"Allegory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old man, "how the Saviour was tempted in the wilderness by the Evil One, is not in your opinion a parable, or an allegory, or mythical legend, without any substance? but you believe that this event actually befell Jesus Christ, the Son of God, along with the various circumstances and questions ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... explain. It appears in the most unexpected places. An obscure Corsican lieutenant becomes Emperor of France, arbiter of Europe, and one of the three or four really great commanders of history; a tinker in Bedford County jail writes the greatest allegory in literature; and the son of two mediocre players develops into the first figure in American letters. Conversely, genius seldom appears where one would naturally look for it. Seldom indeed does genius beget genius. It expends itself ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... something moral so to speak, in monuments, and they derive their poesy from the thought connected with them. For a cathedral, it is the idea of God. For Versailles, it is the idea of the King. Its mythology is but a magnificent allegory of which Louis XIV is the reality. It is he always and everywhere. Fabulous heroes and divinities impart their attributes to him or mingle with his courtiers. In honor of him, Neptune sheds broadcast the waters that cross in air in sparkling arches. Apollo, ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... 1874. Starts a Bible-reading in Dorset. Begins to take Lessons in Painting. A Letter from her Teacher. Publication of Urbane and His Friends. Design of the Work. Her Views of the Christian Life. The Mystics. The Indwelling Christ. An Allegory. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Mrs. Beecher Stowe's epoch-making novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, certainly contributed towards the abolition of slavery in the United States. Dickens gave a powerful impetus to the reform of our law-courts and our Poor Law. Moreover, even in free England, political writers have at times resorted to allegory in order to promulgate their ideas. Swift's Brobdingnagians and Lilliputians furnish a case in point. In France, Voltaire called fictitious Chinamen, Bulgarians, and Avars into existence in order to satirise the proceedings of his own countrymen. But the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... one of those suggestions, like Lord Brougham's of the "unknown public," which, in a single phrase, and a sentence or two of explanation, tell a whole history. This is the class John Bunyan wrote for before the bishops had his Allegory in presentable calf and gold-leaf,—before England knew that her poor tinker had shaped a pictured urn for her full of such visions as no dreamer had seen since Dante. This is the class that believes in John Bright ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... inspired writing and most marvellous orchestration; but it is too long and too diffuse. The plot also is strangely confused and uninteresting, and fails alike as a story and as a vehicle of theories, morals, or religion. "Parsifal," with its sacred allegory, its lofty nobility of tone, and its pure mysticism, stands on a platform by itself, and is almost above criticism, or praise, or blame. The libretto alone might have won Wagner immortality, so original is it and perfect in intention; and the music seems to be no longer ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... allegory of paradise that the rite of the "golden rose" which the Pope blesses on Quadragesima Sunday is derived. The ceremony is very ancient, although the first mention of it appears only in the life of Leo IX. (1049-1055); ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... people of Zealand. Others said that if any one could come back alive from fairy land, the woman must be Hyldreda Kalm. But as later generations arose, they mocked at the story of Kong Tolv and the palace under the hill, and considered the whole legend but an allegory, the moral of which they did not fail to preach to their ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... of English Reading," that he, Landor, failed to appreciate Chaucer, the old man, much vexed, refuted such a falsehood, saying: "On the contrary, I am a great admirer of his. I am extremely fond of the 'Canterbury Tales.' I much prefer Chaucer to Spenser; for allegory, when spun out, is unendurable." It is strange that a man apparently so well read as Mr. Pycroft should have so unjustly interpreted Landor, when it needed but a passing reference to the Conversations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... ancestors of the modern novel—that is, the novella or short pithy story after the manner of the Italians, and the romance of chivalry—appear in an English prose dress.' But the genius of English fiction was still loaded with the chains of allegory and pedantic moralisation; and in the Gesta Romanorum, the 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 ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... country has been more fully and faithfully illustrated as to its scenery, domestic life, and social traits, by popular literature, than Virginia. The original affinity of her colonial life with the ancestral traditions of England, found apt expression in Spenser's dedication of his peerless allegory to Elizabeth, wherein the baptism of her remote territory, in honor of her virginal fame, was recognized. The first purely literary work achieved within her borders was that of a classical scholar, foreshadowing the long dependence of her educated ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the favourite poet of Marie de Medicis, profited by the tediousness of her voyage to make it the subject of an allegory, in which ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... now take a poem of the Hartz mountains, containing no common allegory. Every man is more or less a Treasure-seeker—a hater of labour—until he has received the important truth, that labour alone can bring content and happiness. There is an affinity, strange as it may appear, between those whose lot ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... authority of Luther was thrown in favour of the literal acceptance of Scripture as the main source of natural science. The allegorical and mystical interpretations of earlier theologians he utterly rejected. "Why," he asks, "should Moses use allegory when he is not speaking of allegorical creatures or of an allegorical world, but of real creatures and of a visible world, which can be seen, felt, and grasped? Moses calls things by their right names, as we ought to do.... I hold that the animals took their ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... had written for the last number of the magazine, was an allegory, in which she boldly attempted to disprove the truth of the fact Tennyson has so inimitably embodied in "The Palace of Art," namely, that love of beauty and intellectual culture cannot satisfy the God-given aspirations ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... allegory, you must know," he said, on first introducing it, "which means a story intended to teach some good lesson—a story which says one thing and ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... scene of all represents him the weak slave of his mistress, a quack doctor, and a revivalist—'which things are an allegory.'" ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... I first beheld that extraordinary veteran of the stage, Mademoiselle Pierson, almost immemorially attached, for later generations, to the Theatre Francais, the span of whose career thus strikes me as fabulous, though she figured as a very juvenile beauty in the small feerie or allegory forming M. Ponsard's second act. She has been playing mothers and aunts this many and many a year—and still indeed much as a juvenile beauty. Not that light circumstance, however, pleads for commemoration, nor yet the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... satire seems to have absorbed everything, and while much of the caricature is admirable, especially in the detail of witty and trenchantly satirical dialogue, the central idea of a fountain of self-love is not very well carried out, and the persons revert at times to abstractions, the action to allegory. It adds to our wonder that this difficult drama should have been acted by the Children of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel, among them Nathaniel Field with whom Jonson read Horace and Martial, and whom he taught ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... themes of discord, and, as if to confound confusion, these disputants are interrupted by others, who would maintain that no such person ever existed; that the whole tale is a poetic fiction, an allegory!"