden by an incubus of disease, spoke always of the joy of living, the man who knew hours of bitterness but none of flinching, the man who grappled with his destiny undaunted, and, when death hunted him down in a South Sea island, ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest American romancer, came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for three paradisaical years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and this sequestered life, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... contemptuously in the shade. Without stopping to answer this hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any part of the debt of thanks I owe, in common with every American, to the noblest, healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived, I pass on to Tennyson, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of the race, that all the complex history of language is a unique cultural event. Such a theory constructed "on general principles" is of no real interest, however, to linguistic science. What lies beyond the demonstrable must be left to the philosopher or the romancer. ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... drama could be compared to such a history? Accurate biographies record narratives which no romancer's imagination could hope to rival. Researches, sufferings, labors, triumphs, agonies and disasters, the defeats of destiny, glory, which is the "sunlight of the dead," illuminating the past, whether fortunate or tragic,—such is what the lives of Great Men reveal ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... curious stores which I have assembled are beyond the researches of other men, and not to be laid before those whose deeds of valour are to be bounded by the ordinary probabilities of everyday nature. No romancer of your romantic country ever devised such extraordinary adventures out of his own imagination, and to feed the idle wonder of those who sat listening around, as those which I know, not of idle invention, but of real positive existence, with the means of achieving ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Ellen and the meaning of the squalid sheep ranch, with its travesty of home, its tragic owner. And it was coming between her two selves, the one that she had been forced to be and the other that she did not know—the thinker, the dreamer, the romancer, the one who lived in ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... faith in the man she loves is a romancer's fancy. This feminine personage no more exists than does a rich dowry. A woman's confidence glows perhaps for a few moments, at the dawn of love, and disappears in a trice ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... very eve of his death. The much briefer Castle Dangerous (which is connected with an affecting visit of Scott and Lockhart to the tombs of the Douglases) is too slight to give room for very much shortcoming. Its chief artistic fault is the happy ending—for though a romancer is in no respect bound to follow his text exactly, and happy endings are quite good things, yet it is rather too much to turn upside down the historic catastrophe of the Good Lord James's fashion of warfare. Otherwise the book is more noticeable for a deficiency of spirit, life, and light—for the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... that does not sing the ballad of the dead bride. This lady, in the legends, always loves the cavalier not selected by her parents, the detrimental cavalier. To avoid the wedding which is thrust on her, she gets an old witch to do what the Australian romancer professes to do—to suspend her animation, and so she is carried on an open bier to a chapel on the border of her lover's lands. There he rides, the right lover, with his men-at-arms, the bride revives just in time, is lifted on to his saddle-bow, and "they need swift steeds that follow" the fugitive ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... Harry, I know you've turned romancer. I guess your mystic troubles with the owl—if you really saw an owl—have been a sort of spur to ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and return to Spain, Cervantes once more took up literature, the amusement of his youth. He became a playwright and romancer. The government gave him a small position as a tax-collector, but with such good-natured carelessness did he handle this uncongenial employ that he had repeatedly to make good from his own pocket the losses he entailed upon the government. Even this unsatisfactory labor failed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... essentials.... You ask if it is in me. I think it is. I think it exists in anybody who can glorify the commonplace. To make people look with astonished interest at something which has always been too familiar to arrest their attention—only your romancer can ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Nay, nay, Romancer! Poet! Seer! Sing us back home—from there to here; Grant your high grace and wit, but we Most honor ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... that always puts me to shame, when I think how poor an account I should give, if pressed to describe the military movements that I have happened to witness; and I may as well acknowledge at the outset that I have as little aptitude for the soldier's trade as I have for the romancer's. Single incidents I remember as if they were of yesterday. Single pictures have burned themselves into my brain. But I have no vocation to tell how fields were lost and won; and my experience of military life was too brief and desultory to ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... is the historical basis of Jokai's famous story, "A Feher Rozsa," now translated into English for the first time. No doubt the genial Hungarian romancer has idealised the rough, outspoken, masterful rebel-chief, Halil Patrona, into a great patriot-statesman, a martyr for justice and honour; yet, on the other hand, he has certainly preserved the ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... broke away from his memory and installed themselves in the Bodega, with their peculiar characteristics and their betraying gestures. His memories, brought to life by his recent readings, attained a startling precision. The city of