"Romancer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... After Sir Walter had come back, his fellow-shooter chanced to look at the succedaneum, and was not a little astonished to see it formed part of a tale written by his entertainer's hand. By his friend's urgent inquiries, the Scotch romancer was compelled to acknowledge himself the author, and to save the well ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 50. Saturday, October 12, 1850 • Various
... misnomer when used of an eclectic versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble life like Wordsworth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme, sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as in "Joan of Arc" (1799), "Madoc" (1805), and "Roderick the Goth" (1814); not to speak of translations like "Amadis of Gaul," "Palmerin of England," and "The Chronicle of the Cid." But these were not due to the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... a manner as to distinctly recognise its authority. The All-True and All-Knowing cannot have made a mistake, nor can He have expressly led His disciples to regard as genuine and Divine, prophecies which were in truth the inventions of an ingenious romancer.' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not know how many. But the negroes did not do near as much work as English servants did hence the necessity of keeping so great a number. As for some others of Gumbo's details which were brought to him, he laughed and said the boy was wonderful as a romancer, and in telling such stories he supposed was trying to speak out for ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... had intrusted to his treacherous mistress. The friendly arts of Merlin are succeeded by the machinations of the malicious fairy Morgana, and the watchful care of the the Lady of the Lake. To excite the childlike wonder of his readers, the romancer turns knights to stone, or makes them invisible; he introduces enchanted castles, vessels that steer themselves, and the miraculous properties of the Saint Greal, Arthur and Tristram fight with dragons and giants. The loves of Tristram and Isoud arise ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... found ourselves getting duly excited before the denouement.... Readers of Mr. Christie Murray's novels will know that he belongs to the school of Mr. Charles Reade. And it is no small praise to say that he has caught a fair share of the vigor and rapidity of that romancer. His characters, too, belong to the same category as those that figure in Mr. Reade's stories. They are drawn with a sufficient resemblance to nature to take a complete appearance of vitality so long as we are ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... From the Anglo-Indians' daily association with Orientals and their peculiarly subtle understandings, it is perhaps not so surprising to find an occasional flight of fancy brought to bear upon the subject that would do credit to a professional romancer. One ingenious young civil officer present evolves a deep, deep scheme to get even with the government for present injustice that for far-reaching and persistent revenge speaks volumes for the young gentleman's ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... You note it in Dumas and his gorgeous, clattering tales—improbable, but told in terms of the real. For my part, I often find them too real, with their lusty wenches and heroes smelling of the slaughter-house. Turn now to Flaubert, master of all the moderns; you may trace the romancer dear to the heart of Hugo, or the psychologist in Madame Bovary, the archaeological novel in Salammbo, or cold, grey realism as in L'Education Sentimentale, while his very style, with its sumptuous verbal echoes, its resonant, rhythmic periods—is not all this the beginning of that symbolism ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... his nephew Tristram; but grateful for the service the unknown had rendered he ordered him to be well taken care of, and gave him in charge to the queen and her women. Under such care Tristram rapidly recovered his serenity and his health, so that the romancer tells us he became handsomer than ever. King Mark's jealousy revived with Tristram's health and good looks, and, in spite of his debt of gratitude so lately increased, he again ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... up in my room that night reading "Penthesilia" till it grew gray in the east, and did not lay it down till I had finished it. And yet let no admirer of the great romancer of the twentieth century resent my saying that at the first reading what most impressed me was not so much what was in the book as what was left out of it. The story-writers of my day would have deemed the making of bricks without straw a light task compared with the construction of a romance ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... Aristotle's Politics; after which I shall go through Plato's two treatises again. I every now and then read one of Plutarch's Lives on an idle afternoon; and in this way I have got through a dozen of them. I like him prodigiously. He is inaccurate, to be sure, and a romancer; but he tells a story delightfully, and his illustrations and sketches of character are as good as anything in ancient eloquence. I have never, till now, rated ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... "on the MONA CAIRD lay, eh, my lady?" Jest then, mate, I looks And sees male-looking things by the dozen: but then they turned out to be spooks. There was TOLSTOI the Rooshian romancer, a grim-looking son of a gun, Welting into young Cupid like scissors, and wallopping ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest American romancer, came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for three paradisaical years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and this sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... indeed a singular chance of life that had transformed the recluse romancer of the silent Herbert Street house, where for all the years of early manhood he had lived unnoticed and almost unknown, into the high business official of the Custom House, the lofty neighbor of that ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... autobiography. It is in this work that Dickens makes his defence of the rather exaggerated situations in some of his books, for in this book Dickens proves that his greatest romance is based on the experiences of his own life. 