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More "Fable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on the mechanism he unrolled the valves of a gigantic incubator. Within, recumbent on cotton wool, the almost frenzied spectators perceived two monstrous eggs, like those of the Roc of Arabian fable. Te-iki-pa now chanted a brief psalm in his own language. One of the eggs rolled gently in its place; then the other. A faint crackling noise was heard, first from one, then from the other egg. From each emerged the featherless head of a fowl—the species ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... Dorriforth. The attraction of fable and romance is that it's about us, about you and me—or people whose power to suffer and to enjoy is the same as ours. In other words, we live their experience, for the time, and that's hardly ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... brought nine others in a fortnight, thought he, what would nine bring in a month? Amazingly, they brought nothing, and the rest was silence. Here was a matter of intricate diplomacy never to come within that youth his ken. The morning voyage to the post-office, long mocked as a fable and screen by the families of the sages, had grown so difficult to accomplish for one of them, Colonel Flitcroft (Colonel in the war with Mexico), that he had been put to it, indeed, to foot the firing-line against his wife (a lady of celebrated determination and hale-voiced at seventy), and to ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... translation lesson, and choosing a fable that would specially lend itself, she started the class off translating it into an English fabrication that convulsed both pupils and mistress. Hal, of course, followed suit, and the merriment grew fast and furious after ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... you, if I would, Nor sit among your cloudy shapes; And (spare the fable of the Grapes And Fox) I would not, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the writer quotes lines 426-437 of the Satire. Then follows a long review of 'Childe Harold', in which the critic condemns Harold, the hero, as "an uncouth incumbrance of this flighty Lord;" the want of "plot ... action and fable, interest, order, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... and sounding seas Wash far away,—where'er thy bones are hurl'd; Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides Where thou perhaps, under the whelming tide Visitest the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great Vision of the guarded mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold, —Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth: —And, O ye ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... And they may fall—but who shall date thy end? Lo! all the past has giv'n its light to thee: Expiring Rome, like a departing friend, Gave solemn warning to thy liberty: And e'en the empires, fabulously old In fruitful fable, have a moral told; What say their fallen kings and shrineless God? There is no "right divine" in the fell ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... continued softly to strum on the violin strings—"this Imperial Valley seems to me like a magic spot of the tropics, some land of fable. Richer than the valley of the Nile it has lain here beneath the sea level for thousands of years, dead under the breath of the desert, until a little trickle of water was turned in from the Colorado River, and then it swiftly put forth such luxuriant wealth of food and clothes ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... colonel said whimsically, "I am afraid we are rather like the shepherdess and the chimney-sweep of the fable I read you very long ago. We climbed up so far that we could see the stars, once, very long ago, Patricia, and we have come back to live upon the parlor table. I suppose it happens to all the little ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... manner wins by its simplicity and tenderness. Years ago, Miss Mitford said that she knew no one so thoroughly original. For him she could find no living prototype. And so she went back to the time of John Dryden to find a man to whom she might compare him. And Lowell in his "Fable for ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... 'victor of fortune,' in the text. Now, had the truth been really so, what moral would such a story exemplify beyond the vulgar one of pecuniary improvidence? And yet surely this was not the cause of the Duke's being thrown from his horse. Meantime, Pope well knew that the whole was a ridiculous fable. The Duke had the misfortune to be fatally injured in a fox-chase. In such an extremity, naturally, his servants carry him into the house nearest at hand, which happens to be an alehouse—not 'the worst,' since there was no other; nor was it possible ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... matters of policy; or rather they, being poets, did exercise their delightful vein in those points of highest knowledge, which before them lay hidden to the world; for that wise Solon was directly a poet it is manifest, having written in verse the notable fable of the Atlantic Island, which was continued by Plato. {6} And, truly, even Plato, whosoever well considereth shall find that in the body of his work, though the inside and strength were philosophy, the skin, as it were, and beauty depended most of poetry. For all stands upon dialogues; ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... are beautiful for Colour. A strange Bird. Water-Fowls resembling Ducks and Swans. Peacocks. The King keeps Fowl. Their Fish, How they catch them in Ponds, And how in Rivers. Fish kept and fed for the King's Pleasure. Serpents. The Pimberah of a prodigious bigness. The Polonga. The Noya. The Fable of the Noya ana Polonga. The Carowala. Gerendo. Hickanella. Democulo, a great Spider. Kobbera-guson, a Creature like an Aligator. Tolla-guion. The people eat Rats. Precoius Stones, Minerals, and other Commodities. The People discouraged from Industry ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... he thought himself singular. "This much sunk me. I thought my condition was alone; but how to get out of, or get rid of, these things I could not." Again the very ground of his faith was shaken. "Was the Bible true, or was it not rather a fable and cunning story?" All thought "their own religion true. Might not the Turks have as good Scriptures to prove their Mahomet Saviour as Christians had for Christ? What if all we believed in should be but 'a think-so' too?" So powerful and so real were his illusions that he had hard work to keep himself ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... smile on her lips, yet with tears in the dark eyes. "I know it could not be. Yet if time should come that trouble befel you, and you sought refuge for the child, my heart and my arms would be open. Ah, you think, what could a poor Jewess do for you? Well, maybe so. Yet you know the fable of the mouse that gnawed the net in which the lion was caught. It might be, some day, that even ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... platform. Then he threw off his hat as he always did when excited, and ran. And how he ran! With his fists clenched and his arms tight against his sides he ran as though the hip-boots were the seven-league boots of fable. ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... probably the most ancient of all wind instruments. It was used at the Jewish feast of the Atonement, and the Romans used it for signalling purposes, their infantry carrying circular bronze horns. There is an interesting popular fable that horns were first introduced into Western Europe by the Crusaders; but that is incorrect, in that bronze horns have been found in prehistoric barrows. The horn was commonly used for summoning the folk mote in Saxon times, and in quite early days horns sounded in English homes on the arrival ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... hour from God Power fell on Patrick; and in spirit he saw, Invisible to flesh, the western coasts, And the ocean way, and, far beyond, that land The Future's heritage, and prophesied Of Brendan who ere long in wicker boat Should over-ride the mountains of the deep, Shielded by God, and tread—no fable then - Fabled Hesperia. Last of all he saw More near, thy hermit home, Senanus;—'Hail, Isle of blue ocean and the river's mouth! The People's Lamp, their Counsel's Head, is thine!" That hour shone out through ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... Alexandrian age. The Palestinian rabbis of the time were on the one hand developing by dialectic discussion the oral tradition into a vast system of religious ritual and legal jurisprudence; on the other, weaving around the law, by way of adornment to it, a variegated fabric of philosophy, fable, allegory, and legend. Simultaneously the Alexandrian preachers—they were never quite the same as the rabbis—were emphasizing for the outer world as well as their own people the spiritual side of the religion, elaborating a theology that should ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... with a smile, "did ever you hear the fable of the mountain and the mouse? You'll excuse me, I dare say, but you remind me of that fable. When you came in here, I'll stake my wig, you meant ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... liveliness charmed away the idle lady's ennui, while her pride and love of aristocratic exclusiveness equally gratified the same feelings for her patroness. And from the mist that enwrapped her origin, the ingenious and perhaps self-deceived young creature had contrived to evolve such a grand fable of "ancient descent" and "noble but reduced family," that everybody regarded her in the same light as she regarded herself. And surely, as the quick-sighted Mrs. Gwynne often said, no daughter of a long illustrious line was ever prouder ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... old wife's fable, But senseless stuff at best; Yet, as he had greed, he cried, "Indeed! I will put her powers to test." With a wave of his hand, he further said That to-morrow morning the clever maid Should come to the castle, and he would see What truth in ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... human nature very well when he wrote his fable of the old man and his ass, who tried to please everybody and ended up by pleasing nobody. Bearing this in mind, Madame Midas determined to please herself, and take no one's advice but her own with regard to Vandeloup. She knew if she dismissed ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... legends of the Wolf and the Fox were wielded without mercy by many mediaeval satirists, against the human animals of those species, then prevailing in courts and cloisters. But the jokes took their most permanent form in the fable of "Reyneke de Vos," first published in the year 1498. Written in Low-German by Nicholas Bauman, under the pseudonym of Hinrek van Alkmer, the satire did a similar work to that done by Rabelais, and Boccaccio, and Piers Plowman. It has since been translated into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... ready in a minute, Tom," she said. "A cup of hot coffee'll do the poor craythur, yer grandfather, a power of good. So he's fable, is he?" ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... orderly way from a beginning to a well-defined conclusion, and is full of striking episodes that suggest the culmination. It seems to me to be to a certain extent allegorical, albeit such an interpretation may be unreasonable. At least it is a fable thoroughly characteristic of the negro; and it needs no scientific investigation to show why he selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and brings him out victorious in contests ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... me to a nymph in the fable he was wrong; but he never addressed to me a word in French that was not in good taste. Before we condemn him, uncle, let us see for ourselves. It is a habit you have always recommended to me, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fact and fable were very often confused, and people did not take pains to distinguish the legends of the sibyls from the history of the prophets. When the Latin hymn "Dies Irae" was written, the sibyl was mentioned, with the prophet, as predicting the final destruction of the world. Many painters ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... to interfere with the cultivation of that faith, which is the essential condition of our joy. They cannot force us away from Christ, but they may tempt us away. The sunshine did for the traveller in the old fable what the storm could not do; and the world may cause you to think so much about it that you forget your Master. Its joys may compel Him to hide His face, and may so fill your eyes that you do not care to look at His face; and so the sweet bond may ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... would treat it so," replied the King. "Oh, yes—break your sticks one at a time as the wise man did in the fable!" ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... basket. In case of any subsequent inquiry into the fate of Jimson, It was desirable he should be little seen: in other words, that he should spend the day entirely in the house. To this end, and further to corroborate his fable, he had brought in the leather case not only writing materials, but a ream of large-size music paper, such as he considered suitable for an ambitious character like Jimson's. 'And now to work,' said he, when he had satisfied his appetite. 'We must leave traces of the wretched ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... was a member of the Polish legions, and was bringing back his old bones to that fatherland which he could no longer defend. Then how all the family—how even the servants embraced him, choking with tears! He would seat himself at the board and tell of history more strange than fable; he would relate how General Dombrowski33 was making efforts to penetrate from the Italian land into Poland, how he was gathering his countrymen on the plains of Lombardy; how Kniaziewicz34 was issuing commands from the Roman Capitol, and how, as a victor, he had cast in the eyes of the French an ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... died—in the bright spring-time of the year, in the bright spring-time of his life. Love had been the cradle-song of his infancy, love was the requiem of his youth. His was no romantic fable, no heroic epic; adventures, passions, fame, made up none of its incidents; it was simply the history of a boy's manful struggling against fate—of the quiet heroism of endurance, compensated by inward satisfaction, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... ocean, not to be behindhand with the earth, yielded up her mighty whales, that Mr. Gathergold might sell their oil, and make a profit on it. Be the original commodity what it might, it was gold within his grasp. It might be said of him, as of Midas in the fable, that whatever he touched with his finger immediately glistened, and grew yellow, and was changed at once into sterling metal, or, which suited him still better, into piles of coin. And, when Mr. Gathergold had ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... worship; they cast lots, and one of them offers her own tender infant to be torn by the three, like a roe; then the other women pursue them, and they are turned into bats, or moths, or other creatures of the night. And fable is endorsed by history; Plutarch telling us how, before the battle of Salamis, with the assent of Themistocles, three Persian captive youths were offered to ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... in the Mediterranean basin. The dragon of Wantley lived in a well; the Lambton Worm began life in fresh water, and only took to dry land later on. I have elsewhere spoken of the Manfredonia legend of Saint Lorenzo and the dragon, an indigenous fable connected, I suspect, with the fountain near the harbour of that town, and quite independent of the newly-imported legend of Saint Michael. Various springs in Greece and Italy are called Dragoneria; there is a cave-fountain Dragonara ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... that story of "The Dog and the Water-lily" was "no fable," and that Beau really understood his master's wish when he fetched him a water-lily out of "Ouse's silent tide." How graceful are the last two stanzas of ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... and influencing us not greatly, perhaps, yet strangely and notably. Not once did the real brownie occur to him—the small, naked Gibbie, far more marvellous and admirable than any brownie of legendary fable or fact, whether celebrated in rude old Scots ballad for his taeless feet, or designated in noble English poem of perfect art, as lubber fiend of ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... was it to be found? The Cavalier ran up and down all the stairs, through halls and passages, but no one among all those whom he met had heard talk of the Nightingale. And the Cavalier ran back to the Emperor, and said that it must be a fable made up by those who ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... made us wish that it would move faster than it was doing. It went on in a straight line, apparently not discovering us, as we followed behind. How we longed that it would break into a run. I remembered the fable, however, of the hare and the tortoise: "Sure and steady wins the race." Parched with thirst as we were, it was a hard matter for us to restrain our eagerness. On went the tortoise, turning neither to the right nor to the left. It seemed to us that the ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... assault that they had to endure. In the first place there was such a shower of darts and stones and arrows that the very light of the sun itself was darkened, a thing which I had always before judged to be a fable, but saw that day to be possible. The greater part of them, it is true, fell without effect to the ground, for of twenty missiles scarce one served its purpose, but some were not cast in vain. As for the number, they lay so thick upon the ground that a man might gather ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... all at once, is unbelievable. They throw their heads up and glory in strength of lungs until thunders take second place and the listener knows why not the bravest, not the most dangerous of beasts has man aged to impose the fable of his grandeur ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... that work a chapter on 'History and Fable' was inserted because of its bearing on the author's general views 'regarding the elementary commixture of fable and fact in ages that may be called prehistoric.' In this chapter the author made a rapid survey of the 'kinship between history and fable,' tracing it through the times of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... contradict this delightful tradition, But beg—No, I won't, I will take it—permission, To state, that I think there's a word to be said, From a different text, on the opposite head. And so I'll invent, as well as I'm able, A new home-made, allegorical fable; And my honest purpose shall be, to see If the scoundrel rich have not borne a part In those noble charities, which are The pride of this jolly old city's heart. And if I shall find that the virtuous mob Have ever been known one farthing to pay, Without hoping ...
