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More "Allegory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... and agoreuein, to speak), a figurative representation conveying a meaning other than and in addition to the literal. It is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but the medium of representation is not necessarily language. An allegory may be addressed to the eye, and is often embodied in painting, sculpture or some form of mimetic art. The etymological meaning of the word is wider than that which it bears in actual use. An allegory is distinguished from ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... theologian writes a philosophy which seems to tell us that the New Testament is a system of psychology; and the philosopher writes a Christianity which is utterly unintelligible as to the question whether the Resurrection be a fact or a transcendental allegory. What between the theologian who assents to the Athanasian denunciation in what seems the sense of no denunciation, and the philosopher who parades a Christianity which looks like no revelation, there is a maze which threatens to have the only possible clue ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... day 24 Pleasant-terrace was the most uncomfortable place in the universe. Some one has said that wherever Pleasure is, Pain is certain not to be far off; and the truth of the allegory is never better exemplified than on the day after "a most delightful party." We can only compare it to the morning succeeding a victory by which the conqueror has gained a great deal of glory at a very considerable expenditure of materiel. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... childhood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of afterwards with indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be permitted to pass for poets in their way. The mixture of fancy and reality in the Pilgrim's Progress was never equalled in any allegory. His pilgrims walk above the earth, and yet are on it. What zeal, what beauty, what truth of fiction! What deep feeling in the description of Christian's swimming across the water at last, and in the picture of the Shining Ones within the gates, with wings at their backs ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... beyond my expectation and possibly my wishes; but it is not to be supposed that it is only inferior artists who have abandoned themselves to the excesses of fidelity so abundant in the Campo Santo. There are, of course, enough poor falterings of allegory and tradition in the marble walls and floors of this vast residence of the dead (as it gives you the cheerful impression of being), but the characteristic note of the place is a realism braving it out in every extreme of ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... minister of state. But he had already done enough to earn himself a lasting name amongst the improvers of poetry in England. In tragedy he gave the first regular model; in personification he advanced far beyond all his predecessors, and furnished a prototype to that master of allegory, Spenser. A greater than Spenser has also been indebted to him; as will be evident, I think, to all who compare the description of the figures on the shield of war in his Induction, and especially those ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... complex processes and without any of the lighter aspects of humor, Mr. Sinclair simply refuses to accept existence as it stands and goes on questioning it forever. Samuel the Seeker seems a kind of allegory of its author's own career. He, too, in the fashion of Samuel Prescott, inquires of all he meets why they tolerate injustice and demands that something or other be done at once. These are the methods of the ragged philosophers, whereas the learned understand that justice comes slowly ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... 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 Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... there is a better way of getting what is good; the only fit way for man. Beasts of prey, naturalists tell us, are always lean. It is the graminivorous order that meekly and peacefully crop the pastures that are well fed and in good condition—'which things are an allegory.' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... original and alert person like Botticelli could not fail to keep step with the foremost of his day. 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 ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... the evolution of the special myth was transformed into poetry by the interweaving, collection, and fusion with other myths, and in the minds of a higher order it was resolved into an allegory or symbol of the forces of nature, into providential laws or ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... finding truth at last," she answered, speaking as much to herself as to him. "Why, one might make an allegory out of it. We wander in mist and darkness shaping a vague course for home. And then suddenly the mists are blown away, glory fills the air, and there is no more doubt, only before us is a splendour making all things clear and lighting us over a deathless ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... rather 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 ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... the law, do ye not hear the law? For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bond-maid, the other by a free-woman. But he who was of the bond-woman was born after the flesh; but he of the free-woman was by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... bring it light and life. If that is true how can we avoid the conclusion that He, or his predecessors, must have come many a time before? The belief that He came but once is consistent only with the erroneous notion that Genesis is history instead of allegory, and that the earth is about six thousand years old! Science has not determined its age but we know that it is very old, indeed. Many eminent scientists have made rough estimates, taking into consideration ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... their survival. Of course, of course, you have read "L'Histoire Comique des etats et des Empires de la Lune"?' I admitted, by gesture and facial expression, that I had not. Whereupon he reeled out curious extracts from that allegory—'almost as good as "Gulliver"'—with a memorable instance of the way in which the traveller to the moon was shocked by the conversation of the natives, and the natives' sense of propriety was outraged by the conversation ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... 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 ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... king-like impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affected resignation. The enemies which he enters lists to combat, "Despair and mighty Grief and sharp Impatience," and the forces which he brings to vanquish them, "cornets of horse," &c., are in the boldest style of allegory. They are such a "race of mourners" as the "infection of sorrows loud" in the intellect might beget on some "pregnant cloud" in the imagination. The prologue to the second part, for its passionate earnestness, and ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... complete translation may be found in "Egypt's Place in Universal History," by Bunsen (second edition), and specimens in almost every museum of Europe. There are other theological remains, such as the Metamorphoses of the gods and the Lament of Isis, but their meaning is disguised in allegory. The hymns and addresses to the sun abound in ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... white mosquito netting. They go through a series of beautiful evolutions, floating over the sleeping figure of Columbus. The dance they do is meant to typify, or rather to signify,—as a matter of fact we needn't worry much about what it signified. It is an allegory, done in white mosquito netting. That is generally held to be quite enough. Let us go back ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... steps. He realises to the full the contrast between the young, fragile heads of his girl-saints and the dark, venerable countenances of the old men. The head of S. Lucy, detaching itself like a flower upon its stem, reminds us of the type which we saw in his Watcher in the sacred allegory of the Uffizi. The arched, dome-like niche opens on a distance bathed in golden light. Bellini keeps the traditions of the old hieratic art, but he has grasped a new perfection of feeling and atmosphere. Who the saints are matters ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... passages I inferred, in my first publication, that the name of the true Messiah, was to be DAVID, and not Jesus. To avoid the force of these passages Mr. Everett has recourse to allegory and analogy. ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... and all other symptoms of indigestion; which more frequently proceed from intemperance in eating and drinking than any other cause. The benefits arising from temperance are set in a striking light in the following allegory, which may ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.