'David Copperfield is the great answer of a romancer to the realists. David says in effect, "What! you say that the Dickens tales are too purple really to have happened. Why, this is what happened to me, and it seemed the most purple of all. You say that the Dickens heroes are too handsome and triumphant! Why, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... been the one hard point to get over in his conception of his father, but he could never have explained it by such a scene as this. It would have hampered him terribly in his tale had he dreamed of it. He passed over the unfortunate incident with a romancer's touch, and dwelt upon his grandfather's bitter resentment which he resented as the son of his mother's choice. The Van Eltens and Brodericks all fared hardly at the hands of ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound—the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek as described by the romancer. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... rugged edge of the remainder. He liked the shaky stairway that led to it (when it was not out of gear), and all that was irrelative and irrelevant; what might have been irritating to another was to him singularly appealing and engaging; for he was a poet and a romancer, and his name was Robert Louis Stevenson. He used to come to that eyrie on Rincon Hill to chat and to dream; he called it "the most San Francisco-ey part of San Francisco," and so it was. It was the beginning and the end of the first period of social development ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... himself. This being the case, it follows that the greater part of the objections above insisted upon fall to the ground. What goes on inside a man must needs be accepted as it is revealed to us: to invent psychological attributes does not lie within the province of a romancer. His skill and power are confined to so selecting and arranging the incidents as to provide his psychological data with the freest possible development. In the present case I might easily have devised a stage and a series of events for Malmaison, which would ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... memorable—and would remain so in Louise's mind for weeks. Lawford Tapp, too, quite gave himself up to the charm of the old romancer. To watch Cap'n Amazon's dark intent face and his glowing eyes, while he told of these wonders of sea and land, would have thrilled the ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... not allowed this degree of credit, he must at least be admitted to have displayed a singular talent for the composition of the horrible in fiction. The tale, properly detailed, might have made the fortune of a romancer. ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... do you not love these rare scents that make an Araby of this unmellowed clime? Do you not love the profusion of light which reflects so dazzling a lustre on that soft cheek; and those eyes which the ancient romancer* must have dreamed of when he wrote so prettily of 'eyes that seemed a temple where love and beauty were married?' Does not yon fruit take a more tempting hue, bedded as it is in those golden leaves? Does not sleep seem to hover with a downier wing ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... plan and principal incidents of the "Knight's Tale," Chaucer was indebted to Boccaccio, who had himself borrowed from some prior poet, chronicler, or romancer. Boccaccio speaks of the story as "very ancient;" and, though that may not be proof of its antiquity, it certainly shows that he took it from an earlier writer. The "Tale" is more or less a paraphrase of Boccaccio's "Theseida;" but in some points the copy has a distinct dramatic superiority ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... an imaginative romancer you are! He went where his duty called him, no doubt. I do not remember that I was responsible. And your choice of him shows you are at least not worldly in your selections, for he was a reckless sort of ranger, I believe, with his sword and ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... of Burns, and the sale of Scott's Lays, are the only parallels in modern poetic literature to this success. All eyes were suddenly fastened on the author, who let his satire sleep, and threw politics aside, to be the romancer of his day and for two years the darling of society. Previous to the publition, Mr. Moore confesses to have gratified his lordship with the expression of the fear that Childe Harold was too good for the age. Its success was due to the reverse being the truth. It was just on the level of its ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... chivalry, which yielded such good material to the poet and romancer, was no doubt essential to the growth of civilization, but it must have been an unhappy period for legitimate business. How could trade, commerce, or even the professions, arts, or sciences, flourish while the entire population spread itself over the bleaching-boards, day after ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... world, and he would be ready any moment to join the ranks of the mediaeval knights who translated amorous hyperbole into action, challenging every knight to battle unless he acknowledged the superior beauty of his lady. A great romancer is the lover; he retouches the negative of his beloved, in his imagination, removes freckles, moulds the nose, rounds the cheeks, refines the lips, and adds lustre to the eyes until his ideal is realized and he sees Helen's beauty in ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... This is noteworthy because Jesus immediately gives them a deliberate exhibition of miracles, and bids them tell John what they have seen, and ask him what he thinks now: This is in complete contradiction to what I have called the Rousseau view of miracles as inferred from Matthew. Luke shows all a romancer's thoughtlessness about miracles; he regards them as "signs": that is, as proofs of the divinity of the person performing them, and not merely of thaumaturgic powers. He revels in miracles just as he revels in ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... that almost the present dwellers therein have made it might we find individualities which so decisively failed to blend. So little congruous was the family of Bines in root, branch, and blossom, that it might, indeed, be taken to picture an epic of Western life as the romancer would tell it. First of the line stands the figure of Peter Bines, the pioneer, contemporary with the stirring days of Fremont, of Kit Carson, of Harney, and Bridger; the fearless strivers toward an ever-receding West, fascinating for its untried dangers as for its fabled ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... novel is relaxed and at careless ease, like the club-man after lighting his pipe. The latter does not bear the burden of severe responsibility, but is a thing of holidays and reactions. Still, as of old, it answers to the contemplative castellar cry,—"Hail, romancer! come and divert me,—make me merry! I wish to be occupied, but not employed,—to muse passively, not actively. Therefore, hail! tell me a story,—sing