[1] ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... seems to me to be one of the most beautiful sentences in English literature. Its beauty is largely due to the hungry eyes with which Bunyan looked at the present world during his progress to the next. If he wrote the greatest allegory in English literature, it is because he was able to give his narrative the reality of a travel-book instead of the insubstantial quality of a dream. He leaves the reader with the feeling that he is moving among real places and real people. As for the people, Bunyan can give ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... words long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine the relations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur and Margause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of Palomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory) his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters in point. But of course the main nursery of such things is the Lancelot-and-Guinevere story itself. Nobody has yet made Guinevere a person—nobody but Shakespeare ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... inhabitants of East London scarcely seemed to favour such an idea. But she knew that he had been reading from The Pilgrim's Progress, a book which Mrs. Churton had put in her hands, and helped her to understand. She did not know that he was putting an interpretation of his own on the allegory which might have made the glorious Bedford tinker clench his skeleton fist and hammer a loud "No—no!" on ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... George's Hall and the Chapel; but few of his works are now extant. Hans Jordaens' lively fancy and ready pencil induced his critics to affirm of him, 'that his figures seemed to flow from his hand upon the canvas as from a pot-ladle.' Certainly, from Verrio's fertility in apologue and allegory, and the rapidity of his execution, it might have been said that he spattered out his works with a mop. Nothing daunted him. He would have covered an acre of ceiling with an acre of apotheosis. As Walpole writes, 'His ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... categories, viz.: the LEGAL and the SUBSTITUTIVE. The former embraces the provisions of the great ELEMENTARY, and the latter all the provisions of the great ALIMENTARY principle. The first, accordingly, is limited by the constitution, or the Great National Allegory, while the last is limited by nothing but practice; one contains the proposition, and the other its deductions; this is all hypothesis, that, all corollary. The two great political landmarks, the two public opinions, the bob-upon-bobs, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... poetry; there is not a gleam of the bright human sympathy of Chaucer, of his fresh delight in the gaiety, the tenderness, the daring of the world about him, of his picturesque sense of even its coarsest contrasts, of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit. The cumbrous allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rimed texts from Scripture which form the staple of Langland's work, are only broken here and there by phrases of a shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of a broad Hogarthian humour. What chains one to the poem is its deep undertone of ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... respectable, attributes such things to Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a shadowing-forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visual form, of what such poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe. Which agrees, add they, with a primary law of human ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... world. No. XLL, line 4: concerning Taida, Sinon, Giuda, ed Omero, Adami says: 'These are the four evangelists of the dark age of Abaddon.' Thais is a symbol of lechery; Sinon of fraud; Judas of treason; Homer of lying fiction. So at least I read the allegory. No. XLII., lines 9-14 are noticeable, since they set forth Campanella's philosophical or evangelical communism, for a detailed exposition of which see the ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... She had held aloof so long in her proud reserve that now there seemed nowhere to turn for the sympathy she longed for, and Rosalind's little allegory, with its simple message of patience and hope, fell upon ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... copyright would exist in 1841 have been a source of gratification to Johnson? Would it have stimulated his exertions? Would it have once drawn him out of his bed before noon? Would it have once cheered him under a fit of the spleen? Would it have induced him to give us one more allegory, one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal? I firmly believe not. I firmly believe that a hundred years ago, when he was writing our debates for the Gentleman's Magazine, he would very much rather have had ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... trust that you have entertained no such prejudices: but if you have, I feel assured, that you brought them no further than the threshold of the court:—at that door they fell from you, like the burthen from the pilgrim (in the beautiful allegory) on his reaching the cross; and you stand there with your minds unbiassed, free and pure, to decide between the crown and the defendant in this cause. But it is not only my duty, gentlemen, to clear the defendant, but to extricate the counsel from ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... of fabling was that of allegory, which, as soon as literary activity began to appear in the early church, produced an abundant harvest. This tendency exhibited itself in the first progress of thought in England. Philippe de Than, one of the most ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... tells us, no comfort in any of the established institutions of his day, because confronted with the fraud and falsehood that infected them all, is one of the most pathetic figures in literature. As Skeat suggests, the object of his great poem was to secure, through the latitude afforded by allegory, opportunities of describing the life and manners of the poorer classes, of inveighing against clerical abuses and the rapacity of the friars, of representing the miseries caused by the great pestilences then prevalent, and by the hasty and ill-advised marriages consequent ...
— English Satires • Various
... touches it figures in gross material substance, preferably wood or some sort of upholstery. When, however, his hero first stood in Broadway, he seems to have found no fabric of the looms, no variety of plumage, no sort of precious wood or dye-stuff equal to the allegory, and he wreaks himself in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... His fertile fancy was charmed by the revived stories of Greek Mythology, and for a time he gave himself up to the painting of pagan subjects such as the Birth of Venus from the Sea, and the lovely allegory of Spring with Venus, Cupid, and the Three Graces. He was one of the early artists to break through the old wall of religious convention, painting frankly mythological subjects, and he did them in an exquisite manner ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... blood trickling from it when papa bled him! And now he is well and amongst us, he is handsome certainly, but oh, is it possible he is—he is stupid?" When she lighted the lamp and looked at him, did Psyche find Cupid out; and is that the meaning of the old allegory? The wings of love drop off at this discovery. The fancy can no more soar and disport in skyey regions, the beloved object ceases at once to be celestial, and remains plodding on earth, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as well as the most important and those oftenest used are, Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Allegory, Synechdoche, Metonymy, Exclamation, Hyperbole, Apostrophe, Vision, Antithesis, Climax, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... course there was a triumphal procession when, on the 11th February, the new satrap entered the obedient Netherlands, and there was the usual amount of bell-ringing, cannon-firing, trumpet-blowing, with torch-light processions, blazing tar-barrels, and bedizened platforms, where Allegory, in an advanced state of lunacy, performed its wonderful antics. It was scarcely possible for human creatures to bestow more adulation, or to abase themselves more thoroughly, than the honest citizens of Brussels had so recently done in honour of the gentle, gouty Ernest, but they did ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... devoted to it. It was one of my amusements in the long winter evenings—the only time of the year when Indians will tell stories and legends. They required pruning and dressing, like wild vines in a garden. But they are, exclusively (with the exception of the allegory of the vine and oak), wild vines, and not pumpings up of my own fancy. The attempts to lop off excrescences are not, perhaps, always happy. There might, perhaps, have been a fuller adherence to the original language and expressions; but if so, what a world of verbiage ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... excrescences of books, which the learned at length observing, took warning of their own accord to lop the luxuriant, the rotten, the dead, the sapless, and the overgrown branches from their works. But now all this he cunningly shades under the following allegory: That the Nauplians in Argia learned the art of pruning their vines by observing that when an ass had browsed upon one of them, it thrived the better and bore fairer fruit. But Herodotus holding the very same hieroglyph, speaks much plainer and almost in terminis. ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... Treitschke's brilliant and careful work than the extracts culled from his occasional writings by General von Bernhardi and the late Professor Cramb. It may gratify those who, with so many young German students, forget that Nietzsche, like many other prophets, wrote in allegory, and that when he spoke of valour he was thinking, not of "shining armour," but of spiritual conflicts. But careful enquirers, who would disdain to condemn Macaulay on passages selected by undiscriminating admirers from his Essays, ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... currents of influence; and all three frequently appear in the work of one man, not blended, but distinct. One is the conventional love-poem of the Galician school, seldom containing a fresh or personal note. Another is the stilted allegory with erotic or historical page xvi content, for whose many sins Dante was chiefly responsible, though Petrarch, he of the Triunfi, and Boccaccio cannot escape some blame. Third is a vein of highly moral reflections ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... Metrodoros resolved not only the persons of Zeus, Here, and Athene, but likewise those of human kings and heroes—such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hektor—into various combinations and physical agencies, and treated the adventures ascribed to them as natural facts hidden under a thin veil of allegory. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... we read the Fathers of the church, and see upon what arguments they have built the edifice of religion, we are inexpressibly astonished with their credulity or their knavery: but allegory was the rage of that period; the Pagans employed it to explain the actions of their gods, and the Christians acted in the same spirit when they employed it ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... described but puerilely, have the weight of an allegory. Without it seems but as a shell, but within lies the kernel. Without it is as wax, but within is combed honey; and fire lightens more pleasantly in the shade. For foundation, wall roof, white carved stone, marble smooth, conspicuous ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... brings this charge against the Quakers. There are, he says, many good and wholesome things in their teaching, but they mingle with them a "slighting of the history of Christ, and making a mere allegory of it—tending to the utter overthrow of that warrantable, though more external frame of Christianity, which Scripture itself points out to us" (Mastix, his letter to a Friend, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... and cut up than Josiah Allen wuz. If he hadn't boasted so over its bein' gin to him on account of his bein' so smart and popular and etcetery, he wouldn't have felt so cut up. But as it was, it bowed down his bald head into the dust (allegory). ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... I have put here in contrast with Chaucer, is said to have lived between 1332 and 1400. His Vision of Piers the Plowman (who is partially identified with our blessed Saviour), with some added poems, forms an allegory on life in England, in Church and State, as it appeared to him during the dislocated and corrupt age which followed the superficial glories of Edward ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... bestia triomphante da giove, effetuato dal conseglo, revelato da Mercurio, recitato da sofia, udito da saulino, registrato dal nolano, divisa in tre dialogi, subdivisi in tre parti. In Parigi, 1584, in-8.] This was an allegory in which he combated superstition and satirised the errors of Rome. But in this work Bruno fell into grievous errors and dangerous atheistic deceits. He scoffed at the worship of God, declared that the books of the sacred canon were merely dreams, that Moses ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... heaven at last, is given to understand that it served him right to be mobbed by the brothers Faint Heart, Mistrust, and Guilt, all three recognized members of respectable society and veritable pillars of the law. The whole allegory is a consistent attack on morality and respectability, without a word that one can remember against vice and crime. Exactly what is complained of in Nietzsche and Ibsen, is it not? And also exactly what would be complained of in all the literature which is great enough ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... paroxysms caused by the cold and harsh supremacy of this unbending foreigner, who set himself up for king of France, and had not one feeling in sympathy with the French. Alan Chartier's Quadriloge invectif is a lively and sometimes eloquent allegory, in which France personified implores her three children, the clergy, the chivalry, and the people, to forget their own quarrels and unite to save their mother whilst saving themselves; and this political ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... farewell masque and supper at York-house to their majesties. In the masque the duke appeared followed by Envy, with many open-mouthed dogs, which were to represent the barkings of the people, while next came Fame and Truth; and the court allegory expressed the king's sentiment and the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... ability would attempt to unwind the tangle of Bigot's dishonesty during a critical war. Montcalm wrote home complaints in cipher. The French government bided its time, and Bigot tightened his vampire suckers on the lifeblood of the dying nation. The whole era is a theme for the allegory ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... the facts, if facts they be, remain to be dealt with. And if at last we concede the ultramundane origin of these manifestations, whether as objective reality or only as truth-teaching allegory, what a field is opened to our speculations regarding the realms of spirit and the possible punishments there in store for those who, by degrading their natures in this world, may have rendered themselves unfit for happiness in the next,—and who, perhaps, still attracted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... the group of statuary in the middle of the piazza, representative of the Maremma and Family returning thanks to the Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany for his goodness in causing her swamps to be drained. The Maremma and her children are arrayed in the scant draperies of Allegory, but the Grand Duke is fully dressed, and is shown looking down with some surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt of the propriety of their public ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... themselves in a country road. A story of the same type is told by De La Motte Fouque in The Field of Terror.[33] Before the steadfast courage of the labourer who strives to till the field, diabolical enchantments disappear. It is an ancient legend turned into moral allegory. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... subject? What a sublime poem might be made of the story of some daughter of the desert transported to some cold, western clime, calling for her beloved sun, dying of a grief that none can understand, overcome with cold and longing. It would be an allegory; many ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... allegory; it is repetitive; it might weary one with the savour of that unhappy fifteenth century when the human mind lay under oppression, and only the rich could speak their insignificant words; a foreigner especially might find it all dry bones, but his judgement ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... and advise remembrance of the Creator before that future comes. So much is clear, but the question of the precise meaning of these verses is much too large for discussion here. The older explanation takes them for an allegory representing the decay of bodily and mental powers in old age, whilst others think that in them the advance of death is presented under the image of an approaching storm. Wright, in his valuable commentary, regards the description of the gradual waning away ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... such good Christians that they were called "the true Church of Christ," but who, nevertheless, looked upon the Bible as merely the history of the Jews. He then showed that the Book of Genesis was considered by many doctors of divinity as a mere symbol or allegory. He took up the defense of Gibbon against Kennedy's insinuation that the great historian had maliciously and intentionally kept back the truth; he quoted Warburton as a man whose ingenious theories have found much favor with ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... She was explaining to the English class what was meant by allegory, and she said the purpose of using allegory was to teach an important truth in a homely impressive way that could be remembered. She mentioned several prominent allegories, and said the Bible was one. And you know ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... poet is simple, sensuous, passionate, thus achieving Milton's ideal of poetic excellence. We hope that no philosopher, philologist, or ethnologist will persist in demonstrating the sun-myth or any other allegory from this beautiful poem. It is a story, a charming tale, to while away an idle hour, and nothing more. All lovers of the simple, the beautiful, the picturesque should say to such learned peepers and botanizers, ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... in his first attempt to build a card-castle or a rabbit-hutch. All is part of the training. God looks at the ideal man to which all tends. The popular idea of the fall is to me a very absurd one. There was never an ideal state in the past, but there will be in the future. The Genesis allegory simply typifies the first awakening of consciousness of good and evil—of two wills in a mind ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... and down I went, and deserved what I got: but my rule always was—Fight fair; fall soft; know when you've got enough; and don't cry out when you've got it: but just go home; train again; and say—better luck next fight." And so old Mark's sermon ended (as most of them did) in somewhat Socratic allegory, savouring rather of the market than of the study; but Elsley understood him, and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... powers being fundamentally identical and merely two different modes of activity or functions of the One Eternal, internal Principle, called God. According to the Bible, God said, "Let there be light," and through the power of this outspoken "Word," the world came into existence. This allegory, expressed in modern language, means that by the active Will of the universal First Cause, the images existing in its eternal memory were thrown into objectivity and thus produced the germs from which the worlds ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... the prophets that foretold it. Gloomy, fanatic, implacable and, it may be, mad, yet inspired at least by genius which itself, while madness, is a madness wholly divine, they heralded the future, they established the past. Abraham they drew from allegory, Moses from myth. They made them live, and so immortally that one survives in Islam, the other in words that are a ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... collaborated in the surprising number of twenty-one plays (all but The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green unprinted) with Haughton, Chettle, Dekker, and others. The Parliament of Bees, his most famous and last printed work, is of a very uncommon kind in English—being a sort of dramatic allegory, touched with a singularly graceful and fanciful spirit. It is indeed rather a masque than a play, and consists, after the opening Parliament held by the Master, or Viceroy Bee (quaintly appearing in the original, which may have been printed in 1607, though no copy seems now discoverable earlier ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... are shut in it by Giant Despair, when they are caught trespassing on his grounds. Even assured Christians, we know, may occasionally trespass on these grounds of doubt; but the weapons of modern warfare are not of the seventeenth century. The Interpreter's House in the old allegory dealt only with things found in the Bible, the only channel of revelation to John Bunyan. To the modern pilgrim God reveals Himself in Nature, in art, in literature, and in history. The Interpreter's Hand had to do with all these things. Vanity Fair is not a place through ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... the allegory, were at first companions, and in the beginning of their journey inseparably kept together. But their union was soon found to be disagreeable and inconvenient to both; guilt gave shame frequent uneasiness, and shame often betrayed the secret conspiracies of guilt. After long disagreeement, ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... fill the remaining Part of my Paper with a very pretty Allegory, which is wrought into a Play [3] by Aristophanes the Greek Comedian. It seems originally designed as a Satyr upon the Rich, though, in some Parts of it, 'tis like the foregoing Discourse, a kind of Comparison between Wealth ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... account you will find in the legends of the men of the Desert all manner of fantastic tales incomprehensible to us Europeans, wherein God walks, talks, eats, and wrestles. Nor is there any trace in this attitude of theirs of parable or of allegory. That mixture of the truth, and of a subtle unreal glamour which expands and confirms the truth, is a mixture proper to our hazy landscapes, to our drowsy woods, and to our large vision. We, who so often see from our high village squares soft and distant ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... indeed, much easier to describe what is not humour than what is; and very difficult to define it otherwise than as Cowley has done wit, by negatives. Were I to give my own notions of it, I would deliver them after Plato's manner, in a kind of allegory, and, by supposing Humour to be a person, deduce to him all his qualifications, according to the following genealogy. Truth was the founder of the family, and the father of Good Sense. Good Sense was the father of Wit, who married a lady of a collateral line called Mirth, by whom he ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... Frothinghams and the growth of their typically English characters, maturing just in time for the ordeal that has tested and (one is proud to think) triumphantly approved the spirit of our country. In fact these memoirs of Hugh Frothingham are something more than an idle romance; there is an allegory in them, and some touch of propaganda, cunningly introduced in the fine character of Torrance, the great surgeon who married one of the Frothingham girls and was bombed in the hospital raids. Through the varied activities of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... an Italian, born seven years after the death of Copernicus, published a work on the "Infinity of the Universe and of Worlds;" he was also the author of "Evening Conversations on Ash-Wednesday," an apology for the Copernican system, and of "The One Sole Cause of Things." To these may be added an allegory published in 1584, "The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast." He had also collected, for the use of future astronomers, all the observations he could find respecting the new star that suddenly appeared in Cassiopeia, A.D. 1572, and increased in brilliancy, until it surpassed ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... alienation? Yet this is an exact transcript of the mental condition of Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress," and its counterpart has been found in thousands of wretched lives terminated by the act of self-destruction, which came so near taking place in the hero of the allegory. Now the wonderful book from which this example is taken is, next to the Bible and the Treatise of "De Imitatione Christi," the best-known religious work of Christendom. If Bunyan and his contemporary, Sydenham, had ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... said, "that either the Jews or the Egyptians, being instructed, were blind to the reading of an allegory. But, Prince, if you cannot read this one it is not for me, who am but a woman, to ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... subject rasped 'em, and made 'em nervous. But when these various hardnesses aroze amongst some of the brethern, the rest of the men kinder joined in with 'em, some on one side, and some on the other, and they all baulked right out of the harness. (Allegory.) And there the minister wuz, good old creeter, jest a-sufferin' for the necessities of life, and most half a ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... read your graceful, spirited letter in the 'Athenaeum.' By the way, did you see the absurd exposition of 'Maud' as an allegory? What pure ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... answer. It was plain that Samson's bull-strength was no allegory to them. But the boy's confidence remained quite unimpaired. He faced his adversary with the lust of ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... will show a transformation of style as well as of thought, and changeful Proteus will become a true image of the Poet. The work will manifest a symbolic tendency; it will have an aroma of the wisdom of the East, taught in forms of the parable, the apologue, with hints of allegory. The world, thrown outside of that transparent Greek life, becomes a Fairy Tale, which is here taken up and incorporated into a great poem. We shall be compelled to look thoroughly into these strange shapes of Egypt, and, if possible, reach ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... crossing Westminster Bridge, and on catching sight of a small patch of rocks near the foot of the Moench, rushed precipitately down to it and partook of our third breakfast. Which things, like most others, might easily be made into an allegory. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... of the character and rule of the King over men to that fair vision of Paradise regained, which celebrates the universal restoration of peace between man and the animals. The picture is not to be taken as a mere allegory, as if 'lions' and 'wolves' and 'snakes' meant bad men; but it falls into line with other hints in Scripture, which trace the hostility between man and the lower creatures to sin, and shadow a future when 'the beasts of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... feature and glance. Ruth had listened with an occasional change of colour, but also with an outward pride to which she seemed suddenly to have grown. But her heart was sick and miserable. How could it be otherwise, reading, as she did, the tale just told her in a kind, of allegory, in all its warning, nakedness, and vengeance? But she detected, too, an occasional painful movement of Mrs. Falchion's lips, a kind of trouble in the face. She noticed it at first vaguely as she listened to the music in the other room; but at length she interpreted ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... The allegory which Paul is about to bring is taken from the Book of Genesis which he calls the Law. True, that book contains no mention of the Law. Paul simply follows the custom of the Jews who included the first book of Moses in the collective term, "Law." ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... for—for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of his great allegory— the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended. I say your appreciation is my glorious gratuity. In my proud, humble way,—a shepherd-king,—I was lord of a little vale in the solitary Crimea; but ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... appreciated raillery just as well as men did. Moreover, the Greeks do not appear to have had any very strong attachment to Paganism as a matter of dogmatic belief. To say nothing of the enlightened classes, who saw in this vast hierarchy of divinities only an ingenious allegory, the populace even was mainly concerned with the processions and songs and dances, the banquets and spectacular shows and all the external pomp and splendour of a cult the magnificence and varied rites of which amused its curiosity. But serious faith, ardent devotion, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... by professionals in this country, but the prose play "Cathleen ni Houlihan," because of its national theme, has had more playings in Ireland. Its effect upon the stage is very different from its effect in the study. Read, it seems allegory too obvious to impress. The old woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan, with "too many strangers in the house" and with her "four beautiful green fields" taken from her, is so patently Ireland possessed by England, all four provinces, that ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... in his Pretiosa Margarita the following allegory. In the palace sits the king decorated with the diadem and in his hand the scepter of the whole world. Before him appears his son with five servants and falling at his feet implores him to give the kingdom to him ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... not disdain the usc of allegory, which is truth conveyed to the hearer under a symbolical form. His admirable parables, each of which told a little history, were the most popular methods that could be adopted to instruct the lower classes, who, chiefly uneducated, require ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... moral philosophy affected the world through Roman law, the great masters of which were brought up under its influence. So all pervasive indeed was this moral philosophy of the Stoics that it was read by the Jews of Alexandria into Moses under the veil of allegory and was declared to be the inner meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures. If the Stoics then did not add much to the body of Philosophy, they did a great work in popularising it and bringing it to bear ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... series, "Songs of Innocence," was succeeded by "Songs of Experience," subsequently bound in one volume. Then came the book of "Thel," an allegory, wherein Thel, beautiful daughter of the Seraphim, laments the shortness of her life down by the River of Adona, and is answered by the Lily of the Valley, the Little Cloud, the Lowly Worm, and the Clod of Clay; the burden ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... meanwhile not wholly unknown, yet they only appear in force at the close of this period. And then also the pressure of political and religious strife, veiled in poetry during the greater part of Elizabeth's actual reign under the forms of pastoral and allegory, again imperiously breaks in upon the gracious but somewhat slender and artificial fashions of England's Helicon: the DIVOM NUMEN, SEDESQUE QUIETAE which, in some degree the Elizabethan poets offer, disappear; until filling the central years of the ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... not much on allegory nor sermonizing, but I declare San Francisco gets me started. And when walking along about one's business, one sees such a vivid picture, the allegory forces itself. The grandeur of yesterday, the serious beauty of today, and then the wild ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... read nor any lecture that he had heard ever attempted to explain the enormous creative urge which is felt by every noble mind, and which, indeed, is shared to some extent by every human creature. Put to it like that, Siner concocted a sort of allegory, telling of a negro who was shiftless in the summer and suffered want in the winter, and applied it to the present high wage and to the low wage that was coming; but in his heart Peter knew such utilitarianism ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... the heart, showing no outward sign of giving way in a moment, had been detected a good time since by Dr. Bryerly. My father knew what must happen, and that it could not be long deferred. He feared to tell me that he was soon to die. He hinted it only in the allegory of his journey, and left in that sad enigma some words of true consolation that remained with me ever after. Under his rugged ways was hidden a wonderful tenderness. I could not believe that he was actually ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... certain, looked just like him; and the two, strangely blended in one hideous presence, were the worst nightmare of my dreams. There was too much reality about that "Inbreed-Sin." I felt that I was acquainted with him. He was the hateful hero of the little allegory, as Satan is of ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... by this strange weird tale that is almost like a romance of Oppenheim and is yet like an old-world allegory? Is he laughing at anarchists that they are but policemen in disguise? Is he saying that policemen are really only anarchists? Or does he mean that the Devil masquerades as the spirit of the Holy Day of the week 'Sunday,' ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... at once the allegory. A tailor was condemned to be hung; there was no other tailor in the village; what do the inhabitants do? They said to the judge, 'Your honor, we have only one tailor, and we have three shoemakers; if it is all the same ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... E'en[E] such as graceful Sculpture never knew. In nearer times, and on a neighb'ring shore, Painting but feebly shone, obscur'd by pow'r. See Rubens' soul indignantly advance, Press'd by the pride and vanity of France; Behold, [F] in fulsome allegory spread, The gaudy iris o'er the victor's head! See Genius, deaf to Nature's nobler call, Waste all its strength upon the banner'd hall! E'en now, tho' Gallia, in her blood-stain'd car, Spreads over Europe all the woes of war, Still with ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... realism. It is true that Chaucer shared the beliefs and influences of his time and was a follower of its literary fashions. In his version of the "Romaunt of the Rose," his imitations of Machault, and his early work in general he used the mediaeval machinery of allegory and dreams. In "Troilus and Cresseide" and the tale of "Palamon and Arcite," he carries romantic love and knightly honor to a higher pitch than his model, Boccaccio. But the shrewdly practical Pandarus of the former poem—a character ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of which the Celt is capable when his abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent for some seconds, and then stepped back with an ironical bow. "Not literally true, of course," he said; "only really true. An allegory, shall we ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... for the petty nature of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand." All the fictions of the Middle Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave earnest ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... growing with the growing light, Their sweet sun-worship? these be for the snare (So runs thy fancy) these be for the spit, Larding and basting. See thou have not now Larded thy last, except thou turn and fly. There stands the third fool of their allegory.' ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... black walnut. His study table had pen and ink and paper upon it, just as if he had stepped out of the room. The queen's apartments were very elegantly plain, and her oratory is as pretty a little thing as you can imagine. In all these apartments are fine pictures, and one is superbly frescoed with allegory and history. The room in which the Queen of England and Prince Albert lodged, in 1845, was shown us, and the state bed was still in it. The dining hall was finely ornamented with carvings, old armor, &c. ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... I couldn't stand anything quite so vigorous as the associations of the siege this afternoon. I'm going to the Boboli Gardens, to debauch myself with a final sense of nerveless despotism, as it expressed itself in marble allegory and formal alleys. The fact is that if I stay with you any longer I shall tell you something that I'm too old to tell and you're too old to hear." The old man smiled, but offered no urgence or comment, and at the thither end of the bridge Colville said hastily, "Good-bye. If you ever come ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... with croolty to animals," I say,' and so on. It is evident that this mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so many remote metaphors as a coster puts into a curse; his speech is one long allegory, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... help. It also is one of God's instruments. It is a Force and a Power; and shame upon it, if it did not exert itself, and, if need be, sacrifice its children in the cause of humanity, as Abraham was ready to offer up Isaac on the altar of sacrifice. It will not forget that noble allegory of Curtius leaping, all in armor, into the great yawning gulf that opened to swallow Rome. It will TRY. It shall not be its fault if the day never comes when man will no longer have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations with ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... heard him retorting, as he assisted me to doff my doublet. "Do I jest? Diable! you Gascons are a slow-witted folk! I have a taste for allegory, my friend, but that never yet was accounted so ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... too, is a universe', and of this inner microcosm Petrarch was the poet and genius. It remained for Boccaccio to treat of daily life with an art as distinct and dazzling as theirs. From Dante's Beatrice, through Petrarch's Laura, to Boccaccio's La Fiammetta—from woman as an allegory of the noblest thoughts and purest stirrings of the soul, through woman as the symbol of all beauty worshiped at a distance, to woman as man's lover, kindling and reciprocating the most ardent passion; from mystic, stately periods ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... of prayer, for the Minstrel's foreboding was no idle one. Ere London knew it the Plague was at her gates; yet the King, undeterred, came to spend Christmas at Westminster; but Martin was not in his train. Men's mirth waxed hot by reason of the terror they would not recognise. Banquet and revel, allegory and miracle play; pageant of beautiful women and brave men; junketing, ay, and rioting—thus they flung a defiance at the enemy; and then fled: for across the clash of the feast bells sounded the mournful note of ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... unrivaled, chiefly in his power to portray lofty sentiments which persons of all nationalities can feel, but few can describe. He also excelled in invention, composition, simplicity and grandeur. For moral force in allegory and history, and for fidelity in portrait, Raphael was unsurpassed. His last and most celebrated oil picture, the transfiguration, unfinished, stood at his head as his body ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... Romaunt of the Rose, 1032, where Richesse, "an high lady of great noblesse", is one of the persons of the allegory; and compare Rev. xviii. 