— Nothing to Say - A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing - to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' • QK Philander Doesticks
... Farrago. In his Doctrinal Summary (Summaria Doctrina) Hardenberg taught: "St. Augustine and many other fathers write that the body of Christ is circumscribed by a certain space in heaven, and I regard this as the true doctrine of the Church." (Tschackert, 191.) Hardenberg also published the fable hatched at Heidelberg (Heidelberger Landluege, indirectly referred to also in the Formula of Concord, 981, 28), but immediately refuted by Joachim Moerlin, according to which Luther is said, toward the end of his life, to have confessed ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... moreover remarkable in having resuscitated our knowledge of the existence of the seed-storing habit. Mr. Moggridge points out that the ancients were familiar with the facts, and quotes the well-known fable of the ant and the grasshopper, which La Fontaine borrowed from Aesop. Mr. Moggridge (page 5) goes on: "So long as Europe was taught Natural History by southern writers the belief prevailed; but no sooner did the tide begin to turn, and the current of information ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... exiled so from Truth the mind unstable? Why of its blest reward Forgetful, lost, unable, Seeks it each shadowy fraud and guileful fable? ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... her noble enthusiasms paled, her fantastic and brilliant imagination dulled, and soon she sat listlessly in our midst, a tired, patient smile upon her delicate face, while her sister discoursed volubly upon clothes. Alas, the old fable of the iron pot and the porcelain kettle drifting down the stream together! At the end of the journey the iron pot had not even a scratch upon its thick sides, but the porcelain was broken to pieces. How I longed to take that wounded imagination, that whimsical wit, under ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... e'er Arion's music calm'd the floods And Orpheus ever drew the dancing woods! Why do not British trees and forest throng To hear the sweeter notes of Handel's song? This does the falsehood of the fable prove— Or seas and woods when Handel ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... he had retired from the city to avoid the suitors of Penelope. These trifling occurrences afford a strong presumption that the Ithaca of Homer was something more than the creature of his own fancy, as some have supposed it; for though the grand outline of a fable may be easily imagined, yet the consistent adaptation of minute incidents to a long and elaborate falsehood is a task of the most ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... intuition. For us this means more particularly that it is high time philosophers ceased to treat the great Christian theologians as credulous persons whose convictions need not be taken seriously and the Gospel history as a fable to which the 'enlightened' can no longer pay any respect. They must be prepared to reckon with the possibility that the facts recorded in the Gospel happened and that Catholic theology is, in substance, true. If we are to be philosophers in earnest we cannot afford to have any path which may lead ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... It may affect my whole future, and perhaps yours too, dear cousin, odd as that may seem to you, unless you recall the fable of the mouse ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... can be sure that any thing whatever of the small remainder ever came out of their mouths. All this, ever, is of the less consequence, as these gentlemen descend to tell us how we are to separate the "spiritual" gold which faintly streaks the huge mass of impure ore of fable, legend, and mysticism. Each man, it seems has his own particular spade and mattock in his "spiritual faculty"; so off with you to the diggings in these spiritual mines of Ophir. You will say, Why not stay at home, and be content at once, with the advocates ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... frome his oune authors as Bellarmine, etc., I angred him exceedingly. Then Patrick Hume, David, Mr. Grahame and I went to walk: and particularly to the pierre leve or stone erected a litle way from the city. The story or fable wheirof is this: once as Ste. Radegonde was praying the Devil thought to have smoored[106] or crushed her wt a great meikle stone greater than 2 milstones, which God knows whence he brought, but she miraculously supported it wt hir ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... involved in a mist of fable. According to Suidas he was a contemporary of Kroesus, though Herodotus assigns to him a much remoter antiquity. The latter authority describes him as visiting the northern peoples of Europe and recording his travels in an ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... original from which they are derived. For he who rushes to these lower beauties, as if grasping realities, when they are only like beautiful images appearing in water, will, doubtless, like him in the fable, by stretching after the shadow, sink into the lake and disappear. For, by thus embracing and adhering to corporeal forms, he is precipitated, not so much in his body as in his soul, into profound and horrid darkness; and thus ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... been easy for him to miss what lay beneath the surface. But for the accident of his meeting with Clara, his temperament would have carried him through life, unconscious of love from his own experience and regarding it as a fable of women and poets. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... Juagua were so charged with gold that "men who came from a great distance, and whose country was unknown," established washing-places on the spot. They disappeared during the night, after having collected a great quantity of gold. It would be needless to show that this is a fable. Pyrites dispersed in quartzose veins, crossing the mica-slate, are often auriferous, no doubt; but no analogous fact leads to the supposition that the sulphuretted iron which is found in the schistose marls of the alpine limestone, contains gold. Some ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... explanation in the last [eighteenth] century was the calumny known as mercheta mulierum, now known as a malignant fable popularized by novelists and playwrights. Another suggestion is that it is a custom that has survived from some prehistoric race; a third that it has grown up at different points...." Mr. Peacock regards the last as the most likely. "It is only when ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... precaution of the prudent, no forethought of the wary, nor any expedient of charters, constitutions, or restrictions, will prevent the few from placing their feet on the neck of the many. We may revive the fable of King Log and King Stork, as often, and in as many forms as we will; it will ever be the fable of King Log and King Stork. We are no admirers of political aristocracies, as a thousand paragraphs from our pen will prove; and, as for monarchs, we have long thought ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... which he chose periods and events to represent are illustrated in many of the introductions. Of The Fortunes of Nigel he said: "The reign of James I., in which George Heriot flourished, gave unbounded scope to invention in the fable, while at the same time it afforded greater variety and discrimination of character than could, with historical consistency, have been introduced if the scene had been ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... abroad is much the same as punishing a carp by putting it into the water," said Levin. Then he recollected that this idea, which he had heard from an acquaintance and uttered as his own, came from a fable of Krilov's, and that the acquaintance had picked it up from ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... alone in the turret, but omits the statement (previously made by him) that he deprived Ruthven of his dagger, a very improbable tale, told falsely at first, no doubt, as Robertson the notary at first invented his fable about meeting with Henderson, coming out of the dark staircase. This myth Robertson narrated when examined in September, but omitted it in the trial in November. Henderson now explained about his first ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... or that they here remain longer uncorrupted than in towns, whether large or small. Nor is it proved that in former times the country possessed any advantage in these respects, as compared with our own days and with the modern town. The entire fable of rural innocence appears to rest, not upon an actual comparison between town and country, but rather upon the more lively interest felt in town life, and especially in the life of the great towns: in towns, immorality has been more ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... injuring me meets with some misfortune. Then I remember, and take my revenge. I return the injury sevenfold, as Ivan Petrovitch Ptitsin says. (Of course he never does so himself.) Excellency, no doubt you recollect Kryloff's fable, 'The Lion and the Ass'? Well now, that's you and I. That fable was ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... true names and relative positions, both of which the exigencies of the stage had sometimes obliged me to alter, and while allowing them to fill the same parts, making them act more in accordance with historical fact. No fable however far-fetched, no grouping of characters however improbable, can, however, destroy the interest which the innumerable writings about the Iron Mask excite, although no two agree in details, and ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... rationalistic age, when by many the God of miracles is denied; when the incarnation of the Son of God is considered a fable, having its counterpart in nearly all religions; when a belief in a literal hell and a literal heaven is becoming obsolete; when the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ, making it possible to escape the one and gain the other, is held as a relic of superstition; when the verbal ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... not carry its own moral, what fable does, I wonder? Before the arrival of that hamper, Master Briggs was in no better repute than any other young gentleman of the lower school; and in fact I had occasion myself, only lately, to correct Master Brown for kicking his friend's ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... who amongst my departed friends was the controller of the lying spirit, by whom the medium was possessed. My departed friend compelled him in the first place to tell, that he was Don Quixote, known as the hero in the celebrated Spanish romance or fable called Don Quixote. A similar fiction was also the speech of the demon by whom that medium was possessed, only that those who do not know me, might take the calumny of the devil for truth. After the confession that he was Don Quixote, to make which he was compelled by a higher power, he added ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... Armour clad, of watchet steele, full grim, Fring'd round about the sides, with twisted gold, Spotted with shining stars vnto the brim, Which seem'd to burn the spheare which did th[e] hold: His bright sword drawn, of temper good and old, A full moone in a fable night he bore, On painted shield, which much adorned him, With this short Motto: ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... of them is generally compelled to take the other. They are two, and yet they grow together out of one head or stem; and I can not help thinking that, if Aesop had noticed them, he would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their strife, and when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is the reason why when one ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... have been conducted by an examination of successive points in the Hebrew history and system. In the beginning the Hebrew cosmogony suggested an argument for the superiority of the Platonic theory over the Mosaic. (Cyril. b. ii.) Next he successively attacked the account of Paradise as a fable; entering upon both the probability of the story (Id. b. iii.) and the moral features of the Deity brought out in the narrative. He seems also to have passed from the idea of creation to that of providence, and to have dwelt on the inferiority of the Hebrew scheme as a theory of providence, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... concentration and nerve of the Brownie, but they are from the same brain and heart. "The Country Lass," a long poem, is excellent; with much of Crabbe's power and compression. This, and the greater part of the volume, is in the Scottish dialect, but there is a Fable—the Butterfly and Bee—the English and sense, the fine, delicate humor and turn of which might have been Cowper's; and there is a bit of rugged sarcasm called "Siller," which Burns need not have been ashamed of. Poor Nicholson, besides his turn for verse, was an exquisite musician, and sang ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... (so chance I to please Caecilius owning me now-a-days!) Is it my own default, how so they say it be mine; 10 Nor can any declare aught sin by me was committed. Yet it is so declared (Quintus!) by fable of folk; Who, whenever they find things done no better than should be, Come to me outcrying all:—"Door, the default ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... Mansoul trampled upon things divine, And wallowed in filth as doth a swine; When she betook herself unto her arms, Fought her Emmanuel, despis'd his charms; Then I was there, and did rejoice to see Diabolus and Mansoul so agree. Let no men, then, count me a fable-maker, Nor make my name or credit a partaker Of their derision: what is here in view, Of mine own knowledge, I dare say is true. I saw the Prince's armed men come down By troops, by thousands, to besiege the town; I saw the captains, heard the trumpets ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... or palace of Memnon, two colossal statues, the sepulchres of the kings, and the temple of Medinet Abu. The glory of Thebes belongs to a period prior to the commencement of authentic history. It is recorded only in the dim lights of poetry and tradition, which might be suspected of fable, did not such mighty witnesses remain to attest their truth. Strabo and Diodorus Siculus described Thebes under the name of Diospolis (the city of God), and gave such magnificent descriptions of its monuments as caused the fidelity of those writers to be called in question, till ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... last, outstretched before them, that Caspian Sea of Africa, the existence of which was so long consigned to the realms of fable—that interior expanse of water to which only Denham's and Barth's expeditions had been able to ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... direction with ours, and then came briskly after us. He sets open a window in the coldest day or night, and stands before it. It may do with his constitution; but most people, amongst whom I am one, would say, with the frogs in the fable, 'This may be sport to you; but it is death to us.' It is in vain to try to find a meaning in every one of his particularities, which, I suppose, are mere habits, contracted by chance; of which every man has some that are more or less ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... throne. All this is history; it is the story of the development and progress of the most remarkable man of modern times. You can read the story in countless books; for now, after Napoleon has been dead for over seventy years, the world is learning to sift the truth from all the chaff of falsehood and fable that so long surrounded him; it is endeavoring to place this marvellous leader of men in the place he should rightly occupy—that of a great man, led by ambition and swayed by selfishness, but moved also by a desire to do noble things for the nation that he ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... his work entitled, The English Malady, or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases, as having come under his own observation; and, as this case is exactly similar to that of the Prophet, it may amuse the reader to see how far an ancient fable may be illustrated, and in part explained, by the records of modern science. Dr. Cheyne's patient was probably cataleptic; but the worthy physician must be allowed to tell his ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... about all that may have been permitted or will be permitted in the Divine administration of the universe; he will see that those who with one voice denied, about half a century ago, the existence of aerolites, and summarily dismissed all the alleged facts as a silly fable, because it contradicted their experience,—that those who refused to admit the Copernican theory because, as they said, it manifestly contradicted their experience,—that the schoolboy who refuses to admit the first law of motion because, as he says, it gives the ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... believe to the great German antiquaries, his history seems a model history of a nation. You watch the people and their story rise before you out of fable into fact; out of the dreary darkness of the unknown north, into the clear light of ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... alludes to the fable amusingly recorded by Wieland in his Geschichte der Abderiten. The Abderitans, who were a byword among the ancients for their extreme simplicity, are said to have sent express for Hipocrates to cure ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the American girl is neither an affectation, nor a prejudiced fable, nor a piece of stupidity. The German woman, quoted by Mr. Bryce, found her American compeer furchtbar frei, but she had at once to add und furchtbar fromm. "The innocence of the American girl passes abysses of ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... kind of classical opera, called No, which is performed on stages specially built for the purpose in the palaces of the principal nobles. These No represent the entertainments by which the Sun Goddess was lured out of the cave in which she had hidden, a fable said to be based upon an eclipse. In the reign of the Emperor Yomei (A.D. 586-593), Hada Kawakatsu, a man born in Japan, but of Chinese extraction, was commanded by the Emperor to arrange an entertainment for the propitiation of the gods and the prosperity of the country. Kawakatsu ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... they are so much lighter than those of monarchies, that I view them with much indulgence. I rely, too, on the good sense of the people for remedy, whereas the evils of monarchical government are beyond remedy. If any of our countrymen wish for a King, give them AEsop's fable of the frogs who asked a King; if this does not cure them, send them to Europe. They will go back good republicans. Whether we shall have war or not, is still doubtful. I conclude we shall not, from, the inability of both France and England to undertake a war. But our friend George is rather ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... "that was just a fable. And one of the things I have learned is how frequently there is a basis of fact underlying a fable. And, for that matter, how can we know there is no such monster, some relic of a Mesozoic species supposed to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... necessary to his happiness. His feeling for her, lulled into unconsciousness by the dull round of domesticity, had been sharply stirred by the loss of her presence. Has it not been dinned into us by proverb and sermon and fable that we never prize the music till the sweet-voiced bird has flown—or in other no less ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... wonderful, so thrilling in interest, in the details of character and adventure, in the incessant panoramic display it gave of light and shade. And on it rested the shadow of a strange, pathetic doubt, the mystery of creation. Its romance, its fiction, its fable, and the animating picture it furnished, with its sceptics and its believers, its haters and its lovers, its tyrants and its heroes. Its wide, verbal immensity! I miss all that, or almost all. This life ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... the queen, by right of magnitude at least, of the world's cities, stare aghast upon the legend, almost as Belshazzar stared upon the writing on the wall. Colonists seeking for the first time the comfortable embrace of that mother country which has been the fable of their childhood and the dream of their laborious years of maturity, gaze with withering hearts at this cancer in her bosom. Pure women turn their eyes from it. Children seek it that they may learn in one sharp moment the knowledge of good and evil. The music of the feet ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... to be soft, steady, strong, far-sweeping, and full of warmth, like the Gulf stream, being narrowed into an eddy, and concentrated at a point, changes into the alternate suction and surrender of Charybdis. Which is indeed, I doubt not, the true meaning of that marvellous fable, "infinite," as Bacon said of it, "in ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of Circe, who changed the soldiers or companions of Ulysses into swine. We know also the fable of the Golden Ass, by Apuleius, which contains the account of a man metamorphosed into an ass. I bring forward these things merely as what they are, that is to ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... chaos of that civil war had risen a new nation, mighty in the vastness of its limitless resources, the realities within its reach surpassing the dreams of fiction, and eclipsing the fancy of fable—a new nation, yet rosy in the flesh, with the bloom of youth upon its cheeks and the gleam of morning in its eyes. No one questioned that commercial and geographic union had been effected. So had Rome re-united its faltering provinces, maintaining the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... discovered, the Cathays of the deep are unknown. And whoso crosses the Pacific might have read lessons to Buffon. The sea-serpent is not a fable; and in the sea, that snake is but a garden worm. There are more wonders than the wonders rejected, and more sights unrevealed than you or I ever ever dreamt of. Moles and bats alone should be skeptics; and the only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... abate the contention and at the same time cheer the meal with a pleasant tale: "it is a very old story, it has to be unearthed from the very oldest authors. I will tell you what I found about it in literature, if you will promise me first that you will not look upon it as a fable."' ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... the twenty-second chapter of the Biographia Literaria, points out that the fable and characters of Paradise Lost are not derived from Scripture, as in the Messiah of Klopstock, but merely suggested by it—the illusion on which all poetry is founded being thus never contradicted. The poem proceeds upon a legend, ancient and fascinating, and to call ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... wound—so grievously I misread the allegory, or rather saw no allegory at all. So my mother explained it to me, though all the while, poor creature, her heart was racked with terror for her Mansoul, beaten, perhaps, at that moment from its body by the fury of that awful night. Then when the fable's meaning was explained, and my difficulty smoothed away, we fell to talking of father's home-coming, in vain endeavours to cheat ourselves of the fears that rose again with every angry bellow of the tempest, and agreed that his ship could not possibly be due yet (rejoicing ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... imagination into proper fields, and to present material which will give the child a large store of beautiful images—images that are not only delightful to dwell upon, but are also elevating and refining in their influence upon character. The fairy tale, the folk tale, and the fable, owe their popularity with young children to the predominance of the imaginative element. The traditionary fairy tales and folk stories are usually more suitable than those that appear in teachers' magazines and modern holiday books for children. The hardest ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... given, sufficed to the determining of Florimel's behaviour. I do not mean that she had more than the natural tendency of womankind to enjoy the emotions of which she was the object; but besides the one in the fable, there are many women with a tendency to arousing; and the idea of deriving pleasure from the sufferings of a handsome youth was not quite so repulsive to her as it ought to have been. At the same time, as there cannot be many cats ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... agitation into which the Queen fell publicly on the evening of that day, but also some strange particulars that attended the King's return from the forest; and, being taken up and repeated, and confirmed, as many thought, by the unhappy sequence of his death, the fable found a little later almost universal credence, so that it may now ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... Sappho, which fills the last 250 pages of the first (nineteenth) volume and about as much of the second (twentieth) or last. It has very little connection with the text, save that Sappho and Phaon (for the self-precipitation at Leucas is treated as a fable) retire to the country of the Sauromatae, to live there a happy, united, but unwed and purely Platonic (in the silly sense) existence. The foolish side of the precieuse system comes out here, and the treatment confirms one's suspicion ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... with other persons, notably in the case of Captain Miles Standish and John Alden, in which case the fair maiden herself is given the credit of admonishing the envoy to court for himself. It is very sure, however, that this latter story is a fable. It was probably founded on the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... now proceed to a regular examination of the tragedy before us, in which I shall treat separately of the Fable, the Moral, the Characters, the Sentiments, and the Diction. And ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... before he was sixteen years of age. His memory and his imagination must both have served him well; for he not only acquired a style fit for narrative, exposition, or argument, but also learned to use the fable, parable, paraphrase, proverb, and dialogue. The third element in his education was writing for publication; he began very early, while he was still a young boy, to put all he had learned to use in writing for the ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... Boers had let him past, and had waited for the main body of the patrol, which they had "held up" at short range. The scout, who had passed through them, heard the shouts of "Hands up!" and galloping for dear life, had been able to get clear and pitch the brigadier his terror-bred fable. Apart from taking their clothes, the Boers had treated the prisoners well. They were a party of fifteen men, very poorly clad but well mounted, under a commandant of the name of Theron. Crauford, who was a young English Africander, had, while a prisoner, ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... lightning is the lover's boon, And honey oozing from an amber moon Illumines footing on forbidden wall; Where, 'stead of pursy jeweler's display, Parading peacocks brave the passer-by, And swans like angels in an azure sky Wing swift and silent on unchallenged way. No land of fable! Of the Hills I sing, Whose royal women tread with conscious grace The peace-filled gardens of a warrior race, Each maiden fit for wedlock with a king, And every Rajput son so royal born And conscious of his age-long heritage He looks askance at Burke's becrested page And wonders ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... This little collection from his 240 Fables is meant, first of all, for children. In assembling it no Fable was admitted that has not been approved by generations of the young and old. No apologue addressed to the mature intelligence alone, or framed to fit the society of his day, is ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... squirrel, Lady Mary, is a flying squirrel, and these were only common grey ones, which are a different species. Besides, my dear, this history is but a fable." ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... every atrocious matter. Because, ask a person wherever a vile, slanderous falsehood has been uttered, who it was who said it, and he will reply, 'Truly I don't know who, but somebody in the company said it;' question then every one in the company concerning the fable, and every one will say he heard it from somebody, but no one knows from whom. Is not this a shameful injury?" he demanded. "Be so good as to inform every one whom you may hear naming me, that I have never said any one of these things, nor have ever invented nor uttered a lie to ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... fable reversed; man said woman had nothing to do all day but to enjoy herself. Making a potato pie! What sort of work was that? Making a potato pie was a lark; anybody could ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... hero, record at length that he was killed by a dragon. A digest and running commentary of the poem may be found in Turner's Anglo-Saxons; and no one can read it without discerning the history shining clearly out of the mists of fable. The primitive manners, modes of life, forms of expression, are all historically delineated. In it the intimate relations between the king and his people are portrayed. The Saxon cyning is compounded of cyn, people, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Men soon will cease to name their name, Oblivion soon will quench their fame, And the wild story of their fate, Will yet be subject of debate, 'Twixt antiquarians sage and able, Who doubt if it be truth or fable. ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... but the outline and the faultless contour of a stone? Come back, Pygmalion, from your mythic sleep! return, Art's divinest mystery, germ of all its power, from the deep dust of ages! and teach these modern men that his story whose passion fired a statue's breast was but an immortal fable, a similitude of the truth you feel, but do not see,—that even as our Creator shared His life with His creatures, so do you pour, in far less measure, but obedient to that precedent which is law, your own life and the magnetic instincts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... sea-shore, she was stolen by some Phoenician mariners, carried to Samos, and bought by Iadmon, one of the geomori, or landed aristocracy of the island. The little girl grew day by day more beautiful, graceful and clever, and was soon an object of love and admiration to all who knew her. AEsop, the fable-writer, who was at that time also in bondage to Iadmon, took an especial pleasure in the growing amiability and talent of the child, taught her and cared for her in the same way as the tutors whom we keep to educate our ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... knowledge and experience, the traditions of the day concerning the epoch at which he had originally lived. Now this process of re-scription and personal rectification, pursued by various individual sages from time to time, had the effect of preventing our history from degenerating into absolute fable." ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... arranged according to his judgment or fancy, little solicitous to add or to particularize. If we make an honourable exception in favour of some English poets, the thoughts too are as little novel as the images; and the fable of their narrative poems, for the most part drawn from mythology, or sources of equal notoriety, derive their chief attractions from the manner of treating them; from impassioned flow, or picturesque arrangement. In opposition to the present age, and perhaps in as ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Censor in turn, now trembles at Your dread Tribunal. The first and last Appeal of Players, Poets, Statesmen, Fidlers, Fools, Philosophers and Kings. If, by the boldness of his Satyr, or the daring Novelty of his Plan and Fable, He has offended, He ought to meet with some degree of Candour, as his Offence was the Effect of a Noble Gratitude, and an Over-heated Zeal to Please His Noble Guests & Patrons, whom he Scorn'd to treat with Vulgar Cates Season'd and Serv'd with Flattery and Common ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... showed themselves a little unruly; brave, and such excellent horsemen, as almost to realize the fable of the Centaurs, charging an enemy with the impetuosity of lightning and disappearing with the quickness of thought, they requested me every moment to engage; but I knew too well the value of regular infantry, and how ineffectual ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... office of a co{n}nyng{e} vscher{e} or marshall{e} w{i}t{h}-owt fable must know all{e} estat{es} of the church goodly & greable, and e excellent estate of a kyng{e} w{i}t{h} his blode honorable: 1004 hit is a notable nurtur{e} ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... mother is a Dane, and I am English; There is a pleasant fable in old books, Ye take a stick, and break it; bind a score All in one faggot, snap it ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... original in her talk too; one of those untaught wits that help to stock a country with proverbs. I told you that capital thing I heard her say about Craig—that he was like a cock, who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. Now that's an AEsop's fable in a sentence." ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... the open and die there, if need be! To live in this rat hole, breathing plague, is dying already! Caonabo is a fable! These people! Spaniards have but to lift voice ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and oeconomical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... the bitterness of his soul. He beheld himself to be as the dog in the fable that had dropped the substance to snatch at ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... said the soul, "the dawn that the dreamers dread. The sails of light are paling on those unwreckable galleons; the mariners that steer them slip back into fable and myth; that other sea the traffic is turning now at its ebb, and is about to hide its pallid wrecks, and to come swinging back, with its tumult, at the flow. Already the sunlight flashes in the gulfs behind the east of the ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... down in your kingdom and see what a royal throne you occupied? What a reception your flowers give you! The ambrosia and nectar of the feasts of the deities of fable are overshadowed by the fragrance and sweetness of your worshippers. It would seem that every flower, like a royal subject, was bent on rendering the most exalted honor to her king. No company of maidens preparing for nuptials were ever arrayed like these. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... We children had been watching and waiting for it. The house had been stripped bare; many cases of goods were awaiting shipment around Cape Horn to California. California! A land of fable! We knew well enough that our father was there, and had been for two years or more; and that we were at last to go to him, and dwell there with the fabulous in a new home more or less fabulous,—yet we felt that it must be altogether lovely. We said good-bye ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... of his cab with fully half his cry to finish out; and, curiously, all the time a sad little story from an old holiday in the country kept haunting him. It was at once a fact and a fable concerning a happy little family of swallows, whose sudden tragedy he had seen with his own boyish, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... but a legend I know,— A fable, a phantom, a show, Of the ancient Rabbinical lore; Yet the old mediaeval tradition, The beautiful, strange superstition, But haunts me and holds ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... known for the last thirty or forty years; and we English are, as good King Alfred found us to his sorrow a thousand years ago, very slow to move, even when we see a thing ought to be done. Let us hope that in this matter—we have been so in most matters as yet—we shall be like the tortoise in the fable, and not the hare; and by moving slowly, but surely, win the race at last. But now think for yourself: and see what you would do to save these people from being poisoned by bad water. Remember that the plain question is this—The rainwater comes down from heaven as ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Russia. An abundant cheap supply, firstly, of English and French books, in English and French, but in the Russian character, by means of which Russians may rapidly learn French and English—for it is quite a fable that these languages are known and used in Russia below the level of the court and aristocracy—and, secondly, of Russian books in the Latin (or some easy phonetic development of the Latin) type, will do more to ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... A trembling hand against his throbbing breast, His aimless fingers touched a treasured part Of the green holly-branch of Elfinhart, Laid in his breast when he put off his arms. What perils now are left in fairy charms? For poets fable when they call love blind; Love's habitation is the purer mind, Whence with his keen eyes he may penetrate All mists and fogs that baser spells create. Love? What is love? Not the wild feverish thrill, When heart to heart the thronging pulses fill, And lips ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... true A copy pencil never drew. My Muse her song had ended here, But both their Genii straight appear, Joy and amazement her did strike: Two twins she never saw so like. 'Twas taught by wise Pythagoras, One soul might through more bodies pass. Seeing such transmigration there, She thought it not a fable here. 70 Such a resemblance of all parts, Life, death, age, fortune, nature, arts; Then lights her torch at theirs, to tell, And show the world this parallel: Fix'd and contemplative their looks, Still turning ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... The fable consists of a single event—of the transition from the highest pomp and profusion of artificial refinement to the most abject state of savage life, and privation of all social intercourse. The change is as rapid as it is complete; nor is the description of the rich and generous Timon, banqueting ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... "You know the fable of the fox and the grapes," Bell said, her gray eyes flashing indignantly upon her sister, who, wisely forbore further remarks upon Helen's hands and contented herself with wondering if people generally would take up ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... saying in the services, and elsewhere, that greater privileges grow out of larger responsibilities, and that the latter justifies the former. This is part truth and part fable. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... wonder of its sea-caves. Her childhood had known nothing of fairyland, and now, in this tardy awakening of the imaginative part of her nature, she thought sometimes of Capri much as a child is wont to think of the enchanted countries, nameless, regionless, in books of fable. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... not seize this famous robber? First of all, she kept on asking her husband about it, and he replied that the whole story about Fatia Negra was only a Wallachian fable. It was true that robberies were committed by men who regularly wore black masks, but it was never one and the same man who was guilty of these misdeeds. Nevertheless the name had won a sort of nimbus of notoriety among the common people, ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... of flattery, Your sex's much-lov'd enemy; For other foes we are prepar'd, And Nature puts us on our guard: In that alone such charms are found, We court the dart, we nurse the hand; And this, my child, an Aesop's Fable Will prove much better ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the kettle sizzled there all the evening, giving off anything but an agreeable odor. We were translating the fable of "The Mouse and the Peasant" that night, and nihil Mehurcule is still mixed up in my mind with the odor of that ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... In fable or romance of Uther's son, Begirt with British and Armoric knights; And all who since, baptized or infidel, Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... planted with all manner of fair flowers and lordly trees, and in my folly believed that those who had been my friends were forever after assured of pleasant places, lovely perfumes, and grateful shade; but like the Grecian in the ancient fable, I found I had sown dragon's teeth, and the crop I reaped was of hatred ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... consequence. One betrayed his master and the other did likewise, only with far greater subtlety and wickedness—teaching thousands to disbelieve his claims to godhood—to regard Christianity as a crude compound of Greek mythology and Jewish tradition—a thing built of myth and fable. Even if these two were damned and all the rest were saved—can you not see that a knowledge of their suffering would embitter heaven itself to another hell? Father Riley was good enough to tell us last week of the state of unbaptised infants after ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... by, said, significantly, 'Take care that not a leaf remains on that tree by the morning.' The woman understood the metaphor, and in an hour or two, aided by other strapping Zulu females, attacked the unfortunate Basuto and killed him with clubs. But Cetywayo having thus, like the monkey in the fable, employed a cat's paw to do his dirty work, began to think the Basuto's untimely death might have an ugly appearance in my eyes, so gave orders in my presence that, as a punishment, six of the women who had killed the Basuto should also be put to death. ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... himself. It is the deepest, it is the best in him, but it may not be in the least his own yet. It is one thing to have a mine of gold in one's ground, know it, and work it; and another to have the mine still but regard the story as a fable, throw the aureal hints that find their way to the surface as playthings to the woman who herself is but a plaything in the owner's eyes, and mock her when she takes them for precious. In a word, every man in love shows better than he is, though, thank God, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... condition of Society, equivalent to defying his perpetual fellest enmity? The epithet schneidermassig (tailor-like) betokens an otherwise unapproachable degree of pusillanimity; we introduce a Tailor's-Melancholy, more opprobrious than any Leprosy, into our Books of Medicine; and fable I know not what of his generating it by living on Cabbage. Why should I speak of Hans Sachs (himself a Shoemaker, or kind of Leather-Tailor), with his Schneider mit dem Panier? Why of Shakspeare, in his Taming of the Shrew, and elsewhere? Does ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... blood from vigorous frames. Jesus Christ passes His own blood into our veins and makes us immortal. The Church chose for one of its ancient emblems of the Saviour the pelican, which fed its young, according to the fable, with blood from its own breast. So Christ vitalises us. He in us ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... nature very well when he wrote his fable of the old man and his ass, who tried to please everybody and ended up by pleasing nobody. Bearing this in mind, Madame Midas determined to please herself, and take no one's advice but her own with regard to Vandeloup. She ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... comet was said to have caused the flood; but in the strange characters of the Zend is the legend of an ark (as it were) prepared against the snow. It may be that it is the dim memory of a glacial epoch. In this deep coombe, amid the dark oaks and snow, was the fable of Zoroaster. For the coming of Ormuzd, the Light and Life Bringer, the leaf slept folded, the butterfly was hidden, the germ concealed, while the sun swept upwards ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... German petty princes, and in the other the intolerance of the Established Church. We may assume that is the reason why Lowell admired them; but Lowell was also too critical and polemic to be wholly a poet,—except on certain occasions. In 1847 he published the "Fable for Critics," the keenest piece of poetical satire since Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,"—keen and even saucy, but perfectly good-humored. About the same time he commenced his "Biglow Papers," which did not wholly cease until 1866, and were the most incisive and aggressive anti-slavery ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... the "Survey of Cornwall," published in 1769, and he gives an explanation of the custom which is no doubt erroneous, but is curious for other reasons. "It may be," he says, "this device took original from the Master of Bedlam, who (the fable sayeth) used to cure his patients of that impatience by keeping them bound in pools up to the middle, and so more or less after the fit of their fury" (p. 123). The present Master goes further, and keeps them up to the neck ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... father says that his daughter's tale is unreasonable.] Then more I meled & sayde apert, "Me ynk y tale vnresou{n}able, Godde[gh] ry[gh]t is redy & eu{er} more rert,[20] O{er} holy wryt is bot a fable; 592 I{n} sauter is sayd a verce ouerte at speke[gh] a poy{n}t determynable, '{o}u quyte[gh] vchon as hys desserte, {o}u hy[gh]e ky{n}g ay p{re}termynable,'[21] 596 Now he at stod e long day ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... was more influenced by some other characteristics of Scotland than he was by its scenery. There was, first, its romantic history. That had not then been separated, as it has since been, from the mists of fable, but lay exactly in that twilight point of view best adapted for arousing the imagination. To the eye of Burns, as it glared back into the past, the history of his country seemed intensely poetical—including the line of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... don't quite understand. He asserts that my 'deleterious works' have had 'an effect upon civil society, which requires,' &c. &c. &c. and his own poetry. It is a lengthy poem, and a long preface, with a harmonious title-page. Like the fly in the fable, I seem to have got upon a wheel which makes much dust; but, unlike the said fly, I do not take it all ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... within each Book, and grouped after their Fables. The name is spelled "Aesop" in Riley, "Esop" in Smart and in the Contents. Inconsistencies in fable numbering are described at the beginning of the Table ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and love, that the novel of to-day should take the place of the parable and the fable of early times, and that the artist has a larger and more poetic task than that of suggesting certain prudential and conciliatory measures for the purpose of diminishing the fright caused by his pictures. His aim should be to render attractive ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... also that of his country with the vastest and noblest enterprise inscribed in the annals of history. And each one moved over his own favorite route toward his own goal. It was an apt illustration of the Russian fable of the swan, the crab, and the pike being harnessed together in order to remove a load. The swan flew upward, the crab crawled backward, the pike made with all haste for the water, and the load remained where ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the pety Bretaine, And so haue enemies enuiron round about. I beseech God, that some prayers deuout Mutt let the said apparance probable Thus disposed without feyned fable. But all onely for perill that I see Thus imminent, it's likely for to bee, And well I wotte, that from hence to Rome, And, as men say, in all Christendome, Is no ground ne land to Ireland liche, So large, so good, so plenteous, so riche, That to this worde ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... Fancies grew out of a fable by Pilpay, which Mr. Browning read when a boy. He ... put this into verse; and it then occurred to him to make the poem the beginning of a series, in which the Dervish who is first introduced as a learner should ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... had only interpreted their findings for modern use. There was the tragedy, which had certain proper parts and a certain fixed order of treatment laid down for it; there was the heroic poem, which had a story or "fable," which must be treated in a certain fixed manner, and so on. The authors of the "Classic" period so christened themselves because they observed these rules. And they fancied that they had the temper of the Augustan time—the temper displayed in the works of Horace ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... them built pyramids and founded cities, and appear to have ruled gloriously. They maintained, and even increased, the power and splendour of Egypt. But the history of the Memphite Empire unfortunately loses itself in legend and fable, and becomes a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... singular hold on our affection seems, therefore, to be his rare quality of presenting the unusual but typical dream or reverie as a beautiful object of interest, without endeavoring to give it the character of an allegory or a fable. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... branch which shelters the coralillo, this enemy of man, coiling its tail round the branch, dives down into space with all the length of is body, and strikes with its fangs at the man's forehead. This curious fact was long considered to be a mere fable, but it has now been verified, and belongs to the natural history of India. In these cases the natives see in the snake the envoy of Death, the fulfiller of the will of the bloodthirsty ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... scarcely afforded ground for a cool and deliberate judgment of his powers. He had merely to bark, run on, and jump through an inn window, after a comic fugitive. The next scene of importance to the fable was a little marred in its interest by his over-anxiety; forasmuch as while his master (a belated soldier in a den of robbers on a tempestuous night) was feelingly lamenting the absence of his faithful dog, and ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Veronica ever been asserted to be other than symbolic by the sincere teachers of the Church; and, even so far as in that merely explanatory function, it became the seal of an extreme sorrow, it is not easy to understand how the pensive fable was associated with a flower so familiar, so bright, and so popularly of good omen, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... you think I fable with you? I assure you, He that has once the flower of the sun, The perfect ruby, which we call elixir, Not only can do that, but, by its virtue, Can confer honour, love, respect, long life; Give safety, valour, yea, and victory, To whom he will. In eight and twenty days, I'll ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... red ink. In his little cyclist hand-book there is a diary, and in the diary there is an entry of these things—it is there to this day, and I cannot do better than reproduce it here to witness that this book is indeed a true one, and no lying fable written to while ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... hostile faction is silent, or unheeded; even criticism is gentle and timid. If history had said its last word, if no more were to be known of him than is already written, his fame, however lacking in definite outline, however distorted by fable, would survive undiminished to the latest generations. The blessings of an enfranchised race would forever hail him as their liberator; the nation would acknowledge him as the mighty counselor whose patient courage and wisdom saved the life of the republic in its darkest hour; and illuminating his ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... the temple of Medinet Abu. The glory of Thebes belongs to a period prior to the commencement of authentic history. It is recorded only in the dim lights of poetry and tradition, which might be suspected of fable, did not such mighty witnesses remain to attest their truth. Strabo and Diodorus Siculus described Thebes under the name of Diospolis (the city of God), and gave such magnificent descriptions of its monuments as caused ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... charming irrelevance, "Johnson is the Hercules who strangled serpents in his cradle." The last of Goldsmith's hits was suggested by Johnson's shaking his sides with laughter because Goldsmith admired the skill with which the little fishes in the fable were made to talk in character. "Why, Dr. Johnson, this is not so easy as you seem to think," was the retort, "for if you were to make little fishes talk, they ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... the good is invariably productive of good. The good character is diffusive in his influence. "I was common clay till roses were planted in me," says some aromatic earth in the Eastern fable. Like begets like, and good makes good. "It is astonishing," says Canon Moseley, "how much good goodness makes. Nothing that is good is alone, nor anything bad; it makes others good or others bad—and that other, and so on: like a stone ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... thrilling in interest, in the details of character and adventure, in the incessant panoramic display it gave of light and shade. And on it rested the shadow of a strange, pathetic doubt, the mystery of creation. Its romance, its fiction, its fable, and the animating picture it furnished, with its sceptics and its believers, its haters and its lovers, its tyrants and its heroes. Its wide, verbal immensity! I miss all that, or almost all. This life is evenly ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Bishop of Avranches supposes That all these large and varying doses Of fable mean ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... thought I was mad. He stared at me for a minute, and then, with an indescribable intonation, said, "How de ol' Satan yew fink yew gwain ter get'm, hey? Ef yew spects ter fool dis chile wiv any dem lime-juice yarns, 'bout lanterns 'n boats at night-time, yew's 'way off." I guessed he meant the fable current among English sailors, that if you hoist a sail on a calm night in a boat where flying-fish abound, and hang a lantern in the middle of it, the fish will fly in shoals at the lantern, strike against the sail, and fall in heaps in the boat. It MAY be true, but I never spoke to anybody ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... he will try the case; if not, let them forever be silent." In every essay that follows, there are the same great odds and the same electric call to the youth to face them. It is, indeed, as much a world of fable and romance that Emerson introduces us to as we get in Homer or Herodotus. It is true, all true,—true as Arthur and his knights, or Pilgrim's Progress, and I pity the man who has not tasted its intoxication, or who can ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... is extracted from Mr. Newton's "Defence," and will give us an idea of his sentiments. He was speaking of the fable ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... Bajazet was imprisoned by Timur, so long and so often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected as a fable by the modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity. They appeal with confidence to the Persian history of Sherefeddin Ali, according to which has been given to our curiosity in a French version, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... degree, to myself. Your letter must dispel the unreasoning and I fear envious scepticism of MacCribb, who has put forth a plaunflet (I love that old spelling) in which he derides the history of Aldobrand Oldenbuck as a fable. The Ballad shall, indeed, have an honoured place in my poor Collection whenever the public taste calls for a new edition. But the original, what would I not give to have it in my hands, to touch the very parchment which came ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... and in the great room rose the busy silence of those minutes which precede repasts. Suddenly the four men by the breakfast fable stood back. Lord ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and characters of this book from my memory. To me it can never appear like an amusing fable, or lose its interest and importance, the story is one which is continually before me, and must return fresh to my mind, with painful emotions, as long as I live. With time, and Christian instruction, and the sympathy and example of the ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... love, of which she had never felt herself capable; when she has confessed her love, how absolutely the man whom she loves dominates her! How strong he feels with his cruel right to say: You do no more for love than you have done for money. They know not what proof to give. A child, says the fable, having often amused himself by crying "Help! a wolf!" in order to disturb the labourers in the field, was one day devoured by a Wolf, because those whom he had so often deceived no longer believed in his cries for help. It is the same with these unhappy ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... dimly known, the man who had reached India, China, or the Islands of the Sea, and returned to describe his adventures, made his narrative a matter of conscience, and justly considered that he had added something to the stock of human knowledge. The world of fable had not then contracted into as narrow limits as at present; foreign countries were full of marvels, and science had not made clear the phenomena of nature. The old travelers had all the wonder and the ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... conjecture for his city was safety. Even that is put in a highly hypothetical mood. The augury begins with an "if," regarding the apocryphal story of Romulus and the twelve vultures. But whether the fable of the vultures be true or not, the augury of twelve centuries of safety deduced from it is undeniably false, whether it refers to the material city, or to the political constitution then established. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... embraced in Windsor Forest, where the Norman laid his broad palm on a space a hundred and twenty miles round, and, like the lion in the fable of the hunting-party, informed his subjects that that was his share. The domain dwindled, as did other royal appurtenances. Yet in 1807 the circuit was as much as seventy-seven miles. In 1789 it embraced sixty thousand acres. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... many, who never can forgive another for being more agreeable and more accomplished than themselves, and who can pardon any offence rather than an eclipsing merit. Had the nightingale in the fable conquered his vanity, and resisted the temptation of shewing a fine voice, he might have escaped the talons of the hawk. The melody of his singing was the cause of his destruction; his merit brought him into danger, and his ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... "White Paper" shows that England's claim that she entered this war solely as a protector of the small nations is a fable. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... thousand bridges quicker. Science and art alone won't do, The work will call for patience, too; Costs a still spirit years of occupation: Time, only, strengthens the fine fermentation. To tell each thing that forms a part Would sound to thee like wildest fable! The devil indeed has taught the art; To make it not the devil is able. [Espying the animals.] See, what a genteel breed we here parade! This is the house-boy! that's the maid! [To the animals.] Where's the old lady gone ...