... 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 ...
— English Satires • Various
... a representative of the common people, drops asleep on Malvern Hills, between Wales and England, and sees in his dream an array of virtues and vices pass before him—such as Mercy, Truth, Religion, Covetousness, Avarice, etc. The allegory is not unlike that of Bunyan. By using these as the personages, in the manner of the early dramas called the Moralities, he is enabled to attack and severely scourge the evil lives and practices of the clergy, and the abuses which had sprung up in the Church, and to foretell the punishment, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... bold consoles, which projected from the side walls, were figures called "The Chorus" and "The Ballet," painted by Francis Maynard, while above the middle of the opening, in a segmentary arch, was an allegory, with Apollo as the central figure, by Francis Lathrop. Statues of the Muses filled niches on both sides of the consoles. Over the ceiling, amidst the entwinings of ornamental figures, on a buff ground, were spread a large number of medallions ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... follow youth, 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... as this, said Browning himself, "is imaginary, not real; a nymph and no woman"; but the poem is "an allegory of an impossible ideal of love, accepted conventionally." How impossible he has shown not only here but everywhere—how conventionally accepted. This is not woman's mission! And in the lover's querulous outbreak—the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Art. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings. Taoism accepts the mundane as it is and, unlike the Confucians or the Buddhists, tries to find beauty in our world of woe and worry. The Sung allegory of the Three Vinegar Tasters explains admirably the trend of the three doctrines. Sakyamuni, Confucius, and Laotse once stood before a jar of vinegar—the emblem of life—and each dipped in his finger to taste the brew. The matter-of-fact Confucius found ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... very widely practised in Japan, and it is extremely popular. No doubt, the more educated and intellectual Buddhist,—and the distinction thus suggested needs constantly to be insisted on,—would explain the Paradise of the West as being a mere allegory, and regard Amitabha, as he was originally conceived to be, as merely an ideal personification of boundless light. But to the people generally the Undefiled Ground and its presiding deity ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... of Saul, and Saul himself, were never what are properly termed Prophets; they might be attacked with those (fits) which the pagans call sacred. You must be asleep when you read, not to see that the temptation of Eve is only an allegory. It is the same with the permission given by God to Satan to tempt Job. Why wish to explain the whole book of Job literally, and as a true history, since its beginning is only a fiction? It is anything but certain that Jesus Christ ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... confirmed it. Hans Alienus was, like Goethe's Faust, a work of deep philosophical research into the problems of existence, the purpose and significance of life, set forth in symbolical images and explained by allegory. In the Carolines, a series of short stories connected by the red thread of history which runs through them, he gives a new conception, but a wonderfully graphic and striking one, of Charles XII and his times. It ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... of the Suffragettes who chained themselves with iron chains to the railings of Downing Street is a good ironical allegory of most modern martyrdom. It generally consists of a man chaining himself up and then complaining that he is not free. Some say that such larks retard the cause of female suffrage, others say that such larks alone can advance it; as a matter of fact, I do not believe that they have ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... figurative death and resurrection of the genius of that luminary, they applied these phenomena of the year to man, and composed the allegories relative to his fall and redemption, as inculcated in the Exoteric Creed. In the allegory relating to the fall, it was taught that, after making the first human pair, the Lord of Good or the Lord God placed them in a beautiful garden—corresponding to the seasons of fruits and flowers or months of Spring and Summer, with the injunction, under a, penalty, not to eat of the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... material forms, and on the deliverance of the divine soul that was submerged in the corruption of this earthly world. In his hazy oration on the Mother of the Gods, Julian lost all notion of reality on account of his excessive use of allegory and was swept away ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... two pilgrims 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 ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... legs looking at one leg, when in came four legs, and laid hold of one leg, and up got two legs, caught hold of three legs, and threw 'em at four legs, who ran away with one leg. For, although an ingenious Allegory relating to a butcher, a three- legged stool, a dog, and a leg of mutton, this narrative consumed time; and they were in great suspense. At last, however, little fair-haired Josephine made her curtsey amid great applause; and the ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... the large majority of those assembled the meal they were then taking would represent the whole of their subsistence for the twenty-four-hours. After supper a hymn was sung, and a few words spoken to them by Miss Macpherson on the allegory of the Birds and Flowers in the Sermon on the Mount; and so they sallied forth into the darkness of Arabia Petraea. I mounted to the little boys' bedroom, where the tiniest Arabs of all were enjoying ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... really relented at the doggerel that the English poet puts into the mouth of the half-divine minstrel, they cannot deserve the title of illacrymabiles which Horace gives them. Some of the pedantic scientists (to borrow a new word) have discovered in this tale of true love an allegory about the alternations of Day and Night, Sun and Moon, and what not, for which they deserve the anathema of every scholar and lover of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... starts for Cuzco to-morrow morning; so that, if it is agreeable to you, Senor Alferez, we will travel together.' It was settled that they should. To travel—amongst 'balcony witnesses,' and anglers for 'blind horses'—not merely with a just man, but with the very abstract idea and riding allegory of justice, was too delightful to the storm-wearied cornet; and he cheerfully accompanied Don Antonio to the house of the magistrate, called Don Pedro de Chavarria. Distinguished was his reception; the Alcalde personally renewed his regrets for the ridiculous scene of the two scampish ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... 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, like Spenser's ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... women are, though I was only seven years old when I was bereft of her by the same powers that you call good and wise, and who have also robbed me of my eyesight, my friend, and all else that was dear. I thank you for your kind intention, and you, too, Daphne, for recalling the beautiful allegory. How often we have argued over its meaning! If we continued the discussion, perhaps it might pleasantly shorten the next few hours, which I dread as I do my whole future existence, but I should be obliged in the outset to yield ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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