me a song! If I were now in the van of an army and civilization, higher thoughts would engross me. But I am unstrung, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... in the same romance. The interesting feature of all this is that "She" and "King Solomon's Mines" were written in the early eighties when comparatively nothing was known of the country. Yet Rider Haggard, with that instinct which sometimes guides the romancer, wrote fairly accurate descriptions of the country long before he had ever heard of its actual existence. Thus imagination ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... between cause and effect, the revolutions slow and of secret tardy growth instead of by fire and sword, that men turn to Imagination to bridge the gap. Events, grand and stirring, woven, one believes, into the very fabric of history, are proved to be the pleasant tale of some ancient ardent romancer, with an eye for dramatic effect. And often it is the bit choicest and most intimate of detail, binding the chronicle into a dramatic whole, which the iron pick of Research digs from the heap of bones, and wise men say: "That brilliant hero never lived; this great battle was but ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... stillness we heard the Little Red Doctor communing with memories. Now and then came a muttered word. "Suicide!" in a snarl of scornful rejection. "Fool-made definitions!" Presently, "Story for a romancer, not a physician." He seemed to be canvassing an inadequacy in himself with dissatisfaction. Then, more clearly: "Love from the first. At a glance, perhaps. The contagion of flame for powder. But in that abyss together they ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Wooden Image," in "Mosses from an Old Manse," says the figure of "Admiral Vernon," which has stood on the corner of State and Broad streets, Boston, for over a century, was the handiwork of one Shem Browne, "a cunning carver of wood." Upon this statement of the romancer, for there is no authentic history to warrant it, one paper, in an article entitled "A Funny Old Man," says: "Deacon Shem Drowne, the Carver. Concerning the origin of the carved figure of Admiral Vernon there can be no doubt. History, ancient records, and fiction all record the presence in Boston ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... already won high reputation as poet and dramatist, and his novel "Captain Margaret" showed him to be a romancer of a higher order. "Trepanned" is a story of adventure in Virginia and the Spanish Main. A Kentish boy is trepanned and carried off to sea, and finds his fill of adventure among Indians and buccaneers. The central episode of the book is a quest for the sacred Aztec temple. The swift drama of the ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... their legends we find that drawing after drawing has nothing to tell us but of the beauty of those involved in "the joke," and this, as we shall show further on, gives a peculiar salt, or rather sweetness, to satire from his pencil. He is a romancer. His dialogues are romances. It is the novelist and artist running side by side in the legend and the drawing, but almost independently of each other, the wit and the poet in him trying to play each other's game, that provides the contradictoriness—the charm in his pictures. ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... it be, it seems to me A Novel needs but to be good; Romancer's more than Realist, And True Love's course than too ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... day, there has been no thorough investigation or complete analysis of the history of the witch persecutions. The true story has been distorted by partisanship and ignorance, and left to exploitation by the romancer, ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... solace from the pleasures of imagination,' Trombin observed, following his own train of thought. 'In me a great romancer has been lost to our age, another Bandello, perhaps a second Boccaccio! An English gentleman of taste once told me that my features resemble those of a dramatist of his country, whose first name was William—I forget ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... in the other, the outer view. "We'll presently, after we go," she said, "walk round it again if you like. I'm not in a particular hurry, and it will be pleasant to look at it well with you." He had spoken of the great romancer and the great romance, and of what, to his imagination, they had done for the whole, mentioning to her moreover the exorbitance of his purchase, the seventy blazing volumes that ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... and myself in our underground dungeon, imprisoned for an unknown, uncommitted crime, while I narrate occurrences outside our prison walls looks like a romancer's trick, but how else I am to go about telling this history I do not know. Yolanda is quite as important a personage in this narrative as Max and myself, and I must tell of her troubles as I learned ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... sound like the inventions of the romancer, but they rest on unimpeachable evidence, printed and manuscript, and chiefly on Pickle's own letters to his King, to his Prince, and to his English employers—we cannot say 'pay-masters,' for PICKLE WAS NEVER PAID! He obtained, indeed, singular advantages, but he seldom or never could wring ready ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... romancer rather than a lawyer, Mr. Kent," she said, and not giving him time for a reply, ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... There is a middle Course—say "fib" or "tarradiddle," "Not quite true," "A sort of riddle Facts to smother." We, who love the fair romancer— Be she talker, singer, dancer, What you will, she's sweet—we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... Younger still remains a surprising and rare type; and it is an added pleasure to know that in all that he undertook he was successful (he never undertook anything for himself), and that he was most happy in a loving wife and in his children. It was a rounded life, such as a romancer hardly dares to draw; yet there may be many not less lovely, only less ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... time- honoured sense. He has an almost uncanny introspective insight and, as has been said, a power of rendering its result in language which creates in the reader a sense of excitement and adventure not to be excelled by the ablest romancer. Fadaises, which are to be met with in philosophical works as elsewhere, are not to be frequently encountered in his writings. There is always the fresh breeze of original thought blowing here. He is by nature as well as by doctrine the sworn foe of conventionality. Though he may not give ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... cannot but confess a sentiment of remorse for having visited the dwelling-place—as just before I visited the grave of the mighty minstrel and romancer with so cold a heart and in so critical a mood,—his dwelling-place and his grave whom I had so admired and loved, and who had done so much for my happiness when I was young. But I, and the world generally, now look at him from a different ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... regards its characters and incidents, than Jane Eyre or James's "last," for, in truth, it requires a mind of large scope to imagine as great things as many men, in every country, have really performed. The History of Louisiana affords a rich field to the poet and romancer, who is content simply to reproduce in their original life some of its actual scenes and characters; and Mr. Gayarre has, to a considerable extent, succeeded in this difficult and delicate task. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... even into foreign countries; but it is well to observe limits. Let us be content with holding that in England at least, without prejudice to anything further, Fielding was the first to display the qualities of the perfect novelist as distinguished from the romancer. ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... when the Brownings were having tea with the Storys, the talk turned on Hawthorne. Story, of course, knew the great romancer, whom the Brownings had not then met and about whom they were curious. "Hawthorne is a man who talks with a pen," said Story; "he does not open socially to his intimate friends any more than he does to strangers. It isn't his way to converse." Mrs. Browning had then just ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and splendor as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, The Lady of the Lake, etc., etc., had ever existed in the imaginative brain of a romancer, much less, that they were actually in existence, rushing down the Mississippi, as on the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the forests, and walking against the mighty current 'as things of life,' bearing speculators, merchants, dandies, ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... more than half a century some readers may have forgotten, and more may never have heard, the anecdote connected with this. It was rashly and somewhat foolishly pointed out to the poet-romancer himself that the air of "Bonny Dundee" was the very reverse of melancholy, and that he must have mistaken the name. His reply was the most categoric declaration possible of his general attitude, in such cases, "Et moi, je l'appelle 'Bonny ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... an independence of thought and expression, which we have not before observed, at least in so marked a degree. The number opens with a caustic and well-deserved critique upon the writings of JAMES, the novelist; and we are the more gratified at this, because the defects of this romancer are the besetting sins of certain of our own novelists, who had at one time a fair degree of transient popularity. A lack of skill in the creation or accurate delineation of individual character, which, instead of representing men and women, are didactic exhibitions of the author ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... the fears and surprises, the crosses and disorders of that day, 'twas confused enough to be a dream, and I am apt to think sometimes it was no more. But no, I saw you; when I shall do it again, God only knows! Can there be a romancer story than ours would make if the conclusion prove happy? Ah! I dare not hope it; something that I cannot describe draws a cloud over all the light my fancy discovers sometimes, and leaves me so in the dark with all my fears about ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... to delineate the scenery, sentiments, and incidents of shepherd life,[1] is, like most other literary forms, Greek in origin. It goes back at least to the "Daphnis and Chloe" of Longus, the Byzantine romancer of the fifth century A.D. Longus represents the romantic spirit in expiring classicism, the longing of a highly artificial society for primitive simplicity, and the endeavor to create a corresponding ideal. Indeed the pastoral has always been a product ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... vast organized machinery, and a weak, solitary individual; we have no hopes, no fears—only certainty. But if the materials of pursuit and evasion, as long as the chase is confined to England, are taken away from the store-house of the romancer, at any rate we can no more be haunted by the idea of the possibility of mysterious disappearances; and any one who has associated much with those who were alive at the end of the last century, can testify that there was some reason for ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... Dave, who was, after all, a model of veracity, that he should be treated as a romancer, and never confronted with witnesses to confirm or contradict his statements. Even Uncle Mo, who took him most seriously, continued to doubt the existence of widows' grandmothers, and to accept with too many reservations his account of the mill-model. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... of government. The fact is undoubted; but the means which they employed are uncertain. It appears most probable that this great privilege was the price of their military services; for they held a high place in the victorious armies of Charlemagne; and Turpin, the old French romancer, alluding to the popular traditions of his time, represents the warriors of Friesland as endowed with the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... suffering, down-trodden people contemptuously in the shade. Without stopping to answer this hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any part of the debt of thanks I owe, in common with every American, to the noblest, healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived, I pass on to Tennyson, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of this man was powerful and inexhaustible; he could go on relating and composing all day, from morning to night, without once repeating what he had said before. In his expression you sometimes saw the poet gone astray, sometimes the romancer, and he always succeeded in making his tales realistic by the effective and powerful words in which ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... be the higher task, we need not stop to discuss. But the young author was just now like the great actor in Sir Joshua's picture, between the allurements of Thalia and Melpomene, still doubtful whether he was to be a romancer ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... dazzled, so to speak, by Walter Scott's amazing