— Faust • Goethe
... no more? Return, thou virgin-bloom on Nature's face; Ah, only on the Minstrel's magic shore, Can we the footstep of sweet Fable trace! The meadows mourn for the old hallowing life; Vainly we search the earth of gods bereft; Where once the warm and living shapes were rife, Shadows ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... and also 'had their schools for teaching the arts and sciences, dancing, fencing, and fiddling.' He criticises them severely: 'They drink, sing and dance,' and, with a fine allusion to emphasise his point, declares: 'But the Americans have not that careless volatility, like the cockle in the fable, to sing and dance when the house is on fire over them.' The French were released after the abdication of Napoleon; a year later, peace was signed between England and America, and then, till 1850, the buildings were unoccupied. ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... friendship never parted, But among the evil-hearted; Time's sure step drag, soon or later, To his judgment, such a Traitor; Lady Lukshmi, of her grace, Grant good fortune to this place; And you, Royal boys! and boys of times to be In this fair fable-garden wander free.' ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... Lancelot were no better than they should be, although very poetical personages and true knights, "sans peur," though not "sans reproche." If the story of the institution of the "Garter" be not a fable, the knights of that order have for several centuries borne the badge of a Countess of Salisbury, of indifferent memory. So much for chivalry. Burke need not have regretted that its days are over, though Marie-Antoinette ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat the "Beggar's Petition"; and after all, her next sister, Sally, could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine was always stupid—by no means; she learnt the fable of "The Hare and Many Friends" as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinnet; so, at eight years old ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... the classroom, they do not mind it, but as an actual fact, here in the light of common day on the hill above Slabsides, with the waters of the Hudson glistening below, and the trees rustling in the wind all about us, that is quite another matter. It sounds like a dream or a fable. Many of the processes that have made our globe what we see it have been so slow and on such a scale that they are quite beyond our horizon—beyond the reach of our mental apprehension. The mind has to approach them slowly and tentatively, and become familiar with the idea of them, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... yere. Feb. 22nd, a sharp anger betwene me and the Bishop of Leightyn in the towr, for that he wold not shew his farder interest to Nangle: he sayd that after I had seen his brode seal of commendation, that I had institution and induction to the Nangle. Then I sayd his lordship did fable. He there uppon that so moved that he called me spitefully "coniver." I told him that he did lye in so saying, and that I wold try on the fleysh of him, or by a bastaned gown of him, if he wer not prisoner in the Towr. Inter 12 et ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... the dead was ridiculous, and only meant to keep up a belief in the fable of purgatory, as the fate of all is finally decided, on the departure of the soul ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... that certain honest women act in dividing up the celibates, as the lion in the fable did? What! Surely, in that case, half at least of our altars would become ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... at a stand. His next step he could not see. Capt'n Davy must not be allowed to leave the island, but how to keep him from going away was a bewildering difficulty. To tell him the truth was impossible, and to concoct a further fable was beyond Lovibond's invention. And so it was that when Lovi-bond received the letter from Jenny Crow, he rose to the cue it offered like a drowning man ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... For Homer also curiously wove similar stories, and is most pleasant, yet was disagreeable to my boyish taste. In truth, the difficulty of a foreign tongue dashed as with gall all the sweetness of the Greek fable. For not one word of it did I understand, and to make me learn I was urged vehemently with cruel threats and stripes. Yet I learned with delight the fictions in Latin concerning the wicked doings of Jove and Juno, and for this I was pronounced a helpful boy, being applauded above many ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the pilgrim travellers now claims our attention, and we turn to the frozen north, to the wild region at the back of the north wind, for new activity and discovery. Out of this land of fable and myth, legend and poetry, the fierce inhabitants of Scandinavia begin to take shape. Tacitus speaks of them as "mighty in fame," Ptolemy as "savage and clothed in ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... listening to the whispering of the leaves above you, and catching glimpses through them, of a sky so deliciously blue, and stars so wonderfully bright. It seemed as though in this favoured spot, the fable of a perpetual summer was to be realised, and the whole circle of the year was to be crowned with the same freshness and verdure and beauty, the same profusion of fruits and flowers, which we had thus far enjoyed. But such expectations, ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... so long that I could not help thinking of the frog in the fable, that wanted to swell itself as big as the ox. Then I looked into his face earnestly. Slap went the lid of his right eye; down went my head, and up went my heels. We shot through the passage like an arrow, and ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... thinking of starting a racing stable, and finished up by believing that he really was a fashionable man, and strutted about, and was puffed out with conceit, as he had probably never read La Fontaine's fable, in which he tells the story of the ass that is laden with relics which people salute, and so takes their bows ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... between us and the history of Ireland, but through this mist there shine a few great and sunlike figures whose glory cannot be altogether hidden, and of these figures Cormac is the greatest and the brightest. Much that is told about him may be true, and much is certainly fable, but the fables themselves are a witness to his greatness; they are like forms seen in the mist when a great light is shining behind it, and we cannot always say when we are looking at the true light and when at the ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... reputation was known to some of those who havo spoken about it; if so, they attributed what they heard to the love of the marvellous and the romantic, natural to the non-scientific mind; or else preferred not to import into their writings matter which has so great a likeness to fable, and might have the effect of imperilling their reputation ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... she slept once in the bed before her, she could never be content in her mother's house again. All that she had read and believed of the beauty of cheap and simple ornament, and the vulgarity of costliness, recurred to her as a hypocritical paraphrase of the "sour grapes" of the fox in the fable. She pictured to herself with a shudder the effect of a sixpenny Chinese umbrella in that fireplace, a cretonne valance to that bed, or chintz curtains to those windows. There was in the room a series of mirrors consisting ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the main question, he looks upon the vagaries of others with a gentle eye. M. Halevy, it seems to me, is made of somewhat sterner stuff. He raises a warning voice now and then—in Fanny Lear, for instance, the moral is pointed explicitly—and even where there is no moral tagged to the fable, he who has eyes to see and ears to hear can find "a terrible example" in almost any of these plays, even the lightest. For the congregation to which it was delivered there is a sermon in Toto chez Tata, perhaps the piece in which, above all others, the Muse seems Gallic and egrillarde. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... return any that come into his possession, Ahto is not incapable of generosity. For example, once when a shepherd lad was whittling a stick on the bank of a river, he dropped his knife into the stream. Ahto, as in the fable, "Mercury and the Woodman," moved by the tears of the unfortunate lad, swam to the scene, dived to the bottom, brought up a knife of gold, and gave it to the young shepherd. Innocent and honest, the herd-boy said the knife was not his. Then Ahto dived again, and brought up a knife ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... place, when St. Mark, snatched into ecstasy, heard the voice of an angel saying to him: 'Peace be to thee, Mark; here shall thy body rest.'" The angel goes on to foretell the building of "una stupenda, ne piu veduta Citta;" but the fable is hardly ingenious enough ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... ordinary men, have been found. Probably the skulls of Lauang, which are pressed out in breadth, and covered with a thick crust of calcareous sinter, the gigantic skulls (skulls of giants) have given rise to the fable ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... instantly recollecting herself, she shrank back from him with loathing, as a mean and paltry dastard. "No, no," she cried, "you are no longer the man I loved; our vows of fidelity were pledged over the Bible; that book you have renounced as a fable; and he who has proved himself false to Heaven, can never ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... hyena, jackal, wild boar, and wolf, there he saw them sitting at the entrance, or stopping suddenly as they prowled along, and eyeing him, but not daring to approach. He strode along from rock to rock, and over precipices, with the certainty and ease of some giant in Eastern fable. Suddenly a beast of prey came across him; in a moment he had torn up by the roots the stump of a wild vine plant, which was near him; had thrown himself upon his foe before it could act on the aggressive, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... story that Priene was saved under Alyattes by a stratagem of the philosopher Bias is merely a fable, of which several other examples are found. It would not be possible to conclude from it, as Grote did, that Ardys' rule over the town was ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... them. The seceders at first were for brazening it out, but were brought to reason in a remarkable way. When they kept up a series of disorderly shouts, Agrippa, one of the envoys, begged them to hearken to a fable and having obtained their consent spoke as follows. Once all the Members of Man began a contention against the Belly, saying that they worked and toiled without food or drink, being at the beck and call of the Belly in everything, ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... It is a monthly magazine, publishing stories short and serial, article and essay; drama, verse, satire and sermon; dialogue, fable and fantasy, comment and review. It is written entirely ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... year of his age he exiled himself voluntarily from his beloved country to preach the Gospel to the pagan Picts. The story of his having been banished from Ireland for using his influence to bring about a bloody conflict between chieftains is rejected by the greatest modern historians as a fable. Early writers speak of the saint as a man of mild ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... reason to know,—how much may be added to the firmness of the feeling by personal merit. The respect of which we speak should, in the strongest degree, be a possession of the immediate occupant, and will naturally become dim,—or perhaps be exaggerated,—in regard to the past, as history or fable may tell of them. No one need hesitate to speak his mind of King John, let him be ever so strong a stickler for the privileges of majesty. But there are degrees of distance, and the throne of which we wish to preserve the dignity seems to be assailed ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... for Israel from a family to a nation, and towards the close of the period Balaam, an outsider, bears witness in spite of himself to the growing numbers of the nation and to its glorious future.—In literary form it is a 'mixed epic' or 'canti-fable': a story in prose that breaks into verse at appropriate places. (Compare the expression took up his parable: the parable is an undefined term for a more specialised literary form occurring in the course of more general literature, such as a fable in the midst of a discourse, ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... where unhappily married men indemnify themselves for the appearance of monogamy by an association which can be ended at will? Whence come the mulattoes and the half-breeds of all sorts? Who so credulous as to believe the fable of monogamy? ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... the aspirations which were our own as well as theirs, these writers of our South are living still and will live through the long procession of the years. In the garden of our lives they planted the flowers of poesy, of fable, and of romance. With the changes of the years those flowers may have passed into the realm of the old-fashioned, like the blossoms in Grandmother's garden, but are there any sweeter or ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... hypnotism has recently given him an apperceiving mass for phenomena of this order, and he consequently now allows that the healings may exist, provided you expressly call them effects of "suggestion." Even the stigmata of the cross on Saint Francis's hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable. Similarly, the time-honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is on the point of being admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that he has the name of "hystero-demonopathy" by which to apperceive it. No one can foresee just how far this legitimation of occultist ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... ancient development of the world there came a time when there was danger of truth being corrupted and mingled with fable among those who did not follow the guidance of God, as did Abraham and the patriarchs; then the great lawgiver, Moses, was given the divine commission to make a written record of the creation of the world and of man and to transmit ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... Navy the sinking of the Lusitania means an extraordinary success. Its destruction demolished the last fable with which the people of England consoled themselves; on which hostile shipping relied when it dared to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... country of the Turks and Russians. And last of all will come the end, when the Wahabites will carry all the Jews into hell-fire on their backs." Such are the secret consolations of a good and orthodox Mussulman of The Sahara. A part of this monstrous fable has been related before, with some variations. The gist of the prophecy is, the destruction of the Christians by another Arab Conqueror. Here the now humbled follower of the Prophet finds his sweet revenge. The same revenge the more ignorant and fanatic ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the legends were first Hellenized and humanized, just as this must have been already far removed from the earliest stages of mythopoeic imagination. The reader of Aeschylus or Sophocles should therefore be warned against attributing to the poet's invention that which is given in the fable. ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... the chaos of that civil war had risen a new nation, mighty in the vastness of its limitless resources, the realities within its reach surpassing the dreams of fiction, and eclipsing the fancy of fable—a new nation, yet rosy in the flesh, with the bloom of youth upon its cheeks and the gleam of morning in its eyes. No one questioned that commercial and geographic union had been effected. So had Rome re-united its faltering provinces, maintaining the limit of its ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... is to marry me. Don't look like that, Aunt Sarah. It is true;—it is, indeed." She had now dragged her chair close to her aunt's seat upon the sofa, so that she could put her hands upon her aunt's knees. "All that about Miss Brownlow has been a fable." ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... one of the thirteen states of Yemen; and prodigious tales are told of its opulence, its mosques and minarets, its baths of jasper, and its crescents and colonnades. But Arabia is proverbially a land of fable, and the glories of Aden exhibit Arabian imagination in its highest stage. Possibly, while it continued a port for the Indian trade, it may have shared the wealth which India has always lavished on commerce. But a spot without ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... won't, I will take it—permission, To state, that I think there's a word to be said, From a different text, on the opposite head. And so I'll invent, as well as I'm able, A new home-made, allegorical fable; And my honest purpose shall be, to see If the scoundrel rich have not borne a part In those noble charities, which are The pride of this jolly old city's heart. And if I shall find that the virtuous mob Have ever been known one farthing to pay, Without ...
— Nothing to Say - A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing - to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' • QK Philander Doesticks
... mattered not that the sordidly battered lump proved to be an ingot of crude copper—probably portion of the ballast from some ancient wrecks—and that Truth was sulking down some very remote well when the fable of the golden sinker was invented. Ordinary men—men of the type whom Kinglake designated "Poor Mr. Reasonable Man"—men with common sense, in fact, the very commonest of sense—were not to be beguiled ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... of them a frightful monster ran across their path, which seemed so hideous to Martin, that his mind instantly reverted to the fable of Saint George and the Dragon, and he almost expected to see fire issuing from its mouth. It was a huge lizard, with a body about three feet long, covered with bright scales. It had a long, thick tail. Its head was clumsy ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... power of a single impression and a clear, quick getaway. She left him dazed by the fortune which heaped upon him literary classics in a dozen forms—fiction, essays, history, poetry, short stories, criticism, fable, and the like; she laughed at her own quick liking for the serious-minded, self-deprecatory, old-young man whose big innocent eyes displayed a soul enamoured by the spirited intelligence of an experienced and rather disillusioned young woman who had fled ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane—owes its popularity to the fact ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... themselves in opposition to the dominant tendencies of their times, pointing out the evils and dangers connected with them, and dwelling specially on neglected truths. It is not surprising that the first class are by far the most popular. The public is much like Narcissus in the fable, who fell in love with his own reflection in the water. All men like to find their own opinions expressed with a power and eloquence they cannot themselves attain, and most men dislike a writer who, in the first flush of a great enthusiasm, points out all ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... greater influx of thoughts in one hour at present than in a whole year under the reign of opium. It seems as though all the thoughts which had been frozen up for a decade of years by opium, had now, according to the old fable, been thawed at once, such a multitude stream in upon me from all quarters. Yet such is my impatience and hideous irritability, that for one which I detain and write down fifty escape me. In spite of my weariness from suffering and ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... book is presented to you as a token of esteem and gratitude. 10. The warrior fell back upon the bed a lifeless corpse. 11. The apple tastes and smells delicious. 12. Lord Darnley turned out a dissolute and insolent husband. 13. In the fable of the Discontented Pendulum, the weights hung speechless. 14. The brightness and freedom of the New Learning seemed incarnate in the young and scholarly Sir Thomas More. 15. Sir Philip Sidney lived and died the darling of the Court, and the gentleman ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... Muslims fable the devil to have tempted Abraham to disobey God's commandment to sacrifice Ishmael (Isaac) and to have been driven off by the Patriarch with stones. Hence he ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... is a fable, written to show that it is of no use to expect people to do things which they have not the power to do. The wolf could catch lambs, but he could not learn his letters. So my little Alice can dress dollies, but she does not know how ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... Story of Savages and Barbarians can contain nothing instructive, or entertaining, the Antemilesian Inhabitants of this Land having been mostly such, and all surviving Accounts of them almost totally overcast with Fable, we are therefore, in treating of the antient Scotia, or modern Ireland, to refer principally to three distinguished aeras, whereof the first is, its being peopled by an Iberian or Spanish Colony: ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... Poet's crime, it is a crime Of ignorance, and not a studied theft. Judge for yourselves! the fact is even thus. The Colax is a fable of Menander's; Wherein is drawn the character of Colax The parasite, and the vain-glorious soldier; Which characters, he scruples not to own, He to his Eunuch from the Greek transferr'd: But that he knew those pieces were before Made Latin, ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... save Nechayeff from being arrested by the Swiss authorities and sent back to Russia, defends him on precisely these grounds, claiming that Nechayeff had taken the fable of William Tell seriously. Cf. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... were led into the ring, and one acted the gardener of the fable, went on a hunting trip, waltzed, took off its hat, and played dead. After this performance came the donkey. But it defended itself well; its kicks sent the dogs flying through the air like balloons; ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... grasped Schoppen of beer and Rhine wine hemmed in by an army of expectant throats, for the time was at hand when would sound Donner's motive from the balcony: music made by brass instruments warning the elect that "Rheingold" was about to unfold its lovely fable of water, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Prophet. It is believed by his followers that the body still lies in the coffin in the same state as when it was first buried. There is also a story that the coffin of Mohammed rests somewhere between heaven and earth, suspended in the air. But this fable was invented by enemies to bring ridicule on the prophet and ...
— Famous Men of The Middle Ages • John H. Haaren, LL.D. and A. B. Poland, Ph.D.
... given them profitable employment for many a year." He speaks of a time {222b} "when the inventive head and the sustaining heart of trade were held in bondage by the unruly lower members." A pity that the English working-men will not let themselves be pacified so easily with thy fable as the Roman Plebs, thou modern Menenius Agrippa! Finally, he relates the following: At one time the coarse mule-spinners had misused their power beyond all endurance. High wages, instead of awakening thankfulness towards the manufacturers and leading to intellectual ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... first in the adjustment of the harmony of the individual stanza as a verse paragraph, and secondly in the management of their fable. Spenser has everywhere a certain romance-interest both of story and character which carries off in its steady current, where carrying off is needed, both his allegorising and his long descriptions. The Fletchers, unable to impart ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... haue read in some mappes, and descriptions of these countries, to be an idole after the forme of an old woman that being demanded by the Priest, giueth them certaine Oracles, concerning the successe, and euent of things, I found it to be a very fable. [Sidenotes: A fable. The Sea.] Onely in the Prouince of Obdoria vpon the sea side, neare to the mouth of the great riuer Obba, there is a rocke, which naturally (being somewhat helped by imagination) may seeme to beare the shape of a ragged woman, with a child in her armes (as the rocke by ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... without seeking to know the cause of the charm which amuses and seduces us. To anatomize love would be to enter upon its cure. Psyche lost it for having been too curious, and I am tempted to believe that this fable is a lesson for those who wish ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... the breed, unless it crosses with it. The common law of inheritance may be expected to keep both the original and the variety mainly true as long as they last, and none the less so because they have given rise to occasional varieties. The tailless Manx cats, like the curtailed fox in the fable, have not induced the normal breeds to dispense with their tails, nor have the Dorkings (apparently known to Pliny) affected the permanence of ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... uninteresting hole I then thought it! Having run the punt as far as we could into the opening, there still remained about six feet of water to cross before reaching the sandy mud beyond. A plank, however, that we brought with us served as a bridge. The story of the otters was no fable, for here were the footprints of the beasts all over the mud. We lighted candles and looked into the hole. The ground rose and the roof descended, so that to enter it was necessary to lie perfectly flat, and to crawl along by a movement very like that of swimming; then the ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... poems, where the incidents are fictitious? The prosperity of no empire, nor the grandeur of no king, can so agreeably affect in the reading, as the ruin of the state of Macedon, and the distress of its unhappy prince. Such a catastrophe touches us in history as much as the destruction of Troy does in fable. Our delight, in cases of this kind, is very greatly heightened, if the sufferer be some excellent person who sinks under an unworthy fortune. Scipio and Cato are both virtuous characters; but we are more deeply affected by the violent death of the one, and the ruin ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... my view of the operations of the Colonization Society, in relieving the slave States of the evil which weighs them down more than a hundred tariffs, is illustrated by an old fable, in which it is stated, that a man was seen at the foot of a mountain, scraping away the dust with his foot. One passing by, asked him what he was doing? I wish to remove this mountain, said he. You fool, replied the other, you can never do it in that way. Well, said he, I ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... cover them, and let them swell in the hot water till they are soft. Then drain them, and extract the stones; spread the prunes on a large dish, and dredge them with flour. Take one jill or eight large fable-spoonfuls from a quart of rich milk, and stir into it, gradually, eight spoonfuls of sifted flour. Mix it to a smooth batter, pressing out all the lumps with the back of the spoon. Beat six eggs very light, and stir them, by degrees, ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... such as enuied the mans good fortune: euen so may it hereby appeare that in some cases euen Lions themselues may either be hindered by the contempt, or aided by the helpe of the poore mise, according vnto the fable of Esope. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... this it pleased God that he should fall asleep, and in his sleep Santiago appeared to him with a good and cheerful countenance, holding in his hand a bunch of keys, and said unto him, "Thou thinkest it a fable that they should call me a knight, and sayest that I am not so: for this reason am I come unto thee that thou never more mayest doubt concerning my knighthood; for a knight of Jesus Christ I am, and a helper of the Christians against the Moors." ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... that, from the repeated changes of belief which have taken place in the course of five or six thousand years, the memory of what happened at a remote date has perished, or, if any trace of it remain, has come to be regarded as a fable to which no credit is due; like the Chronicle of Diodorus Siculus, which, professing to give an account of the events of forty or fifty thousand years, is held, and I ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... national reputation, but I hardly cared for that, since he was the pleasantest companion I had ever met. I found myself gossiping to him about our village worthies, making him laugh heartily at their sayings passed into tradition and fable among us boys; for our one-eyed shoemaker and our corpulent grocer, like many other country wits to fortune and to fame unknown, surpassed either Douglas Jerrold or Sydney Smith in quip and drollery. And I did not omit George ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... exemplification of this; repeated columns of assault launched by Lee against our lines came up in succession and were defeated before the other parts of his army could arrive in time to sustain the attack. He realized the old fable. The peasant could not break the bundle of fagots, but he could break one at a ...