... remote from literature's service to man (who has but a short while to live, and labour and vanity if he outlast it). I could join in a hunt after Bunyan's grandmothers, and have actually spent working days in trying to discover the historical facts of which Robinson Crusoe may be an allegory. One half of my quarrel with those who try to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare rests on resentment of the time they force me to waste; and a new searcher for the secret of the Sonnets has only to whistle and I come to him—though, to be sure, that gentleman almost cured me who identified ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... breath. Ammianus Marcellinus mentions, in one of his works, that there exists a book which gives the exact age of Apis, the clue to the mystery of creation and the cyclic calculations. The Brahmans also explain the allegory of the ox Nardi by the continuation of life ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... turn from The White Cockade to the impossible scene outside the post-office and the butcher's shop in Hyacinth Halvey. As for the third of the tragic comedies, The Deliverer, it is a most interesting curiosity. In it we have an allegory of the fate of Parnell in a setting of the Egypt of the time of Moses. Moses himself—or the King's nursling, as he is called—is Parnell; and he and the other characters talk Kiltartan as to the manner born. The Deliverer is grotesque and, in its way, impressive, ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... Where his style reaches its highest level of force and refinement is in the more imaginative passages, and in the occasional general reflections where he makes the thought remarkable by an unexpected cadence of language. A single characteristic passage may be quoted, the allegory of the Creation of Sleep. It occurs in a letter urging the Emperor to take a brief rest from the cares of government during a few days that he was spending at a little seaside town in Etruria. The ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... and I do not forget 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 true to an ideal of life rather ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... below, and is thus mysteriously doomed to spend one-third of the year with her husband in Hades, though for the remainder of the year she is permitted to dwell with Ceres and the gods. This is one of the very few mythological fables of Greece which can be safely interpreted into an allegory. Proserpine denotes the seed-corn one-third of the year below the earth; two-thirds (that is, dating from the appearance of the ear) above it. Schiller has treated this story with admirable and artistic beauty; and, by an alteration in its symbolical character has preserved ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 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
... this mighty tree is placed before our eyes, standing in the midst of time, with ages and empires revolving about it, its roots binding and embracing the earth, its top touching the heavens, its branches strong and healthful—bearing foliage and fruits in abundance. But to drop this allegory. "The Lives of the Saints" demonstrate the doctrines of the Church, by laying before us the history of the most precious portion of her children: of her martyrs, her doctors, her bishops; of holy and ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... chance to settle the entire matter. That is the one intelligent way of treating anything which is really serious. You probably believe I am Robert Etheridge Townsend, but as a matter of fact, I am Hercules in the allegory. So! the beautiful lady or America? Why, the eagle flutters uppermost, and from every mountain side let praises ring. Accordingly ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... Syracuse, now from the poet's own district round Mantua; playful contests between rural bards interspersed with panegyrics on Julius Caesar and the patrons or benefactors of the poet; a continual mingling of allegory with fiction, of genuine rusticity with assumed courtliness; such are the incongruities which lie on the very surface of the Eclogues. Add to these the continual imitations, sometimes sinning against the rules of scholarship, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the most rational religion of all. All that we read about religion that does not seem expressly to agree with it, you may consider as an allegory." ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... material: but it is invisible. The allegorical is that which is shadowy and doth but exist in the fantasy. If I say of these my daughters, they be my jewels, I speak allegorically: for they be not gems, but maidens. But I do not love them in an allegory, but in reality. Love is a moral and spiritual matter, but no allegory. So, Heaven is a spiritual place, but methinks not ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... of Wit (London, 1730), p. 31. Two months after Harte's Essay appeared Hill's Advice to the Poets, which complements the earlier allegory by urging Pope to shun "vulgar Genii" and emulate ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... want of sufficient zeal in discovering and punishing the first offence, the stealing of the cock, which thus became a root of all the rest. There is a good deal of wisdom contained in this narrative or allegory, whichever it may be considered. Offenders become emboldened by impunity, and the first beginnings ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... to regard this fable solely as an allegory intended to convey a moral, we should at once perceive that the adventure of Phaeton represents the wilful folly of a rash young man, who consults his own inclination, rather than the dictates of wisdom and prudence. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... that the book was a kind of allegory, setting forth the eternal struggle between the ideal and the real, between the spirit of poetry and the spirit of prose; and perhaps German philosophy never evolved a more ungainly or unlikely camel out of the depths of its inner ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... house he occupied in Bedford after his release, they were equally about a mile from the jail. He certainly means that the two parts were not written in the same place, nor is there a shadow of a doubt as to the fact that in prison the great allegory was conceived and written. Well might Mr. Doe say, 'What hath the devil or his agents got by putting our great gospel minister in prison?' They prevented his preaching to a few poor pilgrims in the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... as it is, though, sometimes we have to admit we have no cure for that especial pain. Still, you can be quite sure that it isn't easy for us to turn away and leave it, unhealed and aching." Then she threw off the little allegory, and once more spoke with spirit. "Dolph, we're created in mental couples, I suspect. Much as I care for Reed, it was you who had the insight to plan how he could make his life over into something besides the bare existence we all ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... to conduct him to the "dreary cave of Discontent," where the poet leaves him, and "the reverend wizard" (for aught we hear to the contrary) in his company. Mean and familiar incidents and characters do not sort well with allegory, which requires beings that are themselves somewhat