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More "Imaginary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... needed to suffer and to struggle. He sometimes dreamed of hanging there himself, in Jesus's place, his head crowned with thorns, nails driven through his hands and feet, and his side rent by spears. What a coward he must be to complain of an imaginary wound, when God bled there from His whole body, and yet preserved on His lips the blessed smile of the Redemption! And however unworthy it might be, he offered up his wound as a sacrifice, ended by falling ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... have asserted, without the slightest foundation, that a pardon was granted to Ferguson by James. Some have been so absurd as to cite this imaginary pardon, which, if it were real would prove only that Ferguson was a court spy, in proof of the magnanimity and benignity of the prince who beheaded Alice Lisle and burned Elizabeth Gaunt. Ferguson was not only not specially pardoned, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... which might be desirable to him. She had heard of people being confined in private mad-houses, through the conspiracy of relatives who coveted their property. Thus far she had believed these stories to be wholly imaginary, but now she began to believe them true. Her own case had shown her the possibility of unjust and illegal imprisonment, and she had not yet been able to find out any mode of escape. This place seemed now to be her future ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... was somewhat strange. He pretended to be holding a baby, cuddling an imaginary child in his arms. Then he tossed the non-existent little one up in the air, and ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... made for Constantinople, whose long array of marble domes and gilded spires gleamed like a far mirage over the waveless sea. It was too faint and distant and dazzling to be substantial. It was like one of those imaginary cities which we build in a cloud fused in the light of the setting sun. But as we neared the point of Chalcedon, running along the Asian shore, those airy piles gathered form and substance. The pinnacles of the Seraglio shot up from the midst ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... the exasperating tactfulness of a woman checking a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the arm. She sighed, "You're a dear to let me tell you my imaginary troubles." She bounced up, and trilled, "Shall we take the pop-corn in ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... of the natives; another class insists that he has his foot upon the neck of the poor Hindu and is grinding his brown face into the dust. In both England and India are organizations of good people who have conceived it to be their mission to defend and protect the natives from real or imaginary wrongs they are suffering, while there are numerous societies and associations whose business is to see that the Englishman gets ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... a little, bilious-looking personage, who, to use the master's phraseology, was never quite happy unless he was damned miserable. He was full of misfortunes and grievances, and always complaining or laughing, at his real or imaginary disasters; but his complaint would often end in a laugh, or his mirth terminate in a whine. You never could exactly say whether he was in joke or in earnest. There was such a serio-comic humour about him that one side of his countenance ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... adopted sister, he wished to discover, to claim, and restore to the household; but Salome, his wife,—was a monstrous imaginary incubus ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... imaginary crimes, attributed to individuals or townships, or without even taking the trouble to discover any kind of pretext, the Germans often, especially after looting, set everything on fire so as to make all traces disappear. Sometimes, as at Courtacon, they compelled ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... not credible that they can obtain the same materials, it must be expected they will supply from invention the want of intelligence; and that under the title of "The Life of Savage," they will publish only a novel, filled with romantick adventures, and imaginary amours. You may therefore, perhaps, gratify the lovers of truth and wit, by giving me leave to inform them in your Magazine, that my account will be published in 8vo. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Giblett, Sir John Sebright, Youatt, Druce, Lord Weston, and other eminent breeders, as finding from experience that close interbreeding does produce bad effects; and it cannot be supposed that there would be such a consensus of opinion on this point if the evil were altogether imaginary. Mr. Huth argues, that the evil results which do occur do not depend on the close interbreeding itself, but on the tendency it has to perpetuate any constitutional weakness or other hereditary taints; and he attempts to prove this by the argument that "if crosses act ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... she was engaged to a young architect. He, with his triangles and T-squares and things, succeeded in making an imaginary scale-drawing of her heart (up to that time a virgin forest, an unmapped territory), which enabled him to enter in and set up a pedestal there, on which he has remained ever since. He has been only a memory for many years, to be sure, ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... on he watched him keenly and earnestly. He heeded not the oaths, or the taunts, or the threats which flowed from his lips; but as word followed word, and gesture gesture, and look look, he became gradually convinced that the resemblance was more than imaginary—that, indeed, this blaspheming convict was one whom he had ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... orbit and the imaginary line called the equator are not substance. The earth's motion and position are sustained by Mind alone. Divest 90:9 yourself of the thought that there can be sub- stance in matter, and the movements and transitions now possible for mortal mind will be found to be equally 90:12 possible for the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... would like to see it while it was still on the loom. So, accompanied by a number of selected courtiers, among whom were the two faithful officials who had already seen the imaginary stuff, he went to visit the crafty impostors, who were working away as hard as ever they could at ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... dishonour. It was with a sort of grim pleasure that he got up after this and lighted a candle, which shone strangely yellow and smoky in the clear September sunshine. "I'll balk them," he said to himself, with fierce satisfaction, as if those respectable imaginary executors of his had been ill-natured gossips bent on exposing him. And he burnt the papers one by one at his candle, watching the last fibre of each fade away in redness and then in blackness, ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... seldom soa heavy 'at we connot bear em, tho it may be hard wark, but when we're a bit cast daan, we dooant freeat hawf as mich abaat what we have to put up wi, as to what's gooin to happen. Imaginary evils are allus war to bide nor th' ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley
... summing up, for no careful trial lawyer opens a case without first having prepared, to some extent, at least, his closing address to the jury. He has thought about this for weeks and perhaps for months. In his dreams he has formulated syllogisms and delivered them to imaginary yet obstinate talesman. He has glanced through many volumes for similes and quotations of pertinency. He has tried various arguments on his friends until he knows just how, if he succeeds in proving certain facts and the ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... figure supposed to represent him. Or a contact, even merely passing by, was believed to have created indestructible affinities, for instance where the garments of an absent person were operated upon. Often, also, these imaginary relations were founded on reasons that escape us: like the qualities attributed by astrology to the stars, they may have been derived from old beliefs the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... succeeded in making his age think, he did succeed in making it smile. He never attacked it in front, nor with his face uncovered, in order that he might not set the laws in array against him; and to avoid the fate of Servetius, he, the modern AEsop, attacked under imaginary names the tyranny which he wished to destroy. He concealed his hate in history, the drama, light poetry, romance, and even in jests. His genius was a perpetual allusion, comprehending all his age, but ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... a succession of these imaginary potentates, from the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the Jews have ever been strenuous in maintaining, partly to aggrandize their nation, and partly to deprive Christians of the benefit of an argument furnished by the prophecy of Jacob, concerning the termination ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... the Phoenix because, after bewailing my unhappy lot, I proceeded to predict how she would afterwards give her heart to a mortal whose qualities would make him deserve the name of Phoenix. A hundred lines were taken up in the description of these imaginary mental and moral characteristics, and certainly the being who should have them all would be right worthy of worship, for he would be rather a god than ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... which arise from verbal contract, and no others, for it seemed only natural that where words can bind words may also loose: but a debt due from any other cause may be transformed into a debt by stipulation, and then released by an imaginary verbal payment or acceptilation. So, too, as a debt can be lawfully discharged in part, so acceptilation may be made ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... "The intellectual background of our time is Agnosticism, and the reply which faith makes to Agnosticism is couched in terms of the immanence of God." [1] Dr. Horton's meaning will grow clearer to us if we once more glance at our imaginary diagram, letting the smaller figure a, the sphere of immanence, stand for our universe. If the sphere of God's being lay altogether outside the universe, i.e., outside the radius of our knowledge—if He, in other ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... orange-golden glow of the Numidian stone of "giallo antico"; the Carystian marble or "cipollino" with its onion-like layers of white and pale-green; the serpentine variety from Laconia, and the porphyry from Egypt. We might descant upon the lavish wall-paintings, representing landscapes real and imaginary, scenes from mythology and semi-history, floating figures, genre pictures, and pictures of still life; or upon the mosaics in floor and wall depicting similar subjects and often serving to the occupants not so much in the place of pictorial ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... and dozens of items are administered with the same spirit of jealous guardianship by Day, Lashly, Oates and Meares, while our main storekeeper Bowers even affects to bemoan imaginary shortages. Such parsimony is the best guarantee that we are prepared to ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... insurrections. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning. Should this apprehension of domestic danger, whether real or imaginary, extend and intensify itself until it shall pervade the masses of the Southern people, then disunion will become inevitable. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and has been implanted in the heart of man by his Creator for the wisest purpose; and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... treated him with that complacency which is the most engaging quality in a wife. But all this is perfectly compatible with his fondness for her, especially when it is remembered that he had a high opinion of her understanding, and that the impressions which her beauty, real or imaginary, had originally made upon his fancy, being continued by habit, had not been effaced, though she herself was doubtless much altered for the worse. The dreadful shock of separation took place in the night; and he immediately dispatched ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... marble, nor wrought in clay, a more vivid likeness than this, cunning a bust-maker as you think yourself. The portraiture is perfect in character, sentiment, and feature. If it were a picture, the resemblance might be half illusive and imaginary; but here, in this Pentelic marble, it is a substantial fact, and may be tested by absolute touch and measurement. Our friend Donatello is the very Faun of Praxiteles. Is ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Veitel Itzig; and, having concocted his plans, he locked his door, threw himself down exhausted on his hard bed, the imaginary possessor of ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... Principle of Cause and Effect has been accepted as correct by practically all the thinkers of the world worthy of the name. To think otherwise would be to take the phenomena of the universe from the domain of Law and Order, and to relegate it; to the control of the imaginary something which ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... the aforesaid pattern, The unexpected palms Destroying, certainly, the artist's urge, Left him delighted with the imaginary ...
— Hugh Selwyn Mauberley • Ezra Pound
... with my editor to be dealt with at his discretion. My view is, you understand, that I am not entitled to suppress it on the strength of a mere possibility that presents itself to my imagination. But if I gather from you—and I can gather it from no other person—that there is substance in that imaginary possibility I speak of, then I have only one thing to do as a gentleman and as one who'—he hesitated for a phrase—'wishes you well. I shall not publish that dispatch of mine. In some directions I decline to assist the police. Have you followed me so far?' he asked with a touch ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... of the superior moral sense of woman. It is superior in spots but not as a whole.... Here is an imaginary case which will show how undeveloped in some respects woman's moral sense still is: Suppose a train was coming with a children's picnic on board—three hundred merry, laughing children. Suppose you saw this train was about to go through ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... twenty feet in length should bisect the circle to separate the territory for the players. In addition to the circle and line, two spots should be marked on the ground, from which the ball is served. These should be at the ends of an imaginary line crossing the first line at right angles, and should be six feet from the pole, one on ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... their daily practice for all the aches and pains, coughs and colds, inflammations and consumptions, fevers and chills, at the hour of birth and at the time of death, and all intermediate points of life, to induce sleep and to promote wakefulness, and for all real or imaginary ills." ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... were pleased with the neighbors, from whom they had trade for their furs, and could procure spirituous liquors and other articles, which tended to the gratification of their real or imaginary wants. And they were required to surrender larger and larger portions of their domain, and at last, the removal of families from the neighborhood of their long cherished memories of the graves of their ancestors, ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... painting of these scenes from real life, he passed gradually to the painting of things purely imaginary—to those visible only ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... much boasted (supposing them real) could not give him joy, but only in proportion as they should be made subservient to an advantageous peace: he then undertook to prove, that the mighty exploits, on which they insisted so much, were wholly chimerical and imaginary. "I have cut to pieces," says he (continuing Mago's speech,) "the Roman armies: send me some troops.—What more could you ask had you been conquered? I have twice seized upon the enemy's camp, full (no doubt) of provisions of every kind.—Send me provisions and money.—Could you ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... happiness. The passions of men are influenced to so fearful an extent, large masses are so embittered against each other, that I dread the consequences.... Age is, perhaps, unreasonably timid. Certain it is that I now dread consequences that I once thought imaginary. I feel disposed to take refuge under some less turbulent and less dangerous mode of choosing the Chief Magistrate." Then follows the suggestion that the people of the United States elect a body of persons equal in number to one-third of the Senate and that the President be chosen ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... my mind running on the end of de Barral, on the irresistible pressure of imaginary griefs, crushing conscience, scruples, prudence, under their ever-expanding volume; on the sombre and venomous irony in the obsession which had ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... These imaginary terrors gave way to real ones soon enough. The execution of Louis was followed by the declaration of war between France and England and the complete demoralization of the French people, especially of the Parisians. The feeling against England grew daily more ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... you know that I did not expect you to accept my offer, which, after all, was merely imaginary. Now, can you not see that what you fear is men's opinions rather than danger? You are not intimidated at the prospect ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... chicks will bring I can buy a new dress to wear instead of the ragged one I have on." At this moment she looked down at herself, trying to think how she would look in her new dress; but as she did so the pail of milk slipped from her head and dashed upon the ground. Thus all her imaginary schemes perished ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... without any romantic appeals in their behalf, by concealing the truth, or by warping the truth until it becomes falsehood. In the following pages he has depicted the Gypsies as he has found them, neither aggravating their crimes nor gilding them with imaginary virtues. He has not expatiated on 'their gratitude towards good people, who treat them kindly and take an interest in their welfare'; for he believes that of all beings in the world they are the least susceptible of such a feeling. Nor has he ever done them injustice by attributing to them ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... and, by a heavy bribe, consisting of a kettle, an axe, and a knife, he succeeded in enlisting the services of one of the Indians as a guide. That the terror of the Far North professed by these Indians, or at any rate the terror of going there in strange company, was not wholly imaginary was made plain from the conduct of the guide. When the time came to depart he showed every sign of anxiety and fear: he sought in vain to induce his friends to take his place: finding that he must go, ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... live in a mysterious land of weird dreams, in that impenetrable cloud of dementia where all that they have witnessed in their previous life, all they have loved, is reproduced for them in an imaginary existence, outside of all laws that govern the things of this life ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... afterwards circulated as to how a bleeding calf's head, wrapped in a napkin, was thrown out of the window, while the merrymakers within drank all kinds of confusion to the Stuart race. According to the narrative of one who was in the tavern, the calf's head business was wholly imaginary. Nor was the date of the dinner a matter of prearrangement. It seems that the start of the commotion was occasioned by some of the company inside observing that some boys outside had made a bonfire, which, in their hilarity, they were anxious to emulate. ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... of noble and affectionate praises and appreciations of our old boastful big Standard-Bearer, now gone silent forever, his real and imaginary battles all fought, his work done, his life honorably ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... In California's imaginary Hall of Fame, Bret Harte must be accorded a prominent, if not first place. His short stories and dialect poems published fifty years ago made California well known the world over and gave it a romantic interest conceded no other community. He saw the picturesque and he made the world ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... strong tower' and 'the strong city'; the man lifted up above danger on the battlements of the one, and the man fancying himself to be high above it (and only fancying himself) in the imaginary ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... years of this period some rays of improvement shone out. To end the reign of Owen's misleading types and imaginary archetypes, there arose a wielder of two potent words, "morphology" and "biology," the sciences of form and of life, who showed that differences of adult form grew out of likeness and simplicity in the young; and that the life of plants and animals was one science, their study ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... who dally with the cold substance of that monstrous water-lily that Reason has planted in the hearts of our cities; I beg of you, if by some chance this obscure book falls into your hands, do not smile with noble disdain, do not shrug your shoulders; do not be too sure that I complain of an imaginary evil; do not be too sure that human reason is the most beautiful of faculties, that there is nothing real here below but quotations on the Bourse, gambling in the salon, wine on the table, a healthy body, indifference toward ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... The student of modern heraldry would not regard this as a dragon at all, but merely a gryphon or griffin. A recent writer on heraldry has complained that, "in spite of frequent corrections, this creature is persistently confused in the popular mind with the dragon, which is even more purely imaginary."