the romancer, the house illumined and warmed, so perfectly tended and isolated, the bottles poured slowly by little Dorrit and Dora Copperfield and Tom Pinch's sister, appeared to him sailing like an ark in a deluge of mire and soot. Idly he ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... There is a middle Course—say "fib" or "tarradiddle," "Not quite true," "A sort of riddle Facts to smother." We, who love the fair romancer— Be she talker, singer, dancer, What you will, she's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... Miss Tarbell appear to regard Herndon as a mere romancer. The well poised Lincoln and Herndon recently published by Joseph Fort Newton holds what I feel compelled to regard as a sounder view; namely, that while Herndon was at times reckless and at times biased, nevertheless he is in the main to ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... own soul. She must believe his theology, though it pave the highways of hell with the skulls of new-born infants, and make God a monster of vengeance and hypocrisy. She must look at everything from its dollar and cent point of view, or she is a mere romancer. She must accept things as they are and make the best of them. To mourn over the miseries of others, the poverty of the poor, their hardships in jails, prisons, asylums, the horrors of war, cruelty, and brutality in every form, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... which he then took for granted without making note of them. Brief scenes, passages of conversation and of narration, follow one another after the manner of a finished story, alternating with synopses of the plot, and queries concerning particulars that needed further study; confidences of the romancer to himself which form certainly a valuable contribution to literary history. The manuscript closes with a rapid sketch of the conclusion, and the way in which it is to be executed. Succinctly, what we have here is a romance in embryo; one, moreover, that never attained to a viable ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you have cared to follow the argument. I hope you will not ask me what it all means, or what the moral of it is. I rank myself with the historian in this business of tale-telling, and consider that my sole affair is to hunt the argument dispassionately. Your romancer must be neither a lover of his heroine nor (as the fashion now sets) of his chief rascal. He must affect a genial height, that of a jigger of strings; and his attitude should be that of the Pulpiteer:—Heaven ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... the genius of Walter Scott, the stirring scenes of the Porteous riots, and has lent an air of heroic dignity and beauty to the obscure smuggler, George Robertson. It is the happy privilege of the true romancer to find history his handmaid, and to make obscure events immortal, whether they be the scuffles of Greeks and barbarians outside a small town in Asia Minor, or the lynching of a dissolute adventurer by an ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... chronicling what passed before his senses or for explaining what he saw? How does his account of the Indians (p. 18 of this text) compare with modern accounts? Is he apparently a novice, or somewhat skilled in writing prose? Does he seem to you to be a romancer or a narrator ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... slush; yet Joe had a jovial, easy, don't-care way about him that made him a lot of warm friends. He was a good talker, and would have made a fine stump speaker if he had had the training. He was known among the young men I associated with as a romancer of the first water. I never knew so ignorant a man as Joe was to have such a fertile imagination. He never could tell a common occurrence in his daily life without embellishing the story with his imagination; yet I remember ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... magnificent dragon-flies, the carnivorous tyrants of their race, were abundant; and we now know, that while they were, as their name indicates, dragons to the weaker insects, they themselves were devoured by dragons as truly such as were ever yet feigned by romancer of the middle ages. Ants were also common, with crickets, grasshoppers, bugs both of the land and water, beetles, two-winged flies, and, in species distinct from the preceding carboniferous ones, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... various causes, have to send money to England. From the Anglo-Indians' daily association with Orientals and their peculiarly subtle understandings, it is perhaps not so surprising to find an occasional flight of fancy brought to bear upon the subject that would do credit to a professional romancer. One ingenious young civil officer present evolves a deep, deep scheme to get even with the government for present injustice that for far-reaching and persistent revenge speaks volumes for the young gentleman's determination to carry his point. His brilliant ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... laughing,' said A., in singular echo of one of the king's expressions. And again: 'I had been reading the Musketeer books, and he reminded me of Aramis.' Such is the portrait of Tembinatake, drawn by an expert romancer. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a marked talent for assimilating local color, not to make mention of a broader historical sense. Even though he may adopt, as it is the romancer's right to do, the extreme romantic view of history, it is always a living and moving picture that he evolves for us, varied and stirring."