"Dreamer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... deeps. To his poverty-stricken experience, the amount was princely. The mere mention of it made privations to vanish away, luxuries to flourish. He had roseate visions of lavish expenditures: a warm coat for the old mother, furbelows for Plutina, "straighteners" even, if she would have them. The dreamer blushed at the intimacy of his thought. It did not occur to his frugal soul that now he need not continue on The Bonita, but might instead go easily to New York by train. He was naively happy in this influx of good fortune, and showed his emotion in the deepened color under the tan of ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... impossible to adapt himself to the new conditions. He possessed none of the practical qualities of General Hampden. With a mind richly stored with the wisdom of others, he had the temperament of a dreamer and poet and was unable to apply it to any practical end. As shy and reserved as his neighbor was bold and aggressive, he lived in his books and had never been what is known as a successful man. Even before ...
— The Christmas Peace - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... The dreamer spoke to her: "Who are you, standing there in the darkness with those eyes that I can hardly bear to look at? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... exquisite pleasure it gave him to select these things, these fine, soft, silken things. There were many things about this slow-going, amiable brother of theirs that they never suspected. If you had told them he was a dreamer of dreams, for example, they would have been amused. Sometimes, dead-tired by nine o'clock after a hard day downtown, he would doze over the evening paper. At intervals he would wake, red-eyed, to a snatch of conversation ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... calm would go O'er wrathful surge, through blackening storm, 'Mid he deep darkness, white as snow! So stately her bearing, so proud her array, The main she will traverse forever and aye! Many ports shall exult in the gleam of her mast— Hush! hush! Thou vain dreamer, this hour ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... of solitude, as well as student and dreamer, the church warden's favorite resort, when his duties left him at leisure, was a dense grove not far from the town. Thither he went when he wished to be free from all distraction, to think and dream over many things which would appear nonsensical ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... as clearly as in a vision, my whole being divided into two cross-currents that dragged me in different directions; the upper one faced the sun and carried me onward like a dreamer, whilst the lower one held my nature captive, a prey to some inexplicable fear. The extraordinary levity with which I chased away the conviction which kept forcing itself upon me, that I was committing a twofold sin, was amply accounted for by the really genuine affection with which I looked ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... visitations to which Father Vianney was frequently exposed, reached his colleagues, they laughed aloud. They declared that he was a dreamer, whose ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... of the town with a rumble, like a train of cars heard in the night, when one is half asleep. That was the sense of things to me, as I stood in the street, waiting for hell to blow off its lid. It was a dream world, and I was the dreamer, in the center of the strange unfolding sight, seeing it all out of ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... the motto of the dilettante And idle dreamer; 'tis the poor excuse Of mediocrity. The truly great Know not the word, or know it but to scorn, Else had Joan of Arc a peasant died, Uncrowned by glory and by ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... but it is not worth while to try to construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be, of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a human soul had ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... securing for the Netherlands not political independence through revolution, but freedom of thought under the Spanish crown; and this he thinks to accomplish by procuring the stadholdership for Prince Carlos. Now this being the presupposition, it was a great thought of Schiller to bring his humane dreamer face to face with the somber despot, Philip the Second, Let it be granted that Posa's views of statesmanship, which belong to the Age of Enlightenment, could hardly have found lodgment in the brain of a chevalier of the 16th century. The thing is perhaps ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... neck. Let her be a widow whose husband died six months after marriage, six months ago. Let her have come from some distant part of the world, from America—Baltimore will do as well as any other, perhaps better, for the dreamer by the fire has no faintest notion whether Baltimore lies in the middle of a plain or surrounded by mountains, whether it be built of marble or brick or stone. Let her come from Baltimore, from some prettily named street—Cathedral Street—there must be a Cathedral Street ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... to Hermione touched with a glamour such as the imaginative dreamer connects with an earlier world—a world that never existed save in the souls of dreamers, who weave tissues of gold to hide naked realities, and call down the stars to sparkle upon the dust-heaps of the actual. Hermione at first tried to make her husband ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... I was the Dreamer, they the Dream; I roamed 30 Delighted through the motley spectacle; Gowns, grave, or gaudy, doctors, students, streets, Courts, cloisters, flocks of churches, gateways, towers: Migration strange for a ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... up into the face of her friend, with a gentle and peculiar smile. "That must have been exciting intelligence," she said. "inasmuch as it was even able to arouse the dreamer, Frederick Gentz, from his political sleep, and to cause him to take interest again in the affairs of the world. Well, let us hear the news; what ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... a mad, dreadful fear, like that a dreamer suffers in the grip of nightmare, invaded his being. He felt the hairs rising on the nape ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... hearty ha, ha! "I hope you'll cultivate her society," he said, adding, "she is like Pat, as high-toned a fellow as ever lived. He was something of a dreamer, too, and this child has ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... this long-snouted beast. If in spite of this precaution one should have a bad dream, he must cry out on awaking, "tapir, come eat, tapir, come eat"; when the tapir will swallow the dream, and no evil results will happen to the dreamer. ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... for to have known the man was even as great a treat as to read his books. Lewis Carroll was as unlike any other man as his books were unlike any other author's books. It was a relief to meet the pure simple, innocent dreamer of children, after the selfish commercial mind of most authors. Carroll was a wit, a gentleman, a bore and an egotist—and, like Hans Andersen, a spoilt child. It is recorded of Andersen that he actually shed tears, even in late life, should ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... attract. The person whom he called to his counsels was John Robert Godley, a man of acute intellect and wide knowledge, of aristocratic connection and of real religious conviction. He was something of a dreamer, but his dreams were always noble ones. By his enthusiasm he was able to enlist the sympathies of several influential men among his old Christ Church (Oxford) friends. The revolutionary year, 1848, helped the project, and in the year following, Godley himself went out to New Zealand ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... one of the first to found the colony of Petah-Tikvah and therefore merited that people in Jerusalem should mark him out as an object of derision and scorn because he was a dreamer—a man who built the first house in this Petah-Tikvah—who was one of the founders of the "Me'ah Shearim in Jerusalem—who constructed perfect roads in Jaffe—who founded Zionist Societies in the lands of the Diaspora at a time when Zion did not occupy such a ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager
... The dreamer closed his eyes and smiled. A flood of tender memories stole into his heart from the sunlit fields of the South. He had gone hunting wild strawberries with Nan Primrose on the hills at home in North Carolina the day he first ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... mental and bodily strength, with that bright outlook that industry and honor always give a man, he was perfectly secure of ultimate success. His plans mingled in a singular manner the bright enthusiasm of the youthful dreamer and the eminent practicality of the man of affairs. At one time, his mind was fixed on Mexico,—not with the licentious dreams that excited the ragged Condottieri who followed the fated footsteps of the "gray-eyed man of Destiny," in the wild hope of plunder and power,—nor with the vague ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... of misfortune grew, Eve's courage redoubled; the greatness of her husband's nature, his inventor's simplicity, the tears that now and again she saw in the eyes of this dreamer of dreams with the tender heart,—all these things aroused in her an unsuspected energy of resistance. Once again she tried the plan that had succeeded so well already. She wrote to M. Metivier, reminding him that the printing ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... had he realized how hopelessly he had been a dreamer. Firio, P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear became the fantastic memory of another incarnation. His devil should never again rejoice in having his finger on a trigger or send him off an easy traveller in search of gorgeous sunrises. His devil should be transformed into a backbone ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... having a sense of beautiful things has no sense of absolute beauty, or who, if another lead him to a knowledge of that beauty is unable to follow—of such an one I ask, Is he awake or in a dream only? Reflect: is not the dreamer, sleeping or waking, one who likens dissimilar things, who puts the copy in the place ...
— The Republic • Plato
... little boy in Merimna named Rold. I saw him first, I, the dreamer, that sit before my fire asleep, I saw him first as his mother led him through the great hall where stand the trophies of Merimna's heroes. He was five years old, and they stood before the great glass ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... you are too much of a dreamer. But this you must realise—that I am not going to buy an honoured position at the price of insults to my aunt; that is the very last ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... a salt-baker's son and a little cow-keeper when he was anything, was a dreamer of dreams, and when he was upon the high Alps with his cattle, with the stillness and the sky around him, was quite certain that he would live for greater things than driving the herds up when the spring-tide came among ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... a year had brought about, Spiggot pondered sadly, and was only roused from his dreamy mood by the sudden apparition of a traveller on horseback standing before him; for so long and so soft was the grass of the street that his approach had been unheard by the dreamer, whose mind was wandering after the departed glories of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... descriptions of nature in Beowulf. Cynewulf's verse is essentially the verse of an agriculturist; it looks with disfavour upon mountains and rugged scenes, while its ideal is one of peaceful tillage. The monk speaks out in it as cultivator and dreamer. Its tone is wholly different from that of the Brunanburh ballad or the other fierce war-songs. Moreover, it contains one or two rimes, preserved in this translation, whose full significance will be ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... came a time when the days of the dream grew dark with sorrow in a rain of tears. The good mother was dead, the meadowside home by the great river was broken up, and the brothers were parted between two of their kinsmen. William (the dreamer) went to live in a populous city in the Realm of Conjecture, and John, crossing the river into the Enchanted Land, was taken to a distant region whose people in their lives and ways were said to be strange and wicked. To him, in the distribution ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Marlborough, and where, had the Dutch left the Duke a free hand, he would have marched on Paris—with other Allies—as he did on Lille. I must own that history, with its records of bitter enemies yesterday, bosom friends today, does not inspire one with much hope of seeing the dreamer's ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... with dust. He waited until the cloud sank, then he said, "Do you know—but you cannot know what it is to be sent from pillar to post and wait in antechambers where the air stifles, and doff cap—who have been captain of ships!—to chamberlain, page and lackey? To be called dreamer, adventurer, dicer! To hear the laugh and catch the sneer! To be the persuader, the beggar of good and bad, high and low—to beg year in and year out, cold and warmth, summer and winter, sunrise, noon and sunset, calm and storm, beg of galleon ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... glimpses we get of him during his wanderings, from the recollections of certain men with whom he made acquaintance in stages and on river steamboats, make a curious and striking picture of American character. The feverish, high-strung boy was never dismayed and never a dreamer, ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... Freud pointed out a constant connection between some part of every dream and some detail of the dreamer's life during the previous waking state. This positively establishes a relation between sleeping states and waking states and disposes of the widely prevalent view that dreams are purely nonsensical phenomena coming from ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... of nature, Monsieur; a dreamer of dreams such as they become who walk much with the spirits on the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... metropolis, and again I endeavoured to lull myself to sleep. The same expressions proceeded from the lips of the travellers, and they were growing more and more indistinct and shadowy, when I was startled all on a sudden by one of the most palpable sounds that had ever disturbed and confounded a dreamer. I sat up and listened, coughed to convince myself that I was certainly awake, and the sounds were repeated as clear and as audible as before. I would have sworn that Mr Clayton was the gentleman whom we had last picked up—that he was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... of disease in it; yet there were drugs prescribed that cost dollars by the score, and there were alcoholics by the gallon. For months the pain, alcoholics, and morphine kept the mind in such a daze that there were only the imbecilic mutterings of a dreamer ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... working this vein of reminiscence. He sat back in his low arm-chair, his unsubstantial face turned meditatively towards the Magdalen, his hands brought together to support his delicate chin. Helwyse, apprehending that the vein might at last bring the dreamer down to the present day, encouraged ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... recall chiefly his keenness of observation, his contagious laughter, his devotion to reading and to talk. He was also given to taking long walks in the woods, frequently with the solitary companionship of a book. Indeed, his extremely efficient family regarded him as a dreamer and were not entirely clear as to what purpose he was destined to serve in a community which, above all, demanded practical men. Such elementary schools as North Carolina possessed had vanished in the war; the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... the dreamer, had been profoundly touched by the event which had called forth that swift grief; and whereas Diana could not refrain from bemoaning all she must necessarily lose through the season of mourning, Meryl thought chiefly of how they could get away quickly ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... of great wealth and lineage high, Yet through those dungeon walls there came Thy thrilling light, O Liberty! And as the meteor's midnight flame Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth Flashed on his visionary youth, And filled him, not with love, but faith. And hope, and courage mute in death; For love and life in him were twins, Born at one birth: in every other First life, then love its course begins, Though they be children of one ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... to the edition of Jules de Goncourt's Letters, published by Charpentier. The profile, which is reproduced as the frontispiece to this edition of Renee Mauperin, is infinitely gentle; the emaciated contours, the extraordinary delicacy of the features, betray the intellectual dreamer, his mind intent on literary questions, and we understand M. Emile Zola's ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... to her intolerable. There was no place to go to for a walk except St. John's Road, and there, turning listlessly over the pages of the old novel, the time passed imperceptibly. It was like sitting on the sea-shore; the hills extended like an horizon, and as the sea dreamer strives to pierce the long illimitable line of the wave and follows the path of the sailing ship, so did Kate gaze out of the sweeping green line that enclosed all she knew of the world, and strove to look beyond into the country to where her friend ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... marshal or a statesman. You must act, Mr. Walstein, you must act; you must have an object in life; great or slight, still you must have an object. Believe me, it is better to be a mere man of pleasure than a dreamer.' ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... besides being really very good-looking, and the engagement will serve to steady me,—won't it, Ponto?" Thus, smoking his pipe, and talking to his dog as he sauntered through the gardens and orchards of the little domain of Fairoaks, this young day-dreamer built castles in the air for himself: "Yes, she'll steady me, won't she? And you'll miss me when I've gone, won't you, old boy?" he asked of Ponto, who quivered his tail and thrust his brown nose into his master's fist. Ponto ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in his face, even in that moment of secret rage as he sat alone in his workroom before the lamp. There was the frenzy of the fanatic, the exaltation of the dreamer, clearly expressed upon his features, but there was something wanting. There was everything there except the force to accomplish, the initiative which oversteps the bank of words, threats, and angry thoughts, and plunges boldly into the ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... in 1784. He was a poet, dreamer, prophet, and preserver of the legends of his people. For more than three-score years he had roamed about Hawaii, esteemed for his virtues and his wisdom by those who knew him, tolerated as harmless by those who did not. He wandered about the vast and desolate lava fields and talked with ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... Roy—poet and dreamer—became electrically alive to his double heritage of the soldier spirit. From age to age the primeval link between poet and warrior is reaffirmed in time of war: and the Rajput in him recognised only one way of fighting ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... stalk into the giant land. Before he could answer they were back again by the side of the gunboat, seated in the dinghy, and Chips was turning away at his cross-handled auger, which now seemed to go through the steel as easily as if it were cheese-rind, while when the dreamer took hold of a handful of the shavings that were turned out, they were of bright steel, and so hard and sharp that they made the carpenter angry because they did not remove the perspiration and only scratched his face. But he kept on turning all the time, till ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... ideas which this young radical reformer, dreamer perhaps, tried to teach his age. The time was not ripe for him, and there was no environment ready for his message. He spoke to minds busy with theological systems, and to men whose battles were ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... his gold-stool back. Then uprose Champion and dreamer;— For where in the North does such goodness repose? His word o'erflows With the wisdom ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... at a table near me, was highly amused at this unexpected announcement. She fell back in her chair and indulged in a long and hearty laugh. I am certain that most of my readers would have joined in her laugh had they known the object which provoked her mirth. "Poor Tom is such a dreamer," said my sister, "it would be an act of charity in Moodie to persuade him from undertaking such a wild-goose chase; only that I fancy my good brother is possessed with the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... am a man old enough to be your father; something of a philosopher and a dreamer, who has let the current of this world's affairs swim by him unnoted for many years—another, more dependent on present issues, might hesitate to speak to a man of such power as yourself in the manner which I have planned to do; but I would forever lose my own self-respect, which I state honestly ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... beauties of nature, less through readings in the Nouvelle Heloise and Bernardin's Etudes than with his own keen eyes; he was a true idealist, besides, and as such kindles one's enthusiasm. The man's optimism, his grateful personality, his saneness, too—for here is a dreamer neither idle nor morbid—are qualities no less enduring, or endearing, than his fame as "poet-naturalist." The American Farmer might have used Cotton's Retirement for ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... thinking, You with the dreamer's forehead and pure eyes, "What should I lose?—All, All that is worthy the striving for, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... choose: sometimes he angers me With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant, Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies, And of a dragon and a finless fish, A clip-wing'd griffin and a moulten raven, A couching lion and a ramping cat, And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff As puts me from my faith. I tell you what, He held ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... was the new Vicomte, the dreamer and the recluse, caught up by the career of events, as a straw is borne away by a torrent, when the French lords marched with their vassals to Harfleur, where they were soundly drubbed by the King of England; as ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... unforgetable—the chauffeur and Hilmer lifting Mrs. Hilmer into her wheeled chair; Helen Starratt coming forward considerately with a steamer rug for the invalid's comfort; Fred, standing outside the pale of all this activity like a dreamer constructing stage directions for the puppets of his imagination. And out of the almost placid atmosphere of domestic bustle the voice of Mrs. Hilmer again breaking the stillness, this time with a ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the society of phantoms he stepped upon Long Wharf and plumply confronted Captain Cuttle and Dirk Hatteraick. It was no less romance to our author. There is no greater error of those who are called "practical men" than the supposition that life is, or can be, other than a dream to a dreamer. Shut him up in a counting-room, barricade him with bales of merchandise, and limit his library to the ledger and cash-book and his prospect to the neighboring signs; talk "Bills receivable" and "Sundries Dr. to cash" ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... among his fellow-countrymen, very few collectors considered the subject worth notice. And yet, in the space of a quarter of a century, he unearthed more excessively rare and unique items than the wildest dreamer could have supposed to exist. Books and pamphlets which were to be had for the proverbial old song when he first came to this country quickly became the objects of the keenest competition in the saleroom, and invariably found buyers at extravagant prices. As ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... wrote his eyes sparkled and he seemed filled with enthusiasm. At length he threw aside his pen, and rising began to pace the vast apartment with long strides. "Alas!" he muttered, "perhaps after all I am only a vain dreamer, as hosts of others have been before me. But no, my scheme is feasible and cannot fail; it is based on sound principles and a thorough knowledge of mankind; besides, the immense wealth that an all-wise God has placed at my disposal will aid me and form a mighty factor ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... prominent, even bulging, and had the mystic's readiness to tears, but their expression was singularly contradicted by the truculent Kaiser Wilhelm moustache. The man seemed at once a dreamer and a fighter, and it would have been difficult to ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... "Not dreamer: lover, a better word. Don't spend your strength for nothing, my lady and mistress. Do you really believe that you can make ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... inarticulate twaddle? It seems to me that the explanation is to be found in the very quality of his surprising merits. As his books are play to the reader, so were they play to him. He was a great day-dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and humorous visions, but hardly a great artist. He conjured up the romantic with delight, but had hardly patience to describe it. Of the pleasures of his art he tasted fully; but of its cares and scruples and distresses ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... out as it goes, until wide enough to contain the representation of a man, in feature like himself, surrounded by an admiring crowd, who acclaim him Senior Classic. With a start the illusion is dispelled, and the dreamer ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... design and build, in four months, an entire village for the stricken sufferers, including a hotel, a hospital, three schoolhouses, and a church. The too frequent scorn of the "practical man of affairs" for the artist and dreamer, the world's sneaking tolerance for the temperament which creates in forms of ideal beauty rather than in bridges or factories or banks, finds in the life and work of such a man as John Elliott such complete, if ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... for he was hardly thirty when his victory at Bosworth placed him on the throne, the temper of Henry the Seventh seemed to promise the reign of a poetic dreamer rather than of a statesman. The spare form, the sallow face, the quick eye, lit now and then with a fire that told of his Celtic blood, the shy, solitary humour which was only broken by outbursts of pleasant converse ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... information, recalling his assurance that nothing would be done to their disadvantage. In reply, still through a third person, Seward sent them the famous message, over the precise meaning of which great debate has raged: "Faith as to Sumter fully kept; wait and see." If this infatuated dreamer still believed he could dominate Lincoln, still hoped at the last moment to arrest the expedition to Charleston, he was doomed to ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... end of Keats's life this feeling was growing stronger; and it is much dwelt upon in the Revision of Hyperion. There he plainly states that the merely artistic life, the life of the dreamer, is selfish; and that the only way to gain real insight is through contact and sympathy with human suffering and sorrow; and in the lost Woodhouse transcript of the Revision, rediscovered in 1904, there are some lines in which this point is still ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... happened? Why the heroic children of an heroic race, to which civilisation owes its most priceless blessings, should lie murdered there in that distant quarter of the globe? An invisible spirit of mockery answers, "Civilisation is a failure; the Caucasian is played out!" and the dreamer awakens with the echo of the word "Gold! gold! gold!" ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... wars and adventures are within. The various lives he is anxious to live are lived in lonely imaginations. The individuality he realises is in thought. At this point then he is apart from his century—an exceptional temperament set in strong contrast to the world around him—the dreamer face to face with a mass of men all acting with intensity. And the common result takes place; the exceptional breaks down against the steady and terrible pull of the ordinary. It is Hamlet over again, and when Sordello does act it is just as Hamlet ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... of time, King Arthur rose From his sedate post-prandial repose, And called for lights. Along the shadowy aisles His pages' footsteps pattered o'er the tiles, Speeding to do his errand, and at once Four tapers flickered from each silver sconce. The scene was changed, the dreamer's dream dispelled, And what might else have been his fate withheld From Gawayne's grasp. So may one touch of chance Shatter the fragile fabric of romance, And all the heart's desire,—the joy, the trouble,— Flash to oblivion with the ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... the old hunter-naturalist, who very wisely reasoned that among so many gentlemen of large hunting experience he might collect new facts for his favourite science—for to just such men, and not to the closet-dreamer, is natural history indebted for its most interesting chapters. Of course every one of us, guides and all, warmly applauded the proposal, for there was no one among us averse to receiving a little knowledge of so entertaining a character. No doubt ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... bare-legged, unlettered lad, he joined "The great Trek" which in 1837 sought on the dangerous and dreary veldt beyond the Vaal a refuge from British rule. He it was who, surviving the terrors of those tragic times and trained in that stern school, became like Brand and Burgers a dreamer of dreams. He lived to baffle by his superior shrewdness, or slimness, all the arts of English diplomacy. In his later years this President manifestly deemed himself chosen of Heaven to make an end of British rule from the Zambesi to the sea. "The Transvaal shall never be shut up in ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... not that which I do praise; I do not that I say; I sit a talker in the ways, A dreamer ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... all "information received," because I have had a dream!—not one of the ordinary lobster-salad kind of racing-dreams one reads about—(naturally I should not have an inferior kind, having ordered in a stock of the "best selected," one to be taken every night at bed-time)—in which the dreamer only sees one horse—but a most complicated affair, from which it will be an easy task for anyone skilled in dream-lore to extract ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... must be some nonsense of the sort!" exclaimed Aunt Charlotte, in her most vigorous tones. "Raps, indeed! I never heard such twaddle. Of course I don't doubt your word, but it's clear enough that you dreamt the whole thing. You always were a dreamer, Austin, and you're getting worse than ever. I don't believe you know half the time whether ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... "[Greek]," ladies, is "divination by means of an ass's skull." A pettifogger's skull, however, will serve the turn, provided that pettifogger has been bitten with an insane itch for scribbling about things so infinitely above his capacity as the fine arts. Avoid this sordid dreamer, and follow, in letters as in science, the Baconian method! Then you will find that all uninspired narratives are more or less inexact, and that one, and one only, Fiction proper, has the honesty to antidote its errors by professing inexactitude. You will find that ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... selfish to take the trouble to get into other folks' insides; yet you went about complaining that people were unsympathetic. Here's the difference between us; I may be a scoundrel, but whatever I've done I've played the man and never blamed anyone else for my crimes, while you—! You were always a weak dreamer, depending on others for your strength. You were discontented, but you never raised your littlest finger in an attempt to make men better. All you could think of was yourself, and your own ambition ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... long-roundabout methods of accomplishing crimes, to which one would have thought a lady of her imputed sagacity would have found much shorter cuts. It is amazing and inartistic, however, that after all her awkwardness she should fail. Given a blockhead like Armadale, and a dreamer like Midwinter, there is no reason in nature, and no reason in art, why a lady of Miss Gwilt's advantages should not marry both of them; and the author's overruling on this point is more creditable to his heart than to his head. These three people are the chief persons of the story, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... childhood, poor Viola had stolen from the room to weep at the thought that thou didst not love her. And yet, underneath this outward abstraction of the artist, the natural fondness flowed all the same; and as she grew up, the dreamer had understood the dreamer. And now, shut out from all fame himself; to be forbidden to hail even his daughter's fame!—and that daughter herself to be in the conspiracy against him! Sharper than the serpent's tooth was the ingratitude, and sharper ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... accomplished in life. The spontaneous self is secretly yearning for the liberation and fulfillment of the deepest and most powerful sensual nature. There may be an element of father-complex. The horse may also refer to the powerful sensual being in the father. The dream may mean a love of the dreamer for the sensual male who is his father. But it has nothing to do with incest. The love is ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... third-generation dreamer of participating in the glory. His grandfather had been a citizen of Earth and gave up a commercial position to take a job that amounted to little more than a janitor in an obscure department of Interplanetary Financial ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... know: I have written about that," I said. "And now there is another one, the Jewish. Have you read the plan for 'A Jewish State,' by Dr. Herzl, of Vienna? No dreamer he, but wonderfully sane, despite his lofty conception of a moralised, rationalised, modern State. Too 'modern,' indeed, this idea of Messiah as a joint-stock company! I predicted years ago we should come to that. But methinks ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... them in form altogether more exquisite than the crude realities. The chiaroscuro of their experiences is thus so constantly changing and recomposing that—whatever the apparent result of the scene in fact—the dreamer is in retrospect always victor, in the heroic limelight. With Jenny this was a mood, not a preoccupation; but when she had been moved or excited beyond the ordinary she often did tend to put matters in a fresh aspect, more palatable to her ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... whom I now survey Not in the frensy of a dreamer's eye, Not in the fabled landscape of a lay, But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky, In the wild pomp of mountain majesty! What marvel if I thus essay to sing? The humblest of thy pilgrims passing by Would gladly woo thine echoes with his string, Though from thy heights no more one ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... dreamer, "the clown makes a very pretty specter, with his ghastly white face, and his blood-boltered cheeks and nose. I never saw the fun of a clown before, no! no! no! it is not the clown, it is worse, much worse; oh, dear, ugh!" and Triplet rolled off the couch like Richard the Third. ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... to be ridiculed as a superstitious dreamer—nor, on the other hand, could I ask you to accept on my affirmation what you would hold to be incredible without the evidence of your own senses. Let me only say this, it was not so much what we saw or heard (in which you might fairly suppose that we were the dupes ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... a fellow conspirator if I had only known them. They probably became doubly suspicious of me from that moment and only waited to make quite sure before going all out to kill me. And yet, Bolton by coolly assuming I was a liar or a dreamer missed the entire significance of ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... a psychologist not merely of men, but of nations; and so the chief figure of On the Eve, Elena, foreshadows and stands for the rise of young Russia in the sixties. Elena is young Russia, and to whom does she turn in her prayer for strength? Not to Bersenyev, the philosopher, the dreamer; not to Shubin, the man carried outside himself by every passing distraction; but to the strong man, Insarov. And here the irony of Insarov being made a foreigner, a Bulgarian, is significant of Turgenev's distrust of his country's weakness. The hidden meaning ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... in Kamtchatka, on the crazy boats of the fur-thieves, Fate had been driving him to this end. Without doubt, in the foundations of the world was graved this end for him—for him, who was so fine and sensitive, whose nerves scarcely sheltered under his skin, who was a dreamer, and a poet, and an artist. Before he was dreamed of, it had been determined that the quivering bundle of sensitiveness that constituted him should be doomed to live in raw and howling savagery, and to die in this far ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... the poet walk'd along—up this street and down that—he reck'd not how or where. And as crowded thoroughfares are hardly the most fit places for a man to let his fancy soar in the clouds—many a push and shove and curse did the dreamer get ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and Mary died on the same day; the bells that tolled their knell rang out the order for which they stood. But the utter failure of their hopes roused no emotion save that of bitter contempt in Froude. He saw no merit in the "hysterical dreamer" who had sacrificed his all for his religion; he saw no pathos in the life of that lone woman who was condemned, almost from her cradle, to a loveless existence and a forlorn death. His final epitaph on her is that "she had reigned little more than five years, ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... should find their end, could we but trace them, in a condition far different from that in which our finite views and ethics have place. In the man who lives much on the sea we always find, if he be articulate, something of the dreamer and the mystic; that very condition of mind, indeed, which we have traced in Columbus, which sometimes led him to such heights, and sometimes brought him to such variance with the ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... historians, William of Malmesbury—the Norman love of battle and the Norman love of God. Upon these two ideas the history of the Middle Age turns. The crusader, the monk, the troubadour, the priest, the mystic, the dreamer and the saint, the wandering scholar and the scholastic philosopher, all derive thence. Chivalry is born. The knight beholds in his lady's face on earth the image of Our Lady in Heaven, the Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer of men. From the grave of his dead ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... nature to shun the daylight, though they do not fear it, and to prefer the dark, as this is their appropriate work-time; but most of all they love the dusk and the twilight, because this is the best dreaming-time, whether the dreamer be asleep or awake. And all the shifting phantom-jugglery of dreams, all the sweet soothing witcheries, and all the teasing and tantalizing imagery of dream-land, rightly belong to ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... thing I ever knew her to do," said Boyd, slowly. "She has helped me in a hundred ways. Without her assistance, I could never have won through. That cannery site would still be grown up to moss and trees, and I would still be a disheartened dreamer." ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... ornamented with fantastical illustrations, appeared to be tormented by an idea which incessantly mingled with his meditations. That at least was Jehan's idea, when he heard him exclaim, with the thoughtful breaks of a dreamer thinking aloud,— ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Elstow, near Bedford, will always be remembered as the birthplace of John Bunyan, and the cottage is still shown where the "immortal dreamer" was born. It was while in Bedford jail for "conscience' sake" that Bunyan ministered to all posterity by writing the Pilgrim's Progress from this World to the World to Come, under the similitude of a dream. As an allegory ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... learned wisdom by experience; but still I know that the desire has not died, as so many other desires have died, by the natural evolution of age. It has been forcibly suppressed, and that is all. If anybody who reads these words of mine should be offered by any young dreamer such a devotion as I once had to offer, and had to take back again refused so often, let him in the name of all that is sacred accept it. It is simply the most precious thing in existence. Had I found anybody who would have thought so, my life would have been redeemed into something which ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... Mrs. Vanderpool inquired, for she seemed to see in the girl's face and carriage some subtle change; something that seemed to tell how out of the dream had stepped the dreamer into the realness of things; how suddenly the seeker saw; how to the wanderer, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the nineteenth century, on a journey back from the west in a stage- coach, said that some day steam would drive wagons faster than they were going in the coach, his fellow passengers thought him a dreamer—a visionary. But it was only a man of such dreams or visions who in those days could have seen the possibility which has to-day ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... deeply did he desire such wealth and the power which it would bring with it; he who was dependent upon others that looked down upon him as a lazy dreamer, who had never a guilder to spare in his pouch, who had nothing indeed but more debts than he cared to remember. But it never occurred to him to set to work and grow rich like his neighbours by honest toil and commerce. No, that ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... he had learned that. Nor did he know that it was the lay of another vagabond, a dreamer light-hearted in adversity. But it was good—some folks might question its morality—but it was good—good philosophy. Swift and sudden, that was the better way. And sad, ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... a dreamer," he averred, "a dreamer who dreams true. Her ideas are so vivid that she insists on seeing them in tangible form. I don't believe she particularly counts the cost or the base material means by which these ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... meaning of a single sentence. It was a comparatively short sketch entitled "The Exile," in which shining, winged truths and elusive beauties flitted continually against a dark-background of Puritan oppression; the story of one Basil Grelott, a dreamer of Milton's day, Oxford nurtured, who, casting off the shackles of dogma and man-made decrees, sailed with his books to the New England wilderness across the sea. There he lived, among the savages, in peace and freedom until the arrival of Winthrop and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
