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Heroical

adjective
1.
Having or displaying qualities appropriate for heroes.  Synonym: heroic.  "Heroic explorers"






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"Heroical" Quotes from Famous Books



... scene, says, "By which most humble and heavenly meditation, we may easily guess what a spirit of charity he had gotten by often meditation, that every sight brought him new matter to practice most heroical resolutions." ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... not free to talk of exaggeration, or of the "grand manner," as you chose? Were not the terms interchangeable, if you kept an open mind? His personal acquaintance with the "grand manner" in respect of the affections, with heroical love, amounted, save in literature, to practically nothing; yet instinctively he applied those high sounding phrases to the attachment existing between Damaris and her father. Both as discovery and, in some sort, as challenge ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... bringing in and leading away of horses, they did little work in my sight but brown themselves in the sun. One morning Osric's brother came to our camp with their cousin the prizefighter—a young man of lighter complexion, upon whom I gazed, remembering John Thresher's reverence for the heroical profession. Kiomi whispered some story concerning her brother having met the tramp. I did not listen; I was full of a tempest, owing to two causes: a studious admiration of the smart young prizefighter's person, and wrathful disgust at him for calling Kiomi his wife, and telling her he was prepared ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... enormous novel which death prevented Dostoievsky from finishing. Death, this is yet another proof of your astonishing clumsiness! The scene with the old monk at the beginning of "The Brothers Karamazov" is in the very grandest heroical manner. There is nothing in either English or French prose literature to hold a candle to it. And really I do not exaggerate! There is probably nothing in Russian literature to match it, outside Dostoievsky. It ranks, in my mind, with the scene towards the beginning of "Crime and ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett

... through every-heart in the Netherlands. "They took Kloet, wounded as he was," said Lord North, "and first strangled, him, then smeared him with pitch, and burnt him with gunpowder; thus, with their holiness, they, made a tragical end of an heroical service. It is wondered that the Prince would suffer so great an outrage to be done to so noble a soldier, who did ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... never pardon himself if he compared this heroical enterprise with the actions of our Black Prince or Henry V.; or with Henry VIII. in demolishing abbeys and rejecting the papal authority; or Queen Elizabeth's exploits against Spain; or her restoring the Protestant religion, putting the Bible into English, and supporting the Protestants beyond sea. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... brick, almost inextricably wound within one another, by which, if at any time her lodging were laid about by the Queen, she might easily avoid peril imminent, and, if need be, by secret issues take the air abroad, many furlongs about Woodstock in Oxfordshire. [Drayton's England's Heroical Epistles, Note A, on the Epistle, Rosamond ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... man loses all, when life is lost, He lives a coward, or a fool expires. A daring infidel (and such there are, From pride, example, lucre, rage, revenge, Or pure heroical defect of thought,) Of all earth's madmen, most deserves a chain. 980 YOUNG: Night Thoughts, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various

... the imminent peril (for the place lay beneath the mountain, and there was no retreat but by ships), entreated his aid in this extremity. He accordingly changed his first design, and what he began with a philosophical he pursued with an heroical turn of mind." ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... understand, make nothing of impossibilities in matters of faith, and would fain persuade us that the more impossible anything is, for that very reason it is the fitter to be believed; and that it is an argument of a poor and low faith to believe only things that are possible; but a generous and heroical faith will swallow contradictions with as much ease as reason assents to the plainest and most evident propositions. Tertullian, in the heat of his zeal and eloquence, upon this point of the death and resurrection of ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser

... arrogance there is no littleness, no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror; it is his nature, and the untamable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons. He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally catching up, near the beginning, some singular epithet which serves as a refrain when his song is full, or with which, as with a knitting-needle, he catches up the stitches, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... little band who have been amongst the number of our friends at Saint Winifred's—alone, though the youngest of them all—is now dead. He died a violent death. Filled with a missionary spirit, and desirous, like Edward Irving, of "something more high and heroical in religion than this age affecteth," he joined a mission to one of the great groups of Pacific Islands. And there, many a time, in the evening, after a day spent in teaching the natives how to plant their fields and build their houses, he would gather them round him in the twilight, ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... than was expressed in the countenances and movements of these eleven sailors. Their story as told to me is a striking and memorable illustration of endurance and hardship on the one hand, and of the finest heroical humanity on the other, in every sense worthy to be known to the British public. I got the whole narrative direct from the chief mate, Mr. William Meldrum Lloyd, and it shall be related here as nearly as possible in his ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor

... which most served to irritate France and estrange her from England during the first republic? It was the civil war in a portion of our territory, supported, subsidised, and assisted by Mr. Pitt. It was the encouragement and the arms given to Frenchmen, as heroical as yourselves, but Frenchmen fighting against their fellow-citizens. This was not honourable warfare; it was a royalist propagandism waged with French blood against the republic. This policy is not yet, in spite of all our efforts, entirely effaced from the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... I for this consume my quarters in meditations, vows, and woo'd her in heroical epistles? Did I expound the Owl, and undertake, with labour and expense, the recollection of those thousand pieces, consum'd in cellars and tobacco-shops, of that our ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... master. And his master himself did not believe in them without a shadow of doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though mad, stupid. He was at heart a man of despair, as I think I have shown in my above-mentioned book. And because he was a man of an heroical despair, the hero of that inward and resigned despair, he stands as the eternal exemplar of every man whose soul is the battle-ground of reason and immortal desire. Our Lord Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... Motion of our Troops towards the River, which they pretended to pass, and must pass, before they could engage, they were so warmly saluted from the Batteries of the Enemy, and their small Shot, that our Regiments were forc'd to retire in Confusion to their Camp. By which Rebuff all heroical Imaginations were at present laid aside, to consider how they might make ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe

... things; and of how he would say to them always, if they sought to bless his name, "Nay, do not thank me,—thank Rubens. Without him, what should I have been?" And these dreams, beautiful, impossible, innocent, free of all selfishness, full of heroical worship, were so closely about him as he went that he was happy,—happy even on this sad anniversary of Alois's saint's day, when he and Patrasche went home by themselves to the little dark hut and the meal of black bread, whilst in the mill-house all the children of the village sang and laughed, ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various

... or ill I haue done in it, I am ignorant: (the eye that sees roundabout it selfe, sees not into it selfe): only your Honours applauding encouragement hath power to make mee arrogant. Incomprehensible is the heigth of your spirit both in heroical resolution and matters of conceit. Vnrepriueably perisheth that booke whatsoeuer to wast paper, which on the diamond rocke of your iudgement disasterly chanceth to be shipwrackt. A dere louer and cherisher you are, as well of the louers of Poets, as of Poets themselues. Amongst their sacred ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash

... Resolution to speak to the Phantom, let what will be the Consequence, is entirely suitable to his Heroical Disposition; and his Reflection upon his Father's Spirit appearing in Arms, is such as one would naturally expect from him; and the Moral Sentence he ends his short Speech with, suits his virtuous Temper, ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous

... and Katherine Emmerson too; so that but for the thoughts of my absent Anna, and perhaps a little uneasiness on the subject of Antonio, I might be perfectly happy. You know how good and friendly Katherine is, and really Charles does all in his power to please. If he were only a little more heroical, he would be a charming young man: for although he is not very handsome, I don't think you notice it in the least when you are intimate with him. Poor Charles, he was terribly mortified about the flash of lightning—but ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper

... in all princelie wisdom, learning, and heroical artes, JAMES, of Great Britan, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the faeth, grace, mercie, peace, honoure here ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume

... back at once to his tragic and heroical air while he told the story of his devotion to the charming Miss Fotheringay, to which the Major gave quiet attention, and then asked many practical questions, and made so many remarks of a worldly-wise nature that the boy was obliged to give in and acknowledge the sound wisdom of them, and ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds[6]." These are despised by the world, but they have subdued the world. Nay, though they seem most unmanly, they in the event have proved most heroic. For the heroical character springs out of them. He who has thrown himself out of this world, alone can overcome it; he who has cut himself loose of it, alone cannot be touched by it; he alone can be courageous, who does not fear it; he alone firm, who is not moved by it; he alone ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman

... heaven and the banquets of the Gods. But the Gandharvas before becoming celestial musicians in popular tradition, were in the primitive and true signification of the name heroes, spirited and ardent warriors, followers of Indra, and combined the heroical character with their atmospherical deity. Under this aspect the dance of the Gandharvas may be a very different thing from what the commentator means, and may signify the horrid dance ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... twelve-syllabled verse, full of antiquarian and historical details, so accurate as to make the work an authority on such matters. The rushing verse is full of vigour and gusto. Other poems of D. are The Wars of the Barons (1603), England's Heroical Epistles (1598) (being imaginary letters between Royal lovers such as Henry II. and Rosamund), Poems, Lyric and Heroic (1606) (including the fine ballad of "Agincourt"), Nymphidia, his most graceful work, Muses Elizium, and Idea's Mirrour, a collection ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... carpers wyl seeme too spurne at this myne enterprise. Thee one vtterlie ignorant, the oother meanlye letterd. Thee ignorant wyl imagin, that thee passage was nothing craggye, in as much as M. Phaere hath broken thee ice before me: Thee meaner clarcks wyl suppose my trauail in theese heroical verses too carrye no great difficultie, in that yt lay in my choice too make what word I would short or long, hauing no English writer beefore mee in this kind of poetrye with whose squire I ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... eunuchs, and old men, and bastards, are envious. For he that can not possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another's; except these defects light upon a very brave and heroical nature, which thinketh to make his natural wants part of his honor; in that it should be said, that an eunuch, or a lame man, did such great matters; affecting the honor of a miracle; as it was in Narses[42] the eunuch, and Agesilaus[43] and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey

... proudly lazy, and Amodio, that ton of juvenile humanity, whose weighty baritone and eagerness to please make up for the see-saw alternation of his two only expressions and gesticulations,—those of vulgar love-making and mock-heroical revenge. These, with Gazzaniga, the charming, lively, natural Gazzaniga, whose voice is fresh, and who can sing and act so charmingly in genial music, such as Donizetti's "Elisir d' Amore," with also Assoni, the buffo, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... historical-pastoral, tragical-historical;' shrewd thrusts from satirists, wise saws from sages, pleasantries caustic or pathetic from humorists; all these throng Macaulay's pages with the bustle and variety and animation of some glittering masque and cosmoramic revel of great books and heroical men. Hence, though Macaulay was in mental constitution one of the very least Shakesperean writers that ever lived, yet he has the Shakesperean quality of taking his reader through an immense gallery of interesting characters and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley

... that thou art fair is most infallible; true, that thou art beauteous; truth itself, that thou art lovely. More fairer than fair, beautiful than beauteous, truer than truth itself, have commiseration on thy heroical vassal! The magnanimous and most illustrate king Cophetua set eye upon the pernicious and indubitate beggar Zenelophon, and he it was that might rightly say, Veni, vidi, vici; which to anatomize in the vulgar— O base and obscure vulgar!—videlicet, he came, saw, and overcame: ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]

... have quarrelled violently with his informant. A week ago he was a cynical clear-sighted modern, a contemner of illusions, a swallower of formulas, a breaker of shams—one who had seen through the heroical and found it silly. Romance and such-like toys were playthings for fatted middle-age, not for strenuous and cold-eyed youth. But the truth was that now he was altogether spellbound by these toys. To think that he was serving ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... tale your husband has just told me, I could read, as plainly as in the contrast between your looks and his, all the painful secrets of that ill-assorted union, in which you have accepted the sufferer's part. Though your conduct has been unfailingly heroical, though your firmness has never once given way in the exercise of your painful duties, perhaps, in the silence of lonely nights, the heart that at this moment is beating so wildly in your breast, may, from time to time, have rebelled. Your husband's ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac

... fifty of her class since he came to live among them. What cared she for his ragged shoes or the frayed collar about his neck? Did not the whole community admit him to be a very aristocrat of aristocrats, a diamond of class in a quarry of ashes, a figure at once mysterious and heroical? And this knight of the East, what irony led him away with that white-faced Pole, Lois Boriskoff? What did he see in her? What ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton

... the animus furandi. So, in homicide, life may be lawfully taken in some instances, whilst the deed may be excused in others. The sheriff hangs the felon and deprives him of existence; yet nobody thinks of accusing the officer of murder. The soldier slays his enemy, still the act is considered heroical. It does not therefore follow that human life is too sacred to be taken away under all circumstances. The point to be considered was thus narrowed down into one grand inquiry, whether Summerfield was properly to be regarded ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes

... realise John Milton and appraise him more highly, having read Mary Powell and its sequel, Deborah's Diary, than having read Paradise Lost. In The Household of Sir Thomas More she had for hero one of the most charming, whimsical, lovable, heroical men God ever created, by the creation of whose like He puts to shame all that men may accomplish in their literature. In John Milton, whose first wife Mary Powell was, Miss Manning has a hero who, though a supreme poet, was "gey ill to live ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning

... that this little sally might have upon his interests. Despotic and boorish as was the genius of Mr. Hartley, it cowred under that of Sophia with the most abject servility. And that lady now vowed eternal war against the heroical peer. ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin

... secretly made a journey to Paris some time before, and had fallen into intimacy with Thomas Morgan, a bigoted fugitive from England, and with the bishop of Glasgow, Mary's ambassador at the court of France. By continually extolling the amiable accomplishments and heroical virtues of that princess, they impelled the sanguine and unguarded mind of young Babington to make some attempt for her service; and they employed every principle of ambition, gallantry, and religious zeal, to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... call'st thou marvelous, Daughter of Creta? Unto the bard's pregnant word Hast thou perchance never listened? Hast thou not heard of Ionia's, Ne'er been instructed in Hellas' Legends, from ages primeval, Godlike, heroical treasure? All, that still happeneth Now in the present, Sorrowful echo 'tis, Of days ancestral, more noble; Equals not in sooth thy story That which beautiful fiction, Than truth more worthy of credence, Chanted hath of Maia's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... satiric spirit, perhaps, institute splenetic comparisons between the lofty poetical pretensions of posthumous tenderness and their fulfilment? The sentiments of Love especially affect a high heroical pitch, of which the human performance can present, at best, but a burlesque parody. A widow, that hath lived only for her husband, should die with him. She is flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone; and it is not seemly for a mere rib to be his survivor. The prose of her practice accords not ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... ideal of quietism; to possess his own soul in patience, with a suppressed intelligence, a suppressed sociality, without a single spark of generous emulation in the courses of strong-fibred virtue, or a single thrill of heroical pursuit after so much as ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... to that sarcastic acquaintance, who proved to be a medical student resting at Scheveningen from the winter's courses and clinics in, Vienna. He had already got on to many of Boyne s curves, and had sacrilegiously suggested the Queen of Holland when he found him feeding his fancy on the modern heroical romances; he advised him as an American adventurer to compete with the European princes paying court to her. So thin a barrier divided that malign intelligence from Boyne's most secret dreams that he could never feel quite safe from him, and yet he was always ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... excellent Maiestie, haue shewed your selfe a valiant protectour, a carefull conseruer, and an happy enlarger of the honour and reputation of your Countrey; so at length you may enioy those celestial blessings, which are prepared to such as tread your steps, and seeke to aspire to such diuine and heroical vertues. And euen here I surcease, wishing all temporal and spirituall blessings of the life present and that which is to come to be powred out in most ample measure, not onely vpon your honourable Lordship, the noble and vertuous Lady your bedfellow, and those two rare iewels, your ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... Orators of that Age. He in imitation of Ovid de Fastis, put our Christian Festivals into Verse, setting a Copy therein to Baptista Mantuan. Then leaving Ovid, he aspired to Virgil, and wrote the History of the Bible, (with the Lives of some Saints,) in an Heroical Poem, which he performed even to admiration; and though he fell short in part of Virgil's lofty style, yet went he beyond himself therein. He afterward became Prior of Esseby-Abbey, belonging to the Augustines, and flourished under King Henry ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley

... Henry should go into the army, and my mother wants me to besiege Sir John through Lady Macdonald (the general's general) about a commission for him. In the evening, not having to be anybody tragical or heroical, I indulged in my own character, and had a regular game of romps with the boys; my pensive public would not have believed its eyes if it could have seen me with my hair all disheveled, not because of my woes, but because of riotous fun, jumping over chairs and ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... conceive any thing more different from the old English drama, than the heroic plays which were introduced by Charles II. The former, in labouring to exhibit a variety and contrast of passions, tempers, or humours, frequently altogether neglected the dignity of the scene. In the heroical tragedy, on the other hand, nothing was to be indecorous, nothing grotesque: The personages were to speak, not as men, but as heroes; to whom, as statuaries have assigned a superiority of stature, so these poets have given an uniform grandeur of ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott

... avoided in respect of moral character there are three forms; Vice, Imperfect Self-Control, and Brutishness. Of the two former it is plain what the contraries are, for we call the one Virtue, the other Self-Control; and as answering to Brutishness it will be most suitable to assign Superhuman, i.e. heroical and godlike Virtue, as, in Homer, Priam says of Hector "that he was very excellent, nor was he like the offspring of mortal man, but of a god." and so, if, as is commonly said, men are raised to the position of gods by reason of very high excellence in Virtue, the ...
— Ethics • Aristotle

... Heroical Devises of M. Claudius Paradin, Canon of Beauvieu. Whereunto are added the Lord Gabriel Symons and others. Translated out of Latin into English by P. S. With Woodcuts. 16mo. Lond. 1591. Imprinted by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various



Words linked to "Heroical" :   bold, hero, heroic



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