—New York ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... down the room, raising and lowering his voice, and as it were acting the parts." Lockhart, vi. 67-8. The statement of James Ballantyne is at p. 89 of the same volume. The original incidents on which Scott had founded the tale he remembered, but "not a single character woven by the romancer, not one of the many scenes and points of humour, nor anything with which he was connected as the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... very fact not so much so as in prudence she ought. I will not use the name of love on this occasion; for I have applied it too often to transient whims and fancies to escape your satire, should I venture to apply it now. For it is a phrase, I must confess, which I have used—a romancer would say, profaned—a little too often, considering how few years have passed over my head. But seriously, the fair chaplain of Brokenburn has been often in my head when she had no business there; and if this can give thee any clue for explaining my motives in lingering about ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... Route Nationale to the north runs through Crepy to-day, as did the Route Royale of the days of the Valois. It is eighteen kilometres from Crepy to Villers-Cotterets, Dumas's birthplace. The great romancer describes it with much charm and correctness in the early pages of "The Taking of the Bastile." He calls it "a little city buried in the shade of a vast park planted by Francois I. and Henri II." It is a place ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... cannot but confess a sentiment of remorse for having visited the dwelling-place—as just before I visited the grave of the mighty minstrel and romancer with so cold a heart and in so critical a mood,—his dwelling-place and his grave whom I had so admired and loved, and who had done so much for my happiness when I was young. But I, and the world generally, now look at him from a different ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... profession, is a case in point. How many thousands of lads have an intense liking for the idea of a sailor's life! But the liking is not for the sea; it is for some romantic notion of the sea; and the romancer's aptitude for a sea life must at first be taken for granted while his experience is nil. He dreams, probably, of majestic storms, or heavenly calms, of coral islands, and palm groves, and foreign lands and peoples. If very imaginative, he will indulge in Malay ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... Bossuet, he was a dexterous, skilled, and formidable controversialist, whilst, for the instruction of the Duke of Burgundy, which had been confided to him, he became a fabulist, an author of dialogues, in some degree a romancer or epic poet in prose in his famous Telemachus, overadmired, then overdepreciated, and which, despite weaknesses, remains replete with strength and dazzling brilliance. Nowadays there is a marked return to this prince of the Church and of literature, whose brain was complex and even complicated, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... ready any moment to join the ranks of the mediaeval knights who translated amorous hyperbole into action, challenging every knight to battle unless he acknowledged the superior beauty of his lady. A great romancer is the lover; he retouches the negative of his beloved, in his imagination, removes freckles, moulds the nose, rounds the cheeks, refines the lips, and adds lustre to the eyes until his ideal is realized and he sees Helen's beauty in a brow ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... lapse of more than half a century some readers may have forgotten, and more may never have heard, the anecdote connected with this. It was rashly and somewhat foolishly pointed out to the poet-romancer himself that the air of "Bonny Dundee" was the very reverse of melancholy, and that he must have mistaken the name. His reply was the most categoric declaration possible of his general attitude, in such cases, "Et moi, je l'appelle 'Bonny Dundee.'" Victor locutus est: causa finita est (he ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Serilly, and is situated at No. 5 Rue Neuve Saint Francois, in the quarter called the Marais. At the time the "Wandering Jew" was published, the street was often filled by groups of gazers at the strange old edifice, which had been so exactly described by the romancer, that no one could mistake it. Some even ventured to knock at the door and seek further information. They were received by a mysterious and taciturn old Hebrew, who looked as if he himself had charge of the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... there is any lack of faithfulness in Cooper's presentation of the Indian character, it is due to the fact that he was a romancer, and therefore an optimist, bent on making the best of things. He told the truth as he saw it, and nothing but the truth; but he did not tell the whole truth. Here Cooper was akin to Scott, who chose to dwell only on the bright side of chivalry, ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... not curious to know that the greatest poet of Russia is Alexander Pushkin, a man of African descent; that the greatest romancer of France is Alexander Dumas, a man of African descent; and that one of the greatest musicians of England is Coleridge-Taylor, ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... name of backwoodsmen, would not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and splendor as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, The Lady of the Lake, etc., etc., had ever existed in the imaginative brain of a romancer, much less, that they were actually in existence, rushing down the Mississippi, as on the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the forests, and walking against the mighty current 'as things of life,' ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... this dominant impassivity became stirred, when the marble became flesh by contact with life and suffering. And the work of the romancer, begun by the novelist, became warm with a tenderness that is found for the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... one crew's fire to another, I listened for a while to the talking and laughing of the voyageurs, but hearing no thrilling tales or even a humorous story by that noted romancer Old Billy Brass, I went over and sat down at the officers' fire, where Chief Factor Thompson was discussing old days and ways with his ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... will abandon her own better prospects, and share fortunes with her, were she to go abroad.]—Charming romancer!—I must set about this girl, Jack. I have always had hopes of a woman whose passions carry her to such altitudes.