[176] But the investigator of the early history of these wonder-beasts is compelled, even at the risk of incurring the herald's censure, to regard the gryphon as one of the earliest known tentative efforts at dragon-making. But though the fish, the falcon or eagle, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... which every Scot is saturated, and the result was neither peace nor charity. Personally the lad was kindly and good-natured, intellectually he had become arrogant, intolerant, acrid, flinging out at old-fashioned views, giving quite unnecessary challenges, arguing with imaginary antagonists. It has ever seemed to me, although I suppose that history is against me, that if it be laid on any one to advocate a new view that will startle people, he ought of all men to be conciliatory and persuasive; but Carmichael was, at least in this time of fermentation, ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... I give you to wit by all the law's pains and penalties that no man stand in my way, unless he thinks he has lived long enough. For the man that does stand in my way shall stand on his head. (squares off and delivers lusty blows at imaginary passers-by) ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... of longitude sailed there is four minutes' difference of clock-time," Scott proceeded. "You know that a chronometer is a timepiece so nicely constructed and cared for, that it practically keeps perfect time. Meridians are imaginary great circles, and we are always on one of them. With our sextants we find when the centre of the sun is on the celestial meridian corresponding to the terrestrial one; and at that instant it is noon where we are. Then we know what time it is. We compare the time thus obtained with that indicated ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... off. He stood there for a moment, feeling depressed and betrayed. Automatically he reached down and flicked imaginary dust from his blue sleeve with its narrow solitary gold band. Ten minutes later the Gypsy's ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... be mentioned before passing to the consideration of our illustrations is that every one of the thought-forms here given is drawn from life. They are not imaginary forms, prepared as some dreamer thinks that they ought to appear; they are representations of forms actually observed as thrown off by ordinary men and women, and either reproduced with all possible care and fidelity by those who have seen them, or with the help of ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... with prayers for the death of an old Fellow of College who disliked their movement, or as they certainly do when patriots are telling how short a time the prayers took to the killing of him. I have seen a crowd, when certain Dublin papers had wrought themselves into an imaginary loyalty, so possessed by what seemed the very genius of satiric fantasy, that one all but looked to find some feathered heel among the cobble stones. Part of the delight of crowd or individual is always that somebody will be angry, somebody take the sport for gloomy earnest. ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... were bestowed upon him. As the boy became convalescent Ilbrahim contrived games suitable to his situation or amused him by a faculty which he had perhaps breathed in with the air of his barbaric birthplace. It was that of reciting imaginary adventures on the spur of the moment, and apparently in inexhaustible succession. His tales were, of course, monstrous, disjointed and without aim, but they were curious on account of a vein of human tenderness which ran through them all and was like a sweet familiar face encountered ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... having got rid of an imaginary speck of rust that had troubled his soul, replaced the bolt, and was putting away the oil rag, when there was a sharp stifled gasp, followed by a slithering fall, and Captain Dashwood lay in a heap ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... married himself, found no difficulty in getting his brother, Comte Guillaume, a poor officer of the marine troops, to accept the post of husband. In the marriage-contract, signed on 23d July, 1768, she was described as "the daughter of Anne Becu and of an imaginary first husband, Sieur Jean Jacques Gomard de Vaubernier," and three years were taken off her age. The marriage-contract was so drawn as to leave Madame du Barry entirely free from all control by her husband. The marriage was solemnised ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... or rather Madame Strahlberg, had leaped over an imaginary barrier and came dancing toward the company, shaking her large sleeves and settling her little snake-like head in her large quilled collar, dragging after her the Hungarian, who seemed not very willing. ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... according to the real amount of weight they and their errand have? OR, English to have their ears torn off; and imperious French-Spanish Bourbons, grounding on extinct Pope's-meridians, GLOIRE and other imaginary bases, to take command?" The incalculable Yankee Nations, shall they be in effect YANGKEE ("English" with a difference), or FRANGCEE ("French" with a difference)? A Question not to be closed by Diplomatic putty, try as ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... causing some confusion and disorder. But, in addition to these natural drawbacks, the new order of things had to contend with certain national elements in the population, which, feeling themselves injured in their real or imaginary interests, were bent on mischief, hoping to be able to rob the nation, in the midst of the ensuing troubles, of the great political prize she had won. Certain circles of the court and classes of the people strove equally hard to surround with difficulties ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... third man, remembering that he was a philosopher, concluded that he was wasting his imaginary time in hearing this ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... of things about nine o'clock this evening, for one real attempt to enter the house, invariably gives rise to a thousand imaginary attacks and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Haldane; quite so," chuckled Spokeshave, as pleased as Punch at the imaginary compliment. "I do believe I could teach Irving a thing or two if I had the ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... difficult to stay the hand in making extracts, but a few must suffice. In one the First Consul is styled "the new Moses," and there is a list of his Ten Commandments; in another there is a Catechism as to who is Buonaparte, with not very flattering answers. In others there are sketches of the imaginary entry of Napoleon with graphic scenes of pillage, &c., and again adaptations of ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... intended to make, but the very language in which he meant to offer them. As he formed sentences, almost for the first time, his courage and his fancy alike warmed: his sanguine spirit sympathised with the nobility of the imaginary scene, and inspirited the ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... directed to me, yet I take myself to be only an imaginary person; for, although I conjecture I had formerly one from you, yet I never answered it otherwise than in print; neither was I at a loss to know the reasons why so many people of this kingdom were transporting themselves to America. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... man at least has understood him, Walter Pater. Readers of his Imaginary Portraits need not be reminded of A Prince of Court Painters, that imaginative reconstruction of an almost obscure personality. "His words as he spoke of them [the paintings of Rubens] seemed full ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... judge of the goodness of a lens? A country gentleman, like myself, may purchase a lens from an eminent house, with an assurance that it is everything that can be desired (and I am not putting an imaginary case), and may succeed in getting beautiful images upon his focussing-glass, but very unsatisfactory pictures; and it may not be until he has almost abandoned photography, in despair at his own want of skill, that he ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... suitable governments? These institutions existed at the adoption of the Constitution, but the obstacles which they interposed were overcome by that spirit of compromise which is now invoked. In a conflict of opinions or of interests, real or imaginary, between different sections of our country, neither can justly demand all which it might desire to obtain. Each, in the true spirit of our institutions, should concede something ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk
... occurred to me, which I felt bound to communicate to Moore. "My dear fellow," I said in a whisper, "is this quite sportsmanlike? You know you are after some treasure, real or imaginary, and, I put it to you as a candid friend, is not this just a little bit like poaching? ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... communication lines, and the difficulty of cutting in on them from any point except immediately adjacent to the sender or receiver, is strikingly apparent when it is realized that every square inch of an imaginary plane bisecting the unlocated beam would have to be explored with a receiving battery in order to locate the ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... were in no way remarkable, but harmless enough, even including an unfortunate mad woman, whose mania it was to recount unceasingly the ill-treatment to which she had been exposed. At times, her indignation against her imaginary tormentors knew no bounds; at others, she would grow touchingly plaintive on the subject of her wrongs. That she was a nuisance, I am fain to confess; but the treatment she experienced at the hands ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... an air, and a grace, she came with a sort of a courtesy, and a smart bump, and a shock against the stately Miss Rebecca; and whisking round with a little scream and a look of terrified innocence, and with her fingers to her heart, to suppress an imaginary palpitation, dropped a low ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... nerves that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have often troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the nature of their affliction, and had even proved it by experiments upon themselves. "As to an imaginary cry," said I, "do but listen for a moment to the wind in this unnatural valley while we speak so low, and to the wild harp it makes of ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... know about him, Thomas! What are his faults?" he snapped, and settled back to squint at his imaginary stage again. ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... the avenue Victor Hugo. Tchernoff walking along in dogged silence as though the vision of this imaginary procession had overwhelmed him. Suddenly he continued aloud the ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... make glistening glazed tiles. Some of these show scenes from the lives of favorite Spanish heroes, real and imaginary. There are some Toledo tiles that will tell you about Don Quixote of La Mancha, a hero invented 350 ...
— Getting to know Spain • Dee Day
... than those who think the Indians oppressed by subjection to the laws of the States, will unite in attempting to open the eyes of those children of the forest to their true condition, and by a speedy removal to relieve them from all the evils, real or imaginary, present or prospective, with which they may be supposed to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... struggle. Tom paced back and forth, and although he was a proud boy, he sobbed aloud. Tiger whined, licked Tom's face, rushed off into dark corners, and barked savagely at some imaginary enemy, and then came back, and putting his paws on his young master's knees, wagged ...
— Tiger and Tom and Other Stories for Boys • Various
... man keen to observe, assimilate, and express his impressions in a few simple truths. His conception was localized with his own people and time (he never built up the imaginary or followed Italy), and yet into types taken from the streets and shops of Amsterdam he infused the very largest humanity through his inherent sympathy with man. Dramatic, even tragic, he was; yet this was not so apparent in vehement action as in passionate expression. He had ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... I mean," I said, "isn't—he's purely imaginary, but if he had any real existence he wouldn't belong to your church. He'd ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... television show he'd produced, laid in space on an imaginary voyage. The script-writer had had one of the characters say that no constellation would be visible at a hundred light-years from the solar system. It would be rather like a canary trying to locate the window he'd escaped from, from a block away, ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... stiffens up and glares across the table at an imaginary line of doughboys I could guess that ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... manner, if any one should take the trouble to observe, one by one, the characters he has painted, we should be still more confirmed in the above opinion. For instance, Conrad, that magnificent type of the corsair, that energetic compound of an Albanese warrior and a naval officer, far from being an imaginary character, was entirely drawn from nature and real history. All who have travelled in the Levant, and especially at that period, must have met with personages whose appearance distinctly ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... dazzled the eyes of those who had affected to speak of him as a meteorous exhalation, owing its lustre to chance, and destitute of the inherent qualities which constitute true greatness. To a general revolt and disaffection, arising from some actual and many imaginary grievances, succeeded an universal conviction of delusion, disappointment, disgust, and contrition. All parties but that which had the King in their keeping were ready to unite in efforts to save him from those who meant to make his corse a step to his hereditary dignity; and this, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... diary the daily life of my love, an uneventful life, without hope or future before it, but eager and radiant. Marie Fauville was extolled in it as a goddess. Kneeling down to write, I sang litanies of her beauty, and I also used to invent, as a poor compensation, wholly imaginary scenes, in which she said all the things which she might have said but did not, and promised me all the happiness which we ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... Intrigues, cards—cards, intrigues. Now and then, perchance, you may meet with a kind, hospitable family, but such a case is very rare; you much oftener find a ludicrous affectation to imitate the manners of an imaginary high life. There are no public amusements in a government town. During winter a series of balls are announced to take place at the Assembly-rooms; however from an absurd primness, these balls are little frequented, because no one wants to be the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... high eulogiums on himself—"the most valorous adventurer!"—but it is not himself that he has before him, but the idol of his imagination, the imaginary being whom he is acting. And this, that it is entirely a third person, excuses his heart from the otherwise inevitable charge of selfish vanity; and so by madness itself he preserves our esteem, and renders those actions natural by ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... velocities the square-root becomes imaginary. From this we conclude that in the theory of relativity the velocity c plays the part of a limiting velocity, which can neither be reached nor exceeded ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... Mr. Lee, who has brought all these facts to light, seems to share Defoe's ingenuous astonishment at this "strange instance of ungrateful violence," and conjectures that it must have proceeded from imaginary wrong of a very grievous nature, such as a suspicion that Defoe had instigated the Government to prosecute him. It is perhaps as well that it should have fallen to so loyal an admirer to exhume Defoe's secret services and public protestations; the record might otherwise have ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... which it contained, might have endangered the author, and as it was he had no small difficulty, when it was known he was the writer, in escaping from its effects. It consists in a series of letters from an imaginary character, Usbeck, a Persian traveller, detailing the vices, manners, and customs of the French metropolis. The ingenuity, sarcasm, and truth, which that once celebrated production contains, must not make us shut our eyes to its glaring defects; the vices of the age, as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... cordial to the high-born Aelius Lamia (III, 17), whose statue stands to-day amid the pale immortalities of the Capitoline Museum. We have a note of tonic banter to Tibullus, "jilted by a fickle Glycera," and "droning piteous elegies" (I, xxxiii); a merry riotous impersonation of an imaginary symposium in honour of the newly-made augur Murena (III, 19), with toasts and tipsiness and noisy Bacchanalian songs and rose-wreaths flung about the board; a delicious mockery of reassurance to one Xanthias (II, iv), who has married a maidservant and is ashamed of it. He may yet ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... refuse Stanley Baird and cut herself off from him, even after her hopes of Donald Keith died through lack of food, real or imaginary? It would be gratifying to offer this as a case of pure courage and high principle, untainted of the motives which govern ordinary human actions. But unluckily this is a biography, not a romance, a history and not a eulogy. And Mildred ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... of mind, what subtlety, what truth in His replies! How great the command over His passions! Where is the man, where the philosopher, who could so live, and so die, without weakness, and without ostentation? When Plato described his imaginary good man loaded with all the shame of guilt, yet meriting the highest rewards of virtue, he describes exactly the character of Jesus Christ: the resemblance was so striking that all ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... public, it is necessary to deceive them. To deceive them, it is necessary to persuade them that they are robbed for their own advantage, and to induce them to accept in exchange for their property, imaginary services, and often worse. Hence spring Sophisms in all their varieties. Then, since Force is held in check, Sophistry is no longer only an evil; it is the genius of evil, and requires a check in its turn. This ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... and shrieked in correct fashion, while the Indians danced about her, brandishing imaginary tomahawks, and ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... attachment to John Colonna and his love of Laura:" a whimsical junction of detaining causes, in which the fascination of the Cardinal may easily be supposed to have been weaker than that of Laura. In writing to our poet, at Avignon, the Bishop rallied Petrarch on the imaginary existence of the object of his passion. Some stupid readers of the Bishop's letter, in subsequent times, took it into their heads that there was a literal proof in the prelate's jesting epistle of our poet's passion for Laura being a phantom and a fiction. ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Alpinus, murders Memnon in his Poem, and bemires himself in his description of the Rhine, I divert my self in these Satires. 'Tis plain from hence, that Alpinus liv'd in the time when Horace writ these Satires: and suppose Alpinus was an imaginary Name, cou'd the Author of the Poem of Memnon be taken for another? Horace, they may say, liv'd under the reign of the most Polite of all the Emperors; but do we live under a Reign less polite? and would they have a Prince who has so many Qualities in ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... the hero of the Italian snapshots, and Miss Ashwell's face was sufficient confirmation. How thrilling, how wonderful! He was home again, Miss Ashwell would be happy, everybody would be happy! Probably they would be married right away—she had forgotten the imaginary German bride—and maybe Miss Ashwell would let her help her in her shopping. She could go down on Saturday mornings. Aunt Nell knew an awfully good shop for ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... worst you know about him, Thomas! What are his faults?" he snapped, and settled back to squint at his imaginary stage again. ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... stealing into the hearts of Aliena and Oliver, he was no less busy with Ganymede, who, hearing of the danger Orlando had been in, and that he was wounded by the lioness, fainted; and when he recovered he pretended that he had counterfeited the swoon in the imaginary character of Rosalind, and Ganymede said ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... jealously, and had come to regard her daughter as one who had supplanted her in her husband's affections, and her husband as robbing her of the love of her daughter. In truth, Mrs. Samuel Anderson had come to stand so perpetually on guard against imaginary encroachments on her rights, that she saw enemies everywhere. She hated Wehle because he was a Dutchman; she would have hated him on a dozen other scores if he had been an American. It was offense enough that ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... this rumour must have reached them, through women who came to and fro, as some entirely faithful to them were allowed to do, we sent Captain Simon Carfax, the father of little Gwenny, to demand an interview with the Counsellor, by night, and as it were secretly. Then he was to set forth a list of imaginary grievances against the owners of the mine; and to offer partly through resentment, partly through the hope of gain, to betray into their hands, upon the Friday night, by far the greatest weight of gold as yet sent up for refining. He was to have one quarter ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... gentlemen," he said, "I trust you will excuse the gentleman who is playing the part of Marks. He has not been well for several days, and he is somewhat troubled with hallucinations. Of course we know his troubles are all imaginary, ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... expression 'the Soul' has become overfamiliar by constant repetition, and conveys little more than the suggestion of a myth, or the hint of an Imaginary Existence. Now there is nothing in the whole Universe so REAL as the Vital Germ of the actual Form and Being of the living, radiant, active Creature within each one of us,—the creature who, impressed and guided by our Free Will, works out its own delight or doom. The WILL of each man or woman is ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... to make an effort to bring about, if not a union, at least a better understanding and more fraternal intercourse between the Lutherans themselves. We all deplore the divisions that separate us; we believe that the reasons for these divisions are more imaginary than real, and we are persuaded that a free and frank interchange of opinions will materially help to remove whatever obstacles may ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... that the old fellow had not been in London, and I had not formed his acquaintance about the time I was thinking of writing the life of the said Abershaw, not doubting that with his assistance I could have produced a book at least as remarkable as the life and adventures of that entirely imaginary personage, Joseph Sell; perhaps, however, I was mistaken; and whenever Abershaw's life shall appear before the public—and my publisher credibly informs me that it has not yet appeared—I beg and entreat the public to state which it likes best, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... tete-a-tete; she would seek in a thousand ways to tell her love—but she could never quite arrange her avowal in a satisfactory manner. Long before she came to the decisive words which were to kindle his heart to flame in the imaginary dialogue, he would himself take fire by spontaneous combustion, and, falling on his knees, would offer his hand, his heart, and his fortune to her in words taken from "The Earl's Daughter" or ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... tell you," said Bryce, who had no intention of informing her that one person was himself and the other imaginary. "But I can assure you that I am certain—absolutely certain!—that their story is true. The fact ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... know Marmion himself very intimately, the interest gradually deepening as the real character of the Palmer and his relations to the hero are steadily developed. These two take prominent rank with the imaginary characters of literature. James IV, that 'champion of the dames,' and likewise undoubted military leader, is faithfully delineated in accordance with historical records and contemporary estimates. Those desirous of seeing him as he struck the imagination of a poet ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... sneered the prisoner, "to our imaginary encounter on the Champs Elysees, when M. Coquenil claims to have used his teeth ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... hand, those in whom the interior faculties predominate too greatly vividly realize their psychic life, but have more vague and feeble conceptions of material objects, including their own bodies, and attach undue importance to the imaginary and subjective in preference to the objective. The materialists and the illusionists, however, are not entirely composed of these two classes of subjective and objective thinkers. The majority consists ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... window in Magdalen College, Oxford, we behold the work of a worthy pupil of Michael Angelo; we see the great style of painting in its proper place, and applied to its appropriate object. But when we compare his portraits, or imaginary pieces in oil, with those of Titian, Velasquez, or Vandyke, the inferiority is manifest. It is not in the design but the finishing; not in the conception but the execution. The colours are frequently ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... relief at escaping the other fate that awaited him, with scarcely a thought of the dangers which his acceptance might entail. He was not easily frightened and had welcomed the new adventure, dismissing the fears of Jonathan K. McGuire as imaginary, the emanations of age or an ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... encountered her as little as possible, accepted gratefully her interesting, easy billet, and consigned the imaginary young children to a Hades peopled with ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... form, in a way, a separate order with high ideals of the conduct befitting their class. Knighthood was not, however, membership in an association with officers and a written constitution. It was an ideal, half-imaginary society,—a society to which even those who enjoyed the title of king or duke were proud to belong. One was not born a knight as he might be born a duke or count, and could become one only through the ceremony mentioned above. One might be a noble and still not belong ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... most other countries. Something might happen—who could tell? Changes might occur. Possibly a crown would even yet be set upon those pretty, fair curls—which she began to think prettier than ever when she saw the imaginary coronet ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... know how far the sectarians are politically disaffected. Some people imagine that in the event of an insurrection or a foreign invasion they might rise against the Government, whilst others believe that this supposed danger is purely imaginary. For my own part I agree with the latter opinion, which is strongly supported by the history of many important events, such as the French invasion in 1812, the Crimean War, and the last Polish insurrection. The great majority of the Schismatics and heretics are, I believe, loyal ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... matter," replied the spy. "I informed the camp commander—he was a simple sort of leutnant—that I was going to overtake the column, the column, by the bye, having been sent by me on a fool's errand to capture an imaginary laager on Gwelba kopje. According to previous arrangements I fell in with Hauptmann Schmidt's company, and he obligingly set a squad of his Askaris to work to stage the last stand of Scout MacGregor. We trampled the grass, left a few cartridge cases lying about and sent my ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... headlong thoroughfare reaches into the Park,) and retreats suddenly down towards the East River, as if it were disgusted with the smell of old clothes, and had determined to wash itself clean. This excellent intention it has, however, evidently contributed towards the making of that imaginary pavement mentioned in the old adage; for it is still emphatically a dirty street. It has never been able to shake off the Hebraic taint of filth which it inherits from the ancestral thoroughfare. It is slushy and greasy, as if it were twin brother ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... marge Traced by convention stay him from his bent: He had a habitude of mountain air; He brought wide outlook where he went, And could on sunny uplands dwell Of prospect sweeter than the pastures fair High-hung of viny Neufchatel; Nor, surely, did he miss Some pale, imaginary bliss Of earlier sights whose inner landscape still was ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... will, other things being alike, enable it to choke them out altogether. I have shown you that there is no particular in which plants will not vary from each other; it is quite possible that one of our imaginary plants may vary in such a character as the thickness of the integument of its seeds; it might happen that one of the plants might produce seeds having a thinner integument, and that would enable the ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... peasantry; the men dressed in women's clothing, blackened their faces, and fell in armed crowds upon the toll-gates, destroyed them amidst great rejoicing and firing of guns, demolished the toll-keepers' houses, wrote threatening letters in the name of the imaginary "Rebecca," and once went so far as to storm the workhouse of Carmarthen. Later, when the militia was called out and the police strengthened, the peasants drew them off with wonderful skill upon false ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... aunt had gone to the village for ice-cream, and L. and I were left alone in the dining-room. I took her on my lap and had a powerful erection. I almost asked her to play sexually with me in the barn, but instead I spoke of an imaginary girl, the first letters of whose successive names spelled an indecent word for coitus—a word known to almost every Anglo-Saxon child, I fear. L. laughed, but gave no sign of assent. For a neighboring girl of 15 I felt such a drawing that early in the morning I would roll on the floor with my erect ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was fireman, fiercely shovelling imaginary coal; still another at the side of the box grasped the handle of the brake as one ready to die at his post if need be. The last Sullivan paced the length of the wagon-box, being thrown from side to side with fine artistry by the train's jolting. He arrogantly demanded tickets from ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... quitted my own story, and employed myself in imaginary adventures. I figured to myself every situation in which I could be placed, and conceived the conduct to be observed in each. Thus scenes of insult and danger, of tenderness and oppression, became familiar to me. In fancy I often passed the ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... contain strong marks of an exaggerated anticipation of their resources and capabilities, has not, though evidently under the influence of feelings quite incompatible with a correct and disinterested judgment, ventured to rate his imaginary maximum of the profit to be derived from farming in the Illinois, (which appears to be the principal magnet of attraction possessed by the United States,) so high as I have proved by a calculation, to which I defy any one to attach the character of hyperbolical, that the investment ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... I vacated my position at fine leg and merged myself with the slips, who, together with point and cover, were bearing a course towards the labyrinthine ways of the kitchen-garden. After vainly searching for an imaginary ball and finding that we were not actually attacked from the rear, we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... only show how rude and erroneous were their ideas on the structure of the animal body. It may indeed, without injustice, be said that the anatomy of the Hippocratic school is not only erroneous, but fanciful and imaginary in often substituting mere supposition and assertion for what ought to be matter of fact. From this censure it is impossible to exempt even the name of Plato himself, for whom some notices in the Timaeus ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... within. The mind of the vile jester, the tongue that had pursued Duncan Jopp with unmanly insults, the unbeloved countenance that he had known and feared for so long, were all forgotten; and he hastened home, impatient to confess his misdeeds, impatient to throw himself on the mercy of this imaginary character. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... There soon gathered about his standard a sufficient number of powerful peers to enable him to depose the Earl of Angus from the regency and to banish him and all his family to England. The Douglas who figures in the poem is an imaginary uncle of the banished regent, and himself under the ban, compelled to hide away in the shelter provided for him by Roderick Dhu on the lonely island in Loch Katrine. He is represented as having been loved and trusted by King James during the boyhood of the latter, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... warning the kindred of the wild, bade them be quiet till the dawn should bring the mother badger to the lair once more. So, huddled close, they were for a time satisfied with a strangely deliberate game of "King of the Castle," the castle being an imaginary place in the middle of their bed. Towards that spot each player pushed quietly, but vigorously, one or other gaining a slight advantage now and again by grunting an unexpected threat into the ear of a near companion, or by bestowing an unexpected nip on the flank of the cub that held for the moment ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... He had the gift of imagination, psychological insight, the artist's shaping hand. His early romantic plays were put forth as those of Clara Gazul, a Spanish comedienne. His Illyrian poems, La Guzla, were the work of an imaginary Hyacinthe Maglanovich, and Merimee could smile gently at the credulity of a learned public. He took up the short story where Xavier de Maistre, who had known how to be both pathetic and amiably humorous, and ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... not fatigued, their fears that the day would be too warm for him. Mrs. Boultby, who held an opinion that when her lord dropped asleep after a good dinner his face became as the face of an angel, was bending over him, tenderly wiping some perspiration, real or imaginary, from his brow. Boultby, in short, was in his glory, and in a round, sound voix de poitrine he rumbled out thanks for attentions and assurances of his tolerable health. Of Caroline he took no manner of notice as she came near, save to accept what she offered. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... in a single file. An imaginary line to the left of the column designated as the Bank and an imaginary line to the right of the column designated as the Pond. These lines are about three feet apart. Teacher facing column calls out "On the Bank," the players jumping onto the Bank. He then calls out, "In the Pond," the ...
— Games and Play for School Morale - A Course of Graded Games for School and Community Recreation • Various
... insignia expressive of the British armies, and inscribed on the four tablets the number of each regiment who shared in the glories of that day, and by the four tablets be placed the statues of distinguished generals. Thus I have presented you with the external appearance of my imaginary building in honour of the victory of Waterloo; and the interior of this building to be considered as the place of deposit for preserving the powers of the pen, the pencil, and other gems from perishing by water or by fire: to be built of stone, and ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... excellent scholar. He was especially good in figures. When he came to study bookkeeping, he seemed as happy as if he were reading a romance. He mastered with ease the science of single and double entry. He soon became fascinated with the beauties of his imaginary business. For his instructor had prepared for him a regular set of books, and gave him problems, from day to day, in mercantile dealings, which opened up to the youth all the mysteries of 'Dr.' and 'Cr.' Out of these ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... sober and benevolent plans of Mrs. Margaret; for this lady's principal delight was, to assist the needy, and her only earthly or worldly caprice, that of restoring the Tower and its environs, and furnishing, to what she conceived had been its state, in the, perhaps, imaginary days of the exaltation of ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... and the cook received sharp words, which, fortunately for themselves, they were powerful enough to return with interest. Poor old Mrs. Bell cowered lonely and sad by her fireside. Now and then she asked querulously for Mercy, but no Mercy, real or imaginary, ever came near her; and then her old mind would wander off from the land of Beulah, where she really lived, right across to the Celestial City at the other side of the river. Mrs. Bell was too old and too serene to be rendered really unhappy ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... poor devil of an attorney with a large family, and five hundred a year to keep them on, than live the life I do between you and that vulgar beast Caresfoot. It's a dog's life, not a man's;" and poor Bellamy was so overcome at his real or imaginary wrongs that the tears actually rolled down ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... was a three-masted schooner, sleek of line, painted—at one time—a dazzling white. Now with dust dulling the green sides of the bottle, its sails looked loose, its sides grimed. But the name still showed at the prow, and many a time Chris, safe at home in bed, had sailed imaginary voyages in the Mirabelle. It lay there snug and captured, as if at the bottom of a tropical sea, seen through the glass sides of the bottle, and Chris never ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... particular genius of Spenser, than any of his other writings; and having observed that Spenser in a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh calls it, a continued allegory, or dark conceit, he gives us some remarks on allegorical poetry in general, defining allegory to be a fable or story, in which, under imaginary persons or things, is shadowed some real action or instructive moral, or as I think, says he, it is somewhere very shortly defined by. Plutarch; it is that, in which one thing is, related, and another thing understood; it is a kind of poetical ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... lady—that I am wholly unacquainted even with the person of your friend—that the idea of intentional injury on my part, therefore, is ridiculous; and let me add, for the benefit of your friend, that to expect an apology for imaginary injuries, would be the most ridiculous part ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... false name—a step that might go far to invalidate the marriage, by the way—and then leave me to piece-out the broken story, syllable by syllable, to suffer all the torture of a prolonged suspense, all the wasted passion of anger and revenge against an imaginary enemy, to find at last that the man I had loved and trusted, honoured and admired beyond all other men throughout the best years of my life, was the man who had struck this secret blow—it was the conduct of a villain and a coward, John ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the grosser elements of man's nature might be refined away and immortality attained, seems to have suggested an immortality, not merely in an unseen world, but even in this one, to be secured by an imaginary elixir of life. Certain at any rate it is, that so far back as a century or so before the Christian era, the desire to discover this elixir had become a ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... to be a man of twenty-one.' I gave a party on the occasion. She was there. It is unnecessary to name Her, more particularly; She was older than I, and had pervaded every chink and crevice of my mind for three or four years. I had held volumes of Imaginary Conversations with her mother on the subject of our union, and I had written letters more in number than Horace Walpole's, to that discreet woman, soliciting her daughter's hand in marriage. I had never had the remotest intention of sending any ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... some much-persecuted, much-battered Candide, "cultivating his garden" after a thousand disillusions; and holding fast, in spite of all, to the doctrines of some amazing Pangloss. Such encounters with such invincible derelicts must put us most wholesomely to shame. Our neurotic peevishness, our imaginary grievances, our vanity and our pride, are shown up at such moments ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... betraying the Engineer officer unused to handling large bodies of men, and unfamiliar with the military unities, rearranged his command with a straight edge, and distributed it in one way for tactical, and in another for administrative purposes. All the troops lying west of an imaginary line became the left attack under Clery, while those east of it became the right attack. The latter, under Talbot Coke, were ordered to seize the Spion Kop position by night, and entrench it before daybreak, the actual assault being made by Woodgate ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... After all, you are lamenting imaginary misfortunes which I have so imprudently imagined.... They don't exist, and never could exist, for it is a fact that Susy d'Orsel is no longer a rival to be feared. Think rather of the future which smiles upon you. You love and you have ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... face and stooped over to flick an imaginary particle of dust from his trousers' leg. There was but one object in their going and he had not dreamed of being asked what it was. He could not be employed forever in brushing away that speck, and yet he could not, to save his life, construct an answer to Veath's ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... the wide doors and saving themselves, the maddened people, with the cruelty of frenzied beasts, cry and roar, crush one another and perish—not from the fire (for it is only imaginary), but from their own madness. It is enough sometimes when one sensible, firm word is uttered to this crowd—the crowd calms down and imminent death is thus averted. Let, then, a hundred calm, rational voices be raised to mankind, showing them where ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... that Charles Dickens helped to throw the door still wider. Discovering that the child possessed the right to be amused, the imagination of poets and artists addressed itself at last to the most appreciative of all audiences, a world of newcomers, with insatiable appetites for wonders real and imaginary. ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... cheap in those days—it is now if you know how to do it, or else have to. Johnson used to maintain that for thirty pounds a year one could live like a gentleman, and as proof would quote an imaginary acquaintance who argued that ten pounds a year for clothes would keep a man in good appearance; a garret could be hired for eighteen pence a week, and if any one asked your address you could reply, "I am to be found in such a place," Threepence ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... considered sufficient evidence in a court of law; they admitted the necessity of proving that urgent reasons existed for the grant of the dispensation, and the only (p. 284) urgent reason they put forward was an entirely imaginary imminence of war between Henry VII. and Ferdinand in 1503. Cardinal Du Bellay, in 1534, asserted that no one would be so bold as to maintain in Consistory that the dispensation ever was valid;[786] and the papalists were driven to the ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... doctor gave her a week at the utmost. She would like, she said, to have seen the dear Queen ride through the streets amidst the plaudits of the populace, but she supposed it was not to be. So with a lace cap on her head and her nose sharp and shiny she sat up in bed, flicked imaginary bread pellets along the counterpane, talked happily to the boarding-house and made ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... life is, to keep in constant employment that restless active principle within us, which, if not directed right, will be eternally drawing us from real to imaginary happiness. ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... SAVAGE—A living English writer of considerable celebrity, author of "Imaginary Conversations," contributor to several leading periodicals. Mr. Landor is now advanced in years. His humorous verses are few, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... for me, she hardly belonged to the world of reality at all. But when I was sixteen and I met her again, once more at a young people's ball, the glamour suddenly departed. Her appearance had altered and corresponded no longer to my imaginary picture of her. When we met in the dance she pressed my hand, which made me indignant, as though it were an immodest thing. She was no longer a fairy. She had broad shoulders, a budding bust, warm hands; there was youthful coquetry about her—something ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... and imaginary,—none of which however appear to have taken strong hold of the cheerful and courageous temper of the queen,—her attention and that of her council was for some time diverted by the expectation of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... am ready to put forth my hand to find yours. Oh! Anna, you must be everything that is pure and good, through to the very depths of your heart, that mine may not ache in finding it has loved only an imaginary being. Not that I expect you to be perfect—for I shouldn't love you if you were immaculate—but pure in aim and intention and desire, which I believe you ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... may laugh like the rest, and call us the mane, dirty set of Irish vagabonds?" asked the girl, her small eyes kindling with a sense of imaginary insult. ...