— Chancellorsville and Gettysburg - Campaigns of the Civil War - VI • Abner Doubleday
... on the way who were going from Kumbakumba to Chama to beat up recruits for an attack on the Katanga people. The request was sure to be met with alarm and refusal, but it served very well to act the part taken by the wolf in the fable. A grievance would immediately be made of it, and Chama "eaten up" in due course for daring to gainsay the stronger man. Such is too frequently the course of native oppression. At last Kumbakumba's town came in sight. Already the large district of Itawa has tacitly ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... subject can be of universal, hardly can it be of general concern: but there are events and characters so popularly known in those countries where our art is in request, that they may be considered as sufficiently general for all our purposes. Such are the great events of Greek and Roman fable and history, which early education and the usual course of reading have made familiar and interesting to all Europe, without being degraded by the vulgarism of ordinary life in any country. Such, too, are the capital subjects of Scripture history, which, besides their general notoriety, become ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... of her husband's household, and declares that the narrative is quite true, the same subject had been dealt with by most of the old story-tellers prior to her time, and Deslongchamps points out the same incidents even in the early Hindoo fables (see the Pantcha Tantra, book I., fable vi.). A similar tale is to be found in the Gesta Romanorum (cap. cxxii.), in the fabliaux collected by Legrand d'Aussy (vol. iv., "De la mauvaise femme"), in P. Alphonse's Disciplina Clericalis (fab. vii.), in the Decameron (day vii., story vi.), and in ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... to which he gave the title of La Legende des Siecles is thus described in the preface to the first scenes: 'Exprimer l'humanite dans une espece d'oeuvre cyclique; la peindre successivement et simultanement sous tous ses aspects, histoire, fable, philosophie, religion, science, lesquels se resument en un seul et immense mouvement d'ascension vers la lumiere; faire apparaitre, dans une sorte de miroir sombre et clair—que l'interruption naturelle ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... it, looks trustingly in his face and thrusts forth its paw to tear him? Who blames the gorilla? Torn from its dam, caged or chained, it owes its captor a grudge. To the serpent? The story of the warming of the serpent in the man's bosom, is a mere fable. No man was ever fool enough to warm a serpent in his bosom. And the serpent never crosses the path of man if he can help it. The most deadly is that which is too sluggish to get out of his way—therefore bites in self-defense. And the serpent generally ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... were started, When youth departed From the half-hearted Riccardi's bride; For, saith your fable, Great Love is able To slip the cable ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... called karos, made of sheep's skin, with the wool turned inwards. The women arrange it with a long point, which forms a sort of hood, in which they place their children. Both men and women wear leather rings upon their arms and legs—a custom, which gave rise to the fable that this race rolled puddings round their limbs, to feed on from time to time. They also wear copper and iron rings, but these ornaments ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... in strict metaphysical reality, a son of Venus. Having satisfied the rural mind, which thus, unconsciously, accepts an absolute truth under a physical disguise, the metaphysical thinker, the philosopher, also accepts the same fable, knowing and realizing its ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... from the foam of the sea, and the fabled groves of the mysteries of Venus gave place to primitive shrines of Christian worship, while innumerable Grecian legends were merged in early Christian traditions, imparting some of their own tint of fable, yet baptizing anew the groves and hillsides to sanctity. Beautiful hillsides, rippling down to the sea-coasts; and plains, nestling among the mountain slopes, littered with remnants of vast temples ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... The mythological fable which existed among the Indians as to the manner in which this plant was first bestowed upon mankind, is extremely whimsical, somewhat discreditable, and withal of such a nature as to preclude the propriety of our introducing it in this place to the acquaintance of our readers. But writers ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... become English. But they did become Christians, and indeed showed a particular disposition to become monks. Moderns who talk vaguely of them as our hardy ancestors never do justice to the real good they did us, by thus opening our history, as it were, with the fable of an age of innocence, and beginning all our chronicles, as so many chronicles began, with the golden initial of a saint. By becoming monks they served us in many very valuable and special capacities, but not notably, perhaps, in the ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... he, what would nine bring in a month? Amazingly, they brought nothing, and the rest was silence. Here was a matter of intricate diplomacy never to come within that youth his ken. The morning voyage to the post-office, long mocked as a fable and screen by the families of the sages, had grown so difficult to accomplish for one of them, Colonel Flitcroft (Colonel in the war with Mexico), that he had been put to it, indeed, to foot the firing-line against his wife (a lady of celebrated determination and hale-voiced at seventy), and ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... we have the naked legend of the negro's origin, one of those nursery tales in which the ignorant of Christendom still believe But the deduction from the fable and the testimony to the negro's lack of intelligence, though unpleasant to our ignorant ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... the "True Story" Mark Twain had sent the "Fable for Good Old Boys and Girls"; but this Howells returned, not, as he said, because he didn't like it, but because the Atlantic on matters of religion was just in that "Good Lord, Good Devil condition when a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... peoples space With life and mystical predominance; Since likewise for the stricken heart of Love This visible nature, and this common world, 115 Is all too narrow: yea, a deeper import Lurks in the legend told my infant years Than lies upon that truth, we live to learn. For fable is Love's world, his home, his birth-place; Delightedly dwells he 'mong fays and talismans, 120 And spirits; and delightedly believes Divinities, being himself divine. The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... day-beam, and the star of night, And every rolling planet of the sky, Around their circling orbits. O my love! Guided by thee, has not my daring soul, O'ertopt the far-off mountains of the east, Where, as our fathers' fable, shad'wy hunters Pursue the deer, or clasp the melting maid, 'Mid ever blooming spring? Thence, soaring high From the deep vale of legendary fiction, Hast thou not heaven-ward turn'd my dazzled sight, ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... defined as the historical animal. The faculty which, in after ages, was to chronicle the realities developed by time, had at first no employment but to place on record the productions of the imagination. Hence, fable blossomed and ripened in the remotest antiquity. We see it mingling itself with the primeval history of all nations. It is not improbable that many of the narratives which have been preserved for ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... marry me. Don't look like that, Aunt Sarah. It is true;—it is, indeed." She had now dragged her chair close to her aunt's seat upon the sofa, so that she could put her hands upon her aunt's knees. "All that about Miss Brownlow has been a fable." ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... verse is more striking than the sweetness of particular lines. We have not mentioned all the phases of Mr. Taylor's genius. Some of the smaller poems in his volume border on the sensuous; and in "Hylas" he has paid a tribute to ancient fable worthy of its refined inventors; but scenes of moral and natural sublimity are those in which he succeeds best, and by them he ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... me say for myself, that I will not yield to the king of minstrels, Geoffrey Rudel, though the King of England hath given him four manors for one song. I would be willing to contend with him in romance, lay, or fable, were the judge to ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... of his soul. He beheld himself to be as the dog in the fable that had dropped the substance to snatch ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... pantomimi was then revived, to add to the attractions of court-dances. Under the Roman empire the pantomimi had represented either a mythological story, or perhaps a scene from a Greek tragedy, by mute gestures, while a chorus, placed in the background, sang cantica to narrate the fable, or to describe the action of the scene. The question is whether mute pantomimic action, which is the essence of modern ballet, was carried through those court entertainments, in which kings, queens, princes and princesses, took parts with the courtiers; or whether it is of later growth, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... after luncheon, the Duke broached the subject of the ransoms again, still maintaining the fable of selling ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... with the Bible, as giving us the earliest historical point at which Christianity is assailable. What then has modern criticism accomplished on the Bible? The Biblical account of the creation it has shown to be, in its literal sense, an impossible fable. To passages thought mystical and prophetic it has assigned the homeliest, and often retrospective meanings. Everywhere at its touch what seemed supernatural has been humanized, and the divinity that hedged ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... banged faintly, and in the great room rose the busy silence of those minutes which precede repasts. Suddenly the four men by the breakfast fable stood back. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... would say; especially when I reflected how he would misdoubt my words, nor deem the tale true when I should tell him that a kite had carried off my turband with the gold pieces, but rather would he think that I had practised some deceit and had devised some amusing fable by way of excuse. Howbeit I hugely enjoyed what had remained of the ten Ashrafis and with my wife and children fared sumptuously for some days. Presently, when all the gold was spent and naught remained ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... that time a thing happened in Skane which created a good deal of discussion and even got into the newspapers but which many believed to be a fable, because they had not been ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... the continent Atlantis. Perhaps its very existence is but a fable now: it has been many centuries since we have had instruments to record thought force from Earth, and we have lost touch. But, my friends, even then we of Venus had conquered space, and it was we who visited Atlantis to find ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... think that many times it helps to get a different view of things. You remember the fable of the golden windows, do you not? A little boy who had very few pretty things in his own home because his parents were poor, used often to stand in his own doorway at sunset time and look longingly at the big house at the ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... in his early ambition, wished to pass himself off as a gentleman, and called himself Brissot de Warville, as Danton did D'Anton, and Robespierre de Robespierre; but when these worthies were endeavouring to send M. de Warville to the scaffold as an aristocrat, he invented this fable of his father's having some landed property at Ouarville en Beauce (not Beance), and that he was called, according to the custom of the country, from this place, where, it seems, he was put out to nurse. When the dread of the guillotine made M. de Warville anxious ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... two-twenty or less would bring American Match crumbling about their ears. When it was selling at one-fifty or less he could buy it back, pocket his profit, complete his deal with Mr. Stackpole, pocket his interest, and smile like the well-fed cat in the fable. It was as simple as twiddling his thumbs, which he ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... It was, therefore, composed almost simultaneously with Eugene Aram, and afforded to me at least some relief from the gloom of that village tragedy. It is needless to observe how dissimilar in point of scene, character, and fable, the one is from the other; yet they are alike in this—that both attempt to deal with one of the most striking problems in the spiritual history of man, viz., the frustration or abuse of power in a superior intellect originally inclined ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to a regular examination of the tragedy before us, in which I shall treat separately of the Fable, the Moral, the Characters, the Sentiments, and the Diction. And ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... prisoner by the Turks during his tour in the Holy Land, and could be ransomed only by an enormous sum. The extensive travels of the Duke probably originated this tale. The people at large still preserve that traditional fable-loving train of ideas which is so pleasantly shown in their "Duke Ernest." The narrator of this news was a tailor, a neat little youth, but so thin that the stars might have shone through him as through Ossian's misty ghosts. Altogether, he was made up of that eccentric mixture of humor and melancholy ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... sale, And each fall'n nation's melancholy tale. Lo! where of late the Book of Martyrs stood, Old pious tracts, and Bibles bound in wood; There, such the taste of our degenerate age, Stand the profane delusions of the STAGE: Yet virtue owns the TRAGIC MUSE a friend, Fable her means, morality her end; For this she rules all passions in their turns, And now the bosom bleeds, and now it burns; Pity with weeping eye surveys her bowl, Her anger swells, her terror chills the soul; She makes the vile to virtue yield applause, ...
— The Library • George Crabbe
... that nothing can be known, yet will not give up the unprofitable pursuit, because, even while making the discovery, he still hopes vainly that he may yet, in his own person, give the maxim the lie. For ever soaring to the sun, he was for ever realizing the fine Grecian fable of Icarus; and the sea of disappointment into which he perpetually fell, with its tumultuous tides and ever-chafing billows, bearing him on from whirlpool to whirlpool, for ever battling and for ever lost. He was unconscious, as we ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... why then may they not continue justly to partake of the same Privileges and Advantages that are enjoyed by England, which may truly be esteemed their Head, to which they are inseparably joined, as being essential Parts of the same Body Politick? I need not relate the Fable of the Head and Members, for every one knows the Moral inferred from it; how that unless the Members travel and labour for the Service of the Head and Body, and the Head contrives, and the Body conveys Nourishment and ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... to doubt. Here, in the desert, the buried treasure was an intangible thing. In England, the promises of the Greek's dying message were satisfying by their very vagueness. In Africa, face to face with the tremendous solitude, they became unbelievable, a dim fable akin to the legends of vanished islands and those mysterious races to be found only in unknown lands, which have tickled the imaginations of mankind, ever since the dawn of human intelligence. So, a live millionaire being a more definite asset than the hoard of a forgotten city, she ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... of Grecian history and even of Grecian fable. We are inspired by ancient poetry and eloquence, as well as by the bards and orators of modern times. Painting and sculpture are the equal admiration of every refined age. The virtue of patriotism ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... of red ink. In his little cyclist hand-book there is a diary, and in the diary there is an entry of these things—it is there to this day, and I cannot do better than reproduce it here to witness that this book is indeed a true one, and no lying fable written to while away ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... Mrs. Wesselhoeft's "Fable Stories" are proving themselves more and more acceptable to the children. "Old Rough" is a decided ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... knew now that Katy was necessary to his happiness. His feeling for her, lulled into unconsciousness by the dull round of domesticity, had been sharply stirred by the loss of her presence. Has it not been dinned into us by proverb and sermon and fable that we never prize the music till the sweet-voiced bird has flown—or in other no less ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... on that sort of research, little knowledge has been gained; and the most diligent inquirers have been compelled either to confess that they were baffled, or rather than own their disappointment, to substitute fable for fact, and pass the fictions of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... the door and dropped from the platform. Then he threw off his hat as he always did when excited, and ran. And how he ran! With his fists clenched and his arms tight against his sides he ran as though the hip-boots were the seven-league boots of fable. ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... the best fertilizer of the soil. So old an authority as Aesop taught us that in his fable of 'The Buried Treasure,' but it was a terribly expensive sort of fertilizer in my day when it had to come out of the muscles of men and beasts. One plowing a year was all our farmers could manage, and that nearly broke ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... well as defiance in her voice—scorn because he stood before her so silently; scorn because the fierce torrent of her anger had flowed unchecked. She had only to stand up to him, it seemed, and like the giant of the fable he dwindled to a pigmy. She was no longer hurt by his passivity. She despised him ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... and fable press hard upon us as we approach the famous Valley of Mexico and its fine capital. This is the region where that singular "stone age" flourished, of pyramid-building and stone-shaping peoples. Here both geology and history have written their ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... gold-fable was vastly exaggerated. To be sure there was gold, no one could deny that, but it occurred very rarely, and in terrible places to get at. One had to put in ten dollars' worth of work, to get out one dollars' worth of dust. And provisions were so high ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... because, within three days after they had appeared in print, the moralist who wrote them, walking home with a friend, heard a story about another friend, which story he straightway believed, and which story was scarcely more true than that sausage fable which is here set down. O mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! But though the preacher trips, shall not the doctrine be good? Yea, brethren! Here be the rods. Look you, here are the scourges. Choose me a nice long, swishing, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the shadows of our childishness, and they show that we have a long journey before us; and they gain their strength from the fact that we gather them together out of the future like the bundle of sticks in the fable, when we shall have the strength to snap ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... This fable teaches us that it is better to put up with a trifling loss, than to run the risk of losing all we have by going to ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... in the open and die there, if need be! To live in this rat hole, breathing plague, is dying already! Caonabo is a fable! These people! Spaniards have but to lift voice and ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... there is an old fable, which, as we say, is 'as true now as it ever was,' of a glorious creature with wings, and whoever mounts him gets a flying ride into the clouds. But the ...