removed from the common sphere of human nature to meet and join it a little beyond the limits of this world. Yet in this tale, incongruous and disjointed as the dream of a sick man, velut aegri somnia, he has interspersed some lines, ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... easel, not interfering in the least with the traffic, when she came along like a steam-roller, knocked me down, crushed me, and rolled me out flat. I shall never recover my natural shape; and as for the camp-stool and the portable easel—these things are an allegory. But I love her all ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... well; she infuses interest into her figures; she has a love of allegory; her studies in Holland and Norway are interesting. Her 'Whitby,' lighted by sunset, with figures massed in the streets in dark relief against it, is beautiful. Her 'Friends,' showing two women watching the twilight fading from the summits ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... books of the Hindoos contain no uniform or consistent account of the origin of caste, and that the freest scope is given by the individual writers to fanciful and arbitrary conjecture. The story that the castes issued from the mouth, arms, thighs, and feet of Brahma was simply an allegory, which, in the course of time, hardened into a literal statement of fact. The Brahmins, of course, came out of the mouth of Brahma; and, considering that they were the authors and compilers of all the principal books relating to castes and customs, it would have been extremely odd if they ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... has given us a real epic, whose very title, Ad Astra, is symbolic of the high altitudes in which he so triumphantly and so securely navigates. Outwardly it is a story of the War, but there is little difficulty in probing the allegory; and those who follow the hero's vicissitudes as a private in the Gasoliers, right through to his victorious advancement to the rank of Acting Lance-Corporal, unpaid (and there is a symbolism even in the "unpaid"), will readily ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... sad. 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 ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... because the author is true to his conception, and it is interesting as a curious allegorical and humorous illustration of the ruinous character in human affairs of extreme unselfishness. There is the same sort of truthfulness in Hawthorne's allegory of "The Celestial Railway," in Froude's "On a Siding at a Railway Station," ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... "Course 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 to disprove his statement. By turning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... of the play opens when Pillage is at the zenith of his power; a stage direction orders that "The Levee enters, and range themselves to a ridiculous tune"; a partition of places ensues under the allegory of the business arrangements of a theatrical manager; and the author explains that by this levee scene he hopes that persons greater than author-managers may learn to despise sycophants. Close on the heels of the levee ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... visited him. More on this topic may be found in the Koran, chap. xii. The amours of Joseph and Zulieka, as told by the glib tongue of tradition, fitly find their consummation in marriage, and certain Moslems affect to see in all this an allegorical type of Divine love, an allegory which some other divines find in ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... in getting together an article on some subject or another, so that I could pay for my room, and for whatever else I owed. That was the reason I worked on so persistently. I had, in particular, commenced a piece from which I expected great things—an allegory about a fire—a profound thought upon which I intended to expend all my energy, and bring it to the "Commander" in payment. The "Commandor" should see that he had helped a talent this time. I had no doubt but that he would eventually see that; it only was a matter of waiting till the spirit moved ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... endless power of creation which the author possessed. In each figure there is great vigour of conception, and admirable power of execution; but the whole possesses no general character, and produces no permanent emotion. There is a mixture of allegory and truth in many of his greatest works, which is always painful; a grossness in his conception of the female form, which destroys the symmetry of female beauty; and a wildness of imagination in his ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... the priests practiced centered about what are known as the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries. These consisted of representations by means of symbol and allegory, under conditions and amid surroundings the most awe-inspiring, of those great truths concerning man's nature, origin and destiny of which the priests—in reality a brotherhood of initiates and their pupils—were the custodians. ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... popular and celebrated history of the time. Roger Ascham, Elizabeth's tutor, still looked to Lutheran Germany as "a place where Christ's doctrine, the fear of God, punishment of sin, and discipline of honesty were held in special regard." Edmund Spenser's great allegory, as well as some of his minor poems, were largely inspired by ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... little sister of the angels never lived, except in the imagination of the poet. It seems a pure allegory, or, rather, an exercise in arithmetic or a theme of astrology. Dante, who was a good doctor of Bologna and had many moons in his head, under his pointed cap—Dante believed in the virtue of numbers. That inflamed mathematician dreamed of figures, and his Beatrice ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... expresses the outgoings of his heart to a beloved object, the throb of irresistible emotion, the physical ache, the sense of wanting, the joys and pains, the hopes and fears, the ecstasies and disappointments, which belong to genuine passion. The woman is, for him, an allegory, something he has not approached and handled. Of her personality we learn nothing. Of her bodily presentment, the eyes alone are mentioned; and the eyes are treated as the path to Paradise for souls which seek emancipation from ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... a series of smaller processions, which had come together, each from its own metropolitan district. An infusion of allegory became perceptible when patriotic Peckham advanced. So I judged, from the circumstance of Peckham's unfurling a silken banner that fanned heaven and earth with the words, 'The Peckham Lifeboat.' No boat being in attendance, though life, in the likeness ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... See what Guicciardini in his History of Florence says about the suspicious temper of even such a tyrant as the cultivated and philosophical Lorenzo de' Medici. See too the incomparably eloquent and penetrating allegory of Sospetto, and its application to the tyrants of Italy in Ariosto's Cinque ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... 