— Live to be Useful - or, The Story of Annie Lee and her Irish Nurse • Anonymous
... you couldn't! You are too intensely absorbent, you are too rigidly individual. The flame in you would never consent even for an instant to be the flame in anybody else—any of those people who, for the purpose of the state, are called imaginary. Never!" ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... painters would rather do their pictures under and for a given physical condition, to support and be supported by architecture; but with the unfortunate present-day elimination of paintings from most architectural problems, most artists have to paint their pictures for an imaginary condition. The present production of paintings has become absolutely unmindful of the true, function of a painting, which is to decorate in collaboration with the other ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... but the heaps of snow were a terrible hindrance to his erratic progression. The cold air and the shock of a fall lessened his inebriety, but the imperative impulse of his imaginary mission still hypnotized him. It was past one before he reached the tall house. He did not think it at all curious that the great outer portals should be open; nor, though he saw the milk-cart at the door, and noted Cohen's uncomfortable look, did he remember that he had ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of our religion. I want to do what little I can to put another one in God's name, so that we will worship a supreme human god, so that we will worship mercy, justice, love and truth, and not have the idea that we must sacrifice our brother upon the altar of fear to please some imaginary phantom. See what Christianity has done for the world! It has reduced Spain to a guitar, Italy to a hand organ and Ireland to exile. That is what religion has done. Take every country in the whole world, and the country that has got the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... should ever feel his pulse, or hers, at night. Gwen was none the better for doing it. Nor did she benefit by an operation which her mind called looking matters calmly in the face. It consisted in imaginary forecasts of a status quo that was to come about. She had to skip some years as too horrible even to dream of; years needed to live down the worst raw sense of guilt, and become hardened to inevitable life. Then she filled in her scenario ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Canning, in the mock report of an imaginary speech, represented Erskine as addressing the 'Whig Club' thus:—"For his part he should only say that, having been, as he had been, both a soldier and a sailor, if it had been his fortune to have stood in either of these relations to the Directory—as a man and ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... decorate their palaces with gold and ivory and Minton tiles and mother-o'-pearl, I do not see why Jukes's tale should not be true. He is a Civil Engineer, with a head for plans and distances and things of that kind, and he certainly would not take the trouble to invent imaginary traps. He could earn more by doing his legitimate work. He never varies the tale in the telling, and grows very hot and indignant when he thinks of the disrespectful treatment he received. He wrote this quite straightforwardly at first, but he has since touched ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... is only joking, George; you may sit still. I can guess what you are going to say, papa. 'Is not our voyage imaginary, and should we not be ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... and, opening her window very gently, she flung the shining tresses upon the running water, and watched them for a few moments as they floated down the stream. Then she dressed herself in the character of her imaginary brother, took up the carpet-bag in which she had placed what she chose to carry with her, stole softly down-stairs, and let herself out of a window on the lower floor, shutting it very carefully so as to be sure that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the Thursday following Miss Kreitmann's resignation, while Abe was flicking an imaginary grain of dust from the spotless array of samples, the store door burst open and a short, stout person entered. Abe looked up and, emitting an exclamation, rushed forward with both arms extended in ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... for the whole journey, and you received an advance of wages to provide for your families during your absence. You have lately filled yourselves with meat, and you have become lazy; you have been frightened by the footprints of the Bas-e; thus you wish to leave the country. To save yourselves from imaginary danger, you would forsake my wife and myself, and leave us to a fate which you yourselves would avoid. This is your gratitude for kindness; this is the return for my confidence, when without hesitation I advanced you money. Go! Return to Katariff ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... own. I no longer had any doubt that he was a Christian. I longed to ask him about Jerry, but I found that he did not understand a word of English. It was so dark, also, that he could scarcely see my gestures. I tried every expedient to make him comprehend my meaning. I ran on, and then seized an imaginary person, and conducted him back to the fort. I raised my hands in a supplicating attitude. I shook his hands warmly, to show how grateful I should be if he granted my request. At last I began to hope that he understood me. He shook my hands and nodded, and then, assisting me to carry ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... reformations, which their heresies had rendered necessary. I became of course the butt of every thing which reason, ridicule, malice, and falsehood could supply. They have concentrated all their hatred on me, till they have really persuaded themselves, that I am the sole source of all their imaginary evils. I hope, therefore, that my retirement will abate some of their disaffection to the government of their country, and that my successor will enter on a calmer sea than I did. He will at least find the vessel of state in the hands of his friends, and not of his foes. Federalism ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... circumstances, would have hurt him if he bad known of it, but only through his sympathy and his affection—he was unacquainted with the jealousy of a father. But in Janet's eyes they made their little world together, indispensable to each other as its imaginary hemispheres. She had a quiet pain, in the infrequent moments when she allowed herself the full realization of her love for Kendal, in the knowledge that she, of her own motion, had disturbed its unities ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... listen to our self-love, we shall estimate our lot less by what it is, than by what it is not; shall dwell on its hindrances, and be blind to its possibilities; and, comparing it only with imaginary lives, shall indulge in flattering dreams of what we should do, if we had but power; and give, if we had but wealth; and be, if we had no temptations. We shall be forever querulously pleading our difficulties ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... is also a subject for the inquiries of psychology. At the moment the poor man's imaginary sufferings were positively frightful, and he awoke with a gasp. He had always secretly dreaded growing fat, he had always felt a horror of anything like singing or speaking in public, and the only thing in the world he really feared was the possibility of being ridiculous in Margaret's eyes. ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... a raging thirst for the slaughter of the sons of Kings. But come now, I will tell thee a better way: and that is, to kill me: for so wilt thou effectually circumvent and cheat all these love-sick and imaginary Kings, at a single blow: if, as it seems, I am to be a cause of strife and bloodshed, as ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... your collar to it. Once more now. Don't lie down on the job. All together now." The stranger clucked to an imaginary horse and made a motion of lifting ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... in his stall, hailing him (Israel) with his shod fore-foot clattering against the planks—his customary trick when hungry—and so, down goes Israel's hook, and with a tuft of white clover, impulsively snatched, he hurries away a few paces in obedience to the imaginary summons. But soon stopping midway, and forlornly gazing round at the enclosure, he bethought him that a far different oval, the great oval of the ocean, must be crossed ere his crazy errand could be done; and even then, Old Huckleberry would be found long surfeited ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... sister, he wished to discover, to claim, and restore to the household; but Salome, his wife,—was a monstrous imaginary incubus that ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... not imaginary. The acquiescence in indefinite ideas for the sake of comforted emotions, and the abnegation of strong convictions in order to make room for free and plenteous effusion, have for us all the marks of a too familiar reality. Such a doctrine is an everyday plea for self-deception, ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... third only wanted to coin money under the cloak of marriage; another was not of a nature to make a woman happy; here she suspected hereditary gout; there certain immoral antecedents alarmed her. Like the Church, she required a noble priest at her altar; she even wanted to be married for imaginary ugliness and pretended defects, just as other women wish to be loved for the good qualities they have not, and for imaginary beauties. Mademoiselle Cormon's ambition took its rise in the most delicate ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... Captain Tuck, at the other end of the table, whether that gentleman had ever met the deceased Major-General Scully, and being answered in the negative, he descanted fluently upon the merits of that imaginary warrior. After this unscrupulous manoeuvre the major proceeded to do justice to the wine and to indulge in sporting reminiscences, and military reminiscences, and travelling reminiscences, and social reminiscences, all of which he treated in a manner which called ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... are familiar with those passages and chambers will observe while reading the next chapter that no imaginary attractions are added to the existing facts, but many interesting minor ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... gruff and impossible to make terms with; and then Norton, who was the rich man he had come to see and who wanted the land, coaxed him so skilfully, and ordered all sorts of good things to be brought to him, when he found he had come a good way and was hungry; and the imaginary banquet was very funny, David making inquiries and comments over the dishes he did not know and Norton supplying him with others, till he was satisfied. Then, in soothed good humour, David was easy to deal with, and let his land go a bargain. The acting was really extremely good; ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... novel Mr. Scott returns to modern times, where he is as much at home as when writing of imaginary kingdoms or the days of powder and patches. Mr. Scott's last novel, "The Impostor," had Annapolis in 1776 as its locale, but he shows his versatility by centering the important events of this romance in and ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... sense, for the preservation of body and soul" (as Scaliger [990]defines it); for when the common sense resteth, the outward senses rest also. The phantasy alone is free, and his commander reason: as appears by those imaginary dreams, which are of divers kinds, natural, divine, demoniacal, &c., which vary according to humours, diet, actions, objects, &c., of which Artemidorus, Cardanus, and Sambucus, with their several interpretators, have written great volumes. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... wrote Mrs. Schuyler Van Rennselaer in an article in the "Century Magazine" many years ago, "that I dreamily remember a canvas hippodrome where the Fifth Avenue Hotel stands? Kids curvetting in idiotic pride over imaginary mountain peaks on the rough ground of what is Madison Square? Can it be true that when we looked from our nursery windows towards Sixteenth Street we saw, on a lot foolishly called vacant, the most interesting of possible houses, an abandoned street-car, fitted with a front door and a chimney ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... Catholics and Protestants. Even more inflexible was Remigius, criminal judge in Lorraine. On the title-page of his manual he boasts that within fifteen years he had sent nine hundred persons to death for this imaginary crime.(256) ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... this a custom among Hellenes? It reveals a curious state of society, real or imaginary; but I suppose that at Rome in imperial days (cf. panem et circenses) the theory of meat and drink largesses being ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... Romancing freely, he was hardly conscious when he was lying either on a small scale or on a large, being equally delighted with his own conceits and with the pleasure he was giving to his auditors. While thus recounting real and imaginary incidents, he could almost delude himself into the belief that he was still the bold, radiant Casanova, the favorite of fortune and of beautiful women, the honored guest of secular and spiritual princes, the man whose spendings and gamblings and gifts must be reckoned ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... All of them change)—Ver. 369. This must have been imaginary, as they were not likely to be acquainted with the reason ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Benshie, sometimes called the Shrieking Woman, is an imaginary being, supposed by the Irish to predict, by her shrieks and wails, the death of some member in the family over which she exercises a kind of supervision. To this fable Moore alludes in one ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... one by one," laughed his host, "and prove them imaginary. I see a great good-fortune ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... the people who assumed management of the affair considered it only fair to Sylvia (and to Harboro) to keep him in the background. Sylvia had never permitted Harboro to come to the house to see her. She had drawn a somewhat imaginary figure in lieu of a father to present to Harboro's mind's eye. Her father (she said) was not very well and was inclined to be disagreeable. He did not like the idea of his daughter getting married. She was all he had, and he was ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... and glittering knife as he spoke, with which he made two or three savage cuts and thrusts at imaginary tigers before ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... find it helpful to practice these offensive and defensive weapons when you are alone, standing before your mirror and "playing" that your reflection in the glass is the other person. Send this imaginary other person the psychic vibrations, accompanied by the mental picture suitable for it. Act the part out seriously and earnestly, just as if the reflected image were really another person. This will give you confidence ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... he, with Trelawney and Williams, watched for that fatal plaything, the little boat Ariel, which Trelawney had drawn in her actual dimensions for him on the sands of Arno, while he, with a map of the Mediterranean spread before him, sitting in this imaginary ship, had already made wonderful voyages. And one day as he paced the terrace with Williams, they saw her round the headland of Porto Venere. Twenty-eight feet long by eight she was: built in Genoa from an English model ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... was becoming more arrogant and more irascible in proportion as his right to be so diminished. Secretly disgusted with himself, and deeply humiliated by the shameful intrigue to which he had stooped, he took a secret satisfaction in crushing his accomplice with his imaginary superiority and lordly disdain. According as his humor was good or bad, he called him "my dear extortioner," "Mons. Fortunat," or "Master Twenty-per-cent." But though these sneers and insults drove the obsequious smile from M. Fortunat's lips, he was quite capable of including ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... said, 'if you will take me to see one of my patients—one that will make Miss Alden contented till she has some imaginary trouble of her own. My horse is nearly used up from the long drive I've had ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... "reminds me of an old lady who always insisted on her daughter taking a dose of the medicine her doctor prescribed for her own imaginary complaints. 'How can you hope to be well,' she used to say, 'if you ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... your imaginary customer (I hope so, at least, for the sake of your till), prudence gets the better of me; unless," added Ardworth, irresolutely, and glancing at Helen,—"unless, indeed, you ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sphere into Space, and to the Assembly Hall in our Metropolis, and then to Space again, and of my return home, and of everything that I had seen and heard in fact or vision. At first, indeed, I pretended that I was describing the imaginary experiences of a fictitious person; but my enthusiasm soon forced me to throw off all disguise, and finally, in a fervent peroration, I exhorted all my hearers to divest themselves of prejudice and to become believers in ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... early astronomers, because the revolving earth is rocking like a top, with the result that the pole does not always keep pointing at the same spot in the heavens. Each year the meeting-place of the imaginary lines of the ecliptic and equator is moving westward at the rate of about fifty seconds. In time—ages hence—the pole will circle round to the point it spun at when the constellations were named by the Babylonians. It is by calculating ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... that its loss enfeebles the constitution, and results in impotency, premature decline, St. Vitus's dance, paralysis, epilepsy, consumption, softening of the brain, and insanity. No wonder that conscience and fear become tormenting inquisitors, and that the symptoms are changed into imaginary specters of stealthily ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... monasteries burned their invaluable libraries, and invaded the nunneries. The streets were filled with monks and nuns, running this way and that, shrieking and fluttering, to escape the claws of fiendish Calvinists. The terror was imaginary, for not the least remarkable feature in these transactions was that neither insult nor injury was offered to man or woman, and that not a farthing's value of the immense amount of property was appropriated. Similar scenes were enacted in all the other provinces, with the exception of Limburg, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... colony which made the Bostonian critical of the New Yorker, or gave to the true Virginian a feeling of superiority to the "zealots" of New, England. To the Scotch-Irish or German dweller in the Shenandoah Valley it mattered little whether he lived north or south of an imaginary and disputed line that divided Maryland from Pennsylvania. Political subjection to Virginia could not remove the Blue Ridge Mountains which isolated him far more effectively from Williamsburg than from ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... saying, "fell close outside there," waving a hand up the cellar steps. "Bang! crash! we feel the building shake—so." His hands left their task of counting notes, seized an imaginary person by the lapels of an imaginary coat and ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... a league and a half of terrestrial crust. The weight of it seemed to be crushing down upon my shoulders. I felt weighed down, and I exhausted myself with imaginary violent exertions to turn ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... author in this note is imaginary. The question of title to the lands in the case put, must depend upon the constitution, treaties, and laws of the United States; and a decision in the state court adverse to the claim or title set up under those laws, must, by the very words of the constitution and of the judiciary act, be ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... sufficient to keep body and soul together. We were living on our Red Cross parcels, and we ate none of the German food except the bread. It's the only time I ever worked for nothing and boarded myself. We were punished for every offence, real and imaginary, and when a man is driven harder than he can bear, and refuses to work any more, the methods used to force him to work would put any slave-driver to shame; and we were ready to do anything to try and even up the score. This is ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... An imaginary blossom that never fades has been the dream of poets from Milton's day; but seeing one, who loves it? Our amaranth has the aspect of an artificial flower - stiff, dry, soulless, quite in keeping with the decorations on the average ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... for her does not offend her. What am I saying? It enchants her. She is so much flattered by it, that her sole fear is that it may not be true. Dissipate her alarms, show her that the happiness you offer her and of which she knows the price, is not an imaginary happiness. Go farther; persuade her that she will enjoy it forever, and her resistance will disappear, her doubts will vanish, and she will seize upon everything that will destroy her suspicions and uncertainty. She would have already believed you; already she would have resolved to yield ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... without going to it. But Fiske's range-finder makes no mathematical calculations, nor requires them to be made, and is automatic. A base line permanently fixed on the ship is the one side of a triangle required. The distance of the object to be hit is determined by its being the apex of an imaginary triangle, and at each of the other angles, at the two ends of the base line, is fixed a spyglass. These are directed ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... every meeting with prayers for the death of an old Fellow of College who disliked their movement, or as they certainly do when patriots are telling how short a time the prayers took to the killing of him. I have seen a crowd, when certain Dublin papers had wrought themselves into an imaginary loyalty, so possessed by what seemed the very genius of satiric fantasy, that one all but looked to find some feathered heel among the cobble stones. Part of the delight of crowd or individual is always that ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... Jew, and of the two Apologies addressed to the Emperors, [366:2] Though the meeting with Trypho is said to have occurred at Ephesus, it is now perhaps impossible to determine whether it ever actually took place, or whether the Dialogue is only the report of an imaginary discussion. It serves, however, to illustrate the mode of argument then adopted in the controversy between the Jews and the disciples, and throws much light upon the state of Christian theology. Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius appear to have ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... northern shores of Siberia has been accomplished by the Swedish explorer, Nordenskjoeld. The early attempts made by Willoughby, Chancellor, and Burrough failed even to reach the Siberian coast. Hoping later on to reach China by ascending the Ob to the imaginary Lake Kitai—that is, Kathay, or China—the English renewed their efforts to discover the "north-east passage," and in 1580 two vessels, commanded by Arthur Ket and Charles Jackman, sailed for the Arctic Ocean; but they never ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... know why he did not tell the little woman that he had lied to Ole and Joe and let it go at that. But he seemed to dread having her discover that he had lied at all, and so he kept on lying about those three imaginary men. Perhaps he had a chivalrous instinct that she would feel safer, more at ease, if she thought that others were somewhere near. At any rate he did not tell her that his only partners were two burros ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... Nevertheless in moments of expansion, such as the present, she felt the parallel between her own case and that of Jane did, in certain directions, romantically hold. Fortified by thought of the Miss Minetts' agitated interest in all which might befall her, she indulged in imaginary conversations with that great proconsul, her employer—the theme of which, purged of lyrical redundancies, reduced itself to the somewhat crude announcement that "your daughter, yes, may, alas, not impossibly be taken from you; but I, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... had talks with the sub-manager, and, on various pretexts to get information, I interviewed bankers and money men in the city. Finally, after many conferences, we came to the conclusion that the boasted impregnability of the bank was imaginary, and that the vanity and self-sufficiency of the officials would some day prove a snare to ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... had so effectively steered the ship of State through the troubled waters of the interregnum, was, quite unintentionally and unwillingly, the greatest obstacle in the way of the young captain! Everybody who had a grievance—real or imaginary—against the government of Lorenzo, sought Messer Tommaso's advice and sympathy, so that the situation became charged with difficulties and embarrassments. The very merest change in the whim of a fickle people might upset the Medici, and then the Soderini would ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... snow, and hence we had it not as light as it had been for Tom's duel; although the moon made our outlines and features perfectly distinct as we assembled in the hollow, and it would make our pistol-barrels shine brightly enough when the time came, as I ascertained by taking aim at an imaginary mark. ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... own lives interesting. But there are also great numbers of people who find their own lives dull, and wish, like Hedda Gabler, to live a more thrilling life. For them there are published a few whole newspapers, and sections of others, devoted to the personal lives of a set of imaginary people, with whose gorgeous vices the reader can in his fancy safely identify himself. Mr. Hearst's unflagging interest in high society caters to people who never hope to be in high society, and yet manage to derive some enhancement out of the vague feeling that they are part of the ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... sense was made for man, and who would open picture galleries and museums to the public, and make the day somewhat of a day of enjoyment for the masses instead of pressing upon them the duty of mourning over sins largely imaginary, are not more advanced than were my parents forty years ago. They were beyond the orthodox of the period when it was scarcely permissible, at least among the Scotch, to take a walk for pleasure or read any but religious books on ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... bury-me-wick, but here's the blood; don't you see a big black cloud all spread over the floor hereabout, don't ye see?' Milly was stooping over the spot, and tracing the outline of this, perhaps, imaginary mapping, in the air ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... whips and heavier manacles?—Nothing is more distrustful than such a sentiment in such breasts—quickly alarmed, ready to strike, ready for any act of violence, blindly credulous, headlong and easily impelled, not merely against real enemies on the outside, but at first against imaginary enemies on the inside,[2381] but also against the King, the ministers, the gentry, priests, parliamentarians, orthodox Catholics; against all administrators and magistrates imprudent enough to have appealed to the law; ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that night the clanging bell summoned me to go forth an' chase imaginary Chinamen, an' then my patience begun to get baggy at the knees. I wanted to be up in time to gather the milk before the heat of the day, an' I was a couple o' nights shy on my sleep already. The last time I took Fido along an' dropped him into the feed-bin, ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... that the game of dice was at first called the game of God, because the regulation of lottery was one of God's prerogatives; but this derivation is purely imaginary. What appears more likely is, that dice were first forbidden by the Church, and then by the civil authorities, on account of the fearful oaths which were so apt to be uttered by those players who had a run of ill luck. Nothing was commoner than for people to ruin themselves at this ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... of Congress, and force an acquiescence in the treaty. "It was the fear of being involved in a war," he said, "that the negotiations with Great Britain had originated; under the impression of fear the treaty had been negotiated and signed; fear had promoted its ratification; and now, every imaginary mischief was conjured up to frighten the house, to deprive it of that discretion which it had the right to exercise, to force it to carry this treaty into effect." He also charged the merchants of Philadelphia ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... the Lutheran Church has failed to harmonize the doctrines of sola gratia and gratia universalis. However, the first of these strictures is based on gross ignorance of the facts, resulting from a superficial investigation of the articles involved, for the alleged disagreement is purely imaginary. As a matter of fact, no one can read the two articles attentively without being everywhere impressed with their complete harmony. In every possible way Article XI excludes synergism, and corroborates ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... the fellow is his constancy. He was after your imaginary fortune once. I am sure of that. And he was so dazzled by the illumination of that ignis fatuus that he didn't see you, perhaps, and didn't recognize how much he really cared for you. At all events, in his letter to me—and, by the way, it is very strange that he ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... be added to the game by each player pretending that he has a destination or stopping-place, where he would wish to alight. It now becomes the aim of the two players who are "it" to carry him past his point. A player who is thus carried beyond his imaginary stopping-place must feign a violent passion, and imitate angry gesticulations. He may, in addition, feign a great age or a painful infirmity, which will be found to occasion the most convulsive fun for the other players in ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... voluntarily it will not take food. It is a very domestic bird, and fond of notice, its voice on such occasions is pleasing, on some others very harsh and hawk or eagle-like. Its manners are curious, depressing its tail, and arching its neck, and pecking at imaginary objects in a curious way. From the expressive manner in which it looks up at sunset on surrounding objects, especially trees, it is obviously accustomed ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... (M. sulphurea) has amused me exceedingly. They were in the habit of looking at their own images in the windows and attacking them, uttering their peculiar cry, and pecking and fluttering against the glass as earnestly as if the object they saw was a real rival instead of an imaginary one (a friend who observed it, insisted that, Narcissus-like, it was in an ecstasy of self-admiration). What is more remarkable, two of these instances occurred in the autumn, when one would not suppose the same motives for animosity to exist that would probably ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... would it had not been needful for me to call you hither to expostulate these things with you, and in such a manner as this! But necessity hath no law. Feigned necessities, imaginary necessities, are the greatest cozenage which man can put upon the providence of God, and make pretences to break known rules by. But it is as legal, as carnal, and as stupid to think that there are no necessities which are manifest and real, because necessities ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... Majesty's Attorney-General of vindictiveness and foul partiality in the discharge of his duty as prosecuting officer for the Crown. He has sent his nephews and apprentices as spies into my office in order to hunt up imaginary offences. He has preferred bills of indictment against me on supposition of libel, and I have been dragged from my business by a common constable, and obliged to give bail in this Court, while he, the Attorney-General, has allowed the most infamous crimes to pass in review before him, without ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... foot and ankle. But these advances, so far from encouraging Mr. Scuddamore, plunged him into the depths of depression and bashfulness. She had come to him several times for a light, or to apologise for the imaginary depredations of her poodle; but his mouth was closed in the presence of so superior a being, his French promptly left him, and he could only stare and stammer until she was gone. The slenderness of their intercourse did not prevent him from throwing out insinuations of a very ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is not an imaginary place, except in name. It exists within a hundred miles of New York. The house is a palace, the grounds are a park. There is not only a long wing of magnificent guest rooms in the house, occupied by young girls or important older people, but there is also a guest annex, a separate ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... be careful never to over-exert myself, madam—those are the doctor's orders," said Nickie, in his sad, calm way. "The smallest excitement, the slightest strain, and my life goes out like that." Nickie puffed an imaginary candle ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... piece, the mere suspicion of a theft, a suspicion which is actually without foundation. In the latter case it is a young officer who is accused without grounds of having abstracted a silver spoon, which is recovered later on. Thus the base element is reduced in this case to a purely imaginary thing, a mere suspicion, and this suffices nevertheless to do an irreparable injury, in our aesthetical appreciation, to the hero of the piece, in spite of his innocence. This is because a man who is supposed capable of a base ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... black eyes, then she dressed it up with feathers, and scarlet flannel, and one of Ned's leaden hatchets; and in the character of an Indian chief, the late Poppydilla tomahawked all the other dolls, and caused the nursery to run red with imaginary gore. She gave away her new shoes to a beggar child, hoping to be allowed to go barefoot, but found it impossible to combine charity and comfort, and was ordered to ask leave before disposing of her clothes. She delighted the boys ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... when they asked for Joe, he had disappeared; but the next day he was found in a barn, delirious, swinging an empty lantern in front of an imaginary train, and crying, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... than ever, "and the next, that 'the peaches are doing remarkably well,'—now mark my words, Mr. Bellew." As she spoke, the Sergeant wheeled suddenly right about face, and came striding down towards them, jingling imaginary spurs, and with his stick tucked up under his remaining arm, very much as if it had been ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... He pretended to be holding a baby, cuddling an imaginary child in his arms. Then he tossed the non-existent little one up in the air, and pretended to ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... the greatest effort on the part of Maxence and M. de Tregars not to play, but only to pretend to play, and to continue to count imaginary points,—"One, two, three, four." ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... can confirm himself against divine providence because the impious are advanced to honors and become leaders in the state and in the church. Moreover, what is greater or less standing, or greater or less wealth? Is this not in itself imaginary? Is one person more blessed and happier than another for it? Is a great man's standing, or even a king's or an emperor's, not regarded in a year's time as a commonplace, no longer exalting his heart with joy but quite possibly becoming worthless to him? Have those with standing ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the freight and so much for each saddle animal. But when we reached Cruces there was not a mule, either for pack or saddle, in the place. The contractor promised that the animals should be on hand in the morning. In the morning he said that they were on the way from some imaginary place, and would arrive in the course of the day. This went on until I saw that he could not procure the animals at all at the price he had promised to furnish them for. The unusual number of passengers that ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... tea-time and put everybody on edge. He had, unfortunately for his friends, a reputation other than that of a soldier: he posed as a peacemaker. He saw trouble where none existed, and the way he patched up imaginary quarrels would have strained the patience of Job. Still, every one loved him, though they lived in mortal fear of him. So Abbott came about quickly and sailed ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... means limited to such matters. Every time their troops made a stand they were promptly defeated and driven back, but their faltering courage was bolstered up by glorious tidings of wonderful, but wholly imaginary, victories won elsewhere. It was often reported that many times more Americans had fallen in some insignificant skirmish than were actually killed in the whole war, while generals perished by the dozen and colonels by the thousand. ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... Park's proposed route was to proceed up the Gambia, cross the country to the Niger, when they were to sail down the river till they came to its termination. If, as Park supposed, in place of being lost, according to Major Rennel's theory, in some imaginary lake called Margara, it took a southerly direction, and might prove to be the river Congo; it was his intention to embark on board some slave-ship, and return, either by the way of St. Helena or the West Indies. ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on. ...
— Simple Sabotage Field Manual • Strategic Services
... walked an hour or two, or laid myself down on the grass on the summit of the hill, there to satiate myself with the pleasure of admiring the lake and its environs, to examine and dissect all the herbs within my reach, and, like another Robinson Crusoe, built myself an imaginary place of residence in the island. I became very much attached to this eminence. When I brought Theresa, with the wife of the receiver and her sisters, to walk there, how proud was I to be their pilot and guide! We took there rabbits to stock it. This was another source of pleasure ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... understand me?" And in the darkness George's bodily lips moved in unison with those which uttered the words in his imaginary rendering of this scene. An eavesdropper, concealed behind the column, could have heard the whispered word "sure," the emphasis put upon it in the vision was so poignant. "You say you understand ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... premises, comes here sometimes just between daylight and dark, and talks to me till I am ready to put forth my hand to find yours. Oh! Anna, you must be everything that is pure and good, through to the very depths of your heart, that mine may not ache in finding it has loved only an imaginary being. Not that I expect you to be perfect—for I shouldn't love you if you were immaculate—but pure in aim and intention and desire, which I believe ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... here," said McKnight pompously. "And another thing, when you feel this way just remember there are two less desirable places where you might be. One is jail, and the other is—" He strummed on an imaginary harp, with ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... often called idiosyncrasies appear to be, and doubtless are, due to disordered intellect. But they should not be confounded with those which are inherent in the individual and real in character. Thus, they are frequently merely imaginary, there being no foundation for them except in the perverted mind of the subject; at other times they are induced by a morbid attention being directed continually to some one or more organs or functions. The protean forms under which hypochondria appears, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... if they who rail so loudly against existing institutions would take the trouble to trace them to their source, and would, for instance, compare this state as it is today with its condition five hundred or a thousand years ago, instead of measuring it by the standard of some imaginary Platonic republic, they would find, if not less subject for complaint, yet fuller means of understanding and remedying the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... lonely traveler, at other times a merchant carrying goodly pearls, at other times a bandit engaged in feats of plunder. All possible scenes in history or imagination that she understood did the child try to enact in the wilderness. But she went there now with no intention of posing in any imaginary part. She went there ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... His wife was dead. She was not very good, or very intelligent, and she was not at all beautiful. But he preserved a tender memory of her. It was twenty-five years since he had lost her, and he had never once failed a night to have a little imaginary conversation, sad and tender, with her before he went to sleep. He shared all his doings with her.—He had had no children. That was the great sorrow of his life. He had transferred his need of affection to his pupils, to whom he was attached ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... nothing is prettier than the contrast between their dusky ruggedness and the tender, the yellow and pink and violet fringe of that mantle. All this you may observe from the viaduct at the Ariccia; but you must wander below to feel the full force of the eloquence of our imaginary papalino. The pillars and arches of pale grey peperino arise in huge tiers with a magnificent spring and solidity. The older Romans built no better; and the work has a deceptive air of being one of their sturdy bequests which help one to drop another sigh over the antecedents ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... observations on this subject will be the more proper, as it is perceived that the adversaries of the new Constitution are availing themselves of the prevailing prejudice with regard to the practicable sphere of republican administration, in order to supply, by imaginary difficulties, the want of those solid objections which they endeavor ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... something is always happening everywhere, he was never able to fly in a straight line for more than the littlest distance. He was a cowardly bird too, and continually fancied that some person was going to throw a stone at him from behind a bush, or a wall, or a tree, and these imaginary dangers tended to make his journeyings still more wayward and erratic. He never flew where he wanted to go himself, but only where God directed him, and so he did ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... unflagging zeal, generous confidence, pure spirits, and the most unquestioning loyalty! Ignorant of the world which she had not seen, and of those movements of human passion which she had really never felt, she naturally regarded Alfred Stevens as one of the noble representatives of that imaginary empire which her genius continually brought before her eyes. She saw in him the embodiment of that faith in her intellect which it was the first and last hope of her intellect to inspire; and seeing thus, it will be easy to believe that her full heart, which, hitherto, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... "And so far as I can see, that is the principal reason why your friends, Aurora W. Chime and the Reverend Wilbur Short, and the rest of them, condemn it. They object to the evident pleasure of the fisherman more than to the imaginary suffering ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... little voice was very comforting to the two mothers hovering about her, and Jack said, with a look of mingled pity and admiration, as he brandished his crutch over the imaginary foes,— ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... past, the present, and the future. He bounded over the wilderness that lay between him and the beautiful plains of the Saskatchewan. He seized Charley round the neck, and hugged and wrestled with him as in days of yore. He mounted an imaginary charger, and swept across the plains along with him; listened to anecdotes innumerable from Jacques, attacked thousands of buffaloes, singled out scores of wild bulls, pitched over horses' heads and alighted precisely on the ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... motherhood, a potion more exciting, so her much experienced physician said, than any wine ever fermented. She hung over her sleeping baby, poring upon the exquisite fineness of the skin, upon the rosy little mouth, still sucking comically at an imaginary meal, upon the dimpled, fragile hands, upon the peaceful relaxation of the body, till the very trusting, appealing essence of babyhood flooded her senses like a strong drug; and when the child was awake, and she could bathe the much creased little body, and ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... welcome. But, once upon a time, a certain rich miser conceived the design of sponging upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up, for this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to the physician, as that of an imaginary individual. ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... you know about snow!" rejoined the Hon. Bovyne. "Let us get on, there's a good fellow—confound you! don't stare at those imaginary trees any longer, but ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... he was a Christian. I longed to ask him about Jerry, but I found that he did not understand a word of English. It was so dark, also, that he could scarcely see my gestures. I tried every expedient to make him comprehend my meaning. I ran on, and then seized an imaginary person, and conducted him back to the fort. I raised my hands in a supplicating attitude. I shook his hands warmly, to show how grateful I should be if he granted my request. At last I began to hope ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... there, if there was room for the play that gives title to the volume. "Shakespeare's End," however, was doubtless included because it gives its author's ideas as to the mission of Ireland in the world. "An Imaginary Conversation," the second play of the volume, was performed at the Abbey Theatre May 13, 1909, following shortly after "Time"; a discussion of art and patriotism and love among Tom Moore, and his sister Kate and Robert Emmet, with a little, a very little, of the intensity ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... common to the Manchus, the Mongols, and the Northern and Southern Chinese. Among these may be instanced the great respect for, if not worship of, fetishes and rudely made images of animals, both imaginary and real, which are supposed to be embodied there with all their good and evil qualities. The Coreans have an especial veneration for the tiger, the emblem of supernatural strength, courage and dignity. Now ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... monotony and their turgidity. The Jacobin is full of respect for the phantoms of his reasoning brain; in his eyes they are more real than living men, and their suffrage is the only suffrage he recognises—he will march onward in all sincerity at the head of a procession of imaginary followers. The millions of metaphysical wills which he has created in the image of his own will sustain him by their unanimous assent, and he will project outwards, like a chorus of triumph and acclamation, the inward echo of his ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... beginning of hostilities, thousands of "war pictures"—mostly cheap lithographs—were published. The drawing and coloring were better than those of the prints issued at the time of the war with China; but the details were to a great extent imaginary,—altogether imaginary as to the appearance of Russian troops. Pictures of the engagements with the Russian fleet were effective, despite some lurid exaggeration. The most startling things were pictures of Russian defeats in Korea, published before a single military engagement had taken place;—the ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... of this day were employed in taking once more a view of the superb scenery exhibited by the mountains Olympus and Ossa. They appeared upon this occasion in more than usual splendour; like one of those imaginary Alpine regions suggested by viewing a boundary of clouds when they terminate the horizon in a still evening, and are gathered into heaps, with many a towering top shining in fleecy whiteness. The great Olympian chain forms a line which is exactly opposite to Salonica; and even ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... like the cold and pure breast of a virgin repelling those treacherous sentiments which prove the ruin of a shining and glorious innocence. Across the summit of this brilliant and cloud-like peak, which formed the most distant object in the view, ran the imaginary line that divided Italy from the regions of the north. Drawing nearer, and holding its course on the opposite shore, the eye embraced the range of rampart-like rocks that beetle over Villeneuve and Chillon, the latter a snow-white pile that seemed to rest partly ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... once or twice with extreme energy for a few minutes after imaginary whistles or shouts. Once I heard them passing our bows. But it was useless; we stopped, and the moon, from within the mistiness of an immense halo, looked dreamily upon ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... sitting before my looking-glass—never to me a pleasant article of furniture—having my hair dressed. I am hardly awake yet, and have not quite finished disentangling the real live disagreeables which I have to face, from the imaginary ones from which my waking has freed me. At least, in real life, I am not perpetually pursued, through dull abysses, by a man in a crape mask, from whom I am madly struggling to escape, and who is perpetually on the point of ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Italian snapshots, and Miss Ashwell's face was sufficient confirmation. How thrilling, how wonderful! He was home again, Miss Ashwell would be happy, everybody would be happy! Probably they would be married right away—she had forgotten the imaginary German bride—and maybe Miss Ashwell would let her help her in her shopping. She could go down on Saturday mornings. Aunt Nell knew an awfully good shop for linens, ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... blue vault of the sky; and I was struck by the absurdity of the idea when I recalled to mind that once upon a time there were some exceedingly wise people who thought that the stars of heaven participated in our insignificant squabbles for a slice of ground, or some other imaginary rights. And what then? These lamps, lighted, so they fancied, only to illuminate their battles and triumphs, are burning with all their former brilliance, whilst the wiseacres themselves, together with their hopes and passions, have long ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... encounters no dense populations upon its route, through which it cannot work its way, it will assuredly continue to spread. The lines marked out by treaties will not stop it; but it will everywhere transgress these imaginary barriers. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Termagant;] The Crusaders, and those who celebrated them, confounded Mahometans with Pagans, and supposed Mahomet, or Mahound, to be one of their deities, and Tervagant or Termagant, another. This imaginary personage was introduced into our old plays and moralities, and represented as of a most violent character, so that a ranting actor might always appear to advantage in it. The word is now used for ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... drawing an imaginary line between the spot where the bullet struck the mattress and where it went into the floor—extend this line and we find the quarter from where the shot was fired." A ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... not indicate the true north in all parts of the earth, the needle varying in the North Atlantic Ocean from thirty degrees east to nearly thirty degrees west. There is an imaginary line, extending in a north-westerly direction, through a point in the vicinity of Cape Lookout, called the magnetic meridian, on which there is no variation. East of this line the needle varies to the westward; ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... my face with my hand. My memory was still ringing with echoes of the forlorn cry of wrecked love, mingled with the imaginary sobs I had just heard; therefore I hardly listened to the majestic opening of full, harmonious chords, which lead grandly into a sort of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... this was a personal complaint or a mere set of verses on an imaginary occasion. In In Memoriam Tennyson speaks out concerning the loss of a friend. In Maud, as in Locksley Hall, he makes his hero reveal the agony caused by the loss of a mistress. There is no reason to suppose that the poet had ever any such mischance, but many readers ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... inoffensive, but I repeat melancholy. Why does this sadness continue? Alas, it is the law of God. Do not look at me, I beg you, as on one of those women whom I have seen and of whom I have read, who create imaginary misfortunes for themselves, and deck themselves with ideal suffering and melancholy. I have neither sorrow nor passionate regrets and I do not ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... afterwards, very queer and shamefaced about my histrionic papa and mamma. It is striking to observe, not only how early, but how powerfully, imagination [13] is developed in our childhood. For some time after, I regarded those imaginary parents as sustaining a peculiar relation, not only to me, but to one another; I thought they were in love, if not to be married. But they never were married, nor ever thought of it, I suppose. All that drama was ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... not allowed to tell you," said Bryce, who had no intention of informing her that one person was himself and the other imaginary. "But I can assure you that I am certain—absolutely certain!—that their story is true. The fact is—I ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... Purgatorio de San Patricio". In the latter, the name of the Irish prince to whom Patrick was sold is not given; in Jocelin he is called "Milcho." Calderon was either ignorant of this, and gave the king a name that was purely imaginary, or, considering it less musical than he would wish, gave him the more harmonious one of Egerio. The following is Jocelin's version: "And Milcho beheld a vision in the night: and behold Patrick entered his palace as all on fire, and the flames, issuing from his ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... ideal of nature required of us something beyond good. The conception of moral good did not satisfy one while contemplating it. The highest form known to us at present is pure unselfishness, the doing of good, not for any reward, now or hereafter, nor for the completion of an imaginary scheme. This is the best we know. But how unsatisfactory! Filled with the aspirations called forth by the ideal before me, it appeared as if even the saving of life is a little work compared to what the heart would like to do. An outlet is needed more fully satisfying to ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... large half is occupied with his fancy, in all the wanderings of that creature, dreamy, flimsy, anchoring with gossamer, climbing the sky with steps of fog, cast into abysms (as great writers call it) by imaginary demons, and even at its best in a queer condition, pitiful, yet exceeding proud. A quarter of the mental power is employed in wanting to know what the other people think; an eighth part ought to be dwelling upon the fair distracting ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... you!" cried Hanaud in a voice which shook—surely with emotion. He wrung Ricardo's hand. He wiped an imaginary tear from ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... wait upon the Governor. Afterwards people recalled, with a disposition to connect Seymour with this master-stroke in politics, that he had never declined by letter, and that the reasons given, like the illness that kept him from facing the convention, were largely imaginary. "That crowd saw how beautifully they were done," said Depew, then secretary of state at Albany, "while Dean Richmond's ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... fore-foot clattering against the planks—his customary trick when hungry—and so, down goes Israel's hook, and with a tuft of white clover, impulsively snatched, he hurries away a few paces in obedience to the imaginary summons. But soon stopping midway, and forlornly gazing round at the enclosure, he bethought him that a far different oval, the great oval of the ocean, must be crossed ere his crazy errand could be done; and even then, Old Huckleberry would be found long surfeited with ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... with an aspect as benign as the summer sky overhead; Prue ran to and fro pouring forth a stream of counsels, warnings, and predictions; men and maids gathered on the lawn or hung out of upper windows; and even old Hecate, the cat, was seen chasing imaginary rats and mice in the grass till her yellow eyes glared with excitement. "All in," was announced at last, and as the carriage rolled away its occupants looked at one another with faces of blithe satisfaction that their ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... with a yellow clock—which did not go—and glass ornaments in front. There was a small round table before the window, supporting wax fruit under a glass case. There was a hearthrug with a dazzling pattern of imaginary flowers. On the blue cloth of the middle table were four showily-bound volumes, arranged symmetrically. On the head of the sofa lay a covering worked of blue and yellow Berlin wools. Two arm-chairs were draped with long white antimacassars, ready ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... the hero of L'Oeuvre, is unlike Manet in so many respects, there is a close analogy between the artistic theories and practices of the real painter and the imaginary one. Several of Claude's pictures are Manet's, slightly modified. For instance, the former's painting, 'In the Open Air,' is almost a replica of the latter's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe ('A Lunch on the Grass'), shown at the Salon of the Rejected ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... the words saint and hermit with a special purpose. It was by the influence, actual or imaginary, of such, that the Teutons, after the destruction of the Roman empire, were saved from becoming hordes of savages, destroying each ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... announced; they demand a play in honour of the corporation, and Ralph, their apprentice, is to act a principal part in it. Their humour is complied with; but still they are not satisfied, make their remarks on every thing, and incessantly address themselves to the players. Ben Jonson had already exhibited imaginary spectators, but they were either benevolent expounders or awkward censurers of the poet's views: consequently, they always conducted his, the poet's, own cause. But the grocer and his wife represent a whole genus, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... very few months to educate Aleck's imagination and Sally's. Each day's training added something to the spread and effectiveness of the two machines. As a consequence, Aleck made imaginary money much faster than at first she had dreamed of making it, and Sally's competency in spending the overflow of it kept pace with the strain put upon it, right along. In the beginning, Aleck had given the coal speculation a twelvemonth in which to materialize, and had ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... to hear. Listen to it in the past and present speech of providence. The time was when you had the very public sentiment you are now trying to form. From Maine to Louisiana, the American mind was softly yielding to the impress of emancipation, in some hope, however vague and imaginary. Southern as well as Northern men, in the church and out of it, not having sufficiently studied the word of God, and, under our own and French revolutionary excitement, looking only at the evils of slavery, wished it away from the land. It was a mistaken public sentiment. Yet, such as it was, ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... children. But no children were ever in it—or anybody else apparently. And so, in spite of its beauty, it had a lonely look that hurt Jims. He wanted his Garden of Spices to be full of laughter. He pictured himself running in it with imaginary playmates—and there was a mother in it—or a big sister—or, at the least, a whole aunt who would let you hug her and would never dream of shutting you up in chilly, shadowy, horrible ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... simply to himself that he could not give her up to any one else so soon. There would be a long life of joy and satisfaction to her, and he knew she would not grudge him these few years. Then, too, he was quite certain she had not even had an imaginary fancy for these two men—Ben was ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... that could have caused that fracture. Let it be considered how easily the fracture on the skull produced is accounted for. At the dissolution of religious houses, the ravages of the times affected both the living and the dead. In search after imaginary treasures, coffins were broken, graves and vaults dug open, monuments ransacked, shrines demolished, Parliament itself was called in to restrain these violations. And now are the depredations, the iniquities of those times, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... arrived at Washington nine days before his inauguration. The outgoing President, at the opening of the session of Congress, had still kept as the majority of his advisers men engaged in treason; had declared that in case of even an "imaginary" apprehension of danger from notions of freedom among the slaves, "disunion would become inevitable." LINCOLN and others had questioned the opinion of Taney; such impugning he ascribed to the "factious temper of the times." The favorite doctrine of the ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... fine imaginary notion, That draws in raw and unexperienced men To real mischiefs, while they hunt a shadow. 925 ADDISON: Cato, Act ii., ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... a shrug of the shoulders, the foreign substitute for a Burleigh shake of the head; leaving us to infer that we must not make too sure of coming off with a whole skin. Knowing well enough that all apprehensions of that kind were imaginary, we had been only amusing ourselves with him. If there had been any danger, he seemed just the fellow to be in league ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... effigy imaginary, imaginative impending, approaching imperious, imperial imply, infer in, into inability, disability ingenious, ingenuous intelligent, intellectual insinuation, innuendo instinct, intuition involve, implicate irony, sarcasm ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... that though her circle of society was small, yet she found in her neighbourhood persons of good taste and cultivated minds. Her acquaintance, in fact, constituted the very class from which she took her imaginary characters, ranging from the member of parliament, or large landed proprietor, to the young curate or younger midshipman of equally good family; and I think that the influence of these early associations may be traced in her writings, especially ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... hear the big dispatcher growl at him in his bluff way: "Use your head—use your head—Hoogan!" It was always "Hoogan," never "Toddles." "Use your head"—Donkin was everlastingly drumming that into him; for the dispatcher used to confront him suddenly with imaginary and hair-raising emergencies, and demand Toddles' instant solution. Toddles realized that Donkin was getting to the heart of things, and that some day he, Toddles, would be a great dispatcher—like Donkin. ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... Peterhouse, owing to some real or imaginary offence, and removed to Pembroke Hall, where he was surrounded by his old and intimate friends. The next year he carried his two Odes to London, as carefully as if they had been two Epics. Walpole says that he "snatched them out of Dodsley's hands, and made them 'the first-fruits ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... classics by Spanish priests, wrote in excellent prose his famous works, Florida del Inca, Comentarios reales and Historia general del Peru. The second work, partly historical and largely imaginary, purports to be a history of the ancient Incas, and pictures the old Peru as an earthly paradise. This work has had great influence over Peruvian and Colombian poets. Menendez y Pelayo (Ant. Poetas Hisp.-Amer., III, Introd.) considers Garcilasso, or Garcilaso, and Alarcon the two truly ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... flat and the calves of his legs too small, but he is certainly the most picturesque traveler to be seen on the road. He bends his knees more than the white man, and oscillates more to and fro, or from side to side. The imaginary line which his head describes is full of deep and long undulations. Even the boys and young men sway ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... previously to that of gods, that therefore a belief in One God preceded everywhere the belief in many gods. A belief in God as exclusively One, involves a distinct negation of more than one God, and that negation is possible only after the conception, whether real or imaginary, of many gods. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... on the grass. "News is around that Dirty Dan the cattle rustler is gonna try to steal some of my cattle." He patted an imaginary holster at his side. "And I ...
— Texas Week • Albert Hernhuter
... unlike as well as the like. She loved his quick, Cockney accent, his Cockney oaths when he forgot himself—the way he always said "Yeyss" instead of "Yes"—his little assumptions of vanity in socks and tie. She loved a queer blend of Albert and Martin, the real and the imaginary, substance ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... reality of the penchant he believed himself to have inspired, you may be sure the lively scoundrel was not a little flattered at his imaginary conquest. He debated, therefore, in his self-complacent reveries, whether he should take prompt advantage of the weakness of his victim, or pique her by the malice of suspense. He chose the latter tactique, and, with a happy self-esteem, reserved ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... and nervously pulling the gathers of her white morning gown, she listened while the loquacious Kitty told her what she knew of the imaginary wife of Richard Harrington. The hands ceased their working at the gathers, and assuming an air of indifference, Grace rang her silver bell, which was immediately answered by a singular looking girl, whom she addressed ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... leaders. Especially in international diplomacy is truthfulness far to seek. Secretary Hay, indeed, stated in the following words: "The principles which have guided us have been of limpid simplicity. We have set no traps; we have wasted no time in evading the imaginary traps of others. There might be worse reputations for a country to acquire than that of always speaking the truth, and always expecting it from others. In bargaining we have tried not to get the worst of the deal, alway remembering, however, that ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... did not dare write her. I refused utterly to tell her just what was in the letter, but I did succeed in quieting her and making her think that Harry had not broken faith with her, but was blaming himself for some unknown and imaginary wrong he had done her. Peggy rushed immediately up to her room to write reassuring pages to Harry, and her old-maid aunt had the horse put in the runabout and was driven over to Whitman, where nobody knows her—at ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... angle, the only way to produce a good tone. I find it helps my pupils to tell them not to think of the position of the bow-arm while drawing the bow across the strings, but merely to follow with the tips of the fingers of the right hand an imaginary line running at a right angle across the strings. The whole bow then moves as it should, and the arm motions ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... you, have figured chiefly in religion, poetry, and romance. We have been that part of the imaginations of men which creates creeds, poetry, windmills, and fiction. We have no reputation for any other form of existence. We have been purely imaginary beings living in physical bodies for just men. Our character is a legend invented by men; it could never fit a real human being. Yet we have accepted it, and tried to believe in it. You have indeed kept us, but we have not lived ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... long she slept she did not know, but it seemed to her that she had just fallen into slumber when something caused her to open her eyes. For a few moments she lay in that strange debatable region between sleeping and waking when the mind cannot distinguish between the real and the imaginary. All at once she sat up, fully awake, every sense strained and alert. Something was wrong. What was it? She listened intently, but such an intense stillness reigned throughout the house that Sally's soft ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... of his temper had not been overborne by the violence of party, and his and the national interest sacrificed to the passions of a few. Others there were among the Tories who had flattered themselves with much greater expectations than these, and who had depended, not on such imaginary favour and dangerous advancement as was offered them afterwards, but on real credit and substantial power under the new government. Such impressions on the minds of men had rendered the two Houses of Parliament, which were then sitting, as good courtiers ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... away from the pinnacle of his imaginary triumph as if dead, Zell following, wringing her hands, and with streaming eyes; but Edith reminded one of some wild, timid creature of the woods, which, though in an extremity of danger and fear, is alert and watchful, as if looking for some avenue of escape. Her searching eyes turned almost ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... striking remarks on the kind of madness which, whenever some terrible notoriety is given to a particular offence, leads persons of distempered fancy to accuse themselves of it. He observes that when the cruelties of the Inquisition against the imaginary crime of sorcery were the most barbarous, this singular frenzy led numbers to accuse themselves of sorcery. The publication and celebrity of the crime begat the ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a concave mirror, is an imaginary point placed in the centre of a circle formed by continuing the boundary of the concavity of the mirror from any one point of the edge to another ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... called the Scottish Avengers. With them he would retire into valleys far away from the village, where none would mark what they were doing, and there they practised with club and stake instead of broadsword and pike, defended narrow passes against an imaginary enemy, and, divided into two parties, ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... said to have been accompanied, or to the sacred books in which they are recorded; nay, he does not even name the Founder of the Christian faith, otherwise than by describing him as "the founder, real or imaginary, of this ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... And a mere chance tour on a Sunday through our churches would quickly show the lamentably frequent misapprehension of genius by itself; for many a fine genius for the actor's art is spoiled by an imaginary call to the pulpit. The presumption therefore is indeed against the great Tolstoy in his dispute with the great public. Still, I venture to side with Tolstoy. I too venture to think that Tolstoy's greatest work is found not so much in his works of pure art as in his works of pure religion; and ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... have preserved the calm possession of his own mind. But his ecclesiastical ministers soon contrived to seduce the impartiality of the magistrate, and to awaken the zeal of the proselyte. He was provoked by the insults which had been offered to his statues; he was alarmed by the real, as well as the imaginary magnitude of the spreading mischief; and he extinguished the hope of peace and toleration, from the moment that he assembled three hundred bishops within the walls of the same palace. The presence of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... direction. When I first discovered this disagreeable fact, I was in a filthy and obscure lane rather than street, which I did not remember having ever honoured with my presence before. While I was pausing in the vain hope and anxious endeavour to shape out some imaginary chart—some "map of the mind," by which to direct my bewildered course—I heard a confused noise proceed from another lane at right angles with the one in which I then was. I listened: the sound became more distinct; I recognized ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he had alighted on after his leap in the dark, and the sawyers were equally anxious to induce settlers to come there, and so bring a market for their labour close to their hand nothing could make our purchase appear anything except a dead loss. As for the plans, they were purely imaginary. The blue lake was about the only part true to nature; and even that should have had a foot-note to state that it was generally lashed into high, unnavigable waves, ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... of him, determined to tell the whole foolish story, to explain the imaginary obstacles that divided them. But he was not to be found, so the impulse died, and she determined to play the farce out to its end, and now, that she knew the core of the whole situation, she could make it count for ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... Mr. Tubbs went off in search of the housekeeper. "An at-home!" She mimicked his precise tones. "Of all the tiresome things. He'll invite a lot of doddering old women who'll come and look you over this way!" Beryl lifted an imaginary lorgnette to her eyes. "Why didn't you say you'd like a regular party and just have young people—there's a boys' school only ten miles from here and it would have been such fun. Of course I couldn't have come down but I could ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... been said, but a light matter to those who talk with light exaggeration of the achievements of the literary artist; but if we exclude that one creative prodigy among men, who has peopled a whole gallery with imaginary beings more real than those of flesh and blood, we shall find that very few archetypal creations have sprung from any single hand. Now, My Uncle Toby is as much the archetype of guileless good nature, of affectionate simplicity, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... comments of mock amazement crowded one upon another. "Jin ... go! He's got the wrong book—that's rag carpet. Don't look at it too long, Gord, it'll cross your eyes. That ain't a suit, it's a game." A gaunt hand solemnly shook out imaginary dice upon the counter, "It's my move and ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... uncomfortable. It need not have troubled itself; nobody would ever wish to sit there. It was such a big rocking-chair, and Mrs. Patton was proud of it; always generously urging her guests to enjoy its comfort, which was imaginary with her, as she was so short that she could hardly have climbed ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... is apparently imaginary; and a little below we find that it was close to Jinn land. China was very convenient for this purpose: the medieval-Moslems, who settled in considerable numbers at Canton and elsewhere, knew just enough ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... by it, a meeting of the chiefs is called. They assemble in one of their forts, and, after a discussion, decide either for an amicable adjustment, or for an exterminating war. Thus these misguided beings are continually destroying each other for some imaginary insult. ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... so able that Thomas Jefferson afterward spoke of him as "the Colossus of that debate." As Congress sat with closed doors and no report was made of the speech, we have no definite knowledge of its arguments. Fifty years afterwards, shortly after John Adams's death, Daniel Webster wrote an imaginary speech containing what in substance he might have said. The principal argument in opposition was made by John Dickinson, who thought that before the Americans finally committed themselves to a deadly struggle with Great Britain, they ought to establish some stronger ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... and a-sinking".[253] The Alfred (74) sent an officer aboard her, and the boats of three English ships saved about 333 of her crew. The "rest went down with her". The flatulent account of her end, given by Barrere in the convention, is largely imaginary. The crew of the Vengeur did not choose death rather than the surrender of their ship. Some of those whom the efforts of the British seamen failed to save, went down with a cry of Vive la republique! They had surrendered after a hard-fought fight, and they died as ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... is called being "faithful" to a friend, but there are many other kinds required. Passing over the more obvious of these, I would draw attention to the subtler form of untruth, involved in endowing your friend with imaginary ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... on tiptoe, glancing at Bracy as he passed, and then stooped down over a patch of glittering snow, scraping up a handful and straightening himself in the sunshine, as he amused himself by addressing an imaginary personage. ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... happened, kid, when somebody acted up in front of your dad?" From the air he secured an imaginary morsel between stubby thumb and forefinger and then blew the imaginary ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... Miss Bird entered Colorado, which she describes, as we have seen, in such a manner as to suggest that it rivals Dr. Richardson's imaginary "Hygeia" in all essential particulars. From Greeley she hastened to Fort Collins, with the grand masses of the Rocky Mountains facing her as she advanced. Still across the boundless sea-like prairie struck the indefatigable traveller, until she came to a sort ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... they were always ready to help others; and their conversation, though not distinguished by brilliant information, was often full of interest. In nearly every case boasting quitted them with their youth, and the bravest were always the most modest. Influenced by no imaginary points of honor, they estimated themselves at their real worth; and all fear of being suspected of cowardice was beneath them. With these brave soldiers, who often united to the greatest kindness of heart a mettle no less great, a flat contradiction ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... scrupled to supply unrecorded details or explanatory speeches in order to make the scene more vivid to my listeners. In two stories of George Fox's youth, as authentic records are scanty, I have even ventured to look through the eyes of imaginary spectators at 'The Shepherd of Pendle Hill' and 'The Angel of Beverley.' But the deeper I have dug down into the past, the less need there has been to fill in outlines; and the more possible it has been to keep ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... but the fault has not been entirely on one side, and only by mutual support and the recognition of their dependent interests can a satisfactory community life be maintained. The root of the whole trouble lies in the imaginary division of the community into town and country. With the realization that their common interests are essential and that their differences are due to lack of proper adjustment, many of these difficulties will be alleviated. It is my experience that in the most successful ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... which alertness, determination, and fearsomeness are vividly displayed. "0-o-m!" (The thrust of the spear.) "Ha-a-a-ha!" (The spear is given an excruciating and entangling half-turn.) And "Old Billy" exclaims, still holding the imaginary "Bidgero" at the spear's length: "That fella Bidgero can clear out! Finish 'em!" The spear has penetrated the unlucky and daring phantom, several of the barbs have become entangled in its vitals, the enemy is at "Old Billy's" mercy, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... her wants. She did everything he did, even taking mustard, and was very brave at quelling the tears that rose to the doll-like blue eyes. When Mr Beecham wiped his moustache, it was amusing to see her also wipe an imaginary one. ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... the presence-chamber have fallen away. Imaginary faces are crowding around him. He turns to these. He shows them human life as the poet's mirror reflects it: in its varied masquerade, in its mingled good and evil, in its steady advance; in the rainbow brightness of its obstructed lights; the deceptive gloom of its merely repeated ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... our people having landed a few bricks on shore, for building a furnace to refound the ship's bell; yet the alarm was so hot at court, that I was called to make answer, when I represented how absurd was this imaginary fear, how dishonourable for the king, and how unfit the place was for any such purpose to us, having neither water nor harbourage. The jealousy was however so very strongly imprinted in their minds, because I had formerly asked a river at Gogo for that purpose, that I could hardly ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... could not admit of impulsion; for to do this I must have known that a celestial matter was the agent. But so far from knowing that there is any such matter, I have proved it to be merely imaginary. ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... the people is impoverished, while another, and very small part, has more than enough. The workers of our own race, at any rate, have enough common-sense to understand, at least when they are not hysterically excited, that imaginary wrongs are not a sufficient reason for great sacrifices. New Zealand's legislation has not created an ideal society, it is true; but for twenty years it has proceeded step by step in the direction of righting the wrongs of the past, and giving opportunity to that part of its people that ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... characters, he finds, are wanting in variety and nature. Its range of passion and humour is lamentably narrow. [Footnote: Ib. 542-4.] Its declamations "tire us with their length; so that, instead of grieving for their imaginary heroes, we are concerned for our own trouble, as we are in the tedious visits of bad company; we are in pain till they are gone". [Footnote: English Garner, iil 542.] The best tragedies of the French—Cinna ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... furnished a direct and trustworthy test of the advance thus far made in the practical establishment of the right of suffrage secured by the Constitution to the liberated race in the Southern States. All disturbing influences, real or imaginary, had been removed ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Rutherford B. Hayes • Rutherford B. Hayes
... me, which I felt bound to communicate to Moore. "My dear fellow," I said in a whisper, "is this quite sportsmanlike? You know you are after some treasure, real or imaginary, and, I put it to you as a candid friend, is not this just a little bit like poaching? Your ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... swiftly the two women sped northward, following the imaginary burglar, while the devoted Mrs. Allen ran breathless in the opposite direction for Si Pray and ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... For much imaginary work was there; Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles' image stood his spear, Grip'd in an armed hand; himself, behind, Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind: A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, Stood for the ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... write with both in mind. The hope of one will stir memories of the other. And who is there to dispute me? At least I know what a battle should be like, and I shall thrill my readers with imaginary combats." ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... was a far more pretentious affair—a sort of army and navy seminary combined, where mystical mathematical problems were solved by the midshipmen, and great ships-of-the-line were navigated over imaginary shoals by unimaginable observations of the moon and the stars, and learned lectures were delivered upon great guns, small arms, and the curvilinear lines described by bombs in ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... of seeming trite, prosy, and common-place, it is right to remind the young generation who consider the purchase of a railway ticket gives them a right to grumble at a thousand imaginary defects and deficiencies in railway management, how great are the advantages in swiftness, economy, and safety, which they enjoy through the genius, enterprise, and stubborn perseverance of George Stephenson and his friends and ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... the other fellow, and will be likely to be here all the afternoon." I couldn't have stayed there if I would without being spotted, for the moment I got myself a little nearer to him he spied me, and began a pantomime of roping me in hand over fist with an imaginary cable. He would have known my face if I had tried to keep near enough to be safe in case of a sudden move, so I took the chance of keeping my appointment with you, getting up a different mug, ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... storm. (How he had set her mind at rest on that occasion he knew best.) It seemed this exquisite nature only needed the sunshine of his unspoken assurance to respond with delighted tenderness to his refined, his cultured advances. He was already beginning to write imaginary letters to his friends, on the theme of his engagement: semi-humourous academic effusions as to how he, who had so long remained immune, had succumbed at last to feminine charm; how he, the determined celibate—Wentworth always called himself a celibate—had been taken captive ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... Booksellers (1779-1781) which they improperly[229:1] called "Johnson's Poets" (improperly, because the poets were, with four exceptions, the choice not of the biographer but of the booksellers, anxious to retain their imaginary copyright), Marvell has no place. Mr. George Ellis, in his Specimens of the early English poets first published in 1803, printed from Marvell Daphne and Chloe (in part) and Young Love. When Mr. Bowles, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... the rant Miss Cameron expected, Josie gave poor Ophelia's mad scene, and gave it very well, having been trained by the college professor of elocution and done it many times. She was too young, of course, but the white gown, the loose hair, the real flowers she scattered over the imaginary grave, added to the illusion; and she sung the songs sweetly, dropped her pathetic curtsies, and vanished behind the curtain that divided the rooms with a backward look that surprised her critical auditor ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... is," said Bettina, thinking of the garrulous old monk who so evidently desired to earn his lira, "that people will add so much that is imaginary when there is enough that is true. It is a shame to so exaggerate stories of St. Francis's life as to make them seem ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... instinctive guidance, for the production of any tone demanded by the ear. This same ability is invoked in the mental imitation of tones. In one case the muscular contractions are actually performed; in the other the muscular adjustments are wholly or in part imaginary. ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... sneaked it. At first he made excuses; he invented all sorts of lies—ten francs for a subscription, twenty francs fallen through a hole which he showed in his pocket, fifty francs disbursed in paying off imaginary debts. After a little, he no longer troubled himself to give any explanations. The money ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... great constellations of the zodiacal belt which forms the Earth's orbit and the Sun's shining pathway around the celestial universe have been considered as mere imaginary figures, or emblems, invented by an early, primitive people to distinguish the monthly progress of the Sun and mark out, in a convenient manner, the twelve great divisions, or spaces, of the solar year. To this end, IT IS THOUGHT, the various star groups, termed constellations, were fancifully ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... wonderful pomp; then, after having reveled in the sight of a hurricane over the plain where the whirling sands made red, dry mists and death-bearing clouds, he would welcome the night with joy, for then fell the healthful freshness of the stars, and he listened to imaginary music in the skies. Then solitude taught him to unroll the treasures of dreams. He passed whole hours in remembering mere nothings, and comparing his ...
— A Passion in the Desert • Honore de Balzac
... that he had been through hell and insisted that he would live forever now. Another was an artist, a landscape-painter, who had lost his eyesight. He was seeing beautiful landscapes, and the nurses had to strap him to his cot to keep him from struggling to his feet and trying to use an imaginary brush on imaginary canvases. He ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... In every instance of war, parents look to their children with terror as they grow up to the military age. The army is a national curse, and parental feelings are a perpetual source of affliction. If the great body of the people in Europe, instead of clamouring for imaginary rights, and talking nonsense about constitutions, which they have neither the skill to construct, nor would find worth the possession if they had them, would concentrate their claims in a demand for the habeas-corpus, and the abolition of the conscription, they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... leisure of this his first residence in London that Perez published, in the summer of 1594, his Relaciones, under the imaginary name of Raphael Peregrino; which, far from concealing the real author, in reality designated him by the allusion to his wandering life. This account of his adventures, composed with infinite art, was calculated to render his ungrateful and relentless persecutor still more odious, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... kinship, at last tear themselves free from their stem and float off, turn over, and thereafter live happily upon the bottom of the sea, roaming where they will, creeping slowly along and fulfilling the destiny of our imaginary daisy. ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... the girls, a tall, dark, graceful creature, but with the protruding lips, high cheekbones, and flat distended nose of the Malay, rose with contracted eyebrows, took her companion, forced her upon her knees, and then drawing an imaginary kris, she placed the point on the girl's shoulder, and struck the hilt with her right hand as if driving it perpendicularly down into ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... did glory in those two wisps of material! The fragment of envelope had come from a foreign land. What contained it once? joy or sorrow? Was the recipient worthy, or the gift true? And I went on with the imaginary story woven out of the shreds of fabric before me until it filled all my vision, when suddenly fancy was hushed to repose,—for, as sure as I sat there, living souls had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... haven't a ghost of an argument. I don't want to vote myself, you see, and I don't see how I am going to make other women want to. Just at present I have so many matters to bother about that I can't throw myself into an imaginary position. I'd break down and cry—I feel exactly like it—if I hadn't been this way before and managed to pull through by the skin of my teeth. You see, standing up before a crowd makes you feel so desperate and hemmed-in- ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... of the assembly, was opposed to this plan, on account of the pride and insupportable nature of the nobility; and said, that it would be folly to place themselves again under such inevitable tyranny for the sake of avoiding imaginary dangers from the plebeians. Rinaldo, finding his advice unfavorably received, vexed at his own misfortune and that of his party, imputed the whole to heaven itself, which had resolved upon it, rather than to human ignorance and ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... enunciated our strength has grown by leaps and bounds, although in that time the vast increase in our foreign trade and of travel abroad, modern transport, modern mails, the cables, and the wireless have brought us close to Europe and have made our isolation more and more imaginary, there has been until the outbreak of the present conflict small desire on our part to abrogate, or even amend, the old familiar tradition which has for so long given ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... rotated through one-eighth or tenth of a revolution every three minutes, or thereabouts. The general motion given to the grinding tool should be a series of circular sweeps of about one-fourth the diameter of the glass disc, and gradually carried round an imaginary circle drawn on the surface of the lens and concentric with it ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... Macaulay had written a historical novel. I am convinced that it would have been a great one. I do not know if he had the power of drawing an imaginary character, but he certainly had the gift of reconstructing a dead celebrity to a remarkable degree. Look at the simple half-paragraph in which he gives us Johnson and his atmosphere. Was ever a more definite picture ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... soothing game, I believe, in the world than this of holding imaginary triumphant discourse with your enemy. Yet (oddly) it brought me but cold comfort on this occasion, my wound being too recent and galling. The sky, so long clouded, was bright'ning now, and growing serener every minute: the hills were thick with fox- gloves, the vales white with hawthorn, smelling ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... some men has been put to so sore a trial. It is not very difficult for well-formed minds to abandon their interest, but the separation of fame and virtue is a harsh divorce. Liberty is in danger of being made unpopular to Englishmen. Contending for an imaginary power we begin to acquire the spirit of domination and to lose the relish of an honest equality. The principles of our forefathers become suspected to us, because we see them animating the present opposition of our children. ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... in either case vary as the method employed. Mrs. Gamp, the outcome of a single observation, is a type certainly, but exaggerated and "founded on fact" rather than true to life. "The Suburbanite" (see p. 24), though an equally imaginary portrait, is the real thing—the absolute personification of a type ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... every cause of further delay, whether real or imaginary, on the part of Congress to the admission to seats of loyal Senators and Representatives from the State of Tennessee, I have, notwithstanding the anomalous character of this proceeding, affixed my signature to the resolution. My approval, however, is not to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... golden age of Ireland, like the golden age of every other country, never had any real existence. It is like the good old-fashioned servant who from the time of Terence to our own has always lived in the imaginary past, but never in the real present. The belief in a recent golden age is, however, so prevalent in Ireland that I have thought it worth while to investigate the grounds on which it is based and the means by which it has been ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... has been absurdly derived from their imaginary settlement on the banks of the Leman Lake. [21] That fortunate district, from the lake to the Avenche, and Mount Jura, was occupied by the Burgundians. [22] The northern parts of Helvetia had indeed been subdued by the ferocious Alemanni, who destroyed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... route, passing to and from the river, that we had to wait hours for them to get out of our way. Often a drove would get frightened at a passing wagon, the report of a gun, the barking of a dog, or some imaginary enemy, and would start on a run which soon became a furious stampede, the hindermost following those before them, and in their blind fury crowding them forward with such irresistible force that the leaders ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... condition in which the tip of the tongue is bound down to the floor of the mouth by an abnormally short and narrow frenum, or by folds of mucous membrane on each side of the frenum, so that the tongue cannot be protruded. Although this deformity is rare, it is common for parents to blame an imaginary tongue-tie when a child is slow in learning to speak, or when he speaks indistinctly or stammers, and the doctor is frequently requested to divide the frenum under such circumstances. In the vast majority of cases nothing is found to be wrong with the ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... that he should have the power to—but I tell you he's killing out all the good in me—a little bit every day. I can't even want to be good. Oh, how stupid to think you could see—that any one could see! Sometimes I do forget and laugh all at once. It's as grotesque and unreal as an imaginary monster I used to be afraid of—then I'm sick, for I remember we are bound together by the laws of God and man. Of course, you can't see, Aunt Bell—the fire hasn't eaten through yet—but I tell you it's burning inside ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Hungary, thus disentangled on one side, and set free from the most formidable of her enemies, soon persuaded the Saxons to peace; took possession of Bavaria; drove the emperour, after all his imaginary conquests, to the shelter of a neutral town, where he was treated as a fugitive; and besieged the French in Prague, in the city which they ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... There is nothing imaginary in the fertility of the West. Personal observation has satisfied us that it much surpasses anything that exists in the Atlantic States, unless in exceptions, through the agency of great care and high manuring, or in instances of peculiar ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... night to escape assassination, LINCOLN arrived at Washington nine days before his inauguration. The outgoing President, at the opening of the session of Congress, had still kept as the majority of his advisors men engaged in treason; had declared that in case of even an "imaginary" apprehension of danger from notions of freedom among the slaves, "disunion would become inevitable." LINCOLN and others had questioned the opinion of Taney; such impugning he ascribed to the "factious temper of the times." The favorite doctrine of the majority of the Democratic ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... highly ridiculous in the mouth of this excellent actor."[42] In France Harlequin was improved into a wit, and even converted into a moralist; he is the graceful hero of Florian's charming compositions, which please even in the closet. "This imaginary being, invented by the Italians, and adopted by the French," says the ingenious Goldoni, "has the exclusive right of uniting naivete with finesse, and no one ever surpassed Florian in the delineation of this amphibious character. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... had without doubt made some impression upon a spirit not anticipated in an imaginary capacity of governor; but this one here, on the contrary, fortified himself in his resolution, & begged me to tell the French to embark themselves, without considering that my nephew had not time enough to go seek his clothes, ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... signature, as now; a signature better known, perhaps, than any other in the world, and one with which almost every human being who can write is perfectly familiar. Of course it will be understood that the quantities given above are altogether imaginary. It is impossible to remember the exact figures after so many years, but they are inserted to show the form the ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... was very proud of that wonderful hunting-knife of his. He even smiled to see the perceptible shudder with which Nellie surveyed him as he cut imaginary circles in the ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... determined, the history of the human heart traced thread by thread, and the history of society recorded in all its parts, we have the foundation. There will be no imaginary incidents in it; it will consist solely ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... plaint and protest. In politics we call this practice calamity-howling, whether in tornado-swept Kansas, blizzard-bitten Iowa or boss-ridden New York. in literature it is mere charlatanry, mere scagliola, made for sale. Hamlin Garland makes imaginary journeys over "Traveled Roads" to tell us of the utter and intolerable miseries of the Western farmers who live in sod houses. Raising dollar wheat is not so bad, even in a sod house. George Cable and Albion Tourges write sentimental lies about the Southern negroes. Those at all ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... vested with a reasonable soul, and that soul adorned with faculties and capacities adapted both to honour his Maker and be honoured by him; I say, to see it sunk and degenerated to a degree so more than stupid, as to prostrate itself to a frightful nothing, a mere imaginary object dressed up by themselves, and made terrible to themselves by their own contrivance, adorned only with clouts and rags; and that this should be the effect of mere ignorance, wrought up into ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... the rough coats and rougher banter of the shepherds. For though the poet raised the pastoral life of Sicily into the realms of ideal poetry, he was careful not to dissociate his version from reality, and he allowed no imaginary conceptions to overmaster his art. He depicted no age of innocence; his poetry reflects no philosophical illusion of primitive simplicity; he elaborated no imaginary cult of mystical worship. His art, however little it may ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... may be taken at 10 inches. The portion immediately subjacent is called the subsoil, and it has considerable agricultural importance, and requires a short notice. In many instances, soil and subsoil are separated by a purely imaginary line, and no striking difference can be observed either in their chemical or physical characters. In such cases it has been the practice with some persons not to limit the term soil to the upper portion, but to apply it to the whole depth, however great ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... the romantic scallops of a black wig, was giving the big scene from the third act. And though it sounded like a burlesque of that famous passage, and though she limped more than ever as she reeled to an imaginary shrine in the corner, and though the black wig was slightly askew by now, and the black velvet hung with bunchy awkwardness about her skinny little body, there was nothing of mirth in Sid Hahn's face as he gazed. He shrank ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... Chad administered his kick with fantastic force and sent an imaginary object flying. It was accordingly as if they were once more rid of the question and could come back to what really concerned him. "Of course I shall see ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... in the indulgence of his official powers. I would I knew which is the true statement of the case, and whether the once famed De Walton is become afraid of his enemies more than fits a knight, or makes imaginary doubts the pretext of tyrannizing over his friend. I cannot say it would make much difference to me, but I would rather have it that the man I once loved had turned a petty tyrant than a weak-spirited coward; and I would be content that he should study to vex me, rather ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... of worshiping the mastodon head; but I doubt if this can be said to be idol worship. Can and his family were probably monotheists. The masses of the people, however, may have placed the different natural phenomena under the direct supervision of special imaginary beings, prescribing to them the same duties that among the Catholics are prescribed, or rather attributed, to some of the saints; and may have tributed to them the sort of worship of dulia, tributed to the saints—even made images that they imagined to represent such or ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... sat around the tea-table, the two mothers and all the rest of them, looking gloomy enough; while over there in her bit of a brown house, in the village, sat Mrs. Lee in very much the same frame of mind, trying to relieve her feelings by smoothing imaginary wrinkles out of her boy's best clothes, and planning for him any number of bright red neckties, if he would only come back ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... in its landscapes, in its description of bogs and desolation, of dark forests in which lurk savages ready to spring out on those who are rash enough to wander within their confines. All the scenery in it which is not imaginary is Irish and ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... as if to chase an adversary; then they would swerve aside, the slaves on one side rowing, while those on the other backed, so as to make a rapid turn. Then she lay for a minute or two immovable, and then backed water, or turned to avoid the attack of an imaginary foe. Then for an hour she lay quiet, while the knights, divesting themselves of their mantles and armour, worked one of the guns on the poop, aiming at a floating barrel moored for the purpose a mile out at sea. At eleven o'clock they returned to the port. Bread and ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... circularly; in the digestion of his relations he is stoical, and sits regularly. He has an alphabetical table of all the chief commanders, generals, leaders, provincial towns, rivers, ports, creeks, with other fitting materials to furnish his imaginary building. Whisperings, mutterings, and bare suppositions are sufficient grounds for the authority of his relations. It is strange to see with what greediness this airy chameleon, being all lungs and wind, will swallow a receipt of news, as if it were physical; yea, with what frontless insinuation ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... district school, seemed dull work indeed to a boy who was longing to stand sword in hand on a blood-stained deck, in a gory uniform trimmed with skulls and cross-bones, and order his enemies to be thrown one by one into the sea. "The shark awaits your car-casses!" spouted the imaginary desperado with a vicious snap of his teeth; and when Aunt Greg interrupted by asking him to bring in an armful of kindling, he glared at her like the Red Rover himself. Poor Aunt Greg! how little she guessed what ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... . . . of looking out for people's foibles for her own amusement, or the entertainment of her hearers. . . . I do not suppose she ever in her life said a sharp thing.' We may be sure, therefore, that when she seems to imply that her mother's ailments were imaginary, or that Mrs. Knight's generosity to Edward was insignificant, or that Mrs. Knight herself was about to contract a second marriage, she is no more serious than when she describes herself as having taken too much wine, as a hardened flirt, or as a selfish housekeeper ordering only those ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... they will lean on the Lord, and say, Is not the Lord among us?" We are convinced that much of the work of the faithful and pungent preacher, who preaches with his eye fixed on the great white throne and the descending Judge, is to dislodge professors from their imaginary trust in a Saviour who does not save them, and probe deeply their hearts festering with sin, which have been hastily pronounced healed, "slightly healed." Many of us have incautiously said to awakened souls, "Only believe," before we ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the Department The Imaginary Mistress The Middle Classes Cousin Betty The Country Parson In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following: Another Study of Woman ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... which such an imaginary achievement raised his dreams, there was but one higher step, and his colossal egotism immediately mounted to occupy it. On August 9, just two weeks after his arrival ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... discussed. That to an American especially this peculiar beauty tells with great force we can readily believe, and Mrs. Van Rensselaer, whose paper on Salisbury has been quoted before in this book, expresses admirably the feeling, which, whether it be true or only imaginary, is no doubt the impression of such a place as the Close of Salisbury on many an educated visitor. "Salisbury," she writes, "is the very type and picture of the Church of the Prince of Peace. Nowhere ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... contrary, Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. xii, 15): "When the same image that comes into the mind of a speaker presents itself to the mind of the sleeper, so that the latter is unable to distinguish the imaginary from the real union of bodies, the flesh is at once moved, with the result that usually follows such motions; and yet there is as little sin in this as there is in speaking and therefore thinking about such ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... ingenious ways. Looking back now I see that much of my terror was needless. They seldom ill-treated me in act; but knowing, I suppose, that the imagination is often very apprehensive in weakly bodies like mine, they took a delight in threatening me, conjuring up all manner of imaginary horrors, and so working on me that my sleep was disturbed by hideous nightmares. I told nobody of what I suffered, and when Mistress Pennyquick noticed that I was pale and heavy-eyed sometimes in the morning, she did but suppose ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... in his presence. When, however, Egmont had fallen from favor, and was already a prisoner, the Cardinal diligently exerted himself to place under the King's eye what he considered the most damning evidence of the Count's imaginary treason; a document with which the public prosecutor had not ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... there is an imaginary boundary line which lies over the battle line; and there is another which may be on your side or on the other side of the battle line. It is the location of the second line that tells who has the mastery of the air. A word of bare and impressive meaning this of mastery in war, which ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... she passed through sensitive phases of feeling that she mistook for remorse. Believing that she had defrauded her children of the tenderness that should have been theirs, she sought to redeem those imaginary wrongs; bestowing attentions and tender cares which made her precious to them; she longed to make her children live, as it were, within her heart; to shelter them beneath her feeble wings; to cherish them enough in the few remaining days to redeem ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... at the Bush Terminal at Brooklyn," explained Tom. "Look out there; don't get in the way of the ropes," and he pushed the crowd back from the imaginary ropes, and whistled a ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... listen to me. Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections of their day-dreams, and put their trust in him. They fall in love with this imaginary creature in the man ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... an observation of epistemological nature. A geometrical-physical theory as such is incapable of being directly pictured, being merely a system of concepts. But these concepts serve the purpose of bringing a multiplicity of real or imaginary sensory experiences into connection in the mind. To "visualise" a theory, or bring it home to one's mind, therefore means to give a representation to that abundance of experiences for which the theory supplies ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... Legion. At the far edge of the field was a fringe of stunted cedars, like an abatis, partly concealing the old barricade where, in the golden days of their youth, he had played with Shirley at storming the fort; and Shirley, in these fierce assaults, had usually tumbled over upon the imaginary enemy ahead ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... better known than it already is that I strongly favor colonization; and yet I wish to say there is an objection urged against free colored persons remaining in the country which is largely imaginary, if not ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... her. There in the temple of Art, where critical eyes were bent searchingly upon her, Nature triumphantly asserted itself, and she who wept passionately from the bitter realisation of her own accumulated wrongs, was wildly applauded as the queen of actresses, who so successfully simulated imaginary woes. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... centre of the church, on a rug surrounded by foreign consuls. Anton, dressed in his high-school uniform, with his grandfather's old sabre coming to his shoulder, used to act the part of the Governor with extraordinary subtlety and carry out a review of imaginary Cossacks. Often the children would gather round their mother or their old nurse ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... immense use to the humble classes, or those of limited means. There they might purchase, at an amazing reduction in price, excellent things, almost new, the actual depreciation in value being almost imaginary. On one side of the Temple, set apart for bedding, there were heaps of coverlets, sheets, mattresses, and pillows. Further on were carpets, curtains, and all sorts of kitchen utensils, besides ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... as the regions most threatened by the spirit of change. The forecast was not an accurate one. In each of these countries Government proved during the succeeding years to be much more than a match for its real or imaginary foes: it was in the Mediterranean States, which had excited comparatively little anxiety, that the first successful attack was made upon established power. Three movements arose successively in the three southern peninsulas, at the time when Metternich was enjoying ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Jimmie dismissed the taxi-cab and asked for a room adjoining an imaginary Senator Gates. When the clerk told him Senator Gates was not at that hotel, Jimmie excitedly demanded to be led to the telephone. He telephoned the office of the steamship line: and, in the name of ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... They entered this state of abstractedness unconsciously. To do so intentionally, you go by the law of indirectness. For instance, take sight; concentrate your vision and your whole attention upon some object, real or imaginary, until soon the sense of HEARING becomes dormant. A little practice will enable you to study, think or sleep, regardless ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... scandalous innuendos against, or imaginary conversations with, the fair, the brave, and the wise amongst the daughters and sons of America, I say, Read not at all; since herein, though something of mankind, there is little of any man, woman, or child, of the thousands ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... fire were not so full of colour as these early messages. They consisted of code letters. The clock code for signalling the results of artillery fire was first used in 1915 and afterwards generally throughout the war. The target was taken as the centre of a clock and imaginary lines were circumscribed around it at distances of 10, 25, 50, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 yards. These lines were lettered Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, respectively. Twelve o'clock was always taken as true north from the target and the remaining hours accordingly. An observer ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... was as follows:—Taking an imaginary line drawn from the Areonal to Mars as the base line of an isosceles triangle, we were moving along the left side of the triangle, and Mars was moving in a slightly curved line along the right side. Our paths were ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... and, with a "let mamma know," to the butler, set to work to entertain her visitor. She would have had no difficulty in doing this under ordinary circumstances, as all that Mr. Smith wanted was a good listener. He was a somewhat heavy and garrulous old gentleman, with many imaginary, and a few real troubles, the constant contemplation of which served to occupy the whole of his own time, and as much of his friends' as he could get them to give him. But scarcely had he settled himself comfortably in an easy chair opposite to ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... been on the floor while the music was being performed, but disappeared shortly afterwards. He had his gun, and dodged from one chair to the next, and sighted his gun, and bounded away, as though attacking and running from an imaginary enemy. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... the leader, and the sound of the voices, the plod of the iron shoes, and the bell-like tinkle of the harness were all pleasant to hear. The whole thing seemed to her picturesque and interesting, like a small episode in the Old Testament, and imaginary words offered themselves as suitable to describe it. "Therefore that day her husband gathered all that was theirs, and set her behind his horses and they journeyed ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
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