—Had I attacked Miss Howe first, her passions, (inflamed and guided as I could have managed them,) would have brought her into my lure ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... prose. The subject of "Evangeline" was suggested to Longfellow by Hawthorne; and if the great prose poet had written the story himself, it would not have differed essentially in material or in structural method from the narrative as we know it through the medium of the verse romancer. Francois Coppee has composed admirable short-stories in verse as well as in prose. "The Strike of the Iron-Workers" ("La Greve des Forgerons"), which is written in rhymed Alexandrines, does not differ markedly in narrative method from "The Substitute" ("Le Remplacant"), which ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... which I had, for a long series of years, enjoyed so large a portion of public favour. Through the success of those literary efforts, I had been enabled to indulge most of the tastes which a retired person of my station might be supposed to entertain. In the pen of this nameless romancer, I seemed to possess something like the secret fountain of coined gold and pearls vouchsafed to the traveller of the Eastern Tale; and no doubt believed that I might venture, without silly imprudence, to extend my personal expenditure considerably ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... Person,' says the romancer, 'was of so excellent a composition, and his words so Great and so Noble that it was very difficult to deny ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them—the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute. Many writers frankly make no pretence—leastways none that can be discerned—of aiming at historical precision; ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... has been told by any one that the Lagden Commission recommended any of these pitiless iniquities, then we are afraid that his informer is a romancer of the superlative degree. The Lagden report was never discussed in any South African legislature, much less adopted by any Parliament in South Africa; indeed, it is detested because it recommended a Native ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... that he had a certain timid liking for little maidens who had not yet outgrown the company of their dolls, the listener would be apt to smile, if he did not laugh, at the absurdity of the fable. Surely, he would say, this must be the fiction of some fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer, the trick of some playwright. It would make a capital farce, this idea, carried out. A young man slighting the lovely heroine of the little comedy and making love to her grandmother! This would, of course, be overstating the truth of the story, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... reader from 1837, the year of Dr. Ebers's birth in Berlin, to 1863, when An Egyptian Princess was finished. The subsequent events of his life were outwardly calm, as befits the existence of a great scientist and busy romancer, whose fecund fancy was based upon a groundwork of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... my room that night reading "Penthesilia" till it grew gray in the east, and did not lay it down till I had finished it. And yet let no admirer of the great romancer of the twentieth century resent my saying that at the first reading what most impressed me was not so much what was in the book as what was left out of it. The story-writers of my day would have deemed the making of bricks without ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... myself in our underground dungeon, imprisoned for an unknown, uncommitted crime, while I narrate occurrences outside our prison walls looks like a romancer's trick, but how else I am to go about telling this history I do not know. Yolanda is quite as important a personage in this narrative as Max and myself, and I must tell of her troubles as I ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... instinct was a true one. Rome is not favorable to historical romance. Its atmosphere is eminently realistic. The historical romancer is flying through time as the air-men fly through space. But the air-men complain that they sometimes come upon what they call "air holes." The atmosphere seems suddenly to give way under them. In Rome the element of Time on which the imagination has been ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... hearts when he is before our eyes. Goodness is more marketable than greatness, and more necessary. Goodness, greatness! Brilliancy is a cheap commodity when put on the counter beside goodness; and Bishop Bienvenu is a romancer's apotheosis of goodness, and we ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... beauty—all of which, Madame de Vionnet professed, came to her most in the other, the outer view. "We'll presently, after we go," she said, "walk round it again if you like. I'm not in a particular hurry, and it will be pleasant to look at it well with you." He had spoken of the great romancer and the great romance, and of what, to his imagination, they had done for the whole, mentioning to her moreover the exorbitance of his purchase, the seventy blazing volumes that ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... is because we love more passionately. If some of us abroad are profligate, it is because they, poor men, have no helpmate, which, like the amethyst, keeps its wearer pure. I could tell you stories, ladies, of the constancy and devotion of Spanish husbands, even in the Indies, as strange as ever romancer invented." ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... expression, which we have not before observed, at least in so marked a degree. The number opens with a caustic and well-deserved critique upon the writings of JAMES, the novelist; and we are the more gratified at this, because the defects of this romancer are the besetting sins of certain of our own novelists, who had at one time a fair degree of transient popularity. A lack of skill in the creation or accurate delineation of individual character, which, instead of representing men and women, are ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... as not succeeds. Coincidence, like some new Briareus, stretches a hundred long arms hourly across the earth. Some day, when the full history is written—sober history with ample documents—the poor romancer will give up business and fall to reading Miss ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... storm-voices of that Tartarus, as, set to the deep undertone of the spur opposite against which the wind hummed like some awful harp, they called to each other from precipice to precipice. No nightmare dreamed by man, no wild invention of the romancer, can ever equal the living horror of that place, and the weird crying of those voices of the night, as we clung like shipwrecked mariners to a raft, and tossed on the black, unfathomed wilderness of air. Fortunately the temperature was not a low one; indeed, the ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... a romancer wrote, and the phrase in its significance passed into legend. During the dozen or more years that he ruled in Rome, his common sense was obvious. The Tiber overflowed, the senate looked for a remedy in the Sibyline Books. Tiberius set some engineers to work. A citizen ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... the narrator's, but in harmony with their inherent germ) transform themselves, and re-assume the shapes which they might be supposed to possess in the pure childhood of the world. When the first poet or romancer told these marvellous legends (such is Eustace Bright's opinion), it was still the Golden Age. Evil had never yet existed; and sorrow, misfortune, crime, were mere shadows which the mind fancifully created for itself, as a shelter against too sunny realities; or, at most, but prophetic dreams to ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... social disease, and that he didn't land them on the Island, but on an island off the tip of the Island, a tiny island which the Lord had thoughtlessly left lying disrespectfully close to the Isle of Dignity. Katie was too true a romancer to inquire closely about the man who mended the boats, for she liked to think of him as an unreal being who only touched the earth off the tip of the Island, and only touched humanity through Worth. That wove something alluringly ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... cold breath of scorn, though it may have stunted her genius, could not prevent it from bearing unseasonable fruit. Her contributions to the Duncan Campbell literature, "A Spy upon the Conjurer" (1724) and "The Dumb Projector" (1725), in which the romancer added a breath of intrigue to the atmosphere of mystery surrounding the wizard, opened the way for more notorious appeals to the popular taste for personal scandal. In the once well known "Memoirs of a Certain Island adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia" (1725-6) and the no less ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... friend, was a purser in the navy and lived in Augusta, Maine, his official residence being at Portsmouth. He had kept in closer touch with the romancer than any of his other friends had since their graduating days, and he had been from the first a believer in his coming literary renown. So, when The Scarlet Letter shone eminent in the firmament of book-land, it was his triumphant "I-told-you-so" that ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... we have a story of striking interest to tell. It would need the powers of invention of a romancer to devise a series of adventures as remarkable as those which befell old Marius in his flight. It is one of the strangest stories in all the annals of history, a marked illustration of the saying that fact is often stranger ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... stepped on the gunwale, and the boat pushed off from the shore, and went merrily across the lake, which was dimpled by the summer wind. [Footnote: A romancer, to use a Scottish phrase, wants but a hair to make a tether of. The whole detail of the steward's supposed conspiracy against the life of Mary, is grounded upon an expression in one of her letters, which affirms, that Jasper ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... allowance of a golden age of comparatively quiet sovereignty, of feasts and joustings at Camelot, and Caerleon, and Carlisle, of adventures major and minor, and of the great Graal-quest, is but a moderate demand for any romancer to make. At any rate, he or they made it, and justified the demand amply by the result. The contents of the central Arthurian story thus elaborated may be divided into four parts: 1. The miscellaneous adventures of the several knights, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... story of Agnes Surriage, the Maid of Marblehead. The tale is so improbable, according to every-day standards, so in form with the truest sentiment, and so calculated to satisfy every exaction of literary art, that even the most credulous might be forgiven for ascribing it to the fancy of the romancer rather than to the ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... women, and here and there to show an observant consciousness of the changing world; but her imagination long ago sank its deepest roots into the traditions of the Old Dominion. She brings to them, however, no fresh interpretations, as satisfied as any medieval romancer to ring harmonious changes on ancient themes, enlarging them, perhaps, with something spacious in her language and liberal in her sentiments, yet transmitting her material rather as a singer than as a poet, agreeably rather ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... mile and a half. At any rate, if it began where Hamadan now stands, it most certainly extended very much further into the plain. We need not suppose indeed that it had the circumference, or even half the circumference, which the Sicilian romancer assigns to it, since his two hundred and fifty stades would give a probable area of fifty square miles, more than double that of London! Ecbatana is not likely to have been at its most flourishing period a larger city than Nineveh; and we have already seen that Nineveh covered a space, within ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... madness, however, had method in it. Unlike the great romancer and builder of our time, [Footnote: Sir Walter Scott] he never allowed such things to bring him into debt. He kept his mind at ease by such prudence, and soothed and animated it under circumstances of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey |
