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More "Imaginative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have taken place in Mexico the Pan-American Congress of 1902 was of some importance. The feasting and eloquence, the society functions and self-congratulations which ran riot, were characteristic of this imaginative and enthusiastic race of Latin America. If these matters were more in evidence than practical results—as is often characteristic of such assemblies—at least the important step was taken of calling together their ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... many a night's rest. There was, in particular, a wood near Dulwich, whither he was wont to go. There he would walk swiftly and eagerly along the solitary and lightless byways, finding a potent stimulus to imaginative thought in the happy isolation thus enjoyed, with all the concurrent delights of natural things, the wind moving like a spirit through the tree-branches, the drifting of poignant fragrances, even in winter-tide, from herb and sappy bark, imperceptible almost by the alertest sense in the day's manifold ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... look fell on the massive mirror on the wall opposite, and I cried out, for I saw the two of us in its golden frame as in a picture. The picture was so marvellously beautiful, so strange, so imaginative, that I was filled with deep sorrow at the thought that its lines and colors would have to dissolve ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... he says, the Decay and gloom of Nature seem reflected in—nay, as it were, to take a reflection from—the Hero's troubled Soul. In the Autumn Scene which Mr. Woodberry quotes, {282} and contrasts with those of other more imaginative Poets, would not a more imaginative representation of the scene have been out of character with the English Country Squire who sees and reflects on it? As would have been more evident if Mr. W. had quoted a line ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... revenge offered itself, a council of the tribe was called, where those most venerable from age and illustrious for wisdom deliberated for the public good. The composition of the Indian orator is studied and elaborate; the language is vigorous, and, at the same time, highly imaginative; all ideas are expressed by figures addressed to the senses; the sun and stars, mountains and rivers, lakes and forests, hatchets of war and pipes of peace, fire and water, are employed as illustrations of his subject ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... "What imaginative power you have, Norman! You would make your fortune as a novelist. What can I have to be unhappy about? Should you think that any woman has a lot more brilliant than mine? See how young I am for my position—how entirely I have my own way! Could ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... silence had brooded for fifty years over the history of his grandfather—and as the misty period preceding the purchase of Surbridge had given rise to a whole mythology of ancestry like to the anti-historic periods of Greece, and other imaginative nations—he looked upon the appearance of the veritable contemporary of that fabulous age in the same way as Romulus would have regarded any surviving friend and companion of the real bona fide robber ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... scandalised Lady Gruntham, driven to the point of madness by the never-ending stream of wisdom, advice, and plans which from morning till night flowed unceasingly from the store of Mary's book-gleaned knowledge, Jill had cleared up the situation all round by suddenly announcing the imaginative fact that Hahmed was coming to Cairo to fetch her home. Whereupon Mary Bingham had arranged everything to her own entire satisfaction in the twinkling of an eye, told Jack Wetherbourne that she and her mother were leaving for England if he'd like to come too, had worked her maid ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... resemblance to the earlier dialogues, especially to the Phaedrus and Euthydemus. The manner in which the ideas are spoken of at the end of the dialogue, also indicates a comparatively early date. The imaginative element is still in full vigour; the Socrates of the Cratylus is the Socrates of the Apology and Symposium, not yet Platonized; and he describes, as in the Theaetetus, the philosophy of Heracleitus by 'unsavoury' similes—he cannot believe ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... the laws of the highest perfection. But so long as two natures are mixed together, and the strange creature which results from the combination is now under one influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of him except from the old-fashioned moral—or, if you please, imaginative—point of view. ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... there is the lack of imaginative proportion, which rises into a sort of towering blasphemy. An enormous number of live young men are being hurt by shells, hurt by bullets, hurt by fever and hunger and horror of hope deferred; hurt by lance blades and sword blades and bayonet blades breaking into the bloody house ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... value is that distinctively critical analysis which endeavors to discover the different elements, intellectual, imaginative, emotional, that enter into any work of literature, and to determine their relative amount and importance. Such analysis may well form the subject of classroom discussion, and advanced students should often be required to put the conclusions they have drawn ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... vision. You come nearer, and find only blotches of color and dabs of the brush, meaning nothing when you look closely, and meaning a mystery at the point where the painter intended to station you. Some landscapes there were, indeed, full of imaginative beauty, and of the better truth etherealized out of the prosaic truth of Nature; only it was still impossible actually to see it. There was a mist over it; or it was like a tract of beautiful dreamland, seen dimly ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ago when he read that highly imaginative story of Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," and wondered if it would ever be possible for man to create such a marvelous underseas craft as that which the famous French writer described. ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... appeared in the simple garniture of nature, and softened by the adornments of art, charmed the eye and awakened the enthusiasm of a refined and imaginative mind. But the high moral courage, the stern yet lofty impulse of duty, which had achieved so great an enterprize; which had burst the strong links of kindred and country, and exchanged honor and affluence for reproach and poverty, and the ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... period of Japanese history. There are still current among the common people of the west coast extraordinary stories of Oki much like those about that fabulous Isle of Women, which figures so largely in the imaginative literature of various Oriental races. According to these old legends, the moral notions of the people of Oki were extremely fantastic: the most rigid ascetic could not dwell there and maintain his indifference ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... views of dormer-windows, of gabled roofs, vine-clad walls, and a maze of peach and pear blossoms. This was not precisely the kind of lane through which one hurried. One needed neither to be sixteen nor even in love to find it a delectable path, very agreeable to the eye, very suggestive to the imaginative faculty, exceedingly satisfactory to the most fastidious of all the senses, to that aristocrat of all the five, the sense of smell. Like all entirely perfect experiences in life, the lane ended almost as soon as it began; it ended in a steep pair of ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... lines to seek out and bury the dead, he was heartily hailed as a Reformed minister, was treated with as much courtesy as though he had been one of their own predikants, and as the result was so favourably impressed that an imaginative mind might easily fancy him saying to Cronje, "Almost thou persuadest me ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... boys and girls, between the ages of 4 and 14, as to how the man in the moon got there. Only 5 were unable to offer a serious explanation; 48 thought there was no man there at all; 50 offered a scientific explanation of the phenomena; but all the rest, the great majority, presented imaginative solutions which could be grouped into ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... affectation of superior knowledge. Their watchwords were Reason, Science, Philosophy. Moreover, like the Sophists in the time of Socrates, they were assuming, specious, and rhetorical. Augustine—ardent, imaginative, credulous—was attracted by them, and he enrolled ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... and almost fanatical one, on Charles Verity's part. It gave the measure of the man's fortitude, the measure of his paternal devotion. Still knowledge of it might, only too readily, prove a heavy burden to a young girl's imaginative and tender conscience. Yes—he hoped she had ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... this afternoon. I turned for relief to speculative thought of the numberless dramas of the lives of the busy multitude among which I drove. I wondered how many lived simple and uneventful days, like mine, in the pursuit of mere official or domestic duties. Not the utmost imaginative ingenuity of the novelist could have anticipated, as I rode along amidst the hurries and the leisures of a Parisian afternoon, that my next hour or two was about to bring into the monotony of office life an adventure as strange as ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... which childhood's memories depict as adorning a page in our Physical Geography, with its fur-clad traveler sitting comfortably on his sledge, brandishing his whip and dashing gaily along behind a row of trotting dogs, is more imaginative than accurate. The real use of the dog-team, it would appear, is merely to drag the traveler's baggage. The men plough along through the snow in front, and the animals, harnessed in single file, drag the sledge behind them, following the woman, to whom they are ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... near the Southern Cross, occurs a terrible circular abyss, the Coal Sack. So sharply defined is it, so suggestive of a void and bottomless cavern, that the contemplation of it afflicts the imaginative mind with vertigo. To the naked eye it is as black and as dismal as death, but the smallest telescope reveals it beautiful and populous ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... cit, who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen, would not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and splendor as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, The Lady of the Lake, etc., etc., had ever existed in the imaginative brain of a romancer, much less, that they were actually in existence, rushing down the Mississippi, as on the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the forests, and walking against the mighty current 'as things of life,' bearing speculators, merchants, dandies, fine ladies, ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... justice where otherwise there would have been no justice. Yet outwardly he cursed himself for a lawbreaker. And he loved life. He loved the stars silently glowing down at him tonight. He loved even the gray, lifeless rock, which recalled to his imaginative genius the terrific and interesting life that had once existed—he loved the ghostly majesty of the grave-like pinnacle that rose above him, and beyond that he loved all ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... of the Inn": but Fletcher's play, with none of the tragic touches or interludes of superb and sombre poetry which relieve the incoherence of Webster's, is better laid out and constructed, more amusing if not more interesting, and more intelligent if not more imaginative. ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... tramp, and will want food if he is a toiling and sweating millionaire. A man must be supported on food as he must be supported on legs. But cows (who have no history) are not only furnished more generously in the matter of legs, but can see their food on a much grander and more imaginative scale. A cow can lift up her eyes to the hills and see uplands and peaks of pure food. Yet we never see the horizon broken by crags of cake or happy ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... German troops, Burgoyne had the aid of several tribes of Indian auxiliaries, whose aid the British Government had been at some pains to secure—a policy denounced by Chatham in a powerful and much-quoted speech. Burgoyne was a clever and imaginative though not a successful soldier. He conceived and suggested to his Government a plan of campaign which was sound in strategic principle, which might well have succeeded, and which, if it had succeeded, would have dealt a heavy ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... so. And it doesn't matter. I pretty well know your history, which means that I know your training. You're young; you're ambitious, you're experienced; you're imaginative. There's no length you can't go, with these. It just depends on how farsighted your mental vision is. Now listen, Miss Brandeis: I'm not going to talk to you in millions. The guides do enough of that. But you know we do buy and sell in terms of millions, don't you? Well, our infants' wear ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... early morning brightened into dawn, and the first clear ray of the rising sun swept over a scene more beautiful than ever filled the fancy of the most imaginative poet of the Temperate Zones. The sky was perfectly unclouded, and the surface of the sea was completely covered with masses of ice, whose tops were pure white like snow, and their sides a delicate greenish-blue, their dull, frosted appearance forming a striking contrast to ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... growth of the imaginative faculty, which is very early developed in the child, and requires its natural food. "Imagination," says Dr. Seguin, "is more than a decorative attribute of leisure; it is a power in the sense that from images perceived and stored it sublimes ideals." "If I were to choose between two great ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Any imaginative person, choosing to use his pen, knows full well that the sensational department of letters, in our day, affords a freer and fuller scope than has ever been tolerated before; it is therefore left to the author's own choice to secure his favorites, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... break upon me. A man was approaching, and when we met I asked him what was making that noise yonder. "Frogs," he said. At another time, in the flat-woods of Port Orange (I hope I am not taxing my reader's credulity too far, or making myself out a man of too imaginative an ear), I heard the bleating of sheep. Busy with other things, I did not stop to reflect that it was impossible there should be sheep in that quarter, and the occurrence had quite passed out of my mind when, one day, a cracker, talking about frogs, happened to say, "Yes, and we have one kind ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... landscape of Raphael's votive picture, known as the Madonna di Foligno, there is a town with a few towers, placed upon a broad plain at the edge of some blue hills. Allowing for that license as to details which imaginative masters permitted themselves in matters of subordinate importance, Raphael's sketch is still true to Foligno. The place has not materially changed since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Indeed relatively to the state ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... psychological theory. "Prophecy," he says, "is, in truth and reality, an emanation sent forth by the Divine Being through the medium of the Active Intellect, in the first instance to man's rational faculty, and then to his imaginative faculty; it is the highest degree ... of perfection man can attain; it consists in the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty." Maimonides distinguishes eleven degrees of inspiration, and three essential conditions of prophecy: 1. Perfection of the natural constitution ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... of books, which in its proportionate increase marvellously exceeds that of your growing population, are you a wiser, a more intellectual, or more imaginative people than when, as in my days, the man of learning, while he sat at his desk, had ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... of a chronological arrangement of the Works of any author—and especially of a poet who himself adopted a different plan—is that it shows us, as nothing else can do, the growth of his own mind, the progressive development of his genius and imaginative power. By such a redistribution of what he wrote we can trace the rise, the culmination, and also—it may be—the decline and fall of his genius. Wordsworth's own arrangement—first adopted in the edition of 1815—was designed by him, with the view of bringing together, in separate ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... has written, fifty-two novels, many of them excellent and all readable, while still on the right side of sixty, is an achievement of intelligent industry that entitles any novelist, at the latter end, to take matters a little easily. The Moonlit Way (Appleton) has neither the imaginative qualities of The King in Yellow, the humour of In Search of the Unknown, nor the adventurous tang of Ashes of Empire, but it is a good live story that will carry the reader's interest to the last page. Mr. Chambers is at his best when dealing with spies and secret service ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... elbow, as luck would have it, stood a Koopf. Up to this time, Sara had not been able to tell a Koopf from a Gunkus. To be sure, there isn't any difference, really; but you would think that any fairly imaginative child ought to be able to tell one. However, Sara now saw that the ground ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... became convinced she would not come. Upon his return through the grove he reached a point where the unreal and imaginative perceptions were suddenly and stunningly broken. He did hear a step. He kept on, as before, and in the deep shadow he turned. He saw a man just faintly outlined. One of the riders had been watching ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... cuckoo which can do nothing but utter two notes, a flaming and a blinking candle, or a pound of candles falling to the ground, a boy chasing a butterfly, the cackling of a hen when she has laid her egg, all, to his imaginative mind, set forth some spiritual truth or enforce some wholesome moral lesson. How racy, though homely, are these lines on ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... prominent motion picture actress. People told her constantly that she was a "vampire," and she believed them. She suspected hopefully that they were afraid of her, and she did her utmost under all circumstances to give the impression of danger. An imaginative man could see the red flag that she constantly carried, waving it wildly, beseechingly—and, alas, to little spectacular avail. She was also tremendously timely: she knew the latest songs, all the latest songs—when ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of sturdy frame, with all the natural yearning of imaginative youth for adventure, the prospect was an inviting one to them. Their father's glowing accounts of the magnificent scenery, its vast resources and limitless possibilities, caused a yearning on their part probably deeper ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... and fairly well developed; of sensitive, emotional nature, but self-controlled; mentally he is receptive and aggressive by turns, sometimes uncritical, sometimes analytical. His temper is equable, and he is strongly affectionate. Very fond of music and other arts, but not highly imaginative. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... without further ceremony. As they walked through the hall and down the corridors side by side, an imaginative person might have felt that perhaps the eyes of an ancient darkling portrait or so looked down at the pair curiously: the long, loosely built New Yorker rather slouching along by the soldierly, almost romantic figure which, ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... imaginative person, luckily. She got up and made her toilet, and splashed herself briskly in a basin of cold water. The effect of these ablutions was singular—they effected a total cure of ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... one of your men of action, not of passive fortitude. He is imaginative, too, and suffers remorse for his crimes without the soothing comfort of penitence. Twenty-four hours of that black hole would deprive him or any such nature of the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... to finish just one more chapter of Coral Island or Out on the Pampas, we needs must steal a candle from the pantry stock and furtively read by its flickering light. Our own sense of danger, together with the imaginative effect wrought upon our excitive minds by the dancing candlelight and the awesome shadows of the still house, gave a strange ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... religion every month or so. But after a while self-deception ceases to be a comfort. This is when the reformer notices how indifference to politics is settling upon some of the most alert minds of our generation, entering into the attitude of men as capable as any reformer of large and imaginative interests. For among the keenest minds, among artists, scientists and philosophers, there is a remarkable inclination to make a virtue of political indifference. Too passionate an absorption in public affairs ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... of this finer perception, perhaps with some degree of imaginative exaltation, that he set himself to solving the problem of Elsie's influence to attract and repel those around her. His letter already submitted to the reader hints in what direction his thoughts were disposed to turn. Here was a magnificent organization, superb in vigorous womanhood, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... art of carving is universally practised" by them, and he speaks of their models of men, animals, and utensils as "executed in a masterly style." Brinton indeed says they have a more artistic eye for picture-writing than any Indian race north of Mexico. They enliven their long winter nights with imaginative tales, music, and song. Their poets are held in high honor, and it is said they get their notion of the music of verse by sleeping by the sound of running water, that they may catch ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... not won upon her regard,—strange, if it had not given hint of that cool, masculine superiority in him, with which even the most ethereal of women like to be impressed. There was about him also a quiet, business-like concentration of mind which the imaginative girl might have overlooked or undervalued, but which the budding, thoughtful woman must needs recognize and respect. Nor will it seem strange, if, by contrast, it made the excitable Reuben seem more dismally afloat and vagrant. Yet how could she forget the passionate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... hiding the memorials, which are mostly of brown sandstone or gray slate. It lies in deep shadow under cypress and willow. It is very still under the gloom of its careless growths—a place not reassuring to the imaginative. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... conception of an aetherial atom in the rough, based not upon any imaginative hypothesis, but rather upon that strict conformity to observation and experience, which is the very groundwork of all ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... consciousness than our consciousness? Is our whole instinctive belief in higher presences, our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship, to count for nothing? Is it but the pathetic illusion of beings with incorrigibly social and imaginative minds? ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... most faithful portrait of R. H. Home, with his imaginative forehead and somewhat foolish-looking mouth and chin, indicating that mixed character which I should think he owns. Mr. Home writes well. That tragedy on the Death of Marlowe reminds me of some of the best of Dumas' dramatic ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... the youthful mind, that man's special functions are only a detail—albeit a most important one—in nature's vast plan for the propagation of life on earth. This will have the advantage of correcting a trend on the part of the imaginative boy or girl to lay too much stress on the part humanity plays in this great general reproductive scheme. It will lay weight on the fact that the functional workings of reproduction are not, primarily, a source of pleasure, but that—when safeguarded by the institution of matrimony, on which civilized ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... several friends and talks to us with an amazing camaraderie. He is kindly, humourous and tactful. One or two missionaries speak after him, but their conversation is too abstract for us. We want something dramatic, imaginative, to hold our attention, or something wholly natural. Tell us about the bees, the beavers or the toilers of the sea. The longing for flowers has often come to me as I work, and a rose seems of all ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... kingdom is not of this world; [210] because, by these words, Christ meant that his religion was to work on the soul; and of the two parts of the soul on which religion works,—the thinking and speculative part, and the feeling and imaginative part,—Nonconformity satisfies the first no better than the Established Churches, which Christ by these words is supposed to have condemned, satisfy it; and the second part it satisfies much worse than ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... all Sin Saxon would say about it. The girls meant to keep her in mind, and to have their frolic,—the half of them in the most imaginative ignorance as to what it might prove to be; but somehow their leader herself seemed to have lost ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... I," confessed Marable. "But I thought I heard dull scrapings inside the block. My brain tells me I'm an imaginative fool, that nothing could be alive inside there, but just the same, I keep thinking about those eyes we thought we saw. It shows how far ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... lady's father. He was a savage sentimentalist who had his own decided views of his paternal prerogatives. He was a terror; but the only evidence of imaginative faculty about Fyne was his pride in his wife's parentage. It stimulated his ingenuity too. Difficult—is it not?—to introduce one's wife's maiden name into general conversation. But my simple Fyne made use of Captain Anthony for that purpose, or else I would never ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... hardly knew how much this inexplicable fact gave him to think about. He did not even question the American on this point. What could he expect from a man who had tried to make him take giraffes for ostriches? Harris would have given him some explanation, more or less imaginative, which would not have ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... years when her mind was clouded the intricate designs and endless variety of delicate and ingenious stitches had come to have symbolic meanings for her full of mystic significance. In them she poured forth her soul, as another might pour it forth in music, finding there an imaginative language far surpassing, in its subtlety of suggestion, articulate speech. There were deserts of net, of spider's web fineness, to be laboriously traversed; hills of difficulty to be climbed, whence far horizons ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... curiousness of his relationship with Ingram had made it so palatable? Was it not the strangeness of his friendship with Lady Thiselton and the originality of her personality that appealed to him so much, and was it not his imaginative side that had always been so pleased with both? Was it not his peculiar temperament that had always made him keep his relation with each person a thing apart, so that each was unaware of the others; that had made him ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... be depended upon for accurate, reliable information. His information is indefinite, as perhaps it should be in the land of By and By. In spite of his imaginative temperament, his cruelty to animals is flagrant. He starves his dog and rides his pony till the creature's back is sore. He shows no mercy for the bird that loses at the cock-fight; he will mercilessly tear it limb from limb. In order to explain—not to excuse—this cruelty, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... of a doomed individual, whose efforts at good and virtuous conduct were to be for ever disappointed by the intervention, as it were, of some malevolent being, and who was at last to come off victorious from the fearful struggle. In short, something was meditated upon a plan resembling the imaginative tale of Sintram and his Companions, by Mons. Le Baron de la Motte Fouque, although, if it then existed, the author ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... mind that the disorder of the hall and the absence of Kenneth might cause her astonishment. And so when she touched upon the matter of his wound, like the blundering fool he was, he must needs let his tongue wag upon a tale which, if no less imaginative than Joseph's, was vastly its inferior in plausibility and had yet the quality of differing from it totally ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... are more worthy of emulation than a life-saver; I only want to explain that there is, in our day, a race of beings, half-man, half-god, who correspond, in all broad characteristics, to those rather indecent heroes of early imaginative literature. They do with ease those deeds which would have appalled the mailed monsters of chivalry; they regard the other sex as being created solely for their use in port; they love life dearly, but they leave the saving of it, like the heroes of ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... scientific man as a curious object of study among the vagaries of the human mind. Its influence for good or the contrary may be made a matter of calm investigation. I have studied it in the Essay before the reader, under the aspect of an extravagant and purely imaginative creation of its founder. Since that first essay was written, nearly half a century ago, we have all had a chance to witness its practical working. Two opposite inferences may be drawn from its doctrines ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... could have been made more interesting to me had it recorded the curious blunder which Frederick Saunders makes in his "Story of Some Famous Books." On page 169 we find this information: "Among earlier American bards we instance Dana, whose imaginative poem 'The Culprit Fay,' so replete with poetic beauty, is a fairy tale of the highlands of the Hudson. The origin of the poem is traced to a conversation with Cooper, the novelist, and Fitz-Greene Halleck, the poet, who, speaking of ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... Comprehension came to him at once, and he inwardly cursed himself for an imaginative fool before continuing. "Well, Ocky, to tell you the truth, I did see him—right here at the head of the trail. He had his back to the light so I couldn't make out any mask. Er—what ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... Government exist for? Merely to keep national sentiment in order. Ministers know well enough, that despite the various 'Bills' brought in for material advantage and improvement, they have always to deal with the imaginative aspiration of the populace, rather than their conception of logic. For truly, the masses have no logic at all; they will not stop to count the cost of an Army, but they will shout themselves hoarse at the sight of the Flag! The Flag is the Sentiment; the Army is the Fact. The King has secured ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the history of Islam, from the anguish and struggles of the eighth century, the Islam of Haroun and Mutasim arises, imparting even to dying Persia, as it were, a second prime, by the wisdom and imaginative justice of ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... an undercurrent of sympathy with the forlorn waif her father had brought from the city some months before. The very love and awe with which the mountains filled her imaginative soul gave her comprehension of the fear with which they imbued the dull-witted offspring of ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... gratuitously informed me that if I intended to proceed to Russia I had better leave all these things behind, or they would all be confiscated at the frontier. I begged to differ, and the Frenchmen laughed boisterously at my ignorance, and at what would happen presently. In their imaginative minds they perceived my valued firearms being lost for ever, and predicted my being detained at the police station till it pleased les terribles ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... ram's-horn twist round the marked projections at the outer corners, his jealously observant eye, his nose, thin, keen, and apprehensive in spite of the pugnacious high bridge and large nostril, his assertive chin, would not be out of place in a Paris salon. In short, the clever, imaginative barbarian has an acute critical faculty which has been thrown into intense activity by the arrival of western civilization in the Balkans; and the result is precisely what the advent of nineteenth-century thought first produced in England: to-wit, Byronism. By his brooding ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... and the building were hidden over with foliage and fruit, the architect would stand in much the same situation as the writer of allegories. The Faery Queen was an allegory, I am willing to believe; but it survives as an imaginative tale in incomparable verse. The case of Bunyan is widely different; and yet in this also Allegory, poor nymph, although never quite forgotten, is sometimes rudely thrust against the wall. Bunyan was fervently in earnest; with 'his fingers in ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are no longer what they were. Contrarily, in youth, the impressions that things make, that is to say, the outward aspects of life, are so overpoweringly strong, especially in the case of people of lively and imaginative disposition, that they view the world like a picture; and their chief concern is the figure they cut in it, the appearance they present; nay, they are unaware of the extent to which this is the case. It is a quality of mind that shows itself—if in no other way—in that personal vanity, ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... in two short months, how tremendously attached to it must be this cheerful Don Mike, who had been born and raised there, who was familiar with every foot of it, and doubtless cherished every tradition connected with it. He had imagination, and in imaginative people wounds drive deep and are hard to heal; he loved this land of his, not with the passive loyalty of the average American citizen, but with the strange, passionate intensity of the native Californian for his state. ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... her son's future varied very pleasantly. She was an industrious reader of biographies, and more particularly of the large fair biographies of the recently contemporary; they mentioned people she knew, they recalled scenes, each sowed its imaginative crop upon her mind, a crop that flourished and flowered until a newer growth came to oust it. She saw her son a diplomat, a prancing pro-consul, an empire builder, a trusted friend of the august, the bold leader of new movements, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... talking nonsense, sir; it is bad enough to have to suffer it from an over-imaginative child, from a grown-up person it is intolerable. Do you suppose we are going to have the Griffin brought into Court ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... of life was still before him. In eight working years he had already made a name known to all the Army and to thousands beyond its limits. Beyond question he had the touch of genius. The individuality of his power perhaps lay in a clear perception transfused with an imaginative wit that never failed him. The promise of that genius was not fulfilled, but it was felt in all he said and wrote. And beyond this power of mind he possessed the attractiveness of courtesy and straightforward dealing. No ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... song of the shepherd is heard in the land. Sannazzaro's "Arcadia" was the inspiration of Sir Philip Sidney's. It was a natural outburst of the time and it conveys perfectly the spirit of Italian imaginative thought in a period almost baffling in the complexity of ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... to use them. The plasticity of the child's mind is such that a new impression may be erased quickly by a newer one; his character receives a decided bent only through repeated impressions of the same kind. The imaginative faculty is one of the earliest to appear, and a weakness of our educational systems is the failure to realize its importance and to pay sufficient attention to its development. It is well known that imagination is the creative power of the mind which gives life to all ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... to pay a small tribute to my father by way of personal gratitude for this, his first prose work, which was published nearly fifty years ago. Though unknown to many lovers of his greater writings, none of these has exceeded it in imaginative insight and power of expression. To me it rings with the dominant chord of ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... sweet face would glisten upon us from the undulating wave, and "Boat a-hoy!" from the watchful quartermaster would bring us back to reality and the ship; overboard would go our magical cheroot, over the side our imaginative self, and having duly reported the important fact of our return on board, down we would dive through the steerage hatch, to conjure up again in dreams the dear face we saw ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... cities, its gorgeous pagodas, its infinite swarms of dusky population, its long-descended dynasties, its stately etiquette, excited in a mind so capacious, so imaginative, and so susceptible, the most intense interest. The peculiarities of the costume, of the manners, and of the laws, the very mystery which hung over the language and origin of the people, seized his imagination. To plead under the ancient arches of Westminster Hall, in the name of the English people, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rose-brown flesh- tints. There was no real resemblance in this horrible picture to the radiant and glowing loveliness of the Princess Ziska, yet, at the same time, there was sufficient dim likeness to make an imaginative person think it might be possible for her to assume that appearance in death. Several minutes passed in utter silence,—then Lord ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... what went by the name of rest in that sad house, with its troubled inmates. I must confess that, comfortable as my room was, I slept very little. Sir Henry's story stayed with me all through the hours of darkness. I am neither nervous nor imaginative, but I could not help seeing that terrible eye, even in ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... sky-light. Behind the desk were placed a rude shelf, where some "modern instances," and old ones too, were lying-covered with dust—and a gun-rack, where some carbines with fixed bayonets were paraded in show of authority; so that, to an imaginative mind, the aspect of the books and the fire-arms gave the notion of Justice on the shelf, and Law on ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... a cowboy," sighed Joe, looking around the supper table, his gaze lingering on Little Teacher, who was dimpling happily. Imaginative David proceeded to weave his third romance that day, with a glad little beating of the heart, for he had feared that Joe might be planning to wait for Janey, as the Judge was doubtless ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... whistled through the Archway. The boys stuck their hands in their pockets and danced, shivering, but not one deserted the bulletin board. They stared at the dismal figures and a dozen versions of How It Must Have Happened were launched by imaginative spectators, attacked ruthlessly and torpedoed as improbable. The trouble with the whole matter of explaining Chancellor's Hill's two touchdowns was that the very fact of the touchdowns would, an hour ago, have seemed the last word in improbabilities. They talked and shivered ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... Jews believed that the universal recognition of the sovereignty of God would bring about, or would at least be coincident with, the coming of the Golden Age, so frequently spoken of by the prophets, and described with imaginative profusion in the apocalyptic writings. But it is by no means always clear whether the Golden Age was the condition or the result of the coming of the Kingdom. Would the heathen, who knew not God, be converted or be exterminated? ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... said before his father mentioned his visitor's name. But he was not Jack Crane in his game; he was Uncas. The big chairs and the divan were trees in his imaginative eyes. The huge easy chair in which Daddy's caller (Jack thought of him only as "Mister") sat was a fallen log. He, Uncas, meant to ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... of the novelist, and here the playwright's sense of dramatic situation. Yet these things, which are the elements of his work of art though we arbitrarily separate them in criticism, are in the work itself blended and made one by the true imaginative and informing power. For Melchior is not a piece of poetic writing merely; it is that very ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... was born and reared under the shadow of Strasburg Cathedral. The majestic spire, a world in itself, became indeed a world to this imaginative prodigy. He may be said to have learned the minster of minsters by heart, as before him Victor Hugo had familiarized himself with Notre Dame. The unbreeched artist of four summers never tired of scrutinizing the statues, monsters, gargoyles ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... as the writer was evidently a man of thought and talent. The first lecture certainly gives an approach to Darwin's theory, perhaps nearer than any other, as he almost implies the "survival of the fittest" as the cause of progressive modification. But his language is imaginative and obscure. He uses "education" apparently in the sense of what we should term ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... obsolete and with the complexity of present problems always before them, tend to depreciate. He had the first quality which is necessary for popularity: he was readily intelligible. In addition he was prompt, combative, and magnanimous; shrewd, but never subtle; sensible, but not imaginative. He had no ideas which he wished to carry out; he did not like ideas. He wanted England to dominate in Europe and to use her power good-naturedly afterwards; to be, in fact, what a nobleman may be in his home-country, where he ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... appeared with the published report that Miss Blithers herself was supposed to be somewhere in Europe, word having been received that day from sources in London that she had sailed from New York under an assumed name. The imaginative French journals put two and two together and dwelt upon the possibility that the two young people who had never seen each other might have crossed the Atlantic on the same steamer, seeing each other frequently and yet remaining entirely in the dark, so to speak. Inspired ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... She was tall and awkward, with long, flat feet, and a wide face with high cheek bones that was Scandinavian in its type. Her straight hair was the drab shade which flaxen hair becomes before it darkens, and her large mouth had a solemn, unsmiling droop. Her best feature was her brown, melancholy, imaginative eyes. She looked like the American-born daughter of Swedish or Norwegian emigrants and her large-knuckled hands, too, bespoke ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... are positively repelled by the sight of nakedness, even that of a husband or lover. On the contrary, most men delight in gazing upon the uncovered figure of women. It seems that only highly-cultivated and imaginative women enjoy the spectacle of a finely-shaped nude man (especially after attending art classes, and drawing from the nude, as I am told by a lady artist). Or else the majority of women dissemble their curiosity or admiration. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... even here in the ruined valley of Wyoming, that what was lost would be regained. The chords ended, and the echoes, amazingly clear, floated far away in the darkness and rain. Henry roused himself, and came from the imaginative borderland. He stirred a little, and said in a quiet voice to ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... at this work; in fact, the shiftless one was a wonderfully handy man at any sort of task, and with only his hunting knife, a wooden needle of his own manufacture, and deer sinews, he actually made Paul a fur-lined hunting shirt, which seemed to the boy's imaginative fancy about the finest garment ever worn in the wilderness. All of them also put fur flaps on their raccoon-skin caps, and Shif'less Sol even managed to fashion an imitation of gloves out ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Ormond assured his good old imaginative friend that he was upon a wrong scent. Cornelius stopped to humour him; but was convinced that he was right: then turned to the still smoking Father Jos, and went on asking questions ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... England from the press of panic, Lady Boyle being old and infirm. Ah, but your talking friend would interest you, and you might accept the talk in infinitesimal doses, you know. Lamartine has surely acted down the fallacy of the impractical tendencies of imaginative men. I am full of France just now. Are you all prepared for an outbreak in Ireland? I hope so. My husband has the second edition of his collected poems[174] in the press by this time, by grace of Chapman and Hall, who accept all risks. You speak of Tennyson's vexation about the reception of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... in Sicily seemed to Hermione touched with a glamour such as the imaginative dreamer connects with an earlier world—a world that never existed save in the souls of dreamers, who weave tissues of gold to hide naked realities, and call down the stars to sparkle upon the dust-heaps of the actual. Hermione ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... matters. The two had long talks at night. Sally suddenly knew how valuable a friend she had in Miss Summers. She knew the value of an unselfish readiness to serve; and she herself was generous enough and, in a sense, imaginative enough not to exploit Miss Summers. There was a good understanding between them. And Sally, as she looked round at the mahogany furniture in this old house, and saw the dull carpets and engravings which Madam had gathered together in ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... this huge carnivorous dinosaur were found in England nearly a century ago, and the descriptions by Dean Buckland and Sir Richard Owen and the restorations due to the imaginative chisel of Waterhouse Hawkins, have made it familiar to most English readers. Unfortunately it was, and still remains, very imperfectly known. It was very closely related to the American Allosaurus and unquestionably similar ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... romances culled from Hawaiian journals, as the initial volumes of a series of Hawaiian reprints, a venture which ended in financial failure.[3] The romance of Laieikawai therefore remains the sole piece of Hawaiian, imaginative writing to reach book form. Not only this, but it represents the single composition of a Polynesian mind working upon the material of an old legend and eager to create a genuine national literature. As such it claims ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... then in persuading one's self and trying to persuade others that the Church has always accepted them and accepts them now as "additional proofs of the truth of Scripture." A little juggling with words, a little amalgamation of texts, a little judicious suppression, a little imaginative deduction, a little unctuous phrasing, and the thing is done. One great service this eminent and kindly Catholic champion undoubtedly rendered: by this acknowledgment, so widely spread in his published lectures, he made it impossible for Catholics or Protestants ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... under complete control. Normally, he would have seemed much as Sheldon, Senior, had described him—a hard-fisted man, a close bargainer who had won his way to his great wealth by the sheer force of a strong personality. There was little of softness in his face, little that was imaginative. This was not a man to be frightened at the Unseen or to see terrors that did not exist. Otherwise, to Peter he seemed commonplace to the last degree, of Irish extraction probably, the kind of person one meets daily on Broadway or on the Strand. In a ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... treatment which will lead to recovery. Probably there is a good deal of sham and imposture about the process. The canny priests know more than they care to tell about how the patient is worked into an excitable, imaginative state; and of the very human means employed to produce a satisfactory and informing dream.[] Nevertheless it is a great deal to convince the patient that he is sure of recovery, and that nobody less than a god has dictated the remedies. ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... wonderful array of records concerning "the white lady of the Hohenzollerns," who makes her appearance in the old palace at Berlin whenever death is about to overtake a member of the reigning house of Prussia. The late Emperor Frederick—the most matter-of-fact and least imaginative prince of his line—was particularly interested in the matter, and collected all the evidence that he could upon the subject, for the purpose of depositing it in the archives of ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... nonsense!" exclaimed Murray, who had before been vainly endeavouring to stop the imaginative Irishman. "You make me miserable in suggesting the bare possibility of such an occurrence. The brig may be attacked, but I might not arrive in time to save ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... cruel neglect due to internal troubles and that European strife in which the motherland was engaged for so many generations, the eyes of Frenchmen turned to their over-sea dominions with imaginative hope, with conviction that the great continent of promise would renew in France the glories that were Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. How hard the patriotic colonists strove to retain those territories which Champlain, La Salle, Maisonneuve, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... talk about?" A very long pause ensued during which George appeared to be putting his imaginative powers to frightful over-exertion. His forehead wrinkled, his lips twitched, his head moved this way and that, once or twice a gleam of inspiration passed over his face, and then the expression of the deep and puzzled thinker came on again. Finally he said—"Y-e-e-s. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... first elaborate exposition of this idea was that given by the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (born at Konigsberg in 1724, died in 1804), known to every one as the author of the Critique of Pure Reason. Let us learn from his own words how the imaginative philosopher conceived the world to ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... fossils that tell much of the history of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and fixing in the geological scale the place to which the larger beds of remains found in the system belong. Besides being a practical and original geologist, Miller had a fine imaginative power, which enabled him to reconstruct the past from its ruinous relics. The fact that he unfortunately set himself the task of combating the theory of evolution, which was fast gaining ground in his day, should not blind us to the high value of his geological experiences. The ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... headlong into the snare set for them by the President, and combined with his open or secret partisans to reject the proposition of the Questors. Changarnier had blindly vouched for the fidelity of the army; one Republican deputy, more imaginative than his colleagues, bade the Assembly confide in their invisible sentinel, the people. Thus the majority of the Chamber, with the clearest warning of danger, insisted on giving the aggressor every possible advantage. ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... his poems, "The Deserted Garden"—a veritable gallery of imaginative landscape—is entirely Mexican in colouring. Indeed we may conjecture without too much rashness that it is a mere expansion of the sonnet entitled "Tezcotzinco", the fruit of a solitary excursion to the ruins of Nezahualcoyotl's baths, ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... susceptible to olfactory influences. A number of eminent poets and novelists—especially, it would appear, in France—seem to be in this case. Baudelaire, of all great poets, has most persistently and most elaborately emphasized the imaginative and emotional significance of odor; the Fleurs du Mal and many of the Petits Poemes en Prose are, from this point of view, of great interest. There can be no doubt that in Baudelaire's own imaginative and emotional life the sense of smell played a ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and faces familiar to all men, the dim figures of legendary lore. It has an earnest moral purpose, never lightly forgotten or thrown aside. It is remarkable for the deep and extensive knowledge it displays, and for the practical lessons of life and history which it reflects in imaginative form. We have humour and wit, often closely bordering on pathos and tragedy; exploits of war, of love, and of chivalrous adventure, alternate with the cheerful lightness and ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... is too strong for him; regardless of curb and bridle in this instance. Let us pity a man of genius, mounted on so ungovernable a Hobby; leaping the barriers, in spite of his best resolutions. Perhaps the poetic temperament is more liable to such morbid biases, influxes of imaginative crotchet, and mere folly that cannot be cured? Friedrich Wilhelm never would or could dismount from his Hobby: but he rode him under much sorrow henceforth; under showers of anger and ridicule;—contumelious words and procedures, as it were SAXA ET FAECES, battering round him, to a heavy ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of three and ten stands among children and their parents of this generation where the books of Louisa May Alcott stood in former days. The haps and mishaps of this inimitable pair of twins, their many adventures and experiences are a source of keen delight to imaginative children everywhere. ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... conception furnishes evidence of the very highest imaginative power. On a common mind, what it has seen is so feebly impressed, that it mixes other ideas with it immediately; forgets it—modifies it—adorns it,—does anything but keep hold of it. But when Turner had once seen that stormy hour ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... his own disillusionment, perhaps. For if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge's distinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds of imaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no real foundation in fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to have. But it serves, not inaptly, as a text to point out an important scientific truth, namely, that there are not two such ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... will. You are a lady of much imagination; a writer, your daughter tells me. Such an occupation should be an outlet for all imaginative terrors or anticipations, and leave your mind, your judgment, clear and free. I am sure Miss Liddell will do her uncle and herself good by her residence here. Mr. Liddell has been a source of anxiety to me and to my partners. ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... feeling into which the imaginative mind so readily falls, is thus sketched by a poet ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... course," he confessed. "It just was my way of testing what your Professor Michael told about you—that you are extraordinarily intelligent, virile, and imaginative. Had you sent the wallet to me, I should have sought elsewhere for my man. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... latter contains an equally good harbour in Port Victoria Mahe. The Seychelles are remarkably healthy islands—thirty in number—and Gordon recommended them as a good place for "a man with a little money to settle in." He also advanced the speculative and somewhat imaginative theory that in them was to be found the true site of ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... society, his mind did not rust from the want of intelligent companions. The clear perception, accurate knowledge, and unerring judgment of Trenchard, the fantastic cynicism of St. Barbe, and all the stores of the exuberant and imaginative Waldershare, were brought to bear on a young and plastic intelligence, gifted with a quick though not a too profound sensibility which soon ripened into tact, and which, after due discrimination, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... in the British Museum, of the date of about 1540, which shows a certain amount of the north-east coast, and has been thought by some to prove that some one had visited it. But an inspection of it shows that it is far more probably a case of imaginative coast drawing, such as occurs in other places in the same map, and in many others of the same and later dates, and there is certainly no record of any voyage ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... broad aspect, he is facile princeps. Brockden Brown treads a circle of mysterious power but mean circumference: Washington Irving is admirable at a sketch, one of the liveliest and most graceful of essayists, and quite equal to the higher demands of imaginative prose—witness his Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow—but his forte is in miniature, and the orthodox dimensions of three volumes post-octavo would suit him almost as ill as would the Athenian vesture ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... recitation period might well be devoted to the reading of choice passages. Of special value in securing appreciation of the story is the preparation of compositions based on the students' own knowledge of country life. They may be descriptions, both real and imaginative, of some country village; accounts of small social gatherings or card parties; dialogues to show the characteristics of ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... old Lafeu, the maternal indulgence of the Countess to Helena's passion for her son, seem all as it were to vie with each other in endeavours to overcome the arrogance of the young Count. The style of the whole is more sententious than imaginative: the glowing colours of fancy could not with propriety have been employed on such a subject. In the passages where the humiliating rejection of the poor Helena is most painfully affecting, the cowardly Parolles steps ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... be expected to remember General Jackson, spin long, imaginative yarns of forgotten days, and make up-to-date pralines at the same time. If the people who had ears to listen had known the thing to value, this old, old woman could have sold her memories, her wit, and even her imagination better than she had ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... the imaginative organ, may easily conceive the electric effect of such a letter upon the nerves of a poor prisoner, not of the most savage disposition, but possessing an affectionate and gregarious turn of mind. I felt already an affection for the unknown; I pitied his misfortunes, and was ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... that appear in "Hamlet" and in "King Lear"; but from the nature of its subject it is not so profoundly thoughtful as the others. It is a drama of action, which "Hamlet" is not in a high degree; and although a grand example of the imaginative dramatic style, it has the distinction of being the most actable of all Shakespeare's tragedies. It is difficult to conceive any age or any country in which "Othello" would not be an impressive and a welcome play ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Harriet Beecher Stowe has been the object of much unfavorable criticism. It has been assailed, not only as fiction of the most imaginative sort, but as being a direct misrepresentation. Several successful attempts have lately been made to displace the book from Northern school libraries. Its critics would brush it aside with the remark that there never was a Negro as good as Uncle Tom, nor a slave-holder as bad as Legree. ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... height is not apparent, owing largely to its breadth of base. The Sather Campanile in Berkeley looks higher, though it is actually one hundred and thirty-three feet lower. The side towers at the entrances of the Court of Palms and the Court of Flowers, while not so imaginative as the main tower, are far more sky-reaching. As towers go, John Galen Howard's tower at the Buffalo Exposition in 1901 stands unsurpassed in every way ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... transcribed was sufficient, he says, to fill nearly 8,000 of Dr. O'Donovan's pages. Here are, at any rate, materials enough with a vengeance. These materials fall, of course, into several divisions. The most literary of these divisions, the Tales, consisting of Historic Tales and Imaginative Tales, distributes the contents of its Historic Tales as follows:- Battles, voyages, sieges, tragedies, cow- spoils, courtships, adventures, land-expeditions, sea-expeditions, banquets, elopements, loves, lake-irruptions, colonisations, visions. Of what a treasure-house ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... occasion to remind her, looked like a hair-cinch. Her eyes, set rather too far apart for beauty, were round, with pupils which dilated until they all but covered the blue iris; the eyes of an emotional nature, an imaginative mind. Her other features, though delicate, were not exceptional, but the tout ensemble was such that her looks would have been considered above the average even in a country where pretty girls were plentiful. In her present surroundings, and by contrast with ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... my friend Vincent, a solid, good-natured, hard-working man, with a real enthusiasm for literature, not very critical or even imaginative, but with a faculty for clear and careful writing. He was at work on a realistic novel, which made some little reputation; but he has become since, what I think he always was meant to be, an able journalist and an excellent leader-writer on political ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the note to No. 47 applies equally to these truly wonderful verses, which, like "Lycidas," may be regarded as a test of any reader's insight into the most poetical aspects of Poetry. The general differences between them are vast: but in imaginative intensity Marvell and Shelley are closely related. This poem is printed as a translation in Marvell's works: but the original Latin is obviously his own. The most striking verses in it, here quoted as the book is rare, answer more or less ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... caused a momentary mortification in the imaginative Euphemia; but her busy mind was nimble in its erection of airy castles, and she rallied in a moment with the idea that "he might be more than a lord." At any rate, let him be what he may, he charmed her; and he had much ado to parry the increasing boldness of her speeches, without ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... windows and threw a halo over the old buildings. But she liked to see it best in the dim starlight, when all sorts of shadows seemed to lurk between the arches, and a strange, solemn light invested it with a legendary and imaginative interest. ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... o'clock," said the imaginative Mr. Stokes. "Called one of 'em his little wife, and asked her where ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... is really a tremendous personality—dramatic, wilful, generous, whimsical, at times almost cruel in pressing his own conviction upon others, and then again tender, affectionate, emotional, always imaginative, unusual and wide-visioned in his views. He is well worth Boswellizing, but I am urging him to be 'his own Boswell.'... He is inconsistent in many ways, but with a passion for lofty views; the brotherhood of man, peace among nations, religious ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... of interest to the visitors, while she herself, who had agitated thousands of hearts with a breath, sat starving for the admiration that was her natural food. I appeal to the whole society of artists of the Beautiful and the Imaginative,—poets, romancers, painters, sculptors, actors,—whether or no this is a grief that may be felt even amid the torpor of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... as to be scarcely visible. We considered that we had here found one of Nature's artists, who would probably have made a name for himself if given the advantages so many have who lack the ability, for he certainly possessed both the imaginative faculty and no small degree of dexterity in execution. He pointed out to us the house of a farmer over the way who slept in the Parish of Wick and took his meals in that of Canisbay, the boundary being marked by a chimney in the centre of the roof. He also informed us that his brother accompanied ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... in money-making does not make money so much for himself as for those who may come after him. Riches in noble natures have a double sweetness. The possessor enjoys his wealth, and he heightens that enjoyment by the imaginative entrance into the pleasure which his son or his nephew may derive from it when he is away, or the high uses to which he may turn it. Seeing that we have no perpetual lease of life and its adjuncts, we do not live for ourselves. And thus it is that death, which we are accustomed to consider an evil, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... king bestrides his horse here. Italy being so old and Vittorio Emmanuele so new, it follows in most cases that the square or street named after him supplants an older one, and if the Italians had any memory or imaginative interest in history they would see to it that the old name was not wholly obliterated. In Florence, in order to honour the first king of United Italy, much grave violence was done to antiquity, for a very picturesque quarter had to be cleared away for the huge brasseries, stores ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... nor stout, he was to-day an imposing figure. Having received his hard knocks and endured his losses, there was that about him which touched and awakened the sympathies of the imaginative. People thought him naturally agreeable, and his senatorial peers looked upon him as not any too heavy mentally, but personally a ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... hundred cases, but here, this sort of thing is all right for a highly speculative imaginative newspaper man. Both you and McCall infected me with your—let us go outside and enjoy ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... nameless influence which, once felt, cannot be forgotten; once felt, leaves always behind it a restless longing to feel it again—a longing which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning, which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will. I met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far countries and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year—they could not explain why. They had come first, they said, out of idle curiosity, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... him. They had almost forgotten him. Even his old colleagues at the hospital scarcely recognized him, and when they did stop to chat after the meeting, they examined him indifferently, as if they were making notes. Lindsay had probably spread his story, with some imaginative details. According to the popular tale Sommers had been "thrown down" by Miss Hitchcock because he had mixed himself up with a married woman. Then he had been discharged by Lindsay for the same reason, and had sunk, had run away with the woman, and had come back ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... with such a cold as only Burgos can give a man in the early autumn; when I urged him to look to the bad cough he had, he pleaded that it was a very old cough. He had a fascination of his own, which probably came from his imaginative habit of mind, so that I could have wished more adoptive fellow-citizens were like him. He sympathized strongly with us in our grief with the cold of the hotel, and when we said that a small oil-heater would take the chill ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... and degrees of development in the minds of children to which correspond different manners of teaching and even different objects, as we make appeal to one or other of the growing faculties. The first stage is imaginative, the second calls not only upon the imagination and memory but upon the understanding, and the third, which is the beginning of a period of fruition, begins to exercise the judgment, and to give some ideas concerning principles of research ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... sharp-tongued girl. Remember, Saduko, that although you had promised a hundred head, that is less by twenty, at the time you did not own one, and where you were to get them from I could not guess. Moreover," he added with a last, desperate, imaginative effort, for I think he saw that his arguments were making no impression, "some strangers who called here told me that both you and Macumazahn had been killed by certain evil-doers in the mountains. There, I have spoken, and, Saduko, ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... idea, a situation, is suggested to him by real life, he takes traits and peculiarities from this or that person whom he has known or seen, but this is all. When he comes to write—unless, of course, it is a case of malice and bad faith—the mere necessities of an imaginative effort oblige him to cut himself adrift from reality. His characters become to him the creatures of a dream, as vivid often as his waking life, but still a dream. And the only portraits he is drawing are portraits of phantoms, ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... them, no patient growth of character, as in those glorious cathedrals, Amiens, Chartres, Beauvais, which I had so lately seen. There is nothing in reserve; they say everything, they suggest nothing. They have no imaginative vista. ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... tiny mosses whose hues were "pea green and primrose," and sometimes reveals flashes of imaginative insight into natural beauty like "the dark sides of mountains marked only by the blue smoke of weeds driven in circles near the ground." These personal, intimate touches of detail are very different from the highly ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... never afraid of their master, used to visit certain trees on certain days in the year. The pine has a birthday worth celebrating in December, the maple in October, and the birch in May. You think this is all fancy, and believe persons must be very imaginative to find such friends in Nature? Oh, no; along with fancy Nature tucks very real things into our thoughts about her. You only need an introduction to her, and you will see for yourselves. The most practical among you will find ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... definite and distinct in the history of the world. This phase will be the one which underlay and was reflected in the actual cult and institutions of Greece and must therefore be regarded not as a product of critical and self-conscious thought, but as an imaginative way of conceiving the world stamped as it were passively on the mind by the whole course of concrete experience. Of its character we have attempted to give some kind of account in the earlier part of this chapter, and we have now only to summarise ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... in France, even as Frenchmen live there, without being more than a little shocked. He has read a good many books, both old and new; he is one who cares for literature manifestly: then why does he call Mr. H. G. Wells a great imaginative artist? I will not swear to the epithets—I have not his book by me—but I am sure he is too candid to deny that if he has not used them he has used their equivalents. This much I know he has said—for ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... the Saxon poetry may conveniently be arranged under three heads: 1. The mechanical formation. 2. The rhetorical characteristics. 3. The imaginative elements. ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... and imaginative. I had a disturbing vision of darkness, full of lean jaws and wild eyes, amongst the hundred electric lights of the place. But somehow this vision made me angry, too. The sight of that man, so calm, breaking bits of white bread, exasperated me. And I had the audacity ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... this time a race of young men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind of furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meagre garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great men, who afterwards illuminated ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... in childhood sexuality gives rise to enduring imaginative sexual activity. There results that which Hufeland in his Makrobiotik terms psychical onanism, viz., the imaginative contemplation of a train of lascivious and voluptuous ideas. In many instances there even results a poetical treatment of the ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... federal constitution; they had civil and political ceremonies as wisely conceived and as dignified as they were impressive, romantic, and beautiful. Their literature, historical and imaginative, was handed down from generation to generation; and if memory were at fault, there were the wampum belts in ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... pure fiction, and is one of the most splendidly imaginative books we have met with for a long time. It is attributed to the author of the "First and Last" sketches in Blackwood's Magazine, some of which have already been transferred to our pages. No further recommendation can be requisite; but to give the reader ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... sea life must at first be taken for granted while his experience is nil. He dreams, probably, of majestic storms, or heavenly calms, of coral islands, and palm groves, and foreign lands and peoples. If very imaginative, he will indulge in Malay pirates and wrecks, and lifeboats, and desert islands, on which he will always land safely, and commence a second edition of Robinson Crusoe. But he will scarcely think, till bitter experience compels him, of very long ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... which Ethelberta rode divided these two climates like a wall; it soon became apparent that they were wrestling for mastery immediately in her pathway. The issue long remained doubtful, and this being an imaginative hour with her, she watched as typical of her own fortunes how the front of battle swayed—now to the west, flooding her with sun, now to the east, covering her with shade: then the wind moved round to the north, a blue hole appeared in the overhanging cloud, at about the place of the north star; ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... two great names to conjure by, at least to the imaginative. One is Plantagenet, which seems to contain within itself the very essence of all that is patrician, magnificent, and royal. It calls to memory at once the lion-hearted Richard, whose short reign was replete with romance in England and France and ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... did not open to him. They had almost forgotten him. Even his old colleagues at the hospital scarcely recognized him, and when they did stop to chat after the meeting, they examined him indifferently, as if they were making notes. Lindsay had probably spread his story, with some imaginative details. According to the popular tale Sommers had been "thrown down" by Miss Hitchcock because he had mixed himself up with a married woman. Then he had been discharged by Lindsay for the same ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Pitts, the well-known imaginative historian: "I have long held the belief that Saturn is inhabited by a type of being possessing a cylinder-like body composed of an unresisting pulp, a high dome-shaped head filled with gas, and long ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... the water is also a remarkable feature in this river; it inclines so much to milky white, that, when the sun shines on it, it requires no very strong imaginative power to ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... delicate and a great work to do, and you have done it admirably. Be sure that the book will do good. It will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home life is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame, too, the prudery of a not over cleanly though carefully white-washed age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. I confess that the book has made me ashamed of myself. Jane Eyre I hardly ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... that was a mere piece of flattery constructed on the inherited model of legends about the crown (Corona) of Ariadne. It seems evident enough that the older Greek names of stars are derived from a time when the ancestors of the Greeks were in the mental and imaginative condition of Iowas, Kanekas, Bushmen, Murri, and New Zealanders. All these, and all other savage peoples, believe in a kind of equality and intercommunion among all things animate and inanimate. Stones are supposed in the Pacific Islands to be male and female and to propagate their species. Animals ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... and comprehension of jest:—the one only moral sentiment wanting being that of responsibility to an Invisible being, or conscientiousness. But where, among brutes, shall we find the slightest trace of the Imaginative faculty, or of that discernment of beauty which our author most inaccurately confounds with it, or of the discipline of memory, grasping this or that circumstance at will, or of the still ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... proving something rare and rich. As was natural from such conditions, the thought of the nation took on new forms. Calm study of nature and man, and rational speculation on the great problems of life displaced impassioned and imaginative thought. Prophecy gave way to philosophy. The sages became the teachers of men. The third class of books in the Old Testament Canon, known by the Jews as the Writings, belong to this period; Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Jonah, Daniel, ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... abstract and theoretic in the mind of the philosopher. It is now the artist's turn. Accepting the correlated theoretic truths which the scientist and the philosopher have given him, he endows them with an imaginative embodiment perceptible to the senses. He translates them back into concrete terms; he clothes them in invented facts; he makes them imaginatively perceptible to a mind native and indued to actuality; and thus he gives expression ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... of trance state — or in the pendant sonnet. Analogous moods are not infrequent in the great poets. Rupert Brooke seems to have faltered, nervously, at times; these poems mirror faithfully such moments. But even when the image of life, imaginative or real, falters so, how essentially vital it still is, and clothed in an exquisite body of words like the traditional "rainbow hues of the dying fish"! For I cannot express too strongly my admiration ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... as Act II three hours later. PROFESSOR HOLDEN is seated at the table, books before him. He is a man in the fifties. At the moment his care-worn face is lighted by that lift of the spirit which sometimes rewards the scholar who has imaginative feeling. HARRY, a student clerk, comes hurrying in. ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... largely to its breadth of base. The Sather Campanile in Berkeley looks higher, though it is actually one hundred and thirty-three feet lower. The side towers at the entrances of the Court of Palms and the Court of Flowers, while not so imaginative as the main tower, are far more sky-reaching. As towers go, John Galen Howard's tower at the Buffalo Exposition in 1901 stands unsurpassed in every ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... truth it was a crown, the same as surmounts the Arms Royal of England on the sign-board of a Court tradesman. I marvelled at the ways of foreign heraldry. Either this family of d'Albani had higher pretensions than I had given it credit for, or it employed an unlearned and imaginative stationer. I scribbled a line of acceptance ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... to allow was beyond them all. The fertility of which I speak was perhaps his peculiar distinction, and it had no touch of common facility. He could not draw a line that was not hard with thought and rooted in imaginative decision. But he could invent with immense rapidity. It was the old, though rare, story. Alike in his theatre design and his tender landscape, beauty of spirit flowed in everything he did into beauty ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... of this subject has been widely recognized. The answer must be secured from many sources. Only in imagination can we follow the lines along which the spirit will move in the far-off ages, and yet our conclusions will not be wholly imaginative, for the direction in which those lines are tending is clearly perceived. Under the circumstances, therefore, imagination may not be an untrustworthy guide. We are now to deal with prophecies, some of them easy and some of them difficult to read. But reading prophecies ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... of course," he confessed. "It just was my way of testing what your Professor Michael told about you—that you are extraordinarily intelligent, virile, and imaginative. Had you sent the wallet to me, I should have sought elsewhere ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... offering, and he stood a minute looking down at them with a curious expression, for in the Italian part of his nature there was a touch of superstition, and he was just then in that state of half-sweet, half-bitter melancholy, when imaginative young men find significance in trifles and food for romance everywhere. He had thought of Jo in reaching after the thorny red rose, for vivid flowers became her, and she had often worn ones like that from the greenhouse at home. The pale roses Amy gave him were the sort that the Italians lay ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... children and their parents of this generation where the books of Louisa May Alcott stood in former days. The haps and mishaps of this inimitable pair of twins, their many adventures and experiences are a source of keen delight to imaginative children everywhere. ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... De Tabley, wrote a fascinating volume on book-plates, some years ago, with copious illustrations. There is not, however, one specimen in his book which I would exchange for mine, the work and the gift of one of the most imaginative of American artists, the late Edwin A. Abbey. It represents a very fine gentleman of about 1610, walking in broad sunlight in a garden, reading a little book of verses. The name is coiled around him, with the motto, Gravis cantantibus umbra. I will not presume to translate this ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... too useful, not to have a straight-forward, common name; you may call it a sac, though, if you like. I could not think of anything more imaginative; can you, Jane?" ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... change its habits upon the strength of intuitions; it decides only upon the authority of facts. The antinomy had to be expressed in a plainer and clearer manner: J. B. Say was its principal interpreter. But, in spite of the imaginative efforts and fearful subtlety of this economist, Smith's definition controls him without his knowledge, and is manifest throughout ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... the fifteenth century give a foretaste of the Elizabethan song. One carol on the birth of the Christ-child contains stanzas like these, which show artistic workmanship, imaginative power, and, above all, rare ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... my mind and heart were of thoughts and hopes too big for expression, my behavior was so nearly normal that no troublesome questions were propounded. I had no difficulty in keeping my secret. Imaginative children have more secrets to guard than adults ever think ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... and perfection of proportion. There is a prevailing spirit of repose, a sense of space, fair, lightsome, and adapted to serene moods of the meditative fancy in this building, which is singularly at variance with the religious mysticism and imaginative grandeur of a Gothic edifice. The principal beauty of the church, however, is its tone of colour. Every square inch is covered with fresco or rich woodwork, mellowed by time into that harmony of tints which blends the work of greater and lesser artists in one golden hue of brown. Round ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... parish of Canonbie, on the 24th of November 1777, and spent her childhood and early youth amidst Border scenes, Border traditions, and Border minstrelsy. It is probable that these influences fostered the poetic temperament, while they fed the imaginative element of her mind, as she very early gave expression to her thoughts and feelings in romance and poetry. Born to a condition of favourable circumstances, and associating with parents themselves educated and intellectual, the young ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... if we were tempted to finish just one more chapter of Coral Island or Out on the Pampas, we needs must steal a candle from the pantry stock and furtively read by its flickering light. Our own sense of danger, together with the imaginative effect wrought upon our excitive minds by the dancing candlelight and the awesome shadows of the still house, gave a strange relish to ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... more than enough, acting on the suspicion and fear belonging to the savage in their own bosoms, to envelope the idea of him in a mist of dread, deepening to such horror in the case of the more timid and imaginative of them, that when the twilight began to gather about the cottages and farmhouses, the very mention of "the beast-loon o' Glashgar" was enough, and that for miles up and down the river, to send many ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... to Frankfort. Its rhapsodical style, as well as the conceptions of art and nature which it embodies, directly recall Young's Conjectures on Original Composition. Like Young he proclaims that genius is a law to itself, that all imitation and subservience to rule is disastrous to imaginative production. "Principles," he declares, "are even more injurious to genius than examples." The burden of the Essay is the glorification of the genius of the architect of Strassburg cathedral, and of Gothic architecture in general, which, Goethe ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... could more clearly trace his family into obscurity than himself), nor for the vanities of a court, nor for those of society; nor for aught else of the same nature that is apt to have charms for the weak-minded, the imaginative, or the conceited. His political prepossessions showed themselves in a very different manner. Throughout the whole of the five lustres I have named, he was never heard to whisper a censure against government, let its measures, or the character ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... have not only the power of revisiting this earth at their will, but that, when here, they have the power of action, or rather, of exciting to action? Let me put a definite case. A spiritualist friend of mine, a sensible and by no means imaginative man, once told me that a table, through the medium of which the spirit of a friend had been in the habit of communicating with him, came slowly across the room towards him, of its own accord, one night as he sat alone, and pinioned him against the wall. Now can ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... gentlemen gratuitously informed me that if I intended to proceed to Russia I had better leave all these things behind, or they would all be confiscated at the frontier. I begged to differ, and the Frenchmen laughed boisterously at my ignorance, and at what would happen presently. In their imaginative minds they perceived my valued firearms being lost for ever, and predicted my being detained at the police station till it pleased les terribles Cossacques to ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... many sizes bigger than the bridge beneath which it sailed. They were making a sort of fairyland decoration where anything they pleased was possible; it was not a world of fact. As a result they got an imaginative quality in their decoration which none of our more prosaic and literal ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... that they were no stranger than might have been expected, and he may find things quite as strange without the expense of a Van Tromp for guide. Yet he was a guide of no mean order, who made up for the poverty of what he had to show by a copious, imaginative commentary. ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shrewd merchants, but industrious agriculturists, and breeders of good stock of cattle, sheep and goats. They are black in color, tall, well-shaped, with regular features and wooly hair. In character they are amiable, hospitable, imaginative, credulous, truthful, fond of music, dancing and poetry. They are adventurous travellers, extending their commercial journeys over a greater part of Africa. The Mandingoes are the most numerous race of West Africa, and have spread themselves to a great distance from their original seat, being ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman
... deep, nameless influence, which, once felt, cannot be forgotten—once felt, leaves always behind it a restless longing to feel it again—a longing which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will. I met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far countries and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year—they could not explain why. They had come first, they said, out of idle curiosity, because everybody ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Pipper's imaginative description ends too abruptly to be really satisfactory; but one fact about the life of Jabez Puffwater will remain emblazoned on America's history for time immemorial—that if he had only possessed the rhetoric of a Proon—the presence ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... there is in every one a certain discord with regard to war. Every man is divided against himself. On the whole, most of us want peace. But hardly any one is without a lurking belligerence, a lurking admiration for the vivid impacts, the imaginative appeals of war. I am sitting down to write for the peace of the world, but immediately before I sat down to write I was reading the morning's paper, and particularly of the fight between the Sydney and the Emden ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... living person, he'll extricate himself from his difficulty all right; if he's not, and I have unwittingly allowed myself to conjure him up in my fancy, there's no great harm done. If he's nothing more than a marionette, let him fall on the floor, and stay there until I find some imaginative writer who will take him off my hands—you, for instance. You can have Bonetti for a Christmas present, with my compliments. I'm through with him; but as for Miss Andrews, she has been so confoundedly elusive that she has aroused my deepest interest, and I couldn't give ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... ambition had strewed with the dead and the dying, and seemed not only desirous to relieve the victims,—issuing for that purpose directions, which too often were not, and could not be, obeyed,—but showed himself subject to the influence of that more acute and imaginative species of sympathy which is termed sensibility. He mentions a circumstance which indicates a deep sense of feeling. As he passed over a field of battle in Italy, with some of his generals, he saw a houseless dog lying on the body of his slain ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... the light of method, we must get rid of definitions which are often applied to folklore in its attributed sense. Folk-tales are not fiction or art, were not invented for amusement, are not myth in the sense of being imaginative only.[182] Customs and superstitions are not the result of ignorance and stupidity. These attributes are true only if folk-tales, customs, and superstitions are compared with the literary productions and with the science and the culture of advanced civilisation; and this comparison is exactly ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... abstract reasoning to bear upon matters of permanent and supreme importance to all men. Yet, in spite of his ruthless impartiality, I should not hesitate to call him a religious man. This very tendency which no imaginative mind, no man or woman with any strain of poetical feeling, can be without, invests Mill's character with a clash of humanity which entitles him to a place in our affections. It is in this respect that he ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... fact, anyone whose avocations took them underground—would have laughed to scorn these childish fears; but the situation was so new to me, and also I must confess that I am naturally of a nervous, imaginative turn of mind. Still, I was vexed with myself for my cowardly feelings, and started on my walk again, trying not to think of these gloomy surroundings, but drew a picture of my home, wondering how Mary was, if she was well enough to be told of my coming, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... out the dinner-table a whit less symmetrically. Still, I own, the style of his service was slightly depressing. He laid out my clean shirt of a morning as if it had been a shroud; and cleaned my boots as though for a man ON HIS LAST LEGS. The fact is, he was imaginative and atrabilious,—contemplating life through a medium of the colour of his ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... have made a capital ghost story," said Lillyston, "if you had been a little more imaginative and nervous. And still more if the illusion had only been partially optical, and partly the ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... mythopoeic faculty is not equally active in all minds, nor in all regions and under all conditions of the same mind. David Hume was certainly not so liable to temptation as the Venerable Bede, or even as some recent historians who could be mentioned; and the most imaginative of debtors, if he owes five pounds, never makes an obligation to pay a hundred out of it. The rule of common sense is prima facie to trust a witness in all matters, in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sister?" said Mrs. Tulliver. She was not an imaginative woman, but it occurred to her that the large toilet-glass in sister Pullet's best bedroom was possibly broken for ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... such as we find in Agamemnon or Othello. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure of the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive by sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to the humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature as the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God forgive me, ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... rubbed off, mixed with water, and swallowed, as a remedy for many diseases. The deep connection of medicine with magic throwing light on the strange application of stones and hairs, bones and skins, by imaginative mankind, in all ages and places, is exhibited in the common practice of writing with ink a sentence of the Koran (or other sacred words) on a tablet, washing off the ink and making the patient swallow the water in which the sacred phrase has been thus dissolved! How convenient it would be were ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... both sensitive and imaginative, used to tell Margaret that he was a realist. Logotheti, who was by nature, talent and education a thorough materialist, loved to believe that he possessed both a rich imagination and the gift of ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... indeed, in his misanthropy, as in his sorrows, at that period, to the full as much of fancy as of reality; and even those gallantries and loves in which he at the same time entangled himself partook equally, as I have endeavoured to show, of the same imaginative character. Though brought early under the dominion of the senses, he had been also early rescued from this thraldom by, in the first place, the satiety such excesses never fail to produce, and, at no long interval after, by this series of half-fanciful attachments which, though in their ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... hand of a saint, but the giver was credited with miraculous powers such as only a Divine Being could exercise, and which he disclaimed in vain—extravagances too likely to discredit his enterprise with more soberly judging persons than the imaginative Celts who were his earliest converts. But, notwithstanding every drawback, his action was most important, and deserves grateful memory. We may see in it the inception of that great movement whose indirect influence in reforming ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... help thinking of it," persisted the child, in whom the imaginative faculty was unusually, strong for ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... I was about to observe, "your imaginative powers have now arrived at the pitch of clairvoyance," when a noise from the room beneath us, as if all the fireirons had gone off together with a bang, compelled me to acknowledge, to myself at least, that there was something ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... over, and finally they concluded that my mother had been a very imaginative sort of a child, and had read in some book about such a little room, or perhaps even dreamed it, and then had 'made believe,' as children do, till she herself had really thought ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... old enough to remember other summers, several of them, each bringing an advancing crescendo of work. But oh, the happy days! For Betty lived in a world all her own, wherein her play was as real as her work, and labor was turned by her imaginative little mind into new forms of play, and although night often found her weary—too tired to lie quietly in her bed sometimes—the line between the two was never in her thoughts ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... brown hair was parted in the middle, over a high white forehead, and fell in faintly waving curls almost to his neck, forming a frame to the soft oval face, to which his violet-blue melancholy-looking eyes, his calm, finely-chiselled features, and the serious repose of his imaginative mouth, imparted an air of gentleness and thoughtfulness combined. His dark, sober-coloured, simple dress, although somewhat too severe to suit his youthful figure, accorded well with the character of his physiognomy. His falling collar displayed a full ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... telegrams, were within a few hours to paralyse industrial England, to keep her ships idle in the docks, her trains motionless upon the rails, her mines silent, her forges cold, her great factories empty. Even the least imaginative felt the thrill, the awe of the thing he was doing. On paper, in the brain, it seemed so wonderful, so logical, so certain of the desired result. And now there were other thoughts forcing their way to the front. ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for while she was resolute and determined, and had firmness and courage to bear up against the heaviest afflictions, she had no coldness or insensibility in her temperament, but was endowed with the tenderest and warmest affections. She was not by nature imaginative, but her understanding was excellent and utterly devoid of lumber and affectation. She had the sound practical sense of a vigorous and healthy mind, without a particle of vanity or conceit; she never attempted to plunge out of her depth, or ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... years, diligently and indefatigably, I pursued a course of severe application to long-neglected studies, which enabled me fairly to redeem the time I had squandered in early youth. Nor is it unworthy of remark, that, as is often the case with imaginative people, the temptations which had appeared so inviting when beheld from a distance, failed in their powers of allurement on a nearer approach. The Spirit of the Brocken and I made no advances in intimacy, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... when her mind was clouded the intricate designs and endless variety of delicate and ingenious stitches had come to have symbolic meanings for her full of mystic significance. In them she poured forth her soul, as another might pour it forth in music, finding there an imaginative language far surpassing, in its subtlety of suggestion, articulate speech. There were deserts of net, of spider's web fineness, to be laboriously traversed; hills of difficulty to be climbed, whence far horizons disclosed themselves; ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... An imaginative poet avers that woman is the link connecting Heaven and earth. True it is, we see in her the embodiment of purity and heavenly graces, the most perfect combination of modesty, devotion, patience, affection, gratitude and loveliness, and the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... camera obscura, and, like life itself, they are full of repetitions and over-insistence on what is insignificant or of temporary interest. To-day they call for our patience and forbearance, and it will depend upon our imaginative activity in what degree they repay them; even as it depends upon our power of affectionate assimilation in what degree and kind every common day ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... by me to account for this strange cognomen. His head, which was covered with a transparent down, like that which clothes very small chickens, plainly permitting the scalp to show through, to an imaginative mind might have suggested that succulent vegetable. That his parents, recognizing some poetical significance in the fruits of the season, might have given this name to an August child, was an oriental explanation. That from his infancy, he was fond of indulging in melons, seemed on the whole the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... religious zeal that it dominated their entire life. It turned a reflective and imaginative people, who had sought out the hidden mysteries of life by the acuteness of their own perception, to base their entire operations upon faith. Faith dominated the reason to such an extent that the deep and permanent foundations of progress could not be laid, and ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... particular, led more than once to disaster. His angry vanity suspected that while he was now thought incapable of the poetic or imaginative work in which he had once excelled, he was still considered—'like any fool'—good enough for portraits. This alone was enough to make him loathe the business. On two or three occasions he ended by quarrelling with the sitter. Then ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the molasses-jug upside down, and had noted so often the reluctance of the congealed sweetness to assume its liquid nature, that the thing had become to him the visible image of the abstract notion of slowness of movement. An imaginative dramatist or novelist, priding himself on the exactness with which he represented character, could not have invented a more appropriate comparison to be put into the mouth of an ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... misery. He was going away all night. She and Goody would be quite alone—quite alone, with all those dreadful rooms where the sick and dying had lived; those gloomy, chill, sunless abodes for the suffering. Her mind, sensitive and imaginative, shrank with horror from the picture presented to her by her ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... the expressiveness of language more highly than its compeers. The opposite of this, the disposition to set correctness above expressiveness, produces that peculiarly vulgar diction, known as "school-ma'am English," in which for the sake of a dull accord with usage, all the picturesque, imaginative, and forceful employment of ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... could be saved. It was at the time probable that friends would follow them to the Carpathia, or be found on other steamers, or even on the pier at which we landed. The hysterical scenes that have been described are imaginative; true, one woman did fill the saloon with hysterical cries immediately after coming aboard, but she could not have known for a certainty that any of her friends were lost: probably the sense of relief after some hours of journeying about the ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... "I have heard enough of that 'ne plus ultra' of doll! Indeed, Colin, you have given a great deal of pleasure, where the materials of pleasure are few. No one can guess the delight a doll is to a solitary imaginative child." ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with a pleasant laugh, confessed he did not see what was to be done. The policeman, more imaginative, saw a way out. It was that my military friend should set to work and pick up those fifty scraps of paper. He is an English General on the Retired List, and of imposing appearance: his manner on occasion is haughty. He did not see himself on his hands and knees in the chief street of Dresden, ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... the maternal indulgence of the Countess to Helena's passion for her son, seem all as it were to vie with each other in endeavours to overcome the arrogance of the young Count. The style of the whole is more sententious than imaginative: the glowing colours of fancy could not with propriety have been employed on such a subject. In the passages where the humiliating rejection of the poor Helena is most painfully affecting, the cowardly Parolles steps in to the relief of the spectator. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... filled his every waking moment in England. Page himself regarded this ability to smile as an indispensable attribute to a well-rounded life. "No man can be a gentleman," he once declared, "who does not have a sense of humour." Only he who possessed this gift, Page believed, had an imaginative insight into the failings and the virtues of his brothers; only he could have a tolerant attitude toward the stupidities of his fellows, to say nothing of his own. And humour with him assumed various shades; now it would flash in an epigram, or smile indulgently at a passing ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... rose to the intellectual and imaginative state of Greece in her best period, represented wealth, commerce, and conquest, in a greater degree, so were her arts, and with these the lyric. In her best state her nobles danced, Appius Claudius excelled, and ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... my model's simple narrative, the homely realism of which appealed to me on my most imaginative side, for through all its sordid details stood revealed to me the tragedy of the Wandering Jew. Was it Heine or another who said 'The people of Christ is the Christ of peoples'? At any rate, such was the idea that began to take possession of me as I painted ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... ceases to be a comfort. This is when the reformer notices how indifference to politics is settling upon some of the most alert minds of our generation, entering into the attitude of men as capable as any reformer of large and imaginative interests. For among the keenest minds, among artists, scientists and philosophers, there is a remarkable inclination to make a virtue of political indifference. Too passionate an absorption in public affairs is felt to be a somewhat shallow performance, and ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... his own way and stay out. "It will do him no harm, and may cool his peppery blood some!" had been the keeper's decision. So the door was left open, and Last Bull entered or refrained, according to his whim. It was noticed, however,—and this struck a chord of answering sympathy in the plainsman's imaginative temperament,—that, though on ordinary nights he might come in and stay with the herd under shelter, on nights of driving storm, if the tempest blew from the west or northwest, Last Bull was sure to be out on the naked knoll to face it. When the fine ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... cripples the force of an upright mind, while unblushing confidence is a source of strength to a man without conscience. Regulus is a case in point. He has weak lungs, he never looks you straight in the face, he stammers, he has no imaginative power, absolutely no memory, no quality at all, in short, except a wild, frantic genius, and yet, thanks to his effrontery, and even just to this frenzy of his, he has got people to regard him as an orator. Herennius Senecio very neatly turned against him Cato's well- known definition of an ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... grip on life and good things. He was young, just twenty-six, strong and healthy, though slim-built in body, alert and vigorous in mind, unperturbed in soul, buoyant and warmly imaginative. Just at that moment the joy of life was almost at full flood in him, for he had recently been reveling in a new and glorious experience, and now carried it with him, a ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... that Dummie protested his innocence. A violent coup-de-pied broke off all further parlance. He made a clear house of the Mug; and the landlady thereof, tottering back to her elbow-chair, sought out another pipe, and, like all imaginative persons when the world goes wrong with them, consoled herself for the absence of realities by ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... exciting colour contrasts and bizarre contours. They will not be habitually promenaders, or greatly addicted to theatrical performances; they will probably find their secondary interests—the cardinal one will of course be the work in hand—in a not too imaginative prose literature, in travel and journeys and in the less sensuous aspects of music. They will probably take a considerable interest in public affairs. Their menage, which will consist of father, mother, and children, will, I think, in all ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... vision of the end through any enterprise, who would always put the curb of expediency on emotional impulses, who would invariably judge a theory not by its underlying principle, but by its practical application. A charming face, too, complex and imaginative, a face which made the rugged and open countenance of the Governor appear primitive and undeveloped. Corinna admired Benham; she respected him; she liked—was it even possible, she asked herself, that she loved him? Yet here again she was conscious ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... child, in whom the simplicity of practical life and the poetry of imaginative life were curiously blended, she had a fashion of going to her window every night when the moon or stars were shining, to look out for a minute or two before she went to bed; and sometimes the minutes were more than any good grandmother ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... introduction to the terrors of the law was an unspeakably sad one—sad, indeed, to his affectionate and imaginative nature. "I know," he writes, "that we got on very badly with the butcher and baker, that very often we had not too much for dinner, and that at last my father was arrested." He never forgot—how could he, knowing what we know the lad to have been?—often carrying ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... fearful temperament, if it is not a mere unmanning and desolating dread, are not to be overlooked. Fear is the shadow of the imaginative, the resourceful, the inventive temperament, but it multiplies resource and invention a hundredfold. Everyone knows the superstition which is deeply rooted in humanity, that a time of exaltation and excitement and unusual success is held to be often the prelude to some disaster, just ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the times is often made to entertain for his personal safety. They did not apprehend any violence, and their only preparation for the expedition had been a recommendation to God through Our Lady and the Saints. It is as purely imaginative in historians and novelists—and it is difficult indeed to distinguish the one from the other—to surround every castle with a wall of banditti, as to station in Catholic countries of the present day, a robber or ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... which they have filled, with persevering ingenuity, day after day, with eloquent descriptions of the awful state of feeling in the country on this most atrocious subject. Where, patriotic, but most imaginative gentlemen! where have been the great meetings summoned to condemn the principle of the tax? The great landholders, the great capitalists, the great merchants, are pouring their contributions into the exhausted Treasury, with scarce a murmur at the temporary inconvenience it may occasion them!—thus ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... is the poor little fruit of which so much has been written in English descriptions of the peculiarities of the Australian flora. It has been likened to a cherry with the stone outside (hence the vernacular name) by some imaginative person." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... she is really dying? People like that are often hysterical, often nervously imaginative." Selwyn's voice was worried. "You ought not to be sent for like this. ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... and are considered high authority on the questions discussed. A few works, such as "Abdallah," from which the following extract is adapted, were written as a mere recreation in the midst of law studies; they show great imaginative power. Laboulaye took great interest in the United States, her people, and her literature; and many of his works are devoted to American questions. He translated the works of Dr. William E. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... intersected by a bewildering maze of channels winding hither and thither, with the thin sickle of the young moon, gleaming softly silver-white, hanging just above the whole. It was one of those skies that set the imaginative dreamer's fancy free to wander afar into the realms of fairyland and to picture all sorts of strange, unreal happenings; the sort of sky that probably suggested to the simple mind of the Indian the poetic idea that when gazing ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... to be expected, Mr. Russell reluctantly concludes, that progress will come in this way, because "the imaginative effort required ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... side doorways (late 14th century) would doubtless if realized with equal success on the faades, have produced strikingly beautiful results. The modern faade of the Duomo, by the late De Fabris (1887) is a correct if not highly imaginative version of the style so applied. The front of Milan cathedral (soon to be replaced by a new faade), shows a mixture of Gothic and Renaissance forms. Ferrara Cathedral, although internally transformed in the last century, retains its fine 13th-century three-gabled and arcaded screen ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... man tells us that the roof of the house fell in. An imaginative fool, who is also a swindler, assures us that he later saw the roof standing. We remember that the roof was of iron girders covered with wood, and draw this conclusion: That the framework still stands, but that the healing fell through in a mass of blazing rubbish. Our ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... change of intellectual attitude may be detected almost contemporaneously with the fall of the Latin kingdom in Palestine. It is doubtless true that the thirteenth century was the century in which imaginative thought reached its highest brilliancy, when Albertus Magnus and Saint Thomas Aquinas taught, when Saint Francis and Saint Clara lived, and when Thomas of Celano wrote the Dies Irae. It was then that Gothic ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... the words upon a slip of paper, reading them over until tears dimmed his vision, for, in fancy, the imaginative Frenchman assisted at Edith's obsequies, and even heard the grinding of the hearse wheels, once foretold by Nina. Several times he peered out into the silent hall, seeing the lamplight shining from the ventilator over Edith's door, and knowing by ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... He was not a genius. His heart never rode his head. He was neither overlorded by sentiment nor hag-ridden by imagination. Otherwise he might have been guilty of the beautiful exaggerations in Melville's "Typee" or the imaginative orgies in the latter's "Moby Dick." It was Dana's cool poise that saved him from being spread-eagled and flogged when two of his mates were so treated; it was his lack of abandon that prevented him from taking up permanently with the sea, that prevented him from seeing more than one ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... STUART, logician and economist, born in London, son of the preceding; was educated pedantically by his father; began to learn Greek at 3, could read it and Latin at 14, "never was a boy," he says, and was debarred from all imaginative literature, so that in after years the poetry of Wordsworth came to him as a revelation; entered the service of the East India Company in 1823, but devoted himself to philosophic discussion; contributed to the Westminster ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that when death seized upon the man who was brother and pal as well as father to Martin, all the stucco beneath which he had so carefully hidden his spiritual and imaginative side cracked and broke. Under the indescribable shock of what seemed to him to be wanton and meaningless cruelty, the boy gave way to a grief that was angry and agonized by turns. He had left a fit, high-spirited father ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... overlaying the other. The walls are prepared with a glossy paper of a silver gray tint, spotted with small Arabesque devices of a fainter hue of the prevalent crimson. Many paintings relieve the expanse of paper. These are chiefly landscapes of an imaginative cast—such as the fairy grottoes of Stanfield, or the lake of the Dismal Swamp of Chapman. There are, nevertheless, three or four female heads, of an ethereal beauty-portraits in the manner of Sully. The tone of each picture is warm, but dark. There are no "brilliant effects." Repose ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... into the little chapel and taught to pray there. She believed in miracles, and would not have been surprised at any moment if she had met the Child Jesus or the Virgin in the beautiful rambling gardens which surrounded the chateau. She was a sensitive, imaginative child, and the sacred romances she heard filled all her mind and made up her little life. She wished to be a saint herself, and spent hours in wandering in the terraced rose gardens wondering if ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... And I'm prepared to affirm that, in highly-strung, imaginative, or over-worked people change of climate does sometimes actually cause, or seem ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... with tenderness for those who were not happy, and for those who did not know they were unhappy, and for those who wasted their one precious life in being wretched when they might have been happy. How little it would need, she thought (for she was young and imaginative), to turn most people's worries and sadness into joy. Such a little difference in Susie's ways and ideas would make them all so happy; such a little change in Peter's habits would make his wife's ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... a century) untouched by even a breath of ill-will or jealousy on the part of a brother-author. The annals of the genus irritabile scarcely show a parallel to such a career. The most prominent American contemporary of Mr. Irving in imaginative literature, I suppose, was Fenimore Cooper,—whose genius raised the American name in Europe more effectively even than Irving's, at least on the Continent. Cooper had a right to claim respect and admiration, if not affection, from his countrymen, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... this intensity of passion, is a splendid imaginative quality. Few writers of English prose have such command of figurative expression. It must be said, however, that Burke was not entirely free from the faults which generally accompany an excessive use of figures. Like other ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... responds so readily and so completely to a poet's endowment of genius as blank verse, and hence the secret of Marlowe's improvements over his predecessors is his superior poetic gift. He seems to have felt and thought and written with an enormous imaginative power; by making his verse an organic expression of this power he achieved an almost new medium, ranging in variety from the simplicity ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... perilously small, Douglass fell into deeps of black despair, wherein all imaginative power left him. At such times the lack of depth and significance in his work appalled him. "It is hopelessly poor and weak; it does not deserve to succeed. I've a mind to tear it in rags." But he resisted this spirit, partly restrained by some hidden power traceable to the influence of Helen ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... rebel was, before all things else, Griswold the imaginative literary craftsman; and no sooner was the question of his ultimate destination settled thus arbitrarily than he began to prefigure the place and its probable lacks and havings. This process brought him ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... so bloody a beginning he was the first imaginative and thoughtful administrator that Florence had had since Lorenzo the Magnificent. He set himself grimly to build upon the ruins which the past forty and more years had produced; and by the end of his reign he had worked wonders. As first ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... bring down actual blessing, or who confound faith in God with credulity and superstition, may well wonder and perhaps stumble at such an array of facts. But, if any reader is still doubtful as to the facts, or thinks they are here arrayed in a deceptive garb or invested with an imaginative halo, he is hereby invited to examine for himself the singularly minute records which George Muller has been led of God to put before the world in a printed form which thus admits no change, and to accompany with ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... the more we shall come to agree with a statement made by Darwin concerning the devices for securing cross-fertilization of flowers, that they "transcend, in an incomparable degree, the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of the most imaginative man could suggest with unlimited time ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... or girl who becomes familiar with the charming tales and poems in this collection will have gained a knowledge of literature and history that will be of high value in other school and home work. Here are the real elements of imaginative narration, poetry, and ethics, which should enter into the education ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... best antidote against imaginative dread in the necessity for getting on with the coffin, and for the next ten minutes his hammer was ringing so uninterruptedly, that other sounds, if there were any, might well be overpowered. A pause came, however, when ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... not, perhaps, altogether to be scorned. Nor must it be supposed that the lack of reverence implies any want of idealism, or any poverty of imagination, any absence of love or desire of the good and beautiful. The American is idealist and imaginative beyond the Englishman. ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... meantime I can hardly understand how the purest of 'pure scholars' can fail to feel his knowledge enriched by the savants who have compelled us to dig below the surface of our classical tradition and to realize the imaginative and historical problems which so often lie concealed beneath the smooth security of a verbal 'construe'. My own essays do not for a moment claim to speak with authority on a subject which is still changing and showing new facets year by ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... in deck chairs pretending to be rugs, or who went to bed and wished themselves in their peaceful graves. But for himself, the wild turmoil of the waves filled him with sympathetic restlessness. It had never occurred to Peter that he was imaginative, yet he seemed to know what the white-faced storm was saying, and to want to shout ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blow down than his neighbors. With us descendants of the Puritans especially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value thermometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The other day (5th July) I marked 98o in the shade, my high water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen it before. I happened to meet a neighbor; as we ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... other right and proper possessions, this Mr. Morris had a wife and children. They were the right sort of wife, and the right sort and number of children, of course; nothing imaginative or highty-flighty about any of them, so far as Mr. Morris could see; they wore perfectly correct clothing, neither smart nor hygienic nor faddy in any way, but just sensible; and they lived in a nice sensible house in the later Victorian sham ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... that the greatest of Roman poets Lucretius, was an Atheist, while even "some of our most brilliant notorieties in the modern world of song are not the most notable for piety." But our versatile Professor easily accounts for this by assuming that there "may be an idolatry of the imaginative, as well as of the knowing faculty." Never did natural historian so jauntily provide for every fact contravening his theories. Professor Blackie will never understand Atheism, or write profitably upon it, while he pursues ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... moustaches that predestined him to a box-office. And certainly circumstances justified the lady's complaisance, for while hitherto hers had been but a fleeting show, it was now, in the excusably imaginative terms of Colonel Pike, an architectural feature of the cold weather. There was the mystic bower, too, in an octagonal tent under a pipal tree, which gave you, by an arrangement of looking-glasses, the most unaccountable ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Stowe has been the object of much unfavorable criticism. It has been assailed, not only as fiction of the most imaginative sort, but as being a direct misrepresentation. Several successful attempts have lately been made to displace the book from Northern school libraries. Its critics would brush it aside with the remark that there never was a Negro as good as Uncle Tom, nor a slave-holder as bad as Legree. For my part, ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... laughter seemed to fill the inner mind through which the debate passed, while all the time she was apparently looking at the landscape, and chatting with her brother or Delaine. She fell into an angry contempt for that mood of imaginative delight in which she had journeyed through Canada so far. What! treat a great nation in the birth as though it were there for her mere pleasure and entertainment? Make of it a mere spectacle and pageant, and turn with disgust ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... old custom to which the hospital still clings of putting all the little patients into those red flannel jackets on cold days, for it makes the wards look so cheerful—like Christmas fields dotted with bright berries. Jimmy is a dear, and so imaginative that I believe he lives every story that I tell him of the Cumberlands—certainly he likes them better than fairy stories. This afternoon, I had finished telling him about how grandpappy shot the turkey for Dr. MacDonald, ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... visions, the many affectations of nursery days, there will be recalled also a very real love of nature; varying, of course, in its intensity from a mere love of fresh air and free romping, and a destructive taste for nosegays, to a living romance about the daily walks of the imaginative child,—a world apart, peopled with invisible company, such as fairies, and those fancy friends which some children devise for themselves, or with the beasts and flowers, to which ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... streets and skyscrapers of our hurrying city, a gracious mantle of romance. Pauline Johnson has linked the vivid present with the immemorial past. Vancouver takes on a new aspect as we view it through her eyes. In the imaginative power that she has brought to these semi-historical sagas, and in the liquid flow of her rhythmical prose, she has shown herself to be a literary worker of whom we may well be proud: she has made a most estimable contribution ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... the May evening when he first read these new books, to the accompaniment, he said, of two nightingales, one in a copper-beech, one in a laburnum, each striving to outdo the other in melody. A new imaginative world was opened to the boy. In Memorabilia he afterwards recorded the strong intellectual and emotional excitement, the thrill and ecstasy of this poetical experience. To Shelley especially did he give immediate and fervid personal loyalty, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... right have you to talk like that? Men are faithful and constant! Since we are talking about it, I'll tell you that of all the men I knew and know, the best was my late husband.... I loved him passionately with all my being, as only a young and imaginative woman can love, I gave him my youth, my happiness, my life, my fortune, I breathed in him, I worshipped him as if I were a heathen, and... and what then? This best of men shamelessly deceived me at every step! After his death I found in his desk a whole ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... after a certain amount of modern warfare; even the nerves of the least imaginative may snap before ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... mentality" and "the well-authenticated cases of the sudden warping of abnormal intelligences resulting in the startling termination of amazing careers," or snivel dismally over "the complete collapse of that imaginative power which, hitherto, had been this detective's greatest asset, and which now, on the principle that however deep a well may be if a force-pump be put into it it must some time suck gravel, seemed to have come to ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... 'dazzlers,' to enable them more readily to practise the art of lying and deception upon their gullible listeners. Then again, with reference to the Gipsies having a religion of their own. There is not a word of truth in this imaginative notion prevalent in the minds or some who have been trying to study their habits. Excepting the language of some of the old-fashioned real Gipsies, and a few other little peculiarities, any one studying ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... name "The Art of the Short Story" is at once associated, has written this whimsical and imaginative tale of Hortense and the Cat. Antique furniture, literally stuffed with personality, hurries about in the dim moonlight in order to help Hortense through a thrillingly strange campaign against a sinister Cat and a villainous Grater. The book offers rare humor, irresistible ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... judged by a terrestrial standard, certainly have, in their apparent absence of any physical relation to neighbouring objects, all the appearance of being works of art rather than of nature. The keen-sighted and very imaginative Gruithuisen believed that in some instances they represent roads cut through interminable forests, and in others the dried-up beds of once mighty rivers. His description of the Triesnecker rill-system reads like a page from a geographical primer. A portion of it is compared to ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... wish to question you, my dear,' he continued, almost kindly. 'Whatever your thoughts are, they are your own. But I cannot see you wasting away before my eyes without wishing to help you. It is part of my duty. Now a man is stronger than a woman, and less imaginative. It may be that you are distressing yourself with little reason, and that, if you would confide in me, I might demonstrate to you that you have no cause for repining. Consider well, whether you can tell me your trouble, and ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... superstition and sentimental belief," he soliloquized. "Some conception of the mind is embodied, or some object is idealized and magnified until the original is lost sight of, and men come to worship a mere fancy of their own. Then some mind, stronger and more imaginative than the average, gives shape and form to this confused image; and so there grows in time a belief, a theology, or rather a mythology. To think that this Lincoln, whom I've seen in attitudes anything ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... is of never-ending joy to the listeners. However, I should wish to introduce a note of grave warning in connection with this subject. This special artifice can only be used by such narrators as have special aptitude and gifts in this direction. There are many people with good imaginative power but who are wholly lacking in the power of mimicry, and their efforts in this direction, however painstaking, remain grotesque and therefore ineffective. When listening to such performances, of which children are strangely critical, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... o'clock in the morning of the tenth of July, 1860, the front door of a certain house on Anchor Street, in the ancient seaport town of Rivermouth, might have been observed to open with great caution. This door, as the least imaginative reader may easily conjecture, did not open itself. It was opened by Miss Margaret Callaghan, who immediately closed it softly behind her, paused for a few seconds with an embarrassed air on the stone step, and then, ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... nonsense, of course. I did not think I was so imaginative, but I declare I fancied I saw, looking through the windows of that now utterly dark room, a man lying dead on ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... he reckons as effects of sloth, belong to the "wandering of the mind after unlawful things." This tendency to wander, if it reside in the mind itself that is desirous of rushing after various things without rhyme or reason, is called "uneasiness of the mind," but if it pertains to the imaginative power, it is called "curiosity"; if it affect the speech it is called "loquacity"; and in so far as it affects a body that changes place, it is called "restlessness of the body," when, to wit, a man shows the unsteadiness of his mind, by the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... man was approaching, and when we met I asked him what was making that noise yonder. "Frogs," he said. At another time, in the flat-woods of Port Orange (I hope I am not taxing my reader's credulity too far, or making myself out a man of too imaginative an ear), I heard the bleating of sheep. Busy with other things, I did not stop to reflect that it was impossible there should be sheep in that quarter, and the occurrence had quite passed out of my mind when, one day, a cracker, talking ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... advances; the interest ceases with the inquirer when the catastrophe is ascertained, as in the romance whose denouement turns on a mysterious incident, which, once unfolded, all future agitation ceases. But in the true infancy of science, philosophers were as imaginative a race as poets: marvels and portents, undemonstrable and undefinable, with occult fancies, perpetually beginning and never ending, were delightful as the shifting cantos of Ariosto. Then science entranced ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... working head; and a prudent man as well as ingeniose." In the portrait these characteristics, physical and mental, are well displayed: sanity of mind—that is, clearness, shrewdness, courage, kindliness, the contentment which makes the best of good and evil fortune, are, to the imaginative mind, written in the face, as presented in his picture, of this great man. His greatness fell short of genius, for it was the effect of ordinary qualities, rarely combined and tempered into one character; but more effective for useful work in the ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... remembrance? Who calls him by his secret name? Let a man but feel for that is his battle, for that his cyclic labor, and a warrior who is invincible fights for him and he draws upon divine powers. Let us but get that way of looking at things which we call imaginative, and how everything alters. For our attitude to man and to nature, expressed or not, has something of the effect of ritual, of evocation. As our aspiration so is our inspiration. We believe in life universal, in a brotherhood ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... the wayward ocean, and though it be full of error as the Almagest, yet it shall surpass the thumb-rules of Philistia. It must be a doctrine which allows imagination her right and durable career, and therefore not be monist. For materialism is too wildly imaginative at the start: like a runner who at the outset overstrains his heart and thereafter runs no more, the follower of this creed, by his postulate of a blind impersonal Law, exhausts his power of speed and plods henceforth eyes downward over flattest plains of dulness. ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... his inner tissue, there was something of the old founder of his family, a secret tenacity of soul, a dread of showing his feelings, a determination not to know when he was beaten. Sensitive, imaginative, affectionate boys get a bad time at school, but Jon had instinctively kept his nature dark, and been but normally ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... enlightenment enough to wish to know a little about the great lives and great thoughts, the shining words and many-coloured complexities of action, that have marked the journey of man through the ages. Macaulay had an intimate acquaintance both with the imaginative literature and the history of Greece and Rome, with the literature and the history of modern Italy, of France, and of England. Whatever his special subject, he contrives to pour into it with singular ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... wild fowl, or a battle scene, or even a prize fight, or a mother tending a sick child, because these incidents appeal to them. But they seldom see in a picture anything but the subject; they do not appreciate: imaginative quality or composition, or colour, or light and shade or indeed anything except exact imitation of the actual. So in nature the average man is; struck by something so exceptional as a lofty rock, like Ailsa Craig or the Needles off the Isle ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
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