— Little Prudy's Sister Susy • Sophie May
... Ascabart. "These two sons of Anak flourished in romantic fable. The first is well known to the admirers of Ariosto by the name of Ferrau. He was an antagonist of Orlando, and was at length slain by him in single combat.... Ascapart, or Ascabart, makes a very material figure in the History of Bevis of Hampton, by whom he was conquered. ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... exact statements of truth? Not always. The primitive human mind could only lisp its wonderful glimpses of truth in legend and myth. And so in fable and allegory the early Israelites sought to show the power of good over evil, and thereby stimulate a desire for right conduct, based, of course, on right-thinking. And thus it is that the most significant thing in their sacred records is their many, many stories of the triumph of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Circassian Richard Garnett The Female Phaeton Matthew Prior The Lure John Boyle O'Reilly The Female of the Species Rudyard Kipling The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue William Watson Suppose Anne Reeve Aldrich Too Candid by Half John Godfrey Saxe Fable Ralph Waldo Emerson Woman's Will Unknown Woman's Will John Godfrey Saxe Plays Walter Savage Landor Remedy Worse than the Disease Matthew Prior The Net of Law James Jeffrey Roche Cologne Samuel Taylor Coleridge Epitaph on Charles II John Wilmot Certain Maxims of Hafiz Rudyard Kipling A Baker's ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... you did, and letting that brother of mine get away sneering and sniggering at me, with his nose cocked up in the air, and swelling with pride till he's like the frog in the fable." ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... miracle of harmony!—a calm set in round the negro minstrel. Orpheus was no fable: the animals obeyed this new enchantment; and when Dick, on recovering from his terror, was unable to understand what was going on around him, he saw himself surrounded by an audience a hundred fold more attentive to the charms of ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... fire-making, how fire-making led to the subjugation of electricity. Much of the most telling work of fire can be better done by its great successor, while electricity performs many tasks possible only to itself. Unwitting truth there was in the simple fable of the captive who let down a spider's film, that drew up a thread, which in turn brought up a rope—and freedom. It was in 1800 on the threshold of the nineteenth century, that Volta devised the first electric battery. In a hundred years ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... Maria Theresiens Leben, p. 44 n. (who cites the Vienna Pamphleteers, without much believing them); Mailath (a Hungarian), Geschichte des OEsterrichischen Kaiser-Staats (Hamburg, 1850), v. 11-13 (who explodes the fable). Cut down to the practical, it stands as above:—by no means a bad thing still. That of "bringing in Baby" was a pretty touch in the domestic-royal way;—and surely very natural; and has no "art" in it, or none to blame and not love rather, on the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... been at the fellow's shop a fortnight, I began to suggest that their return would gratify me to the degree of rapture. Mr. Krome put us off with one excuse and another (all equally plausible) and presently a month had rolled by. Like the man in the fable who tried brickbats when kind words were no longer of avail, I threatened to turn the work of glazing over to another glazier who was not so busy with his lying as to prevent him from attending to the duties of his legitimate trade. This served as a mild remedy, for ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... among the hoi polloi from the circle of initiated priests, the Hierophants of the sanctum sanctorum of the old temples, under the guise of religious fables, it may not be amiss to search for universal truths even under the patches of fiction's harlequinade. This fable about the Pleiades, the seven Sisters, Atlas, and Hercules exists identical in subject, though under other names, in the sacred Hindu books, and has likewise the same occult meaning. But then like ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... some other thing. For, so far as our consciousness is concerned, things are merely groups of actual and potential reactions on our own part, that is to say of expectations which experience has linked together in more or less stable groups. The practical man and the man of science in my fable, were both of them dealing with Things: passing from one group of potential reaction to another, hurrying here, dallying there, till of the actual aspect of the landscape there remained nothing in their thoughts, ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... satisfy me! The systems devised by the sages are but tales imagined to amuse the eternal childishness of men. We divert ourselves with them, as we do with the stories of The Ass, The Tub, and The Ephesian Matron, or any other Milesian fable." ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... a nymph in the fable he was wrong; but he never addressed to me a word in French that was not in good taste. Before we condemn him, uncle, let us see for ourselves. It is a habit you have always recommended to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurl'd Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides. Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, 160 Where the great vision of the guarded Mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold; Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth. And, O ye Dolphins, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... that gave a new turn of the fables into choliambics. Nobody that I know of mentions him but Suidas, Avienus, and Tzetzes. There's one Gabrias, indeed, yet extant, that has comprised each fable in four sorry iambics. But our Babrius is a writer of another size and quality; and were his book now extant, it might justly be opposed, if not preferred, to the Latin of Phaedrus. There's a whole fable of his yet preserved at the end of Gabrias, of 'The Swallow and the Nightingale.' Suidas ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... call Lamb's religion that helped him to enjoy life so humbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of all that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a 'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical, 'matter-of-lie' persistence ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the old fable of "The Man and the Lion," where the lion complained that he should not be so misrepresented "when the ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... abounding sense of humor, and always employed it in illustration of his argument—but never for the mere sake of provoking merriment. In this respect he had the wonderful aptness of Franklin. He often taught a great truth with the felicitous brevity of an Aesop fable. His words did not flow in an impetuous torrent, as did those of Douglas; but they were always ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... that it was probably among his papers at Brussels, but that he doubted whether it would be possible to find it in his absence. Whether such a document ever existed, it is difficult to say. To perpetrate such a fraud would have been worthy of Charles; to fable its perpetration not unworthy of the Cardinal. In either case, the transaction was sufficiently high-handed and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... true. No ward in all the hospital would take him in to lie side by side with the most miserable white wreck there. Like the bat in Aesop's fable, he belonged to neither race; and the pride of one, the helplessness of the other, kept him hovering alone in the twilight a great sin has brought to ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... believe the Egyptians so perished, or that God ever appeared in a pillar of cloud, I reply, "Be it so—believe or disbelieve, as you choose;—This is yet assuredly the fact, that the author of the poem or fable of the Exodus supposed that, under such circumstances of Divine interposition as he had invented, the triumph of the Israelitish women would have been, and ought to have been, under the direction of a prophetess, expressed ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... from the other. It is practically the distinction used in the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama, and it flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison, for example, in examining Paradise Lost considers in order the fable, the characters, and the sentiments; these will be the substance: then he considers the language, that is, the style and numbers; this will be the form. In like manner, the substance or meaning of a lyric may be distinguished from ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... concerned, on all points which can be tested, the Pentateuchal writer states that which is not true. What, therefore, is his authority on the matter—creation by a Deity—which cannot be tested? What sort of "inspiration" is that which leads to the promulgation of a fable as divine truth, which forces those who believe in that inspiration to hold on, like grim death, to the literal truth of the fable, which demoralises them in seeking for all sorts of sophistical shifts to bolster up the fable, and which finally is discredited and repudiated when the fable is finally ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... manifestation of what is in the man for the man himself. It is the deepest, it is the best in him, but it may not be in the least his own yet. It is one thing to have a mine of gold in one's ground, know it, and work it; and another to have the mine still but regard the story as a fable, throw the aureal hints that find their way to the surface as playthings to the woman who herself is but a plaything in the owner's eyes, and mock her when she takes them for precious. In a word, every man in love shows better than he is, though, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... would not!" But I had to yield. My dream was that our General had told me a fable. It was of a young rat, which seeing a cockerel, whose tail was scarcely longer than his own, leap down into a barrel, gather some stray grains of corn and fly out again, was tempted to follow his example, but having got in, could only stay ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... for a madman, and laughed him to scorn. Notwithstanding which, the wiser sort could not let it sink into their belief, that a stranger, who had no interest to deceive them, should undergo so many hardships and dangers, and come so far, on set purpose to cheat them with a fable. In these considerations, they were desirous of clearing those doubts, which possessed them, in relation to those mysteries which they had heard. Xavier answered them so distinctly, and withal so reasonably, with the assistance of Paul de Sainte Foy, who served him for interpreter ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... he been so insignificant a person. And he, whose conversation was so sought after in the gay season in town, was thrown for companionship upon a scarce-grown boy whose talk was about as salted, and whose intellect as great, as those of the cockerouse in our fable. He stood it about a se'nnight, at the end of which space Philip was put on his horse, will-he-nill-he, and made ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Jews! Neither fable nor deception! Every man may test its reality for himself, for every man will carry over with him a portion of the Promised Land—one in his head, another in his arms, another ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... have set down, Only for this meridian, fit to be known Of your crude traveller.... First, for your garb, it must be grave and serious, Very reserv'd and lock'd; not tell a secret On any terms; not to your father: scarce A fable, but with caution: make sure choice Both of your company, and discourse; beware You never speak a truth— PEREGRINE. How! SIR P. Not to strangers, For those be they you must converse with most; Others I would not know, sir, but at distance, ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... the arts in their infancy were, In a fable of old 'tis exprest, A wise Magpye constructed that rare Little house for young birds, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... How should you know anything about it? The young mouse in the fable thought the cat was a very fine gentleman. Con—found him!' said Mr. Falkirk, stopping short, 'how did he know? Was he at the ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... shortly he began to refuse to talk about the thing at all. The act was completed. Like the creature of fable, it had consumed itself. Out of that old man's consciousness it had departed. Amazingly. Like a dream ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... which had agitated the profoundest reasons, and to settle with a sneer, the mysteries before which the mightiest thinkers had veiled their eyes in reverence and awe; that he should profess to set aside Christianity as a childish fable not worthy a wise man's acceptance, and triumph over it as a defeated and deserted cause; this indeed filled De Vayne's mind with sorrow and disgust. So far from being impressed or dazzled by Bruce's would-be cleverness, he sincerely grieved over his ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... public, at festivals, for the instruction and delight of the audience; and rehearsed before battle, as incentives to deeds of glory. Thus tragedy and the epic muse were born, and, in the progress of taste, arrived at perfection. It is no wonder that the ancients could not relish a fable in prose, after they had seen so many remarkable events celebrated in verse by their best poets; we therefore find no romance among them during the era of their excellence, unless the Cyropaedia of Xenophon may be so called; and it was not till arts and sciences began to revive ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... curiosity which spurred Poe and Whitman to experiment with new forms. But Lowell revealed early extraordinary gifts of improvisation, retaining the old tunes of English verse as the basis for his own strains of unpremeditated art. He wrote "A Fable for Critics" faster than he could have written it in prose. "Sir Launfal" was composed in two days, the "Commemoration Ode" ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... nothing: [Greek: apethane de kai ho plousios kai etaphe], according to his riches; it is in hell only that he receives his reward. In opposition to Gesenius, Hitzig remarks: "That transition of the signification is a fable." Following the example of Martini he derives [Hebrew: ewir] from the Arabic. But in opposition to that, Gesenius again remarks in the Thesaurus: "Sed haud minoribus difficultatibus laborat ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... Grecian fable, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a fountain, and, having pined away because he could not kiss it, was changed into the flower which bears his name.—Ovid, Metamorphoses, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... are! He said nothing of himself. He was absorbed in my stories concerning you. I told him as pretty a fable as La Fontaine related of the Avare qui avait perdu son tresor! I said you were a beautiful chatelaine besieged by an army of lovers, but the knight errant Fortunatus had alone won your favor, and would receive your hand! The brave Colonel! I could see he ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... true, and not a fable made by the weavers of words, he who doubts may know from the fisher-folk, who to-day ply their calling amongst the reefs and sandbanks of that lonely coast. For there are those among them who, peering from the ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... the old regime. The very chair on the back of which his hand rested seemed a part of the type—one of those beautiful white chairs of the period, on which, on snowy, glittering tapestry, was woven a Fable of ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... affections, and say, that good affections are one with wisdom, and evil affections are contrary to it." When they had ascended the hill Parnassus, some guards there brought water in crystal cups from a fountain in the mount, and said, "This is water from the fountain which, according to ancient fable, was broken open by the hoof of the horse Pegasus, and was afterwards consecrated to nine virgins: but by the winged horse Pegasus they meant the understanding of truth, by which comes wisdom; by the hoofs of his feet ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... principally from the Greeks is but like the boyhood of knowledge, and has the characteristic property of boys; it can talk, but it cannot generate; for it is fruitful of controversies but barren of works. So that the state of learning as it now is appears to be represented to the life in the old fable of Scylla, who had the head and face of a virgin, but her womb was hung round with barking monsters, from which she could not be delivered. For in like manner the sciences to which we are accustomed have certain general ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... bring art as an adjunct in impressing the young mind were of the order already familiar in the New England Primer, ingenuous in their simple straightforwardness and of uncompromising faithfulness to nature. The fable of the Boy that stole Apples, which I have never been able to trace back of Webster, but through him has become a part of our mental furniture, is briskly set forth at one of its points in a queer wood-cut. The old man in his continental coat has only gone as far as words, and the ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... and ceremony, went into a learned discussion with my lord of Montacute and Master Sandy as to the origin of the snapdragon, which he, with his customary assumption of deep learning, declared was "but a modern paraphrase, my lord, of the fable which telleth how Dan Hercules did kill the flaming dragon of Hesperia and did then, with the apple of that famous orchard, make a fiery dish of burning apple brandy ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... poet that is—to abate the contention and at the same time cheer the meal with a pleasant tale: "it is a very old story, it has to be unearthed from the very oldest authors. I will tell you what I found about it in literature, if you will promise me first that you will not look upon it as a fable."' ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... call Kronos, and to him they sacrifice their own children, to him who had many sons by Rhea, and in a fit of madness ate his own children. And they say that Zeus cut off his privy parts, and cast them into the sea, whence, as fable telleth, was born Aphrodite. So Zeus bound his own father, and cast him into Tartarus. Dost thou mark the delusion and lasciviousness that they allege against their gods? Is it possible then that one who was prisoner and mutilated should be a god? What folly? What ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... It is a fable, written to show that it is of no use to expect people to do things which they have not the power to do. The wolf could catch lambs, but he could not learn his letters. So my little Alice can dress dollies, but she does not know how to take care ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... is, that there are so few natural chords between others' voices and this string in our souls, and that those which at first may have jarred a little by and by come into harmony with it.—But I tell you this is no fiction. You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a fable, but what will you say to Mario and the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... circulation of the Spectator, which represents so perfectly the wit, humor, and satire of the early eighteenth century in England, was only about ten thousand copies. This limited audience smiled at the urbane delicate touches of Mr. Steele and Mr. Addison. They understood the allusions. The fable concerned them and not the outsiders. It was something like Oliver Wendell Holmes reading his witty and satirical couplets to an audience of Harvard alumni. The jokes are in the vernacular, but in a vernacular as spoken in a certain social medium. It ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... fully convinced that Claire was seeking to deceive him; but her confidence astonished him. He wondered what fable ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... Infidelity was triumphant and religion was on the point of expiring. Something extraordinary seemed necessary to arrest the attention of a giddy people who were ready to conclude that Christianity was a fable and futurity a delusion. This revival has done it. It has confounded infidelity and brought numbers beyond ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... story "The Blue Ribbons," and a small blank book, in which, whenever the train stopped, Kate wrote with all her might. For Kate had a desire to convince Sylvia Joanna that one was much happier without being a countess, and she thought this could be done very touchingly and poetically by a fable in verse; so she thought she had a very good idea by changing the old daisy that pined for transplantation and found it very unpleasant, into ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... following the days in which the man had been away from his beloved oasis. The swift rush of naked feet, taking her as swiftly to the roof, where peeping between the carved marble she would look upon a distant scene, which could well have illustrated some Eastern fable. ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... over infinitesimal successes. However, as I really believe there is some good done in the long run—gutta cavat lapidem non vi in this business—it is a useful and honourable career in which no one should be ashamed to embark. Always remember the fable of the sun, the storm, and the traveller's cloak. Forget wholly and for ever all small pruderies, and remember that you cannot change ancestral feelings of right and wrong without what is practically soul-murder. Barbarous as the customs ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bewailing this hardness of heart, in which he thought himself singular. "This much sunk me. I thought my condition was alone; but how to get out of, or get rid of, these things I could not." Again the very ground of his faith was shaken. "Was the Bible true, or was it not rather a fable and cunning story?" All thought "their own religion true. Might not the Turks have as good Scriptures to prove their Mahomet Saviour as Christians had for Christ? What if all we believed in should be but 'a think-so' too?" So powerful and so real were his ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... with some ridiculous or evil association. The preparation had begun after the first performance of 'The Shadow of the Glen,' Synge's first play, with an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had taken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but 'from a writer of the Roman decadence.' Some spontaneous dislike had been but natural, for genius like his can but slowly, amid what it has of harsh and strange, ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... a Dane, and I am English; There is a pleasant fable in old books, Ye take a stick, and break it; bind a score All in one faggot, snap it over ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... certain little widowed star, which has lost its previous mortal, concentrating from a billion billion of miles, or leagues, or larger measure, intense, but generally invisible, radiance upon him or her; and to take for the moment this old fable as of serious meaning, my star was to find bad facts at a glance, but no bad folk ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... mountains, though this is never even whispered now, as she has declared herself to be a daughter of the Gods, with a miraculous birth and upbringing. As she has decreed it a sacrilege to question this parentage, and has ordered to be burnt all those that seem to recollect her more earthly origin, the fable passes current for truth. You see the faith I put in you, Deucalion, by telling you what ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... should be put between two empty dishes, and the cook should be recompensed with the jingling of the poor man's money, as he was satisfied with the smell of the cook's meat." This is affirmed by credible writers as no fable, but an undoubted truth.—FULLER'S Holy State, lib. iii. ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... into the brightest greens and umbers. Three miles away, but seemingly very much closer, was the bold headland of the Peak, and more inland was Stoupe Brow, with Robin Hood's Butts on the hill-top. The fable connected with the outlaw is scarcely worth repeating, but on the site of these butts urns have been dug up, and are now to be found in Scarborough Museum. The Bay Town is hidden away in a most astonishing fashion, for, until you have almost ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... Supper he resumed the combat with Bishop Hoadley, the object of Whig idolatry, and Tory abhorrence; and at every weapon of attack and defence the non-juror, on the ground which is common to both, approves himself at least equal to the prelate. On the appearance of the Fable of the Bees, he drew his pen against the licentious doctrine that private vices are public benefits, and morality as well as religion must join in his applause. Mr. Law's master-work, the Serious Call, is still read as a popular and powerful book of devotion. ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... their praus to trade in Aru, and to buy tripang and birds' nests. It is not impossible that something similar to what they related to me really happened when the early Portuguese discoverers first came to Aru, and has formed the foundation for a continually increasing accumulation of legend and fable. I have no doubt that to the next generation, or even before, I myself shall be transformed into a magician or a demigod, a worker of miracles, and a being of supernatural knowledge. They already believe that all the animals I preserve will come to life again; ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... frequent migrations are a proof of the rude and infant state of their communities; and whose warlike exploits, so much celebrated in story, only exhibit the struggles with which they disputed the possession of a country they afterwards, by their talent for fable, by their arts, and their policy, rendered so famous in ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... some light summer fabric, and her rounded arms and neck were partially bare. She looked so white and cool, so self-possessed, and, with all her smiles, so devoid of warm human feeling, that Dennis felt a sudden chill at heart. The ancient fable of the sirens occurred to him. Might she not be luring him on to his own destruction? At times he almost hoped that she loved him; again, something in her manner caused him to doubt everything. But there were not, as in the case of Ulysses and his crew, friendly ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... began to relate one, by the readiness with which it adapted itself to the childish purity of his auditors. The objectionable characteristics seem to be a parasitical growth, having no essential connection with the original fable. They fall away, and are thought of no more, the instant he puts his imagination in sympathy with the innocent little circle, whose wide-open eyes are fixed so eagerly upon him. Thus the stories (not ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the nerves of an entomologist when he puts his hand on a specimen unknown, undescribed. The hunter trembles when he espies in the thicket the royal hart whose existence has been called a fable. My emotion was all of this, intensified; nearer, perhaps, to the feeling of the elected mortal who has discovered a new continent. For I ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... of Saint Bartholomew. This was the emancipation of the human mind. These were the fruits of the great victory of reason over prejudice. France had rejected the faith of Pascal and Descartes as a nursery fable, that a courtezan might be her idol, and a madman her priest. She had asserted her freedom against Louis, that she might bow down before Robespierre. For a time men thought that all the boasted wisdom of the eighteenth century was folly; and that those hopes of great political and social ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... prejudices, to a mere instrument of vanity, but even when so disfigured we may still recognize in it some faint feature of a sublime idea. I know no apter symbol of tender sensibility of honour as portrayed by Calderon, than the fable of the ermine, which is said to prize so highly the whiteness of its fur, that rather than stain it in flight, it at once yields itself up to the hunters and death. This sense of honour is equally powerful in the female ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... a beast, but because he is ceasing to be a man. It is the dying man in him that it makes uncomfortable, and he trots, or creeps, or swims, or flutters out of its way—calls it a foolish feeling, a whim, an old wives' fable, a bit of priests' humbug, an effete ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... the change was a fable. I had not long to wait to find I had been utterly deceived. According to Mr. Astor, his reason for his stopping his expensive paper was not as stated! As soon as I discovered this I called together my friends, and as they would have to supply a huge capital ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... story of Slata Baba, or the Golden hagge, which I haue read in some mappes, and descriptions of these countries, to be an idole after the forme of an old woman that being demanded by the Priest, giueth them certaine Oracles, concerning the successe, and euent of things, I found it to be a very fable. [Sidenotes: A fable. The Sea.] Onely in the Prouince of Obdoria vpon the sea side, neare to the mouth of the great riuer Obba, there is a rocke, which naturally (being somewhat helped by imagination) may seeme to beare the shape of a ragged woman, with a child ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... and the deep breathing, (to give it no other name), of the slumberers—in the midst of many deep thoughts, I say, I came to the conclusion that in my present circumstances the worst thing I could do was to think! I remembered the fable of the pendulum that became so horrified at the thought of the number of ticks it had to perform in a lengthened period of time, that it stopped in despair; and I determined to "shut ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... every paragraph or so I would appeal for an explanation of something. Generally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear Ingo strive to make the meaning plain. What a puckering of his bright boyish forehead, what a grave determination to elucidate the fable! What a mingling of ecstatic pride in having a grown man as pupil, with deference due to an elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest transports of glee never forgot his manners! I would make some purposely ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... and to pray to dead men whom they had dubbed saints, as well as to put faith in many other abominable falsehoods. They found, therefore, no difficulty in persuading the more ignorant people to believe this most blasphemous fable, which from henceforth became one of the most powerful engines for increasing the influence of the priests over the minds of men, though many, both learned and unlearned persons in our own and other countries loudly protested against the novel doctrine, as contrary ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... quotes from was inspired by the performance of the great Pasta in Simone Mayer's weak musical setting of the fable of the Colchian sorceress, which crowded the opera-houses of Europe. The life of the French classical tragedy, too, was powerfully assisted by Rachel. Though the poem on which Cherubini worked was unworthy of his ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... things did not surprise the calm, equable mind of Jem. But perched on the sward on the top were two strange beings, the like of whom Jem had never seen before, and whom his fancy now at once recognized as the mermen of fable and romance. Their faces were dark as that of his sable majesty; their hair was tossed wildly. But they looked the picture of despair, whereas mermen were generally reputed to be jolly. It might be no harm to accost them, and Jem was not shy ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... aught deceived me, my son," observed the herdsman, "else should I say thou wert mocking me with some wild fable; so passing all belief doth it seem, that the son of my lord the king should have been contented to dwell with so poor and humble a man as myself in the ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... the great canyon, which had seemed like a hunter's fable rather than truth. Slone's sight dimmed, blurring the spectacle, and he found that his eyes had filled with tears. He wiped them away and looked again and again, until he was confounded by the vastness and grandeur and the vague ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... doubt of appearances, Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only, May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters, The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known, (How often they dart out of themselves ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... vain amusement flies, A fable or a song; By swift degrees our nature dies, Nor can ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... arrogance, but it was pretty and effective. Every tory intellect on earth is pleased to discourse in that way of the labors of the only men who greatly help their species,—the patient elaborators of truth. A caterpillar, as we learn from this fable, had crawled slowly over a fence, which a gallant horseman took at a single leap. ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... and coldness, and disaffection. "The servant is not greater than his lord." All true; he had preached that doctrine to himself for twenty years, and earnestly strove to live by it. I do not say that he sunk under the humiliation; only, don't you remember the fable of the last straw that broke the camel's back? What I do say is, that he had borne hundreds and thousands of "straws." Also, remember it was the Lord who called him from work. Assuredly he did not call himself. I think the master said: "Let him come; it is enough; ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... giant, a terrae filius or son of the earth, who was strong only when his foot was on the earth, lifted in air he became weak as water, a weakness which Hercules discovered to his discomfiture when wrestling with him. The fable has been used as a symbol of the spiritual strength which accrues when one rests his faith on the immediate fact ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... favour till the time of the King's death, January 5, 1066. On his deathbed Edward did all that he legally could do on behalf of Harold by recommending him to the Witan for election as the next king. That he then either made a new or renewed an old nomination in favour of William is a fable which is set aside by the witness of the contemporary English writers. William's claim rested wholly on that earlier nomination which could hardly have been made at any other time than ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... behalf to clear the matter up. He was to be as it happened as unsuccessful in his last embassy as he had been in his first. The old doge, according to the legend which I am bound to say is now generally regarded as a fable, received him coldly and, so the tale runs, invited him to dinner upon a fast day. "In front of the envoys of other princes who were of greater account than the Polentani of Ravenna, and were served before Dante, the larger fish were placed, while in front of Dante was placed the smallest. ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... block relics of the past are the pretty cuts to Mrs. Trimmer's "Fabulous Histories, or The Robins:" these were designed by Thomas Bewick, and engraved by John Thompson, his pupil, who enriched Whittingham's celebrated Chiswick Press with his fine and tasteful work. A numerous series of little fable cuts by the same artist are to be found in this volume. One of the quaintest sets engraved at an early period by John Bewick (the Hogarth of Newcastle), are to "The Hermit, or Adventures of Edward Dorrington," or "Philip Quarll," as ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... traveled widely in the Greek world and in the East, as a preparation for his great task of writing an account of the rise of the Oriental nations and the struggle between Greece and Persia. Herodotus was not a critical historian, diligently sifting truth from fable. Where he can he gives us facts. Where facts are lacking, he tells interesting stories in a most winning style. A much more scientific writer was Thucydides, an Athenian who lived during the epoch of the Peloponnesian War and became the historian of that contest. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... that on the very day of his death (it took place in 735) he was dictating to his amanuensis, and had just completed a book. His works are wonderful for his time, and not the less interesting for a fine cobweb of fable which is woven over parts of them, and which seems in keeping with their venerable character. Thus, in speaking of the Magi who visited the infant Redeemer, he is very particular in describing their age, appearance, and offerings. Melchior, the first, was old, had gray hair, and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... put her finger on the mainspring of it. One needn't assume that there were not other young women at the prince's ball as beautiful as Cinderella, and other gowns, perhaps, as marvelous as the one provided by the fairy godmother. The godmother's greatest gift, I should say, though the fable lays little stress on it, was a capacity for unalloyed delight. No other young girl, beautiful as she may have been, if she were accustomed to driving to balls in coaches and having princes ask her to dance with them, could possibly have looked at that prince the way Cinderella ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... been permitted to exist under the veneer of civilization. She sees clearly what she has to destroy. So do we. No American and Englishman can meet but that they grip hands and thank God together that they are comrades in this Holy War. They are out, like Knights of Fable, to rid the earth of a pestilential monster; and they will not rest until their foot is on his ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... the transition from wood to stone, (a figure carved out of one wooden log must have necessarily its feet near each other, and hands at its sides), these literal changes are as nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the bestowing of apparent life. The figures of monstrous gods on Indian temples have their legs separate enough; but they are infinitely more dead than the rude figures at Branchidae sitting with their hands on their knees. And, briefly, the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... purity of large pearls. The ocean, not to be behindhand with the earth, yielded up her mighty whales, that Mr. Gathergold might sell their oil, and make a profit on it. Be the original commodity what it might, it was gold within his grasp. It might be said of him, as of Midas, in the fable, that whatever he touched with his finger immediately glistened, and grew yellow, and was changed at once into sterling metal, or, which suited him still better, into piles of coin. And, when Mr. Gathergold had become so very rich that it would have taken him a hundred years only to count his ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to a nymph in the fable he was wrong; but he never addressed to me a word in French that was not in good taste. Before we condemn him, uncle, let us see for ourselves. It is a habit you have always recommended ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... power of journalism, the art of repeating a name again and again with some ridiculous or evil association. The preparation had begun after the first performance of 'The Shadow of the Glen,' Synge's first play, with an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had taken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but 'from a writer of the Roman decadence.' Some spontaneous dislike had been but natural, for genius like ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... at him, but they had no more effect upon the culprit than did the grass upon the bad boy in the fable; so the farmer got a long pole and prodded the apple thief until he whined and ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... light filters through the thick trees; its rifts are as rigid as candles. The nymph in the brake is threatening. Another epicene creature flies by her. Love shoots his bolt in midair. Is it from Paphos or Mitylene! What the fable! Music plucked down from the vibrating skies and made visible to the senses. A mere masque laden with the sweet, prim allegories of the day it is not. Vasari, blunt soul, saw but its surfaces. Politian, the poet, got ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... turbulent, and deformed, to which one may lawfully joyne those rocks, those incumbrances, and those hideous monsters. If so it happen, that his Disciple prove of so different a condition, that he rather love to give eare to an idle fable than to the report of some noble voiage, or other notable and wise discourse, when he shall heare it; that at the sound of a Drum or clang of a Trumpet, which are wont to rowse and arme the youthly heat of his companions, turneth to another that calleth ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Granada, in every cave among the rocks of the wild gorge, sleeps an enchanted Moor in armour, on an enchanted steed, guarding hidden treasure, or waiting for the magic word which will set him free to fight for his banished rulers. And yet, here was I entering this ancient citadel mighty in history and fable, in an automobile, with a ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... letter to Monsieur Foscue, that Merchant sends word that he knows nothing at all about me; to which the Rascally Scribe adds, in the Lingua Franca, that I was no doubt an Impostor who had trumped up a convenient Fable of my being a Gentleman, and having Correspondents who would be Answerable for my Ransom in Europe, in order to get better food and treatment until the real truth could be known. Whereupon he tells me that his Highness ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... mentioned by Servius in his commentary on Virgil (it was pointed out to one of the authors by Mr. Mackail). But we did not know that the Star of the story was actually called the "Star-stone" in ancient Greek fable. The many voices of Helen are alluded to by Homer in the Odyssey: she was also named Echo, in old tradition. To add that she could assume the aspect of every man's first love was easy. Goethe introduces the same quality in the fair witch of his Walpurgis Nacht. ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... likely, that out of this simple plot I might weave something attractive; because the reign of James I., in which George Heriot flourished, gave unbounded scope to invention in the fable, while at the same time it afforded greater variety and discrimination of character than could, with historical consistency, have been introduced, if the scene had been laid a century earlier. Lady Mary Wortley Montague has said, with equal truth and taste, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... in a breath so long that I could not help thinking of the frog in the fable, that wanted to swell itself as big as the ox. Then I looked into his face earnestly. Slap went the lid of his right eye; down went my head, and up went my heels. We shot through the passage like an arrow, and rose to the surface of ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... hopes, and the aspirations which were our own as well as theirs, these writers of our South are living still and will live through the long procession of the years. In the garden of our lives they planted the flowers of poesy, of fable, and of romance. With the changes of the years those flowers may have passed into the realm of the old-fashioned, like the blossoms in Grandmother's garden, but are there any sweeter or more royally blooming ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... never parted, But among the evil-hearted; Time's sure step drag, soon or later, To his judgment, such a Traitor; Lady Lukshmi, of her grace, Grant good fortune to this place; And you, Royal boys! and boys of times to be In this fair fable-garden wander free.' ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... in Rome two sets of antiquities, the Christian, and the heathen. The former, tho of a fresher date, are so embroiled with fable and legend, that one receives but little satisfaction from searching into them. The other give a great deal of pleasure to such as have met with them before in ancient authors; for a man who is in Rome can ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... pleaded pressure of work, an essay—which, in reality, he had abandoned years ago—on Vermeer of Delft. "I know that I am quite useless," she had replied, "a little wild thing like me beside a learned great man like you. I should be like the frog in the fable! And yet I should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun it would be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of old papers!" she had gone on, with that self-satisfied air which a smart woman adopts when she insists that her one desire is ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... expanded, inch by inch, to spacious provinces, and the Yellow Sea shallowed up with the silt of winters innumerable—waited while the primordial civilisations of Copt, Accadian, Aryan and Mongol crept out, step by step, from paleolithic silence into the uncertain record of Tradition's earliest fable—waited still through the long eras of successive empires, while the hard-won light, broadening little by little, moved westward, westward, round the circumference of the planet, at last to overtake and dominate ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... he said, "that if AEsop had observed this he would have made a fable from it, how the Deity, wishing to reconcile these warring principles, when he could not do so, united their heads together, and from hence whomsoever the one visits the other attends immediately after; as appears to be the case with me, since I suffered pain in my leg before ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... proposed to rehearse the lustrous story of Rome, from its beginning in the mists of myth and fable down to the mischievous times when the republic came to its end, just before the brilliant period ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... anachronism which the case admits of) that Mr. Archdeacon W. has absolutely introduced the idea of sin into the "Iliad;" and, in a regular octavo volume, has represented it as the key to the whole movement of the fable. It was once made a reproach to Southey that his Don Roderick spoke, in his penitential moods, a language too much resembling that of Methodism; yet, after all, that prince was a Christian, and a Christian amongst Mussulmans. But ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the fable o'er, Which mute attention had approv'd before; Though under spirits love th' accustomed jest, Which chases sorrow from the vulgar breast; Still hearts refin'd their sadden'd tints retain— The sigh gives pleasure and the jest is pain: Scarce ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... other planting or farming community in the United States. Living almost exclusively among themselves, their manners and feelings were homogeneous; and living, too, almost entirely upon the products of their plantations, independent of their market-crops, they grew rich so rapidly as to mock the fable of Jonah's gourd. This wealth afforded the means of education and travel; these, cultivation and high mental attainments, and, with these, the elegances of refined life. The country was vast and fertile; the Mississippi, flowing by their homes, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... merely of a species; he is Renard, an individual, with a personality of his own; Isengrin is not merely a wolf, he is the particular wolf Isengrin; each is an epic individual, heroic and undying. Classical fable remotely exerted an influence on certain branches of the Romance; but the vital substance of the epic is derived from the stores of popular tradition in which material from all quarters—the North of Europe and the Eastern world—had been ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... illustrations of the fable of this play, compare Hyginus, Fab. clxxxiv., who evidently has a view to Euripides. Ovid, Metam. iii. fab. v. Oppian, Cyneg. iv. 241 sqq. Nonnus, 45, p. 765 sq. and 46, p. 783 sqq., some of whose imitations I shall mention in my notes. With the opening speech of this play compare the ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... names have reference to the exceeding brittleness of its long tail, which often breaks in many pieces in the hands of the enemy trying to capture the lizard. That these pieces ever join and heal together is of course a silly fable. As a matter of fact, the body in a comparatively short time grows a new tail, which, however, is much shorter and stumpier than the old one. The new piece is often of a different color from the rest of the body and {99} greatly resembles ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... distinguish each from the rest, which may be done by diversity of matter, which always makes some diversity of management. The old and middle comedy simply represented real adventures: in the same way some passages of history and of fable might form a class of comedies, which should resemble it without having its faults; such is the Amphitryon. How many moral tales, how many adventures, ancient and modern; how many little fables of Aesop, of Phaedrus, of Fontaine, or some other ancient ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... unemployment this scheme was on a par with the method of the tailor in the fable who thought to lengthen his cloth by cutting a piece off one end and sewing it on to the other; but there was one thing about it that recommended it to the Vicar—it was self-supporting. He found that there would be no need to use all the money he had extracted from the semi-imbecile old ladies for ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... giraffe, with his prehensile lip, raised nearly twenty feet in the air, can browse upon these trees without difficulty. Not so the elephant, whose trunk cannot reach so high; and the latter would often have to imitate the fox in the fable, were he not possessed of a means whereby he can bring the tempting morsel within reach—that is, simply by breaking down the tree. This his vast strength enables him to do, unless when the trunk happens to be one of the largest ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... the wolf in the fable appreciated the kindness of the crane. Why not thank him with the same simplicity with which he served you. You are a real wolf; you are for ever disparaging, detracting, or blaming ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... to extend beyond the period of the flood, and from these the "dark idolater of chance," who would rejoice to prove that "Book of Books" a splendid fable, draws his deductions. But how he fails. The learned men of China, those held in the greatest repute amongst a people where such a reputation is not easily obtained, themselves admit, that the history ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... come so near doubting the principle to which he adhered as at this time. A few days went a long way in Chellaston towards making a stranger, especially if he was a young man with good introduction, feel at home there, and the open friendliness of Chellaston society, acting like the sun in AEsop's fable, had almost made this traveller take off his coat. Had Robert been a person who had formerly agreed with him, it is probable that when the subject was opened, he would have confessed the dubious condition ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... last great conflict between truth and error is but the final struggle of the long-standing controversy concerning the law of God. Upon this battle we are now entering,—a battle between the laws of men and the precepts of Jehovah, between the religion of the Bible and the religion of fable and tradition. ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... of a fable they used to employ, When I was a little boy: How once through fear of the marriage-bed a young man, Melanion by name, to the wilderness ran, And there on the hills he dwelt. For hares he wove a ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... much doubt it. I am a child in these matters. I had only seen a chicken in its wild state once or twice before we came down here. I had never dreamed of being an active assistant on a real farm. The whole thing began like Mr. George Ade's fable of the author. An author—myself—was sitting at his desk trying to turn out something that could be converted into breakfast food, when a friend came in and sat down on the table and told him to go right on ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... of Jenny's unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A caricature of himself, reading (the book was upside-down). In the background a dancing couple, recognisable as Gombauld and Anne. Beneath, the legend: "Fable of the Wallflower and the Sour Grapes." Fascinated and horrified, Denis pored over the drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious Rouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The expression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered by a feeble envy; ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... the heroes of Grecian history and even of Grecian fable. We are inspired by ancient poetry and eloquence, as well as by the bards and orators of modern times. Painting and sculpture are the equal admiration of every refined age. The virtue of patriotism has been illustrated by savage as well as civilized life. Thus every recorded event of the ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... Amerinus, with all his misfortunes, injustices, and miseries, is now to us no more than the name of a fable; but to those who know it, the fable is, I think, more ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... the whole of the Old Testament the vine is represented as one of the most precious blessings bestowed by the Creator upon man. In the incomparable fable of Jotham, when he lifted up his voice on the summit of Mount Gerizim, and cried to the men of Shechem, 'Hearken unto me, ye men of Shechem, that God may hearken unto you,' he told them that when the trees of the forest went forth to anoint them a ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... Fagalde's celebrated chocolate factory and the old churchyard high above the river—while our horses were being changed—and then resumed our journey to the Pas de Roland. [Footnote: So-called from the fable that Roland, coming to the place and wishing to cross, found the rocks barring his passage, so kicked them, whereupon they parted for him to pass between.] The scenery now became very charming, the winding river (Nive) adding ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... I believe to the great German antiquaries, his history seems a model history of a nation. You watch the people and their story rise before you out of fable into fact; out of the dreary darkness of the unknown north, into the clear light of civilized ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... a pilgrimage to Mount Kaf, to pay their homage to the Simorg. From this poem, written five hundred years ago, we cite the following passage, as a proof of the identity of mysticism in all periods. The tone is quite modern. In the fable, the birds were soon weary of the length and difficulties of the way, and at last almost all gave out. Three only persevered, and arrived before the throne ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... ancients to priests and heroes, and used in their sacrifices. "A crown of bay" was the earnestly-desired reward for great enterprises, and for the display of uncommon genius in oratory or writing. It was more particularly sacred to Apollo, because, according to the fable, the nymph Daphne was changed into a laurel-tree. The ancients believed, too, that the laurel had the power of communicating the gift of prophecy, as well as poetic genius; and, when they wished to procure pleasant dreams, would place a sprig under ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... to be found? The nobleman went up stairs and down, through halls and passages; yet none of those whom he met had heard of the bird. So he returned to the emperor, and said that it must be a fable, invented by those who had written the book. "Your imperial majesty," said he, "cannot believe everything contained in books; sometimes they are only fiction, or what is called ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... must import a wooden leg." At Dunsinnane the old prejudice broke out. "Sir," said he to Boswell, "Macbeth was an idiot; he ought to have known that every wood in Scotland might be carried in a man's hand. The Scotch, Sir, are like the frogs in the fable: if they had a log, they would make a king of it." We will quote here a stanza which contains quite a serious application of the pun; and for Hood's purpose no other word could so happily or so pungently ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... The reader of it nowadays, we suspect, will think its success not very expensively achieved, and it certainly has a main fault that makes it strangely disagreeable. When the past was chiefly the affair of fable, the storehouse of tradition, it was well enough for the poet to take historical events and figures, and fashion them in any way that served his purpose; but this will not do in our modern daylight, where a freedom with the truth is ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... your pity, and have a right to claim it: for it is only since I loved you that I have recognized my own great needs and deficiencies. Complete the work you have unconsciously begun, dearest. Reverse the fairy fable, and let the beautiful princess come to waken with her kiss the slothful prince, who else might ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... of Colle. "Sapia was my name," she said, "but sapient I was not[28], for I prayed God to defeat my countrymen; and when he had done so (as he had willed to do), I raised my bold face to heaven, and cried out to him, 'Now do thy worst, for I fear thee not!' I was like the bird in the fable, who thought the fine day was to last for ever. What I should have done in my latter days to make up for the imperfect amends of my repentance, I know not, if the holy Piero Pettignano had not assisted me with his prayers. But who art ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... majority, can keep open all the markets, or at least sufficient ones for their objects, the cries of the tobacco-makers, who are the minority, and not at all in favor, will hardly be listened to. It is truly the fable of the monkey pulling the nuts out of the fire with the cat's paw; and it shows that G. Mason's proposition in the convention was wise, that on laws regulating commerce, two thirds of the votes should be requisite to pass them. However, it would have been trampled under ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... that civil war had risen a new nation, mighty in the vastness of its limitless resources, the realities within its reach surpassing the dreams of fiction, and eclipsing the fancy of fable—a new nation, yet rosy in the flesh, with the bloom of youth upon its cheeks and the gleam of morning in its eyes. No one questioned that commercial and geographic union had been effected. So had Rome re-united its faltering provinces, maintaining the limit of its imperial ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... what I have said: he's a stripling. Is it worth while talking about an ignoramus and a savage, who wishes to remain an ignoramus and a savage, and does not conceal the fact? You see: he reasons as the bear in the fable bent ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... this charming story is supposed to have but little foundation in fact. Many of Rodrigo's legendary exploits are still less authentic; but history and fable unite in declaring him a warrior of no common stamp. His master, King Ferdinand, as we have said, invaded the territories of his brothers and friends, besides those of his enemies. Garcia, Ramirez, and Bermudez successively fell before his attacks, which Rodrigo, in the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... in the Maccabees, we rely upon the Lord to fight our battles, without lifting a weapon in our defence, or, like the wagoner in the fable, we content ourselves with calling on Hercules, we shall find in the end that 'Faith without Works is dead.' ... The world, as you say, is 'the world'—a quarrelling, vicious, fighting, plundering world—yet it is a very good world ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... ecclesiastical unity. From the Imperial city Episcopacy gradually radiated over all Christendom. The position assumed by Dr. Lightfoot—that it commenced in Jerusalem—is without any solid foundation. To support it, he is obliged to adopt the fable that James was the first bishop of the mother Church. The New Testament ignores this story, and tells us explicitly that James was only one of the "pillars," or ruling spirits, among the Christians of the Jewish capital. [62:2] The very same ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... the child for religious education; and that an education based on "reality," as in this method we would adopt, is too arid, and tends to dry up the founts of spiritual life. Such reasoning, however, will not be accepted by religious persons. They know well that faith and fable are "as the poles apart," since fable is in itself a thing without faith, and faith is the very sentiment of truth, which should accompany man even unto death. Religion is not a product of fantastic ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... upon the whole, my view of the operations of the Colonization Society, in relieving the slave States of the evil which weighs them down more than a hundred tariffs, is illustrated by an old fable, in which it is stated, that a man was seen at the foot of a mountain, scraping away the dust with his foot. One passing by, asked him what he was doing? I wish to remove this mountain, said he. You fool, replied the other, you can never do it in that way. ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... any of your learned correspondents inform me whether the fable of Cupid and Psyche was invented by Apuleius; or whether he made use of a superstition then current, turning it, as it suited his purpose, into the beautiful fable which has been handed down to us as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... downright improvements, so that, if he had not given us the genuine 'Prometheus,' he had given us something better. In such a case we should all reply, but we do not want something better. Our object is not the best possible drama that could be produced on the fable of 'Prometheus'; what we want is the very 'Prometheus' that was written by AEschylus, the very drama that was represented at Athens. The Athenian audience itself, and what pleased its taste, is already ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... any of these facts. Nor does Dr. Rendel Harris suggest why it is so dangerous an operation to dig up the mandrake which he identifies with the goddess, or why it is essential to secure the assistance of a dog[248] in the process. The explanation of this fantastic fable gives an important clue ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... had reached his height, played only his own music; he played divinely and incomprehensibly; next to his passion for music was his greed for gold. These three facts sum up all we really know about the master—the rest fades off into mist—mystery, fable and legend. We do know, however, that he composed several pieces of music so difficult that he could not play them himself, and of course no one else can. Imagination can always outrun performance. Paganini had no close friends; no confidants: he never mingled in society, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... edit., fol. cccvj. rev. Poor Caxton (towards whom the reader will naturally conceive I bear some little affection) is thus dragooned into the list of naughty writers who have ventured to speak mildly (and justly) of Anselm's memory. "They feign in another fable that he (Anselm) tare with his teeth Christ's flesh from his bones, as he hung on the rood, for withholding the lands of certain bishoprics and abbies: Polydorus not being ashamed to rehearse it. Somewhere they call him a red dragon: ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... over their breasts, and which they are obliged to rub with salt continually, to keep them from putrefaction." Thus even the great salt trade of the interior of Africa is not wholly untinged with fable. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... in Syracuse pleased themselves with the fable that their fountain, Arethusa, had been a Grecian nymph, who, like themselves, had crossed the sea to Sicily. The poetry of Theocritus, read or sung in sultry Alexandria, must have seemed like a new welling up of the waters of Arethusa ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... meeting four men on the way who were going from Kumbakumba to Chama to beat up recruits for an attack on the Katanga people. The request was sure to be met with alarm and refusal, but it served very well to act the part taken by the wolf in the fable. A grievance would immediately be made of it, and Chama "eaten up" in due course for daring to gainsay the stronger man. Such is too frequently the course of native oppression. At last Kumbakumba's town came in sight. Already the large district of Itawa has tacitly ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... here on excellent terms with us all. You can interview, if you will, any member of the household. You can make your inquiries at the station from which he departed. Your appearance here at such an untimely hour, and your barely veiled accusations, remind me of the fable of the bull in the china shop. If you think that we have locked your brother up here, pray search the house. If you think," she added, with curling lip, "that we have murdered him, pray bring down an army of detectives, invest the place, and pursue your investigations in whatever direction you ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lies in the indolence or faithlessness of those who ought to take the lead in the redress of public grievances. The whole history of low traders in sedition is contained in that fine old Hebrew fable which we have all read in the Book of Judges. The trees meet to choose a king. The vine, and the fig tree, and the olive tree decline the office. Then it is that the sovereignty of the forest devolves upon the bramble: then it is that from a base ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... from the past. It is a thing separate and alone: gorgeous, dazzling, strong, and rarely beautiful. Totally unlike the art of the old masters, it takes its scenes from Nature and actual living life—depending not on myth, legend or fable. It discards pure imagination, and by holding a mirror up to Nature has done the world the untold blessing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... now to human proofs of the dignity of learning, we find that among the heathen the inventors of new arts, such as Ceres, Bacchus, and Apollo, were consecrated among the gods themselves by apotheosis. The fable of Orpheus, wherein quarrelsome beasts stood sociably listening to the harp, aptly described the nature of men among whom peace is maintained so long as they give ear to precepts, laws, and religion. It has been said that people would then be happy, when kings were ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... rather large square. The spacious rooms within it have some literary interest, as at one time occupied by Ephraim Chambers, the encyclopaedist (1680-1750), and by the more famous Oliver Goldsmith. The whole building, renovated within and without, is now held by a social club. For many years a fable was believed that a subterranean passage connected it with the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... "Fact and Fable in Psychology," remarks that the modern forms of irregular healing present apt illustrations of occult methods of treatment which were in vogue long ago. And chief among these is the mental factor, whether utilized when the patient is awake or when ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... father like son," says the fable, And is justified clearly in Abel; No bowling he fears And his surname appears An extremely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... the falconers always keeping their young birds hooded six weeks, till they are quite tamed. He offered to train it, if Fritz would part with it; but this Fritz indignantly refused. I told them the fable of the dog in the manger, which abashed Fritz; and he then besought his brother to teach him the means of training this noble bird, and promised to present him with ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... learn a good deal about the personages you mention from Bulfinch's "Age of Fable," from Alexander S. Murray's "Manual of Mythology," and from Mrs. Clement's "Handbook of Legendary and Mythological Art"; but the poems of Homer,—the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey,"—of both of which there are good English translations,—are the chief ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... the proverb, the sages appear from the earliest times to have used the fable also; this is illustrated by the fable of Jotham in Judges ix. 6-21. Of the riddle a famous examples is that of Samson in Judges xiv. 14, 18, which combines rhythm of sound with rhythm of thought and well illustrates the form of the ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... lad, what is't you read— Romance or fairy fable? Or is it some historic page Of kings and crowns unstable?' The young boy gave an upward glance— 'It is the ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... was given this letter to read, and I suggested the utmost caution in obeying this request, for, as the old rat in the fable said, there might be "concealed mischief in this heap of meal" I called for the other two letters, and found they were written by the same hand Willis says: "Oh! I know the old boss too well, he's true as steel; he won't ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... lover in fable In such a predicament stand, A letter I wrote to my MABEL, To ask for her heart and her hand, With compliments worded so nicely, A lifelong devotion I swore; She's answered—and left me precisely As wise ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... "You will perhaps say, that it is easy for me to preach against riches; but like the Fox in the fable, the grapes are sour. I speak, however, with indifference of the good that Providence has placed beyond my reach. Geoffrey, I was once the envied possessor of wealth, which in my case was productive of ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... so eager and unsophisticate that he can note that 'winning wave in the tempestuous petticoat' which has rippled to such good purpose through so many graceful speeches since. So that though Julia and Dianeme and Anthea have passed away, though Corinna herself is merely 'a fable, song, a fleeting shade,' he has saved enough of them from the ravin of Time for us to love and be grateful for eternally. Their gracious ghosts abide in a peculiar nook of the Elysium of Poesy. There 'in their habit as they lived' they dance in round, they ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... the harmless folly of the time. We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty. Our life is short, and our days run As fast away as does the sun; And, as a vapor or a drop of rain, Once lost, can ne'er be found again: So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade, All love, all liking, all delight Lies drowned with us in endless night. Then while time serves, and we are but decaying, Come, my Corinna, come, let's ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... third of the great series, MacFlecknoe, is Dryden's masterpiece of satiric irony; a purely personal attack upon his rival, Shadwell, "Crowned King of Dulness, and in all the realms of nonsense absolute". Finally, the Hind and the Panther represents a new development of the "satiric fable". Dryden gave to British satire the impulse towards that final form of development which it received from the great satirists of the next century. There is little that appears in Swift, Addison, Arbuthnot, Pope, or even Byron, for ...
— English Satires • Various
... to make out similar hypotheses, and thus to exhibit the absurdity of your Communal pretensions. Should a Commune say, "No person shall be arrested in future, and it is prohibited under pain of death to learn by heart the fable of the wolf and the fox." What could you say to that? Nothing, unless you admitted that you were mistaken just now in supposing, that the integrity of the Commune ought to have no other limit but the right of equal independence of all the ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... and often, that America is not old enough to have developed a legendary era, for such an era grows backward as a nation grows forward. No little of the charm of European travel is ascribed to the glamour that history and fable have flung around old churches, castles, and the favored haunts of tourists, and the Rhine and Hudson are frequently compared, to the prejudice of the latter, not because its scenery lacks in loveliness or grandeur, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... living in large families has many economic advantages. We all know the edifying fable of the dying man who showed to his sons by means of a piece of wicker-work the advantages of living together and assisting each other. In ordinary times the necessary expenses of a large household of ten members are considerably ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... curiosity and speculation than that of George Eliot. Had she only lived earlier in the century she might easily have become the centre of a mythos. As it is, many of the anecdotes commonly repeated about her are made up largely of fable. It is, therefore, well, before it is too late, to reduce the true story of her career to the lowest terms, and this service has been well done by the author of the present ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... Richelieu made the theatre one of his favourite pursuits, and though not successful as a dramatic writer, his encouragement of the drama gradually gave birth to genius. Scudery was the first who introduced the twenty-four hours from Aristotle; and Mairet studied the construction of the fable, and the rules of the drama. They yet groped in the dark, and their beauties were yet only occasional; Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Crebillon, and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... oozing from an amber moon Illumines footing on forbidden wall; Where, 'stead of pursy jeweler's display, Parading peacocks brave the passer-by, And swans like angels in an azure sky Wing swift and silent on unchallenged way. No land of fable! Of the Hills I sing, Whose royal women tread with conscious grace The peace-filled gardens of a warrior race, Each maiden fit for wedlock with a king, And every Rajput son so royal born And conscious of his age-long heritage He looks askance at Burke's becrested page ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... a poem of essential worldly wisdom, to be bracketed with Browning's equally oracular "The Statue and the Bust," fable and poem forming ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... entangling ourselves with the almost hopeless difficulties they raise as to whether a character as a whole is good or bad. Moreover, the goodness or badness of character is not absolute, but relative to the current form of civilisation. A fable will best explain what is meant. Let the scene be the Zoological Gardens in the quiet hours of the night, and suppose that, as in old fables, the animals are able to converse, and that some very wise creature who had easy access to all the cages, say a philosophic ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Chaldæa, it is now impossible to know. But the Hebrews received the Mysteries from the Egyptians; and of course were familiar with their legend,—known as it was to those Egyptian Initiates, Joseph and Moses. It was the fable (or rather the truth clothed in allegory and figures) of OSIRIS, the Sun, Source of Light and Principle of Good, and TYPHON, the Principle of Darkness and Evil. In all the histories of the Gods and Heroes lay couched and hidden astronomical details and the history of the operations ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... constructive scale. So this enterprise, in my fond and fatuous fancy, is associated with the sweet Mae Marsh as The Wild Girl of the Sierras—one of the loveliest bits of poetry ever put into screen or fable. ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... this fable, he expresses no opinion as to the merits of the controversy between the Red-faced Man and the Hare that, without search on his own part, presented itself to his mind in so odd a fashion. It is one on which ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... spurred Poe and Whitman to experiment with new forms. But Lowell revealed early extraordinary gifts of improvisation, retaining the old tunes of English verse as the basis for his own strains of unpremeditated art. He wrote "A Fable for Critics" faster than he could have written it in prose. "Sir Launfal" was composed in two days, the "Commemoration Ode" ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... Upon this it pleased God that he should fall asleep, and in his sleep Santiago appeared to him with a good and cheerful countenance, holding in his hand a bunch of keys, and said unto him, "Thou thinkest it a fable that they should call me a knight, and sayest that I am not so: for this reason am I come unto thee that thou never more mayest doubt concerning my knighthood; for a knight of Jesus Christ I am, and a helper of the Christians against the Moors." While he was thus ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... at last he said. "Your Maud is not for me, nor those like me. Between us and you is that 'great gulf fixed;'—what did the old fable say? I forget.—Che sara sara! I am but as others: I am but what I ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... once embraced in Windsor Forest, where the Norman laid his broad palm on a space a hundred and twenty miles round, and, like the lion in the fable of the hunting-party, informed his subjects that that was his share. The domain dwindled, as did other royal appurtenances. Yet in 1807 the circuit was as much as seventy-seven miles. In 1789 it embraced sixty thousand acres. The process of contraction has since been accelerated, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Vidularia, which was lost in the Middle Ages) all have the same general character, with the single exception of the Amphitruo. This is more of a burlesque than a comedy, and is full of humour. It is founded on the well- worn fable of Jupiter and Alcmena, and has been imitated by Moliere and Dryden. Its source is uncertain; but it is probably from Archippus, a writer of the old comedy (415 B.C.). Its form suggests rather a development of the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... [3] "What resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son, Begirt with British and Armoric knights; And all who since, baptized or infidel, Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore When Charlemain with all his peerage ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... satisfactorily prove the historical existence of Christ, and that they have to winnow through a vast amount of chaff to get at his presumed philosophy, and the facts in his life, which like that of Buddha is wrapped up in traditional fable. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... and the history of Ireland, but through this mist there shine a few great and sunlike figures whose glory cannot be altogether hidden, and of these figures Cormac is the greatest and the brightest. Much that is told about him may be true, and much is certainly fable, but the fables themselves are a witness to his greatness; they are like forms seen in the mist when a great light is shining behind it, and we cannot always say when we are looking at the true light and when at the ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... about us. Is one to give free rein to his fancy or imagination; to see animal life with his "vision," and not with his corporeal eyesight; to hear with his transcendental ear, and not through his auditory nerve? This may be all right in fiction or romance or fable, but why call the outcome natural history? Why set it down as a record of actual observation? Why penetrate the wilderness to interview Indians, trappers, guides, woodsmen, and thus seek to confirm your observations, if you have all the while been "struggling against fact and ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... judgment the right course would steer, Know well each ancient's proper character, His fable subject scope in every page, Religion, country, genius of his age Without all these at once before your eyes, Cavil you may, but never criticise. Be Homers works your study and delight, Read them by day and meditate by night, Thence form your judgment thence your maxims bring And trace the muses ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... Nugent, obtained for him, from Dr. Madox, Bishop of Worcester, the vicarage of Snitterfield, worth about 140l. After having inserted some small poems in Dodsley's Collection, he published (in 1767) Edgehill, for which he obtained a large subscription; and in the following year, the fable of Labour and Genius. In 1771, his kind patron, Lord Willoughby de Broke, added to his other preferment the rectory of Kimcote, worth nearly 300l. in consequence of which ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... interest. It is construction that is now desired; and he who studies history only that he may vanquish belief in the interest of knowledge cannot command the attention of those whose attention is best worth having. That fable is fable and mythus mythus no one need now plume himself on informing us, provided he has nothing further to say. Of course, we raise no childish and sentimental objection to what is called "negative criticism." It may not be the best possible policy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... are more moral in the country, or that they here remain longer uncorrupted than in towns, whether large or small. Nor is it proved that in former times the country possessed any advantage in these respects, as compared with our own days and with the modern town. The entire fable of rural innocence appears to rest, not upon an actual comparison between town and country, but rather upon the more lively interest felt in town life, and especially in the life of the great towns: in towns, immorality has been more carefully studied and more ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... seems to have been conveyed there by fairies; and at the base the eye is charmed by the fine and picturesque forest of Bourgtheroulde: villages elegantly grouped, enrich with their beautiful fabrics each bank of the Seine which majestically traverses a luxurious landscape. Romance, fable, and the tradition of shepherds and peasants describe Robert the Devil as Governor of Neustria, and a descendent of Rollo the celebrated Norman chief, whose name was changed to Robert, Duke of Normandy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. On three cloths were figures of the Incas with their wives, on medallions, with their Ayllus and a genealogical tree. Historical events in each reign were depicted on the borders. The fable of Tampu-tocco was shown on the first cloth, and also the fables touching the creations of Viracocha, which formed the foundation for the whole history. On the fourth cloth there was a map of Peru, the ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... with,—who has never enjoyed the peculiar advantages to be derived from the society of little dirty boys, never been admitted to the felicity of popular songs, nor exercised his pluck in a rough-and-tumble, nor ventilated himself in wholesome "giddy, giddy, gout,"—to whom dirt-pies are a fable! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... with it. The common law of inheritance may be expected to keep both the original and the variety mainly true as long as they last, and none the less so because they have given rise to occasional varieties. The tailless Manx cats, like the curtailed fox in the fable, have not induced the normal breeds to dispense with their tails, nor have the Dorkings (apparently known to Pliny) affected the permanence of the ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... reckons nine Pharaohs, who reigned for a century and a half, and each of them built pyramids and founded cities, and appear to have ruled gloriously. They maintained, and even increased, the power and splendour of Egypt. But the history of the Memphite Empire unfortunately loses itself in legend and fable, and becomes a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... variance with the popular theology, self-evident. It is only when they come to their descriptive theism, if I may say so, and then to their drollest heaven, and to some autocratic not moral decrees of God, that the mythus loses me. In general, too, they receive the fable instead of the moral of their Aesop. They are to me, however, deeply interesting, as a sect which I think must contribute more than all other sects to the new faith which ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in the centre), creeds, conventions fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth and spreads to the roof of heaven. The quality of BEING, in the object's self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto—not criticism by other standards and adjustments thereto—is ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... world in pursuit of a living skeleton called Death in Life—I recollect at the time very few people, among the guests of a certain elegant translator of English poetry, understood the mystic meaning of a fable as true as it was fanciful. Myself alone, perhaps, as I sat buried in silence, thought of the whole generations which as they were hurried along by life, passed on their way without living. Before my eyes rose faces of women ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... saviour to deliver— A Son of Man, in love and might! A holy fire, of life all-giver, He in our hearts has fanned alight. Then first heaven opened—and, no fable, Our own old fatherland we trod! To hope and trust we straight were able, And knew ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... said Mrs. Arrowpoint, bitterly. "Every one else will say that for you. You will be a public fable. Every one will say that you must have made an offer to a man who has been paid to come to the house—who is nobody knows what—a gypsy, a Jew, a ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
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