fertility, always himself and always original, I did not despair, for I found the source of his genius in the infinite variety of human nature. Chance is the greatest romancer in the world; we have only to study it. French society would be the real author; I should only be the secretary. By drawing up an inventory of vices and virtues, by collecting the chief facts of the passions, by depicting characters, by choosing ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... I am about to write will not appear to future generations either credible or probable, especially when a long lapse of years shall have made them old stories; for which reason I fear that I may be looked upon as a romancer, and reckoned among playwrights. However, I shall have the courage not to shrink from this important work, because my story will not lack witnesses; for the men of to-day, who are the best informed witnesses of these facts, will hand on trustworthy testimony of ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... Eve, and precisely as I am about to set it forth. It has been said by critics that I am a romancer of the wildest sort, but that is where my critics are wrong. I grant that the experiences through which I have passed, some of which have contributed to the gray matter in my hair, however little they may have augmented that within my cranium—experiences which I have from time to time ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... all in the secret, and interested only in the temperament expressed or the aspect of life envisaged in a given work? One would have thought that as the painter turned critic in Fromentin at least to a certain extent sought out and dealt with the hidden workings of his art, so the romancer or the poet-critic might also have told off for us "the very pulse of the machine." The last word has not been said on the mysteries of the writer's art. We know, it may be, how the links of Shakespeare's magic chain of words are ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... These novels of New York in the Revolutionary days are another striking example of the enthusiasm which Mr. Chambers puts into his work. To write an accurate and successful historical novel, one must be a historian as well as a romancer. Mr. Chambers is an authority on New York State history during the Colonial period. And, if the hours spent in poring over old maps and reading up old records and journals do not show, the result is always apparent. The facts are not ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... there was quiet, a romancer wrote, and the phrase in its significance passed into legend. During the dozen or more years that he ruled in Rome, his common sense was obvious. The Tiber overflowed, the senate looked for a remedy in the Sibyline Books. Tiberius set some engineers to work. A citizen swore by ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... little maidens who had not yet outgrown the company of their dolls, the listener would be apt to smile, if he did not laugh, at the absurdity of the fable. Surely, he would say, this must be the fiction of some fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer, the trick of some playwright. It would make a capital farce, this idea, carried out. A young man slighting the lovely heroine of the little comedy and making love to her grandmother! This would, of course, be overstating the truth of the story, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... two daughters enjoy their mother fully as much as I do, for is she not the most fascinating romancer they ever knew? Now that they are all of an age to be attending school and looking out for themselves, after the manner of independent young Americans, they require from her nothing but sympathy, for their grandmother ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... You feel alive. And off there," with a wave of the whip toward the sea, "off there lies our fortunes. O happy day! to take part in a really truly adventure, without the assistance of a romancer!" ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... Ellen and the meaning of the squalid sheep ranch, with its travesty of home, its tragic owner. And it was coming between her two selves, the one that she had been forced to be and the other that she did not know—the thinker, the dreamer, the romancer, the one who lived in fancy the life ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... or a romancer," said Monsieur Gravier, "I should take the side of the luckless husbands. I, who have seen many things, and strange things too, know that among the ranks of deceived husbands there are some whose attitude is not devoid of energy, men who, at a crisis, can be very dramatic, ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... social disease, and that he didn't land them on the Island, but on an island off the tip of the Island, a tiny island which the Lord had thoughtlessly left lying disrespectfully close to the Isle of Dignity. Katie was too true a romancer to inquire closely about the man who mended the boats, for she liked to think of him as an unreal being who only touched the earth off the tip of the Island, and only touched humanity through Worth. That wove something alluringly mysterious—and ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... now, King Jurgen of Eubonia, how you underrate the Author's ability. This is one of the romancer's most venerable devices that is being practised. See for yourself!" And suddenly Horvendile pushed Jurgen so that Jurgen tumbled over in the ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... conversation and of narration, follow one another after the manner of a finished story, alternating with synopses of the plot, and queries concerning particulars that needed further study; confidences of the romancer to himself which form certainly a valuable contribution to literary history. The manuscript closes with a rapid sketch of the conclusion, and the way in which it is to be executed. Succinctly, what ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... country stretches of water are doubly welcome. They take the place of hills, and give the eye what it craves,—distance; which softens angles, conceals details, and heightens colors,—in short, transfigures the world with its romancer's touch, and blesses us with illusion. So, as I loitered along the south road, I never tired of looking across the river to the long, wooded island, and over that to the line of sand-hills that marked the eastern rim of the East Peninsula, ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... such heterodoxy was for the moment indistinguishable from atheism; but he soon arrived at a better understanding of his son's position. Nothing appears more unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of Stevenson's way of thought. The poet, the romancer within him, revolted from the conception of formless force. A personal deity was a necessary character in the drama, as he conceived it. And his morality, though (or inasmuch as) it dwelt more on ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... developed but once in the history of the race, that all the complex history of language is a unique cultural event. Such a theory constructed "on general principles" is of no real interest, however, to linguistic science. What lies beyond the demonstrable must be left to the philosopher or the romancer. ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... one-book man or one-style man, but enjoy what is good in all. But I am thinking of the settled judgment and the visible practice of the vast English-speaking and English-reading world. And judging by that test, we cannot shut our eyes to this, that we have no living romancer who has yet achieved that world-wide place of being read and welcomed in every home where the language is heard or known. George Meredith has been a prolific writer for thirty years and Stevenson for ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... poor Romancer—thou whose printed page, Filled with rude speech and ruder forms of strife, Was given to heroes in whose vulgar rage No trace appears of gentler ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... had stirred him into half believing, Caleb had had gradually lengthening moments of doubt in which he admitted to himself that his sister was right in her chafing analysis of him, her brother. Before morning came he had told himself a dozen times that he was nothing more than a sentimental old romancer, who saw in every beggar a worthy spirit bewitched by Destiny, and a Circumstance-enchanted fairy-prince in every ragamuffin who chanced to have big eyes. Merely because they had so persistently denied him sleep—those thoughts ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... Summerland," as the old Northmen call it), is to be confronted with the scenes of the novel at every turn; for Mr. Blackmore has so successfully woven the legends of the whole countryside into his story that one grows to believe it a veritable history, and is as disappointed to find traces of the romancer's own hand here and there as to find the hills and valleys laid bare of the forests which adorned them in the ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... from the rich. It seems to be in the very nature of the people, and although it is hard to write, my experience convinces me that my statement is not exaggeration. I have found the Chinese—I speak of the common people, for in my travels I have not mixed much with the rich—the greatest romancer on earth. I question whether the great preponderance of the Chinese people speak six consecutive sentences without misrepresentation or exaggeration, tantamount to prevarication. Regretting that I have to write it, I give it as my opinion that the Chinese is a liar by nature. And when he is ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... bad name on the Continent,' her brother replied. He had no sympathy with nonsense, and naturally not with a youth who smelt of being a dreamy romancer and had caused the name of Englishman to be shouted in his ear in derision. And the fellow might delay his arrival at the Baths and sight of the lady of his love ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... societies exist which are Satanic, not in the sense that the devil comes to preside at their meetings, as that romancer of a Leo Taxil pretended, but in that their initiates profess the cult of Lucifer. They adore him as the true God, and they are animated by an implacable hatred against the Christian God, whom they ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Edouard Durocher, the fashionable painter of the nineteenth century, was a large, common-looking man with a huge moustache, like that of a book agent; and Theophile de Sonis, the elegant story-writer, the worldly romancer, had a copper-colored nose, and his harsh beard was like that of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... allowance of a golden age of comparatively quiet sovereignty, of feasts and joustings at Camelot, and Caerleon, and Carlisle, of adventures major and minor, and of the great Graal-quest, is but a moderate demand for any romancer to make. At any rate, he or they made it, and justified the demand amply by the result. The contents of the central Arthurian story thus elaborated may be divided into four parts: 1. The miscellaneous adventures of the several knights, the king himself sometimes taking ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... that Sir Archibald Roylance did not altogether believe Dickson's tale; it may be that he considered him an agreeable romancer, or a little mad, or no more than a relief to the tedium of a wet Sunday morning. But his incredulity did not survive one glance at Saskia as she stood in that bleak drawing-room among Victorian water-colours and faded chintzes. The young man's boyishness deserted him. He stopped ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... Sign of the Cat and the Racket,' showed in its treatment of the heroine's unhappy passion the intuition and penetration of the born psychologist, and in its admirable description of bourgeois life the pictorial genius of the genuine realist. In other words the youthful romancer was merged once for all in the matured novelist. The years of waiting and observation had done their work, and along the streets of Paris now walked the most profound analyst of human character that had scrutinized society since the days when William Shakespeare, fresh from Stratford, trod the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... ballastless Mukhbir was to be despatched with a mail for Suez. The whole Expedition, except only the sick left at the fort, was now bound southwards. The Sayyid and our friend Furayj accepted formal invitations to accompany us: Bukhayt, my "shadow," with Husayn, chef and romancer-general, were shipped as their henchmen; and a score of soldiers and quarrymen represented the escort and the working-hands. Briefly, the Sinnr, though fretting her vitals out at the delay, was detained two days (March 19—20) in the Sharm Yhrr. Amongst other things that consoled us for quitting ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... should take up the whole world, I would seek out new worlds to pass through, rather than break them: and (he adds,) that you may give credit to this my exaggeration, behold at least he that promiseth you this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name hath come to your hearing." Illustrious Romancer! were the "fine frenzies," which possessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this Second Part, to be exposed to the jeers of Duennas and Serving Men? to be monstered, and shown up at the heartless banquets of great men? Was that pitiable infirmity, which in thy First ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... noble, was a preacher like Bossuet; also like Bossuet, he was a dexterous, skilled, and formidable controversialist, whilst, for the instruction of the Duke of Burgundy, which had been confided to him, he became a fabulist, an author of dialogues, in some degree a romancer or epic poet in prose in his famous Telemachus, overadmired, then overdepreciated, and which, despite weaknesses, remains replete with strength and dazzling brilliance. Nowadays there is a marked ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... the plays of her village-friends and the dreams of romantic incident which early formed the main feature of her inner life. Already at a very early age her mother used to say to those who laughed at the little romancer,—"Let her alone; it is only when she is making her novels between four chairs that I can work in peace." This habit of mind grew with her growth. Her very dolls played grandiose parts in her child-drama. The paper on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... Nay, nay, Romancer! Poet! Seer! Sing us back home—from there to here; Grant your high grace and wit, but ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... into Italy the army of Eneas, king of Carthage. Another colony of Idumaeans, flying from the sword of David, took refuge in the dominions of Romulus. For these, or for other reasons of equal weight, the name of Edom was applied by the Jews to the Roman empire. * Note: The false Josephus is a romancer of very modern date, though some of these legends are probably more ancient. It may be worth considering whether many of the stories in the Talmud are not history in a figurative disguise, adopted from prudence. The Jews might dare to say many things of Rome, under the significant appellation ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... saints Amicus and Amelius. But of course it was all a mistake—a mistake which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century! Then somebody called the attention of the Church to the unmistakable fact that Amicus and Amelius were merely inventions of some mediaeval romancer. Then the Church made investigation, and greatly shocked, withdrew from the list of its saints those long-loved names of Amicus and Amelius—a reform in which I cannot help thinking the Church made a very serious mistake. What matter whether those ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... before led her to infer that marriage was not my object. I never dreamed she could have been so foolish as to have mistaken me, little provoking romancer though she be! So I naturally wished her to know what a sacrifice of prejudice, of—of myself, in short, I was willing to make for her sake; yet I don't think she was aware of it after all. I believe I might have any lady in Manchester if I liked, and yet I was willing ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... sacrifices. He speaks of Forrest's gallant stand against it—preventing the execution of the order, but costing the high-souled chief his own command, forcing him to seek other fields of enterprise, and with an organization of conscripts and absentees win fights that a romancer would not dare to imagine. He speaks, too, of unhappy dissensions among officers which added to the discouraging condition ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... detail that always puts me to shame, when I think how poor an account I should give, if pressed to describe the military movements that I have happened to witness; and I may as well acknowledge at the outset that I have as little aptitude for the soldier's trade as I have for the romancer's. Single incidents I remember as if they were of yesterday. Single pictures have burned themselves into my brain. But I have no vocation to tell how fields were lost and won; and my experience of military life was too brief and desultory to be of ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... romancer! Do you imagine that anyone very nice would chum in with Jim Peters? Isn't there something in your book about birds of the ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... is like a figure out of Dumas, and indeed did service as a model to that delightful romancer, had come from Orleans to escort Jeanne upon her way, and Dunois met her as she approached the town. There could not be found more unlikely companions than these two, to conduct to a great battle the country maid ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... everything unlike them. Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... me, personally, as the romancer speaking of his chief puppets as "our friends." This LAWRENCE FLETCHER is perpetually doing. Now his heroes are not "my friends," for, when I read, I am strictly impartial, at all events, through two-thirds of the book, and, if I learn to love any one or two (or more) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... she continued. "He loves to throw a glamour around everything he says or does. Because he honors me by interesting himself in my concerns, he has probably told you all sorts of wonderful things about me and my friends. A very ingenious romancer, Mr. Pritchard, you know. Confess, now, didn't he tell ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... here and there to show an observant consciousness of the changing world; but her imagination long ago sank its deepest roots into the traditions of the Old Dominion. She brings to them, however, no fresh interpretations, as satisfied as any medieval romancer to ring harmonious changes on ancient themes, enlarging them, perhaps, with something spacious in her language and liberal in her sentiments, yet transmitting her material rather as a singer than as a poet, agreeably ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... mixture of archaisms, neologisms, his exuberance, his slow development of plots, his lack of proportion (noticeable, naturally, in his longer works rather than in his short fiction) he stands pre-eminent as a patron of the nation's intellectual youth and as the romancer of its opulent imagination. ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... full of faith in the man she loves is a romancer's fancy. This feminine personage no more exists than does a rich dowry. A woman's confidence glows perhaps for a few moments, at the dawn of love, and disappears in a trice ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... crew's fire to another, I listened for a while to the talking and laughing of the voyageurs, but hearing no thrilling tales or even a humorous story by that noted romancer Old Billy Brass, I went over and sat down at the officers' fire, where Chief Factor Thompson was discussing old days and ways with his ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... had, for a long series of years, enjoyed so large a portion of public favour. Through the success of those literary efforts, I had been enabled to indulge most of the tastes which a retired person of my station might be supposed to entertain. In the pen of this nameless romancer, I seemed to possess something like the secret fountain of coined gold and pearls vouchsafed to the traveller of the Eastern Tale; and no doubt believed that I might venture, without silly imprudence, to extend my personal expenditure considerably beyond what ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... modern tendency, as compared with the main stream of scepticism which was destroying democracy. Evolution became more and more a vision of the break-up of our brotherhood, till by the end of the nineteenth century the genius of its greatest scientific romancer saw it end in the anthropophagous antics of the Time Machine. So far from evolution lifting us above the idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at least with a logical and potential argument for eating them. In the case of the American negroes, it may be remarked, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... affectation and false sentiment, his keen sense of pleasure and delight, pours itself out in the pastoral medley, forced, tedious, and yet strangely beautiful, of his "Arcadia." In his "Defence of Poetry" the youthful exuberance of the romancer has passed into the earnest vigour and grandiose stateliness of the rhetorician. But whether in the one work or the other, the flexibility, the music, the luminous clearness of Sidney's ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... beautiful and lively scene. The few trees which still remained as shelters were generally lighted up by our fires into grand chandeliers, reflecting upon our white tents a weird light of gold and green, which might have furnished the pen of the romancer, and the pencil of the artist, their most interesting ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... easy black necktie, in his loose buttoned black frock-coat, in his pensive face, in the flow of his dark hair, in his eyelashes, in the very turn of his moustache, the exact realisation of the Paris artist's ideal as it was presented on the stage. But no romancer that I know of has had the boldness to prefigure the life and home of this young husband and young wife in the Children's Hospital in ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... stupendous drama of the skies. The human interest connected with the mountains and the mesas of New Mexico and Arizona is not very great. No mediaeval mystery haunts these castles sculptured by the hand of Nature. No famous romancer has lighted on their cliffs the torch of his poetic fancy. No poet has yet peopled them with creatures of his imagination. We can, unfortunately, conjure up from their majestic background no more ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... "Charles, his Friend," on the stage. The book is, in many respects, a thriller, reminding one somewhat of The Diary of a Late Physician, by SAMUEL WARREN. This volume is handsomely got up—too handsomely—and profusely, too profusely, illustrated. For both romancer and reader, such stories are better un-illustrated. A sensational picture attracts, and distracts. In this collection the Baron can recommend The Beryl Coronet, The Red-Headed League, The Copper Beeches, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... case, I am at least convinced of this: that he was no romancer, and thoroughly believed in the extraordinary mental ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... and shore and sky and earth were giving him of their best, his father came back with innumerable stories of adventure that would of themselves have set up a young romancer in business. Having talked his mind dry of experiences he returned to Mississippi to make another collection of thrilling tales, leaving William Gilmore, Jr., with a mental outlook upon life which the glories of Charleston could never ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... is established between writer and reader, and lasts pretty nearly for life. I meet people now who don't care of Walter Scott, or the "Arabian Nights"; I am sorry for them, unless they in their time have found their romancer — their charming Scheherazade. By the way, Walter, when you are writing, tell me who is the favourite novelist in the fourth form now? Have you got anything so good and kindly as dear Miss Edgeworth's Frank? It used to belong to a fellow's sisters generally; ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... events. A corner is devoted to children, another to women, another to religious Americans, and a little sermon is preached. Then there are suggestive pictures for the man about town, recipes for the cook, weather reports for the traveler, a story for the romancer, perhaps a poem, and an editorial page, where ideas and theories are promulgated and opinions manufactured on all subjects, ready made for adoption by the reader, who in many instances has his thinking done for him. I made a test of this, and asked a number of ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... sure whether the saying, "The corpse of an enemy smells sweet," attributed to Charles IX. of France, in allusion to Coligny, is historical or was the invention of a romancer. It occurs in Dumas's ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... call thee, "They don't answer" Tells me Central. (Oh, the crime!) Then thou sayest, thou Romancer, ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... generation as having persecuted one Maule, who declared that God would give his enemy "blood to drink." It became a conviction with the Hawthorne family that a curse had been pronounced upon its members, which continued in force in the time of the romancer; a conviction perhaps derived from the recorded prophecy of the injured woman's husband, just mentioned; and, here again, we have a correspondence with Maule's malediction in the story. Furthermore, there occurs in the "American Note-Books" (August 27, 1837), a reminiscence of ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... or Not Unpleasant Group as originally constituted consists of VII, a phthisical case (cf. IV), VIII, probably feeble-minded romancer, not deluded in the sense of self-deception (probably best excluded from present consideration); IX, probably not safely to be assigned to the Pleasant or Not Unpleasant Group, feeling passive in somewhat the same sense as Case VI (see ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10 |