17, Authorized Version. This has so entirely escaped the knowledge of Ben Jonson, English scholar as he was, that in his Grammar he cites 'riches' as an example of an English word wanting ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... building, the working day and the musical instruments in the orchestra are dramatized in turn. The dialogue of the latter far more intimately suggests their quality than does the speech of the flutes in Tieck, where their spirit is cerulean blue. Wasa, unfortunately, runs off into dull allegory, and this work is not to be compared with August von Schlegel's Gate of Honor as a satire on ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... could represent as the true inner meaning of the traditional rites. To this end they laid hold of the old myths, and applied to them an allegorical system of interpretation. Myth interpreted by the aid of allegory became the favourite means of infusing a new significance into ancient forms. But the theories thus developed are the falsest of false guides as to the original meaning of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the Paper, but to the Person bringing or carrying the News? Mercury also is, if I understand it, by a Transmutation of Meaning, from a God turned into a Book—From hence our Club thinks they have not fair Play, in being deny'd the Privilege of making an Allegory ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... at last, like a draggled kite, Ishmael sinks among the ferns and passes away, while the assassins fly back and tell how they settled the fool who could not keep the shot out of his carcass. If the observer sees this often, his disposition to moralise may become very importunate, for he sees an allegory of human life written in black specks on that sky that broods so softly, like a benediction, over the fair world. One may easily bring forward half a score of similar instances from the animal kingdom. A buffalo falls ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... if, as each leaf came from the chisel, it took proper life and fluttered freely on the wall, and if the vine grew, and the building were hidden over with foliage and fruit, the architect would stand in much the same situation as the writer of allegories. The Faery Queen was an allegory, I am willing to believe; but it survives as an imaginative tale in incomparable verse. The case of Bunyan is widely different; and yet in this also Allegory, poor nymph, although never quite forgotten, is sometimes rudely thrust against the wall. Bunyan was fervently ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mankind, the deluge of Deuca'lion, and then onward down to the time of Augustus Caesar. This great work of the pagan poet, called The Metamorphoses, is not only the most curious and valuable record extant of ancient mythology, but some have thought they discovered, in every story it contains, a moral allegory; while others have attempted to trace in it the whole history of the Old Testament, and types of the miracles and sufferings of our Savior. But, however little of truth there may be in the last of these suppositions, the beautiful and impressive account of the Creation ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... such-like expressions were intended primarily as references to a neglected study of theology or a previous devotion to a contemplative life. The omission, therefore, of the commentators who interested themselves mainly in the allegory to tell us about the real Beatrice cannot be used as ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... dreams which may be history or may be allegory. There is in them nothing grotesque, nothing which could mar the feeling of authenticity, the sense of the actual occurence of the dream incident. The faces and figures perceived have the light shade ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... tract in Woodstock, entitled Vindication of the Book of Common Prayer against the Contumelious Slanders of the Fanatic Party terming it "Porridge." The author of this singular and rare tract (says Sir W.) indulges in the allegorical style, till he fairly hunts down the allegory. The learned divine chases his metaphor at a very cold scent, through a pamphlet of his mortal quarto pages.—See a Parallel of the Liturgy with the Mass Book, Breviary, &c., by Robert Baylie. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... an allegory, signifying that Euripides was after all worried out of life by the curs of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... fairy princess,—a consumptive school-mistress,—a young woman dying of the perfidy of her lover,—a mysterious widow; and I daily expect to hear that a caterpillar which figured as hero in one of my tales was an allegory of myself, and that a cat mentioned in "The New Tobias" is a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... stories. It is, in effect, one tale he is telling, a tale in which Poictesme and the more local Lichfield are, for all their topographical dissimilarities, the same place, and all his people interchangeable symbols of the changeless desires of men. Whether the allegory is told in the terms of Gallantry with its perfumed lights, its deliberate artifice and its technique of badinage, or presented in the more high-flying mood of Chivalry with its ready passions and readier rhetoric, it prefigures the subsequent pageant in which the ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... Navarre (d. 1253). There is in the work of these poets a great sameness. Their one theme was love as the essential principle of perfect courtly conduct, and their treatment was made still more lifeless by the use of allegory which was beginning to reveal its fascination for the mediaeval mind. From all their work the note of individuality is almost completely absent. Their art consisted in saying the same conventional ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... seem over well pleased. He was quite aware that his daughter was a very clever young woman; and he did not know what insane idea might have got into her head of throwing an allegory at him. ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... allegory, to which there would seem to be some allusion in the words of Scripture, "Strait is the gate," etc., is of Zoroastrian origin. Compare the Zend-Avesta, Yasna xix. 6 (Sacred Books of the East, edited by F. Max Muller, 1887, xxxi. 261), "With even threefold (safety ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Vergil, and Edward Kirke furnished it with an elaborate prose commentary. Spenser took the same liberties with the pastoral form as did Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a vehicle for satire and allegory, made it carry political and social allusions, and planted in it references to his friends. By its publication Spenser became the first poet of the day. It was followed by some of his finest and most beautiful things—by ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but when the Duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks them for their final word, they all cry together Vive l'Empereur! Monsieur Rostand, perhaps, did not know that he was writing an allegory. To me that field of Wagram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear nothing but the voices of pain; the whole is one phonograph of horror. It is right that we should hear these things, it is ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... terms of Mystic Masonry the conflict between the Sons of Cain and the Sons of Seth, and unravels the allegory dealing with the building of Solomon's Temple, the Queen of Sheba, and the Grand Master, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... effectual motive for well-doing" (p. 104). My only comment is c'est ignolile! His Reverence acts the part of Satan in Holy Writ, "Does Job serve God for naught?" Compare this selfish, irreligious, and immoral view with Philo Judaeus (On the Allegory of the Sacred Laws, cap. 1viii.), to measure the extent of the fall from Pharisaism to Christianity. And the latter is still infected with the "bribe-and-threat doctrine:" I once immensely scandalised a Consular Chaplain by ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... successfully distinguished parables from myths and fables; but this is laboriously to erect a fence between two flocks that in their nature manifest no tendency to intermingle; whereas, from some other forms of analogy, such as the allegory, the parable cannot be separated by a definition expressed in general terms, which shall be at once universally applicable and ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... like the multiplicity of the things; how the use of metaphor—that prolific source of new words—is a suggesting of ideas that are like the ideas to be conveyed in some respect or other; and how, in the copious use of simile, fable, and allegory among uncivilised races, we see that complex conceptions, which there is yet no direct language for, are rendered, by presenting known conceptions more or less ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... half unconscious, Ariadne is already under her fated star: for above is the constellation of Ariadne's crown—the crown