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More "Literal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... predispositions, tastes, inclinations, etc. All that goes to make up that which we call "Character" is the workings of the Law of Karma. There is no such thing as Chance. Nothing ever "happens." All is regulated by the Law of Cause and Effect or Karma. As a man sows so shall he reap, in a literal sense. You are what you are to-day, by reason of what you were in your last life. And in your next life you will be what you are making of yourself to-day. You are your own judge, and executioner—your own bestower of rewards. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... a position to vouch for them from personal knowledge, any more than I am in a position to personally vouch for the invasion of England by William of Normandy. But they rest on as good evidence as most other private events of sixty-odd years ago, and there is no reason for doubting their literal truth. With regard to the supernatural element, I am free to confess that I am not able to accept it in entirety. This is not because I question the veracity of those who vouch for the alleged facts, but because I have not received those facts at first hand, and because I am not very ready ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... communistic principles. The Christians shared all things; those who had property realised it, and pooled the proceeds in a common fund, which was distributed to individual members as need arose. It is impossible not to recognise in this action consistent and literal obedience to the teaching of Jesus. The disciples had followed Jesus to the end of his journey in Jerusalem; they were waiting for his manifestation in glory, and sold all that they had and gave to the poor. But in terms of ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... thereto relating, as compared with their exact completions in Josephus's history; upon which completions, as Dr. Whitby well observes, Annot. on Matthew 24:2, no small part of the evidence for the truth of the Christian religion does depend; and as I have step by step compared them together in my Literal Accomplishment of Scripture Prophecies. The reader is to observe further, that the true reason why I have so seldom taken notice of those completions in the course of these notes, notwithstanding their being so very ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... remains of which are to be seen in many places. In the grass itself, and round the edge of these groups so artistically assorted by the hand of Nature, lies slyly hidden the "wait-a-bit" bush,[49] according to the literal translation from the Dutch, whose thorny entanglements no one ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... was a ringer," continued the Captain as he helped himself to another layer of waffles. "Wonder if Clemmie took what you said about launching out as literal?" ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... offered to me there was extended with equal warmth to little Mabel, who soon arrived, a most forlorn little maiden. She was only three years old, and she had not seen me for some weeks; her passion of delight was pitiful; she clung to me, in literal fashion, for weeks afterwards, and screamed if she lost sight of me for a moment; it was long before she got over the separation and the terror of her lonely journey from Sibsey and London in charge only of the guard. But she was a "winsome wee thing", and ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... Jesus comfort his friends who are left? As we read over the story of the sorrow of the Bethany home we find the answer to our question. You say, "He brought back their dead, thus comforting them with the literal undoing of the work of death and grief. If only he would do this now, in every case where love cries to him, that would be comfort indeed." But we must remember that the return of Lazarus to his home was only a temporary restoration. He came back to the old ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... thought is the fulness." Lewes paraphrases it, "for the highest degree of organization gives the highest degree of thought." The difference is intentional, since Lewes himself criticises the translation of Ritter. Ritter's translation is certainly the more literal, but the fact that such diversity is possible suggests one of the chief elements of uncertainty that hamper our interpretation of the thought of antiquity. Unfortunately, the mind of the commentator has usually been directed towards such subtleties, rather than towards ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... eighteenth century that music began to be cultivated as an art in America.[391:1] Up to that time "the service of song in the house of the Lord" had consisted, in most worshiping assemblies on this continent, in the singing of rude literal versifications of the Psalms and other Scriptures to some eight or ten old tunes handed down by tradition, and variously sung in various congregations, as modified by local practice. The coming in of "singing by rule" was nearly coincident with the introduction of Watts's psalms and hymns, and ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the Jewish religion, it will be remembered that the tree appears mysteriously connected with the beginning of life and is interwoven with the first ideas of human action and experience. The literal sense, however, of the allegory in Genesis concerning the woman, the tree, and the serpent, and its meaning as generally accepted by laymen and the uneducated among the priesthood, has little in common with its true significance as understood by ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... proofs taken out of the Old Testament, and urged in the New, being sometimes not to be found in the Old, nor urged in the New, according to the literal and obvious sense, which they appear to bear in their supposed places in the Old, and, therefore, not proofs according to the rules of interpretation established by reason, and acted upon in interpreting ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... spite of his keen observation, never thought for a moment of the true state of the case. He was a very literal unimaginative man, and having once learned to regard Brian as an old family friend and as his doctor, he never dreamed of regarding him in the light of his daughter's lover. Also, as is not unfrequently the case when a man has only one child, ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... unrelated and indefinite to be spoken of as forming a school, seem to stretch out a hand on one side to those who think that all is legend, asking them to accept a historical basis; on the other side they say to their fellow Christians that there is a growing danger lest, in clinging to a literal and unique meaning, which cannot be defended before the increasing knowledge of the day, the spiritual meaning should be entirely lost. There is a danger of losing "the story of the Christ," with that thought of the Christ which has been the support and inspiration ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... infallible; we desire only to be told on what evidence that great and awful fact concerning it properly rests. It would seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser than argument—as if it had been felt that nothing short of this literal and close inspiration could preserve the facts on which Christianity depends. The history of the early world is a history everywhere of marvels. The legendary literature of every nation upon earth tells ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... with the personages, is anything but choice. There is (barring a possible double meaning or two) nothing of the kind generally known as licentious; it is the merely foul and dirty language of common folk at all times, introduced, not with humorous extravagance in the Rabelaisian fashion, but with literal realism. If there had been a little less of this, the piece would have been much improved; but even as it is, it is a capital example of farce, just as Ralph Roister Doister is of a rather rudimentary kind of ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... or the ut of the Latin. Nee eme vitzn, nap hibe, I see that you are lax; Nee aguteran, Domincotze amo misa ea vitzaca, I know that you have not heard mass Sunday; where vitzaca or vitzcauh is passive perfect, and the literal rendering is, I know, on Sunday your mass was not heard. I desire that you may live here, Nee eme iuide cteo naqum, in which cteo is an active perfect participle, and the verb naqum, I desire, ever requires this construction. The verb queem, I command, is peculiar likewise ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... to recognise two systems of ideas, two bodies of symbols and superstitions altogether distinct—in a word, two religions: the one altogether sensible, derived from the adoration of natural phenomena, and by its forms, as well as by its literal development, reminding us of the polytheism of the Greeks; the other founded upon a material pantheism, metaphysical, mysterious, sacerdotal, and presenting the most astonishing conformity with the religions of the East. That last has received the name of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... he lived for, his literal daily bread. I suppose what would be prosperity to him would be miserably insufficient for some other people. I wonder how we can help being conscious, in the midst of our comforts and pleasures, of the lives which are being starved to death in more ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... The literal interpretation of [bli makom] is, there is "no place" clean of defilement; but the word [makom] being used to designate God (see above, chapter II, n. 35), suggests the interpretation, "without mention of the name ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... tradition, as the author says in a prefatory letter addressed to Joseph ibn Aknin, his favorite disciple. He believes that even those to whom the book appeals are often puzzled and confused by the apparent inconsistencies between the literal interpretation of the Bible and the evidence of reason, that they do not know whether to take Scriptural expressions as symbolic or allegoric, or to accept them in their literal meaning, and that they fall a prey to doubt, and long for a guide. Maimonides is prepared ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... them orders quietly, which must have been to search the house and grounds for Monsieur de Pepicot. As we returned to the hall, the Count questioned me, watching me sharply the while. I was perfectly safe in telling the literal truth, though not all of it: how Monsieur de Pepicot was a stranger to me, how I had never spoken to him before yesterday, how I knew nothing of his business, and so forth. Of course I said nothing of his midnight walk or of having conversed with him at all after going to ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... really had a good deal in it. I had been in New York, and knew the length of Broadway; and at the recollection, felt flattered by the thought of being conveyed in an open chariot drawn by four or even eight horses, with nodding plumes, (literal ones for the horses,—only metaphorical ones for me,) past those stately buildings fluttering with handkerchiefs, and through streets black with people thronging to see the man who had solved the riddle of Africa. And then ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... troubling themselves very little whether the meaning is exact or not. One's translation is sure to be full of gross blunders, but the supreme blunder is that of translating at all when one is trying to catch not a fact but a feeling. If translate one must, we had best begin by trying to be literal, under protest that it matters not a straw whether we succeed. Twelfth-century art was not precise; still less "precieuse," like Moliere's ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... W. S. Dugdale. Another version of great merit, of both the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is that of Mr. A. J. Butler. It is accompanied by a scholarly and valuable comment, and I owe much to Mr. Butler's work. But through what seems to me occasional excess of literal fidelity his English is now and then somewhat crabbed. "He overacts the office of an interpreter," I cite again from Howell, "who doth enslave himself too strictly to words or phrases. One may be so over-punctual in words that he may mar ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... the early bird that gets, or is bound to get, the worm. I mean it in a literal sense. Our people go to business at a much earlier hour and go home much later. There is quite a number of them in your line of ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... expected from the Liberator Czar was not forthcoming, and the democracy they hoped for was far from being realized, they became desperate, and determined to demand their rights by force. The peasants, too, sobering up from the intoxication, the figurative as well as the literal, caused by the vodka drunk in honor of their newly-acquired volyushka (sweet liberty), discovered that the emancipation ukase of the czar had been craftily intercepted by the bureaucrats, and their dream of owning the land they had hitherto cultivated as serfs would never come true. Russia was rife ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... beginning God created,' but a more literal and spiritual rendering would make the pivotal statement, 'God creates.' Now we know there can be no beginning or end to Omnipotence, hence there must be a continuous creating, and thus the term 'beginning' could only refer to the manifestation of what had already been ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... the soul. And a victory really won over a sensual sin is already a challenge sounded to our most spiritual sin. And it is this discovery that has given to fasting the place it has held in all the original, resolute, and aggressive ages of the Church. With little or nothing in their Lord's literal teaching to make His people fast, they have been so bent on their own spiritual deliverance, and they have heard and read so much about the deliverances both of body and of soul that have been attained by fasting and its accompaniments, that they have taken to it in their despair, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... one to detect and sniff gastronomic possibilities in the humblest materials. Joseph Bourgogne looked the cook. His phiz gave us faith in him; eyes small and discriminating; nose upturned, nostrils expanded and receptive; mouth saucy in the literal sense. His voice, moreover, was a cook's,—thick in articulation, dulcet in tone. He spoke as if he deemed that a throat was created for better uses than laboriously manufacturing words,—as if the object of a mouth were to receive tribute, not to give commands,—as if that pink stalactite, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the first line springs in part from the fact that the custom is not elsewhere spoken of. The second line may pass. The third defies literal translation. It means 'no long tongues thrust out like the tongue of a thirsty Apulian bitch'. But the omission of all mention both of 'protrusion' and of the 'dog days' makes the Latin almost ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... We cannot always press the words of the Lord to their utmost literal meaning. I suppose He used language a great deal as we do, to be taken at its face value, and not screwed and pressed and tortured into literal exactness until all the spirit is taken out of it? But these words sound ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... shown himself far and away the ablest of the opposition Senators. He had as much intellect as any of them; and he had what theorists, such as he, usually lack, skill at "grand tactics"—the management of men in the mass. His one weakness—and that, from my standpoint, a great one—was a literal belief in democratic institutions and in the inspiring but in practice pernicious principle of exact ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... volume, a considerable number of notes are introduced. These notes the compiler had some hesitation in inserting, from a feeling that many of them were mere literal explanations or illustrations, conveying generally but a very poor idea of the deeper meaning which the proverbs themselves are capable of yielding; and also in deference to opinions which have been expressed ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... from among literal hundreds and thousands, and they were cared for far more tenderly than the masters cared for themselves. There was a reason in it, for upon their speed and endurance depended the life of the outlaw. Moreover, the policy of Jim Boone was ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... distinguished medical director in that department, equally distinguished for the success with which he has led forward the musical education of New England, trained a corps of buglers to converse with each other by long and short bugle-notes, and thus to carry information with literal accuracy from point to point at any distance within which the tones of a bugle could be heard. It will readily be seen that there are many occasions in military affairs when such means of conversation might prove of inestimable value. Mr. Tuttle, the astronomer, on duty in the same campaign, ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... but the whole drawing lacks that individual something which we call Style. In the Lalanne drawings we see foliage convincingly represented by means of the mere outlines and a few subtle strokes of the pen. There is no attempt at the literal rendering of natural objects in detail, all is accomplished by suggestion: and while I do not wish to be understood as insisting upon such a severely simple style, much less upon the purist theory that the function ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... when he was in her visible presence; but now he thought he understood her better than he had ever done then. He had, he felt, not grasped the inner meaning of much that she said. Words might convey but little in their literal sense and yet give to a sympathetic listener an insight into the depths of the speaker's nature, or hint at a thought too finely spun ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... the Christian life be charity, gentleness, forgiveness, non-resistance to evil, then all war is a violation of the faith. The question is not unimportant. It is not a subject which you can toy with, or put aside as having no immediate bearing on life and duty. If the literal application of the teaching of Christ to social and political life be impossible, then the rationalists are right when they urge us to drop a religion which we profess on Sunday and repudiate on Monday. If the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... contracts his hands, &c. 'Thallus manus contrahit, tu patronos.' The pun is (a) bad and (b) untranslatable into reasonably good English. The literal meaning is 'Thallus contracts his hands, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... I haven't upset his blamed theology," Reed objected. "I'm sound enough; I wouldn't upset a mouse. Ask Ramsdell if I've ever argued against his belief in the literal greening apple, 'a wee bit hunripe, sir,' upon ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... taste and execution, that the Dean expressed a desire to have them translated into English. Dr. Gore told him that the author, a Mr. Macgowran, lived at a little distance, and that he would be proud to furnish a literal translation of his own composition either in Latin or English, for he was well skilled in both languages. Mr. Gore accordingly sent for the bard, the Laureate of the Plains, as he called himself, who came immediately. "I am very well pleased," said the Dean, "with your composition. The ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... asuspicion aroused by the substitution of German customs and motif and word-play, together with contemporary literary allusion, allusion to literary mediocrities and obscurities, of such a nature as to preclude the possibility of the book's being a literal translation ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... said No—which was the literal truth—but then it would not have been the whole truth, for they knew quite well that Dolly had been milked, and also who had done it. And their mother had always taught them that to make a person believe a lie is nearly as bad as telling him one. ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... dissent from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself. Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that those magnificent speeches of Wolsey ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... these days, Letitia," said Billy, with the greatest innocence of mien and expression, a manner he always uses in speaking to Letitia's rather literal directness and in which he delights greatly. "They undress. You are unclothed enough as to ankles and if you roll the sleeves of your tennis shirt to your shoulders, take off your collar and tuck in the ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... love of God. In this state a man can distinguish truth from falsehood, pure gold from base metal, in matters of belief; he can see the connexion of the various dogmas, and their harmony with reason; and in reading Scripture he can penetrate beneath the literal to the spiritual meaning. But when Clement speaks of reason or knowledge, he does not mean merely intellectual training. "He who would enter the shrine must be pure," he says, "and purity is to think holy things." And again, "The more a man loves, the more deeply ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... the while Karl Steinmetz was storming in his guttural English at the door, upbraiding hired waiters for their stupidity in accepting two literal facts literally. The one fact was that they were forbidden to admit any one without a ticket; the second fact being that tickets were not to be obtained at the price of either one or the other of the two great motives ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... Biblical criticism, have been largely accepted among the most educated clergy. Very few of them would now deny the antiquity of the world, the antiquity of man, or the antiquity of death, or would maintain that the Mosaic cosmogony was a true and literal account of the origin of the globe and of man, or would very strenuously argue either for the Mosaic authorship or the infallibility of ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... rather a nice cottage when it's launched," said the Captain, pointing to a building in process of erection, which stood so close to the edge of the Thames that its being launched seemed as much a literal allusion ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... find an explanation unnecessary, for to a fool everything is right, and he finds no difficulty anywhere. And if a really wise man reads them, there will be but two ways in which he will consider them. If he takes them in their literal sense and thinks them bad, he will say, This is foolishness, and in so doing he says nothing at all against the foundation of the faith." The School of Shammai, who lived before Christ, and the School ...
— Hebrew Literature
... borrow from all science, and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the bull by the horns in a literal as well as figurative sense, the lad began gradually to develop into that terrible embodiment of unrest—a boy. He exhibited no very marked peculiarities up to this time to distinguish him from other youths; but just grew into the conglomerate mass of good, bad and indifferent ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... definite repetitions on various degrees of the scale.[18] For an elaborate example of Transposition nothing can surpass the opening movement of Cesar Franck's D Minor Symphony, the entire first part of which consists of a literal repetition in F minor of what has been previously announced in ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... part of this little fracas is the denial of his Lordship, as to pilfering the thoughts and fancies of others; for it so happens, that the first passage of The Bride of Abydos, the poem in question, is almost a literal and unacknowledged translation from Goethe, which was pointed out in some of the periodicals soon after the ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... to keep within the license accorded to them, we must compel the prisoners to accept whatever injustice or outrage the unrestrained despots of the ranges have the whim to inflict upon them. There are desperate revolts at times—desperate in the literal sense, since they have no hope of relief in them, but only the tragic rage against tyranny which will sometimes blaze up in victims—and on the other hand there are officials who will resign their positions rather than connive at abuses. But every means is taken to ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... "The literal meaning of the word is 'cultivable land.' As to its appropriateness, you can judge for yourselves. I do not know who bestowed upon it this misfit of a name, but it must have been a hardy explorer, who did it in a ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... took the oath required of them, and the king at once displayed the utmost zeal in exacting literal performance of the ordinances contained in the Book of the Law. His first step was to purify the temple: Hilkiah and his priests overthrew all the idols contained in it, and all the objects that had been fashioned in honour of strange gods—the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... good Mademoiselle Cormon," which, from the lips of the beaux esprits of society, means that she was as ignorant as a carp, and rather a poor fool; but many persons of her own calibre took the remark in its literal sense, ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... in contact with them. But that individuals, and even families, of extraordinary stature and strength existed in the earliest ages cannot be denied, except by those who regard the narrative of Scripture as equally fabulous with the fictions of the poets; although the statements are literal and exact, occur in a variety of incidental notices, and are confirmed by discoveries related by authors of ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... seizing her plump hand, pressed it to his lips with all the violence of real transport. The nymph, whose passions nature had filled to the brim, could not hear such a rhapsody unmoved. Being an utter stranger to addresses of this kind, she understood every word of it in the literal acceptation; she believed implicitly in the truth of the encomiums he had bestowed, and thought it reasonable he should be rewarded for the justice he had done to her qualifications, which had hitherto been almost altogether ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... consciousness. And if the fugitive elements want to venture forth they must be correspondingly disguised, in order to pass the censor. Freud calls this disguising or paraphrasing process the dream disfigurement. The literal is thereby displaced by the figurative, an allusion intimated through a nebulous atmosphere. Thus, in the following example, an unconscious death wish is exhibited. In the examination of a lady's dream it struck me that the motive of ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... political picture was a joking, profligate, careless king, nominally absolute—the heads of great houses paying court to, but in reality governing, that king, whilst revelling with him on the plunder of a nation, and a set of crouching, grovelling vassals (the literal meaning of vassal is a wretch), who, after allowing themselves to be horsewhipped, would take a bone if flung to them, and be grateful; so that in love with mummery, though he knew what Christianity was, no wonder he admired such a church as that ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... Hellenic influence. The Hindu astronomical terminology reveals the same relationship to western thought, for Var[a]ha-Mihira (6th century A.D.), a contemporary of [A]ryabha[t.]a, entitled a work of his the B[r.]hat-Sa[m.]hit[a], a literal translation of [Greek: megale suntaxis] of Ptolemy;[306] and in various ways is this interchange of ideas apparent.[307] It could not have been at all unusual for the ancient Greeks to go to India, ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... obscenities of Zola, whereat Ouida protested that they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe the life and emotions of a woman whose whole life is given up to love, and then, as we know, he chose a singularly ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... not have been right to break up the company. When Don Quixote, carried away by his feelings like a Sicilian facchino, came to the assistance of Don Gayferos by drawing his sword and attacking the Moorish puppets, he broke up Master Peter's company in a very literal sense, and had to pay four and a half reals for King Marsilio of Saragossa and five and a quarter for the Emperor Carlo Magno; but it is not clear how large or how splendid ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... if you had told him so; but it is a literal fact that he almost never addressed his daughter save in the ironical form. Whenever he addressed her he gave her pleasure; but she had to cut her pleasure out of the piece, as it were. There were portions left over, light remnants ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... day in the Nineteenth century that one comes in contact with a human being who has had to submit to the "ordeal by fire" in this literal mediaeval fashion; who has endured perils, insults, physical privations and torments, coupled with intense and ceaseless anxiety for years; and this in extreme youth before the troubles and difficulties of life have more gradually and gently taught the lessons of endurance ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... completely his own way. He was too robustly original to "transcribe" well, and his bold emphatic speech, curbed to the task of reproducing the choice and pregnant sobriety of Attic style, is apt to eliminate everything but the sobriety. The "transcribed" Greek is often yet flatter than "literal" versions of Greek verse are wont to be, and when Browning speaks in his own person the style recovers itself with a sudden and vehement bound, like a noble wild creature abruptly released from restraint. Among the finest of these ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... a treasure of Greek learning: history and fable, philosophy and grammar, were alike at his command; and he read the poems of Homer in the schools of Florence. It was from his explanation that Boccace composed [* and transcribed a literal prose version of the Iliad and Odyssey, which satisfied the thirst of his friend Petrarch, and which, perhaps, in the succeeding century, was clandestinely used by Laurentius Valla, the Latin interpreter. It was from his narratives that the same Boccace collected the materials for his treatise ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... those of the original letters. But it is not surprising that, after the lapse of so long an interval, Napoleon's memory should somewhat have failed him. However, it will not, I presume, be deemed unimportant if I present to the reader literal copies of this correspondence; together with the explanation of some curious circumstances ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that, beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of kindling, which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of wood, ended my domestic duties for the day. Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed in the palace, and I lay ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time, moreover, in trying to bring within the four corners of his definition some uses of the terms of beauty, which are really only applied to objects by way of analogy, and are not meant to predicate the beautiful in any literal or scientific sense. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... toisi epesi poieon}: "even in the verses which he composed," in which he might be expected as a poet to go somewhat beyond the literal truth.] ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... the excitement of ineffable and horrid joy, they whip him round the circle, that he may expose each part of his body to the flame, while the other part is fanned by the cool air, that he may thus undergo the literal operation of slow roasting. During this abhorrent process, the children fill the circle in convulsions of laughter; and the women begin to thrust their burning torches into his body, lacerating the quick of the ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... In other places it was necessary to omit or to condense passages. Wherever this is done attention is called to it in the notes. The chief omission is a portion of the section on dialects. Otherwise the translation is practically literal. Additional bibliography of psychological and criminological works likely to be generally ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... with the STORY OF SIEGFRIED, still another version of the time-honored legend. The story as I shall tell it you is not in all respects a literal rendering of the ancient myth; but I have taken the liberty to change and recast such portions of it as I have deemed advisable. Sometimes I have drawn materials from one version of the story, sometimes from another, and sometimes largely from my own imagination alone. Nor shall I be accused of ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... speak to him with diffidence. Courtiers, submissive in the presence of their sovereign, are only the more ready to caricature him; with little good breeding, they called those answers they so much dreaded, Les coups de boutoir du Roi.—[The literal meaning of the phrase "coup de boutoir," is a thrust from the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... mischiefs, its foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the poem. The picture of life held up before us is the literal ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... particular eviction was not in strict conformity with the landlord's right. Mr. Morley offered to consider the question of right, and added that what was much wanted in Ireland was 'a strict and scrupulous and literal spirit of legality.' Later on the same evening, Mr. Dillon made a vigorous appeal to the Chief Secretary not to give the aid of armed force to carry out evictions. Mr. Morley responded with alacrity. 'I for one am ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... is well to use the word "informal" in the invitation, that guests may not put themselves to inconvenience as regards dress. It must be remembered that this term is too often misleading in its nature, and many a sensitive guest has been seriously annoyed by finding herself, after a too literal interpretation of the "informal" character of the entertainment, in a crowd of gay butterflies, a misuse of the word that ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... dull serving folk," she said to those nearest her. "One cannot pay for wit with wages and livery. They can but obey the literal word. Sir John, leaving me in haste this morning, I forgot a question I would have asked, and sent ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... support the Constitution. But he believed that the Constitution should be interpreted in the light of the Declaration of Independence, so as to be the law of life to a great, powerful and free people. To this principle of interpretation, all strict or narrow criticism, founded on its literal meaning, must yield. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... it's in mine mouf," answered literal Demi, putting out his tongue, with a chocolate drop on it, thinking she alluded ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... passengers. No second cabin, but plenty of steerage. She sailed, you remember, from Naples. He had been doing some work, some very important work, in the Aquarium. The only other person of consequence—I am speaking in the most literal and un-snobbish sense—in the first cabin, was Benson. No" (with a lifted hand), "don't interrupt me. Benson, as we all know, was an international figure. But Benson was getting old. His son could be trusted to carry on the House of Benson. In fact, every one suspected that the son ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... his own, during the undertaking; but it is probable that these examinations were the result rather of the contradictory versions already existing, than of a desire to make a perfect transcript of the original. And in those days, what is called literal translation was less cultivated than at present. If something like the general sense could be decorated with the easy gracefulness of a practised poet; if the charms of metrical cadence and a pleasing fluency could be made consistent ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... terms 'increase' and 'diffusion' should receive literal interpretation in accordance with the evident intention of the testator; that such terms being logically distinct, the two purposes mentioned in the bequest were to be kept in view in the organization of the institution; that the increase of ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... code is founded on that of Austria. The civil code is a localized modification of the Code Napoleon. The first translation of the latter code was almost literal, and made without reference to the manners and historical antecedents of Servia: some of the blunders in it were laughable:—Hypotheque was translated as if it had been Apotheke, and made out to be a depot of drugs! When the translator was asked for the reason of this extraordinary ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... your readers oblige me by giving me either a literal or poetical translation of the following lines, taken from Foulis, Rom. Treasons, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... the Body. Intelligent people who are also reverent and good, in their anxiety to be faithful to the letter of dogma as well as to its spirit, prefer to cling to these words rather than confess, what is quite certain, that an absolutely literal sense was attached to these words by the framers of them; they were scientifically ignorant of the fact that matter is disintegrated and disseminated so rigorously that there may be component particles of a hundred of his predecessors in one human body now existent. No symbolical interpretation ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Swiss scenery until he can place himself front to front with one of those mighty crags, in broad daylight, with no "effect" to aid him, and work it out, boss by boss, only with such conventionality as its infinitude renders unavoidable. We have seen that a literal facsimile is impossible, just as a literal facsimile of the carving of an entire cathedral front is impossible. But it is as vain to endeavor to give any conception of an Alpine cliff without minuteness of detail, and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... of the Italian subject Cerruti against the Republic of Colombia, differences arose between the parties to the arbitration in regard to the scope and extension of the award, of which certain articles were contested by Colombia, while Italy claimed their literal fulfillment. The award having been made by the President of the United States, as an act of friendly consideration and with the sole view to an impartial composition of the matter in dispute, I could not but feel deep concern at such a miscarriage, and while unable to accept ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... into existence with the establishment of the American Union—the one founded on the sovereignty of the States and the continuance of slavery was espoused by the hot-blooded citizens of the South; the other, upon the literal construction of the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created free and equal," and the supremacy of the general government over States Rights, and this was the slogan of the cool, calculating, but equally brave people ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... of fortune that fixed Ann Arbor as the location of the University of Michigan. A literal interpretation of history may suggest that politics and speculation had their share in the selection of the site, but these factors might have operated quite as easily in favor of some other Michigan village. The fact remains ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... "Heptameron," Crebillon fils, or of matter-of-fact Monsieur le Docteur Maitre Rabelais,—works which, more or less, carry a moral instruction in every tale, which, like the tales of the "Malice of Women," in the unexpurged edition of the literal translation of the "Arabian Nights," contains much more of practical moral lessons, even if in the flowery and warm, spiced language of the Orient, than any supposed nastiness, on account of which they are classed among ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... inward man, And outward, like a clan and clan, Have always been at daggers-drawing, And one another clapper-clawing. 80 Not that they really cuff, or fence, But in a Spiritual Mystick sense; Which to mistake, and make 'em squabble In literal fray's abominable. 'Tis heathenish, in frequent use 85 With Pagans and apostate Jews, To offer sacrifice of bridewells, Like modern Indians to their idols; And mongrel Christians of our times, That expiate less with greater crimes, 90 And call the foul abomination, Contrition and mortification. ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... of his civilisation, the glory that was Greece. The credit of such random compilations as that which "E.S.S." and Mr. George Allen have just effected is quite secure. It is the pure, pedantic, literal editions, the complete works of this author or that author which are forgotten. It is such books as this that have revolutionised the destiny of the world. Great things like Christianity or Platonism have never ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... brings with him when he tells us the impossible. And then his style, in its ardent and luminous simplicity, flexible to every bend of the spirit which it clothes with flesh, helps him in the idiomatic translation of dreams. The visions of Swedenborg are literal translations of the imagination, and need to be retranslated. Coleridge is equally faithful to the thing seen and to the laws of that new world into which he ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... its prayers." This caution is intended as a reply to a sagacious critic who censures the description, because it is not an exact and prosaic inventory of the characteristics of the Lake of Como!—When Melnotte, for instance, talks of birds "that syllable the name of Pauline" (by the way, a literal translation from an Italian poet), he is not thinking of ornithology, but probably of the Arabian Nights. He is venting the extravagant, but natural, enthusiasm of ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... more treasures than were ever dreamed of in ancient Golconda. There was everything the soldier's heart might desire, from gun grease and cigarette paper down to wine and provisions; the whole stored away in a literal honey-comb of shelves and drawers with which the ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... own,' might, on the worst view of the case, have suggested greater diligence at home; but on a wider view English book-work is by no means a 'poor thing.' Its excellence at certain periods is as striking as its inferiority at others, and it is a literal fact that there is no art or craft connected with books in which England, at one time or another, has not held the ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... not share his beliefs. She was a stern realist, a sneering sceptic, in the most literal ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... place; and he was so loved and trusted by the firemen of his district, that no mayor, however beset by applicants for office, had ever dreamed of removing him. In all of Uncle Ith's limited relations with the world, he was esteemed an honest man; and his word would have possessed the literal novelty of being as good as his note, had necessity ever required him to borrow money. But Uncle Ith was frugal, and made his small salary suffice for himself and a family of ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... occasions, was always ascribed by distant hearers to an outbreak of hostilities. If either speaker had addressed the other by name, the advent of the Sergeant-at-Arms would have been the next thing looked for. On this occasion Laetitia's literal transmission of "Are you going to help the tongue or not, papa?" recalled his wandering mind to his responsibilities. Sally's liver-wing—she was the visitor—was pleading at his elbow for its complement ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... own person, the literal meaning of the overworked phrase, "frozen with amazement." Before him stood the most dangerous man in Europe; a man who had done murder and worse; a man only in name, a demon in nature. His long black eyes half-closed, his perfectly chiselled ivory face ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... His favourite political picture was a joking, profligate, careless king, nominally absolute—the heads of great houses paying court to, but in reality governing, that king, whilst revelling with him on the plunder of a nation, and a set of crouching, grovelling vassals (the literal meaning of vassal is a wretch), who, after allowing themselves to be horsewhipped, would take a bone if flung to them, and be grateful; so that in love with mummery, though he knew what Christianity was, no wonder he admired such a church as that of Rome, and ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... painting is an art which merely addresses the eye; it does not in any particular exercise the moral sense. And second, painting, in common with all the other arts, implies the dangerous quality of imagination. A man of imagination is never moral; he outsoars literal demarcations and reviews life under too many shifting lights to rest content with the invidious distinctions ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after a time. "You care for me, don't you? You don't think I'd sit here and plead with you if I didn't care for you? I'm crazy about you, and that's the literal truth. You're like wine to me. I want you to come with me. I want you to do it quickly. I know how difficult this family business is, but you can arrange it. Come with me down to New York. We'll work out something later. ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... happiness before her; but the picture he drew of her prospects justified his misery, at being only able to goad her on, instead of drawing her back. He was absolutely amazed at himself. He had spoken only the literal truth, when he said that he had been unconscious of the true nature of the feelings that always drew him towards her, though only to assert his independence, and make experiments by teasing in his ironically courteous ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mean that!" Elizabeth never could get accustomed to this literal streak in the small maiden's character; and, in consequence, her little preachments often received an unexpected shower-bath. "I meant not to promise to do favors for other folks unless we can and will ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... few pages of a very close literal translation, which will enable the reader to form some idea of the nature and style of the original, and to see how far it has been departed from in ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... of the boy and the wolf, had then a literal application. Every child in the days of our fathers knew the story of Putnam, and the she-wolf which he dragged from its den. This and similar tales go far to make up the popular reputation of the hero, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... will not show how Shakespeare did it, and in the second place, if it does, it will show that he did not do it by analysis. In the third place,—to say nothing of not doing it by analysis,—if he had analysed it before he did it, he could not have analysed it afterward in the literal and modern sense. In the fourth place, even if Shakespeare were able to do his work by analysing it before he did it, it does not follow ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... years—composes an oil painting, as it were, from the hints and suggestions of a water-colour sketch long since designed and long since half forgotten—is essentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick of repetition which sciolists might think to detect in the present instance. Again we must needs fall back on the inevitable and indefinable test of style; a test which could be of no avail if we were foolish enough to ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... prisoner's side, were illegal; but Monseigneur de Beauvais was well aware that anything would be legal which effected his purpose, and that once Jeanne was disposed of, the legality or illegality of the proceedings would be of small importance. I have thought it right to give to the best of my power a literal translation of these examinations, notwithstanding their great length; as, except in one book, now out of print and very difficult to procure, no such detailed translation,(8) so far as I am aware, exists; and it seems to me that, even at the ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... Tale, as Byron perceived, is superior to the execution. The style is laboured and involved, and the narrative long-winded and tiresome. It is, perhaps, an adaptation, though not a literal translation, of a German historical romance. But the motif—a son predestined to evil by the weakness and sensuality of his father, a father punished for his want of rectitude by the passionate criminality of his son, is the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... that he complains of. There may have been a want of the form of giving notice; but perhaps this may have been an excuse for the want of that notice—namely, that the resolutions of this day fortnight were proposed by the founder of this Association, as simply and entirely the literal and the sole reiteration of the resolutions upon which he founded this Association. He had no doubt upon the subject. It is a maxim that all pledges and tests are to be taken in the sense and in the spirit of the person ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... from his experience of Wang's profession, which he followed for some years,—until he became too large to go in a hat, or be produced from his father's sleeve. The money you left with me has been expended on his education. He has gone through the Tri-literal Classics, but, I think, without much benefit. He knows but little of Confucius, and absolutely nothing of Mencius. Owing to the negligence of his father, he associated, perhaps, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... with him when he tells us the impossible. And then his style, in its ardent and luminous simplicity, flexible to every bend of the spirit which it clothes with flesh, helps him in the idiomatic translation of dreams. The visions of Swedenborg are literal translations of the imagination, and need to be retranslated. Coleridge is equally faithful to the thing seen and to the laws of that new world into which he ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... Bullen's 'Old Plays,' vol. ii.). The first performance of the tragedy we may thus assign to a day immediately preceding the 27th of August, 1619. When we remember that Barnavelt was executed on May 13th of the same year, we have in this play another striking instance of the literal interpretation given by dramatists of the day to Hamlet's definition of the purpose ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... l. 229. stifling: partly literal, since the widow's weed is close-wrapping and voluminous—partly metaphorical, since the ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... in her own apartment. She longed to converse with him at her ease—to hear his tale from his own lips—to sympathize with and console him. Oh! who could blame her if in so doing she departed from the strict and literal meaning of that vow which had bound her to consider her relations as dead to her? But the fault—if fault it were—was so venial, that to justify it is to invest it with an importance which it would not have possessed ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... matter to Fothadh, his poet and adviser. The learning and piety of the bard were well known; and a decision favourable to the clergy was the result. This decision was given in a short poem of four quatrains which is preserved in the preface to the "Martyrology" of Aengus. The following is a literal translation:— ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... about joyously on his communistic errand. But bees, one must remember, have heavy bodies and relatively small wings: in the rarefied air of mountain heights they can't manage to support themselves in the most literal sense. Hence their place in these high stations of the world is taken by the gay and airy butterflies, which have lighter bodies and a much bigger expanse of wing-area to buoy them up. In the valleys and plains the bee competes at an advantage ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... "purpose"), and, when so "acquired," then began to serve the "purpose" assigned, the argument would not have involved the fallacy which we are now considering. But, as it stands, the argument reverts to the teleology of pre-Darwinian days—or the hypothesis of a "purpose" in the literal sense which sees the end from the beginning, instead of a "purpose" in the metaphorical sense of an adaptation that is evolved by the very ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... eye against his gun, which he was carrying before him; and after a minute's rueful look he joined heartily in the shouts of laughter of his father and brother at his expense, "Ah, Charley, brag is a good dog, but holdfast is a better. I never saw a more literal proof of the saying. There, jump up again, and I need not say look ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... are followed by their English equivalents. Literal translations have been followed, excepting a few instances where preference is shown for a clearer or more ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... I had not reflected on the nature of war. I merely knew it to be a science, cultivated chiefly by the human race, and that in its practice explosives are largely used. To "blow-up" effectively, whether in a literal or figurative sense, is difficult. To improve this power in war, and in the literal sense, I set myself to work. I invented a torpedo, which seemed to me better than any that had yet been brought out. To test its powers, I made a miniature fortification, ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... rejoined Willoughby, bowing gaily to me. Then taking up the whip—Dixon was a virtuoso in whips, and always carried one with six feet of handle and twelve feet of lash—he aimed at the team, collectively, a clip which, in the most literal sense, recoiled on himself. And so the officer's son and the sojer's son took their way together; to become, as I afterward learned, the most attached and mutually considerate friends on the track. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... point again to the fact that we are more likely to have made upon us, by an interpretative translation, an effect more nearly like that made upon the listener contemporary to the time of the making of the story than if the translation were literal. We are always forgetting the so obvious fact that the kind of metaphor or descriptive epithet of this sort or that, which would make a certain effect on the listener of the tenth century, will make a very different effect ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... a mixed dream and is due to more than one cause. The first part is literal in its fulfilment, and belongs to the spiritual class; the other part of the dream is subjective, and therefore allegorical in meaning. Together with the letter, it ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... terrific Scythe of Time (for I now discovered the literal import of that classical phrase) had not stopped, nor was it likely to stop, in its career. Down and still down, it came. It had already buried its sharp edge a full inch in my flesh, and my sensations grew indistinct and confused. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... back. Democracy like that was too much for her. The deacon himself left our church a few months later because he discovered that I did not believe in a literal hell of "fire ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... way. The meek will he guide in judgment; and the meek he will teach his way." But if men will undertake to explain scripture in their own strength and wisdom, what must we expect but to have them mangled and made havoc of, or explained in a mere mystical or literal sense? "The natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." See ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... no need to be so literal," returned Mrs. Challoner, reprovingly; for she was a gentlewoman of the old school, and nothing grieved her more than slipshod English or any idiom or idiotcy of modern parlance in the mouths of her bright young daughters: to speak of any young man except Dick without ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... however, in imitating Christianity. A few years ago Dr. D.C. Greene attended the preaching services of a modern Shinto sect, the "Ten-Ri-Kyo," the Heaven-Reason-Teaching, and was surprised to hear almost literal quotations from the "Sermon on the Mount"; the source of the sentiment and doctrine was not stated and very likely was not known to the speaker. Dr. Greene, who has given this sect considerable study, is satisfied that the insistence ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... indulged? These vices of youth are varnished over by the saying, that there must be time for 'sowing the wild oats,' and that 'wildest colts make the best horses.' These figurative oats are, however, generally like the literal ones; they are never to be eradicated from the soil; and as to the colts, wildness in them is an indication of high animal spirit, having nothing at all to do with the mind, which is invariably debilitated and debased by ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... style which has reference to the words and phrases used in speaking and writing. The secret of literary skill from any standpoint consists in putting the right word in the right place. In order to do this it is imperative to know the meaning of the words we use, their exact literal meaning. Many synonymous words are seemingly interchangeable and appear as if the same meaning were applicable to three or four of them at the same time, but when all such words are reduced to a final analysis it is clearly seen that there is a marked difference in their meaning. ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... you, preserve for me always the honor of your good graces; and believe, my charming Sister, that never brother in the world loved with such tenderness a sister so charming as mine; in short, believe, dear Sister, that without compliments, and in literal truth, I am yours ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the tendency to over-resolve, becomes unsatisfying to the impatient, who want results to come as they walk. Probably this is a reason that it is occasionally said that Emerson has no vital message for the rank and file. He has no definite message perhaps for the literal, but messages are all vital, as much, by reason of his indefiniteness, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... the signs can never be realized until actually witnessed, and their beauty is much heightened by the free play to which the arms of these people are accustomed, and the small and well-shaped hands for which they are remarkable. Among them can seldom be noticed in literal fact— ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... quite certain, and even those who contend for the literal interpretation of this part of the Bible will generally admit, that the purpose of the revelation is not to teach Science at all. It is to teach great spiritual and moral lessons, and it takes the facts of nature as they appear to ordinary people. ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... of the State indicates the early troubles through which it went, the literal interpretation being "To the stars (and stripes) through difficulties." The State is generally known now as the "Sunflower State," and for many years the sword has given place to the plowshare. But the very existence of Fort Riley shows that t ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... enough to brain a wild beast, and his staff to lean upon or to touch his sheep, while the ancient shepherd without firearms would surely still more require both. They will comfort me—a very beautiful verb, the literal meaning of which is to help another, choked with grief or fear, to breathe freely, and ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... of our readers a bad compliment. It is enough to say that a fund was raised for Flanagan's defence, and a threatening notice written to be pasted on the Bodagh Buie's door—of which elegant production the following is a literal copy:— ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... by a blue-and-white handkerchief knotted under her chin. The forehead was freely lined; and the lips opened, when they did open, on dark, unfrequent teeth. These observations Swan made as he moved forward to speak to her; for there was no special expressiveness or animation to relieve the literal stamp of her features. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... the thoroughly immature mind be made to realise the discomfort and misery that would inevitably attend wrong-doing. It was a truth, although not a literal truth. Many literal truths convey a false impression to the immature mind, whilst a symbolic truth may convey as true an impression as such a mind is capable ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... Batoche? But her intuitions were crystal clear. There were no breaks, no obscurations in her spiritual vision. It was evident that she had studied and communed direct with nature, and that her soul had grown in literal contact with the winds and the flowers, the trees and the water courses, and the pure untrammelled elements ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... most popular collection of English prose stories which had been translated from the Latin at the end of the fifteenth century, 'human beings are mere puppets, inhabiting the great fabric of mediaeval thought and mediaeval institution.... It was the work of the Renaissance to recover the literal and obvious sense of human life, as it was the work of the closely-allied Reformation to recover the literal sense of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... account of Henry Morgan's deeds at Maracaibo is taken from the narrative of John Esquemeling, but no attempt has been made to give a literal translation of his words. Morgan had passed through the Gulf of Venezuela, captured the town of Maracaibo and made his way through the narrow passage into the lake of the same name, where he captured ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... [Sidenote: Deut. 32. v. 21. Rom. 10. v. 19.] I will prouoke them to enuy (namely such as keepe not his Law) by a people, which is no people, and by a foolish nation will I anger them. This prophecie is fulfilled, according to the literal sense thereof, vpon all nations which obserue not the Law of God. All this which I haue written concerning the land of Pascatir, was told me by certaine Friers prdicants, which trauailed thither before euer the Tartars ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... to a third reason why, under the stress of war, English Christianity is hardly in revival, namely, Bible difficulties. The Prayer Book comes down to us from men who were held by a belief in the literal truth of the whole Bible. In so far as it has been an effective manual for ordinary people, it has been on the strength of an absolute dogma in their minds as to the "Word of God." That dogma has in a vague and somewhat ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... will translate them for you. The Greek hymns are all in rhythmical prose, like the Te Deum and the Gloria. A literal translation can be sung as well as the originals. You will then enter into the mind and spirit of the ancient Eastern Church before the days of ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... is! It may seem brutal of me to put a literal construction upon what you have used as a figure of speech, but let the truth come out. You are poor, unprotected, alone, and you ask me to go and leave you so! God knows it is little enough that I have it in my power to do, ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... went home with him—a long half-hour on the trolley, then up three flights into "light housekeeping" rooms in the back. There was cold meat on the table, and bread. The janitor's wife, good soul, had made a pot of coffee. "Light housekeeping" is a literal expression, let me tell you, and doctor's bills make it lighter. I followed him into the last room of the three. It looked different from the way I remembered it the afternoon before. When he turned the gas higher I saw why—the bed was gone—one of those stretcher things takes less room. ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... chief impression made on a near observer. In politics the Americans are first and foremost jurists, and indeed in a narrower and more literal sense than the English Imperialists, with whom, according to their old traditions, justice only serves as a cloak for their political ambitions. I cannot judge how far the Americans have become full-blooded Imperialists since their entry into the war, i.e., ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... bull by the horns in a literal as well as figurative sense, the lad began gradually to develop into that terrible embodiment of unrest—a boy. He exhibited no very marked peculiarities up to this time to distinguish him from other youths; but just grew into the conglomerate mass of good, bad and indifferent qualities ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... abounded on the seafloor: various isis coral, cornularian coral living in isolation, tufts of virginal genus Oculina formerly known by the name "white coral," prickly fungus coral in the shape of mushrooms, sea anemone holding on by their muscular disks, providing a literal flowerbed adorned by jellyfish from the genus Porpita wearing collars of azure tentacles, and starfish that spangled the sand, including veinlike feather stars from the genus Asterophyton that were like fine lace embroidered by the hands of water ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... lighted hall, when the lack of clear light adds to the horror of the scene. Note the Rembrandtesque effects in such phrases: 'aux tremblantes clartes,' 'l'ombre indistincte,' 'a travers l'ombre, on voit toutes les soifs infames,' and it ends in 'le triomphe de l'ombre,' a phrase in which the literal and the figurative are subtly blended together. On the other hand, how everything sparkles and gleams in Le Mariage de Roland! Olivier's sword-point glitters like the eye of a demon, while Durandal shines as he falls on his foeman's head; the sunshine is all ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... maids? Do they meet the smiles of parents with feigned tears? They weep copiously within the very threshold of the nuptial chamber. No, so the gods help me, they do not truly grieve."—Catullus, lxvi. 15.]— [A more literal translation. D.W.] ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... by the merest accident, intercepted the enclosed prescription. As it seems rather a sorry jest, and tends to attract attention to Miss Dodd and her movements, he has ventured with some misgivings to send it back with a literal translation, on reading which it will be for Miss Dodd to decide whether it ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... superior to every man who makes you laugh, whether by making faces or verses? Are you aware that you have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so far as to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your royal delight? Now if a man can only be allowed to stand on a dais, or raised platform, and look down on his neighbor who is exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right!—first-rate performance!—and all the rest of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... called and seemed much excited by the fact that he had received a despatch from Berlin in which the German Government—which, of course, means the Emperor—had strongly and finally declared against everything like an arbitration tribunal. He was clearly disconcerted by this too literal acceptance of his own earlier views, and said that he had sent to M. de Staal insisting that the meeting of the subcommittee on arbitration, which had been appointed for this day (Friday), should be adjourned on ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... little further this "babble of green fields" and of bare nature in general as superior to artificial imagery, for the poetical purposes of the fine arts. In landscape painting the great artist does not give you a literal copy of a country, but he invents and composes one. Nature, in her natural aspect, does not furnish him with such existing scenes as he requires. Everywhere he presents you with some famous city, or celebrated ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... himself from joviality during the time of his preparation, but he judiciously combines study with amusement—never stirring without his translation in his pocket, and even, if he goes to the theatre, beguiling the time between the pieces by learning the literal order of a new paragraph. Every school possesses circulating copies of these works: they have been originally purchased in some wild moment of industrious extravagance by a new man; and when he passed, he sold them for five shillings to another, who, in turn, disposed of them ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... of letters, in the transition from hieroglyphical to literal expression, it is not to be wondered if the custom of expressing ideas by personal images, which had so long prevailed, should still retain its influence on the mind, though the use of letters had rendered the practical ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... profess to speak in the name of religion? At the same time, though we bring support to the New Testament, it would, indeed, be a misconception if these, or any such remarks, were quoted as sustaining its literal accuracy—an idea from which so much harm has come in the past. It would, indeed, be a good, though an unattainable thing, that a really honest and open-minded attempt should be made to weed out from that record the obvious forgeries and interpolations ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... constitution, and in the subservience of the individual to the institution. This was temperamental. Behind them were many much larger groups of those needed either the interpretation or the protection of the law for their private interests. These were of all sorts from honest literal-minded dealers, through shady contractors and operators, down to grafters and the very lowest type of strong-arm bullies. The tone and respectability came from the first, the practical results from the second. The first class had a genuine intellectual contempt for men whose minds ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... nine times in the New Testament, and with the single exception of Acts 17:29, refers every time to the mark of the beast. We are not, of course, to understand in this symbolic prophecy, that a literal mark is intended; but the giving of the literal mark, as practiced in ancient times, is used as a figure to illustrate certain acts that will be performed in the fulfillment of this prophecy. And from the literal ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... that the body is in a literal sense of the word, a chemical laboratory. The foods we eat, the fluids we drink, the gases we breathe are complex chemical compounds which the body must take apart and put together again in such a way that ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... I; odious mono-literal; thinnest, feeblest, most insignificant of letters, I dread your egotistic influence as my bane; they will not suffer you, nor bear with a book so speckled with your presence. Still, world, hear me; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... our [10] ideas; their sentiments are not our sentiments their ethical life represents for us regions of thought and emotion yet unexplored, or perhaps long forgotten. Any one of their ordinary phrases, translated into Western speech, makes hopeless nonsense; and the literal rendering into Japanese of the simplest English sentence would scarcely be comprehended by any Japanese who had never studied a European tongue. Could you learn all the words in a Japanese dictionary, your acquisition would not help you in the least to make yourself understood in speaking, ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... government, like the most perfect of religions, taken in a literal sense, is a contradictory idea. The problem is not to discover how we shall be best governed, but how we shall be most free. Liberty commensurate and identical with Order,—this is the only reality of government and politics. How shall this absolute liberty, synonymous with order, ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... husband, and him, and the Chief. Tell him I love my friend. Tell him I think he deserves to be in Rome. Tell him—' Enter Countess Ammiani to reprove her for endangering the hopes of the house by fatiguing herself. Sandra sends a blush at me, and I smile, and the countess kisses her. I send you a literal transcript of one short scene, so that you may feel ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... only that. You mustn't be so literal about everything. I mean let's not become baggy-minded. Take Flora again. Flora was her class poetess and I don't believe she has a literary thought or a book in her head now except her account book. Let us improve ourselves, Albert. Read evenings and subscribe to the Symphony and the Rubinstein ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... (tom. ii. l. xvii. p. 225,) instead of pounds, uses the more classic appellation of talents, which, in a literal sense and strict computation, would multiply sixty ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... sides, and looks of astonishment were cast in my direction. Certainly my entrance to Natondre could not have been more dramatic, and I believe that they almost thought that I had fallen from the skies, which is the literal meaning ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... had a decent man to manage it. It came to nothing this year. She told me so. You see it just is a literal new castle. Mr. Argenter is too busy in town to look after it; and they've been cheated and disappointed right and left. They're not to blame for being new," he continued, seeing the least possible little lifted look about Amy's delicate lips and eyebrows. "I hate that ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... she is worse. With her complaint, being worse may be only a preliminary to being better. Don't take my words for more than their literal meaning.' ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... law of the flesh, live with Christ to the law of the mind. To live with Christ after death is to rise with Him. It implies Resurrection. Here again Arnold is constrained to admit the validity of Catholic interpretation. He cannot deny that Paul believed absolutely in the physical, literal, and material fact of Christ's bodily Resurrection. But he insists that, while accepting this fact, Paul lays far more stress upon the spiritual interpretation of it. For Paul, death is living after the flesh; life is mortifying the flesh by the spirit; "resurrection is the rising, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... fashion. It is no wonder that the heart of a female, unimproved by reason, and untinctured with natural good sense, should flutter at the sight of such a gaudy thing, among the number of her admirers: this impression is enforced by fustian compliments, which her own vanity interprets in a literal sense, and still more confirmed by the assiduous attention of the gallant, who, indeed, has nothing else to mind. A Frenchman in consequence of his mingling with the females from his infancy, not only becomes acquainted with all their customs ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... showed up vividly the elements of Mormon life that were most repulsive to her, the broad assumptions of ignorance, the fierce beliefs born of isolation, and the growth by indulgence of such animal characteristics as were not kept under by a literal morality or enforced by privations. She was going to see a man who could speak with the voice of the sober past, whose tones would bring back to her the intellectual delicacies of Ephraim's conversation, the broad, pure vision of ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... the literal reproduction of sights and scenes which our natural instinct and our better informed taste and judgment teach us to avoid, art has been far in advance of literature. It is three hundred years since Joseph Ribera, more commonly known as Spagnoletto, was ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... found free from that grossness which is unavoidable in a strictly literal translation of the original into English; and which has rendered the splendid translations of Sir R. Burton and Mr. J. Payne quite unsuitable as the basis of a popular edition, though at the same time stamping ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... cramping weight of shoes and the freedom of their minds from the restraints of school. With the approach of maturity came routine and responsibility for the whites, routine alone for the generality of the blacks. Some of the males of each race grew into ruffians, others into gentlemen in the literal sense, some of the females into viragoes, others into gentlewomen; but most of both races and sexes merely became plain, wholesome folk of a ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... organise themselves on communistic principles. The Christians shared all things; those who had property realised it, and pooled the proceeds in a common fund, which was distributed to individual members as need arose. It is impossible not to recognise in this action consistent and literal obedience to the teaching of Jesus. The disciples had followed Jesus to the end of his journey in Jerusalem; they were waiting for his manifestation in glory, and sold all that they had and gave to the poor. But in terms of political ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... was the idealist historian of the poet, and that the adventures which he related of him were not to be taken in the literal ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... Mrs. Procter. What was it Suzanna had once said? "Mrs. Procter cuddles all children in her heart." And Suzanna and Maizie stood watching her, asking a literal translation of a principle laid down for ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... into practicality when he desires his friend to 'study the mother,' and take notes of all that passed, as it might have the effect of fixing the fate of the lover. Temple, it may be imagined, did not interpret his commission in such a literal spirit, and inconstancy and insanity could hardly be recommendations in Miss Blair's eyes. That such should be the case,—outside the confessions of Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre,—would appear to the ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... inaccuracies they are merely literal accidents, and the books reflect credit on author, publishers, and stereotyper. We ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... has his difficulties with all the poets. Homer is too literal, Milton too literary, and there is too much of the whooping savage in Whitman. He seems to think the real poet is yet to appear; a poet on new terms, the reconciler, the poet-priest,—one who shall unite the whiteness and purity of the saint with the power and unction ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... excellent objection. You might also, with some propriety, object to the term equilibrium being applied to a body that is without weight; but I know of no expression that would explain my meaning so well. You must consider it, however, in a figurative rather than a literal sense; its strict meaning is an equal diffusion. We cannot, indeed, well say by what power it diffuses itself equally, though it is not surprising that it should go from the parts which have the most to those which have ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... be the theological history of a soul, so I shall not attempt to decide upon the exact proportion of literal acceptance of Christian dogma underlying the young pastor's sermons. I doubt if he could have told you himself, and I am sure he would have considered the point as unimportant as I do. His was a message of humanity delivered in terms of Christianity. The message ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... boat, making a winter passage. There were very few cabin passengers. No second cabin, but plenty of steerage. She sailed, you remember, from Naples. He had been doing some work, some very important work, in the Aquarium. The only other person of consequence—I am speaking in the most literal and un-snobbish sense—in the first cabin, was Benson. No" (with a lifted hand), "don't interrupt me. Benson, as we all know, was an international figure. But Benson was getting old. His son could be trusted to carry on the House of Benson. In fact, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... chamber, though it often boast The grateful presence of a literal toast, Can hardly claim, amidst its various wealth, The right unchallenged to propose a health; Yet though its tenant is denied the feast, Friendship must launch his sentiment at least, As prisoned damsels, locked from lovers' ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... you with a clever air why the servile wars were always the most fierce, desperate and atrocious of all wars. And you may make such answer as you can—even the eminently feminine one, if you choose, so typical of the women's literal mind "I don't see what this has to do with it!" How many arguments have been knocked over (I won't say knocked down) by these few words! For if we men try to put the spaciousness of all experiences into our reasoning and would fain ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... eagerness to do something which will pass as a settlement, either China's—and Siberia's—interests will be sacrificed in some unfair compromise, or irritation and friction will be increased—and in the end so will armaments. In any literal sense, it is ridiculous to suppose that the problems of the Pacific can be settled in a few weeks, or months—or years. Yet the discussion of the problems, in separation from the question of armament, may be of great use. For it may further that publicity which is a pre-condition of any ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... Rupert, stamping about between cold and anger, and slapping himself like a cabman, "he doesn't seem to have been very literal or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the deuce, may I ask, have you brought us ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... possess a particle of that mysterious, yet in his calling priceless, gift termed magnetism for the lack of a better definition. All respected him, few warmed toward him or thought of opening to him their hearts. His mind was literal, and within it the doctrines were like labelled and separate packages, from which he took from time to time what he wanted as he would supplies from a store-room. God was to him a Sovereign and a Judge who would save a few of the human race in exact accordance with ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... works were suspended, having got leave of absence from Mr. Taylor, who commanded the Bell Rock tender, and had in his possession one of the Protection Medals. Unfortunately, however, for Dall, the Regulating Officer thought proper to disregard these documents, as, according to the strict and literal interpretation of the Admiralty regulations, a seaman does not stand protected unless he is actually on board of his ship, or in a boat belonging to her, or has the Admiralty protection in his possession. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the conquest of the air, its significance is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar checking the steeds of his song, Hugo ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... the katobolism generally. Volubility is almost regularly increased, and is, indeed, one of the most sensitive and constant of the correlations in emotional delight.... Pleasantness is correlated in living organisms by vascular, muscular and glandular extension or expansion, both literal and figurative." (G. Dearborn, "The Emotion of Joy," Psychological Review Monograph Supplements, vol. ii, No. 5, p. 62.) All these signs of joy appear to occur at some stage of the process ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... with Evelyn. She had attracted him strongly when he was in her visible presence; but now he thought he understood her better than he had ever done then. He had, he felt, not grasped the inner meaning of much that she said. Words might convey but little in their literal sense and yet give to a sympathetic listener an insight into the depths of the speaker's nature, or hint at a thought too finely spun ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... for his first friend a comrade who knew exactly his own limits. Guynemer could save Jean Krebs from his excess of literal honesty by showing him the enchantment of his own ecstasies, but Jean Krebs furnished the motor for Guynemer's ambitious young wings. Without the technical lessons of Jean Krebs, could Guynemer later have got into the aviation field at Pau, and won so easily ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... amazing tale. It pleased him to reflect that if she could see him at the Walker table with Red Leary and the Governor, that most accomplished of villains, eating hot biscuits which had been specially forbidden by his physician, she would undoubtedly decide that he had made a pretty literal interpretation of her injunction to throw a challenge ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... "breath of life" and, by means of the wand which he called "the great magician,"[78] could enable the dead to be born again. The wand is supposed by some scholars[79] to be a conventionalized representation of the uterus, so that its power of giving birth is expressed with literal directness. Such beliefs and stories of the "magic wand" are found to-day in scattered localities from the Scottish Highlands to ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... the existence of which he admits as fully as any Darwinian, Mr. Booth tells men whose evil case is one of those consequences that envy is a corner-stone of our competitive system." Mr. [287] Cunningham's physiological studies will have informed him that the process of "shutting the eyes," in the literal sense of the words, is not always wilful; and I propose to illustrate, by the crucial instance his own letter furnishes, that the "shutting of the eyes" of the mind to the obvious consequences of accepted propositions may also be involuntary. At least, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... sheet, and as he compared the constructed renderings with the literal translation, the ghost of a smile stole across ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... the same people returned with Mansong's answer, a literal translation of which I give as follows. "Mansong says he will protect you; that a road is open for you every where, as far as his hand (power) extends. If you wish to go to the East, no man shall harm you from Sego till you pass Tombuctoo. If you wish to go to the ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... greatest cause which, in ancient or in modern times, has been pleaded at the bar of the moral judgment of mankind. (Cheers.) I know that to some this will sound as the language of exaggerated feeling; but I can only say that I have expressed myself in language which I believe conveys the literal truth. (Hear, hear.) ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... have as foolish notions as any one else. Some think that they win Heaven by believing something with their minds about our Lord's atonement. Some think they go to Heaven by soaring up through the air. Some of them, taking in its literal meaning the glorious imagery of the Apocalypse, picture to themselves streets of beaten gold and walls of flashing emerald and jasper, and the wearing of crowns and the singing of Psalms over and over again through all ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... against the government; he ordered the messenger to be arrested and gave the signal for attack on the Aventine, while at the same time he caused proclamation to be made in the streets that the government would give to whosoever should bring the head of Gracchus or of Flaccus its literal weight in gold, and that they would guarantee complete indemnity to every one who should leave the Aventine before the beginning of the conflict. The ranks on the Aventine speedily thinned; the valiant nobility in union with the Cretans and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... me to a third reason why, under the stress of war, English Christianity is hardly in revival, namely, Bible difficulties. The Prayer Book comes down to us from men who were held by a belief in the literal truth of the whole Bible. In so far as it has been an effective manual for ordinary people, it has been on the strength of an absolute dogma in their minds as to the "Word of God." That dogma has in a vague and somewhat ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... without parables. Or, as Augustine says (De Qq. Evang., qu. xvii), this means, "not that He spoke nothing literally, but that He scarcely ever spoke without introducing a parable, although He also spoke some things in the literal ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... reads into them the feelings of a New York or Boston woman. The following is an instance. A girl sings to a warrior (I give only Miss Fletcher's translation, omitting the Indian words): "War; when you returned; die; you caused me; go when you did; God; I appealed; standing," This literal version our author explains and translates freely, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... priestess, and apparently alone. A closer view of her person brought me no disenchantment. Perfect beauty, like the sublime, produces an impression of the infinite, and I only speak the literal truth when I say that she appeared infinitely beautiful to me. Her golden hair, rippling over the delicate ear and gathered into a knot behind, her large violet eyes and blooming white skin, her Grecian profile and stately yet flowing form, might have become an Aphrodite ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... rebuked. I'm literal. I'm instructed. I have brought you down here to talk the situation over with me. I can get men in plenty to advise me, but I want to know what you think about a number of things. Moreover, I want you to tell me ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... a curious fact that the kindred of the buffaloes and bisons differ exceedingly in the measure of their domesticability. Thus, the ordinary buffalo of Asia, though a dull brute, is very subjugable, even in the literal sense, for he makes a tolerable beast for the plough and bears the yoke with due patience. His African kinsman, on the other hand, is perhaps the most unconquerable of all the large wild animals. The late Sir ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... of air had been tinctured with Doctor Haggage's brandy, was handed down among the generations of collegians, like the tradition of their common parent. In the earlier stages of her existence, she was handed down in a literal and prosaic sense; it being almost a part of the entrance footing of every new collegian to nurse the child who had been born ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... numberless subtle links and windings. The authors of the Apocryphal books (of "Daniel" and of "Enoch," for instance), men highly exalted, in order to aid their cause, committed, without a shadow of scruple, an act which we should term a fraud. The literal truth has little value to the Oriental; he sees everything through the medium of his ideas, his ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... an instant to propose that every one should read poetry. The man whose imagination has never taken fire from literature of any kind, whose brain is literal and dislikes any embroidery upon the surface of plain fact, who is deaf to music, unresponsive to ideas, and limited in his emotions—such a man in my opinion is unfortunate, although he is often an excellent citizen, lives happily, makes a good husband, and may save the state. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... taken as a more or less poetical account under the metaphor of motion. These "leanings" are literal in the sense that one note does imply another as its natural complement and satisfaction and we seek to reach or make it. The striving is an intrinsic element, not a by-product for ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... Our mother determined to accord him an interview in her own apartment. She longed to converse with him at her ease—to hear his tale from his own lips—to sympathize with and console him. Oh! who could blame her if in so doing she departed from the strict and literal meaning of that vow which had bound her to consider her relations as dead to her? But the fault—if fault it were—was so venial, that to justify it is to invest it with an importance which it would not have possessed save for the frightful results to which it led. You have already heard ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... one of those autobiographical novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal sense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a century and a ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... the whole time, in spite of continual efforts on the part of Marston to make me keep silence. I am not the man calmly to let pass black insinuations against the character of a friend. No, I stood up for him. I am glad to think how I stood up for him, not only metaphorically, but in the most literal sense of the term; for I found myself continually getting up, and Marston as often pulling me ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... expedient to which they resorted was that of selecting the rules of law common to Rome and to the different Italian communities in which the immigrants were born. In other words, they set themselves to form a system answering to the primitive and literal meaning of Jus Gentium, that is, Law common to all Nations. Jus Gentium was, in fact, the sum of the common ingredients in the customs of the old Italian tribes, for they were all the nations whom the Romans had the means of observing, and who sent successive swarms of immigrants to Roman soil. ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... was looked upon as an instigation to servile insurrection. The "Appeal" was proscribed, and a price put upon the head of the author. Garrison deprecated the sanguinary character of the book. For he himself was the very reverse of Walker. Garrison was a full believer in the literal doctrine of non-resistance as enunciated by Jesus. He abhorred all war, and physical collisions of every description, as wicked and inhuman. He sang ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... undiscovered until a comparatively recent time. Its eighteenth-century gravestones are consequently for the most part rustic and primitive. The skull and other bones here depicted, decked with wheat-ears and other vegetation, probably have some literal reference to the agricultural pursuits of the deceased, although of course they may be only poetical allusions ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... far-sighted plans. Even when most of them had accepted his leadership and were obeying his orders, a handful of desperate men refused to go. They took refuge on the hill of the Acropolis, and acting upon the literal meaning of the oracle toiled with axe and hammer, building up wooden barriers before the gates ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... suspended, having got leave of absence from Mr. Taylor, who commanded the Bell Rock tender, and had in his possession one of the Protection Medals. Unfortunately, however, for Dall, the Regulating Officer thought proper to disregard these documents, as, according to the strict and literal interpretation of the Admiralty regulations, a seaman does not stand protected unless he is actually on board of his ship, or in a boat belonging to her, or has the Admiralty protection in his possession. This order of the Board, however, cannot be rigidly followed in practice; and therefore, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... attorney had proved more of a Job's comforter in the literal sense of the term, than he had intended; in fact he had overdone it—the picture was too highly coloured to appear natural, and at once threw back poor Job upon a full view of all his troubles, which Mr Smith perceiving, mildly resumed, "I'm not surprised, my good fellow, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... conceived an affection for a young nobleman called Walther, and had promised to marry him at an early date. Here, then, was a complication indeed, and Hans was sorely puzzled to know how to act, while the unfortunate Minna was equally perplexed, and for many weeks she endured literal torment, her heart being racked by a constant storm of emotions. She was deeply attached to Walther, and she felt that she would never be able to forgive herself if she broke her promise to him and failed to bring ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... of Mr. Lewisham's thoughts, and he was mechanically trying to keep the book open in three places at once, at the text, the notes, and the literal translation, while he turned up the vocabulary for ludibrium, when his attention, wandering dangerously near the top of the page, fell over the edge and escaped with incredible swiftness ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... in Europe and America, concede that the Scriptures have both a literal and a moral meaning. Which of the two is the more important to gain,—the literal or the moral sense of the word devil,—in order to cast out this devil? Evil is a quality, ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... they adopted was a piece of insanity in the literal sense of the word, a confused medley of ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... genuine truth can also be drawn in full from the literal sense of the Word; for the Word in this sense is like a man clothed, whose face and hands are bare. All that concerns man's life, and so his salvation, is ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg
... could get tea, coffee, and chocolate, a toasted roll, and the touch of cold ham which an invalid loves. And we beheld, and they were bringing up the side of the vessel trays of delicious pastry, and festoons of fowls, with more literal butcher's meat. And we said, "There will be no famine on board. Make the most of your supper, Can Grande; for it will be the last of earth to you, for some time to come." And now came silence, and tears, and last embraces; we slipped down the gangway into our little craft, and, looking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... cleaving of soul to God is expressed (ver. 1) by an image that may be connected with his circumstances at Engedi: "In Thee has my soul taken refuge." The English version is correct as regards the sense, though it obliterates the beautiful metaphor by its rendering "trusteth." The literal meaning of the verb is "to flee to a refuge," and its employment here may be due to the poetical play of the imagination, which likens his secure retreat among the everlasting hills to the safe hiding-place which his spirit found in God his habitation. A similar analogy appears ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... her father's misfortune and of calumny as regards herself—though not an absolute success, is worth a dozen Harriets, with thirteen Charlottes thrown in to make "25 as 24" in bookseller's phrase. Bage's extravagant or perhaps only too literal manners-painting (for it was an odd time) appears not infrequently, as in the anecdote of a justly enraged, though as a matter of fact mistaken, husband, who finds a young gentleman sitting on his wife's lap, with her arms round him, while he is literally and en tout bien tout ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... to fade before the chandelier, and Mrs. Marchmont, somewhat surprised at the rumpled plumage of the young ladies, and the fact that Mr. De Forrest's neck-tie was awry, suggested that they retire and prepare for supper, whereat they retreated in literal disorder. But without the door their old frenzy seized them, and they nearly ran over the dilatory Bel upon the stairs. With sallies of nonsense, smothered laughter, a breezy rustle of garments, and the rush of swift motion, they seemed to die away in the upper halls like a summer gust. To Mrs. ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... together a little, we set to work to make out where we were now. I have said that there was light above, and on examination we found that it came from the sky. Our river that was, Sir Henry said, a literal realization of the wild vision of the poet {Endnote 10}, was no longer underground, but was running on its darksome way, not now through 'caverns measureless to man', but between two frightful cliffs which cannot have been ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... for the moment, no question as to how far the gospels are original, and how far they consist of Greek and Chinese interpolations. The record that Jesus said certain things is not invalidated by a demonstration that Confucius said them before him. Those who claim a literal divine paternity for him cannot be silenced by the discovery that the same claim was made for Alexander and Augustus. And I am not just now concerned with the credibility of the gospels as records ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... possible, threw himself in her way, and might have succeeded in exchanging a few words with her, as she was guarded only by the dejected Chamberlain and his halberdiers, but she seemed to have taken, in its most strict and literal acceptation, the command to be silent which she had received from the Queen; for, to the repeated signs of her grandson, she only replied by laying her finger on her lip. Dr. Lundin was not so reserved. Regret for the handsome ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... like the most perfect of religions, taken in a literal sense, is a contradictory idea. The problem is not to discover how we shall be best governed, but how we shall be most free. Liberty commensurate and identical with Order,—this is the only reality of government and ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... termed Al-Agha and quotes the proverb (No. 156) "One night the whore repented and cried:—What! no Wali (Al-Agha) to lay whores by the heels?" Some of these Egyptian by-words are most amusing and characteristic; but they require literal translation, not the timid touch of the last generation. I am preparing, for the use of my friend, Bernard Quaritch, a bona fide version which awaits only the promised volume of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... watching Sebastian, watching him quietly, with those wistful, earnest eyes, as a cat watches a mouse-hole; watching him with mute inquiry, as if she expected each moment to see him do something different from what the rest of us expected of him. Slowly I gathered that Hilda Wade, in the most literal sense, had come to Nathaniel's, as she herself expressed ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... V-shaped depression called a cove, and between two coves thus formed is a reverse [symbol: upside-down V], called a point, always, naturally, composed of the hardest rock, and not infrequently ending in a literal point so sharp that it is like a vast granite bowsprit thrust out into the green plains far below, terminating in a sheer precipice of several hundred feet. Roughly, then, you may visualize this section of the Cumberlands as a giant double-edged ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished." This prophecy was the property of all Christians, and might receive different interpretations. The literal interpretation, favoured by some theologians, was that, at some date fast approaching, Christ would reappear visibly on Earth, accompanied by the re-embodied souls of dead saints and martyrs, while the rest of the dead slept on, and that in the glorious ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... folks give up their murderous execution of the fugue-full anthem, and when will London congregations understand that the singing-psalms are not set apart exclusively for charity-children? When shall Bishop Kenn's 'Awake my soul,' cease to be our noonday exhortation; and a literal invocation for sweet sleep to close our eye-lids no longer be the ill-considered prelude to an afternoon discourse? Take some trouble to improve and educate, or get rid of, if possible, your generally ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... been wholly uninfluenced—being a woman of an alert mind—by the controversy which, in the seventies and eighties, was raging about a pretty crass and literal materialism, and her writings probably reflect—with a good deal of indirection—that controversy. Here is a possible key to a good many things which are otherwise puzzling enough. She is, in her own fashion, the defender of an idealistic interpretation ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... tri-literal word, denotes these six members of Microprosopos. For this latter is formed after the fashion of Macroprosopos, but without Kether, the will, which remains in the first prototype or Universal; though invested with a portion of the Divine Intellectual Power and Capacity. The first Universal ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... half-lengths) and translating it from the ideal into literalism, I doubt whether the unfortunate king was really a handsome or impressive-looking man: a high, thin-ridged nose, a meagre, hatchet face, and reddish hair and beard,—these are the literal facts. It is the painter's art that has thrown such pensive and shadowy grace ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... this incident naturally left me were at length and suddenly dispersed, as sad thoughts not infrequently are, by a petticoat. When I say petticoat, I use the word in its literal sense, not colloquially as a metaphor for its usual wearer, meaning thereby a dainty feminine undergarment seen only by men on rainy days, and one might add washing-days. It was indeed to the fortunate accident of its being washing-day at the pretty cottage near which in the course ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... The brief literal translation of the word biology, science of life, is full explanation of its scope. A course in the subject is not Zoology, nor Botany, nor Bacteriology, nor Physiology—but rather all of these in one. Biology should logically follow the nature ...
— Adequate Preparation for the Teacher of Biological Sciences in Secondary Schools • James Daley McDonald
... One literal minded woman who had overheard Mary's remarks about lairs and new trails, and who had been on the watch for something wild all across the state of Texas, looked up in disappointment. There was nothing whatever in their ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... recent Russian proposals came as an answer to the last attempt for an understanding which the Powers believed could be arrived at honourably, and they have been rejected by the Vienna Conference, not because they were not in accordance with the literal wording of the programme, but because they were contrary to the intention of it. Your Majesty's Ambassador has taken part in this Conference and its decision, and when your Majesty now says: "The task of Diplomacy ceases at ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... unless it was the genius of Greek or Greco-Roman antiquity, supplied Michelangelo with the motive force for this prentice-piece in sculpture. Donatello and other Florentines worked under different sympathies for form, affecting angularity in their treatment of the nude, adhering to literal transcripts from the model or to conventional stylistic schemes. Michelangelo discarded these limitations, and showed himself an ardent student of reality in the service of some lofty intellectual ideal. Following and closely observing Nature, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Tom was very literal. "Say, Annie," he blurted out, "I begin to think you have had to do most of the work over there. Now, ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... either joy or sorrow, or to be conscious that he was not dining at Ancester. The General fished up a wandering eyeglass to look at him, and said:—"Quite correct!" Miss Smith-Dickenson remarked upon the dangers attendant on over-literal interpretations. The Hon. Mr. Pellew perceived in this that Miss Dickenson had a ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... may refer to this hereafter, and to show that we at least are not guilty of exaggeration, we subjoin the passage in the original Italian, from which it will be seen that our translation is as literal as possible. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... language used is symbolical, and has naught to do with sex, in any sense. Woe unto him or her who takes these allegories of the Soul as literal histories, for nothing but sorrow will follow such materialization of divine mysteries. If Simon or his followers fell into this error, they worked their own downfall, under the Great Law, as surely do all who forge such bonds of ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... Lovelace to Belford.— Receives a letter from Clarissa, written by way of allegory to induce him to forbear hunting after her. Copy of it. He takes it in a literal sense. Exults upon it. Will now hasten down to Lord M. and receive the gratulations of all his family on her returning favour. Gives an interpretation of his frightful dream to his ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... we can see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for the moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists. The philosopher, then, qua ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... class-room tone. He was all brown like a leaf with Valley dust and sun and rain. The old cadet cap was older yet, the ancient boots as grotesquely large, the curious lift of his hand to Heaven no less curious than it had always been. He was as awkward, as hypochondriac, as literal, as strict as ever. Moreover, there should have hung about him the cloud of disfavour and hostility raised by that icy march to Romney less than three months ago. And yet—and yet! What had happened since then? Not much, indeed. The return of the Stonewall ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... of the term burial throughout this paper is to be understood in its literal significance, the word being derived from the Teutonic Anglo-Saxon "birgan," ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... a little. It was like Harvey to be literal. He had said he was going to go round and have a good time, and he was losing no time. But in their restricted social life, where most of the men worked until five o'clock or even later, there were fewer afternoon calls paid. Belle wondered with mild sisterly curiosity ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... ABROAD, objected to him as a companion of their children in the church at home. At this juncture the Editor offered to take him into his printing office as a "devil." For a while he seemed to be endeavoring, in his old literal way, to act up to that title. He inked everything but the press. He scratched Chinese characters of an abusive import on "leads," printed them, and stuck them about the office; he put "punk" in the foreman's pipe, and had been seen to swallow small type merely as a diabolical ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... be found free from that grossness which is unavoidable in a strictly literal translation of the original into English; and which has rendered the splendid translations of Sir R. Burton and Mr. J. Payne quite unsuitable as the basis of a popular edition, though at the same time stamping the works as the two most ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... giuoca" is a phrase which refers to the system of the public lotteries, {300} established (so much to their shame) by the Italian governments; and a page of explanation of that system would be needful, to make any literal translation of it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... was so eminently unsatisfactory that it produced a characteristic protest. "I am really distressed by the illustration of Mrs. Pipchin and Paul. It is so frightfully and wildly wide of the mark. Good heaven! in the commonest and most literal construction of the text, it is all wrong! She is described as an old lady, and Paul's 'miniature arm-chair' is mentioned more than once. He ought to be sitting in a little arm-chair down in a corner of the fireplace, staring up at her. I can't say what pain and vexation ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... introduced him to me (a me lo 'ntrodussi); but Boccaccio here uses the word introdurre in its rarer literal sense to lead, to ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... calculated to save his skin. I do not deny that Sir Thomas Picton has described him as a "thieving blackguard." But I am sure that this was merely the downright, rather extravagant manner, of censure peculiar to that distinguished general, and that those who have taken the expression at its purely literal value have been lacking at once in charity and in knowledge of the caustic, uncompromising terms of speech of General Picton whom Lord Wellington, you will remember, called ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... pleasure in the poetry itself will not be distracted by a marginal numbering of the lines; by index-figures and footnotes; or by antiquated peculiarities of spelling, capitalization, and elision. Except where literal conventions are essential to the poet's purpose,—as in The Castle of Indolence, The Schoolmistress, or Chatterton's poems,—I have followed modern usage. Dialect words are explained in the glossary; and the ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... the woman, becoming more literal as she went on, "and Marie Blanc knows it. Her husband once got the loan of it from Cloudbrow, and she looked at it with care, because she had never seen such a knife before. She knew all its marks. Why does Cloudbrow deny that it is his? Because it was Cloudbrow who killed Perrin. If ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... there been such, or so signal, a retribution. They who had taken to the sword had perished by the sword, not figuratively but in the literal meaning of the words. Stabbers by trade, they had fallen stabbed, by the hands of those whom they had destined to ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Grandchildren of the Ghetto, which is mainly a history of the middle-classes, is mainly a history of isolation. "The Upper Ten" is a literal phrase in Judah, whose aristocracy just about suffices for a synagogue quorum. Great majestic luminaries, each with its satellites, they swim serenely in the golden heavens. And the middle-classes look up in worship and the lower-classes in supplication. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Elsmere quickly—'I know; I cannot conceive it, nor could you. Imagine standing up Sunday after Sunday to say the things you do not believe,—using words as a convention which those who hear you receive as literal truth,—and trusting the maintenance of your position either to your neighbour's forbearance or to your own powers of evasion! With the ideas at present in my head, nothing would induce me to preach another Easter Day sermon to a congregation ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he received from English scholars. In itself the book was a bold defiance of theological tradition. It set aside the Latin version of the Vulgate which had secured universal acceptance in the Church. Its method of interpretation was based, not on received dogmas, but on the literal meaning of the text. Its real end was the end at which Colet had aimed in his Oxford lectures. Erasmus desired to set Christ himself in the place of the Church, to recall men from the teaching of Christian theologians to the teaching of the Founder of Christianity. The whole ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... on that of Austria. The civil code is a localized modification of the Code Napoleon. The first translation of the latter code was almost literal, and made without reference to the manners and historical antecedents of Servia: some of the blunders in it were laughable:—Hypotheque was translated as if it had been Apotheke, and made out to be a depot of drugs! When the translator was asked for the reason of this extraordinary ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... breakfast is much preferable to a dinner, not merely in the enjoyment, while it is passing, but afterwards. I made a good suggestion to Miss Hosmer for the design of a fountain,—a lady bursting into tears, water gushing from a thousand pores, in literal translation of the phrase; and to call the statue "Niobe, all Tears." I doubt whether she adopts the idea; but Bernini would have been delighted with it. I should think the gush of water might be so arranged as to form a beautiful drapery about the figure, swaying and fluttering ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... it necessary that we accept the literal meaning of the passage, and conceive the Deity speaking with human voice, and calling creation forth by audible fiat. The voice of the Deity is that unheard and silent command which nature hears and obeys throughout all his works. The pious and sincere believer sees an overruling providence ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... and increase in the katobolism generally. Volubility is almost regularly increased, and is, indeed, one of the most sensitive and constant of the correlations in emotional delight.... Pleasantness is correlated in living organisms by vascular, muscular and glandular extension or expansion, both literal and figurative." (G. Dearborn, "The Emotion of Joy," Psychological Review Monograph Supplements, vol. ii, No. 5, p. 62.) All these signs of joy appear to occur at some stage of the process ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... all to pardon those imperfections, which I acknowledge to be very many, & so much the more, by reason of my long & many years continuance in foreine countries. Howbeit, I hope to have truly observed the literal sence & full effect of the history, as the author setteth it forth, which if it may please you to peruse & accept in good part, I shall be greatly emboldened to proceede & publish also the second & third booke, which I am assured will neither be vnpleasant nor vnprofitable to the readers. Thus ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... device of Beethoven to impress the main theme upon the hearer by definite repetitions on various degrees of the scale.[18] For an elaborate example of Transposition nothing can surpass the opening movement of Cesar Franck's D Minor Symphony, the entire first part of which consists of a literal repetition in F minor of what has been previously ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... remarkable attempts to recompose the Bible; Dr. Geddes's version is aridly literal, and often ludicrous by its vulgarity; as when he translates the Passover as the Skipover, and introduces Constables among the ancient Israelites; but the following attempts are of a very different kind. Sebastian Castillon—who afterwards changed ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... afterwards denied to the Chilian Government that he refused, on the 4th of August, to pay the squadron. Here is the same assertion, in his own handwriting, on the 9th! During the whole of this time the squadron was in a state of literal destitution; even the provisions necessary for its subsistence being withheld from it, though the Protector had abundant means of supplying them; but his object was to starve both officers and men into desertion—so as to accelerate the dismemberment of the squadron which I would not ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... a meaning for those who reject the real descent of the species or their primordial germs one from another, and acknowledge only the ideal bond of a common plan in their successive manifestations. But as soon as we examine more closely the literal and logical meaning of the word, we shall find it of most weight when we understand by it the before-mentioned gradual evolution in opposition to the theory of progress by leaps or new creations. Moreover, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... the American artist, painted a picture of Robert like an Italian, and then presented it to me like a prince. It is a wonderful picture, the colouring so absolutely Venetian that artists can't (for the most part) keep their temper when they look at it, and the breath of the likeness is literal.[35] Mr. Page has secrets in the art—certainly nobody else paints like him—and his nature, I must say, is equal to his genius and worthy of it. Dearest Miss Mitford, the 'Athenaeum' is always as frigid as Mont Blanc; it can't be expected to grow warmer for looking over your green ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... merely upon the language employed. The language is only symptomatic. The terminology of respiration and digestion when used in connection with religion is frankly and palpably symbolic. That of sexual love is as often frankly literal, and can be correlated with the actual state of the person using it. Digestion and respiration must go on in any case; but it is precisely the point at issue whether with a different sexual life these so-called religious ecstatic states would have ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... before I spoke again I was enabled to see clearly what duty required of me. Eva and Little Christchurch, with Jack's feelings and interests, and all my wife's longings, must be laid on one side, and my whole energy must be devoted to the literal carrying out of the law. It was a great world's movement that had been projected, and if it were to fail now, just at its commencement, when everything had been arranged for the work, when again would there be ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... common law, so in the constitution, change has been effected in substance without any corresponding change in terminology. There is hardly one of the phrases used to describe the position of the crown which can be understood in its literal sense, and many of them are currently accepted in more senses than one. The American constitution of 1789 reproduced, however, in essentials, and with necessary modifications, the contemporary British ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... subtlety. Lefevre tried to see simply what the text said, and as it became more human it became, for him, more divine. His preface is a real cry of joy at his great discovery. He did, indeed, interpret everything in a double sense, literal and spiritual, and placed the emphasis rather on the latter, but this did not prevent a genuine effort to read the words as they were written. Three years later he published in like manner the Epistles of St. Paul, with commentary. Though he spoke of the apostle as a simple ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... in the Brazilian language a word that better than any other describes the feeling with which one remembers a sojourn in Brazil. This word, saudades, is charged with an abundance of sentiment, and, though a literal translation of it is difficult to arrive at, its meaning approaches "sweet ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... our approach to Plato's Dialogues is not a matter of indifference. They will mean more or less to us, according to our spiritual condition. Much more passed from Plato to his disciples than the literal meaning of his words. The place where he taught his listeners thrilled in the atmosphere of the Mysteries. His words awoke overtones in higher regions, which vibrated with them, but these overtones needed ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... without the expression of simple approval, but with the restrictive declarations which the King had at first made.[492] But besides this it was seen how little the King intended to be bound to the literal meaning of his words, for arrests without definite assignment of the reason had again taken place. The Star Chamber, which was already regarded as a court of doubtful legality, had imposed harsh and arbitrary ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... ethnic elements upon its fertile soil; that those elements in time became fused together, and that, even in the beginning, the diversities that distinguished them one from another were less marked than a literal acceptance of the tenth chapter of Genesis might lead ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... faint exasperation (it showed a little around the edges, like a green petticoat under a black dress). "Oh, these literal people!" she said, half to herself. Then she continued, still more patiently, "Isn't it just as easy to imagine sides as a bottom? Well, as I was saying, if I write them fast enough to fill it up—I mean if one should stick, of course—somebody a hundred years from now may come along and notice ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... agreed Bertram, with a promptness that carefully hid his surprise at her literal acceptance of what he had proposed as a huge joke. "Come, is it a go? Shall I telephone to see if I can ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... memory returned to Mrs. Procter. What was it Suzanna had once said? "Mrs. Procter cuddles all children in her heart." And Suzanna and Maizie stood watching her, asking a literal translation of a principle laid ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... hearers to an outbreak of hostilities. If either speaker had addressed the other by name, the advent of the Sergeant-at-Arms would have been the next thing looked for. On this occasion Laetitia's literal transmission of "Are you going to help the tongue or not, papa?" recalled his wandering mind to his responsibilities. Sally's liver-wing—she was the visitor—was pleading at his elbow for ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... France to the other; indeed, they are scarcely confined to any country, and, like traditions, seem to have wandered up and down into all regions. For instance, I was very much surprised, a short time ago, to see in a work on Persian popular literature, an almost literal version of a song, well-known on the Bourbonnais, which I had ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... winner. Does he only "seem to succeed?" Who does succeed, then, if he no more than seems? The vulpine intellect knows where the geese live, it is elsewhere said; but among Reineke's victims we do not remember one goose, in the literal sense of goose; and as to geese metaphorical, at least the whole visible world lies down complacently at his feet. Nor does Mr. Carlyle's expressed language on this very poem serve any better to help us—nay, it seems as if he feels uneasy in the neighbourhood of so strong a rascal, so briefly ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... with my father, because he walked faster, and talked with me while he walked, instead of being lost in his own thoughts and conversing only at intervals. A love of wandering seemed to possess him in the most literal sense; his rambles appeared to be without design, or any limit but my fatigue; and when I was "done up," he carried me home in his arms, on his shoulder, or pickback. Our communion was not always concord; as I have intimated, he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... on the origin of man are contained in his Recherches sur l'Organisation des Corps vivans (1802) and his Philosophie zoologique, published in 1809. We give the following literal translation in full of the views he presented in 1802, and which were probably first advanced in lectures ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... A literal prose translation of Homer, by Mr. T. A. Buckley, has just appeared in London. No prose version will cause any just notion of the spirit of Homer. Of the half dozen metrical translations published recently, we think that of our countryman Munford the best. Henry W. Herbert ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... hands furiously between his knees. It was absurd, preposterous. There was no smallest occasion to take those words in such a desperately literal sense. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... the contrary, do not injure those that go no further than the apparent meaning. Thus, for instance, they assert that there are punishments and rivers under the earth: and if we adhere to the literal meaning of these we shall not be injured. But they are deficient in this, that as their apparent signification does not injure, we often content ourselves with this, and do not explore the latent truth. We may also say that philosophic fables look to the enemies of the soul. For if we were entirely ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... anything good, will get fresh hope and heart from his story. It is well, indeed, that there have been some in whom the physical system equals the moral; men like Christopher North and Sydney Smith,—men in whom the play of the lungs was as good as the play of the imagination, and whose literal heart was as excellent as their metaphysical. We have all seen examples in which the noblest intellect and kindest disposition were happily blended with the stoutest limbs and the pleasantest face. And the sound mind in the sound body is doubtless ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... The best literal translation of the work into English thus far made is that of George Long. It is published by Little, Brown & Co. of Boston. A most admirable work, 'The Life of Marcus Aurelius,' by Paul Barron Watson, published by Harper & Brothers, New York, will repay careful reading. Other general ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... thing," I said, "as carrying honesty too far. All extremes are wrong. There are lots of occasions on which it isn't at all right to tell the literal truth." ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... not so easy to explain. It transforms this literal translation into an idiomatic one. Perhaps you will understand its workings a little later when you learn how and why I am able to ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... very remarkable that Titus did not people this now desolate country of Judea, but ordered it to be all sold; nor indeed is it properly peopled at this day, but lies ready for its old inhabitants the Jews, at their future restoration. See Literal Accomplishment of Prophecies, ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... legend imputes to Priam and the Trojans. Pausanias, upon the same ground and by the same mode of reasoning, pronounced that the Trojan horse must have been, in point of fact, a battering-engine, because to admit the literal narrative would be to impute utter childishness to the defenders of the city. And Mr. Payne Knight rejects Helen altogether as the real cause of the Trojan war, though she may have been the pretext of it; for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... place we are reminded that he was a millennarian. The Chiliastic teaching of his work is the subject of severe comment with Eusebius, who accuses him of misinterpreting figurative sayings in the Apostolic writings and assigning to them a literal sense. This tendency appears also in the one passage which Irenaeus quotes from Papias. But the answer to this is decisive. Chiliasm is the rule, not the exception, with the Christian writers of the second ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... labelled either literary or "humanistic" studies on the other is to my mind wholly unfounded in the nature of things, and destructive of any liberal view of education. It may perhaps be held that literature in its most literal sense is a name for anything that is expressed by means of intelligible language—a use of the word which certainly admits of no comparison with the meaning of science, but which also leads to no ideas of any educational interest. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the translation of the Pentateuch and was continued from that time till 130 B.C. by the translation of the rest, the whole being in reality the achievement of several independent workmen, who executed their parts, some with greater some with less ability and success; it is often literal to a painful degree, and it swarms with such pronounced Hebraisms, that a pure Greek would often fail to understand it. It was the version current everywhere at the time of the planting of the Christian Church, and the numerous quotations in the New Testament from the Old are, with ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... fat, swarthy personage in the full dress uniform of a general, received us in a haughty manner, and cross-questioned us in the most minute and tedious manner. Dennis somewhat puzzled him by the style of his answers, which were anything but literal translations of what Captain Hassall said. The result, however, was favourable, and we were allowed to go wherever we chose about the city, and to get the necessary repairs of our ships executed, and to obtain all the ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... focussed every aspiration of his mind, his soul, and his body. He knew he must ask himself the inevitable question and face it without blinking. Was he appalled by her real age; could he ever get away from the indubious fact that whatever miracle science may have effected, her literal age was verging on sixty? If she were not an old woman she had been one. That beautiful body had withered, undesired of all men, that perfect face had been the battered mirror of an aged ego. He did not ask himself if ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and give de countersign," responded the literal soldier, who at such a time would have accosted a spirit of light or goblin damned ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... patience to grope through the trackless intervals of time, and the skill to supply the lost words and syllables of history by careful collation with those which are spared. How faithfully this accidentally found MS. typifies such a labor, the reader may judge from the literal copy of it I now offer to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... was better grounded and had a more literal meaning than might be supposed; for the swinging gate communicated with the burial-ground, and almost directly in little Pansie's track there was a newly dug grave, ready to receive its tenant that afternoon. Pansie, however, fled ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... after this did George Muller ever resort to the lot: once at a literal parting of the ways when he was led by it to take the wrong fork of the road, and afterward in a far more important matter, but with a like result: in both cases he found he had been misled, and henceforth ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... habit of speech whatever. We accepted from them no phrase or idiom: the build and nature of the English language remained the same— unaffected by foreign manners or by foreign habits. It is true that Chaucer has the ridiculous phrase, "I n'am but dead" (for "I am quite dead"[4])— which is a literal translation of the well-known French idiom, "Je ne suis que." But, though our tongue has always been and is impervious to foreign idiom, it is probably owing to the great influx of French words which took ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... wealth. He had various corporate interests in the larger syndicates, but the basis and foundation of his fortune was real estate. His houses on the avenue were the best possible property, and his elevator row in the importers' quarter was indeed a literal gold mine. It was known that, many years before, his grandfather had died and left him the property, which, at that time, was of no great value. Young Walcott had gone out into the gold-fields and had been lost sight of and forgotten. Ten years afterwards ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... till the suit at law with the other "pretended corporation" should be terminated, and the incumbrances thereby caused removed with the vanquishment of the enemy. Those who have taken the story of the Kilkenny cats in its literal sense have done grievous injustice to the character of the grimalkins of the "faire cittie," who are really quite as demure and quietly disposed a race of tabbies as it is in the nature of any such animals ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... ancient Roman one. Some Latin writers of the twelfth century make mention of Insula Bona; and the word, Lillebonne, spelt, as it not uncommonly is, L'Ilebonne, might be regarded as originating from that appellation, of which, indeed, it is a literal translation. But the point is not worth arguing: it is equally possible, that Insula Bona may be no other than ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... chraestotaes] are Dion Cassius's words. Antony's language was differently reported, and perhaps there was no literal record of it. Dion Cassius, however, can hardly have himself composed the version which he gives in his history, for he calls the speech as ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... Bowen's Corners. Near their house was the tavern, its proprietor known to all the people roundabout as "Uncle Sam" Bowen. He and Daniel Read never wearied in setting forth the merits of "free salvation." They were the only two persons in all that section of the country who did not believe in a literal hell. It was the common sentiment then that only those disbelieved in endless punishment who had reason to be afraid of it, and, since both these men were exemplary in every other respect, it was impossible for their friends to understand their ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... the foot of the bed, gazing at the wall above his head. "I must earn our expenses until we're safe," said she, once more telling a literal truth that was yet a ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... its literal meaning, means an infusion of intelligence that lifts up the minds of man, and it is generally so accepted by the world at large, but education, as far as Catholicism goes, means only a rehearsal of abominations, which have been practiced upon the followers of this creed for centuries in the past, ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... chapels with pillared porticoes, but of a very old-fashioned kind. They believed in present miracles, in instantaneous conversions, in revelations by dreams and visions; they drew lots, and sought for Divine guidance by opening the Bible at hazard; having a literal way of interpreting the Scriptures, which is not at all sanctioned by approved commentators; and it is impossible for me to represent their diction as correct, or their instruction as liberal. Still—if I have read religious history aright—faith, hope, and charity have ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... them. His poetry in form and material is all his own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science, and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... can scarcely be denied that the will of God has been distinctly revealed on this subject. The promises made to believing prayer are explicit, numerous, and diversified. If we take them in their simple and literal meaning, or if in fact we give to them any reasonable interpretation whatever, they seem to be easily understood. Our difficulty seems to be this: the promise is so "exceeding great" that we cannot conceive ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... vessels made them more than a match, in this kind of encounter, for the clumsy, top-heavy, and sluggish marine castles in which Spain and Portugal then went forth to battle on the ocean. It seems almost like the irony of history, and yet it is the literal fact, that the Dutch galleot of that day—hardly changed in two and a half centuries since—"the bull-browed galleot butting through the stream,"—[Oliver Wendell Holmes]—was then the model clipper, conspicuous among all ships for its rapid ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that it produced a characteristic protest. "I am really distressed by the illustration of Mrs. Pipchin and Paul. It is so frightfully and wildly wide of the mark. Good heaven! in the commonest and most literal construction of the text, it is all wrong! She is described as an old lady, and Paul's 'miniature arm-chair' is mentioned more than once. He ought to be sitting in a little arm-chair down in a corner of the fireplace, staring up at her. I can't say what pain and vexation ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... of it as a matter of curiosity. . . . THE correspondent who sends us the following, writes upon the envelope containing it: 'I have endeavored to preserve the measure of the original, and at the same time to present a literal translation.' It will be conceded, we think, that he has been successful in his endeavor. Perhaps in some lines (as in 'Pertransivit gladius') the translation ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... the narrow hallway connecting the four rooms on which the social regeneration of her village depended, she caught the sweet low thrum of a guitar and a too familiarly seductive voice burst forth into a chant, whose literal significance she was unable to grasp, owing to lack of familiarity with the language in which it was couched, but whose general tenor no one could mistake, so tender and arch ...
— A Philanthropist • Josephine Daskam
... amusement of the afternoon was an apple-guessing contest, the names of different varieties of apples to be guessed from literal definitions, thus: The Royal Apple—. King. After that there was an apple-peeling contest in Hallowe'en fashion and each girl threw the peeling over her left shoulder to discover the initial of ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... he had no conscientious or doctrinal scruples about a third term. He had found the White House a congenial abode, had accepted the literal theory that his election in 1908 would not imply a third but a second term, and he wanted to remain. In point of fact I have an impression that, barring Jackson and Polk, most of those who have got ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... experience, but a composition by portions of that experience suggested. Thus while egotism was avoided, the fancy was exercised, and the heart satisfied. I translate as before, and my translation is nearly literal; it continued thus:— ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... is our duty, when we have the desires of the people before us, to pursue them, not in the spirit of literal obedience, which may militate with their very principle,—much less to treat them with a peevish and contentious litigation, as if we were adverse parties in a suit. It would, Sir, be most dishonorable for a faithful representative of the Commons to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of Timotheus was metaphorical, and that of Cecilia literal. But, while we stoop to such criticism, we seek for blots in ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... religious doctrines which they held which most greatly surprised John. They attached no importance, whatever, to the ceremonial law of the Jewish Scriptures; maintaining, in the first place, that the Scriptures had a spiritual signification wholly apart from the literal meaning, alone understood by the world; and that this spiritual meaning could only be attained by those who, after long probation, were initiated into the inner ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... most literal sense we live and move and have our being in the realm of spiritual forces. "Our life is hid with Christ in God." That assertion is no mere mystic phase, but a plain and direct assertion of an absolute spiritual truth. Our real life, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... that line. There are arguments, too, from the distances. There are two journeys in the book from Eatanswill to Bury, which seem to furnish data for both theories—the Ipswich and the Norwich ones. But if we have to take the dejeuner in its literal sense, and put it early in the day, say, at eleven, and Mr. Pickwick's arrival at Bury, "wery late," as Sam had it, we have some six hours, or, say, forty miles, covered by the journey. But the events at Mrs. Leo Hunter's were certainly at mid- day—between one and three o'clock. ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... a ransom for us. Or the analogy of the ceremonial law is accepted; and then Christ is set forth as a propitiatory or expiatory offering to obtain remission of sins for us. Regarding Christ as suffering for us in one or another of these Scripture forms or figures taken as the literal dogmatic truth, we have as many distinct theories. Then, again, different as these figures are from each other, they will yet be used interchangeably, all in the sense of one or another of them. And then, again, to double the confusion ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... was anywhere; he only said he had a coral breastpin in it for Sally," put in the literal Hannah. ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... est usque ad caelum— whose the soil, his to the sky— is a maxim in these pine regions of literal importance. There is something besides utility also to be mentioned in this connection. With the exception of swamps, which are few and far between, the timber land has all the beauty of a sylvan grove. ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... to allow of the literal carrying out of Tatiana Markovna's promise that Mark should not wait for Vera in the arbour. An hour after her conversation with Vera she had descended the precipice, accompanied by Savili and five peasants with axes, and within two hours the arbour had been carried ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... very fine, but one drawback remained—neither Indian understood a single syllable uttered by the other, but the beaming expressions scarcely needed literal interpretation. Truth makes it necessary to add that, with all this effusiveness, the ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... two Greek words, a literal translation of which would signify the "arrangement of skins," appears to have been practised in a limited degree ages ago, for may we not say without doubt that the first taxidermists were the ancient Egyptians, ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... much practice, added to a naturally alert mind, he became astonishingly ingenious in the torture of that honest but unimaginative gentleman whom he considered his best friend. He achieved the most surprising expressions by the mere literal translation of French idiom, and he could at any time bring Hartley to a crimson agony by calling him "my dear "'before other men, whereas at the equivalent "mon cher" the Englishman would doubtless never, as the phrase goes, ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... proselyte warrior, who declared with enthusiasm that he had learned from the Sulpitian missionary that the King of France was the eldest son of the wife of Jesus Christ.[32] This he of course took in a literal sense, the mystic idea of the Church as the spouse of Christ being beyond his savage comprehension. The effect was to stimulate his devotion to the Great Onontio beyond the sea, and to the lesser Onontio who represented ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... error," said the literal Agatha, as she smoothed down Little Poll's skirts and twisted her ringlets into formal corkscrews. "Right THERE, you are in error, my dear. The reason I told Robert to marry you was because he said to me, when ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... there is no substantial basis for these tales of crime. The history of mankind is not so pure but that we can afford to lose a few dark pages out of the record. Let it be granted that of the times which Homer sung historically we know nothing literal at all—not any names of any kings, of any ministers, wars, intrigues, revolutions, crimes. They are all gone—dead—passed away; their vacant chronicles may be silent as the tombs in which their bones are buried. Of such stuff as that with which historians ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... be used, or fresh versions made. In a few instances, important narratives hitherto unprinted will be inserted. The English texts will be taken from the earliest editions, or those having the highest historical value, and will be reproduced with literal exactness. The maps will be such as will give real help toward understanding the events narrated in the volume. The special editors of the individual works will supply introductions, setting forth briefly the author's career and opportunities, when known, ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... Virgil which he lent me, with Hamilton's literal translation between the lines, and an old tattered Latin grammar; I felt myself quite a learned man—actually the possessor of a Latin book! I regarded as something almost miraculous the opening of this new field ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... drifts in the world of man, so are there drifts in the world of micro-organisms— hunger-quests for food. Little is known of the micro-organic world, but that little is appalling; and no census of it will ever be taken, for there is the true, literal "abysmal fecundity." Multitudinous as man is, all his totality of individuals is as nothing in comparison with the inconceivable vastness of numbers of the micro-organisms. In your body, or in mine, ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... hindrance to a traveler and literal man of the world is this confusion of tongues! There is no human being who can make himself verbally understood everywhere on this little globe. In the Russian empire alone there are more than a hundred spoken languages and dialects. The emperor, with all his erudition, has many subjects ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... purity of style would in any case have been praiseworthy, but are nothing less than admirable, if not wonderful, when we consider how close the translator has on the whole (in spite of occasional slips into inaccuracy) kept himself to the most rigid limit of literal representation, phrase by phrase and often line by line. The really startling force and felicity of occasional verses are worthier of remark than the inevitable stiffness and heaviness of others, when the technical difficulty of such a task is duly ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... carefully prepared with far more than the average erudition, because it had been changed throughout by the substitution of bad readings for good, in defiance of MS. authority, with a view of preserving a literal agreement with the Vulgate.[124] Sigonius, another of the Vatican students, was instructed to prepare certain text-books by Cardinal Paleotti. These were an Ecclesiastical History, a treatise on the Hebrew Commonwealth, and an edition of Sulpicius Severus. The MSS. were returned ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... dispute that all the typical movements of our time are upon this road towards simplification. Each system seeks to be more fundamental than the other; each seeks, in the literal sense, to undermine the other. In art, for example, the old conception of man, classic as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been attacked by the realist, who asserts that man, as a fact of natural history, is a creature with colourless ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, it is impossible to determine. The natives are firmly convinced that the skeletons represent the slain in a great battle fought near this spot; but this is only tradition. At all events, the words of prophecy attributed to the old Scotch bard Ossian have a very literal application with reference to this interesting relic of bygone times: "The stranger shall come and build there and remove the heaped-up earth. An half-worn sword shall rise before him. Bending above it, he will say, 'These ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... that its author was expounding the biblical standpoint, and not his own, can it be reconciled with his general doctrine of progress and evolution in Hebrew thought. It would seem to accept the Sinaitic Covenant as a literal episode, and even to synchronise the Mission with it. But an investigation of the history of other Chosen Peoples will, I fear, dissipate any notion that the Sinaitic Covenant was other than a symbolic ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... if we take the Christian code, and suppose the New Testament made the literal guide of in every man, tell me, Mr. Fellowes, what would the consequence? What ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... coal-black negro stalking along with a Sergeant's chevrons on his arm, or to gaze on a regimental line of dusky faces on dress parade, but we soon got used to it. The first strong peculiarity of the negro soldier that impressed itself, upon us was his literal obedience of orders. A white soldier usually allows himself considerable discretion in obeying orders—he aims more at the spirit, while the negro adheres to the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... meant by the 'imitation of Christ' has been also misconceived. Imitation is not a literal mechanical copying. To make the character of another your model does not mean that you are to become his mimic or echo. In asking us to follow Him, Christ does not desire to suppress our individuality, but to ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... of their tastes and occupations? In cultivating the aesthetic side of man's nature; in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture, physical science—in all this lies recreation, in the true and literal sense of that word, namely, the recreating and mending of the exhausted mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now neglect, either for himself, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... earth, according to that which the Lord saith: [Sidenote: Deut. 32. v. 21. Rom. 10. v. 19.] I will prouoke them to enuy (namely such as keepe not his Law) by a people, which is no people, and by a foolish nation will I anger them. This prophecie is fulfilled, according to the literal sense thereof, vpon all nations which obserue not the Law of God. All this which I haue written concerning the land of Pascatir, was told me by certaine Friers prdicants, which trauailed thither before euer the Tartars came abroad. And from that time they were subdued ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... escaped outside. Anything beyond his literal duty did not strike the faithful Jem. He stood on the door-sill, and gazed after me with a ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... of my profession, perhaps, that the degradation has been due, more than to those who represent their plays. They have interpreted, perhaps in too literal a sense, the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... unquestioned bounds, it might at any time throw the country into confusion. And so has each House of Parliament." But if the absolute supremacy of the Crown in the legal point of mew exactly the same over temporal matters and causes as over spiritual, is taken by no sane man to be a literal fact in temporal matters, it is violating the analogy of the Constitution, and dealing with the most important subjects in a mere spirit of narrow perverseness, to insist that it can have none but a literal meaning in ecclesiastical matters; and that the Church did ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... little girl chosen the sharpest arrow in her aunts' quiver—nay, bad she been Miss Gascoigne herself, she could not have shot more keenly home. For the dart was barbed with truth—literal truth; which, however, sore it be, people in many difficult circumstances of life are obliged to face, to recognize, and abide by—to soften and subdue if they can—but woe betide them if by any cowardly weakness or shortsighted selfishness, they are tempted ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... general idea of the Doctrine of Descent is that the plants and animals of the present day are the lineal descendants of ancestors on the whole somewhat simpler, that these again are descended from yet simpler forms, and so on backwards towards the literal "Protozoa" and "Protophyta" about which we unfortunately know nothing. Now no one supposes that Darwin originated this idea, which in rudiment at least is as old as Aristotle. What Darwin did was to make it current intellectual coin. He gave it a form that commended itself to the scientific ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... broke my back I should die, Will. It is always fatal, I believe!" quoth Rachel the literal, blushing with pleasure at his praise, but talking as primly and properly as if she were addressing a class in a school. She is a queer girl ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... philosophy; and still less have we any right to demand this of him in his use of mythology and figures of speech. And we observe that while employing all the resources of a writer of fiction to give credibility to his tales, he is not disposed to insist upon their literal truth. Rather, as in the Phaedo, he says, 'Something of the kind is true;' or, as in the Gorgias, 'This you will think to be an old wife's tale, but you can think of nothing truer;' or, as in the Statesman, he describes his work as a 'mass of mythology,' ...
— Statesman • Plato
... know, before you arrived on the scene to put everything in focus. And if I had done all that, while you were still here in Rome, running up and down your scales, honestly . . . I know I sound awfully literal . . . but I don't see how we ever could have met, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... classical, who could philosophize in Socratic dialogue after the fashion of Plato—such a man a creature of the Ghetto! Doubtless he took his Judaism in some vague Platonic way; it was impossible to imagine him the literal bond-slave of that minute ritual, winding phylacteries round his left arm or shaking himself in a praying-shawl. Anyhow here—in logical lucid Hebrew—were Maimon's doubts and difficulties. If Mendelssohn was sincere, let him resolve them, and earn the blessings of a truly ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... by this time had ceased to be literal, except so far as it applied to Dick. Other cadets at his table talked among themselves, though never to Prescott. Greg, being Dick's roommate, was the sole ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... come in the bothering time and space, bothering in their relation to heavenly things, I mean. On the Friday, the penitent thief, as you call him, was to be with Jesus in Paradise; and now it was Sunday, and Jesus said he had not yet been up to see his Father. Some would say, I am too literal, too curious; what can Friday and Sunday have to do with Paradise? But words MEAN in both worlds, for they are not two but one—surely at least when Jesus thinks and speaks of them; and there can be no wrong in feeling ever so blindly ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... the spirited opposition which its corporation offered to the oath of spiritual supremacy. In 1622 Viscount Falkland came over as Lord Deputy, and Usher, who was at heart a Puritan,[469] preached a violent sermon on the occasion, in which he suggested a very literal application of his text, "He beareth not the sword in vain." If a similar application of the text had been made by a Catholic divine, it would have been called intolerance, persecution, and a hint that the Inquisition was at hand; as ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... in perfect health! And you, preserve for me always the honor of your good graces; and believe, my charming Sister, that never brother in the world loved with such tenderness a sister so charming as mine; in short, believe, dear Sister, that without compliments, and in literal truth, I am ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... stories is figurative. The faithful are not perplexed by the discrepancies in the inspired narratives, and one can hardly imagine an Indian sect agitated by the question whether God made the world in six literal days. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Scripture is so many-sided, and so fathomless in signification, that to dwell on one point more than another might be a wrong to the full impression, and an irreverence in the translation. Thus, as a poet, he sacrificed a good deal to the duty of being literal, but his translation is a real assistance to students, and it is on the whole often somewhat like to Sternhold's, whom he held in much respect for ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... the Club!" But if we were merry, we were wise. Shortly after dinner, M. Gail rose, as if in a moment of inspiration, from his seat—and recited the Latin verses which are here enclosed.[162] They will at least make you admire the good humour of the poet. He afterwards chanted a song: his own literal version of the XIXth ode of Anacreon, beginning [Greek: He ge melaina pinei]. The guests declared that they had never sat so long at table, or were more happy. I proposed a stroll or a seat upon the lawn. Chairs and benches were at hand; and ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... After directing that the labour of all the household, 'man-servant and maid-servant,' should cease, it then proceeds to the ox and the ass, and the stranger that is within thy gates. Now, gentlemen, this cannot be applied to the stranger in the literal sense of the word, the hospitality of the age forbidding that labour should be required of him. At that time slaves were brought from foreign lands, and were a source of traffic, as may be inferred by the readiness with which the Ishmaelites ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... than they had found it. Hegel had taught too long and thoroughly to be without influence after his eyes had ceased to look upon his entranced auditors at Berlin. It was not long after his death that his favorite theory of antagonisms had a literal fulfillment in the course adopted by the adherents to his opinions. His most ardent disciples found it difficult to tell what he had believed definitely, so varied are the expressions of his views in the eighteen volumes of his works. Even the same book was interpreted differently. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... so much taste and execution, that the Dean expressed a desire to have them translated into English. Dr. Gore told him that the author, a Mr. Macgowran, lived at a little distance, and that he would be proud to furnish a literal translation of his own composition either in Latin or English, for he was well skilled in both languages. Mr. Gore accordingly sent for the bard, the Laureate of the Plains, as he called himself, who came immediately. "I am very well pleased," ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... responsibility because the government is presumably the people's voice and its needs also presumably are the common needs and not the special interests of individuals. It is hardly necessary to point out that it was not the intention of government officials who made the appeal to excite a literal interpretation; they did not expect to be taken so seriously and up to date they have not been taken more seriously than they intended by American labor. All they mean and what they expect to gain, is what employers have meant and wanted; that is labor's surrender of its ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... the philosophy of Karma and of reincarnation, which are the tenets of theosophy. They hold with strict fidelity to what they believe to be the literal teachings of Christ. ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... now called "The Mazarins," and those of the Parliament "The Fronde." The literal meaning of the word fronde is sling. It is a boy's plaything, and when skillfully used, an important weapon of war. It was with the sling that David slew Goliath. During the Middle Ages this was the usual ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... within their bars, 'Mid bottles, mirrors and cigars— The woman passed behind each screen, And soon ocurred a "literal" scene— Rum, ruin, racket! ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... think, in recognition of the spirit of the Jewish institution, that one day in seven should be a day of rest. But I hold that Christians are freed from the literal observance of ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... know and love them all, especially the Major Duquesnois, an almost literal translation into French of Colonel Newcome. He took to me at once, in spite of my Englishness, and drilled me, and taught me the exercise as it was performed in the Vieille Garden and told me a new fairy-tale, I verily believe, every afternoon for seven years. Scheherezade could ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... passion which these objects inspire can go along with the imagination which seeks to express that passion and the uneasy sense of delight accompanying it by something still more beautiful, and no one can feel this passionate love of nature without quick natural sensibility. To a mere literal and formal apprehension, the inimitably characteristic epithet, 'violets DIM', must seem to imply a defect, rather than a beauty; and to any one, not feeling the full force of that epithet, which suggests an image like 'the sleepy eye of love', the allusion ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... clenching his hands furiously between his knees. It was absurd, preposterous. There was no smallest occasion to take those words in such a desperately literal sense. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... should feel that his understanding of life and of people has been increased and broadened. But it should always be remembered that truth is quite as much a matter of general spirit and impression as of literal accuracy in details of fact. The essential question is not, Is the presentation of life and character perfect in a photographic fashion? but Does it convey the underlying realities? 2. Other things being equal, the value of a book, and especially of an author's whole work, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... and it is a literal fact that I rubbed my eyes, half believing that I dreamed. For beneath, she was arrayed in gossamer silk which more than indicated the perfect lines of her slim shape; wore a jeweled girdle and barbaric ornaments; was a figure fit for the walled gardens of Stamboul—a ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... creation of the world, and the views of life after death have been illustrated by copious translations, together with discussions of the specimens chosen. The translations, I may add, have been made direct from the original texts, and aim to be as literal as is consonant with presentation in ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... and fear of the children of Israel upon the nations that were "under the whole heaven;" and that "all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn." And of course the universally admitted existence of such a class of passages, in which words are not to be accepted in their rigidly literal meanings, but with certain great modifications, renders the task of determining and distinguishing such passages from others in which the meaning is definite and strict, not only legitimate, but also ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... said Ruth, "that Laura is gone. She is very literal-minded. She might not understand that we could be hastily married and even lease a house, this way, and still be only ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... given the meaning here, not a literal translation. The writer begins: "After the death of King Crisnarao from his disease, as has been already recounted." Then he inserts a long parenthesis which might he read: "While he was sick ... he had made ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... hither—alluding to the burden of an old love-charm which is still used by the young of both sexes on May-morning. It is a literal translation of the Irish ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... given them something to think and talk about. Into this still pool Elder Hankins threw the vials, the trumpets, the thunders, the beast with ten horns, the he-goat, and all the other apocalyptic symbols understood in an absurdly literal way. The world was to come to an end in the following August. Here was an ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... still keeps her sofa; the first enthusiasm of her affliction has worn away, and she has nothing to sustain her now but planning our expeditions about the city. She has got the map and the history of Quebec by heart, and she holds us to the literal fulfilment of her instructions. On this account, she often has to send Dick and me out together when she would like to keep him with her, for she won't trust either of us alone, and when we come back she examines us separately to see whether we have skipped anything. This ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... emphatically have the same virtues. And one virtue which they very markedly share is that neither tyrants nor rabbles are snobs; they do not care a button what they do to wealthy people. It is true that tyranny was sometimes treated as coming from the heavens almost in the lesser and more literal sense of coming from the sky; a man no more expected to be the king than to be the west wind or the morning star. But at least no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only his own mill; no pedantic scholar can trim the morning ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... this work by the Countess of Pembroke, after it had been condemned to destruction by the author. The fourth may indeed signify nothing more than Lady Sidney's bereavement by her husband's death; but this interpretation seems too literal for a professed allegory. The sixth obviously alludes to the splendid obsequies to Sidney, performed at the Queen's expense, and to the competition of the States of Holland for the honor of burying his ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... Bave, Esquire Bordey, and other expectants and dependents. Viglius, always remarkable for his pusillanimity, was at this period already anxious to retire. The erudite and opulent Frisian preferred a less tempestuous career. He was in favor of the edicts, but he trembled at the uproar which their literal execution was daily exciting, for he knew the temper of his countrymen. On the other hand, he was too sagacious not to know the inevitable consequence of opposition to the will of Philip. He was therefore most eager to escape the dilemma. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... have agreed that her stepson was wonderful, but with quite a literal meaning. She found him a real cause for wonder—this poised, handsome, crippled boy of nineteen, with his tailor, and his tutor, and his groom, and the heavy social responsibilities that bored him so heartily. With the ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... Or ignorant poor, seeking instruction, to whom it would be months of schooling. And then, I should but have given you samples, Hazel, which you might multiply by the hundred and the thousand, and still keep far within the literal fact.' ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... than the fact that in every division of her realm there seems to be a class of parasites. In the vegetable world, as is well known, there are various plants that depend wholly on other plants for the supply of their vital forces. And in the human sphere there are parasites in a very real and literal sense—men and women who rely upon the toil and thrift of others to sustain them ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... thus with these dull serving folk," she said to those nearest her. "One cannot pay for wit with wages and livery. They can but obey the literal word. Sir John, leaving me in haste this morning, I forgot a question I would have asked, and sent a lacquey to ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to a small and comparatively sequestered cafe where he had already more than once found refreshment and comparative repose, together with solutions that consisted mainly and pleasantly of further indecisions. It was a literal fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid mirror and his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his tobacco, might have been regarded by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn't ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... other improbabilities and incongruities. Every thing of this kind was now awakened; while, in order to master the Hebrew, I occupied myself exclusively with the Old Testament, and studied it, though no longer in Luther's translation, but in the literal version of Sebastian Schmid, printed under the text, which my father had procured for me. Here, I am sorry to say, our lessons began to be defective in regard to practice in the language. Reading, interpreting, grammar, transcribing, and ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... anabasis has been told in hundreds and thousands of fragments—the anabasis that has had no katabasis—the literal going up of a people, as we shall see, from primitive husbandry and handicraft and a neighborly individualism, to another level, of machine labor, of more comfortable ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... repentance can avail nothing when a man has not repentance? yet let these passages appear, with a casting weight of allowance, and their absurdity will not be so extravagant, as when examined by the literal touchstone.— ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... symbolizes the truth that a truly spiritual union bestows the crown of immortality; the power of Godhood in the Kingdom of Love; which supersedes all earthly kingdoms in splendor. This is a literal truth, although it cannot be understood in its full significance until we ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... Greeks, as it is by their present descendants. Even during the classic ages of Greece [Greek: beta] represented [Greek: phi] in certain dialects. The name Berenice or Beronice, borne by more than one daughter of the Ptolemies, would be more correctly written Pherenice or Pheronice. The literal coincidence of this name and its modifications with the Vernice of the middle ages, might almost warrant the supposition that amber, which by the best ancient authorities was considered a mineral, may, at an early period, have been distinguished ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... judgment as a painter? I am afraid this illustration of a critic's science will not prove what is desired. A painter knows a copy from an original by rules somewhat resembling these by which critics know a translation, which if it be literal, and literal it must be to resemble the copy of a picture, will be easily distinguished. Copies are known from originals, even when the painter copies his own picture; so if an author should literally translate his work, he would lose the manner ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... wonder, which this learned philosopher will render visible to them." Yet all this while the royal family have not so much as even thought of seeing the wonders of Mr. Katterfelto. This kind of rhodomontade is very finely expressed in English by the word puff, which in its literal sense, signifies a blowing, or violent gust of wind, and in the metaphorical sense, a boasting ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... rosy girl of fourteen, as rough as her native wilds, with a mind so free from guile that she gave a literal interpretation to everything ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... as the literal rule of the smallest details of her life, she never wore a mixture of wool and cotton, as that was forbidden to the Jews, nor would she wear any imitation of linen for the same reason. In consequence, her clothes, which were of sound material, never looked common, ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... the life of humanity, which unites as one the past and the present, and which, owing no allegiance of a servile kind to time, becomes a pledge for futurity. Browning's personal experience is here taken up into his imagination and transfigured, but its substance remains what it had been in literal fact. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... founded on that of Austria. The civil code is a localized modification of the Code Napoleon. The first translation of the latter code was almost literal, and made without reference to the manners and historical antecedents of Servia: some of the blunders in it were laughable:—Hypotheque was translated as if it had been Apotheke, and made out to be a depot of drugs! When the translator was asked for ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... while Mr. Oke was despatching his Saturday heap of Conservative manifestoes and rural decisions—he was justice of the peace in a most literal sense, penetrating into cottages and huts, defending the weak and admonishing the ill-conducted—one morning while I was making one of my many pencil-sketches (alas, they are all that remain to me now!) of my future sitter, Mrs. Oke ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... literal sense the day after Cartoner landed in England on his return from America. Deulin saw his friend emerge from a club in Pall Mall and walk westward, as if he had business in that direction. Like many travellers, the Frenchman ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... those things belong to rich people who live in towns, and after all they are luxuries. Besides, you have often said yourself that everybody ought to get his bread by the work of his own hands, yet you get money and not bread. Why shouldn't you keep to the literal sense of your words? You ought to be getting bread, that is, you ought to be ploughing, sowing, reaping, threshing, or doing something which has a direct connection with agriculture, for instance, looking after cows, digging, building ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of many love-songs refer to the dawn, the time of the day when they are usually sung; but this reference is not a literal one. It figures the dawn of love in the breast of the singer. The Indian stands so close to Nature that he sees his own moods reflected ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... at him in consternation. "He's dumb, he's dumb!" they cried in astonishment, raising at once a literal pandemonium. ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... obtained by suggestion. The technique is varied and interesting, but the whole drawing lacks that individual something which we call Style. In the Lalanne drawings we see foliage convincingly represented by means of the mere outlines and a few subtle strokes of the pen. There is no attempt at the literal rendering of natural objects in detail, all is accomplished by suggestion: and while I do not wish to be understood as insisting upon such a severely simple style, much less upon the purist theory that the function of the pen is concerned with form alone, I would impress upon the student ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... the source of supply of heat and light, we are compelled to look for a philosophy more consistent than any hitherto advanced. Controlled too much by the literal evidence of the senses and the superficial appearance of things, we have ever regarded the sun as ALL ALONE in developing and ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... Bruno de Malpas would even have thought of alluding to the literal and primary meaning of the words. From the first moment of their joint existence, Jerusalem and Rome have been enemies and rivals. Not content with, so far as in her lay, blotting out the very name of Israel from under heaven, ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... Dee insisted, and was informed that they were henceforth to have their wives in common. Dee, a little startled, inquired whether the spirits might not mean that they were to live in common harmony and good-will? Kelly tried again, with apparent reluctance, and said the spirits insisted upon the literal interpretation. The poor fanatic, Dee, resigned himself to their will; but it suited Kelly's purpose to appear coy a little longer. He declared that the spirits must be spirits, not of good, but of evil; and refused to consult them any more. He thereupon took his departure, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... des Propheties qui servent de fondement a la religion Chretienne, Londres (Amsterdam), 1768. Translation of Anthony Collins, A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, London, 1724. Contains also The Scheme of literal Prophecy considered, 1727, also by Collins in answer to the works of Clarke, Sherlock, Chandler, Sykes, and especially to Whiston's Essay towards restoring the text of the Old Testament, one of the thirty- five works directed ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... phrase is narrow and literal, and while it may have such a meaning, it can also have a very different one. Suppose that, instead of looking with languid eyes alike upon all things, a man finds some question of vital import, or a pursuit that promises good to himself and to ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... and, besides, it would not have been right to break up the company. When Don Quixote, carried away by his feelings like a Sicilian facchino, came to the assistance of Don Gayferos by drawing his sword and attacking the Moorish puppets, he broke up Master Peter's company in a very literal sense, and had to pay four and a half reals for King Marsilio of Saragossa and five and a quarter for the Emperor Carlo Magno; but it is not clear how large ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... arrangements are very imperfect. As a help to those who study the text at home, I have recounted the general course of the action and dialogue just in sufficient outline to enable the reader to follow what is going on, adding here and there a literal translation, where it seemed desirable, especially where the meaning of the original ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... have lived in the early days of the Faith," he said, "You are too literal—too exact in your following of Christian ethics. That sort of thing does not work nowadays. ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... though far from the best that might be done, one likes to make an end of the matter by Print. I suppose very few People have ever taken such Pains in Translation as I have: though certainly not to be literal. But at all Cost, a Thing must live: with a transfusion of one's own worse Life if one can't retain the Original's better. Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle. I shall be very well pleased to see the new MS. of Omar. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... to these signs by the ancient Sanskrit writers and their exoteric or literal meanings ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... almost instinctively, a horseman with the hands of a Chaloner, and the seat of a Land, endowed with a bright intelligence which seized the common sense of things, and comprehended the meaning of an order as well as its literal injunctions, and a happy disposition which made a trouble of nothing, he was a general favourite wherever he went. He was attached as a galloper—or bearer of orders—to the General's staff, but, being employed ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... Sophocles and the Phocion. These were true portraits, no doubt; thus it was that these men appeared to their fellow-citizens; but it does not follow that they would have appeared so to us. What they saw is there; it is a reality both for them and for us; but the literal identification of it with the form belongs to them, not to us, and our mimicry of it can result only in these abstraction's. For us it is elsewhere, beyond these finite shapes, on which, by an illusion, it seemed to rest. The Greek statues ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact. To him every natural object seemed to possess something of moral or spiritual life, to be really capable of a companionship with man, full of fine intimacies. An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged not ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... of fetid nuisances, such as slaughter-houses and manufactories of offensive stuffs, have converted cities into pestilential inclosures, and kept Jefferson's saying—"Great cities are great sores"—true in its most literal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... assistance to him. He did not mention Mercer and remained no longer than a couple of minutes, standing outside the cell. In the afternoon Doctor Cardigan came and shook hands warmly with Kent. He had found a tough job waiting for him, he said. Mercer was all cut up, in a literal as well as a mental way. He had five teeth missing, and he had to have seventeen stitches taken in his face. It was Cardigan's opinion that some one had given him a considerable beating—and he grinned at Kent. Then ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... wrong in the kitchen, and then go and fetch Melissa." The woman was, perhaps, wise to defer the evil moment as long as possible. Matters might soon change for the better, and good or evil could come only from without. So Dido clung to the literal sense of her master's question, and something note-worthy had actually happened in the kitchen. She drew a deep breath, and told him that a subordinate of the night-watch had come in and asked whether Alexander were in the house, and where his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... this evidence that we are warranted in assuming that the figures were destroyed by Ludlow's troopers when he garrisoned the belfry. But such an assumption requires many facts to support it which are not forthcoming. We have no proof that Hollar's sketch was intended to be a literal transcript of what he saw; it is quite possible that for the sake of effect he preferred to complete the design according to the supposed intention of its builders. We are not certain that the niches ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... which they adopted was a piece of insanity in the literal sense of the word, a confused medley of absurd, ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... demands of a wealthy and noble adversary. He carefully distinguished the judge from the legislator; and though he meditated a necessary reformation of the Roman jurisprudence, he pronounced sentence according to the strict and literal interpretation of those laws, which the magistrates were bound to execute, and the subjects ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... above alluded to is contained in the closing lines of the "Metamorphoses," of which we give a literal translation below: ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... said once in my hearing (said Luther) that he was earnest against the Anabaptists, as contemners of God's word, and also against those which attributed too much to the literal word, for (said he) such do sin against God and his almighty power; as the Jews did in naming the ark, God. But, (said he) whoso holdeth a mean between both, the same is taught what is the right use of the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a literal but unidiomatic translation of the English cognate "waterproof," humorously for {wasserdicht} ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... I spoke the literal truth. I have no references to give either as to character, attainments, or birth. I have no friends. And I agree with you and Mrs. Heron that I should not be a fit person to teach your ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... who yet knew that the Jew was a man who would not hesitate at murder, and that his expression about getting his knife into Fraser was meant in a very literal sense. "I mean to get even with my man if I come across him again. But I won't be such a fool as to attempt it here. Take a look outside and see if Snaky ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... but in which Mr. Page used the expression, "we prefer that European Powers shall acquire no more territory on this continent," alarmed those precisians in language, who pretended to believe that the Ambassador had used the word "prefer" in its literal sense, and interpreted the sentence to mean that, while the United States would "prefer" that Europe should not overrun North and South America, it would really raise no serious objection if ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... facts and figures, tell the same story in different ways, locate the same incident at different periods, ascribe the same deeds to different men, quote statistics which are plainly exaggerated, mistake poetic legend for sober prose, report the marvellous tales of tradition as literal history, and give us statements which cannot be read as scientific facts without denying our latest and most authoritative knowledge. I shall not enumerate these "mistakes of Moses," and of others. That is an ungracious ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... expression is literal, and was twice uttered in the course of the evening. He then went on to add, that seeing the impossibility of doing as he could wish, he had been compelled to acquiesce in the proposal that came nearest to his own views. The friends of the ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... this parent idea, of which all the rest is but the necessary and inevitable deduction, is contained in the phrase far oftener repeated than understood, 'La Ilah illa Allah,' 'There is no God but God.' A literal translation, but much too narrow for the Arab formula, and quite inadequate to render its true force in an ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... truth Raeburn, spite of his keen observation, never thought for a moment of the true state of the case. He was a very literal unimaginative man, and having once learned to regard Brian as an old family friend and as his doctor, he never dreamed of regarding him in the light of his daughter's lover. Also, as is not unfrequently the case when a man has only one child, he never could take in ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... ponderous and terrific Scythe of Time (for I now discovered the literal import of that classical phrase) had not stopped, nor was it likely to stop, in its career. Down and still down, it came. It had already buried its sharp edge a full inch in my flesh, and my sensations grew indistinct ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of stage machinery, but to bring to the observation of his piece their highest powers of imagination, whereby alone can full justice be done to a majestic theme. The central topic of the choric speech is the essential limitations of all scenic appliances. The dramatist reminds us that the literal presentation of life itself, in all its movement and action, lies outside the range of the stage, especially the movement and action of life in its most glorious manifestations. Obvious conditions of space do not allow "two mighty monarchies" literally to be confined within the ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... his demand of speedy justice in a very literal sense, and allowing only fifteen days for the examination of this important affair, she sent a citation to Lenox, requiring him to appear in court, and prove his charge against Bothwell.[*] This nobleman, meanwhile, and all the other persons accused by Lenox, enjoyed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... two ways. First, painting is an art which merely addresses the eye; it does not in any particular exercise the moral sense. And second, painting, in common with all the other arts, implies the dangerous quality of imagination. A man of imagination is never moral; he outsoars literal demarcations and reviews life under too many shifting lights to rest content with the invidious distinctions of ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for them from personal knowledge, any more than I am in a position to personally vouch for the invasion of England by William of Normandy. But they rest on as good evidence as most other private events of sixty-odd years ago, and there is no reason for doubting their literal truth. With regard to the supernatural element, I am free to confess that I am not able to accept it in entirety. This is not because I question the veracity of those who vouch for the alleged facts, but because I have not received those facts at first ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... unsatisfying to the impatient, who want results to come as they walk. Probably this is a reason that it is occasionally said that Emerson has no vital message for the rank and file. He has no definite message perhaps for the literal, but messages are all vital, as much, by reason of his indefiniteness, as in ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... it. If all parsons had preached about it for the last fifteen years as Mr. Headley did last Sunday, if they had told people plainly that, if the cholera was God's judgment at all, it was His judgment of the sin of dirt, and that the repentance which He required was to wash and be clean in literal earnest, the cholera would be ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... visual and tactile sensations which, reduced to a mathematical baldness, now furnish terms to natural science. Mind then dwelt in the world, not only in the warmth and beauty with which it literally clothed material objects, as it still does in poetic perception, but in a literal animistic way; for human passion and reflection were attributed to every object and made a fairy-land of the world. Poetry and religion discerned life in those very places in which sense and understanding perceived body; and when so ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... capable of various interpretations which have changed from time to time. The benefit derived by any citizen from most of the public services evidently cannot be measured with exactness. The standard of equality cannot be applied in any literal sense to strong and weak, to rich and poor. It is possible, however, to interpret equality with reference not to objective goods, but to the psychic sacrifice occasioned by taxation. Ability is of many kinds and may be differently understood. ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
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