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 right that not one of them should be silenced; but these cries of distress ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... three wise lectures which he addressed to the young men of his village, (though his intimate friends have guessed all the while that his hand was in some of the wittiest and most unique contributions to the Knickerbocker,) has published during the last month one of the best specimens of allegory furnished by this age. It is entitled "Salander," and has for its subject the backbiting dragon sometimes called by similar name. It makes a neat duodecimo, illustrated with wood cuts, and is published by ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Colonies. The stamps of British East Africa bear a flaming sun and the legend "light and liberty," typical of the light of civilization and progress now dawning upon that part of the world. And on one of the late issues of Portugal is a beautiful allegory of the muse of history watching Da Gama's voyage to ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... little Mistress Merciless and Master Sweetheart became fast friends, and the Queen of Sheba was handmaiden to them both; for the simple, loyal creature had not a mind above the artless prattle of childhood, and the strange allegory of the lame boy's speech filled her with awe, even as the innocent lisping of our little Mistress Merciless delighted her heart and came within the comprehension of her limited understanding. So each day, when it was fair, these ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... has done in a volume entitled "Marvels of Our Bodily Dwelling." This book teaches physiology and hygiene, by metaphor, parable, and allegory in a most charming way. Superbly illustrated. 12mo. Price, cloth, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... 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 ancient Anglo-Norman ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... this singular and rare tract indulges in the allegorical style, till he fairly hunts down the allegory. ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... diversion?" The speaker, ruffling his locks with a hand that scattered the powder, turned on the brilliant audience his strange corrugated frown. "Fools! simpletons!" he cried, "not to see that in applauding the Achilles of Metastasio they are smiling at the allegory of their own abasement! What are the Italians of today but men tricked out in women's finery, when they should be waiting full-armed to rally at the first signal of revolt? Oh, for the day when a poet shall arise who ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... all her projects, bears the stamp of greatness. The name of the artist is Falconet: "he was a Frenchman; but," adds Sir R.K.P. "this statue, for genius and exquisite execution, would have done honour to the best sculptors of any nation. A most sublime conception is displayed in the design. The allegory is finely imagined; and had he not sacrificed the result of the whole to the prominence of his group, the grand and united effect of the statue and its pedestal striking at once upon the eye, would have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... material trifles. Enormous problems, and yet more enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is this spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among all other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same philosophical idea—some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual. But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... that were homes, along the edge of the chasms that were streets, everywhere we have seen flowers and vegetables springing up in freshly raked and watered gardens. My pink peonies were not introduced to point the stale allegory of unconscious Nature veiling Man's havoc: they are put on my first page as a symbol of conscious human energy coming back to replant and rebuild ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... 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
... "This allegory all seems much ado about nothing," she said presently, filliping over the leaves. "Really, I can't see that there is any wilderness in the world, or devils to fight in or out of pits. At least ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... whom I met at the Free Church of Stromness, to which, at the Disruption, she had followed her respected minister. It seemed a fact as curiously compounded as some of those pictures of the last age in which the thin unsubstantialities of allegory mingled with the tangibilities of the real and the material, that the sister of one of Byron's heroes should be an attached member of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... against avarice is intended to be conveyed in the tale, or rather apologue, or perhaps we should consider it as a sort of allegory, related by the sagacious bird on the 47th Night, according to the India Office MS., but the 16th Night of Kadiri's abridgment. It is to the following effect, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... name and figure the most agreeable to his peculiar fancy. The fable of Atys and Cybele had been already explained by Porphyry; but his labors served only to animate the pious industry of Julian, who invented and published his own allegory of that ancient and mystic tale. This freedom of interpretation, which might gratify the pride of the Platonists, exposed the vanity of their art. Without a tedious detail, the modern reader could not form a just idea of the strange allusions, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... a dark green tuft rose in the midst of the desolation; the earliest fruits of a soil that had been fattened with human blood. The whole landscape, which, seen by a favoring light, and in a genial temperature, had been found so lovely, appeared now like some pictured allegory of life, in which objects were arrayed in their harshest but truest colors, and without the relief of ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... at, but not pulled. How different from those wild gardens of the neighboring woods where we children roamed at will, shouting rapturously over the finding of a bed of scentless blue violets or delicate anemones that withered and were thrown away before we reached home,—an allegory, alas! of our ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... one of the many stories in which the names are symbolical. We have another example in 'Dicky Random,' and, I suppose, in 'Captain Murderer' too, while in 'Prince Life,' to which we soon come, which is frankly an allegory, the habit is carried beyond Bunyan, who made his attributes very like men and called them Mr. or Lord to increase the illusion or diminish the cheat. The drawback to this kind of nomenclature is ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... bound to deliver to him, every single year, fifty virgins; you will perhaps escape the error of good M. Chompre, who saw in the labyrinth nothing but an English garden; and you will recognize in this ingenious fable a refined allegory, or we may better say a faithful and fearful image of the dangers of marriage. The paintings recently discovered at Herculaneum have served to confirm this opinion. And, as a matter of fact, learned men have for a long time believed, in accordance with the writings ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... insipid Allegory[18], thinking to please by a new Taste; but their Works dy'd in their Birth, and were so little read ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... Siegfried? What can he make out of the incestuous love of Siegmund and Sieglinda? And of Siegfried's naive passion on his first glimpse of a woman? What do we want him to make of it? Is that the way we wish to introduce him to sex? And as for the rest, the allegory of the ring itself, the sword, the dragon's blood, what do little children get from this except the excitement of magic? What we get because of what we have to put into it, is a different matter and should never be confused ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... neither saw nor heard any thing, consequently took no notes, which my readers will rejoice at, because they will be spared that inexhaustible supply to the trunk makers, "A Tour through France and Switzerland." I travelled night and day; for I could not sleep. The allegory of Io and the gad-fly, in the heathen mythology, must surely have been intended to represent the being, who, like myself, was tormented by a bad conscience. Like Io, I flew; and like her, was I pursued by the eternal gad-fly, wherever I went, and in ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... said for "The Magnetic Lady," who, in her bounty, draws to her personages of differing humours to reconcile them in the end according to the alternative title, or "Humours Reconciled." These last plays of the old dramatist revert to caricature and the hard lines of allegory; the moralist is more than ever present, the satire degenerates into personal lampoon, especially of his sometime friend, Inigo Jones, who appears unworthily to have used his influence at court against the broken-down old poet. And now disease claimed Jonson, ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... needs to be more fully discussed. The Middle Ages were essentially the ages of allegory. Theology and philosophy treated their categories as independent beings, and poetry and art had but little to add, in order to give them personality. Here all the countries of the West ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... the abundant use which they allow of figurative language, a result of their total want of terms expressive of abstract, and purely spiritual ideas. To clothe these in words, they must have recourse to figures, chiefly metaphor and allegory, hence arises so much of what an American writer calls "the picturesque brilliancy" of the savage tongues. To express the term "prosperity," for example, the Indian will employ the image of a bright sun, a cloudless ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... pictures of Cupid with the Love-god of the Renaissance, as he is represented to this day, confused with angels, in every faded form of ornament and allegory, in our furniture, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... some antient Amonian records, which had been preserved in the innermost part of a temple, and known to very few. Upon this discovery he applied himself with great diligence to make himself master of the contents: and having, by divesting them of the fable and allegory with which they were obscured, obtained his purpose, he brought the ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... allusion, often bold even to insolence, to Buckingham's feelings towards Anne of Austria. The comedy, in heroic style, of Europe, which appeared in the name of Desmarets, after the cardinal's death, is a political allegory touching the condition of the world. Francion and Ibere contend together for the favors of Europe, not without, at the same time, paying court to the Princess Austrasia (Lorraine). All the cardinal's foreign policy, his alliances with Protestants, are there ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... 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 and Richard Cobden and all the defenders of true American ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... emotional temperament. Chiron is impressive on the vanity of fruition (Dialogues of the Dead, 26). And the figuring of Truth as 'the shadowy creature with the indefinite complexion' (The Fisher, 16) is only one example of Lucian's felicity in allegory. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... having been embalmed in the poetry of Milton and of Shakespeare, as well as writers only inferior to these great names. Of Spenser we must say nothing, because in his "Faery Queen" the title is the only circumstance which connects his splendid allegory with the popular superstition, and, as he uses it, means nothing more than an Utopia ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... attainments. The blue color of the sapphire represented Faith; the verdure of the emerald, Hope; the redness of the ruby, Charity; and the splendor of the topaz, good works." Jewelers, who usually deal so little in sentiment in their works, may learn from this ingenious allegory the advantage of calling up the wonder-working aid of fancy, in forming their combinations ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... retained shape 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 looked at him with a sharp, frank mistrust, and turned away through the open door. Rowland ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... though spirited historical and romantic ballads of anonymous origin: Iliads without a Homer, as Lope de Vega called them. The first to attempt a reform in Castilian verse was the Marquis of Villena (died 1434), who introduced the allegory and a tendency to imitate classical models; and although he himself left nothing of consequence, his influence is plainly revealed in the works of his far greater pupils and successors, the Marquis of Santillana and Juan de Mena. Strangely enough, the reigns ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... 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 world upon which the mystic symbol of Psyche has just ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... 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
... profess to be a Catholic? Do you perhaps think me a superior of the superiors in the Church? Will you, perhaps for that reason, rest in peace upon my word, if my word be different from what you call the word of the Church? Listen to this allegory. Thirsty pilgrims draw near to a famous fountain. They find its basin full of stagnant water, disgusting to the taste. The living spring is at the bottom of the basin; they do not find it. Sadly they turn for aid to a quarryman, working in a neighbouring ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... been written by a French, a Spanish, or an Italian Chaucer, just as well as by the British Daniel. Spenser's "Faerie Queene" numbers St. George and King Arthur among its heroes; but its scene is laid in Faerie Lande, if it be laid anywhere, and it is a barefaced moral allegory throughout. Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, the elimination of which from English literature would undeniably be a serious loss to it; yet, of these plays twenty-three have entirely foreign scenes and characters. Milton, as a political writer, was English; but his "Paradise ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... later books are prose-poems, not only in the affluence and rhythm of their style, but in the allegoric form and purpose which, pervade them. This characteristic is plain enough in Tricotrin and Folle-Farine, but finds its most marked expression in Pascarel. "Only an Allegory" would be a more expressive sub-title for the book than "Only a Story," for the story is the mere thread which sustains and binds together a series of parables and crystallized truths. Most of these, indeed, she has embodied in former works, but nowhere as in Pascarel is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 336.] This is one of the inconsistencies which are the essence of mythology. Mr. Leaf points out that when Hephaestus is about exercising his craft, in making arms for Achilles, Charis "is made wife of Hephaestus by a more transparent allegory than we find elsewhere in Homer," whereas, when Aphrodite appears in a comic song by Demodocus (Odyssey, VIII. 266-366), "that passage is later and un-Homeric." [Footnote: Leaf, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... of its own thoughts, and is unable to sustain the weight of hope and love that presses upon it.—The effects of the passion of love alone might have dissipated Mr. Wordsworth's theory, if he means anything more by it than an ingenious and poetical allegory. THAT at least is not a link in the chain let down from other worlds; 'the purple light of love' is not a dim reflection of the smiles of celestial bliss. It does not appear till the middle of life, and then seems like 'another morn risen ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... had the care of Immanuel's sheep on the Delectable Mountains, and their names were Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere. Now, in that very beautiful episode of his great allegory, John Bunyan is doing his very utmost to impress upon all his ministerial readers how much there is that goes to the making of a good minister, and how much every good minister has to do. Each several minister must do all that in him ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... steel, with lance in rest, and bearing her Medusa shield. Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Virgil, all on horseback, with attendants in antique armor at their back, surrounded the daughter of Jupiter, while the city band, discoursing eloquent music from hautboy and viol, came upon the heels of the allegory. Then followed the mace-bearers and other officials, escorting the orator of the day, the newly-appointed professors and doctors, the magistrates and dignitaries, and the body of the citizens generally completing ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... melodies yearning with mystic passion. And in these songs the womanhood he had rejected came back in amorous strains that recalled the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's, and seemed to his disciples to veil as deep an allegory:— ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... sentiment? Are these figures really the goddesses of the Iliad and of Sophocles?' The truth is, I think, that they are neither the one nor the other. They are the goddesses of ancient reflection and allegory; the goddesses, that is, of the best and most characteristic worship that these idealized creations awakened. What we have treated hitherto as the mortal weakness of the Olympians, the fact that they have no roots in ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... Bishop Hall says, "Seldom doth God seize upon the heart without a vehement concussion going before. There must be some blustering and flashes of the law. We cannot be too awful in our fear."[50-1] Bunyan, in his beautiful allegory of the religious life, lets Christian exclaim: "Had even Obstinate himself felt what I have felt of the terrors of the yet unseen, he would not thus lightly have given us the back." The very word for God in the Semitic tongues means "fear;"[50-2] Jacob swore ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... quite inordinately embrace the pretext of his lovely soul. His portrait, painted on the wall of the Sala (you may see it also in Rome and Florence) might at any rate serve for the likeness of Mr. Worldly-Wiseman in Bunyan's allegory. He was fond of his glass, I believe, and he made his art lucrative. This tradition is not refuted by his preserved face, and after some experience—or rather after a good deal, since you can't have a little of Perugino, who abounds wherever old masters ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... of the Birds is "the everlasting allegory of foolish sham and flimsy ambition." It was aimed particularly at the ambitious Sicilian schemes of Alcibiades; for at the time the play appeared, the Athenian army was before Syracuse, and elated by good news daily arriving, the Athenians were building the most ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... imagination seizes it; we are twisting, twirling, trying to make an allegory. The fourteen years are fourteen months; we are Paul and the devil is Barnabas, Titus is— Then a sudden loathing comes to us: we are liars and hypocrites, we are trying to deceive ourselves. What ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... brilliance and charm. The story, as in the previous pictures, is not insisted upon; the biblical episode and the rabbinical legend are treated in the same fantastic way as the classic myth. Giovanni Bellini had first introduced this lyric conception in his treatment of the mediaeval allegory, as we see it in his picture, also in the Uffizi, hanging near the Giorgiones; all three works were originally together in the Medici residence of Poggio Imperiale, and there can be little doubt are intimately ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... indicate the glory of the morning star, while yet the dark night hides in the hollows. The lamb is born in the fold. The morning star glitters in the sky. The bud is alive in its sheath; the green corn under the snow; the lark twitters as he passes. Now these to me are the allegory ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... picked up the stalk. Was it her own mood she told me in the allegory? Or was it the mood she knew to be in me? There had been an echo of sorrow in the laugh, of pity, kindness, and regret: and the laugh that she uttered in giving the fresh bloom to the King had seemed pure derision. It was my love, not hers, that found its symbol in the dying flower ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... declare. For the divine authority is always conveyed in one of the following ways—the historical, which simply announces facts; the allegorical, whence historical matter is excluded; or else the two combined, history and allegory conspiring to establish it. All this is abundantly evident to ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... of those soft lineaments misled the friends. Raphael and Emile took the coffee which she poured into the cups brought by Aquilina, and began to talk with her. In the eyes of the two poets she soon became transformed into some sombre allegory, of I know not what aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous and ardent expression of her commanding acquaintance a revelation of heartless corruption and voluptuous cruelty. Heedless enough to perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to feel no misgivings; a pitiless demon ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... down," the boy answered nonchalantly, more from inherent indifference than from any comprehension of Weldon's allegory. ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... nearest magistrate to-morrow morning for a warrant. Gridley, a disappointed suitor, has been here to-day and has been alarming. We are not to be put in bodily fear, and that ill-conditioned fellow shall be held to bail again. From the ceiling, foreshortened Allegory, in the person of one impossible Roman upside down, points with the arm of Samson (out of joint, and an odd one) obtrusively toward the window. Why should Mr. Tulkinghorn, for such no reason, look out of window? Is the hand not always ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... and fond of power, With humorous Scots let them disport their hour, 120 Let them dance, fairy like, round Ossian's tomb; Let them forge lies and histories for Hume; Let them with Home, the very prince of verse, Make something like a tragedy in Erse; Under dark Allegory's flimsy veil, Let them, with Ogilvie,[335] spin out a tale Of rueful length; let them plain things obscure, Debase what's truly rich, and what is poor Make poorer still by jargon most uncouth; With every pert, prim prettiness of youth, 130 Born of false taste, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... 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
... who was not in Daisy's secret, and knew nothing of Arthur Noel's allegory, was conscious of a momentary wild fear that her little sister had taken leave of her senses; but she soon began to see meaning in Daisy's words, and was only too glad to yield to ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... volume of the 'Rambler' were sent him by Miss Mulso, now Mrs. Chapone. The papers contributed by Mrs. Carter had much of his esteem, though he always blamed me for preferring the letter signed "Chariessa" to the allegory, where religion and superstition ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... hope, high impulse, active happiness, itself, but active messenger of many joys to others, it made appeal in its decline to have its toiling days and patient hours remembered, and to die in peace. Trotty might have read a poor man's allegory in the fading year; but he ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... of 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 of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... about. Besides, why should you be frightened?—our fears, ourselves in fact—are the only thing we really need be frightened of—our weaknesses and ignorances and folly. There was great truth in that rather ghastly story of Calderra's, allegory though it is, about the man whose evil genius was himself; have you ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... a fanciful 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 lives ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... therefore an Alexandrine. Each stanza contains only three rhymes, which are disposed in this order: a b a b b c b c c. —The music of the stanza is long-drawn out, beautiful, involved, and even luxuriant. —The story of the poem is an allegory, like the 'Pilgrim's Progress'; and in it Spenser undertook, he says, "to represent all the moral virtues, assigning to every virtue a knight to be the patron and defender of the same."[17] Only six books were completed; and these relate the adventures of the knights who stand for Holiness, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... of its apparent extravagance, than the gravest cogitations of ordinary men. It is surely no incredible thing, that He who, in the dispensations of the human period, spake by type and symbol, and who, when He walked the earth in the flesh, taught in parable and allegory, should have also spoken in the geologic ages by prophetic figures embodied in the form and structure of animals. Nay, what the poet imagined, though in a somewhat extreme form, the philosophers seem to be on the very eve of confirming. The ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... anti-Jewish school, whose design was not to add another to the existing biographies of Christ, not to represent him as a real man, nor to give an account of any human life, but to produce an elaborate theological work in which, under the veil of allegory, the Neo-platonic conception of Christ as the Logos, the realized Word of God, the divine principle of light and life, should be developed. With this purpose, the writer made a free selection from the sayings ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... threads of parable, precept allegory, and narrative, leading nowhere if you will, or else weaving themselves into the little fiction story about Cliff McGowan and his one talent. There is but a definition to follow; and then the homely actors ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... a monumental aquatic composition expressing in exuberant allegory the triumph of Energy, the Lord of the Isthmian Way. It is the central sculptural feature of the South Garden, occupying the great quatrefoil pool in front of the tower. The theme is Energy, the Conqueror - the Over Lord - the Master; Energy, mental ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... went frequently to Oxford, to perform at the oratorios and concerts; and it may easily be imagined that the ancient allegory of the Muses throwing chains over Cupid was here reversed, and the quiet shades of learning not a little disturbed by the splendor of these "angel visits." The letters of Halhed give a lively idea, not only of his own intoxication, but of the sort of contagious ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... and ask him to accept it as a token of my profound respect." Colia joyfully promised to do the errand, but he demanded explanations. "What does the hedgehog mean? What is the meaning of such a present?" Aglaya replied that it was none of his business. "I am sure that there is some allegory about it," Colia persisted. Aglaya grew angry, and called him "a silly boy." "If I did not respect all women in your person," replied Colia, "and if my own principles would permit it, I would soon prove to you, that I know how to answer such an insult!" But, in the ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... vaguely sorry for Reinaldo; but death was peace; this was hell in living veins. The memory of the world beyond the forest grew indistinct. She recalled her first dream and turned in loathing from the bloodless selfishness of which it was the allegory. Superstition and tradition slipped into some inner pocket of her memory, there to rattle their dry bones together and fall to dust. She saw only the figure, relaxed for the first time, the profile of a man ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... these difficult questions, it may be resolved into a good argument, as an excellent allegory to represent the struggle in the mind of man between good and evil inclinations. But to take them as they actually are, and merely to talk by way of natural consequence—for to argue from nature is certainly the best way to get to the bottom of the devil's story,—if there ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... Henry More 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 ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Rossetti's theory when he said: "Rossetti's view of Dante's meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of common sense. How could a poet—and such a poet as Dante—have written the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rossetti? The boundaries between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think, at first reading." It was, doubtless, due to his devotion to studies of the Florentine that Gabriele Rossetti named ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... as may be. She shall not suck me, I believe, in vain, nor be destitute of her allowance; there shall her justum both in peck and lippy be furnished to the full eternally. You expound this passage allegorically, and interpret it to theft and larceny. I love the exposition, and the allegory pleaseth me; but not according to the sense whereto you stretch it. It may be that the sincerity of the affection which you bear me moveth you to harbour in your breast those refractory thoughts concerning me, with a suspicion of my adversity to come. We have this saying ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... his poetic powers exhibits the foundation upon which his later life was built. The figure of Beatrice, which appears veiled under the allegory, and indistinct in the bright cloud of the mysticism of the "Divina Commedia," takes her place in life and on the earth through the "Vita Nuova," as definitely as Dante himself. She is no allegorized piece of humanity, no impersonation of attributes, but an actual ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
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