with which Bacchus presented his bride. And observe in connection with the astronomical side of the allegory the figure in Bacchus's train with the serpent round him: this is the serpent-bearer (Milton's "Ophiuchus huge") translated to the skies with Bacchus and Ariadne. Notice too another piece of poetry: the marriage ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... world lay imprisoned and explained in the daily hurry of his very blood. He understood, because he felt, the power of the ocean tides; and, flitting to and fro through the tenderer regions of his extended Self, danced the fragrance of all the wild flowers that ever blew. That strange allegory of man, the microcosm, and earth, the macrocosm, became a sudden blazing reality. The feverish distress, unrest, and vanity of modern life was due to the distance men had traveled from the soul of the world, away from large simplicity ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... him bound by any precedent or any self-imposed law of literality. If he should see his work as a mighty historical picture, or series of such pictures, we should not gainsay him his conception or bind him rather to any genre result. We ourselves have been evolving here the notion of some large allegory which should bear the relation to all other allegories that Bartholdi's colossus of Liberty bears to all other statues, and which should carry forward the story and the hero, or the heroine, to some such supreme moment as that when, amid the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... out of his bargain, when he had complied with the terms of the contract by Faust; and Gounod in his opera does exactly for "immediate dramatic effect," what we hold it would be necessary to do for R. L. Stevenson. Goethe, with his casuistries which led him to allegory and all manner of overdone symbolisms and perversions in the Second Part, is set aside and a true crisis and close is found by Gounod through simply sending Marguerite above and Faust below, as, indeed, Faust had agreed by solemn compact with Mephistopheles ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... enough to be recognized, and she gave a little moan of pity. She seemed not to understand the young man's allegory, but yet to feel that it pointed to some great purpose, which must be an evil one, from being expressed in such a lawless fashion, and to perceive that Rowland was in some way accountable for it. She ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... base of the side wall he was approaching-something that stood out in startling contrast to all the surroundings and yet seemed so much a part and parcel of the somber scene as to suggest an actor amid the settings of a well-appointed stage, and, as though to carry out the allegory, the pitiless rays of flaming Kudu topped the eastern cliff, picking out the thing lying at the foot of the western wall like ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... beef is rare, and can't help thinking That the old fable of the Minotaur—From which our modern morals, rightly shrinking, Condemn the royal lady's taste who wore A cow's shape for a mask—was only (sinking The allegory) a mere type, no more, That Pasiphae promoted breeding cattle, To make the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... comedy; for, if we believe him, and who can be better credited? he was the most daring of all his brethren, the poets, who practised the same kind of writing. Upon this supposition we may conclude, that the comedy of those days consisted in an allegory drawn out and continued; an allegory never very regular, but often ingenious, and almost always carried beyond strict propriety; of satire keen and biting, but diversified, sprightly, and unexpected; so that the wound was given before it was perceived. Their points of satire were thunderbolts, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... 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
... picturesque. And the same which is said here of him by way of example is largely true of the highest class of literature. Dante's Divine Comedy is supremely important as a philosophy; but it is important merely as a panorama. Spenser's Faery Queen pleases us as an allegory; but it would please us even as a wall-paper. Stronger still is the case of Chaucer who loved the pure picturesque, which always includes something of what we commonly call the ugly. The huge stature and ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... an allegory," he continued. "I felt it so at the time. Yes, I had half a mind to answer 'Backward' and give up my berth in this ship. Then I looked at you again, and something inside of me said 'Forward.' So I came up the rest of the gangway and took off my hat to you, a salutation I had no right ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins, which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which has hardly the novelists's scope. New England, in Hawthorne's work, achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, and the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... hesitation, this new visitor settles upon the purple head of an iris bloom. With its vivid colouring and its quick movements the butterfly brings an atmosphere of life into the courtyard that was hitherto lacking. Its appearance too suggests the famous allegory, the unsolved riddle of human existence which so puzzled the divine Plato and the ancient philosophers of Athens and Syracuse. Here are we, the living men of to-day, watching the corpse of a departed ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... had recourse to insipid Allegory[18], thinking to please by a new Taste; but their Works dy'd in their Birth, and were so little read that they ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... the present opportunity to ask the authority for the portrait of Bunyan appended to his ever-fresh allegory. The engraved portrait I have has not the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... There is the lesson of "Cinderella," which is the same as that of the Magnificat— EXALTAVIT HUMILES. There is the great lesson of "Beauty and the Beast"; that a thing must be loved BEFORE it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the "Sleeping Beauty," which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep. But I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but with the ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... emphasized the fine lines of her admirable figure. Her flat was furnished chiefly with books and rich oriental hangings and vast cushions and great bowls of scented flowers. On the mantel-shelf was the crystal that amused her lighter moments and above it hung a circular allegory by Florence Swinstead, very rich in colour, the Awakening of Woman, in a heavy gold frame. Miss Alimony conducted her guest to an armchair, knelt flexibly on the hearthrug before her, took up a small and elegant poker with ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... horrors how finished an allegory for old John Bunyan! With what religious unction he would have led his Christian traveller from that unknown city on the edge of the sands, across the Soul's Desert ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... god Pan in the Cornhill Magazine, my brother Anthony wrote me a letter venturing to criticise it, in which he says: "The lines are very beautiful, and the working out of the idea is delicious. But I am inclined to think that she is illustrating an allegory by a thought, rather than a thought by an allegory. The idea of the god destroying the reed in making the instrument has, I imagine, given her occasion to declare that in the sublimation of the poet the man is lost ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... seemed antiquated and worn out in his days, went farther still. It comprised the whole intellectual scheme of medieval theology and philosophy. In the syllogistic system he found only subtlety and arid ingenuity. All symbolism and allegory were fundamentally alien to him and indifferent, though he occasionally tried his hand at an allegory; and he ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... traditional twenty-four hours' delay which an Indian invariably believes is due his own dignity before replying to a vitally important demand, I boldly cast precedent and custom to the four winds, and once more seized on allegory to aid me in ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers |
