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More "Imagination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stirred the stagnant waters. The first was War. The Baron, or Feudal Lord, carried off the young men of the village to fight: those of them who returned had things to tell of the outside world. They fired the imagination and awakened the enterprise of the lads. The second was Trade at the trading ports: the lads saw, and continued to talk with, the foreign sailors—the Fleming, the German, the man of Rouen or Bordeaux: some of them went on board the ships of the merchant ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... minister sat thinking. Near him on the desk lay a few loose sheets of paper—his sermon notes. Under the suspended pencil in his fingers lay other sheets of paper, blank—his sermon to be. But the minister was not thinking either of what he had written, or of what he intended to write. In his imagination he was far away in a little Western town with a missionary minister who was poor, sick, worried, and almost alone in the world—but who was poring over the Bible to find how many times his Lord and Master had told him to "rejoice and ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... Independence.—The modern Colonial policy of England has, or is thought to have, achieved two results which impress popular imagination:—it has relieved English statesmanship from an unbearable burden of worry and anxiety; it has (as most people believe) changed Colonial unfriendliness or discontent into enthusiastic or ostentatious loyalty. Some politicians, therefore, who are anxious to terminate the secular ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... bricks. [FOOTNOTE 668:1]. An analogous case is presented by the so-called mental cup. On the tenth, so-called avivakya, day of the Soma sacrifice extending over twelve days, there takes place the mental offering of a Soma cup, all the rites connected with which are rehearsed in imagination only; the offering of that cup is thus really of the nature of thought only, but as it forms an auxiliary element in an actual outward sacrificial performance it itself assumes the character of ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... covered with moss or earth, and earth with vegetation, that untravelled Englishmen and Americans are not very familiar with naked rock as a conspicuous element of landscape. Hence, in their conception of a bare cliff or precipice, they hardly ascribe definite color to it, but depict it to their imagination as wearing a neutral tint not assimilable to any of the hues with which nature tinges her atmospheric or paints her organic creations. There are certainly extensive desert ranges, chiefly limestone formations, where the surface is either white, or has weathered down to a dull uniformity of tone which ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... princess kept her room, with the curtains drawn to shut out the dying lake. But she could not shut it out of her mind for a moment. It haunted her imagination so that she felt as if the lake were her soul, drying up within her, first to mud, then to madness and death. She thus brooded over the change, with all its dreadful accompaniments, till she was nearly distracted. As for the prince, she had forgotten him. However ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... dimensions and the serious character of historical paintings. The old academical subjects had disappeared with the cooked juices of tradition, as if the condemned doctrine had carried its people of shadows away with it; rare were the works of pure imagination, the cadaverous nudities of mythology and catholicism, the legendary subjects painted without faith, the anecdotic bits destitute of life—in fact, all the bric-a-brac of the School of Arts used up by generations of tricksters and fools; and the influence of the new principle was evident ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... this feature of minstrelsy perhaps its greatest traditions. Wearing shining silk hats, frock-coats, and lavender trousers, and headed by "the world's greatest minstrel band," the "Forty—Count 'Em—Forty" swayed the heart and moved the imagination of admiring multitudes wherever ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... three hours, they found that the path was descending into a deep and narrow valley. On the way they passed many of the fetish signs, so terrible to the negro's imagination. Pieces of blue string, with feathers and rags attached to them, were stretched across the path. Clumps of feathers hung suspended from the trees. Flat stones, with berries, shells, and crooked pieces of wood, were nailed against the ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... as all the music that ever has been, or ever shall be, composed. When I further consider that these sounds, placed by the interval of a third one above another, do constitute one entire harmony, which governs and comprises all the sounds that by art or imagination can be joined together in musical concordance, that, I cannot but think a significant emblem of that Supreme and Incomprehensible Three in One, governing, comprising, and disposing the whole machine of the world, with ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... story has developed new necessities, and I now find it convenient to quote from that book passages which it could not have contained if cast into the sea at the time stated; for if thrown upon the resources of my imagination I might find the temptation to exaggerate ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... could not see. Blunt scissors, clumsy hands, bad material.... It was a nightmare to Sally. She did not go far enough to imagine the despairs, the aching hands, the tears, which attended the realisation of an evening's botch. She was not really a very humane person. She had both too much imagination for that infirmity of the will, and not enough. She passed from ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... them passed, looked back, stopped and returned. "Gen'lemen, sirs, to you. Mr. Mahch, escuse me by pyo accident earwhilin' yo' colloquial terms. I know e'zacly what cause yo' sick transit. Yass, seh. Thass the imagination. I've had ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... days in the mountains except our party, and he naturally concluded the man had made his ascent from the Crawford House. My eye seemed spell-bound to the glass. I mentally speculated upon the character and destiny of the pilgrim who, at this season, and alone, could climb up those steeps. My imagination invested him with a strange interest. He had wandered far away from the world, and above it. There was something in his mind—perhaps in his destiny—akin to the severity of this barren solitude. The spell was broken ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... wake up mentally. His face took on an alert look and the glow of the born inventor enveloped his whole being. "You see, Miss Douglas, the field of electricity is in one sense limitless. We know so little about it. And I suppose it is true that new things are possible to an extent beyond our imagination." ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... such a jumble of marvels and horrors as were hardly fitting to appear in a sober book like ours, pledged to confine itself to possibilities, if not to facts. Where the narrative should have been truest, if truly told, there the narrator was wildest, drawing freely upon his imagination to fill up the wide gaps between the few conspicuous incidents marking its setting out and winding up. Gap number one was made interesting with bears; gap number two, lively with panthers; gap number three, thrilling with wolves; and where the war-path led into the shades of night, there the woods ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... how far the beliefs of the understanding, the perceptions of the senses, and the delusions of the imagination, may be confounded, the subject belongs not only to theology and moral and political science, but to physiology, in its original and proper use, as embracing our whole nature; and the facts presented may help to conclusions relating to what is justly regarded as the great mystery ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... coming dawn. Through the shadows, the mountain masses loomed formidable and mysterious, vaguely outlined against the deeper gloom of valleys. The melancholy of the scene seemed a fit setting for the cottage that rested invisible within the forest, a half-mile distant from him. In imagination, he saw the withered old woman, his mother, still standing on the threshold, looking toward him, even as he looked toward her, her heart warm with love, her every thought a prayer for his happiness. It ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... never afterwards clouded, the tactics that meant victory: "Make the party policy suit the campaign in the other provinces; leave Quebec to Laurier and me." He foresaw that the issue in Quebec would not be made by the government nor by the bishops; it would be whether the French-Canadians, whose imagination and affections had already been captured by Laurier, would or would not vote to put their great man in the chair of the prime minister of Canada. All through the winter and spring of 1895 Tarte was sinking test ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... had always loved him more as a sister loves a dear brother than as a maiden loves her betrothed husband. She had not seen him for three years. And she had seen so much since they had parted! In truth, his image had grown dim in her imagination. ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Dublin such as it appeared to her soon after the Union; Lord Clonbrony had painted it with convivial enthusiasm, such as he saw it long and long before the Union, when first he drank claret at the fashionable clubs. This picture, unchanged in his memory, and unchangeable by his imagination, had remained, and ever would remain, the same. The hospitality of which the father boasted, the son found in all its warmth, but meliorated and refined; less convivial, more social; the fashion of hospitality had improved. To ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... existed in the trade. Of these he had also been an eye-witness. It was on this account that he felt contrition for not having attended the House on this subject; for there were some cruelties in this traffic which the human imagination could not aggravate. He had witnessed such scenes over the whole coast of Africa: and he could say, that, if their lordships could only have a sudden glimpse of them, they would be struck with horror; and would be astonished, that they could ever have been permitted to exist. ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... looked around the room. "My dear friends are badly fooled," he chuckled with glee. "They believe the chief is with you, and he is not here. Why, they have already spent, in imagination, the money that they are going to derive from the sale of his plumes. What a shock it will be to them when they learn that the bird has flown. I wish I could see their faces when they ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... member wherewith he preserved order in his domestic kingdom, and therefore generally associated Government with the Police. In his view these were to clear away evil-doers and leave every one else alone. The higher objects of Government were, if at all, outlined in the shadowiest form in his imagination. Government imposed taxes—that he was obliged to know. Government maintained the parks; for that he thanked it. Government made laws, but what they were, or with what aim or effects made, he knew not, save only that ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... agitation from the parents to Bertalda, and from Bertalda to the parents; suddenly cast down from that heaven of happiness of which she had dreamed, and overwhelmed with a fear and a terror such as she had never known even in imagination. "Have you a soul? Have you really a soul, Bertalda?" she cried again and again to her angry friend, as if forcibly to rouse her to consciousness from some sudden delirium or maddening nightmare. But when Bertalda only became more and more enraged, when the repulsed parents ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... which the vague and superstitious accounts of the trappers had thrown a delightful obscurity, which we anticipated pleasure in dispelling, but which, in the meantime, left a crowded field for the exercise of our imagination. ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... a joker, and his statements were apt to be somewhat embellished by his vivid imagination, so that we accepted them with caution; but now he looked exultant, and we believed him, especially as he took his hat and stick and ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... repeat the cry of wild birds as a signal when making an attack. Perhaps a whole band was preparing to come in upon her through the windows she had forgotten to examine. There is no knowing to what desperate fancies her fevered imagination might have tortured her, if a whole chorus of hoots had not commenced. So, concluding that if they were not real owls, but men with evil intentions so stupid as to make so much noise, they were not worth lying ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... I awoke with a start: unusual sounds were on the air; and the sinister visage of the past evening's visitor presented itself to my disturbed imagination. I stilled my heart, and listened. The sounds seemed to come from the negro village. I sprang from my bed, and, approaching the window, unclosed the jalousie, and saw a number of negroes pouring down the mountain-side—some bearing large torches, and all yelling ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... her hands down, shudderingly, over her averted face, as though to shut something even from her imagination. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Imagination cannot rise above thee; Near and afar I see thee, and I love thee; My misery away from me I thrust it, For thy perfection I behold, and ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... were not known until the end of the thirteenth century, and were not common for two centuries after that. There was little knowledge that could not pass from mouth to mouth. Such little vernacular literature as did exist was transmitted orally, and no great issue which appealed to the imagination of the masses had as yet come to the front to create any strong desire for the ability to read. As a result, the education of the masses was in hand labor, the trades, and religion, and not in books, and the need for book education ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... native of the city, indicated by his surname, and was born there most likely about the year 1105. His was one of those proud and ambitious natures, in which imagination and enthusiasm are mixed up in far greater proportions, than judgment and sobriety. From his childhood he developed shining parts and an ardor for study, calculated to elicit their full force. To ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... of the sites left something to be desired in particularity. But that, I reasoned, rather made for Tobias's veracity than otherwise. Were the document merely a hoax, as John continued to suspect, its author would have indulged his imagination in greater elaboration. The very simplicity of the directions argued their authenticity. Charlie Webster was inclined to back me in this view, but neither of my friends showed any optimism in regard to the possible ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... of the evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then as he wended his way by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farm-house where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination,—the moan of the whippoorwill from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm, the dreary hooting of the screech-owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fire-flies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... to discern anything in it; to make sure, however, I sang out to the look-out men on the forecastle to keep their eyes wide open, and their answer came so sharp and prompt as to convince me that they were fully on the alert, and that I had allowed my imagination to deceive me. I therefore turned to Saunders with some remark upon my lips in reply to his, when I saw the corposant suddenly leave the gaff- end and go driving away to leeward on the wings of the gale. I naturally expected that it would almost immediately vanish, but it did not; on the contrary, ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... down the steps and away from the village. She knew that the postman, having passed through Olmeta, must now be on the high-road on his way to Perucca, and she felt sure that he must have in his bag the letter of which she had followed, in imagination, the progress ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... took hold on their imagination; the sermon on the stones and the hammer was not soon forgotten. Many years afterwards, some of the older natives when leading in prayer in the church would offer the petition, "O Lord, thy word is like a hammer, take it and with it break ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... may be by the philosophic generalities with which it is filled, he has long inspected manufactures in this country; the name of every place is familiar to him; objects and forms are this time clearly defined to his arid imagination, and he begins to see things through ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... strength and of wealth, it is impossible not to consider every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea as a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the grace of wit, the glow of imagination, the depth of thought, and all the gifts which are bestowed by Providence with an equal hand, turned to the advantage of the democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... exclusively reasoners (of such I cannot judge), nor mere poets (of whom, so far as concerns the union of words with music, I ought to be able to judge), but the few who unite reason and poetry, and appeal at once to the common-sense of the multitude and the imagination of the few. The highest type of this union to me is Shakspeare; and I can comprehend the justice of no criticism on him which does not allow this sense of incomplete satisfaction augmenting in proportion as the poet soars to his highest. I ask again, In ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rivals the most splendid edifices of modern times, while another could perceive nothing but filth and ruins, surmounted by a gaudy mosque and a few glittering minarets. The greater number, it must be acknowledged, have drawn from their own imagination the tints in which they have been pleased to exhibit the metropolis of Judea; trusting more to the impressions conveyed by the brilliant delineations of poetry, than to a minute inspection of what they might have seen with ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... myself to go and get one of the chairs that stood, at a distance, against the wall (she had given herself no concern as to whether I should sit or stand); and while I placed it near her I began, gaily, "Oh, dear madam, what an imagination you have, what an intellectual sweep! I am a poor devil of a man of letters who lives from day to day. How can I take palaces by the year? My existence is precarious. I don't know whether six months hence I shall have bread to put in my mouth. ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... mind imagine the sun-rising itself (as now while I speak of it), I could not foretell it. But neither is that day-break which I discern in the sky, the sun-rising, although it goes before it; nor that imagination of my mind; which two are seen now present, that the other which is to be may be foretold. Future things then are not yet: and if they be not yet, they are not: and if they are not, they cannot be seen; yet foretold ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... the being dissuaded from his plans if he communicated them, he not only formed them in private, but he kept them secretly; and, his imagination filled with the kindness, the tenderness, the excess of fondness he had experienced from his father, beyond any other person in the world, he had thought with delight on the separation from all his other kindred, ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... Zarathustra's habit of designating a whole class of men or a whole school of thought by a single fitting nickname may perhaps lead to a little confusion at first; but, as a rule, when the general drift of his arguments is grasped, it requires but a slight effort of the imagination to discover whom he is referring to. In the ninth paragraph of the Prologue, for instance, it is quite obvious that "Herdsmen" in the verse "Herdsmen, I say, etc., etc.," stands for all those to-day who are the advocates ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... through evolution is a kind of cosmic or biologic legerdemain that baffles and bewilders us. It so far transcends all our earthly knowledge and experience and all the flights of our philosophy that we stand speechless before it. It opens a gulf that the imagination cannot clear; it opens vistas from which we instinctively shrink; it opens up abysms of time in which our whole historic period would be but a day; it opens up a world of struggle, delay, waste, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... self-abnegation, that this or that question as to the estate should be settled in the interest, not of the setting, but of the rising sun. "It is your affair rather than mine, my boy;—do as you like." He could picture to himself in his imagination a pleasant, half-mock melancholy in saying such things, and in sharing the reins of government between his own hands and those of his heir. As the sun is falling in the heavens and the evening lights come on, this world's wealth and prosperity afford no pleasure equal to this. It is this delight ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... sounds began, as she heard the mill-wheel creak and turn and the rush and roar of the water below, common sense came to her aid, and she was able to tell herself that her night alarm might have been due to nothing more than her own startled imagination. ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... curious thing about Katrin Texel was that though her corporeal part might be a direct inheritance from her Burgomeister father and his substantial brewery, her spirit had been designed for an artful fairy of half her size, in order that it might go pirouetting into airy realms of the imagination. For she was gay enough and lightsome enough in her demeanor. She came in with a skip which would have been entrancing in some elfish mignonne who could dance light-foot on spring flowers without crushing them. But when this our solid Burgomagisterial Katrin tripped in, it ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Hessian and British accounts, as well as those of our own local historians, the battle-field on Long Island was a scene of carnage, a pen in which our men were slaughtered without mercy. The confused strife, says one writer, "is too terrible for the imagination to dwell upon." "An appalling massacre," says another, "thus closed the combat." "The forest," writes a Hessian officer, "was a scene of horror; there were certainly two thousand killed and wounded lying about." Lord Howe himself, as we have seen, "computed" that the American ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... were looking at him with intent faces, their interest thoroughly aroused. Wellesly decided to draw on his imagination for any necessary or interesting details that the prospector had not ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... ways as fastidious as Tennyson's versification. The scenes on the desert island are some of them commonplace. The shipwreck and the like remind one of other photoplays, but the rest of the production has a mood of its own. Seen several months ago it fills my eye-imagination and eye-memory more than that particular piece of Tennyson's fills word-imagination and word-memory. Perhaps this is because it is pleasing to me as a theorist. It is a sound example of the type of film to which this chapter is devoted. If you cannot get your local manager to ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... ardent student of character and life; he has wit of the swiftest, the most comprehensive, the most luminous, and humour that can be fantastic or ironical or human at his pleasure; he has passion and he has imagination; he has considered sex—the great subject, the leaven of imaginative art—with notable audacity and insight. He is as capable of handling a vice or an emotion as he is of managing an affectation. He can be trivial, or grotesque, or satirical, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... has made stronger appeal to the imagination of Christendom than even Ancient Egypt, because of its association with the captivity of the Hebrews, whose sorrows are enshrined in the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... anticipated an unpleasant five minutes in Master Bean's company. Imagination boggled at the thought of an ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Felix, but I was so moved by her kindness and generosity that I could not speak. I had received money for services performed, and I had obtained it from Nanny as a loan, to be repaid with interest; but so much money, as a gift, had never entered into my imagination. I could not restrain my feelings; I dropped my face on the counter, to conceal the tears ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... which are described appear all the more dreadful, as is natural, the nearer they are brought to the imagination, but it seems only too probable that the final reckoning in loss of life and material wealth will prove far more stupendous than has even yet ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... dissolve away, And bring me Surrey's fields to take their place: This floor be grass, and draughts as breezes play; Yon curtains trees, to wave in summer's face; My ceiling, sky; my water-jug a stream; My bed, a bank, on which to muse and dream. The spell is wrought: imagination swells My sleeping-room to hills, and woods, and dells! I walk abroad, for naught my footsteps hinder, And fling my arms. Oh! mi! ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... finest descriptive passages seem often languid or diffuse, and not to present to their eyes any distinct picture. Perhaps sometimes this objection may be just; but to paint to the eye is easier than to the imagination—and Wordsworth, taking it for granted that people can now see and hear, desires to make them feel and understand; of his pupil it must not ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... of the priests, and the magnificence of the altar, and the images and vessels of silver and gold, reflecting their splendor, by the light of wax candles, on the sombre pillars, roofs, and windows of the Gothic church, and the effect heightened by exciting music, and other appeals to the taste or imagination, rather than to the reason and the heart. The sermons of the clergy were frivolous, and ill adapted to the spiritual wants of the people. "Men went to the Vatican," says the learned and philosophical Ranke, "not to pray, but to contemplate the Belvidere ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... help laughing outright, in spite of her depression, at the idea of Margaret as an angel; it was so difficult (even to her dressmaking imagination) to fancy where, and how, the wings would be fastened to the brown stuff gown, or the blue ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... sober as an orthodox, theological treatise, though the poem is essentially a work of the most fertile imagination, a drama with all the rich accessories that tradition offered in the matter of colouring and effect. And it is withal exquisitely simple, devout, and noble, breathing a spirituality strangely at variance with the semi-barbaric people with whom ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... in one ear then in the other, picturing to my imagination favours done me, real or imagined, until, to hear them, they might have been my guardian angels; while I went between them silent and mighty sullen, casting about in my mind as to what all ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... Fabien, my friend, whither away? You are letting your imagination run away with you again. A hint from it, and off you go. Come, do use your reason a little. You have seen this young lady again, that is true. You admired her; that was for the second time. But she, whom you so calmly speak of as "Jeanne," ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... in agitation. "Why don't you go to a doctor? Why don't you take care of your health? My dear, darling Sasha," she said, and tears gushed from her eyes and for some reason there rose before her imagination Andrey Andreitch and the naked lady with the vase, and all her past which seemed now as far away as her childhood; and she began crying because Sasha no longer seemed to her so novel, so cultured, and so interesting as the year before. ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... very bitter and a very surprising thing for me to hear her speak in this way. Trouble I knew she must have suffered on Ken's Island; but this was a story beyond all imagination. And what could I say to her, what comfort give her—I, a rough-hearted sailor, who, nevertheless, would have cut off my own right hand if that could have served her? Indeed, to be truthful, I had nothing to say, and there we were ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... half-hour which succeeded. For the moment, all present dangers were lost sight of, in the glow of future hopes. Maud's imagination portrayed scenes of happiness, in which domestic duties, Bob beloved, almost worshipped, and her father and mother happy in the felicity of their children, were the prominent features; while Beulah and little ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... there also in his uncommunicating company. Here, I felt, was perhaps the answer to my question, the secret of the enigma that puzzled me; and as I went over my memories of that time, and revived its sombre and almost sinister fascination, I seemed to see an answer looming before my imagination. But it was an answer, an hypothesis or supposition, so fantastic, that my common sense ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... have to avoid, then, even while we carry on our own old process of education, is this development of the powers of so-called self-expression in a child. Let us beware of artificially stimulating his self-consciousness and his so-called imagination. All that we do is to pervert the child into a ghastly state of self-consciousness, making him affectedly try to show off as we wish him to show off. The moment the least little trace of self-consciousness enters in a child, good-by ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... exclaimed Christine in surprise. "I thought it was my imagination. Those four girls you folks ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... armistice first. General Lee won his spurs in Mexico. The plan might fire his imagination—as it would have fired the soul of Caesar or Napoleon. If he refuses to go over the head of Davis, you can then announce the vote of Congress ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... He knows that pine will kindle his fire readily and that one of the hard woods will hold it longest. He knows that out of the leaping flames, whether they be composed of phlogiston or incandescent hydrogen, loved fancies flashed into the minds of the elder race, born of the flicker of flame on the imagination of a primitive people, backed by dark forests, night and wind-riding storms. If he have the hardihood let him light his Yule log in the winter twilight of the snowy woods. He will do well to pick a spot where ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... homage bestowed by their descendants. Such a system could not fail to establish a belief in good and evil genii, and of tutelar spirits presiding over families, towns, cities, houses, mountains, and other particular places. It afterwards required no great stretch of the imagination to give to these "airy nothings a ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... more congenial theme than this of bravery and beauty, youth and fame, immortal honour and untimely death; nor could any sculptor of death have poetised the theme more thoroughly than Agostino Busti, whose simple instinct, unlike that of Michelangelo, led him to subordinate his own imagination to the pathos ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... irrevocably, from without. She had thought herself prepared for this ending of hope. She had even, imagining herself hardened and indifferent, gone in advance of it and had sought to put the past under her feet and to build up a new life. But she had not been prepared; that she now knew. The imagination of the fact was not its realisation in her very blood and bones, nor the standing ready, armed for the blow, this feel of the blade between her ribs. And looking down at the only home she had ever had, ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Generation, they are to be husbanded by another kind of seed, even so it is with Wit which if not applied to some certain study that may fix and restrain it, runs into a thousand Extravagancies, and is eternally roving here and there in the inextricable labyrinth of restless Imagination. ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... shaggy, but perfectly white eyebrows; a snow-white beard of great thickness descended below the middle of his breast. He wore a large white turban, and a white cashmere abbai, or long robe, from the throat to the ankles. As a desert patriarch he was superb, the very perfection of all that the imagination could paint, if we would personify Abraham at the head of his people. This grand old Arab with the greatest politeness insisted upon our immediately accompanying him to his camp, as he could not allow us to remain in his country as strangers. He would ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... Mrs. Shaw was as good-tempered as could be; and Edith had inherited this charming domestic quality; Margaret herself had probably the worst temper of the three, for her quick perceptions, and over-lively imagination made her hasty, and her early isolation from sympathy had made her proud; but she had an indescribable childlike sweetness of heart, which made her manners, even in her rarely wilful moods, irresistible of old; and now, chastened even by what the world called her good fortune, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... settled around the deserts of Karmania and Drangaria—the then natural boundaries of India. And unless history regards as colonists the many thousands of dead men and those who settled for ever under the hot sands of Gedrosia, there were no other, save in the fertile imagination of the Greek historians. The boasted "invasion of India" was confined to the regions between Karmania and Attock, east and west; and Beloochistan and the Hindu Kush, south and north: countries which were all India ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... prophecies of happiness upon the bride and groom, proceeding to particulars which greatly delight the young men, but which cause Ona to blush more furiously than ever. Jokubas possesses what his wife complacently describes as "poetiszka vaidintuve"—a poetical imagination. ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... health was far from being established; and my strength, as may be presumed, was now much reduced by the fatigue of travelling. I shall be able to give but a faint idea of the feelings with which I passed that night, but must leave it to the imagination of my readers. Now once more in the neighborhood of the Convent, and surrounded by the nuns and priests, of whose conduct I had made the first disclosures ever made, surrounded by thousands of persons devoted to them, and ready to proceed to any outrage, as I feared, whenever their interference ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... was larger than he had dared to hope; was ample for the realization of all his plans for the new life in Mexico. From the hour that this was determined, and the time for their sailing fixed, a new expression came into Ramona's face. Her imagination was kindled. An untried future beckoned,—a future which she would embrace and conquer for her daughter. Felipe saw the look, felt the change, and for the first time hoped. It would be a new world, a new life; why not a new love? She could not always be blind to his devotion; and when she saw it, ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... do with Jack? In imagination she saw him in a prison cell, perhaps doomed to drag out all the after years of his life there, and the thought seemed ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... seemed to him that it was not this alone that had decided his fate. He felt as though a grey veil had descended over his whole future; even over all that in his imagination had elevated him above the more ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... centuries of our era two other forms of satire took their rise, viz.:—the Milesian or "Satiric Tale" of Petronius and Apuleius, and the "Satiric Dialogue" of Lucian. Both are admirable pictures of their respective periods. The Tales of the two first are conceived with great force of imagination, and executed with a happy blending of humour, wit, and cynical irony that suggests Gil Blas or Barry Lyndon. The Supper of Trimalchio, by Petronius, reproduces with unsparing hand the gluttony and the blatant vice of the Neronic epoch. The Golden Ass of Apuleius is a clever sketch of contemporary ...
— English Satires • Various
... monotonous surroundings furnish them with little to work upon. The mind, finding scant material for sustained logical deduction, falls back upon contemplation. Intellectual activity is therefore restricted, narrow, unproductive; while the imagination is unfettered but also unfed. First and last, these shepherd folk receive from the immense monotony of their environment the impression of unity.[1182] Therefore all of them, upon outgrowing their primitive fetish and nature worship, gravitate ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... frequently from her work to drive them away, saying, as she did so, "Good bees, make our honey from something else; we gain nothing if you drain our grapes for it; we want these grapes for the winter;" and as she spoke, her imagination sped fleetly forward to the winter, The Virgin must have forgiven her, to give her again the joy of a child in her arms. Ay, a joy! Spite of poverty, spite of danger, spite of all that cruelty and oppression could do, it would still be a joy ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... indicate that such environment was: how a lively soul, acted on by it, did not fail to react, chameleon-like taking color from it, and contrariwise taking color against it, must be left to the reader's imagination—One thing we have gathered and will not forget, That the Old Dessauer is out, and Grumkow in, that the rugged Son of Gunpowder, drilling men henceforth at Halle, and in a dumb way meditating tactics as few ever did, has no share in the foul enchantments ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... who boasts of his modesty will feel no shame at producing nothing. He hides his ineptitude behind this convenient veil whose thickness allows him to hint of the existence of things which are nothing but figments of his imagination. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... that a new idea to you? Ability never asserts itself to its utmost unless fed by the imagination, and I don't know yet whether Allen possesses either. Success in any line depends upon the extent of ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... It was the threat material in the great game of bluff he was playing, and it had taken even me by surprise. He was one of those incredibly stupid energetic people who seem sent by heaven to create disasters. His energy to the first glance seemed so wonderfully like capacity! But he had no imagination, no invention, only a stupid, vast, driving force of will, and a mad faith in his stupid idiot 'luck' to pull him through. I remember how we stood out upon the headland watching the squadron circling far away, and how I weighed the full meaning of the sight, seeing clearly ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... one least expects it, on all the gaieties and busy interests of existence (for at this hour the Corso and the Caffes are most crowded)—all this, without any reference to the intrinsic solemnity of such a scene, is calculated, as mere stage effect, powerfully to stir up the sympathies and imagination of a stranger. On the inhabitants, as might be apprehended, such pageants have long since lost all their influence; and I have seen a line extending down a whole street, without deranging a single lounger from his seat, or interrupting for an instant the pleasures ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... Griffeth stood next, owing to his likeness to his eldest brother, the twins soon won her favour also. They were in some respects more interesting, as they were less easily understood, wilder and stranger in their ways, and always full of stories of adventure and warfare, which fascinated her imagination even when she knew that they spoke of the strife between England and Wales. She had a high spirit and a love of adventure, which association with ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... terrible. In "Soul-Examination," a number of boys during the day plant some flags in different parts of a graveyard, under a lonely tree, or by a haunted hill-side. At night they meet together and tell stories about ghosts, goblins, devils, etc., and at the conclusion of each tale, when the imagination is wrought up, the boys, one at a time, must go out in the dark and bring back the flags, until ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... casually heard a former master recite or read aloud from Hebrew and Greek books. This legend do psychologists accept on no evidence at all, because it illustrates a theory which is, doubtless, a very good theory, though, in this case, carried to an extent 'imagination ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... frightened had Manuel, upsetting tradition, declined the offering. With the morbid contrariness of the human imagination, the boy's avid ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... earth a little about the roots of this science, as we have done of the rest, the duty and office of rhetoric is to apply reason to imagination for the better moving of the will. For we see reason is disturbed in the administration thereof by three means—by illaqueation or sophism, which pertains to logic; by imagination or impression, which pertains to rhetoric; and by passion or ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... under the names of Christian parties but savages at heart, put the whole people to ransom and to sack. Indeed, the Wars of Religion were like hell; the tongue can describe them better than the imagination can conceive them. The whole sweet and pleasant land of France, from the Burgundian to the Spanish frontier, was widowed and desolated, her pride humbled by her own sons and her Golden Lilies trampled in the bloody mire. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Bud, without words, how tenuous was his hold upon Eddie. He possessed sufficient imagination to know that his own carefully discipline past, sheltered from actual contact with evil, had given him little enough by which to measure the soul of a ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... live in any climate, least of any his own. As for his mind, that follows his wasted body; it's hectic. He affects a detachment which he will never have. It's a pose. He is exceedingly sentimental, has an imagination which—if you could follow it—might alarm you. I have no doubt at all but that, in imagination, he has you safe in some island of Cythera or another, and has slain every other male inhabitant of it lest some one of them should ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... so, you know. Every bright young imagination is apt to find greater glories in the misty past, or grander possibilities in a still more misty future than in the too practical and prosaic present in which both duty and destiny lie. And so Helena ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... Chandos liked her more and more. He enjoyed her society. She was not witty, she could not amuse a whole room full of people, she could not create laughter, she was not the cause of wit in others, nor did talking to her awake the imagination and arouse all the faculties of ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... things bowed Fleda to the ground and made her bury her face in her hands. But there was one item of happiness from which her thoughts never even in imagination dissevered themselves, and round it they gathered now in their weakness. A strong mind and heart to uphold hers,—a strong hand for here to rest in,—that was a blessing; and Fleda would have cried heartily but that her feelings were too high wrought. They made her deaf ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... repeat nearly the same arguments, which he had formerly used, respecting necessity, the uniform, and Lady Diana Sweepstakes. To all this Mr. Gresham made no reply, and longer had the young gentleman expatiated upon the subject, which had so strongly seized upon his imagination, had not his senses been forcibly assailed at this instant by the delicious odours and tempting sight of certain cakes and jellies in a pastrycook's shop. "Oh, uncle," said he, as his uncle was going to turn the corner to pursue the road to Bristol, "look at those jellies!" pointing ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... perceptual and conceptual forms as class notions with particular characteristics. Bhik@su who supposes that the determinate character of things is directly perceived by the senses has necessarily to assign a subordinate position to manas as being only the faculty of desire, doubt, and imagination. ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... extremely warm. This was the usual evening seat of the family, especially its elder and more honourable members. How they contrived to stand the very close quarters to the blazing logs, and how they managed never to set themselves on fire, must be left to the imagination. ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... he has completed his grisly task; but it was obviously impossible for anyone in the book to live happily ever after so long as he remained alive. Just how Mr. HARRIS BURLAND and the villainous figment of his lively imagination perform these deeds of dastard-do is not for me to reveal. The publishers modestly claim that in the school of WILKIE COLLINS this author has few rivals. As regards complexity of plot the claim is scarcely substantiated by the volume before me; but if bloodshed be the food of fiction Mr. ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... wretched resorted; mounted a gloomy dirty staircase, and, befriended by the fog, still growing thicker and thicker, and by the early hour of the morning, reached a house previously hired, which, if shocking to the eye and the imagination from its squalid appearance and its gloom, still was a home—a sanctuary—an asylum from treachery, from captivity, from persecution. Here Pierpoint for the present quitted us: and once more Agnes, Hannah, and I, the shattered members of a shattered family, were thus gathered ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... in arms; and at the same time employed his gifts, his riches, and his friends above all things, to increase his power in the city. And now Cato's old admonitions began to rouse Pompey out of the negligent security in which he lay, into a sort of imagination of danger at hand; but seeing him slow and unwilling, and timorous to undertake any measures of prevention against Caesar, Cato resolved himself to stand for the consulship, and presently force Caesar either to lay down his arms or discover his intentions. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Freddy's dignity, and extremely distasteful to him besides. His prospects consisted of a hope that if he kept up appearances somebody would do something for him. The something appeared vaguely to his imagination as a private secretaryship or a sinecure of some sort. To his mother it perhaps appeared as a marriage to some lady of means who could not resist her boy's niceness. Fancy her feelings when he married a flower girl who had become declassee under extraordinary ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... to press, our last extract must be short: it relates to words often enough employed indiscriminately—imagination, conception, fancy. '"Imagination" and "fancy" are frequently confounded together, but are, nevertheless, very distinct in their signification. In the first place, "imagination" implies more of a creative power than "fancy;" it requires a greater ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... made himself as conspicuous by his character and his intellect as by his victories; and the imagination of the French began to be touched by him [1797]. His proclamations to the Cisalpine and Ligurian republics were talked of.... A tone of moderation and of dignity pervaded his style, which contrasted with the revolutionary ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... imagination, high and noble, And the brave heat of a true Florentine: For Spain trumpets abroad her interest In the King's heart, and with a black coal draws On every wall your scoffed at injuries, As one that has the refuse of her sheets, And the sick Autumn of ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... Irish imagination that has devised this dreadful picture of the artful Jenny and Mrs. Poynsett spinning their toils to entrap the whole five brothers. Come, Cecil, take my advice and put it out of your head. Suppose it were true, small blame to ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "you are letting your imagination run away with you; she cannot be the same person; her features are entirely different, and she is ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... have gone unnoticed by the other man. Or best of all, he may try to relate the incident with similar events occurring recently, as in the case of a number of fires, burglaries, or explosions coming close upon each other. Whatever course he chooses, he should use his imagination to good advantage, taking care always to make his rewrite truthful. Here is the way a few rewrite men have ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... with you, the imagination Of partnership in legislation Could only enter in the noddles Of dull and ledger-keeping twaddles, Whose heads on firms are running so, They even must have a King and Co., And hence most eloquently show forth On checks and ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... and patience of the people, in that long sorrowful march through the wilderness, held out as long as it did. Whether fact or fiction, it is one of the most melancholy records in human history. Whether as a mere work of the imagination, or the real experience of an afflicted people, our finer sentiments of pity and sympathy find relief only in ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... happened that Kenneth clattered down the road on the sorrel mare just a moment before the girls emerged from the house, and while he was riding off his indignation at their presence at Elmhurst, they were doing just what his horrified imagination had depicted—that is, penetrating to all parts of the grounds, to every nook in the spacious old gardens and even to the stables, where Beth endeavored to make a friend ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... moral teachers? CRITICISM opens to us the poetry we possess; and, like a magnanimous kingly protector, shelters and fosters all its springing growths. What is criticism as a science? Essentially this—FEELING KNOWN—that is, affections of the heart and imagination become understood subject-matter to the self-conscious intelligence. Must feeling perish because intelligence sounds its depths? Quite the reverse. Greatest minds are those in which, in and out of poetry, the understanding contemplates the will. Then first the soul has its proper strength. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... this battered black hat or compressed within the forlorn squirrel-trimmed gray suit. The dragging movement, the hint of dropping on the seat not from fatigue but from desperation, completed the picture his imagination had already painted of some world-worn, knocked-about creature who had come to the point at which, in his own phrase, ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... six o'clock to the clipped shriek of a whistle. Shortly after, a key turned in his door. There followed the sound of scores of bare feet pattering up and down the hall. Was it imagination or did these muffled footfalls have an inhuman softness?... Suddenly his door flew open. He shrank beneath the bedclothes, peering out with one ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... countenance was visible. What must be the state of Martial brides in general, when the signature of the contract immediately places them at the disposal of an utter stranger, it was beyond the power of my imagination to conceive, if their feelings were at all to be measured by Eveena's under conditions sufficiently trying, but certainly far better than theirs. Nothing was so likely to quiet her as perfect calmness on my ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... thunder and lightning so in my ears and eyes, that I believe, while my blood runs cold. I would not be practised upon—no, not for one of Flushie's ears, and I hate the whole theory. It is hideous to my imagination, especially what is called phrenological mesmerism. After all, however, truth is to be accepted; and testimony, when so various and decisive, is an ascertainer of truth. Now do not tell Mr. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... quickness she so happily discovered in herself, was not so much an honour to her, as what she owed to her sex; which, as I had observed in many instances, had great advantages over the other, in all the powers that related to imagination. And hence, Mrs. Betty, you'll take notice, as I have of late had opportunity to do, that your own talent at repartee and smartness, when it has something to work upon, displays itself to more advantage, than could ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... had exhausted my fund and stretched my imagination I was rewarded by being told that I was a regular old woman ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... mass of hair lock by lock, thinking it an unnecessary nightly labor, the restless head under her hands was turned towards the portable husband. Archange had not much imagination, but to her the thing was uncanny. She repeated what she said ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... thoughtful and deliberate display of genius. In this respect the Greek drama stands forth as most philosophically perfect. The drama, moreover, has always been by far the most popular form of poetry; because it aids, as much as possible, the imagination of the auditor, and for distinctness and clearness of impression stands preeminent above both the epic narrative and the emotional description of ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem'd mine. But now afflictions bow me down to earth: Nor care I, that they rob me of my mirth, But oh! each visitation 85 Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of imagination. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... winced at this check to his story. These stolid mariners had no imagination. He wished to enthuse them, to fire them with the vision of countless wealth, but they had side-tracked ideality for some stupid reminiscence of a collision. In a word, they did him good, and he reached the point of his narration all ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... is necessary to appeal to force of another kind, and to employ means, which although indirect, are without dispute the most adequate under the peculiar circumstances of these lands; means which, by influencing the imagination, excite veneration, subjugate the rude intellect of the inhabitants, and lead them to endure our dominion without repugnance. And well can one understand, too, how ready these means are found, and how we are ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... are reasonably provided for, we must be able confidently to invoke the third element, the underlying strength of citizenship—the self-confidence, the ability, the imagination and the devotion that give the staying ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... now in my power to send you a piece of homespun in return for that I received from you. Not of the fine texture, or delicate character of yours, or, to drop our metaphor, not filled as that was with that display of imagination which constitutes excellence in Belles Lettres, but a mere sober, dry, and formal piece of logic. Ornari res ipsa negat. Yet you may have enough left of your old taste for law reading, to cast an eye over some of the questions it discusses. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the machinery then set in motion in truth defective—is there some inherent vice in the construction of the state engine? Is the law weak when it should be strong? Is its boasted majesty, after all, nothing but the creation of a fond imagination, or a delusion of the past? Are the wheels of the state-machine no longer bright, polished, and fit for use as they once were? or are they choked and clogged with the rust and dust of accumulated ages? Or, if not in the machine, does the fault, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... feel very old and a little crude and hard. He realized that there was something rare, almost exquisite, about the boy, and that he lived largely in a beautiful world of his own imagination. It would have surprised Norry if any one had told him that his fraternity brothers stood in awe of him, that they thought he was a genius. Some of them were built out of pretty common clay, but they felt ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... course the hoodlum class would like nothing better than to see their natural enemies, the defenders of law and order, ignominiously shot, and they do not restrain themselves a bit on account of the hostages. Just lack of imagination. ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... his Voyage Musicale en Italie, has given as follows the curious effects that an AEolian harp produced upon his lively and impassioned imagination: "On one of those gloomy days that sadden the end of the year, listen, while reading Ossian, to the fantastic harmony of an AEolian harp swinging at the top of a tree deprived of verdure, and I defy you not to experience a profound feeling of sadness and of abandon, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... he had been compelled to restore them to the convent. The assailants of Wagenfeld accuse him of wilful deception; but the probability is that the document which he translated is one of those inventions of the Middle Ages, in which history and geography were strangely confounded with imagination and romance; and that it is an attempt to restore the lost books of Philo Byblius, as Philo himself is more than suspected to have invented the history which he professed to have translated from Sanchoniathon. (See ERSCH and GRUEBER'S Encyclopaedia, 1847; MOEVER'S ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... "Man's reasoning," he says,[45:2] "is a creature which flows from that Spirit to this end, to draw up man into himself. It is but a candle lighted by that soul, and this light, shining through flesh, is darkened by the imagination of the flesh. So that many times men act contrary to reason, though they think they act according to Reason.... The Spirit Reason, which I call God, the Maker and Ruler of all things, is that spiritual power that guides all men's reasoning in right order, and to a right ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... southern route. Treasure went overland across the Isthmus. Every year an elephantine treasure-ship sailed from Panama westward through the South Sea; and there was a rich trade between the American mines and the Orient and the Spanish peninsula, by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Doughty's imagination was fired by the gorgeous possibilities of the idea, and when he became the secretary of Christopher Hatton, the Queen's handsome Captain of the Guard, he laid the plan before him with all the eloquence of his persuasive tongue. Hatton finally obtained from Elizabeth ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... eyes are for colors, the ears for sounds, the nose for scents, the tongue for flavors, the touch for heat and cold, for hard and soft. Each sense has its own sphere of knowledge and brings what it has perceived before the imagination, and this hands it over to the reason within, which reads and illuminates the productions of the imagination, judges them, and in this way comes to a knowledge of the substances. But the reason has little light if it is separated from the body, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... flushed and then grew livid, and he put his hand to his forehead. Then he forced a smile and said in a voice that trembled in spite of himself: "Mr. Muller, your imagination is wonderful. And which of these two do you think it is that has committed these crimes—the perpetrator of which you have ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... commenced to speculate upon the future, and terrifying fears were conjured by a vivid imagination, she had but to raise her lids and look upon that noble face so close to hers to dissipate the last ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a scene that strikes the imagination more than this little desert in these depths of Western obscurity, occupied not by a gross herdsman, or amphibious fisherman, but by a gentleman and two ladies, of high birth, polished manners and elegant conversation, ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... as usual. As for your illness, I will say that it is more the imagination of Your Highness than anything else. The constitution is strong, and with my assistance Your Highness will live ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... the bayonet. How Denny regarded the matter when he found that George had not only cheated him out of the anticipated delight of cowhiding him, but had also cheated him out of himself is left for the imagination to picture. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... Lise. She was not lacking in imagination of a certain sort, and Janet's remark did not fail in its purpose of summoning up a somewhat abject image of herself in wet velvet and bedraggled feathers—an image suggestive of a certain hunted type of woman Lise and her kind held in peculiar horror. And she was the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... high road, and the only signs of human activity that reached me came from the adjacent river; therefore, when presently an outcry arose from somewhere on my left, for a moment I really believed that my imagination was vividly reproducing the episode of the ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... so general that they are exemplified in the economic life of every society, from the most primitive to the most highly civilized. They are the principles of Social Economic Statics, and in order to have them distinctly before us we have created in imagination a society which is changeless in size, in form, and in mode of economic action. In such a condition the wages of labor would remain fixed, as would also the interest on capital. Wages and interest would absorb the whole product of social industry; ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... knowledge of ultra-waves, but do not use them intelligently—they cannot neutralize even these ordinary forces we are now employing. They are of course more intelligent than the lower ganoids, or even than some of the higher fishes, but by no stretch of the imagination can they be compared to us. I am quite relieved—I was afraid that in my haste I might slay members ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... passing struck his elbow, and—! Now an interesting thing has happened: each one of you fellows got a picture, complete in all details, to a climax. Yet there was no real picture; it was all in your imagination, spurred by twenty-one simple words. And it was a moving picture, too, and it went away past the word-spurs, because you painted the balance of it yourselves like a flash. You saw the glass fall and smash on the floor, and you saw the ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... and principles, and consider him according to his own particular model. Though I am not continent myself, I nevertheless sincerely approve the continence of the Feuillans and Capuchins, and highly commend their way of living. I insinuate myself by imagination into their place, and love and honour them the more for being other than I am. I very much desire that we may be judged every man by himself, and would not be drawn into the consequence of common examples. My own weakness nothing alters the esteem ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... if you had been in my boots you must long since have gone mad? well, it is because I have been able to think of all the others who are in my boots that I have kept my sanity. It has not been easy. It is not as if my imagination alone had been tortured. Just as I have the sense that my village is there—" he pointed with his sensitive hand, "so I have the sense of what has happened there. I KNOW that she is alive," he concluded, "and that she ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... did not come up to my desire to succeed in them. However, I had an innate inclination for reading, especially works of history; and thus was inspired with ambition to emulate the examples presented to my imagination,—to do something and become somebody, which partly made amends for my coldness for letters. In fact, I have always thought that if I had been allowed to read history more constantly, instead of losing my time in studies for which I had no aptness, I might have ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... and Monsieur Dorn, with one fist stuck against his own fat ribs, swayed to the motion with admirable nonchalance. His voice, which has the barky tone inseparable from military command, would ring about the square like the voice of a commander-in-chief, and by the exercise of a practised imagination, I could almost persuade myself that I stood face to face with the horrid front ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... be free as thy Thoughts and Contemplations, but fly not only upon the wings of Imagination; Joyn Sense unto Reason, and Experiment unto Speculation, and so give life unto Embryon Truths, and Verities yet in ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... just what kind of a young lady his cousin Phyllis Fontaine might be he had no idea. People could not in those days buy their pictures by the dozen, and distribute them, so that Antony's imagination, in this direction, had the field entirely to itself. His fancy painted her in many charming forms, and yet he was never able to invest her with any other distinguishing traits than those with which he was familiar—the brilliant ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... by the more intense cold, pulled hard against the bit, and made the coachman's arms ache. The doctor looked away for a moment at the vapours that began to clothe the afternoon in the hollows and depressions of the landscape, and at the sun, whose gathering change of aspect smote on his imagination as something akin to the change that falls over the faces of men towards that hour when the sun of their glory makes ready for its setting. Still keeping his glance on that sad red sun in its nest of radiating vapours, he ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... not forgotten. It may be a stretch beyond the power of a latter-day imagination to fancy a visitor proposing to fascinate his company by some "scatterings of Seneca and Tacitus," or even to think ourselves back to a time when these "were good for all occasions." Yet, those who say "Chaucer[K] for our money above all our English poets because ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... providential, and that he ought not to neglect the only means by which he could perform his promise;—that his father could very well spare the sum he wanted, and that it was only taking before the time what by inheritance must be his own hereafter.—In this imagination he opened the drawer, and was about to pursue his intention, when he recollected that the money would certainly be missed, and either the fault be laid upon some innocent person, who might suffer for his crime; or he himself would be suspected of a thing, which, in this second thought, ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... I don't believe in wasting even a diary. Father ... it would be easier to write "Dad," but Dad sounds disrespectful in a diary ... says I have a streak of old Grandmother Marshall's economical nature in me. So I'm going to write in this book whenever I have anything that might, by any stretch of imagination, be supposed worth while. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... society, and the light of experience illumines the pathway before us. It is when we come to the methods of organization and management, the spirit of the economic organization of the future state, that the light fails and we must grope our way into the great unknown with imagination and our sense of justice ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... Bancroft's imagination and enthusiasm were alike exuberant. His pages abound in fine and acute insight. His generalizations are vivid and enlightening. He spared no pains to acquire true style, frequently rewriting his chapters, and sometimes testing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... looked down, as if irresolute. And this set my heart up at my mouth. And, believe me, I had instantly popt in upon me, in imagination, an old spectacled parson, with a white surplice thrown over a black habit, [a fit emblem of the halcyon office, which, under a benign appearance, often introduced a life of storms and tempests,] whining and snuffling through ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... together, not with a long gap between each, but in unbroken succession like days of the week. It was a great change to find himself for the first time (I quite settled that it WAS the first) in an empty silent room with no soul to care for. I could not help following him in imagination through crowds of pleasant faces, and then coming back to that dull place with its bough of mistletoe sickening in the gas, and sprigs of holly parched up already by a Simoom of roast and boiled. The very waiter had gone home; and his representative, ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... these incidental glimpses of life and death running away with us from the main object the picture was meant to delineate. The more evidently accidental their introduction, the more trivial they are in themselves, the more they take hold of the imagination. It is common to find an object in one of the twin pictures which we miss in the other; the person or the vehicle having moved in the interval of taking the two photographs. There is before us a view of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... "and I'll tell you all something. A lady that mama knows heard some of Gwen's stories, and she told Mrs. Harcourt what perfectly awful things Gwen was telling, and Mrs. Harcourt said that she was very glad, and thankful that Gwen had such great imagination, and said she wouldn't, for the world do anything to check it, because it's a SURE sign she'll be something fine ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks
... prevented or hindered a grand children's party as the Butterfly's Ball, where she was to have been the Butterfly, and Lord Ivinghoe the Grasshopper, and all the children were to appear as one of the characters in Roscoe's pretty poem. Never was anything more delightful to the imagination of the little cousins, and they could not marvel enough at her seeming so little uneasy about anything so charming, and quite ready and eager to throw herself headlong into all their present enjoyments, making wonderful surmises as ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... appropriated, and where she played at all sorts of solitary games. In that wilderness she imagined herself at times a lonely traveler, at other times a merchant carrying goodly pearls, at other times a bandit engaged in feats of plunder. All possible scenes in history or imagination that she understood did the child try to enact in the wilderness. But she went there now with no intention of posing in any imaginary part. She went there because her ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... out strongly here. And it is this touch of nature appearing always in the Old Testament stories which gives to them their reality. The writer of ordinary histories has for the most part his favourites. These are the heroes of his imagination, and the history of their doings is unconsciously tempered by this partiality. And there are others whom he holds in disfavour. And the figure of these on his page is darkened accordingly. And the book of another historian passes over ...
— Is The Young Man Absalom Safe? • David Wright
... people of consequence. "Vivian Grey," then, though not a great novel is beyond question a marvelously true picture of the life and character of an interesting period of English history and made notable because of Disraeli's fine imagination and vivid ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... stark from the prairie in unsoftened ugliness, and there was nothing to stir the imagination in the great waste of sun-bleached grass. Day by day, while the dust whirled by them, and the gaunt telegraph posts came up out of the far horizon and sank into the east, they raced across the wide levels. The red dawns burned behind them, the sunsets flamed ahead, and still there ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... "oversensitive, from dwelling too long on this painful chapter of your life. No one knows better than myself what disorders of the imagination may result from a mood of the soul, a passing mood,—the pains of growth, perhaps. You are a woman now; but let the woman not be too hard upon the girl that she was. After what you have been through quite lately, and for two years past, I pronounce you ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... undoubted egotism. For she was comely and had a taking manner, never troubling herself unless her own personal convenience were threatened. She laughed a good deal, though her sense of humour was none of the finest, and she was far too practical to possess any imagination. In short, as she herself expressed it, she was sensible; and, being so, she had small sympathy with her sister-in-law's foolish sentimentalities, which she considered wholly out of place in the everyday life at ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... home. No desire to visit the Orient—the native land of his brain—seems to have disturbed him. Possibly the Italian journey was in some respects disenchanting. The few poems which date from it are picturesque and descriptive, but do not indicate that his imagination was warmed by what he saw. He was never so happy as when alone with his books and manuscripts, studying or writing, according to the dominant mood. This secluded habit engendered a shyness of manner, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... children did not forget. Gradually their unknown uncle came to assume in their imagination a form that would have surprised him had he been suddenly confronted by it. It was that of a benevolent-faced fairy clad in robes of purple and ermine, and wearing on his head a crown resplendent with gems of myriad colors. In his hand he carried a ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... passions, glory and war. He was never more gay than in the camp, and never more morose than in the inactivity of peace. Plans for the construction of public monuments also pleased his imagination, and filled up the void caused by the want of active occupation. He was aware that monuments form part of the history of nations, of whose civilisation they bear evidence for ages after those who created them have disappeared ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... was no response. Beth was to utterly overcome to speak. She hardly dared believe it was his call she heard, issuing up from the tomb. She feared that her hope, her frantic imagination, her wish to have it so, had conjured up a voice that had no genuine existence. Her lips moved, but made no audible sound. She trembled violently. Van called again, with more of ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... ardour of the master and the docility of the pupil, the lesson was prolonged to such a time, that the Colonel, asleep between his two branches, could have dreamt all the dreams that might present themselves to his imagination before either of these worthies ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... building." This vision of a better future is not, perhaps, as unclouded for the present generation of Americans as it was for certain former generations; but in spite of a more friendly acquaintance with all sorts of obstacles and pitfalls, our country is still figured in the imagination of its citizens as the Land of Promise. They still believe that somehow and sometime something better will happen to good Americans than has happened to men in any other country; and this belief, vague, innocent, and uninformed though it be, is the expression of an essential constituent in our ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... brother of mademoiselle du Pont, he was immediately brought into the parlour, where he had not waited long before a young lady appeared behind the grate: as he found it was not her he expected, he was a little at a loss, and not without some apprehensions that his imagination had deceived him: I know not, madame, said he, if chance has not made me mistaken for some happier person:—I thought to find a sister here.—No, replied she laughing, Horatio shall find me a sister in my good offices;—mademoiselle Charlotta will be here immediately;—she has counterfeited an ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... that was there to-day; the young man, I mean," Charlotte explained, and then she told what had happened with a want of fullness which her mother's imagination supplied. ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... soldier's wife in all its unpleasantness; and what was odd, with a languishing air, which she owed to her perusal of romances. She was a simpering, but masculine creature. Old romances produce that effect when rubbed against the imagination of cook-shop woman. She was still young; she was barely thirty. If this crouching woman had stood upright, her lofty stature and her frame of a perambulating colossus suitable for fairs, might have frightened the traveller at the outset, troubled her confidence, and disturbed what caused ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... had made his ascent from the Crawford House. My eye seemed spell-bound to the glass. I mentally speculated upon the character and destiny of the pilgrim who, at this season, and alone, could climb up those steeps. My imagination invested him with a strange interest. He had wandered far away from the world, and above it. There was something in his mind—perhaps in his destiny—akin to the severity of this barren solitude. The spell was broken by ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... quantities, and turn them about his ears. In time of action he wore a sling over his shoulders with three brace of pistols. He stuck lighted matches under his hat, which appeared on both sides of his face and eyes, naturally fierce and wild, made him such a figure that the human imagination cannot form a conception of a fury more terrible and alarming; and if he had the appearance and look of a fury, his actions corresponded with ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... days, but I think I will soon return to Sulgostow. I suffer everywhere, and it always seems to me that I will be most happy in whatever place I am not. My lot is brilliant in imagination, but miserable in reality. And yet, my parents have received me well, and have treated me with the greatest kindness. But a matter of comparatively slight importance is one of the causes of my uneasiness here: I have no money; I cannot make the slightest present to my sisters, and can ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... But wasn't it sweet of him! To have the courage to live his own life after his own fashion—to break away from the banquet of life—so early and so drunk! A beautiful act like that does appeal to a superior woman's imagination! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... to dawn on Martin's Imagination that the overseer must be an eccentric individual, who found pleasure in taking his visitors by surprise. But although this seemed a possible solution of the difficulty, he did not feel satisfied with it. He could with difficulty resist the temptation to attack the viands, however, and was beginning ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... first "memorandum" might have proved if it had been ratified. It is always difficult to tell how things that have not been tried would have worked if they had been. We now know only this much—that the imagination of man could hardly picture worse results than those wrought out by the plan that was finally adopted—namely, to destroy everything that existed in the way of government, and then build from the bottom on the foundation of ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... better." And they talked about Ingres for some time, until Owen's thoughts went back to Evelyn, and looking from the portrait by Ingres to the drawing by Boucher he seemed suddenly to lose control; tears rose to his eyes, and Harding watched him, wondering whither Owen's imagination carried him. "Is he far away in Paris, hearing her sing for the first time to Madame Savelli? Or is he standing with her looking over the bulwarks of the Medusa, seeing the shape of some Greek island dying in the twilight?" And Harding did not speak, ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... to Don Luis, was the crowning terror. After all the difficulties which, in his stubbornly confident imagination, he had managed to surmount, he was brought face to face with the horrible vision of Florence ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... gigantic bastion she had constructed in France and Belgium into a house of cards. Well might the Dardanelles expedition be hailed in the press as a stroke of strategical genius and associated with Mr. Churchill's imagination. Easy also is it to understand the concentrated fear and force which the Germans put into Mackensen's coming ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... the country, and around which the vague and superstitious accounts of the trappers had thrown a delightful obscurity, which we anticipated pleasure in dispelling, but which, in the meantime, left a crowded field for the exercise of our imagination. ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... thought that these little figures were endowed with some supernatural powers or attributes, but of course this was mere superstition. The whole power of the little figures arose from the fact that they aided the imagination of the spell-worker in forming a mental image of the person sought to be influenced; and thus established a strong mental rapport condition. Added to this, you must remember that the fear and belief of the public greatly aided the spell-worker, and increased his power and influence ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... rather than to disappoint the wishes of his master. Before his departure, the Prince called him aside and said: "You cannot meet with such peril that the hope of your reward shall not be much greater; and in truth, I wonder what imagination this is that you have all taken up—in a matter, too, of so little certainty; for if these things which are reported had any authority, however little, I would not blame you so much. But you quote to me the opinions of four ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... answered humbly—"unless it was my own vivid imagination. Would there be anything very wonderful in a gentleman of your age and appearance conducting some charming person to ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... posted himself at his place, grim and silent, with the watch in his hand. Geoffrey walked on beyond the flag, so as to give himself start enough to reach his full speed as he passed it. "Now then!" said Perry. In an instant more, he flew by (to Mrs. Glenarm's excited imagination) like an arrow from a bow. His action was perfect. His speed, at its utmost rate of exertion, preserved its rare underlying elements of strength and steadiness. Less and less and less he grew to the eyes that followed his course; still lightly flying over the ground, still firmly ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... young nobleman, greatly in the king's favour for his comely air, his politeness, and a certain peculiar happiness in the turn of his conversation, had spent the evening till eleven o'clock with the monarch, in pleasant familiarity; and had given a loose, with the utmost mirth, to the sallies of his imagination. The monarch felt some remorse, and being touched with a kind of compassion, bid him, two or three times, not to go home, but lie in the Louvre. The count said, he must go to his wife; upon which the king pressed him no farther, but said, 'Let him go! I see God has decreed his death.' ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... numbers, with the forms of men in different attitudes, portrayed in the blood and representing the figures he had previously seen in the heavens.[3] These were without doubt creatures of Nat Turner's own imagination made by him with coloring matter to make the Negroes believe that he was a ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... pseudonym. The pseudonym shows imagination. Let us be thankful for that. Gastronomy is bankrupt. Formerly it was worshipped. Formerly gastronomy was a goddess. To-day the sole tributes consist in bills-of-fare that are just like the Sahara minus the oases. It is the oases we want and it is muskrat we get. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... it was really true that nightly, as we lay down to sleep, we did not dare plan for the morning, feeling that we might be homeless and beggars before the dawn. How unreal it will then seem! We will say it was our wild imagination, perhaps. But how bitterly, horribly true it ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... powerful man was Old Joe the collier, who flourished and was known in every village in the Salisbury Plain district during the first thirty-five years of the last century. I first heard of this once famous man from Caleb, whose boyish imagination had been affected by his gigantic figure, mighty voice, and his wandering life over all that wide world of Salisbury Plain. Afterwards when I became acquainted with a good many old men, aged from 75 to 90 and upwards, I found that Old Joe's memory is still green ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... the B-Types muttered ominously. They didn't like my idea—nor me. I wondered what I'd think of next and wished that I'd been born utterly devoid of imagination. Then this would never have happened. There didn't seem to be much point in staying here any longer, either. Maybe they weren't so good at telepathing by ...
— Robots of the World! Arise! • Mari Wolf
... and to the old grey house on the cliff—the home of Essec Powell, the preacher. In vain he sought for any sign of the girl whose acquaintance he had made so unexpectedly, and he was almost tempted to believe that she was no other than a creature of his own imagination, born of the witching moonlight hour, and absorbed again into the passing shadows of night. But could he have seen through the walls of that old grey house, even now at that early hour, he would have understood what kept ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... same age on being asked, "Where is your beard?" the child would place its hand on its chin and move its thumb and fingers as if drawing hair through them, or as it was in the habit of doing if it touched its father's beard; this is evidence of imagination, which, however, certainly occurs much earlier in life. At the close of the second year a great advance was made in using two words together as a sentence—e.g., "home, milk," to signify a desire to go home and have some milk. In the first month ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... excellence and the wisdom of legislation, contributes prodigiously to increase its power. There is an amazing strength in the expression of the determination of a whole people; and when it declares itself, the imagination of those who are most inclined to contest it, is overawed by its authority. The truth of this fact is very well known by parties; and they consequently strive to make out a majority whenever they can. If they have not the greater number of voters on their side, they assert that the true majority ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... and distress, let imagination fill your soul with fears. But if peace, happiness, health and power be your desires, live the WHITE LIFE and hold fast only ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... this planet This was an ideal star. It travelled through the earth's atmosphere, and moved according to the requirements of the gospel Munchausen. What became of it afterwards we are not informed. Probably it was born and died in Matthew's imagination. He blew it out when he had done with it, and thus it has escaped the attention ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... am sure, and I believe that you, my sister, will agree with me, that, above and beyond its terrors and its pitfalls, Imagination has few finer qualities, and none, perhaps, more helpful to our hearts, than those which enable us for an hour to dream that men and women, their fortunes and their fate, are as ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... of Leonard during this interval was almost solely internal, the struggle of intellect with its own difficulties, the wanderings of imagination ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... tale of Peter Williams, is not the hand of Providence to be seen? This person commits a sin in his childhood, utters words of blasphemy, the remembrance of which, in after life, preying upon his imagination, unfits him for quiet pursuits, to which he seems to have been naturally inclined; but for the remembrance of that sin, he would have been Peter Williams the quiet and respectable Welsh farmer, somewhat fond of reading the ancient literature of his country in winter ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... her room because its springs were broken, and dream long, beautiful, hopeless dreams of a lover with "long black lashes and a soldierly carriage." Of course it was highly reprehensible to have such thoughts at the tender age of sixteen, but then the child had no mother to check that erring imagination, and she was ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... has come when such commonplace compliments ill suit our altered positions to each other? Nay, listen to me patiently; and let not my words in this last interview pain you to recall. If either of us be to blame in the engagement hastily contracted, it is I. Gustave, when you, exaggerating in your imagination the nature of your sentiments for me, said with such earnestness that on my consent to our union depended your health, your life, your career; that if I withheld that consent you were lost, and in ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... order is the Cardinal's description of a gentleman. Here there is no flight of poetical imagination, but a manifestation of felicitous intuition and penetrating insight as rare as it is convincing, and the generous wide vision of a man of the world, undimmed by the faintest trace ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... therefore he is not to be brought in as an umpire in this case. Finally, Matthiolus and so many as describe the locust do set down none other form than that of our grasshopper, which maketh me so much the more to rest upon my former imagination, which is that the locust ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... dream, that, hovering in the midnight air, Clasp'd with thy dusky wing my aching head, While to imagination's startled ear Toll'd the slow bell, for bright ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... circumstances. With Mat Bailey, the stage-driver, with whom Cummins had traveled that fatal day, he had ridden over the same road, had passed the large stump which had concealed the robbers, and had become almost an eye-witness of the whole affair. My father's rehearsal of it fired my youthful imagination. So it was like a return to the scenes of boyhood when, thirty-six years after the event, I, too, traveled the same road that Cummins had traveled and heard from the lips of Pete Sherwood, stage-driver of a later generation, the same thrilling ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... that far excelled that of the Czar in material resources, suzerain of seven kingdoms and thirty principalities, he called his allies and vassals about him at Dresden, and gave to the world the last vision of that imperial splendour which dazzled the imagination of men. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... went on. "That sort of belief, it seems to me, would grow up in any race that had imagination, and the Nipes must have plenty of that, or they wouldn't have the technology they ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... rejoined thereto, merely by washing the parts, placing them in close continuity, and allowing the natural powers of the body to effect the healing. Moreover, in spite of BACON'S remarks on this point, the effect of the imagination of the patient, who was usually not ignorant that a sympathetic cure was to be attempted, must be taken into account; for, without going to the excesses of "Christian Science" in this respect, the fact must be recognised that the state of the mind exercises a powerful ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... career. Rome, Greece, and Asia,—which for some unexplained reason never become (according to Dr. Temple) any part of the Colossal Man at all,—now come in; "Rome to discipline the human will; Greece, the reason and taste; Asia, the spiritual imagination." (p. 19.) The Law and the Prophets had disciplined the Colossal Child's conscience,—with what success we have seen. At all events, Moses and Isaiah are for infants: we have passed the age for such helps as they could supply. In a word,—"The childhood of the world was over ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... his hand over his eyes. Against the darkness his fevered imagination pictured advancing "gray phantoms." "They come like demons from the hell they have created," he muttered. "I hope to God they don't use 'starlights' over our trenches tonight. Flesh and ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... giving the sum total of their effects, their varying influences on the mind. He does not go into the minutiae of a landscape, but describes the vivid impression which the whole makes upon his own imagination; and thus transfers the same unbroken, unimpaired impression to the imagination of his readers. The colours with which he paints seem yet wet and breathing, like those of the living statue in the Winter's Tale. Nature in his descriptions ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... been addressing an American audience, she would have appealed to every man to vote only for candidates pledged to no-license. From Garvah they made a pilgrimage to the Giant's Causeway. Miss Anthony had, when at Oban, visited Fingal's Cave, and the two wonders that always fix themselves upon the imagination of the youthful student of the world's geography ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
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