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More "Visionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... neither shy nor slow nor visionary. Nor shall his theory of immanent morality trouble him for the while. Reality is met with reality on solid, though sometimes slippery, ground. His animalism, long leashed and starved, is eager for prey. His Phoenician passion is awake. And fortunately, Khalid finds ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... disquisition, and the boldness of Pindaric daring. I have three strong champions to defend me against the attacks of Criticism: the Novelty, the Difficulty, and the Utility of the work. I may justly plume myself that I first have drawn the nymph Mathesis from the visionary caves of abstracted idea, and caused her to unite with Harmony. The first-born of this Union I now present to you; with interested motives indeed—as I expect to receive in return the more valuable offspring of your Muse. Thine ever, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Zachary. That one word was more eloquent than all the rest of his words put together. This fellow is no visionary. His scheme may be daring, and unprincipled, but—he knows very well ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... same laughter and chatter and suppressed song. Opposite the tiny table the same man with the broad, good-natured face was making critical, smiling observation, as of yore. As ever, the look recalled the visionary to the present. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... not His very self, have stifled in the breast of modern rationalism all fertile ideas of the Divinity. If God, in fact, is a personal being outside of us, he who believes himself to have peculiar relations with God is a "visionary," and as the physical and physiological sciences have shown us that all supernatural visions are illusions, the logical Deist finds it impossible to understand the great beliefs of the past. Pantheism, on the other hand, in suppressing the Divine personality, is as far as it can be from the ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... and substance of the accursed ones at which he looked. As he felt the change going on he tried to utter a cry, but he could not make a sound nor move a limb. The ground under him rocked and pitched; it grew darker and darker, till everything was visionary; and he thought himself surrounded by spirits, and in the mansions of the damned. Something like a deep black cloud began to gather gradually round him. The gigantic structure, with its tall terrific arches, turned slowly into darkness, and the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Watson's mind, another expression showed itself in the hollow-cheeked, massive face. It was the look of the visionary who sees in events the strange verification of obscure instincts and divinations in which he himself perhaps has only half-believed. He and Fenwick had been friends now—in some respects, close friends—for a good many years. Of late, they had met rarely, and neither ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had been standing, sat down. Before him, on the ginger of the wall, hung the portrait of the gorgeous swashbuckler. Behind the latter were portraits, dim, remote, visionary, of other progenitors who probably never existed. But he was convinced that they had, convinced that always, sword in hand, they had upheld the honour of the Casa-Evora. No, surely, his daughter had not forfeited that. No, certainly, he did not suspect her. But there was much that he did not ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... elder, and let me prophesy! That boy just takes after his father, and he will never amount to anything in this world or any other. His mother what is dead was a good woman—an awful good woman; but she was sort o' visionary. They say that she used to see things at camp-meetin's, and lose her strength, and have far-away visions. She might have seen fairies. But she was an awful good woman—good to everybody, and everybody loved her; and we were all sorry when she died, and we all love her grave ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... things, which, in the pictures of that period, fills the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the hillsides with pools of water, and the pools of water with flowering reeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and in his visionariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion of Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or less refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary painters; ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... without respect for the most sacred things, he is generally allowed to be a man of integrity, and even by his enemies, an enthusiast, who deceives himself as much as others. Now in the hopes of obtaining some uncertain and visionary good, and even while declaring his horror of civil war and bloodshed, he has risen in rebellion against the actual government, and is the cause of the cruel war now raging, not in the open fields or even in the scattered ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... which the testator firmly believed were still concealed somewhere about the Trevern property. The widowed Lady Trevern, however, was a capable and practically-minded woman, little inclined to set much value upon this visionary idea of "treasure trove." She was most reluctant to see her sons waste their lives in a hopeless search after the missing property, and succeeded in impressing both her children with her own views regarding the utter hopelessness of their father's quest. And, as the years passed away, the story ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... not know, I found her unconscious. The ladies were out, the old Aunt had a stroke. It is such a sweet, promising life, and can be developed into something worth while. You may think me visionary—" ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... will own that I am no visionary, and that you will allow others to watch over you, since you will ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... spoke after a prolonged pause, during which he stared at the white-faced man before him. A smile was upon that white face. George was deeply affected. He seemed to have stepped out of a world of visions—a world that had a visionary Church, visionary preachers, visionary doctrines—all unsubstantial as words, which are but breath—into a world of realities—such realities as life and death and——Ah, there were no other realities in existence but the two: ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... for the formation of the Turkish gendarmerie under Colonel Valentine Baker. Associated with this crowd of silly and inexperienced boys was an old grey-bearded American doctor, who believed in the whole cock-and-bull story as if it had been gospel, and had undertaken to act as surgeon aboard that visionary craft. He was a delightful old fellow, and, for all his simplicity, had a vein of humour in him. Odd as it may sound, he was a man of some distinction, and had served with conspicuous honour in the Civil War, He had money of his own, and ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... he afterward said, "I did a little of a number of things fairly well—sang, played the guitar and violin, acted, painted signs and wrote poetry. My father did not encourage my verse-making for he thought it too visionary, and being a visionary himself, he believed he understood the dangers of following the promptings of the poetic temperament. I doubted if anything would come of the verse-writing myself. At this time it is ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... mother did not know of the spiritualistic orgies in Switzerland, she knew that my father was a spiritualist. And this vexed her, not only because she conceived it to be visionary folly, but because it was 'low.' She knew that it led him to join a newly-formed band of Latter-Day mystics which had been organised at Raxton, but luckily she did not know that through them he believed himself to be holding communication with his first wife. The members of this body were tradespeople ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... clouds;—kelpie and gnome, Lurlei and Hartz spirits; the wraith and foreboding phantom; the spectra of second sight; the various conceptions of avenging or tormented ghost, haunting the perpetrator of crime, or expiating its commission; and the half fictitious and contemplative, half visionary and believed images of the presence of death itself, doing its daily work in the chambers of sickness and sin, and waiting for its hour in the fortalices of strength and the high places of pleasure;—these, partly degrading us by ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... are turned aside from the career they might have accomplished, by a visionary and impracticable fastidiousness. They can find nothing that possesses all the requisites that should fix their choice, nothing so good that should authorise them to present it to public observation, and enable them to offer it to their ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... had, as we have remarked, made him in some sort a visionary. This, then, was in the nature of a vision. He actually saw that Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him. He had almost reached the point of asking himself who that man was, and he ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... images reflected on the mirror of the mind, and that therefore objective reality of things is doubtful-nay, more, they are unreal, illusory, and dreams. If so, we can no longer distinguish the real from the visionary; the waking from the dreaming; the sane from the insane; the true from the untrue. Whether life is real or an empty dream, we are ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... believed that the earth was a vast animal which breathed and reasoned, or to claim the palm of comparative merit because Sir Thomas More listened to the babbling of a pretended prophetess, and Luther waged what he considered no visionary but actual combats with the powers of darkness. If then we have dwelt on the defects of an age when civilization was still struggling with the remains of barbarism, it is to foster no spirit of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... THE GREAT1 (356-323 B.C.), king of Macedon, was the son of Philip II. of Macedon, and Olympias, an Epirote princess. His father was pre-eminent for practical genius, his mother a woman of half-wild blood, weird, visionary and terrible; and Alexander himself is singular among men of action for the imaginative splendours which guided him, and among romantic dreamers for ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... absorbing. It was as if through that narrow, shut-up chamber a gust of mountain air were sweeping like a breath of fresh life. Mr. Gresley was vaguely stirred in spite of himself, until he remembered that it was all fantastic, visionary. He had never felt like that, and his own experience was his measure of the utmost that is possible in human nature. He would have called a kettle visionary if he had never seen one himself. It was only saved from that reproach by the fact that it hung on ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... false impression with the community. Had not the through time of steamers this season been suppressed, the governor of the State would not have imagined five-day trips from Buffalo to New York, as per his message, and our city editors would not have ventilated such visionary pretensions. There are a multitude of horse-boat captains that can reduce their net canal time of movement below the Baxter's, which has been so extensively commented upon; but their so doing would not expedite the ...
— History of Steam on the Erie Canal • Anonymous
... "beards," and particularly terrible inventors, who all had an infallible way of destroying at a blow the Prussian army, and who accused General Trochu of treason, and of refusing their offers, giving as a reason the old prejudices of military laws among nations. One of these visionary people had formerly been physician to a somnambulist, and took from his pocket—with his tobacco and cigarette papers—a series of bottles labelled: cholera, yellow fever, typhus fever, smallpox, etc., and proposed as a very simple thing to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Street he left the train and strode across the park, his imagination playing happy, visionary tunes. He would drop in to-morrow at St. Isidore's on his way back from White and Einstein's. He must see more of those fellows at Henry's clinic; they seemed a good set. And he was not sure that he should answer the Baltimore man so flatly. He would write ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... With the wide diversity of opinion that prevails, each of us must make concessions in order to secure such a measure as will accomplish the objects sought for without impairing the public credit or the general interests of our people. This is no time for visionary theories of political economy. We must deal with facts as we find them and not as we wish them. We must aim at results based upon practical experience, for what has been probably will be. The best prophet of ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... it, Amine, since you are so earnest. I can refuse you nothing; but I have a foreboding that yours and my happiness will be wrecked for ever. I am not a visionary, but it does appear to me that, strangely mixed up as I am, at once with this world and the next, some little portion of futurity is opened to me. I have given my promise, Amine, but from it ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... queerly. He spent his money just as usefully and wisely, but the shock of sudden wealth after a life of poverty, people said, had unsettled his mind. He claimed to see things that others did not see, to hear voices, and to have visions. Evidently, he was not of the harmless, foolish, visionary order, but a man of character and of great personal force, for the people became divided in their opinions, and the vicar, good man, regarded and treated him as a "special case." For many, his name and atmosphere became charged almost with a spiritual ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... never felt before. On such occasions he was apt to leave his door open, and listen as for footsteps; for what might not come to him out of this vague, nebulous world beyond? Perhaps even SHE,—for this strange solitary was not insane nor visionary. He was never in spirit alone. For night and day, sleeping or waking, pacing the beach or crouching over his driftwood fire, a woman's face was always before him,—the face for whose sake and for ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... not take it with all the seriousness that she did. I would not wound her for the world if I could help it, but the idea of a shroud gets too near the bone to be safe, and I had to fend her off at all hazards. So when I doubted if the Fates regarded the visionary shroud as of necessity appertaining to me, she said, in a way that was, for her, ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... thought over all manner of plans for removing both children from the influence of their wretched home and drunken parents; but most of these were pronounced by the more experienced to be visionary and not feasible. So they still continued to return to them at night, although, "weather fair or weather foul, weather wet or weather dry," they never failed to be present at their post as early as ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... faith and opinions as deserving to be punished because heretical. Nor does he approve the course of those who endanger the peace and quiet of great nations, and the best interest of their own race by indulging in a chimerical and visionary philanthropy—a luxury which chiefly consists in drawing their robes around them to avoid contact with their fellows, and proclaiming ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... But a visionary man, named Baillie, calculated the alleged observations backward, and found them sufficiently correct to satisfy him that all the rest of the story was equally true. It never seems to have occurred to him, that if he could calculate eclipses backward, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... think I hear some of my fair readers exclaim, "Is this the early rising this new correspondent of the MIRROR means to enforce? Drag us from our beds at peep of day! The visionary barbarian! Why, ferocious as our Innovator is, he would just as soon drag a tigress from her's! We will not obey this self-appointed Dictator!" Stay, gentle ladies; in the first place I am not going to enforce this or any other hour; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... and the wind how could any such message be delivered? And already the steamer was away from the land, standing out to the lonely plain of waters, and the sound of the engines had ceased, and the figures on the deck had grown faint and visionary. But still there was that one speck of white visible; and the man knew that a pair of eyes that had many a time looked into his own—as if with a faith that such intercommunion could never be broken—were now trying, through overflowing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... led there a narrower life than his father's had been. He was, nevertheless, the most broadly characteristic figure of the Puritan of his time. He was able and learned, abnormally laborious, leaving over 400 titles attributed to him; and at the same time he was an ascetic and visionary. The work by which he is best remembered, the Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England from its First Planting in the Year 1620, unto the Year of our Lord 1698 (1702), is the chief historical monument of the period, and the most considerable ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... on "Fors" for some time his attention was drawn by Mr. W.C. Sillar to the question of "Usury." At first he had seen no crying sin in Interest. He had held that the "rights of capital" were visionary, and that the tools should belong to him that can handle them, in a perfect state of society; but he thought that the existing system was no worse in this respect than in others, and his expectation of reform in the plan of investment went hand-in-hand with ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... her that belief or unbelief was a matter of education and temperament, and that the feelings of which Dennis spoke were but the deceptive emotions of our agitated hearts. To that degree that the Divine love seemed visionary and hopeless, she longed for him to speak of his own, if in truth it still existed, that she could understand and believe in. If during what remained of life she could only drink the sweetness of that, she felt it was the best she could hope ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... man, all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the mind ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... their blood is full of it.... The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her. They are the merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile, the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan. These impossible contradictions war ceaselessly in ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... thief and supplanter, drove at his throat with a knife. He missed: but the next instant, these two fond friends, whose friendship had fenced us others off almost as strangers, were wallowing and knifing one another on the bottom-boards,—all over the visionary legacy of a Jew, thousands of miles away, whose picking of their pockets had been their common reminiscence and their standing joke through days of horror! And political economists used to tell us that money is a ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... through the blue of the immeasurable distance." And his music, at least those rich fragments that are his music, make us feel as though that summer sojourn had been symbolic of his career, as though in spirit he had ever lived in some high, visionary place overlooking the sweep of centuries in which Russia had waxed from infancy to maturity. It is as though the chiming of the bells of innumerable Russian villages, villages living and villages dead and underground a thousand years, had mounted incessantly to his ears, telling him of ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... that he must come to her without a penny, knowing that she had the means to keep them both modestly. Nor could he, without a pang, think of surrendering the twenty-eight thousand dollars he had fought for and won. He was no visionary. The value of money he understood perfectly. It stood for power, place, honor, the things that were worth having. Given what he had, Jack knew he could double it in Goldbanks within the year. There were legitimate opportunities for investment ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... the history of human life from the beginning, what a visionary spectacle it is! How miraculously permanent in the whole! how sorrowfully ephemeral in the parts! What pathetic sentiments it awakens! Amidst what awful mysteries it hangs! The subject of the derivation of the soul has been copiously discussed ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... scenes of earthly joy! ah, much-lov'd shades! Soon may my footsteps tread your vernal glades. Ah! should kind Heav'n permit me to explore Your seats of still tranquillity once more! E'en now to Fancy's visionary eye, Hope shews the flattering hour of transport nigh, Blue shines the aether, when the storm is past; And calm repose succeeds to sorrow's blast. Flourished, ye scenes of every new delight! Wave wide your branches to my raptur'd sight! While, ne'er to roam ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... my worst suspicions stand confirmed. I have declared to De Valmont my passion for his niece, and the sullen visionary has denied my suit—nay, insolently told me "Geraldine's affections are another's right." —Curses on that minion's head!—'tis for Florian De Valmont's heiress is reserved—and shall I suffer this vile foundling, this child of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... Rule leaders, and that he, for one, fully believed that all would duly come to pass, once the Bill were carried, which happy event he never expected to see. Every man was to be a kind of king in his own country, evictions were to be utterly unknown; the peasantry were to live rent free, under a visionary scheme of which he had all the absurd particulars; the old sporting maxim reminding farmers that landlord shooting begins on January 1st and ends on December 31st was to become obsolete by reason of a complete extinction of the species—only an odd one being occasionally dug out of the ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... brown, whirling past, beneath other tarpaulin hoods, or at carriage windows, or shielded by enormous dripping wicker hats, or bared to the pelting rain. Curious odors greeted him, as of sour vegetables and of unknown rank substances burning. He stared like a visionary at the streaming ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... instances in which Zoroaster lays aside the prophet, assumes the legislator, and discovers a liberal concern for private and public happiness, seldom to be found among the grovelling or visionary schemes of superstition. Fasting and celibacy, the common means of purchasing the divine favor, he condemns with abhorrence, as a criminal rejection of the best gifts of Providence. The saint, in the Magian religion, is obliged to beget children, to plant useful trees, to destroy noxious ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... that of ordinary talk. The poets of Italy, Spain, and France began to rain influence and to modify and refine not only style but vocabulary. Men were discovering new worlds in more senses than one, and the visionary finger of expectation still pointed forward. There was, as we learn from contemporary pamphlets, very much the same demand for a national literature that we have heard in America. This demand was nobly answered ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Where her future lay visualized before her, heroic deeds, great ambitions, wide charity, he planned years with her, selfish, contented years. As different as smug, satisfied summer from visionary, palpitating spring, he was for her—but she ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... came to Kitty's side. As he approached her his eyes fastened on the loveliness of her attitude, her fair head. In his own expression there was a visionary, fantastic joy; it was the look of the dreamer who, for once, finds in circumstance and the real, poetry ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... from our own experience in order to show what has actually been accomplished in the way of fostering the love of music in one Public School. We are aware that this standard would appear entirely visionary to the authorities of some other schools: there are some to whom the idea of one choir singing in two parts seems more than is practicable. But when music is recognised as an integral part of education, as it used to be in Greece, then we may look forward to a ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Dame Gourlay was able actually to play off such a piece of jugglery, it is clear she must have had better assistance to practise the deception than her own skill or funds could supply. Meanwhile, this mysterious visionary traffic had its usual effect in unsettling Miss Ashton's mind. Her temper became unequal, her health decayed daily, her manners grew moping, melancholy, and uncertain. Her father, guessing partly at the cause of these appearances, made a point of banishing Dame ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... exertion, are too heavy with sleep to have room for tears. They do not reflect that in the morning she breaks into a new consciousness of reality from the clinging dreams of her maternal ambition, and not from the small visionary arms, the fragrant kiss, the angel whisper of her lost babe. They do not feel that in opening upon the light, her eyes part with the fading gleam of gems and satin, and kneeling coronets, and red right ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... must not be a country without ideals. They are useless if they are only visionary; they are only valuable if they are practical. A nation can not dwell constantly on the mountain tops. It has to be replenished and sustained through the ceaseless toil of the less inspiring valleys. But its face ought always ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... pupil, Garrick, had formed the same resolution; and, accordingly, in March, 1737, they arrived in London together. Two such candidates for fame, perhaps never, before that day, entered the metropolis together. Their stock of money was soon exhausted. In his visionary project of an academy, Johnson had probably wasted his wife's substance; and Garrick's father had little more than his half-pay.—The two fellow-travellers had the world before them, and each was to choose his road to fortune and to fame. They brought with them genius, and ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... theory, but repugnant to the principles of the highest authority in metaphysical disquisition. But while we condemn his speculative notions as degrading to human nature, and subversive of the most important interests of mankind, we must admit that he has prosecuted his visionary hypothesis with uncommon ingenuity. Abstracting from it the rhapsodical nature of this production, and its obscurity in some parts, it has great merit as a poem. The style is elevated, and the versification in general harmonious. By ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... contemplated the establishment of a monarchy, Hamilton said: "The idea of introducing a monarchy or aristocracy into this country, by employing the influence and force of a government continually changing hands towards it, is one of those visionary things that none but madmen could meditate, and that no ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... public of the day. In one of his advertisements we find him complaining bitterly of 'the extraordinary concourse of unruly people who robbed him, and treated with savage rudeness his extraordinary services.' Something of a visionary, too, was Sir Balthazar;—yet, with all his vanity as to his own merits—his coxcombry about his proceedings,—a sort of reformer and benefactor also in a small way. At one time we find him advertising that, besides lecturing gratis, he will lend from one shilling ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... of this remarkable woman is one that holds a lesson for all. Eccentric, careless, and fearless; handsome, witty, and learned; ambitious, shrewd, and visionary,—she was one of the strangest compounds of "unlikes" to be met with ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... of the missing Charles, addressed to "Jailers and Guardians," circulated privately among them; everybody remembered to have met Charles under distressing circumstances. Yet it is but due to my countrymen to state that when it was known that Thompson had embarked some wealth in this visionary project, but little of this satire found its way to his ears, and nothing was uttered in his hearing that might bring a pang to a father's heart, or imperil a possible pecuniary advantage of the satirist. Indeed, Mr. Bracy Tibbets's jocular proposition ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... poised in perfect balance, are so calmed and restrained, each by the other, that most of us lose the sense of both. The artist does not see the strength, by reason of the chastened spirit in which it is used: and the religious visionary does not recognize the passion, by reason of the frank human truth with which it is rendered. He is a man ten times greater than Leonardo;—a mighty colorist, while Leonardo was only a fine draughtsman in black, staining the chiaroscuro drawing, like a colored print: he ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... Forth to Clyde, and the greater work of Hadrian and Severus between Tyne and Solway. St. 6, 7 The Arthurian legends,—now revivified for us by Tennyson's magnificent Idylls of the King,—form the visionary links in our history between the decline of the Roman power and the earlier days of the Saxon conquest. St. 9 Villagedom; Angles and Saxons seem at first to have burned the larger towns of the Romanized Britons and left them deserted, in favour of village-life. St. 11 Village-moot: Held on a ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... he SUGGESTIONS, and very vague and indefinite ones too, still they might be pleasant enough to absorb and repress bitter memories for a time. As for me, my poor skill would scarcely avail you, as I could promise you neither self-oblivion nor visionary joy. I have a certain internal force, it is true—a spiritual force which when strongly exercised overpowers and subdues the material—and by exerting this I could, if I thought it well to do so, release your SOUL—that is, the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... such advantage of our wide circulation as will give repining invalids to understand, that the advantages of a foreign climate are closely limited by one portion of the profession, and considered by another portion as highly problematical, if not entirely visionary. This applies, however, mainly to consumption; for the advantages of the climatic change are seldom denied in dyspepsy, rheumatism, scrofula, and the tribe of nervous diseases. Even in these, however, the locality chosen is rarely a proper one. There are countries ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... as a possibility. It seemed as if their lives had been so poor and rigid in circumstance that they did not fix their minds, as more prosperous people might do, on thoughts of customary pleasure. The stories that they love are of quite visionary things; of swans that turn into kings' daughters, and of castles with crowns over the doors, and lovers' flights on the backs of eagles, and music-loving water-witches, and journeys to the other world, and sleeps that ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... the general had received letters advising him of the shipment of a whole cargo of as good vagabonds as were to be had in the New York market. In truth it was wonderful a see how credulous this opulent merchant was; and how readily he fell into all the visionary schemes for overthrowing governments that had their origin in the disordered brain of my hero. As for generals, the large-eyed merchant had consigned my hero no less than a whole mob, no two of whom could be found to agree on a single subject, if you ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... by classical exercitations does not help us to solve. There sat the son of his trust and his pride, whose sound and equal temperament, whose precocious worldly wit, whose precise and broad intelligence, had been the visionary comfort of his paternal days to come; and his son had told him, reiterating it in language special and exact as that of a Chancery barrister unfolding his case to the presiding judge, that he had deceived and wronged an under-bred girl of the humbler classes; and that, after a term of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 11 Now this he spake because of the stiffneckedness of Laman and Lemuel; for behold they did murmur in many things against their father, because he was a visionary man, and had led them out of the land of Jerusalem, to leave the land of their inheritance, and their gold, and their silver, and their precious things, to perish in the wilderness. And this they said he had done because of the foolish ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... his first voyage. He had been scorned as an adventurer by the courtiers of Lisbon, mocked as a visionary by the learned priests of the Council in Salamanca, who, with texts from the Scriptures and quotations from the saints, had tried to convince him that the world was flat; he had been pointed at by the rabble in the streets as a madman who maintained ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... dissenting voice in all St. Antipas that Sabbath upon the proposal that this powerful young preacher be called to its pulpit. The few who warily suggested that he might be too visionary, not sufficiently in touch with the present day, were quieted the following Sabbath by a very different sermon on certain flaws ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... her rare, sweet blushes, and lowers her eyes. "It was a wild remark. I can see no sense in it. But perhaps he will kindly explain. I say, Luttrell, you shouldn't spend your time telling this child fairy tales; you will make him a visionary. He says you declared Miss Massereene had entire control over the sun, moon, and stars, and that they were never known to ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... Dreaming, blindfold led By visionary hand, did soul's advance Precede my body's, gain ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... deprived of both parents, all the orphans of the thickly-inhabited district that constituted his mission became objects of his special care. And at a time when such an institution as a Catholic orphanage was regarded as visionary, or the ephemeral creation of a too ardent zeal, this good pastor succeeded in founding and supporting an asylum which has since become of incalculable value, not only to the Catholics as a body, but to the inhabitants of the whole city and state. A house of refuge ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... and before the personal management of his property had awakened in him the sleeping instincts of parsimony. But as his capital accumulated, and problems of investment and considerations of interest began to encroach upon his visionary hours, we saw a gradual arrest in the ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... dreams the Patriot, who indignant draws The sword of vengeance in his Country's cause; Bright for his brows unfading honours bloom, Or kneeling Virgins weep around his tomb. 200 So holy transports in the cloister's shade Play round thy toilet, visionary maid! Charm'd o'er thy bed celestial voices sing, And ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... to bring things to pass in a way that excited his enthusiasm. He never tired of listening to his stories of what he had done and of what he was going to do. As for Washington, Harry thought he was a man of ability and comprehension, but "too visionary," he told the Colonel. The Colonel said he might be right, but he had never ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fountains, the fair earth and the sweet sky. Courteous, tender, and gentle as any paladin, sweet-tongued and harmonious as any poet, liberal as any prince, was the barefooted beggar and herald of God. We ask no visionary reverence for the Stigmata, no wondering belief in any miracle. As he stood, he was as great a miracle as any then existing under God's abundant, miraculous heavens; more wonderful than are the day and ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... tender-hearted fellow he is: happy as a boy; hospitable to the verge of beggary; enthusiastic as he is visionary; simple as he is genuine. A Virginian of good birth, fair education, and limited knowledge of the world and of men, proud of his ancestry, proud of his State, and proud of himself; believing in states' rights, slavery, and the Confederacy; and away down in the bottom of his soul ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... which was to set the French King free from the war. The prospect of placing Isabella [Footnote: Philip was now arranging to bestow Flanders upon her as an independent sovereignty.] on the English throne was more visionary than ever. The Spanish party among the English Catholics were growing more and more out of favour; pride in the prestige of English arms, scorn that England should be dominated by a nation which could not match her in open fight, strengthened the patriotic section. The Scots would ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... meantime, Connie herself was silent, and saw no more of the lady. Her attachment to Mary grew into one of those visionary passions which little girls so often form for young women. She followed her so-called governess wherever she went, hanging upon her arm when she could, holding her dress when no other hold was possible,—following her everywhere, like her shadow. The vicarage, ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... destitute of any previous medical knowledge, they would be enabled to ascertain the nature of their malady, as well as of the diseases of others, and devise the means of their cure." Upon this dogma was founded the mystery of incubations, or the art of healing by visionary divination. ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... Shells from the palace walls fell upon us thick and fast. No lightning's flash can accomplish such ruin as the modern ordnance projectile. A few centuries back the thought would have been incomprehensible; even so the visionary and ridiculed idea of to-day may be realised in the future. The shots descended, a veritable storm of lead, and several times the clouds of choking dust they set up enveloped us; but we were undaunted, and continued to work the Maxim, spreading ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... movement of the eye is as adequate as a slight motion of the cranium to an equine quadruped devoid of its visionary capacities." ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... from Europe to Asia, to unite his new acquisitions with Antioch and the provinces of Syria. [188] But his vast enterprise, perhaps of easy execution, must have seemed extravagant to vulgar minds; and the visionary conqueror was soon reminded of his dependence and servitude. The friends of Tarik had effectually stated his services and wrongs: at the court of Damascus, the proceedings of Musa were blamed, his intentions were suspected, and his delay in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... intercourse with unearthly beings, he has, by his writings and speech, left room for simple-minded people who have read his works and history, to suppose that he did. His belief in presentiment was very strong, as also visionary warnings of imminent ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... railroad struggle, his defeat at the Salmon River Canon, his rout at the delta crossing, and his final death-blow at Kyak. His career stood out boldly in all its fraudulent colors; failure was written across every one of his undertakings. The naked facts showed him visionary, incompetent, unscrupulous. ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... exhausted the lamp goes out," admitted Chang Tao, "but my time is not yet come. During the visionary watches of the night my poising mind was sustained by Forces as you so presciently foretold, and my groping hand was led to an inspired solution of ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... I have had report of him. He is a visionary. There is no sedition in him. He affirms ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the first time Bienville the man, Bienville the visionary, Bienville the enthusiast, the dreamer of dreams and the builder of castles. I watched ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... [189:4] but they did not understand how their lowly Master was to establish His title to such high offices. [189:5] Though they "looked for redemption," and "waited for the kingdom of God," [189:6] there was much that was vague, as well as much that was visionary, in their notions of the Redemption and the Kingdom. We may well suppose that the views of the multitude were still less correct and perspicuous. Some, perhaps, expected that Christ, as a prophet, would decide the ecclesiastical ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... visionary project, that some time or other when his circumstances should be easier, he would go to Aleppo, in order to acquire a knowledge as far as might be of any arts peculiar to the East, and introduce them into Britain. When this was talked of in Dr. Johnson's company, he said, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... proposed to raise an immediate sum of L2,000 in furtherance of the Projector's views, and as some protection to the parties who may embark in the matter, that this is not a visionary plan for objects imperfectly considered, Mr Colombine, to whom the secret has been confided, has allowed his name to be used on the occasion, and who will if referred to corroborate this statement, and convince any inquirer ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... No less strange and visionary to them seemed the real transitions they noted from the moving train. How one morning they missed the changeless, motionless, low, dark line along the horizon, and before noon found themselves among the rocks and trees and a swiftly rushing ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... the tameness, the vulgarity of the world. It is the duty, no doubt, of people who are responsible for the education of these young men to try and turn them into respectable citizens, Sometimes the process is successful; sometimes it is not. Often enough these visionary, perverse people are misunderstood and shunted till they make shipwreck of their lives. The path of originality is even harder than the path of the transgressor, because the stakes for which the man of genius plays are so tremendous. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... answered negligently. "As a physician he was, I believe, rather visionary than practical. I have his Colliget, his most famous work in that line, but for my part, in the case of an ordinary disease, I would rather trust myself," with a shrug of contempt, "to ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... capacity. Even at an early age, I found that I had not the heart for the fray. Stamped on my narrow forehead, on my whole being, perhaps, so clearly that every unsympathetic boss could understand at once, was the mark of the visionary. My pitiable willingness to work was ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... the other hand, these long fingers were smooth jointed, he would, while having the same desire for ideality and for everything intellectual, be impulsive and inspirational, would lack a sense of detail and a love for detail in his own work, would be visionary, artistic, emotional. Such a person would be suited to artistic work, such as painting, making designs, models, etc., but could not be trusted to perform anything requiring detail, research or science, and would be utterly ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... with the past. Her mind had known only a confused pain, a confused pity, for herself and for the man whom she once had loved. The death, so long ago, of that young love seemed more with her than her husband's death, which took on the visionary, picture aspect of any tragedy seen from a distance, not lived through. But now, in this long, firelit leisure, that was the final summing of it all. She was grave, she was sad; but she could feel no severity for herself, and, long ago, she had ceased to feel any ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... from an observed effect the existence, in time past, of a cause similar to that by which we know it to be produced in all cases in which we have actual experience of its origin. This, for example, is the scope of the inquiries of geology; and they are no more illogical or visionary than judicial inquiries, which also aim at discovering a past event by inference from those of its effects which still subsist. As we can ascertain whether a man was murdered or died a natural death, from ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... came upon hIm quite removed from this of being pursued, suddenly, like an electric shock, as he was creeping through the streets Some visionary terror, unintelligible and inexplicable, asssociated with a trembling of the ground,—a rush and sweep of something through the air, like Death upon the wing. He shrunk, as if to let the thing go by. It was not gone, it never had been there, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Nation, which occurred in the latter half of the fifth decade of the century, turned all eyes toward the fertile valleys and the mountains of fabulous wealth on the Pacific Coast. Even before the acquisition of this territory some visionary minds had pictured it bound to the United States, if not by political ties, at least by bonds of steel.[119] The Oregon treaty of 1846 brought part of the coveted land under the jurisdiction of the United States, and the necessity of a railroad ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... showing him all the beauty of her swamp-world—great shadowy oaks and limpid pools, lone, naked trees and sweet flowers; the whispering and flitting of wild things, and the winging of furtive birds. She had dropped the impish mischief of her way, and up from beneath it rose a wistful, visionary tenderness; a mighty half-confessed, half-concealed, striving for unknown things. He seemed to have found ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... distinctly remember that for about one half-minute the whole vast universe appeared to swim in the same watery uncertainty in which I floated. I began to doubt everything, to distrust the stars, the line of low bushes for which I was wearily striving, the very land on which they grew, if such visionary tiring could be rooted anywhere. Doubts trembled in my mind like the weltering water, and that awful sensation of having one's feet unsupported, which benumbs the spent swimmer's heart, seemed to clutch at mine, though not yet to enter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... they to sail on until they perished, or until all return with their frail ships became impossible? Who would blame them should they consult their safety and return? The admiral was a foreigner, a man without friends or influence. His scheme had been condemned by the learned as idle and visionary, and discountenanced by people of all ranks. There was, therefore, no party on his side, but rather a large number who would be gratified by ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... morning, from a visionary coach and six, with the dismal account that Bellarmine was run through the body by Horatio; that he lay languishing at an inn, and the surgeons had declared the wound mortal. She immediately leaped out of the bed, danced about the room in a frantic manner, tore her hair and beat ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... in the course of that night did Middleton fancy that the communication of the miscreant was entitled to some attention, and as often did he reject the idea as too wild and visionary for another thought. He was awakened early on the following morning, after passing a restless and nearly sleepless night, by his orderly, who came to report that a man was found dead on the parade, at no great distance from his quarters. Throwing ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... times, and she was to be her husband's good angel by helping him to catch up with them. And it was evident that Pauline would be her ally. Selma for the first time asked herself whether it might be that Wilbur was a little visionary. ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... have practically disappeared; there is an island of hell and an island of paradise.[1303] The island conception is the last relic of paganism, but now the voyage is undertaken for the purpose of revenge or penance or pilgrimage. Another series of tales of visionary journeys to hell or heaven are purely Christian, yet the joys of heaven have a sensuous aspect which recalls those of the pagan Elysium. In one of these, The Tidings of Doomsday,[1304] there are two hells, and besides heaven there ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... river. It was a very warm, almost sultry noonday, more like midsummer than mid-October, and the river was almost blinding in its flashing beauty. Loosening our knapsacks, we called a halt and, leaning over the railing guarding the precipitous bank, luxuriated in the visionary scene. So high was the bank, and so broad the river, that we seemed lifted up into space, and the river, dreamily flowing beneath a gauze veil of heat-mist, seemed miles below us and drowsily unreal. Its course inshore was dotted with ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... economy, of incorruptible integrity, passed from the earth two years ago; but to those who knew him his memory is as fresh as the verdure above his grave at Greenwood. More lately, one who had been from the outset associated with what to many appeared this visionary plan, to whose capacity and experience, his legal skill, his legislative influence, his social distinction, the work has been always largely indebted, and who was for years the President of the Board, has followed into the silent land. ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... human soul and to clarify spiritual vision in the human mind. It does not signify that now, at more than fourscore, his hand sometimes trembles a little on the harp-strings, and his touch falters, and his music dies away. It is still the same harp and the same hand. This fanciful, kindly, visionary, drifting, and altogether romantic comedy of Robin Hood is not to be tried by the standard that is author reared when he wrote Ulysses and Tithonus and The Passing of Arthur—that imperial, unapproachable standard that no other poet ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... loved her. I had won her trust, and my first duty was to speak her name with pride. But I had had that brief glimpse of Penelope Blight, the companion of my boyhood; I had walked with her, grown lovelier than my dreams, through visionary woods and fields. She was before me, a dainty woman of the world; behind her the firelight fanned the leaves carved for her long ago by the old Italian artist; from above Reynolds's majestic lady looked down at her kindly, at me with a haughty stare, as if she read presumption in my mind. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... The visionary, whose name was Marraton, after having travelled for a long space under a hollow mountain, arrived at length on the confines of this world of spirits, but could not enter it by reason of a thick forest, made up of bushes, brambles, and pointed ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... or, equally unprincipled, supported its cause with bad patriots,—one laments that such parts should have been devoid of every virtue: but when Alcibiades turns chemist; when he is a real bubble and a visionary miser; when ambition is but a frolic; when the worst designs are for the foolishest ends,—contempt extinguishes all reflection on ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and the sleep which is in the grave, is long! Let me use that life, so transitory, for the glory of those heavenly dreams destined to comfort the sleep which is so long. This pure creature—pure from every suspicion of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure in senses more obvious—never once did this holy child, as regarded herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that was travelling to meet her. She might not prefigure ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... unperceived, or where there is none to perceive it, or where it falls dead, and fails in its effect, the solitary eye which gazes will find no pleasure, no joy—only distress—as for something calling to him out of a visionary world from which his own race is shut out. We cannot feel healthily alone. The sense of worship, the sense of beauty, the sense of sight, is only alive and keen when shared by others .... It is something not alone, but generated by the action of the object ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... celebrated Belgian physician, scholar and visionary, of noble family, was born at Brussels in 1577. At an early age he began the study of medicine, and was appointed Professor of Surgery at the University of Louvain. Becoming, however, infected with the ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... such a thing, as being very anxious about what they should eat, and what they should drink, and wherewith they should be clothed; though, if she had looked more narrowly at her own imaginations of poverty, she would perhaps have discovered on the visionary table always a delicate dish for her husband—in the wardrobe, always a sleek black coat—and in his waiting-room, a clear fire in winter; while the rest of the picture was made up of bread and vegetables, and shabby gowns for herself, and devices to keep herself warm ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... reason is not absolutely sufficient to reveal all that we wish to understand, to reconcile all that we wish to see in harmony with the workings of the deity. But it may be dangerous to seek for help in the regions of our feelings and imagination, to give ear to our visionary forebodings. They try to set up their own supremacy, and may easily fall out with reason, though at the outset they seem to uphold her. If they gain their aim, and this noble mediatorial power, which seated in the centre of all our spiritual powers, irradiating and ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... his childhood he was sent to one of the excellent schools established by the weavers in their own quarter, and that there or afterwards he came under some influence, both religious and learned, which stamped him the practical visionary that he remained throughout his life. Thereafter, between his sea voyagings and expeditions about the Mediterranean coasts, he no doubt acquired knowledge in the only really practical way that it can be acquired; that is to say, he received it as and when he needed ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... she, with an arch smile, "I really thought you were a man of too much sense, and above all, too much courage, to be terror-struck by every idle report. You should leave such horrors to us weak women—to the visionary mind. Now, I could not blame poor Amelia, if she were to ask, 'Then was there no truth in the report of the Spanish incognita?'—No, no," pursued Mrs. Beaumont, playfully, refusing to hear Captain Walsingham; "not to me, not to me, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... his way through the crowd to shake hands with the Rev. Septimus Marvin, who seemed to emerge from a visionary world of his own in order to perform that ceremony and to return thither ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... and falls on marble columns, bronzed beams, mosaic walls, screens of wrought iron and carved wood. We walk as if through an interlaced forest and undergrowth of rich entangled colours. It all seems visionary, unreal, fantastic, until we climb the bench by the end of the inner screen and look upon the Rock over which ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... more packed into them, of course, than into many a lover's months and years, but one effect it has had on me has been to make you, when you aren't here physically with me, like this, where by merely reaching out I can touch you, a little—visionary to me. I confuse you with the Dumb Princess over there whom you made me create. I get misgivings that you're just a sort of wraith. Well, if you're going away and we aren't to be within—touching distance of each other again for a long while—perhaps ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... asserted that mankind is growing better, day by day, he must have had before his inner eye fair visions of a future race—the Future of Truth, which come it must—some day—but now lies dormant in the lap of the gods, its alluring, visionary, transcendental form depicted, for an optimistic instant, in the fervent, hopeful heart of a sincere but far-sighted reformer. But it is written: false prophets must come, deceiving in respect to all things in heaven and earth. "Mundus ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... shoes. Those which Rose wore in winter were trimmed with lamb's-wool, which she wrought very dexterously; she was clever and ingenious but, it must be confessed, a little imperious; and was sometimes surprised sighing like a person indulging in visionary wishes, and ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... you against what is worst, and holds forever before you the necessity of becoming a new man; if it makes you understand that pain is a deliverer; if it increases your respect for the conscience of others; if it renders forgiveness more easy, fortune less arrogant, duty more dear, the beyond less visionary. If it does these things it is good, little matter its name: however rudimentary it may be, when it fills this office it comes from the true source, it binds you to man and ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... indulging silly fancies; the Mother Superior asserted that if God granted her request, it would be only as a punishment for her presumption; others, whose judgment she equally deferred to, pronounced the project visionary and delusive, yet her great courage never failed, for it was founded on a perfect confidence that in His own time, God would do His own work, using her as his instrument, all unworthy though she was. In two letters, she fully explained her position to her former spiritual ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... inquire if what he traces is good or ill. He knows that society regards him as an outcast, but society's point of view is not the only one, that he knows too, and also, though he be a lecher, a crapulous and bestial fellow at times, at other times he is a poet, a visionary, the only poet that Catholicism has produced since Dante. Huysmans, the apologist of Gilles de Rais,—there he is over yonder, talking to the impressionist painter, that small thin man with hair growing thickly, low ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... alone. William Pressley did not speak to the boy at all or notice him in any way. He did not dislike him, for he never disliked anything that was not of some importance. He disapproved of his impractical, visionary character, and thought that it might have rather an undesirable influence over Ruth. For this reason he tacitly discouraged all intimacy between them, but he did not take the trouble to express it and merely ignored the lad. And David, seeing how it was, felt instantly and strongly, ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... this man's impractical nature to help to persuade him to do for himself that which is practicable. Such a man ought to have life insurance, for example, and to have it so protected that he can do nothing visionary and impracticable with it. Make him think of himself, if you can, conferring ideal benefits upon his wife and family. You could never interest him in the bare, trite facts in the case, but when you have gained his interest, see to it that ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... hand. He looked pleased, yet doubtful too for a moment. Then he seemed to banish his hesitation and, with a deprecating smile, said something which she could not understand. She nodded intelligently to get rid of him. Already, from the roof, she caught sight of a great visionary panorama glowing with colour and magic. She was impatient to climb still higher into the sky, to look down on the world as an eagle does. So she turned away decisively and mounted the dark, winding stair till she reached a door. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... less remarkable than these missionaries were those who labored in other spheres. Loyola himself, though visionary and monastic, had no higher wish than to infuse piety into the Catholic Church, and to strengthen the hands of him whom he regarded as God's vicegerent. Somehow or other he succeeded in securing the absolute veneration of his companions, so much so that the sainted Xavier always ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... the train and strode across the park, his imagination playing happy, visionary tunes. He would drop in to-morrow at St. Isidore's on his way back from White and Einstein's. He must see more of those fellows at Henry's clinic; they seemed a good set. And he was not sure that he should answer the Baltimore man so flatly. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... while after. And it was natural that men who captained or accompanied the exodus from existing forms and associations into the doubtful wilderness that led to the promised land, should find more to their purpose in the Old Testament than in the New. As respects the New England settlers, however visionary some of their religious tenets may have been, their political ideas savored of the realty, and it was no Nephelococcygia of which they drew the plan, but of a commonwealth whose foundation was to rest on solid and familiar earth. If what they did was done in a corner, the results ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... bounded by the horizon of the town where they live, some by the particular church to which they belong, some the denomination, some the state, or even the nation. Jesus fixes the horizon of His follower as that of the world. Jesus was visionary. He talked about all nations, a race, ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... Rome, for instance, had for him a sort of talismanic fascination, not unlike that possessed by Jerusalem for the mediaeval Christian. When he spoke of the people or the republic he frequently used those terms in an ideal and visionary sense (as theologians use the Church) rather than in one strictly corresponding with the case of any existing nation, or any hitherto tried form of government. This does not alter the fact that his theories, which have been briefly ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... movements of sympathy for these congregated thousands. A voice, almost unbroken, has sounded out; 'Peculiar and insuperable difficulties prevent a general revival in cities: such are the occupations, such the habits, such the temptations, and such the superabounding iniquity, that it were visionary to hope for any general and powerful work of mercy.' Well, then, had we not better give all up; and let human nature here sink into its natural channels; and let multitudes before our eyes continue ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton
... have sounded the key-note of Schumann's deepest nature. But these feelings could only find their fullest outlet in the musical form expressly suited to subjective emotion. Accordingly, the "Sturm and Drang" epoch of his life, when all his thoughts and conceptions were most unsettled and visionary, was most fruitful in lyric song. In Heinrich Heine he found a fitting poetical co-worker, in whose moods he seemed to see a perfect reflection of his own—Heine, in whom the bitterest irony was wedded to the deepest pathos, "the spoiled ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... would rather stay with Doris, and she was captivated with the Royall House and Eudora. The children never seemed in the way of the grown people there, and if elderly men talked politics and city improvements,—quite visionary, some thought them,—the young people with Alice and Helen had the garden walks and the wide porch, and discussed the enjoyments of the time with the zest of enthusiastic inexperience but ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... for the first time Bienville the man, Bienville the visionary, Bienville the enthusiast, the dreamer of dreams and the builder of castles. ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... many years. But he was also active in the lumber industry in the Saginaw district and several other things. It was difficult for a man of such mercurial, restless temperament to stay constant to any one occupation; in fact, had he been less visionary he would have been more prosperous, but might not have had a son so gifted with insight and imagination. One instance of the optimistic vagaries which led him incessantly to spend time and money on projects that would not have appealed to a man ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... of abject pauperism,' put in Herbert blandly; 'a reductio ad absurdum of all your visionary Schurzian philosophy, my dear Ernest. Look at it another way, now, and just consider. Which really and truly matters most to you and me, a great work of art or a highly respectable horny-handed son of ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... of brilliant and rather mystifying speeches, that there were now three "religions" in Germany—the Lutheran, the Reformed and the Moravian; but that their duty and mission in the world was, not to restore the old Church of the Brethren, but rather to gather the children of God into a mystical, visionary, ideal fellowship which he called the "Community of Jesus." For the present, he said, the home of this ideal "Gemeine" would be the Moravian Church. At Herrnhut and other places in Saxony it would be a home for Lutherans; at Herrnhaag ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... to make him happy. To be sure, I don't say that instead of a poet I would not rather have married a notary or a lawyer, something rather more serious, rather less vague as a profession; nevertheless, such as he was he took my fancy. I thought him a trifle visionary, but charming all the same, and well-mannered; besides he had some fortune, and I thought that once married poetizing would not prevent him from seeking out some good appointment which would set us ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... turbulent reign forced to face great political agitators. However, the King had behind his throne, always, that conservative class (found in every country) that clings tenaciously to the past and dreads the future. The watchword of all William's enemies was "Liberty!" The cry, visionary as it was, served as a rallying point for those who favored some form of French constitutionalism; and while, as a whole, the so-called friends of Liberty were very impracticable, had no definite ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... a hearty laugh at the expense of the visionary, although they did him the justice to believe that his theoretical improvements on the policy of majesty were the ebullition of a generous heart, warm in fraternal regard for the whole ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... But this unfortunate failing in her nephew's wife, developed under her roof and during his absence, had been a severe blow. No one directly blamed her for it, except the late curate, Mr. Warden, and a few extravagant, visionary persons, who deemed it best to abstain totally from the source of so much misery and poverty among their fellow-beings, and to take care, as far as in them lay, to place no stumbling-block in the way of feeble feet. But, strange to say, all the estimable ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... lying in the sunshine with the beauties of Nature around him, whose silent teaching works upon him till the true SPIRIT OF POETRY speaks within his soul, and combats the misanthropy and weakness of the sensuous MAN, showing him that Action is the end of Life, not mere indulgence in abstract and visionary rhapsodies. ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... hand, these long fingers were smooth jointed, he would, while having the same desire for ideality and for everything intellectual, be impulsive and inspirational, would lack a sense of detail and a love for detail in his own work, would be visionary, artistic, emotional. Such a person would be suited to artistic work, such as painting, making designs, models, etc., but could not be trusted to perform anything requiring detail, research or science, and would be utterly useless in any position where discipline or control ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... to shoot in the patches of forest, to fish in the river, and find he knew not what in those wondrous solitudes where man had probably never yet trod, he heard a call, and, brought back to himself from his visionary expedition, he ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... lined with scholarly and costly volumes in glazed cases. The house must have been taken furnished; for it had no congruity with this man of the shirt sleeves and the mean supper. As for the earl's daughter, the earl and the visionary consulships in foreign cities, they had long ago begun to fade in Challoner's imagination. Like Doctor Grierson and the Mormon angels, they were plainly woven of the stuff of dreams. Not an illusion remained to the ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... current of feeling is also recognizable in the 'Dittamondo' of Fazio degli Uberti, composed about the year 1360—a description of visionary travels, in which the author is accompanied by the old geographer Solinus, as Dante was by Virgil. They visit Bari in memory of St. Nicholas, and Monte Gargano of the archangel Michael, and in Rome the legends ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... something visionary in her eyes, which made them look for a moment like the eyes of a woman whom he had not seen till now. Then ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... a heavy sigh answered him, a grunt from the cook, and a moan from Neddie. Our spirits were too low to be stirred even by Blodgett's visionary tales. It was hard to believe that the moon above the mountains was the same that had shone down upon us long before off ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... had not been a cheerful one, subjected to the ever-changing whims of a visionary father, with whom one of her practical cast of mind could have no point of sympathy. And since she came to Lindsleyville it was harder than ever, for there was no neighbor nearer than Gager's, ten miles away, and there was not a woman within fifty miles. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... The introduction of coal meant destruction for this local business of wood cutting, and wiped out the value of many a farm. Coal had to win its way against prejudice and local interest, and it only won out by showing power. I am sure that 75 years ago, if some visionary Yankee had said that coal would be so freely used in New England that cord wood would be almost unsaleable, the public would surely have given him that honorary title which goes with prospective ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... whether (said I to our cordial Friend, Who in the hey-day of astonishment Smiled in my face) this were in simple truth A work accomplished by the brotherhood Of ancient mountains, or my ear was touched 70 With dreams and visionary impulses To me alone imparted, sure I am [7] That there was a loud uproar in the hills. And, while we both were listening, to my side The fair Joanna drew, as if she wished 75 To shelter from some object of her fear. —And hence, long afterwards, when eighteen moons Were wasted, as I chanced ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... them, while the extremists care rather to preach discontent and agitation than to achieve solid results. As a matter of fact, our position is as remote from that of the Bourbon reactionary as from that of the impracticable or sinister visionary. We hold that the Government should not conduct the business of the nation, but that it should exercise such supervision as will insure its being conducted in the interest of the nation. Our aim is, so far as may be, to secure, for all decent, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... agitation on his own part, and that while she thought him so sedulous only to avoid her, he was simply occupied in seeking another. This painful suggestion, which every thing seemed to confirm, again overset all her schemes, and destroyed all her visionary happiness. Yet how to reconcile it with what had passed at their last meeting she knew not; she had then every reason to believe that his heart was in her power, and that courage, or an opportunity more seasonable, was all he wanted to make known his devotion to ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... by no means the least interesting feature of the demonstration. He has none of the look of the visionary, this man who has gone to war with time and space; neither had George Stephenson. He is short and thick-set, with a full face, a heavy moustache hiding his mouth, and heavy eyebrows. He is troubled a little with asthma, which makes him somewhat staccato and breathless in speech, and perhaps ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... people, of his own state, must be for every man the highest objects of his efforts; then only, starting from his own nation, may his wishes have a higher aim. I cannot respect anyone who abandons the soil of patriotism in order to waste his time on visionary schemes in the domain of politics, to wax enthusiastic over universal peace and to call ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... had a very meritorious command of myself, and was the only man in the town fit for a magistrate; for in everything I was seen to be most cautious and considerate. I could not, however, when I saw the turn the affair took to my advantage, but reflect on what small and visionary grounds the popularity of public men ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... opposition-course, or rather I built a castle in the air, on a tolerably solid foundation; and it seemed to me quite romantically honorable to mark out my own path of life, which appeared the less visionary, as Griesbach had already made great progress in a similar way, and was commended for it by every one. The secret joy of a prisoner, when he has unbound the fetters, and rapidly filed through the bars of his jail- window, cannot be greater than was mine as I saw ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise. Dante was alone—except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless. The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his home and the voices of his daughters; Shakespeare had his free associates of the stage; Goethe, his correspondents, a court, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... oppose himself directly to the strong current of popular feeling. With rare dexterity he took the tone, not of an advocate, but of a judge. The danger which seemed so terrible to many honest friends of liberty he did not venture to pronounce altogether visionary. But he reminded his countrymen that a choice between dangers was sometimes all that was left to the wisest of mankind. No lawgiver had ever been able to devise a perfect and immortal form of government. Perils lay thick on the right and on the left; and to keep far from one evil ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... impetuous, ill-balanced friends that surrounded her? Not the noble-minded geographer, Elisee Reclus; not the fiery citizen-count, Rochefort; not the handsome, cultivated Gustave Flourens, already "fey" with the doom to which he had been born; not that kindly visionary, the Vicomte de Coursay-Delmont, now discarding his ancient title to be known only among his grateful, penniless patients as Doctor Delmont; and surely not Professor Tavernier, nor yet that militant hermit, ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... Vegetable Kingdom; no class, nor order, nor genus of more than a few species claims absolute exemption from it, whilst the grand total of unstable forms, generally assumed to be species, probably exceeds that of the stable." Yet he contends that species are neither visionary, nor even arbitrary creations of the naturalist, but realities, though they may not remain true for ever. The majority of them, he remarks, are so far constant, "within the range of our experience," and their forms and characters so faithfully handed down through ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... cherished the hope of some time regaining a complete independence such as that of the Free State. Some ardent spirits dreamt of a Dutch South African Republic with Pretoria for its future capital; and there were probably a few men of the same visionary type in the Colony and the Free State who talked in the same wild way, especially after the Jameson invasion had stirred Dutch feeling to its depths. But from such dreams and such talk it is a long step to a "conspiracy of the Dutch over all South Africa." The ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... traces is good or ill. He knows that society regards him as an outcast, but society's point of view is not the only one, that he knows too, and also, though he be a lecher, a crapulous and bestial fellow at times, at other times he is a poet, a visionary, the only poet that Catholicism has produced since Dante. Huysmans, the apologist of Gilles de Rais,—there he is over yonder, talking to the impressionist painter, that small thin man with hair growing thickly, low down on his forehead—Huysmans ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... assumption is still true, and of the utmost consequence. But ancient theory was compelled to assume, not only that men could give little attention to public questions, but that the attention available would have to be confined to matters close at hand. It would have been visionary to suppose that a time would come when distant and complicated events could conceivably be reported, analyzed, and presented in such a form that a really valuable choice could be made by an amateur. That time is now in sight. There is no longer any doubt that the continuous reporting of an ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... yellow, white, and brown, whirling past, beneath other tarpaulin hoods, or at carriage windows, or shielded by enormous dripping wicker hats, or bared to the pelting rain. Curious odors greeted him, as of sour vegetables and of unknown rank substances burning. He stared like a visionary at the ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... increasing everywhere. So generally is this true, that a person who refuses to eat hot bread, or cake, or biscuit, is deemed singular. He who ventures to lift his voice against it is deemed an ascetic or a visionary. But such a voice must be raised, and heard, too, whether its monitions are ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... It never stirred but at a signal from good sense. It stopped at the first check from good sense. Yet, though disciplined to such obedience, it gave noble proofs of its vigour. In truth, much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world, amidst things as strange as any that are described in the Arabian Tales, or in those romances on which the curate and barber of Don Quixote's village performed so cruel an auto-de-fe, amidst buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin, fountains more wonderful than ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of which pay their stockholders 15 per cent. or more. It can relieve the stagnation and make profitable investment by an active campaign for public and private contracts and for sound and fair concessions, not visionary or get-rich-too-quick schemes. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... projects of setting worlds in order, which are bound to fail. We consider too little plans for putting our own households in order, which might easily be made to succeed. A large part of our seeming ills would be dispelled if we could but turn from the visionary to the practical. We need the influence of vision, we need the inspiring power of ideals, but all these are worthless unless they can ...
— Better Homes in America • Mrs W.B. Meloney
... And yet I am far from sure. What about Dante? Haven't you sometimes stumbled over his grave assurances that this and that did really befall him? Putting aside the feeble notion that he was a deluded visionary, how does one reconcile the artist's management of his poem with the Christian's stem faith? In any case, he was more poet than Christian when he wrote. Milton makes no such claims; he merely prays for the ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... in the rear of the warm sunny shower The visionary boy from shelter fly; For now the storm of summer rain is o'er, And cool, and fresh, and fragrant is the sky. And, lo! in the dark east, expanded high, The rainbow brightens to the setting Sun! Fond fool, that deem'st the streaming glory nigh, How vain the chase ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... derived in part from tribal practices and is supposed to be implemented by the Libyan people themselves in a unique form of "direct democracy." QADHAFI has always seen himself as a revolutionary and visionary leader. He used oil funds during the 1970s and 1980s to promote his ideology outside Libya, supporting subversives and terrorists abroad to hasten the end of Marxism and capitalism. In addition, beginning in 1973, he engaged in military operations ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Jean-Marie is the proud possessor of a fashionable kepi. Besides, we had a glass of Hermitage last night; the glow still suffuses my memory. I was growing positively niggardly with that Hermitage, positively niggardly. Let me take the hint: we had one bottle to celebrate the appearance of our visionary fortune; let us have a second to console us for its occultation. The third I hereby ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... expedition as the opportunity he would have to write an epoch-making book and confound his scientific rivals. In their enthusiasm, the adventurers did not take into consideration the fact that the map might be wrong, or that the strange metals be just visionary deposits. The boys' enthusiasm drowned all doubts in their minds; Zeb and the ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... anything just at the moment. He would merely wonder why, in all these two thousand years, we had not arranged to do anything about what He had said before. He would wonder how we could keep on so, making his great faith for us so poetic, visionary, and inefficient. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to Kitty's side. As he approached her his eyes fastened on the loveliness of her attitude, her fair head. In his own expression there was a visionary, fantastic joy; it was the look of the dreamer who, for once, finds in circumstance and the ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ass thyself! Is it not well to bring away the most we can," returned the visionary, sore dismayed; when, seeing how their talk apart made the Frank suspicious, he relapsed into English with a ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... boys to live without meat or practical jokes, to love truth, honesty, and hard lessons; he would teach girls to forego jewelry and cucumber-pickles, to study physiology, and to abhor flirtations. Visionary, was he? You can not help smiling at a man who has a "vocation," and who wants to give the world a good send-off toward its "goal." But there is something noble about it after all. Something to make ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... these words of my text we must try to listen to them with the ears of a Roman. Here was a poor little insignificant Jew, like hundreds of his countrymen down in the Ghetto, one who had his head full of some fantastic nonsense about a young visionary whom the procurator of Syria had very wisely put an end to a while ago in order to quiet down the turbulent province; and he was going into Rome with the notion that his word would shake the throne ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... there have been visionary theorists or 'cranks' in all ages, and there must have been some basis for this almost universal erroneous opinion in the South that the people of the North advocated social equality or social intercourse between the white and colored races; and yet nothing could be farther from the truth. In ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... sometimes by another, according to occasion and circumstance. He was constructing what seemed to be some kind of a frail mechanical toy; and was apparently very much interested in his work. He was a white-headed man, now, but otherwise he was as young, alert, buoyant, visionary and enterprising as ever. His loving old wife sat near by, contentedly knitting and thinking, with a cat asleep in her lap. The room was large, light, and had a comfortable look, in fact a home-like look, though the furniture was of a humble sort and not over abundant, and the knickknacks ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... result, it is not easy to secure practical foresight on the part of a city council elected for the current year. Its members are afraid of making taxes too heavy this year, and considerations of ten years hence are apt to be dismissed as "visionary." It is always hard for us to realize how terribly soon ten years hence will be here. The habit of doing things by halves has been often commented on (and, perhaps, even more by our own writers than by foreigners) as especially ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... pretensions in right of their conception than I shall venture to do, under the peril of being supposed to characterize their execution. Two remarks only I shall address to the equity of my reader. First, I desire to remind him of the perilous difficulty besieging all attempts to clothe in words the visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams, where a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music; and, secondly, I desire him to consider the utter sterility of universal literature in this ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Italy; and the voluminous tales of Sir Lancelot and Sir Tristram were devoutly studied by the princes and nobles, who disregarded the genuine heroes and historians of antiquity. At length the light of science and reason was rekindled; the talisman was broken; the visionary fabric melted into air; and by a natural, though unjust, reverse of the public opinion, the severity of the present age is inclined to question the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... as you say when you can't," he replied. "But I will come down a little nearer earth, if you prefer. Short of those visionary distances there are features of the prospect either way in which I differently rejoice. One thing is the shining black roofs of the cabs, moving and pausing like processions of huge turtles up and down the street; obeying the gesture of the mid-stream policemen ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... hardened. She was further of peculiar service in keeping all safe and smooth between the ward and guardian. All Beauclerc's romance the general would have called by the German word "Schwaermerey,"—not fudge—not humbug—literally "sky-rocketing"— visionary enthusiasm; and when it came to arguments, they might have turned to quarrels, but for Lady Davenant's superior influence, while Lady Cecilia's gentleness and gaiety usually succeeded in putting all serious dangerous ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... other people think of you, of your plans, or of your aims. No matter if they call you a visionary, a crank, or a dreamer; you must believe in yourself. You forsake yourself when you lose your confidence. Never allow anybody or any misfortune to shake your belief in yourself. You may lose your property, your health, your reputation, other people's confidence, even; but there ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... but right drap-o'-my-heart's-blood stuff, that would waken a body out of their last linen. I wonder where the cummers will anchor their craft?'—'And I'll vow,' said another rustic, 'the wine they quaff is none of your visionary drink, such as a drouthie body has dished out to his lips in a dream; nor is it shadowy and unsubstantial, like the vessels they sail in, which are made out of a cockleshell or a cast-off slipper, or the paring of a seaman's right thumb-nail. I ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... close with the last. He who begins life too cold a reasoner may end it a calculating egotist; and he who is ruled solely by his imagination is in danger of having his mind so ripened as to bring forth the fruits of a visionary. Had it pleased heaven to have left me the dear son I possessed for so short a period, I would rather have seen him leaning to the side of exaggeration in his estimate of men, before experience came to chill his hopes, than to see him scan his fellows with a too philosophical eye in boyhood. ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... taken possession of your visionary mind now?" she queried. "Just when I thought you were quite contented to stay with me, you start off to teach a score or more of ignorant little savages in some obscure part of some obscure region, not yet blessed with the ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... under his blankets unable to sleep, and listened to the north wind. Sometimes Rea mumbled in his slumbers; once his giant form started up, and he muttered a woman's name. Shadows from the fire flickered on the walls, visionary, spectral shadows, cold and gray, fitting the north. At such times he longed with all the power of his soul to be among those scenes far southward, which he called home. For days Rea never spoke a word, only gazed into the fire, ate and slept. Jones, drifting ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... follow England, especially when she knows the contents of that packet. As for America, she came into this after the great sacrifices had been made. She demands nothing more than is to be yielded up. It is not for the sake of visionary ideas, not for diplomatic precedence that the humanitarians of the world are going to hesitate about ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... though it trod upon a rock! Such a miracle, contrary to all reason, is worthy of acceptance only by the blind, childish, credulity of infidelity. Whatever the object before him, then, it is real; his convictions are soberly and well founded; he runs his race to no visionary, misty goal; but some actual reality is the lode-star of his life. Let us listen to his own explanation: "forgetting those things that are being, reaching forth unto those that are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... know a bit about such things. A big surgery journal, back in the '40s, had published a visionary article on grafting a whole limb, with colored plates as if for a real procedure[A]. Then they'd developed techniques for acclimating a graft to the host's serum, so it would not react as a foreign body. First, they'd transplanted hunks of ear and such; then, in the '60s, fingers, ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... finances of this unhappy country better than they are at present conducted," he added, laughing. "I have great hopes of you as a financier, Ned, since that affair of the Holland loans, and as for myself, Luxembourg has urged me seriously to enter the ministry. 'Tis a curious proposition, but these visionary philosophers, who are trying to pilot the ship of state into a safe harbor, know nothing of their business, and will fetch up on some hidden reef pretty soon, if I mistake not. The Assembly is already held in utter contempt—their sittings are tumultuous ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... I think, fairly produce this as a proof that the progress of civilization over the earth has been directed, set bounds to, and regulated by certain laws framed by Infinite wisdom; and, although such views may by some be deemed visionary, I feel some confidence that these laws are as certain and definite as those which control the movements of the heavenly bodies. I believe moreover, that they are capable in some degree of being studied and reduced to order, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... invasion of Paris. We crawled into a stifling crib of a dark coffee-house, and sucked thick brown sediment out of liliputian cups; we smoked hemp from small-bowled pipes until we fell off into a state of visionary stupor known as "kiff;" we paid our respects to the Kadi, exchanged our boots for slippers, and settled down cross-legged on mats as if we were the three tailors of Tooley Street; we almost consented to have ourselves bled by a Moorish barber—Mahomet Lamarty's ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... we come to the funny part. To describe the high visionary and mystic Jew like Spinoza or Zangwill is a great and delicate task in which even Dickens might have failed. But most of us know something of the make and manners of the low Jew, who is generally the successful one. Most of us know the Jew who calls himself ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... old stone structure that has stood there for nearly a century. For years I have tried in vain to rent or sell it. I have left no stone unturned, Quinby. I know I am regarded as a visionary, a ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... turn often, although without any hope of ease, or when he is pursued to leap down a precipice, to avoid an enemy just at his back; so, men in the extremest degree of misery, and want, will naturally fly to the first appearance of relief, let it be ever so vain, or visionary. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... et multiple, lugubre et rayonnante, faible et sacree, L'Homme.' The poet thus dreamt of a vast epic, of which the central figure should be no mythical or legendary hero, but Man himself, conceived as struggling upwards from the darkness of barbarism to the light of a visionary golden age. Every epoch was to be painted in its dominant characteristic, every aspect of human thought was to find its fitting expression. The first series could pretend to no such completeness, but the poet promised that the gaps should be filled up in succeeding ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... rural people, remains what it always has been in Sicily and in the isles of Greece. The habits and the passions of his countryfolk have not altered, the echoes of their old love-songs still sound among the pines, or by the sea-banks, where Theocritus 'watched the visionary flocks.' ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... of the least visionary men of the age, was persuaded that science could put a living being to sleep and wake him up again at the end of an infinite number of years—arrest all the functions of the system, suspend life itself, protect an individual against the action of time for a ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... He lifted his starry eyes with their mystic, visionary rapture fully on the young physician. "And yet I remember how George Eliot prayed that when her troubles came she might get along without being drugged by that stuff—meaning the Christian religion, sir—and I guess I'd kind o' like that me ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... been employed in saving Ghent and in the protection of the English shores against the threat of invasion were squandered by John of Gaunt in a war which he was carrying on alone the Spanish frontier in pursuit of the visionary crown which he claimed in his wife's right. The enterprise showed that the Duke had now abandoned the hope of directing affairs at home and was seeking a new sphere of activity abroad. To drive him from the realm had been from the close ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... cheek, as he thought of the inconsistency of human nature, and reflected how many brave men, whom the yell of the pibroch would have sent headlong against fixed bayonets, as the wild bull rushes on his enemy, might have yet feared to encounter those visionary terrors, which he himself, a man of peace, and in ordinary perils no way remarkable for the firmness of his nerves, was now risking ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... supported by James in the attempt to divert the fur trade from Montreal to Albany by bringing the Iroquois Indians under English control. The scheme, which involved nothing less than the ruin of Canada, was by no means a visionary one. The Five Nations, lying south of the chain of lakes, could profit but little by the fur trade while it remained in French hands. But let Albany replace Montreal as the chief market, and they would become the indispensable middle carriers between the northern tribes and the English. ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... of dogmas founded on the Western Paradise, we must not forget that both of them preached a new Buddha—not the real figure in history, but an unhistoric and unreal phantom, the creation and dream of the speculator and visionary. Amida, the personification of boundless light, is one of the luxuriant growths of a sickly scholasticism—a hollow abstraction without life or reality. Amidaism is utterly repudiated by many Japanese Buddhists, who give no place to his idol on their altars, and reject utterly the teaching ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... into the vault, he observed it began slowly to fill with water. Bailing and pumping were resorted to, and when he had exhausted his own and his wife's strength, they summoned the assistance of the neighborhood. But the vengeance of the visionary lady was perfect; the waters of the lake had forced their way into the vault, and John, after a year or two spent in draining and so forth, died broken-hearted, the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... mystics "are all but unanimous in their refusal to attribute importance to any kind of visionary experience" (Underhill, Mysticism, p. 335). St John of the Cross, Madame Guyon and Walter Hilton are cited as severe ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... ears like the highly coloured visionary dream of some over-enthusiastic Hebrew. Yet this is a calm statement of what is found here. And be it keenly marked, it is a picture which the godly Hebrew of the old time never lost sight of. This is the first thing that stands ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... corrupts a people, and destroys the spirit of liberty. JOHNSON. 'Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual[502]. Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private man. What Frenchman ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... threshold and asking careless questions of Andrews, without coming in and risking the freshness of her draperies by contact with London top-floor grubbiness. The child was, in fact, too full of the reality of her happiness with Donal and Donal's mother to be more than faintly bewildered by a sort of visionary conundrum. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Love, for which the god has taken ample vengeance on him, by perverting his taste and feelings. The grossest of all the absurdities in this dialogue is, attributing to Aristophanes, so much of a scoffer and so little of a visionary, the silly notion of male and female having been originally complete in one person, and walking circuitously. He may be ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... politics, but he was careful to consult the character and prejudices of the late king, Kalakaua. That amiable, far from unaccomplished, but too convivial sovereign, had a continued use for money: Gibson was observant to keep him well supplied. Kalakaua (one of the most theoretical of men) was filled with visionary schemes for the protection and development of the Polynesian race: Gibson fell in step with him; it is even thought he may have shared in his illusions. The king and minister at least conceived between them a scheme of island confederation—the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have enjoyed the friendly status of a partner as a wholesome complement to the ardors of marriage. She knew that her husband differed from the legendary bohemian in having a strictly upright code in money matters, but she wished it could be less visionary. He mentally oscillated between pauperism and riches. Let him fail to sell a picture and he offered to pawn his coat; but the picture sold, he aspired to hire a mansion. In a word, she began to see that he was incapable either of foresight or moderation. Could she ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... Gates. If there was any real danger of those results following from the Persian occupation of Lazica which both nations anticipated, the sum must be considered to have been one of the best investments ever made by a State. Even if we believe the dangers apprehended to have been visionary, yet it cannot be viewed as an exorbitant price to have paid for a considerable tract of fertile country, a number of strong fortresses, and the redemption of an obligation which could not with honor ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... they competent as men? that is, were they men of sober judgment, able correctly to see and record the facts that came under their observation, and not visionary enthusiasts who mistook dreams for realities? This question admits of a short and satisfactory answer. No proof whatever exists that they were visionary men, but abundant proof to the contrary. Their narratives are calm, unimpassioned, and straightforward, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... a being Within me—a strange load my heart did bear, As if some living thing had made its lair Even in the fountains of my life:—a long 2970 And wondrous vision wrought from my despair, Then grew, like sweet reality among Dim visionary ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... there is necessarily neither the same amount of personal knowledge on the part of the electorate, nor do the consequences of a mistaken policy recoil so directly and so unmistakably upon them. These subjects, therefore, are the happy hunting-ground of the visionary and the phrase-maker. I have seen the people of this country talked into a policy with regard to South Africa at once so injurious to their own interests, and so base towards those who had thrown in their lot with ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... Whereat the King smiled, and bid him return to Ireland." The saving was questionable; for to prevent an insurrection by timely concessions, is incomparably less expensive than to suppress it when it has arisen. The "purchase of peace" was equally visionary; for the Irish never appear to have been able to sit down quietly under unjust oppression, however hopeless resistance ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... temperamentally a democrat, he had a great yearning for the reorganization of society in the general interest. His championship in this direction earned him the reputation in some quarters of being full of "fads," a visionary. But his neighbors, who had toiled and suffered beside him through the years, knew "Ed." Partridge, man to man, and held him in high regard; they admired him for his human qualities, respected him for his abilities, and wondered at his theories. ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... life more fully present to her than it had ever been before; and the vision for the time excluded all realities,—all except the returning sun-gleams which broke out on the waters as the evening approached, and mingled with the visionary sunlight of promised happiness; all except the hand that pressed hers, and the voice that spoke to her, and the eyes that looked at her with grave, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... women of the family this sense of unrealized importance grew tenfold in their consciousness, because they had few opportunities of encountering reality in their narrow lives and because as women they were apt to dream of wealth, even of visionary wealth. It cannot be said that Clark's Field had much to do with John's marriage which had taken place in 'sixty-seven, because at that early date it was not considered a large expectation even by the Clarks. But John had a younger sister, Ada or ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... but dress like their fathers, in the skins and furs of animals; they must not drink ardent spirits; and I do not remember whether he extended his inhibitions to the gun and gunpowder, in favor of the bow and arrow. I concluded, from all this, that he was a visionary, enveloped in their antiquities, and vainly endeavoring to lead back his brethren to the fancied beatitudes of their golden age. I thought there was little danger of his making many proselytes from the habits and comforts they had learned from the whites, ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... old chiefs. Cheschapah turned his impudent yet somewhat visionary face upon his father. "What do you know of medicine?" said he. "Two sorts of Indians are among the Crows to-day," he continued to the chiefs. "One sort are the fathers, and the sons are the other. The young warriors are not afraid of the white man. The old plant corn with the squaws. ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... his living with some approach to certainty, he had stopped, thinking it good to be poor, and retrenching time from his work to give to thought; that is to say, he sometimes passed entire days in meditation, absorbed, engulfed, like a visionary, in the mute voluptuousness of ecstasy and inward radiance. He had thus propounded the problem of his life: to toil as little as possible at material labor, in order to toil as much as possible at the labor which is impalpable; in ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... receive also this lesson. In both examples, childish though it be, this Heathen and Christian art is alike sincere, and alike vividly imaginative: the actual work is that of infancy; the thoughts, in their visionary simplicity, are also the thoughts of infancy, but in their solemn virtue they are the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... emblem of fire and sword; the blackness of the other betokened the mourning that attends them. In his train were wild figures in the Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model, giving the whole march a visionary air, as if a dream had broken forth from some feverish brain, and were sweeping visibly through the midnight streets. A mass of people, inactive, except as applauding spectators, hemmed the procession in; and several women ran along the sidewalk, piercing the confusion ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... by the reformers, and which were necessary to a just exercise of power in the people, whose representatives should share in the administration of the government. And many of the leaders in the revolution, even in its incipient stage, on the other hand, had such ambitious views, or visionary projects, that nothing would satisfy them, but an entire relinquishment of power long claimed and exercised by the Kings of this ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... himself to indicating the smallest evolutions of a soul, and all the most secret motives of our every action, giving but a quite secondary importance to the act and fact in itself. It is but the goal, a simple milestone, the excuse for the book. According to them, these works, at once exact and visionary, in which imagination merges into observation, are to be written after the fashion in which a philosopher composes a treatise on psychology, seeking out causes in their remotest origin, telling the why and wherefore of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... to oppose himself directly to the strong current of popular feeling. With rare dexterity he took the tone, not of an advocate, but of a judge. The danger which seemed so terrible to many honest friends of liberty he did not venture to pronounce altogether visionary. But he reminded his countrymen that a choice between dangers was sometimes all that was left to the wisest of mankind. No lawgiver had ever been able to devise a perfect and immortal form of government. Perils lay thick on the right and on the left; and to keep far from ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... exclaimed, "the confines of vision." Snatching it violently out of his hands, he walked away with the Taoist, under a lofty stone portal, on the face of which appeared in large type the four characters: "T'ai Hsue Huan Ching," "The Visionary limits of the Great Void." On each side was a scroll ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... woman. What did old women know of the world? Aubrey was not aware that sixty years before, that very grandmother, then young Lettice Eden, had thought exactly the same thing of those who stood in her way to the same visionary Paradise. ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... the salvation that Christ brings. That is our first thought. We often have very vague,—I might also say visionary—ideas of what Christ is; we love the person of Christ, but that which makes up Christ, which actually constitutes Him the Christ, that we do not know or love. If we love Christ above everything, we must love humility above everything, for humility is the very essence ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... could to make him happy. To be sure, I don't say that instead of a poet I would not rather have married a notary or a lawyer, something rather more serious, rather less vague as a profession; nevertheless, such as he was he took my fancy. I thought him a trifle visionary, but charming all the same, and well-mannered; besides he had some fortune, and I thought that once married poetizing would not prevent him from seeking out some good appointment which would ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... lingered on the borders of that fairyland where time and duty are not, but only one ineffable moment always passing, never past. Then with a long sigh, the breath of which dispersed a whole gleaming world of visionary delights, he got down doggedly on the commonplace pavement. Ah, what a descent it was! the moment his foot touched these vulgar flags, he was once more the hard-worked doctor at everybody's command, with a fretful patient waiting for him a mile beyond St Roque's; ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... have been acquainted with the Smith family for a number of years, while they resided near this place, and we have no hesitation in saying that we consider them destitute of that moral character which ought to entitle them to the confidence of any community. They were particularly famous for visionary projects; spent much of their time in digging for money which they pretended was hid in the earth, and to this day large excavations may be seen in the earth, not far from their residence, where they used to spend their time in digging for hidden treasures. Joseph Smith, Sr., and his son Joseph ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... of the room alone. Now he was confused again. Had he been right or was he just another visionary? Certainly, he hadn't explained himself with ...
— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley
... to a position equal to that of his white brethren? Is this idea of inducing them to exchange the bow and arrow for the carpenter's bench, the war-club for the blacksmith's hammer, the net and canoe for the plough, a mere visionary one, or is it a scheme that we have a good prospect of seeing carried into effect? The following questions suggest themselves and we are prepared with ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... its touch, as he did from the first sound of that loud iron voice. With eyes that started from his head, his limbs convulsed, his face most horrible to see, he raised one arm high up into the air, and holding something visionary back and down, with his other hand, drove at it as though he held a knife and stabbed it to the heart. He clutched his hair, and stopped his ears, and travelled madly round and round; then gave a frightful cry, and with it rushed away: ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... why not more?" "Stick to the coast, and don't go sailing straight away from all known land into waters unknown and mysterious," said the wise men. "But if the unknown waters bring us to the riches of Cathay?" said the king. "That's the extravagant dream of a visionary; it contains no truth and much danger," said the wise men. "Try it yourself, and see. Unbeknown to this Columbus, just send out a ship of your own to the west, and let them come back and tell us ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... by itself in a poor, marshy orchard, and packed with hay; to make it more attractive, we were told it had been the scene of an abominable murder, and was now haunted. But the day was beginning to break, and our fatigue was too extreme for visionary terrors. The second or third, we alighted on a barren heath about midnight, built a fire to warm us under the shelter of some thorns, supped like beggars on bread and a piece of cold bacon, and slept like gipsies with our feet to the fire. In the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her future lay visualized before her, heroic deeds, great ambitions, wide charity, he planned years with her, selfish, contented years. As different as smug, satisfied summer from visionary, palpitating spring, he was for her—but she was for all ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... something they particularly wanted to say. His tired fancy strayed off for a second to the thought of what it would have been like come back, at the end of the day, to such a sweet community of silence; but his mind was too crowded with importunate facts for any lasting view of visionary distances. The thought faded, and he merely felt how restful it ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... extraordinary pleasure, before I was twenty, the works of several of the Fathers, and all the old romances; which tinged my ideas with a certain piety and extravagance that rendered my virtues as well as my imperfections particularly mine.... The dull, the formal, and the visionary, the hard-honest man, and the poor-liver, are a people I have had no connection with; but have always kept company with the polite, the generous, the lively, the rational, and the brightest freethinkers ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... becomes, in the language of Plato, a meditation or practising of death. This excessive preoccupation with a problematic future has been a fruitful source of the most fatal aberrations both for nations and individuals. In pursuit of these visionary aims the few short years of life have been frittered away: wealth has been squandered: blood has been poured out in torrents: the natural affections have been stifled; and the cheerful serenity of reason has been exchanged for the melancholy ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... formed the same resolution; and, accordingly, in March, 1737, they arrived in London together. Two such candidates for fame, perhaps never, before that day, entered the metropolis together. Their stock of money was soon exhausted. In his visionary project of an academy, Johnson had probably wasted his wife's substance; and Garrick's father had little more than his half-pay.—The two fellow-travellers had the world before them, and each was to choose his road to fortune and to fame. They brought with them ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... means that is another matter. It is impossible to find anything out through explanations of it otherwise than "a theoretic perfection of government, questionable in its origin, hazardous in its progress, and visionary in its end." On the Englishman proposing to them the British constitution as a model they "hold it cheap in respect of liberty" and greet it with a smile; it is, especially, not in conformity with "the principles." And observe that we are ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... cheerily, because we transgressed no duty, and incurred no self-reproach? Bring back that state of happy ignorance, and you shall have no reason to call me unkind. But while you form schemes which I know to be visionary, and use language of such violence and passion, you shall excuse me if I now, and once for all, declare, that since Deborah shows herself unfit for the trust reposed in her, and must needs expose me to persecutions of this nature, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... as the Materialist had conceived it; secondly, the image of Intellect, obstinately separating all its inquiries from the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all kinds of perplexity and resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation before it settles at last into the simple faith which unites the philosopher and the infant; and thirdly, the image of the erring but pure-thoughted visionary, seeking over-much on this earth to separate soul from mind, till innocence itself is led astray by a phantom, and reason ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... seeming obedience to a parliament, in whose service he pretended to be retained? Trample, too, upon that parliament in their turn, and scornfully expel them as soon as they gave him ground of dissatisfaction? Erect in their place the dominion of the saints, and give reality to the most visionary idea which the heated imagination of any fanatic was ever able to entertain? Suppress again that monster in its infancy, and openly set up himself above all things that ever were called sovereign in England? Overcome first all his enemies by arms, and all his friends afterwards by artifice? Serve ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... some wholesome spring of delight. What a speed the train was going at! One could scarcely stand in the jolting carriage. Old Time must not make too sure of his victory. One felt a wistful partisanship for his snorting rival, striving for ever to accomplish the impossible. The labouring visionary was not ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... pleased, yet doubtful too for a moment. Then he seemed to banish his hesitation and, with a deprecating smile, said something which she could not understand. She nodded intelligently to get rid of him. Already, from the roof, she caught sight of a great visionary panorama glowing with colour and magic. She was impatient to climb still higher into the sky, to look down on the world as an eagle does. So she turned away decisively and mounted the dark, winding stair till she reached a door. She pushed it open with some difficulty, and ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Besides, we had a glass of Hermitage last night; the glow still suffuses my memory. I was growing positively niggardly with that Hermitage, positively niggardly. Let me take the hint: we had one bottle to celebrate the appearance of our visionary fortune; let us have a second to console us for its occultation. The third I hereby dedicate to ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as to make the rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would further ask whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet's imagination,—(a state, which spreads its influence and colouring over all, that co-exists with the exciting cause, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... almost the sine qua non of an individual destined to be famous or successful. Varieties of course existed, such as when combined with beetling brows and sunken eyes one recognized the professor or arch-critic of his generation. Or, when taken with the square forehead, thin mouth and visionary eyes of the military genius, one saw some great general. Or simply existing in some silly scion of good family, and meaning nothing whatever, in this case usually over-high at the thin bridge, and in profile far too strong for the weak ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... heard you talk so before, Guy," said his mother looking at him. His eyes had grown dark with intensity of expression while he was speaking, gazing at visionary flowers or beauties through the dinner-table mahogany. He looked up and laughed as she addressed him, and rising turned off lightly with his ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... I called to mind the poor fellow's speech about the beetle's being "the index of his fortune." Upon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled, but at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity—to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary, by ocular demonstration, of the fallacy of ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... concluded from the traces of resemblance which I have incidentally noticed in passing through the L' Allegro and Il Penseroso."—After extracting the lines, Mr. Warton adds, "as to the very elaborate work to which these visionary verses are no unsuitable introduction, the writer's variety of learning, his quotations from scarce and curious books, his pedantry sparkling with rude wit and shapeless elegance, miscellaneous matter, intermixture of agreeable tales and illustrations, and, perhaps, above all, the ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... incite, and enable every one to obtain lawful pleasures, and to augment the general felicity. But the peculiar virtues of the New Testament, either debase the mind by overwhelming fears, or intoxicate it with visionary hopes, both which, are equally fitted to turn away men from ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... flowing in the same direction. This could not last long without having a bad effect on the body. I had an illness, which, although I was racked with pain, was a positive relief to me, as it compelled me to live in the present suffering, and not in the visionary researches I had been continually making before. My kind uncle came to nurse me; and after the immediate danger was over, my life seemed to slip away in delicious languor for two or three months. I did not ask—so much did I dread falling into the old channel ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... consciousness of it, leads often to seemingly irrelevant digressions. Yet, is it not worth a moment's pause to find out that the stately site of Washington Square North, as well as other adjacent and select territory, was originally the property of two visionary seamen; and that the present erratic deflection of Broadway came from one obstinate Dutchman's affection for his own grounds and his uncompromising determination to use a gun to defend them, ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... the affair given by themselves; although more, it is believed, to suit the taste and belief of the time they lived in than their own. The two brothers had passed many hours silent and in the dark; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the visionary world, into which they had unconsciously slipped, presented to both such phenomena—founded on the meditations and recollections in which both had been immersed—as were easily rendered in the exoteric types of romance. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... Richmond or its communications to join with Grant in the capture of Lee's army, and the other was to destroy the military resources of the Southern Atlantic States. The first was too grand, and perhaps might seem too visionary, to be talked about at first, nor was any mention of it at that time necessary. Besides, events might possibly render the march to Richmond unnecessary or impracticable; or, possibly, Sherman might be compelled for some reason to make his new ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... much was anticipated was not satisfactory. The eminent prelate did not realise Tancred's ideal of a bishop, while his lordship did not hesitate to declare that Lord Montacute was a visionary. ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... with more general powers. They wished things to get more and more into confusion, to justify the violent measure they proposed. The idea of establishing a government by reasoning and agreement, they publicly ridiculed as an Utopian project, visionary ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Being no visionary, he did not underestimate the power of circumstance. This Betty had learned from him. And what could practically be done with circumstance such as this? The question had begun to recur to her. What could she ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... institutions of education. As a young man I found the writings of Emerson unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible. I was concerned with physical science, and with routine teaching and discipline; and Emerson's thinking seemed to me speculative and visionary. In regard to religious belief, I was brought up in the old-fashioned Unitarian conservatism of Boston, which was rudely shocked by Emerson's excursions beyond its well-fenced precincts. But when I had got at what proved to ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... find it to be true, as it is reported, that to the Second Sight nothing is presented but phantoms of evil. Good seems to have the same proportions in those visionary scenes, as it obtains in real life: almost all remarkable events have evil for their basis; and are either miseries incurred, or miseries escaped. Our sense is so much stronger of what we suffer, than of what we enjoy, that ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... was the deep voice of the maid of the long trail speaking of the streams and the waving grass of that visionary Land ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... have cut off his nose and ears as deliberately and of malice aforethought have made his mother unhappy; and as he was of such a generous disposition that he would give away anything to any one, he instantly made a present of his visionary red coat and epaulettes to ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... short, the poorly sown and badly cultivated minds, and on which the theory had only to fall to smother the good grain and thrive like a nettle. Add to these charlatans and others who live by their wits, the visionary and morbid of all sorts, from Fanchet and Klootz to Chalier or Marat, the whole of that needy, chattering, irresponsible crowd, ever swarming about large cities ventilating its shallow conceits and abortive pretensions. Farther in the background ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Professor Meiser, one of the least visionary men of the age, was persuaded that science could put a living being to sleep and wake him up again at the end of an infinite number of years—arrest all the functions of the system, suspend life itself, protect ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... by a severely frosty night. Truly a most beautiful night! She would have delighted to see it here. The Downs were like floating islands, like fairy-laden vapours; solid, as Andrew Hedger's hour of eating; visionary, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... distance." And his music, at least those rich fragments that are his music, make us feel as though that summer sojourn had been symbolic of his career, as though in spirit he had ever lived in some high, visionary place overlooking the sweep of centuries in which Russia had waxed from infancy to maturity. It is as though the chiming of the bells of innumerable Russian villages, villages living and villages dead and underground a thousand years, had mounted incessantly ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... time of his childhood he was sent to one of the excellent schools established by the weavers in their own quarter, and that there or afterwards he came under some influence, both religious and learned, which stamped him the practical visionary that he remained throughout his life. Thereafter, between his sea voyagings and expeditions about the Mediterranean coasts, he no doubt acquired knowledge in the only really practical way that it can be acquired; that is to say, he received it as and when he needed ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... to join them in the war, and sustain them with our blood and treasure. If so, the temple of Janus will never be closed on our continent, and war will be our normal condition—a war not declared by us, or in our own interest, but by the South, as a foreign government. Such an alliance is visionary, ruinous, and impracticable. It is simply a scheme to secure ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... long. Nobody could guess of what it was that France or the world might be with child: nobody, till the birth in 1789, and even for a generation afterwards. France is weakly and unwieldy, has strange enough longings for chalky, inky, visionary, foolish substances, and may be in the family-way for aught ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the folly which so strongly actuated themselves. Far more likely was it that their assaults were the work, misguided but surely excusable, of the Plain Man, irritated at last to execute judgment on these frenzied and incompetent efforts after that unprofitable dream of the visionary, a world peace. It was well known that the question of disarmament ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... collector, classifier, and hero-worshipper. In the hall of the "presbytere" hangs a case of carefully-mounted butterflies, the result, no doubt, of an earlier passion for collecting. His "specimens" have changed, that is all: he has passed from butterflies to men, from the actual to the visionary Psyche. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... of despair, and dismissed all illusion from his youthful bosom. The boy turned his head away, and the voice which he had made so gruff quavered at the end. He felt in himself at that moment all the depths of profound and visionary passion, something more than any man ever was conscious of who had an object and a hope. The boy had neither; he neither hoped to marry her nor to get a hearing, nor even to be taken seriously. Not even the remorse of a serious passion rejected, the pain of self-reproach, ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... shop until he had looked it through. This taste for the supernatural seems to have grown upon him after his wife's death, and influenced him so deeply that, had he not been possessed of a deal of shrewd common sense, there might have been danger of his embracing some of the visionary doctrines in which he was so learned. But no! even Spiritualism, to which not a few of his brother novelists succumbed, whilst affording congenial material for our artist of the superhuman to work upon, did not ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... said I, reaching out my hand and shaking it in the air with my visionary friend—"thanks. I've studied these things with some care, and I've tried to find a reason for everything in life as I know it. I have always regarded Henry as a moral man—as is natural, since in spite of all you can say he is the real ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... us something of a clue to his character: a strong will; great physical energy; sanguine, fanatical temperament; unbounded courage and little wisdom; crude, visionary ideality; the inspiration of biblical precepts and Old Testament hero-worship; and ambition curbed to irritation by the hard fetters of labor, privation, and enforced endurance. In association, habit, language, and conduct, he was clean, but coarse; ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... He said, that great Iredonozor, the Emperor of the Moon, was enamour'd on a fair Mortal. It must be so—and either he descended to court my Daughter personally, which for the rareness of the Novelty, she takes to be a Dream; or else, what they and I beheld, was visionary, by way of a sublime Intelligence:—And possibly—'tis only thus: the People of that World converse with Mortals.—I must be satisfy'd in this ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... but the widow and her daughter knew what the fight had been, for Clay Westmore, the brother, was but a boy and in college at the time. He had graduated only a few months before, and was now at home, wrapped up, as Richard Travis had heard, in what to him was a visionary scheme of some sort for discovering a large area of coal and iron thereabouts. He had heard, too, that the young man had taken hold of what had been left, and that often he had been seen following the ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... separate single things critically and yet not be overcome by the mass of details, mindful of the high destiny of man, to comprehend the mind of nature, which lies concealed under the mantle of phenomena." This sounds visionary and impracticable for children of the common school, especially when we know that much lower aims have not been successfully reached. In fact it cannot be said that the natural sciences have any recognized standing ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... yet I am far from sure. What about Dante? Haven't you sometimes stumbled over his grave assurances that this and that did really befall him? Putting aside the feeble notion that he was a deluded visionary, how does one reconcile the artist's management of his poem with the Christian's stem faith? In any case, he was more poet than Christian when he wrote. Milton makes no such claims; he merely prays for ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... idea of compassion to such lengths that he followed thieves in order to give them good flour in place of the bad that they had stolen from him by mistake—this simple-minded being, whose only desire was to suffer for the "truth," possessed without doubt the soul of a saint and a visionary. ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... joliment bien ensemble, tous les deux—ils sont inseparables!" she would often exclaim, apropos of these visionary beings; and apropos of the ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... He knew deep in his heart that no human being could ever be the actual comrade of this man. This lord of the voiceless desert needed no human companionship; yet as the marshal glanced from the black shadow of Satan to the gleaming eyes of Bart, and then to the visionary face of Barry, he felt that he had been admitted by Whistling Dan into the mysterious company. The thought stirred him deeply. It was as if he had made an alliance with the wandering wind. Why he had been accepted he could not dream, but he had ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... to the front and crush down disorder with an iron heel; but that will not be until the need for a saviour of society is evident to all. I hope, my dear fellow, you will not be carried away with these visionary ideas. I can, of course, understand your predilections for a Republic, but between your Republic and the Commune, for which the organs of the mob are already clamoring, there is no shadow of resemblance. They are both ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... Those visionary maids - I feel a sharp and sudden poke Between the shoulder-blades - "Why, Brown, my boy! Your growing stout!" (I told you he would ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... which transcend usual human experience, have for several generations sought to reconstruct the figure of Jesus on an entirely naturalistic basis. Instead of the Jesus of the gospels, they give us, as the actual Man, Jesus the Sage, or the Visionary, or the Prophet, or the Philanthropist, who, they think, was subsequently deified by His followers. Such reconstructions handle the sources arbitrarily, eliminating from even the earliest of them that which clashes with their preconceptions. They fail to ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... talents and acquisitions as the late King of Sweden; and by the Empress of Russia, whose extraordinary abilities, information, and magnanimity, astonish the world, would have afforded a noble subject for contemplation and record. This reflection may possibly be thought too visionary by the more sedate and cold-blooded part of my readers; yet I own, I frequently indulge it with an earnest, unavailing regret. BOSWELL. In The Spectator, No. 436, Hockley in the Hole is described as 'a place of no small renown ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... rocks Darken'd old Avon's stream, in the ivied cave Recluse to sit and brood the future song, Yet not the less, PENATES, loved I then Your altars, not the less at evening hour Delighted by the well-trimm'd fire to sit, Absorbed in many a dear deceitful dream Of visionary joys: deceitful dreams— Not wholly vain—for painting purest joys, They form'd to Fancy's mould ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... it hidden from thyself. Life, thou saidst, is short: and the sleep which is in the grave, is long! Let me use that life, so transitory, for the glory of those heavenly dreams destined to comfort the sleep which is so long. This pure creature—pure from every suspicion of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure in senses more obvious—never once did this holy child, as regarded herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that was travelling to meet her. She might not prefigure the very manner of her death; she saw not in ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... or fancies he has a duty towards them, he may choose for the symbols of his art their legends, their history, their beliefs, their opinions, because he has a right to choose among things less than himself, but he cannot choose among the substances of art. So far, however, as this book is visionary it is Irish for Ireland, which is still predominantly Celtic, has preserved with some less excellent things a gift of vision, which has died out among more hurried and more successful nations: no shining candelabra have prevented us from looking into the darkness, and when one looks into the darkness ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... rather sadly. The man's perfect simplicity, his eagerness for the most lofty ideals, the spotless purity of his life, commanded Gilbert's most true admiration. And yet to the Norman, Arnold of Brescia was but a dreamer, a visionary, and a madman. Gilbert could listen to him for a while, but then the terrible tension of the friar's thought and speech wearied him. Just now he was almost glad that his companion should depart so suddenly; but as he watched him he saw him stop, as if he had forgotten something, and then turn back, ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... them with whom I am acquainted are especially lovers of the true faith, and are persons in whom I have unbounded confidence." The inquisitors, on hearing this, were so fully convinced that the poor widow's representations had no other foundation than the visionary workings of a disordered brain, that they allowed the learned doctor to depart with her under his charge. Thus was the danger to the infant Church at Seville for the time mercifully removed, and while it gained strength to endure the coming ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... a privilege to be able to take such advantage of our wide circulation as will give repining invalids to understand, that the advantages of a foreign climate are closely limited by one portion of the profession, and considered by another portion as highly problematical, if not entirely visionary. This applies, however, mainly to consumption; for the advantages of the climatic change are seldom denied in dyspepsy, rheumatism, scrofula, and the tribe of nervous diseases. Even in these, however, the locality chosen ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... practical preparation for the proposed country life, although many of the plans seemed visionary enough. Randolph had long been considering an offer from a local magazine that would enable him to do most of his work at home, but the pay was smaller and less certain than he could wish. However, ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... which in a real history must walk shadowed under the veil of modesty; for the soul, still less than the body, will consent to be revealed to all eyes. Hence, although most of my books have seemed true to some, they have all seemed visionary to most. ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... believed it was all in vain. The feeling grew upon her that belief or unbelief was a matter of education and temperament, and that the feelings of which Dennis spoke were but the deceptive emotions of our agitated hearts. To that degree that the Divine love seemed visionary and hopeless, she longed for him to speak of his own, if in truth it still existed, that she could understand and believe in. If during what remained of life she could only drink the sweetness of that, she felt it was the best she could ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... dwelling are his only estate, his only capital, his only wealth, and he does not take the trouble to conceal the fact. The very idea of a fixed income is as distasteful to him as the possibility of possessing it is distant and visionary. There is always money in abundance, money for Faustina's horses and carriages, money for Gouache's select dinners, money for the expensive fancies of both. The paint pot is the mine, the brush is the miner's pick, and the vein has ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... of and a sharp pale face. Martin had a faded daguerreotype of him set against the background of the old Wiltshire kitchen, his black clothes hung upon him like a disguise, his eyes burning even upon that faded picture with the fire of his spirit. For James Warlock was a mystic, a visionary, a prophet. He walked and talked with God; in no jesting spirit it was said that he knew God's plans and could turn the world into a blazing coal so soon as he pleased. It was because he knew with certainty that God would, in person, soon, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... is neither science nor philosophy. It cannot be concealed, however, that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally visionary, the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things to their natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical enthusiasm is much the same; and both have received a sensible shock from ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... at him, astonished, admiring. This visionary, this poet so estranged from flesh and blood, had put his finger on ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... voyage no inferior place must be assigned to the hope of finding the primeval seat of Paradise.11 The curious traveller, exploring these visionary spots one by one, found them lying in the light of common day no nearer heaven than his own natal home; and at last all faith in them died out when the whole surface of the globe had been surveyed, no nook left wherein romance and superstition might any longer play at hide ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... one, though the chief, worker among many, it will be necessary, while proceeding with our story, to give convincing testimony from outsiders concerning the reasonableness and practicableness of his aims and hopes. In giving some interesting and striking illustrations by way of proof that he is no visionary, but a cool-headed, hard-working calculator who well knows that the capital he is working with will yield a high percentage, we may have to tell of what is in progress in ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... Archer-God Declining slow, and with a sullen awe. 520 Then Phoebus, far from all the warrior throng To his own shrine the sacred dome beneath Of Pergamus, AEneas bore; there him Latona and shaft-arm'd Diana heal'd And glorified within their spacious fane. 525 Meantime the Archer of the silver bow A visionary form prepared; it seem'd Himself AEneas, and was arm'd as he. At once, in contest for that airy form, Grecians and Trojans on each other's breasts 530 The bull-hide buckler batter'd and light targe. Then thus Apollo ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... the pretty sight, it lost reality as things do when too closely scrutinized, and became a visionary confluence of lines and colors, a soft stir of bloom like a flowery expanse moved by the air. This ecstatic effect was not exclusive of facts which kept one's feet well on the earth, or on the roof of one's college barge. Out of that "giddy ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... in the world, I have occasionally built castles in the air, and equally of course they have invariably tumbled down in due time with a crash This particular castle however, not only attained to a great elevation in the visionary builder's eyes, but it covered so vast an area of land, that the story of its rise and fall deserves to be placed on record, as a warning to aerial architects and also as a beacon-light to ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... with such unusual fire, I wish him absent whom I most desire. And now I faint with grief; my fate draws nigh; In all the pride of blooming youth I die. Death will the sorrows of my heart relieve. Oh, might the visionary youth survive, I should with joy my latest breath resign! 90 But oh! I see his fate involved in mine.' This said, the weeping youth again returned To the clear fountain, where again he burned; His tears defaced the surface of the well With circle after circle, as they ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... hopelessness of such a passion she never considered, nor asked herself its end, or scarce suspected its aim; it was pleasant to her at the time, and she looked not to the future, but fed it with visionary schemes, and soothed it with voluntary fancies. Now she knew all was over, she felt the folly she had committed, but though sensibly and candidly angry at her own error, its conviction offered nothing but sorrow ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... of the same characteristics which he afterward treated in modified forms. They are the two poles, the extremes,—both of them remote and chilly,—of good and evil, from which the writer withdrew, after exploring them, into more temperate regions. The movement of these persons is visionary, and their personality faint. But I have marked a few characteristic portions of the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... left the train and strode across the park, his imagination playing happy, visionary tunes. He would drop in to-morrow at St. Isidore's on his way back from White and Einstein's. He must see more of those fellows at Henry's clinic; they seemed a good set. And he was not sure that he should answer the Baltimore man so flatly. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... from the benevolent operations which Mrs. Fry now commenced. The officers of Newgate despaired of any good result; the people who associated with Mrs. Fry, charitable as they were, viewed her plans as Utopian and visionary, while she herself almost quailed at their very contemplation. It also placed a great strain upon her nervous system to attend women condemned to death. She wrote: "I have suffered much about the hanging of criminals." And again: "I have just returned from a melancholy ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... taper of selfish and painful wisdom, holding it up to the great models and to the dim idea, and seeing nothing but overwhelming greatness and dimness. The days of illumination are gone! But do you know I fancy—I fancy"—and he grew suddenly almost familiar in this visionary fervour—"I fancy the light of that time rests upon us here for an hour! I have never seen the David so grand, the Perseus so fair! Even the inferior productions of John of Bologna and of Baccio Bandinelli seem to ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... right. In their visionary leaps to affluence they soared to giddy heights. They strutted and bragged as if the millions were already theirs. To hear them, you would think they had an exclusive option on the treasure-troves of the Klondike. Yet, before and behind ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... who have worked with him have remarked upon his eagerness, once he has decided a course of action, to carry it into practical effect. The President of the Czecho-Slovak Republic, Thomas G. Masaryk, said that of all the men he had met, "your visionary, idealistic President is by far and away the most intensely practical." One of the Big Four at Paris remarked: "Wilson works. The rest of us play, comparatively speaking. We Europeans can't keep up with a man who travels a straight path with such a swift stride, never looking ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... off San Pedro, California, Mr. Dana, lying in his berth, "vowed that, if God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that class of beings with whom my lot has been so long cast.'' This vow he carried out in no visionary scheme of mutiny or foolish "paying back'' to the captain, but by awakening a "strong sympathy'' for the sailors "by a voice from the forecastle,'' in his ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... bailiff's breaking his fast on the same. Claret flows soberly from long-necked bottles whose corks bear the brand of the wine-merchant, high priced and legal, instead of from the cask of which the snug sandy cove and the roguish-looking hooker could have told tales. But, in spite of visionary rents, and poor-rates sternly real, the Irish squire still clings to the exercise of that hospitality which has been an heirloom with the tribes since ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... man see in Jesus but a harmless visionary? He had evidently made up his mind that there was no mischief in Him, or he would not have questioned Him as to His kingship. It was a new thing for the rulers to hand over dangerous patriots, and Pilate had experience enough to suspect that such unusual loyalty concealed something ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... smile. "War Eagle" Niles, down there, was a reformer. For forty years he had been bellowing against despots and existing order, and, for the Duke of Fort Canibas, he typified "Reform!" Visionary, windy, snarling, impracticable attempts ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... effects of repose to the portrayal of action, Raphael showed himself capable of both. The Hellenic calm of Parnassus is not more impressive than the splendid charge of the avenging spirits upon Heliodorus; the visionary idealism of the angel-led Peter is matched by the vigorous realism of Peter called from his fishing to the apostleship; the brooding quiet of maternity expressed in the Madonna of the Chair has a perfect complement in the ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... thirsty! so thirsty!" Emily raised the poor tortured body with a patient caution which spared it pain, and put the glass to her aunt's lips. She drank the lemonade to the last drop. Refreshed for the moment, she spoke again—spoke to the visionary servant of her delirious fancy, while ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... farmers themselves were not in it, yet their leaders were. But the farmers form the vast majority of the Boers. They are an independent and stiff-necked type; and it is as absurd to suppose that their leaders could pledge them to such vast and visionary schemes as it is to suppose that such schemes could have the slightest interest for them. As a matter of fact, what has given old Kruger his long ascendency is the way in which he shares and embodies the one or two simple, dogged ideas of the mass of the Burghers. ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... that, in 1808, while Luisa yet lived, a few scientists and professors of Konigsberg had formed a sort of Union—vague enough and visionary—to encourage virtue and discipline and patriotism. And now, in 1812, four years later, the memory of Luisa still lingered in those narrow streets that run by the banks of the Pregel beneath the great ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... the fashion of this world, should live together as brothers, seeking one another's elevation and spiritual growth." It was essentially socialistic in its conception and execution and, although professedly altruistic in its nature, was in reality a visionary scheme which reflected but little credit upon the judgment of either its originators or its patrons. Its company was composed of "members" and "scholars," to whom may be added a celebrated list of those who ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... failure. His advice was unpractical, and though, as the first prophet of "China for the Chinese," he found a fundamental truth, he found it too soon for immediate utility. On political matters he and the I.G. disagreed; the latter was far too wise to hold with Gordon's somewhat visionary idea that China could raise an army as good as the best in the twinkling of an eye; and when Gordon left Peking after a very short stay, he left disappointed ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... of postscript to this earlier one—and the two Sheare brothers. Compared to Wolfe Tone, however, all these were mere amateurs in insurrection, and pale and shadowy dabblers in rebellion. Lord Edward was an amiable warm-hearted visionary, high-minded and gallant, but without much ballast, and to a great degree under the guidance of others. The mainspring of the whole movement, as has been seen, was Protestant and Northern, and now that all hope of constitutional reform was gone, it was resolved to ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... work, to begin life again, as you say—how sweet and terrible and glad it would be! But I know, oh, I know myself and I know you! I am like one who has lived forever. I am not good, and I am not foolish, I am only mad; and the madness in me urges me to that visionary world where you and I could live and work and wander, and be content with all that would be given us—joy, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... hours, awful, horrible hours, when it seemed to me as though all this were a delusion, a mystification—as though in some way an evil demon assumed the queen's form by night to mock me, poor frenzied visionary, with a happiness that has no existence, but lives only in my imagination. When such thoughts come to me, I feel a frenzied fury, a crushing despair, and I could, regardless of my oath and even the danger that threatens you, rush to you, and, before ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... not see; and his romance was always a fruit of the soil. The artist in him, seeming to be in conflict with the peasant, fortified, clarified the peasant, extracted from that hard soil a rare fruit. You see in his face an extraordinary mingling of the peasant, the visionary, and the dandy: the long hair and beard, the sensitive mouth and nose, the fierce brooding eyes, in which wildness and delicacy, strength and a kind of stealthiness, seem to be grafted on an inflexible ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... his castle in the air, Brian naturally thought of giving it a mistress, and this time actual appearance took the place of vision. He fell in love with Madge Frettlby, and having decided in his own mind that she and none other was fitted to grace the visionary halls of his renovated castle, he watched his opportunity, and declared himself. She, woman-like, coquetted with him for some time, but at last, unable to withstand the impetuosity of her Irish lover, confessed in a low voice, with a pretty smile on ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... he was reticent about was the story of his uncle. Poor, crack-brained visionary, he had gone to his account now, and what need was there to recount his ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... Ferdinand, preparing to lead forth his magnificent army in Europe's supreme contest with the Moors, how insignificant seemed the visionary expedition of Columbus, about to start in three small shallops across the unknown ocean. But grand as was the triumph of Ferdinand, it now seems hardly worthy of mention in comparison with the wonderful achievement of the poor ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... tired of wandering; he would marry; he would settle down and enjoy his own; he would seek the good of the people, and make his great estates an example among landowners. And then within three weeks he had learned that there was a pretender to the throne, that in Cullerne there was a visionary who claimed to be the very Lord Blandamer. He had had this wretched man pointed out to him once in the street—a broken-down fellow who was trailing the cognisance of all the Blandamers in the mud, till the very boys called him Old Nebuly. Was he to fight for land, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... Harry was a superior being, a man who was able to bring things to pass in a way that excited his enthusiasm. He never tired of listening to his stories of what he had done and of what he was going to do. As for Washington, Harry thought he was a man of ability and comprehension, but "too visionary," he told the Colonel. The Colonel said he might be right, but he had never noticed ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... and said, "A visionary Scottish nobleman! a dreamer a hundred years before his time! Is it worth while?" while he himself saw a dream of sunshine when he visited his Colonists on Red River, when he made allocations for their separate homes for them, when he ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... correct some of the erroneous impressions current among us as to the intellectual qualities and temperament of the Italian people. The common, or, at least, a very prevalent, notion concerning them is that they are an impassioned, imaginative, excitable, visionary race, capable of brilliant individual efforts, but deficient in the power of organization and combination, and in patience and practical sagacity. Some of us go, or have gone, farther, and have supposed that the Austrian domination ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... would do without any dilemma at all: to treat the man simply as a man, and give him no more and no less favour than he would to anybody else. In short, I am sure a practical physician would drop all these visionary, unworkable modern dreams about type and criminology and go back to the plain business-like facts of the French Revolution ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... into one. Foolish and fruitless as it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets on the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind assumption to accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, that he too like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, and like other poets found them or made them fruitful as well as bitter, though it might ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... or two men revolting enough in speech and aspect to drive Hitty to her own room, where, in a creaking chair, she rocked monotonously back and forth, watching the snapping fire, and dreaming dreams of a past that seemed now but a visionary paradise. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... sterilisation of the bearers of certain superior qualities, intellectual or physical. In a more general way he attacks the democratic movement, a movement, as P. Bourget says, which is "anti-physical" and contrary to the natural laws of progress; though it has been inspired "by the dreams of that most visionary of all centuries, the eighteenth."[250] The "Equality" which levels down and mixes (justly condemned, he holds, by the Comte de Gobineau), prevents the aristocracy of the blond dolichocephales from holding ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... of the first to see the importance of Canada; and after 1685 he was supported by James in the attempt to divert the fur trade from Montreal to Albany by bringing the Iroquois Indians under English control. The scheme, which involved nothing less than the ruin of Canada, was by no means a visionary one. The Five Nations, lying south of the chain of lakes, could profit but little by the fur trade while it remained in French hands. But let Albany replace Montreal as the chief market, and they would become the indispensable middle carriers between ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... unfulfilled longings to some young hearts, and fade away like the early cloud and morning dew, to leave behind only a memory of mingled pain and sweetness, recalled in after time with something of self-pity and something of surprise that such things had ever seemed real and not visionary, and had touched the warm springs in the heart now chilled, it may be, by the stern exigencies of ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... to the common sense of mankind. Your unperverted understandings can best determine on subjects of a practical nature. The positions and plans which are said to be above the comprehension of the multitude may be always suspected to be visionary and fruitless. He who made all men hath made the truths necessary to human happiness ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... golden opportunities which, once past, might never come again. So I reasoned; so time went on; so I lived, plodding on by day in the Ecole de Medecine, but, when evening came, resuming my studies at the leaf turned down the night before, and, like the visionary in "The Pilgrims of the Rhine," taking up my dream-life at the point where ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... George, were not the playing fields at Eton food for all manner of flights? No old maid's gown, though it had been tormented into all the fashions from King James to King George, ever underwent so many transformations as those poor plains have in my idea. At first I was contented with tending a visionary flock, and sighing some pastoral name to the echo of the cascade under the bridge. How happy should I have been to have had a kingdom only for the pleasure of being driven from it, and living disguised in an humble vale! As I got further into Virgil and Clelia, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... parts of Nebuchadnezzar's visionary image were interpreted to signify four successive monarchies, the Babylonian being the first. In the seventh chapter Daniel records his own vision of four great beasts that arose out of the violently agitated sea, and these represent the same four kingdoms described in Nebuchadnezzar's dream. ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... that the lovers of poetry were impatient. Up to this point Crabbe shows himself wholly unsuspicious of this fact. It had not occurred to him that it was possible for him safely to trust his own instincts. And yet there is a stray entry in his diary which seems to show how (in obedience to his visionary instructor) he was trying experiments in more hopeful directions. On the twelfth, of May he intimates to his Mira that he has dreams of success in something different, something more human than had yet engaged his thoughts. "For the first time in my life that I recollect," he writes, "I have ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... convict St. Francis of bad heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun and moon. There may have been heralds stupid enough to say so even in that much more logical age, but it is no sufficient way of dealing with visions or with revolutions. St. Thomas of Canterbury was a great visionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as England was concerned his revolution failed and his vision was not fulfilled. We are therefore told in the text-books little more than that he wrangled with the King about ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... life had not been a cheerful one, subjected to the ever-changing whims of a visionary father, with whom one of her practical cast of mind could have no point of sympathy. And since she came to Lindsleyville it was harder than ever, for there was no neighbor nearer than Gager's, ten miles away, and there was not a woman within fifty ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... unknown depths of the past. As one reads, an extraordinary procession of persons seems to pass before one's eyes—Moses, Archimedes, Achilles, Job, Hector and Charles the Fifth, Cardan and Alaric, Gordianus, and Pilate, and Homer, and Cambyses, and the Canaanitish woman. Among them, one visionary figure flits with a mysterious pre-eminence, flickering over every page, like a familiar and ghostly flame. It is Methuselah; and, in Browne's scheme, the remote, almost infinite, and almost ridiculous ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... misfortune, nor disappointment, nor accidents, nor delay, nor the protracted gloom of years, could avail to disturb the public trust in him. It was apart from circumstances; it was beside the action of caprice; it was beyond all visionary, and above all changeable feelings. It was founded on nothing extraneous; not upon what he had said or done, but upon what he was. They saw something in the man, which gave them assurance of a nature and destiny ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... direction I had chosen. What would he say if he knew of my determination; and was it filial and just to let him remain in ignorance of it? Yet I reasoned that after all I had made no final decision. I was attracted, it is true, by what might be called a visionary theory; but when I had given the principles of moderation further thought, I might conclude not to devote myself to them. It would be time enough later to speak of the subject. At present I was only too poorly prepared to present the ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... that had made those tracks. He had hunted elephants in the jungles of Bengal, and knew all the peculiarities of the grand quadruped. Such footmarks as were now under his eyes could not have been made by a mere visionary animal, but only by a ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... and, like Millet, very near to the soil; a natural man, yet crossed by nature with a perverse strain; the possessor of a sensibility exalted, and dolorous; morbid, sick-nerved, and as introspective as Heine; a visionary and a lover of life, very close to the periphery of things; an interpreter of Baudelaire; Dante's alter ego in his vast grasp of the wheel of eternity, in his passionate fling at nature; withal a sculptor, always profound and tortured, translating rhythm and motion into the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... sleep under shelter I woke refreshed, and was not driven by the cruel spur of hunger into the wet forest. The wished time had come of rest from labour, of leisure for thought. Resting here, just where she had rested, night by night clasping a visionary mother in her arms, whispering tenderest words in a visionary ear, I too now clasped her in my arms—a visionary Rima. How different the nights had seemed when I was without shelter, before I had rediscovered ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... to a white man's land, north into Arizona where the Three Hills of Gold are waiting, to say nothing of the Lost Stone Cabin mine, lost not twenty miles from Quartzite, and in plain sight of Castle Dome. Now there is nothing visionary about that, Kit! Why, I knew an old-timer who freighted rich ore out of that mine thirty years ago, and even the road to it has been lost for years! We know things once did exist up in that country, Kit, and down here we are all tangled up with Mexican-Indian ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... later, that I came out of my bewilderment. I looked about, dazedly. Thus, I saw so extraordinary a sight that, for a while, I could scarcely believe I was not still wrapped in the visionary tumult of my own thoughts. Out of the reigning green, had grown a boundless river of softly shimmering globes—each one enfolded in a wondrous fleece of pure cloud. They reached, both above and below me, to an unknown distance; and, not only hid the shining of the Green Sun; but supplied, in place ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... of Columbus seemed too visionary to most princes, and it was years before he was able to persuade the Spanish sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, to grant him three small ships and enough men to start upon his voyage. But on August 3, 1492, he finally set sail ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... hope of organising them for active service in the cause. But this group soon broke up, and Mr. Stephen ascribes their failure in part to their name, observing that the word '"Philosophical" in English is synonymous with visionary, unpractical, and perhaps simply foolish.' There would be less satire, and possibly more justice, in saying that the word gives a chill to the energetic hot-gospeller of active Radicalism, who pushes past the philosopher as one standing too far behind the fighting line, although he may be ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the visionary regions of fancy, let us pursue the thought a stage farther; and consider Birmingham as one great family, possessed of a capital of Eight Millions. Her annual returns in trade as above, from which we will deduct ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... a 'pretty man.' Tall, slim, and slight, with long curly light hair, pink and white complexion, visionary whispers, and a tendency to moustache that could best be seen sideways. He had light blue eyes; while his features generally were good, but expressive of little beyond great good-humour. In dress, he was both smart and various; indeed, we feel a difficulty in fixing him in any particular costume, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... stemming the torrents of Jacobinism in America, and resolved to render the 'Echo' subservient to that purpose. They therefore proceeded to attack, as proper objects of satire, those tenets, as absurd in politics as pernicious in morals, the visionary scheme of equality, and the baleful doctrine that sanctions the pursuit of a good end by the ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... which we call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man. In ages less visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man after all. Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... never made a pretence to him or you that I loved him. I knew, and, father, you knew, and he knew, that I never did. I was not wholly indifferent, for I had a hope of being pleasant and useful to Tom. I made that wild escape into something visionary, and have slowly found out how wild it was. But Tom had been the subject of all the little tenderness of my life; perhaps he became so because I knew so well how to pity him. It matters little now, except as it may dispose you to think ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... he was then printing an elegy of his own composition, on the death of Aisquila Rose—and as he had but one small font of types, and used no copy, but composed the elegy in the press, he could not employ him in the composition. Keimer was a visionary, whose mind was frequently elevated above the little concerns of life, and consequently very subject to make mistakes, which he seldom took the pains to correct. Franklin had frequently reasoned with him upon the importance of accuracy ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... theory of supposed love, and that upon guesses and surmises, so that the whole edifice was just as shadowy and unsubstantial as it could well be. But then it is curious to see how much real torment people manage to extract from visionary troubles. ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... the article of penance, or postpone it to some future occasion, when I may be better able to perform it; for I am just now particularly hungry, and am always better able to resist temptation with a full stomach than an empty one. As I find it displeasing to Sir Ralph, I will not insist upon my visionary partner in the dance, at least until I am better able to substantiate the fact; and I shall listen to your lectures, worthy sir, with great delight, and, I doubt not, with equal benefit; but in the meantime, as carnal wants must be supplied, and mundane ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... are feasting their fruitful imaginations with the idle and visionary dreams of fanaticism; with a kind of chimerical heaven of which they know nothing, as to its certainty: this man is in heaven already: dwelling in love, he 'dwelleth in ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... only he SUGGESTIONS, and very vague and indefinite ones too, still they might be pleasant enough to absorb and repress bitter memories for a time. As for me, my poor skill would scarcely avail you, as I could promise you neither self-oblivion nor visionary joy. I have a certain internal force, it is true—a spiritual force which when strongly exercised overpowers and subdues the material—and by exerting this I could, if I thought it well to do so, release your SOUL—that is, the Inner Intelligent Spirit which is the actual You—from its house of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... MS. stories, which he desires to print under the title of "Tales of the Folio Club." An offer by the proprietor of the Baltimore Saturday Visitor, of two prizes, one for the best tale and one for the best poem, induced him to submit the pieces entitled "MS. Found in a Bottle," "Lionizing," "The Visionary," and three others, with "The Coliseum," a poem, to the committee, which consisted of Mr. John P. Kennedy, the author of "Horse-Shoe Robinson;" Mr. J.H.B. Latrobe, and Dr. James H. Miller. Such matters are usually disposed of in a very off-hand way: Committees to award literary prizes drink to ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the Doctor began, when all were seated on the visionary camp-stools—which, by the way, are far superior to those in use in a world of realities, because they do not creak in the midst of a fine point demanding absolute silence for appreciation—"I do not know why I have been chosen to preside over this gathering of phantoms; it is the province of ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... him, but she was like one in a dream. She had married a vision of perfection, and entered on a romance of happy poverty, and she had no desire to awaken; so she never exerted her mind upon the world around her, when it seemed oppressive; and kept the visionary James Frost before her, in company with Adeline and the transformed Sir Hubert. It was much easier to line his tent with a tapestry of Maltese crosses, than to consider whether the hall should be ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was anything but delighted. This idea of travel in Africa and lion-hunting made him shudder beforehand; and when the house was re-entered, and whilst the complimentary concert was sounding under the windows, he had a dreadful "row" with Quixote-Tartarin, calling him a cracked head, a visionary, imprudent, and thrice an idiot, and detailing by the card all the catastrophes awaiting him on such an expedition—shipwreck, rheumatism, yellow fever, dysentery, the black plague, elephantiasis, and the ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... Labour'd affliction's fetters to unbind, Ere his o'er-burthen'd faculties could cope With that ambitious task of tender hope, To render justice to you both; and frame } Memorials worthy of each honour'd name: } A debt the heart must feel! & truth, and nature claim! } Your smile, dear visionary guests of night! O'er my nocturnal hours breath'd new delight; Made me exult in labour, plann'd for you! Its progress from your inspiration grew: The toil was sweet, that your approvance cheer'd; For what your love inspir'd, that love endear'd. Nor unregarded by the fair, and ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... however slender, could not but admit he should enter the world under very different auspices as a retainer of Sir Halbert Glendinning, so famed for wisdom, courage, and influence, from those under which he might partake the wanderings, and become an agent in the visionary schemes, for such they appeared to him, of Magdalen, his relative. Still, a strong reluctance to re-enter a service from which he had been dismissed with ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... told with some confusion and Dismay, the usual consequence of dreams Of the unpleasant kind, with none at hand To expound their vain and visionary gleams. I've known some odd ones which seemed really planned Prophetically, or that which one deems A "strange coincidence," to use a phrase By which such things are ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Build and blow up, as best ye may, And do your worst to scare away Some visionary foe,— But, if in brute and blundering power You tear down Rodolph's granite tower, Defeat and scorn and shame that hour Shall whelm you like an arrowy shower— Haro! ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... as literal as I was visionary in my mental renderings of the New Testament, read at Aunt Hannah's knee. I was much taken with the sound of words, without any thought of their meaning—a habit not always outgrown with childhood. The "sounding brass and ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... alone, Like brain sick frenzy in its feverish mood. Fills the light air with visionary terrors And shapeless forms ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... of the revival of learning. Hippocrates and Galen were studied, and were translated into Latin. Paracelsus, a German physician (1493-1541), besides broaching various theories more or less visionary, advanced the science on the chemical side, introducing certain mineral remedies. Vesalius, a native of Brussels (1514-1564), who became chief physician of Charles V. and Philip II., dissected the human body, and produced the first comprehensive ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... smiled once more upon the company, and, applying his left thumb to the tip of his nose, worked a visionary coffee-mill with his right hand: thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime (then much in vogue, but now, unhappily, almost obsolete) which was familiarly denominated 'taking a grinder.' (Imagine a modern solicitor's ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... rivalry will be a rivalry in doing good? No one doubts that the lot of each member of society would be infinitely better under such conditions; why not strive to bring about such conditions? Is it visionary to hope and labor for this end? "Where there is no vision the people perish." It is a "death grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word." The old system has broken down; it can let loose the furies, but it cannot bind them; it is impotent to save. The question is not ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... who starved in the wilderness near the heap of stones you see." Leaving this resting-place of an interpreter who had interpreted so little, the party attained a stream of rather unusual importance. The reputed gold-bearing river of Ouitubamba rolled from its tunnel before them, exciting the most visionary schemes in the mind of Colonel Perez, to whom its auriferous reputation was familiar. Nothing would do but that the California process of "panning" must be carried out in these Peruvian waters, and the peons, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Crystal, visionary, passionate, and fantastic in purpose, are, in method, trenchantly formal and clear; and the schools of Clay, absolutely realistic, temperate, and simple in purpose, are, in method, mysterious and soft; sometimes licentious, ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... him with something visionary in her eyes, which made them look for a moment like the eyes of a woman whom he had not seen till ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... possessed, the statuesque effects of repose to the portrayal of action, Raphael showed himself capable of both. The Hellenic calm of Parnassus is not more impressive than the splendid charge of the avenging spirits upon Heliodorus; the visionary idealism of the angel-led Peter is matched by the vigorous realism of Peter called from his fishing to the apostleship; the brooding quiet of maternity expressed in the Madonna of the Chair has a perfect complement in the alert activity of ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... castle in the air, Brian naturally thought of giving it a mistress, and this time actual appearance took the place of vision. He fell in love with Madge Frettlby, and having decided in his own mind that she and none other was fitted to grace the visionary halls of his renovated castle, he watched his opportunity, and declared himself. She, woman-like, coquetted with him for some time, but at last, unable to withstand the impetuosity of her Irish lover, confessed in a low voice, with a ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... collar mended since he had taken it off. Then he went out into the damp November night, unlit by moon or star. But to Stewart the darkness of night, on whatever corner of earth he might chance to find it descended, remained always a romantic, mysterious thing, setting his imagination free among visionary possibilities, without form, but not for that void. The road between the railing of the parks and the row of old lopped elms, was ill-lighted by the meagre flame of a few gas-lamps and hardly cheered by the smothered glow of the small prison-like windows of Keble, glimmering ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... chronological order, after the missionary, came the military adventurer—of which class La Salle was the best representative. But the expeditions led by these men, were, for the most part, wild and visionary enterprises, in pursuit of unattainable ends. They were, moreover, unskilfully managed and unfortunately terminated—generally ending in the defeat, disappointment, and death of those who had set them on foot. They left no permanent impress upon the country; the most acute moral or ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... much to ensure its success. These were the Philomuse Society, founded at Athens in 1812, and the Philike Hetaireia, established in Odessa in 1814. The former was a literary club, the latter a political society whose schemes were wild and visionary. The object of the inhabitants of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... sane or not, how much more then, when it is a question of an inventor, of an act of the creative faculty, i.e., of a venture into the unknown! How many innovators have been regarded as insane, or as at least unbalanced, visionary! We cannot even invoke success as a criterion. Many non-viable or abortive inventions have been fathered by very sane minds, and people regarded as insane have vindicated their imaginative constructions ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... answered. "We had no funds for special research and Dr. Veeder's ideas were so far ahead of his time that, then, they seemed visionary. Now, twenty years later, when a great deal of similar work has been done in Europe and in this country, we see that Dr. Veeder was a real pioneer, although, of course, many of his conclusions are still doubtful. Yet, in poverty, ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... required to modify and defend their old positions. Each new invention would violate a greater number of known analogies; for if a theory be required to embrace some false principle, it becomes more visionary in proportion as facts are multiplied, as would be the case if geometers were now required to form an astronomical system on the assumption of ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... 2:11 11 Now this he spake because of the stiffneckedness of Laman and Lemuel; for behold they did murmur in many things against their father, because he was a visionary man, and had led them out of the land of Jerusalem, to leave the land of their inheritance, and their gold, and their silver, and their precious things, to perish in the wilderness. And this they said he had done because of the foolish imaginations ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... great precipice which had to be skirted, and this, too, haunted me with its terrors: I found myself toiling on a perilous road, which all at once crumbled into fearful depths just before me. A violent shivering fit roused me from this gloomy dreaming, and I soon after fell into a visionary state which, whilst it lasted, gave me such placid happiness as I have never known when in my perfect mind. Lying still and calm, and perfectly awake, I watched a succession of wonderful pictures. First of all I saw great vases, ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... I think of the heavier stroke which was first to fall. A few days after this dream I was charging myself with being visionary; yet a few of these most impressive dreams, I believe, have been designed for our instruction. My husband was seized with a heavy cold, accompanied by a severe cough, that was increasing; yet he was able to be about the house and barn, giving directions, as to outdoor work, ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... The true visionary is often a man of action, and Shelley was a very peculiar combination of the two. He was a dreamer, but he never dreamed merely for the sake of dreaming; he always rushed to translate his dreams into acts. The practical ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... History has relieved her moral character from the aspersions thrown upon it, and philosophy has quite denuded her of the least claims to supernatural power, whether derived from above or from below: nothing remains but the enthusiast and the visionary, and the strange position into which circumstances conducted her. And this position of the thought-bewildered maid is rendered the more striking, when we consider that it was her own countrymen who judged of her in so contradictory a manner; for the war which raged around ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... is the medium through which Savonarola is visualized; but there he is probably made too theatrical. Yet he must have had something of the theatre in him even to consent to the ordeal by fire. That he was an intense visionary is beyond doubt, but a very real man too we must believe when we read of the devotion of his monks to his person, and of his success for a while with the shrewd, worldly ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... in place of the chaff of thrice-sifted negation; while her aesthetic instinct responded in accord to the praise of Beauty as the beloved heir of Good and Truth, whose right it is to reign. On the other hand, strong common-sense saved her from becoming visionary, while she was too well-read as a scholar to be caught by conceits, and had been too sternly tried by sorrow to fall into fanciful effeminacy. It was a pleasing surprise to see how this friend of earlier days was acknowledged as a peer of the realm, in this ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... fighting the party over in her dream; and as the visionary custard-cups crashed down through one lobe of her brain into another, she gave a start as if an inch of lightning from a quart Leyden jar had jumped into one of her knuckles with its sudden and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... reviewer should be "Yea, yea; and nay, nay!" A Barmecide's feast of fame is a supererogation of malice. We hold that all authors so derided have a right to call upon their critics to make good their words; and build up the visionary castles of their Fata Morgana, (like London Bridge in the nursery song) with "gravel and stone;" or rather, "with silver and gold." A heavy mulct should be imposed on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... that the Cutchery court and the grand jury of Salem could be regulated on a similar plan. I was persuaded that government was a practical thing, made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians. Our business was to rule, not to wrangle; and it would have been a poor compensation that we had triumphed in a dispute, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... is by truth interiorly in concupiscence, but by education exteriorly in intelligence, 267. Interesting particulars concerning concupiscence not visionary or fantastic, in which all men are born, 269. All the concupiscences of evil reside in the lowest region of the mind, which is called the natural; but in the region above, which is called the spiritual, there are not any ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... as it was of the folly which so strongly actuated themselves. Far more likely was it that their assaults were the work, misguided but surely excusable, of the Plain Man, irritated at last to execute judgment on these frenzied and incompetent efforts after that unprofitable dream of the visionary, a world peace. It was well known that the question of disarmament ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... myself for one moment of the idea that an engine really works, with weary, reluctant strength like a genii slave, waiting vengefully for the time of retaliation, which sooner or later is sure to come; or of the visionary notion that a graceful, gliding ship, with all sails set, receives the same pleasure from its own motion and beauty that a snow-white swan must do "as down she bears before the gale," with her ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... only near relative, a brother. Always a visionary, easy-going, impractical little man, he had never been willing to stick at steady employment, but was always chasing rainbows and depending upon his sister for a home and means of existence. When the Klondike gold fever struck the country he was one of the ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... impeded the oars,[94] and twined {around them} in encircling wreaths; and clung to the sails with heavy clusters of berries. He himself, having his head encircled with bunches of grapes, brandished a lance covered with vine leaves. Around him, tigers and visionary forms of lynxes, and savage bodies of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... eye is as adequate as a slight motion of the cranium to an equine quadruped devoid of its visionary capacities." ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... unmindful of the shock, continued in a kind of heedless reverie to watch, as he combed, the still visionary thoughts that passed in tranced stillness before his eyes. He longed beyond measure for freedom that until yesterday he had not even dreamed existed outside the covers of some old impossible romance—the ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... the old anthropomorphic idea of God—the idea of the Prophet and Psalmist, wholly untouched by the questioning of Job; become tender, through the mellowing growth of centuries; sublimated in a heart of exquisite goodness and tenderness; and mixed with a visionary interpretation of ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... most comprehensive and clear view of its importance to the city of Cleveland and the Mahoning Valley, and confidently anticipated for them, in the event of its completion, a rapidity and extent of development and prosperity, which were then regarded as visionary, but which the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... use what might otherwise have crystallised into an amorphous lava. So the wild freedom of the twelfth century was captured to form the Monarchy, the University, the full Gothic of the thirteenth: so the Revolution permitted Napoleon and produced, not the visionary unstable grandeur of the Gironde, but the schools and laws and roads and set government we see to-day. So the spring storms of the Renaissance settled, I say, into that steady summer of stable form which has now for ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... vessel would or could come in sight of the crater, so long as the existence of the reefs was known; but the course steered by the Rancocus was a proof that ships did occasionally pass in that quarter of the Pacific. Mark had indulged in no visionary hopes on this subject, for he knew he might keep in the offing a twelvemonth and see nothing; but an additional twenty-four hours might realize ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... before the Ardmachians, even like the former wain which had borne the sacred body unto Dunum; and they stayed not to follow its track, believing that it carried the precious burden, until it came within the borders of Ardmachia, unto a certain river which is named Caucune. Then the visionary wain disappeared; and the people, frustrated of their hope, unsatisfied and sad, ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... was it hidden from thyself. "Life," thou saidst, "is short, and the sleep which is in the grave is long. Let me use that life, so transitory, for the glory of those heavenly dreams destined to comfort the sleep which is so long." This poor creature—pure from every suspicion of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure in senses more obvious—never once did this holy child, as regarded herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that was traveling to meet her. She might not prefigure the very manner ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the legal profession, both professionally and socially, for some years past has convinced me that the average lawyer still looks upon the ideas concerning crime and the criminal expressed by physicians of a forensic bent as totally unpractical and visionary. It would take only a brief visit to a criminal department of any modern, well-conducted hospital for the insane to convince any fair-minded individual that the physician handles the problem of the criminal not only in a more scientific and rational manner than does one not possessed of this particular ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... impregnable capital of his prodigious empire, and the work that he did was solid. He never perceived the value of Bombay, which is the best harbour in Asia, and did not see that the key of India is the Cape of Good Hope. His language was sometimes visionary. He beheld a cross shining in the heavens, over the kingdom of Prester John, and was eager for an alliance with him. He wished to drain the Nile into the Red Sea. He would attack Mecca and Medina, carry off the bones of the prophet, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... going through a mental crisis, such as, in other circumstances, and under fostering influences, has produced more than one small ecstatic enthusiast; the infant shining light of some Methodist conventicle; the saintly child visionary of some Catholic convent. But Madelon had no one to foster, nor to interpret for her these feverish visions, so inexplicable to herself, poor child! To the good-natured, careless, jovial American, she would not have even hinted at them for worlds, and not less carefully did she shun ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... advantage in having imagination, since that visionary faculty opens the mental eyes to facts that more practical and duller ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... they might unitedly watch over her brother. But Ezra begged not to be removed, unless it were to go with them to the East. All outward solicitations were becoming more and more of a burden to him; but his mind dwelt on the possibility of this voyage with a visionary joy. Deronda, in his preparations for the marriage, which he hoped might not be deferred beyond a couple of months, wished to have fuller consultation as to his resources and affairs generally with Sir Hugo, and here was a reason for not delaying his visit to Diplow. But he thought quite as much ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the only man in the town fit for a magistrate; for in everything I was seen to be most cautious and considerate. I could not, however, when I saw the turn the affair took to my advantage, but reflect on what small and visionary grounds the popularity of public men ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... like to send her some very beautiful thing indeed,' cried Ella, with emphasis, and eyes dilating at some visionary magnificence. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... neighbourhood was one Abner Thurstan, a farmer who lived over the border in Blundell parish; but as he was an Anabaptist—or Baptist as they were then beginning to call themselves—and my father had a great contempt and dislike for the visionary ideas of that sect, even he came but seldom to our house. His daughter Patience was a great favourite with my mother; and for that matter I did not dislike the child, and would oftentimes pluck her an apple from our trees or cut a whistle for her out of a twig ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... are the objects of his devout veneration. Yet he ceases to be a sentimentalist when duty calls him to face the realities of life. An order to shorten sail transforms him at once into another being. He usually swears with refined eloquence on unexpected occasions, when a sudden order draws him from visionary meditation. Dreams, which may be the creation of indigestible junk—that is, salt beef which may have been round the Horn a few times—are realities: privileged communications from a mystic source. There is great vying with each other in the relation of some grotesque nightmare fancy, which may ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... Holy Roman Reich, which had been a wiggery so long. Nobody could guess of what it was that France or the world might be with child: nobody, till the birth in 1789, and even for a generation afterwards. France is weakly and unwieldy, has strange enough longings for chalky, inky, visionary, foolish substances, and may be in the family-way for aught ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... field we glean The field of the Samosatene, Each something takes and something leaves And this must choose, and that forego In Lucian's visionary sheaves, To twine a modern posy so; But all any gleanings, truth to tell, Are mixed with mournful asphodel, While yours are wreathed with poppies red, With flowers that Helen's feet have kissed, With leaves of vine that garlanded The Syrian Pantagruelist, The sage who laughed the world away, Who ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... the formation of the Turkish gendarmerie under Colonel Valentine Baker. Associated with this crowd of silly and inexperienced boys was an old grey-bearded American doctor, who believed in the whole cock-and-bull story as if it had been gospel, and had undertaken to act as surgeon aboard that visionary craft. He was a delightful old fellow, and, for all his simplicity, had a vein of humour in him. Odd as it may sound, he was a man of some distinction, and had served with conspicuous honour in the Civil War, He had money of his ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... rear of the warm sunny shower, The visionary boy from shelter fly! For now the storm of summer-rain is o'er, And cool, and fresh, and fragrant is the sky. And, lo! in the dark east, expanded high, The rainbow brightens to the setting sun! Fond fool, that deem'st the streaming glory nigh, How vain the chace ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... "But this is visionary, for I am so fast in prison that I cannot get forth. The thought is bitterness. When I recollect where and what I am, and compare it with where and how I ought to be employed, it is misery; but when to this the recollection of my family and the present derangement ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... fire, were disastrously apparent in the bright light that fell from the glass roof. The drawn features and straggling beard of the young man, whose very light eyes, high, narrow forehead, and long fair hair thrown back in disorder gave him the appearance of a visionary, all were accentuated in the uncompromising light; and so was the dogged will expressed in that limpid glance which met Jenkins' eye coldly, and offered in anticipation an unconquerable opposition to all his arguments, all ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... in his quarter of the city[3163] a small independent republic, aggressive and predominant, the center of the faction, a refuge for the riff-raff and a rendezvous for fanatics, a pandemonium composed of every available madcap, every rogue, visionary, shoulder-hitter, newspaper scribbler and stump-speaker, either a secret or avowed plotter of murder, Camille Desmoulins, Freron, Hebert, Chaumette, Clootz, Theroigne, Marat,—while, in this more than Jacobin State, the model in anticipation of that he is to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... occurred to him that failure was possible, or that, with the amount of capital which he believed was still at his disposal, the plan was unpractical. Young, highly optimistic, and somewhat visionary, his dreams assumed the ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... sacrifice and common union, let the churches of Milton as a unit work and pray and sacrifice to make themselves felt as a real power on the side of the people in their present great need. It was Christian America, but Philip's plan was not adopted. It was discussed with some warmth, but declared to be visionary, impracticable, unnecessary, not for the church to undertake, beyond its function, etc. Philip was disappointed, ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... makes you understand that pain is a deliverer; if it increases your respect for the conscience of others; if it renders forgiveness more easy, fortune less arrogant, duty more dear, the beyond less visionary. If it does these things it is good, little matter its name: however rudimentary it may be, when it fills this office it comes from the true source, it binds you ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... taxes necessary to self-government and the prosecution of the Kaffir wars. The Treasury was empty—save for the much-quoted 12s. 6d. The Government L1 bluebacks were selling at 1s. Civil servants' salaries were months in arrear. The President himself—the excitable, unstable, visionary, but truly enlightened and patriotic Burgers—had not only drawn no salary, but had expended his private fortune, and incurred a very heavy liability, in the prosecution of the unsuccessful Secocoeni war. No amount of ex post facto evidence as to the supposed feelings and ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... as a "young man" by the reverend Jonah, and now I was spoken of as a "hireling tool" by Miss Judson. I scarcely knew which was most disagreeable, and I began to think that board and lodging in the present, and a visionary three thousand pounds in the future, would scarcely compensate me for such an ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... use every honest exertion to turn out of power those weak and wicked men whose wild and visionary theories have been tested and found wanting. Above all, we ought to drive from our shores foreign influence, and cherish American feeling. Foreign influence has been in every age the curse of republics—its ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... excites in the student is wonder that the thought of it could ever have entered a sane mind. A wilder or more chimerical scheme never disturbed the dreams of a schoolboy; yet no one has ever pressed a reasonable undertaking with more earnestness and confidence than Burr his visionary purpose. He exhibited, throughout, an infatuation and a degree of incompetency for great achievements, which would cover the enterprise with ridicule, were it not for the misfortunes which it brought ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... improvements. Later theories were no more satisfactory. The French Revolutionary philosophers, especially Rousseau, with his theory of voluntary social contract, and the Utopian dreamers who followed, were longing for justice and political efficiency, but their theories seem crude and visionary from the point of view of the social science of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... for the departure of Sam-Chaong on his momentous journey; and in a few days, supplied with everything necessary for so toilsome an undertaking, the famous priest started on what seemed a wild and visionary enterprise in pursuit of an object which anyone with less faith than himself would have deemed beyond the power of any ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... great brows knitted and lowered. For full half an hour invention and resource poured scheme after scheme through that teeming brain, and prudence and knowledge of the world sat in severe and cool judgment on each in turn, and dismissed the visionary ones. At last the deep brow began to relax, and the eye to kindle; and when he rose to ring the bell his face was a sign-post with Eureka written on it in Nature's vivid handwriting. In that hour he had hatched a plot worthy of Machiavel—-a plot complex yet clear. A servant-girl ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... a visionary? The two things are absolutely contradictory.—You once called me "the padlock ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... and full of light, Fair town, arrayed in robes of white, How visionary ye appear! All like a floating landscape seems In cloud-land or the land of dreams, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as one of her friends observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... glass and mahogany. They were liable at any moment to be broken by the violent contours of customers. A sight of Helen in Leuce could be obtained only by dint of much concentrated staring at the clock; and as often as not Mr. Rickman's eye dropt its visionary freight on encountering the cashier's eye in its passage from ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... by all the Procter family lingered for days after father's Saturday afternoon at home. And then ordinary hours intruded and filled the small lives with their duties and their pleasures. Still shadowy, deeply hidden, the influence of the visionary father lay. Even small Maizie awoke to tiny dreams, her literalness for ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... the short reply. Our friend, like many other Corsicans we met with, still nourished the visionary hopes which had caused his country so much blood and misery during her long and fruitless struggles for a ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... understands how a man situated as Smith is must be beset with requests of all kinds. Now it is an inventor needing capital; again it is some visionary who comes to advocate a brilliant scheme which must surely yield millions of profit. A choice has to be made between these projects, rejecting the worthless, examining the questionable ones, accepting the meritorious. ...
— In the Year 2889 • Jules Verne and Michel Verne
... their ardor cools off their energies become dormant, and by the time they are ready to commence business they are as unfit to do so as they were visionary in making the purchase. ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... by the ideal but by sheer contempt. Destiny gave him eighty years of existence, that he might slowly decompose the decayed age; he had the time to combat against time, and when he fell he was the conqueror. His disciples filled courts, academies, and saloons; those of Rousseau grew splenetic and visionary amongst the lower orders of society. The one had been the fortunate and elegant advocate of the aristocracy, the other was the secret consoler and beloved avenger of the democracy. His book was the book of all oppressed and tender souls. Unhappy and devotee himself, he had placed God ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... cessation, a coolness from business, an indolence almost cloistral, which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spake of the past; the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... cultivate a situation of prosperity unexampled in our history. The state of our commerce, our revenue, and, above all, that of our public funds, is such as to hold out ideas which but a few years ago would indeed have appeared visionary, and which there is now every ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... confidence in the fundamental value of the concern that we were willing to assume this risk. There are always a few men in an undertaking of this kind who would risk all on their judgment of the final result, and if the enterprise had failed, these would have been classed as visionary adventurers, ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... be certain miners who stayed below ground for months at a time; and, like one of these, Roberto remained buried in his purpose, while life went its way overhead. Though I was not in his confidence I knew well enough where his thoughts were, for he went among us with the eye of a lover, the visionary look of one who hears a Voice. We all heard that Voice, to be sure, mingling faintly with the other noises of life; but to Roberto it was already as the roar of mighty waters, drowning every other ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... alone, Like brain-sick frenzy in its feverish mode, Fills the light air with visionary terrors, And shapeless forms ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Frontenac, to whose policy he adhered, and whose prejudices he shared. He was amply gifted with the kind of intelligence that consists in quick observation, sharpened by an inveterate spirit of sarcasm, was energetic, enterprising, well instructed, and a bold and sometimes a visionary schemer, with a restless spirit, a nimble and biting wit, a Gascon impetuosity of temperament, and as much devotion as an officer of the King was forced to profess, coupled with small love of priests and an aversion to Jesuits.[18] Carheil ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... was curiously hard to lead up to. It would be hard to set before any outsider the conditions at the Boyd house, or his own sense of obligation to help. Put into everyday English the whole scheme sounded visionary ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... socialism and Islam derived in part from tribal practices and is supposed to be implemented by the Libyan people themselves in a unique form of "direct democracy." QADHAFI has always seen himself as a revolutionary and visionary leader. He used oil funds during the 1970s and 1980s to promote his ideology outside Libya, supporting subversives and terrorists abroad to hasten the end of Marxism and capitalism. In addition, beginning ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... would marry; he would settle down and enjoy his own; he would seek the good of the people, and make his great estates an example among landowners. And then within three weeks he had learned that there was a pretender to the throne, that in Cullerne there was a visionary who claimed to be the very Lord Blandamer. He had had this wretched man pointed out to him once in the street—a broken-down fellow who was trailing the cognisance of all the Blandamers in the mud, till the very boys called him Old Nebuly. Was he to fight for land, and ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... a mother. She had no children by her former two husbands, and Lord Stourton testified positively that she never had either son or daughter by Prince George. Nevertheless, more than one American claimant has risen to advance some utterly visionary claim to the English throne by reason of alleged descent from ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... very idea of going into the harbour, therefore, gave me pleasure, and there was no mad or foolish thing that I would not have done, only to gaze upon the walls which contained the constant object of my thoughts. These were wild and visionary notions, and with little chance of ever arriving to any successful issue; but at one or two-and-twenty we are fond of building castles, and very apt to fall in love, without considering our prospect of success. I replied, that I thought it very possible, ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... must be regarded, either in part or altogether, as the physiological cause of the phenomenon. This is clearly the case when, on the subjective side, the hallucination answers to a preceding energetic activity of the imagination, as in the case of the visionary and the monomaniac. Sometimes, however, as we have seen, the hallucinatory percept answers to previous prolonged acts of perception, leaving a kind of reverberation in the structures concerned; and in this ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... consciousness. Unlike your idealless and brainless American brothers, your ideals soared above the belly and the bank account. No wonder you impressed the one human being among all the infuriated mob at your trial—a newspaper woman—as a visionary, totally oblivious to your surroundings. Your large, dreamy eyes must have beheld a ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... several seconds I was rendered literally speechless with amazement. The colossal impudence and audacity of the proposal took my breath away. But I soon collected my scattered faculties, and forthwith proceeded vigorously to remonstrate with the visionary enthusiast who, I instantly recognised, must be the originator of ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... Consult came to this Design, To work him by a kind of Touch Divine. To raise some holy Spright to do the Feat. Nothing like Dreams and Visions to the Great. Did not a little Witch of Endor bring A Visionary Seer t'a cheated King? And shall their greater Magick want Success, Their more ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... realities. Such was now my case. The good Numa could not more thoroughly have persuaded himself that the nymph Egeria hovered about her sacred fountain and communed with him in spirit than I had deceived myself into a kind of visionary intercourse with the airy phantom fabricated in my brain. I constructed a rustic seat at the foot of the tree where I had discovered the footsteps. I made a kind of bower there, where I used to pass my mornings reading poetry and romances. I carved ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... have had report of him. He is a visionary. There is no sedition in him. He affirms ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... orange roof, draped in fantastic festoons of roses, with a single curving palm-tree stuck black and feathery against the gold sunset, it is hardly to be wondered at that I should slip into a mood of visionary enjoyment, looking for a time on the whole thing as the misty phantasm ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... on in a droning tone, giving theories of his own as to the nature of the Magrepha, and I, with my arms around Sigmund, half listened to the sleepy monotone of the good old visionary. But what spoke to me with a more potent voice was the soughing and wuthering of the sorrowful wind without, which verily moaned around the old walls, and sought out the old corners, and wailed, and plained, and sobbed in a way that was enough to ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... himself up to his full height, while his eyes seemed starting from their sockets, and gleaming like two balls of living fire, and his whole frame agitated, and as if it were dilating with the internal workings of his wild visionary spirit. Macpherson shook and shrunk ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... that nature, in all her operations, disowns the visionary basis upon which the funding system is built? She acts always by renewed successions, and never by accumulating additions perpetually progressing. Animals and vegetables, men and trees, have existed since the world began: but that existence has been carried on by succession of ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... through Watson's mind, another expression showed itself in the hollow-cheeked, massive face. It was the look of the visionary who sees in events the strange verification of obscure instincts and divinations in which he himself perhaps has only half-believed. He and Fenwick had been friends now—in some respects, close friends—for a good many years. Of late, they had met rarely, and neither of the men was a good correspondent. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sea, across which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, [Footnote: Appendix II, "Our Lady of Salvation."] it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being. Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... literary person who can always be dismissed as 'imaginative,' though he is generally nothing of the kind. But it cannot be denied that ladies either see more ghosts than men or are less reluctant to impart information. The visionary lady who keeps up a regular telepathic correspondence with several friends is likely to see a ghost, and should certainly be entered at 'fixed local ghosts,' but there are slight objections to such evidence, as not free from ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... thee babbling to the vale Of sunshine and of flowers, But unto me thou bring'st a tale Of visionary hours." ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... this principle, and the world will continue to suffer from its belief in gorgons, demons, spectres, gods, and monsters; in Tartarean regions and torments of damned spirits. Adopt it, and life flows undisturbed by visionary fears, and death comes as a long and welcome sleep, upon which no terrors and no ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... records which transcend usual human experience, have for several generations sought to reconstruct the figure of Jesus on an entirely naturalistic basis. Instead of the Jesus of the gospels, they give us, as the actual Man, Jesus the Sage, or the Visionary, or the Prophet, or the Philanthropist, who, they think, was subsequently deified by His followers. Such reconstructions handle the sources arbitrarily, eliminating from even the earliest of them that which clashes with their preconceptions. They fail to do justice to Jesus' consciousness of ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that night, he was a victim to random recollections. His infatuation for Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his boyish love affairs, and had long disturbed his bachelor dreams. He was painfully timid in everything relating to the emotions, and his hurt had withdrawn him from the society of women. The fact that it was all so done ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... was by no means the least interesting feature of the demonstration. He has none of the look of the visionary, this man who has gone to war with time and space; neither had George Stephenson. He is short and thick-set, with a full face, a heavy moustache hiding his mouth, and heavy eyebrows. He is troubled a little with asthma, which makes him somewhat staccato and breathless in speech, and perhaps also ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... for a biographer to be required to keep at once independent and in unison the poet, statesman, courtier, schemer, patriot, soldier, sailor, freebooter, discoverer, colonist, castle-builder, historian, philosopher, chemist, prisoner, and visionary. The variety of Ralegh's powers and tendencies, and of their exercise, is the distinctive note of him, and of the epoch which needed, fashioned, and used him. A whole band of faculties stood ready in him at any moment for action. Several generally were at work simultaneously. For the man to be properly ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... years had gradually been dropping from his thoughts all through his journey across Egypt and the Continent. They were no more than visionary now. Nor was he occupied with any dream of the things which might have been but for his great fault. The things which had been, here, in this small town of Ireland, were too definite. Here he had been most happy, here he had known the uttermost of his misery; here his presence had brought ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... us, and which one motion of the head on the pillow may dissolve, or deepen into more oppressive delight! In some such dreaming state of mind are we now; and, gentle reader, if thou art broad awake, lay aside the visionary volume, or read a little longer, and likely enough is it that thou too mayest fall half asleep. If so, let thy drowsy eyes still pursue the glimmering paragraphs—and wafted away wilt thou feel thyself to be into the heart of a Highland forest, that knows no bounds ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... operation of inferring from an observed effect the existence, in time past, of a cause similar to that by which we know it to be produced in all cases in which we have actual experience of its origin. This, for example, is the scope of the inquiries of geology; and they are no more illogical or visionary than judicial inquiries, which also aim at discovering a past event by inference from those of its effects which still subsist. As we can ascertain whether a man was murdered or died a natural death, from the indications exhibited ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... resignation was unnecessary. He was criticised as the possessor of a kind of supernatural virtue that could scarcely be popular with the slaves of party, and he was considered whimsical, fantastic, impracticable, a man whose 'conscience was so tender that he could not go straight,' a visionary not to be relied on—in fact, a character and intellect useless to the political manager." "I am greatly alarmed at Gladstone's resignation. I fear it foretells measures opposed to the Church truth," wrote Wilberforce; and Peel told ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... Rebus, adding an equally bulky and imaginary supplement—Et Quibusdam Aliis. This is as often used to feather a piece of unfledged wit, as the speculation concerning the number of angels that could dance on the point of a needle, and yet I have never been able to trace out the inventor of these visionary tomes. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... observant eyes and found it beautiful. When he had flowers to paint, he painted the whole plant accurately, not the blossoms individually, like the painter of Richard II. He liked fine stuffs, embroideries, jewels, and glittering armour. He was no visionary trying to free himself from the earth and live in contemplation of the angels and saints in Paradise, like so many of the thirteenth ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... fifty years, has been taking a direction quite the contrary of his. Run over the names that will readily occur of modern novelists and short-story writers, and ask yourself whether the vivid coloring of these realistic schools must not inevitably have blanched to a still whiter pallor those visionary tales of which the author long ago confessed that they had "the pale tints of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade." With practice has gone theory; and now the critics of realism are beginning to nibble ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... grand contempt this great man talked of the people who busied themselves in the visionary pursuits of politics or literature, or who devoted themselves to the Arts or Field-sports! With him earthworks were the grandest achievements of humanity, and there was no such civiliser as a parliamentary ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... these highest Beings, whose powers exceed even those attributed by men to their gods—if even these are bound by and are subservient to Law, then imagine the presumption of mortal man, of our race and grade, when he dares to consider the Laws of Nature as "unreal!" visionary and illusory, because he happens to be able to grasp the truth that the Laws are Mental in nature, and simply Mental Creations of THE ALL. Those Laws which THE ALL intends to be governing Laws are not to be defied or argued away. So long as the Universe endures, ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... principle is to the carrying out either of a visionary or a predatory foreign policy in Europe, it does not imply any similar hostility to a certain measure of colonial expansion. In this, as in many other important respects, the constructive national democrat must ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... (1813), the Douce Collection (1840), and the Bodleian Library (1843), it is made known that there are copies of it preserved in these great collections. In Warton's Hist. of Eng. Poetry (ed. 1840), it is also recorded by Park, in his notes to the chapter on Gower, in which he refers to Bulleyn's visionary description of that poet. Cooper's Athenae Cantabrigienses, art. Bulleyn (1858), also carefully notes the Dialogue and its editions. And in 1865 Collier's well-known Bibliographical Account of Early English Literature again gives an account (two pages long) of the much ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... unhappiness had, as we have remarked, made him in some sort a visionary. This, then, was in the nature of a vision. He actually saw that Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him. He had almost reached the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horrified ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... no Babbler with a tale Of sunshine and of flowers, 10 Thou tellest, Cuckoo! in the vale Of visionary hours. ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... you say when you can't," he replied. "But I will come down a little nearer earth, if you prefer. Short of those visionary distances there are features of the prospect either way in which I differently rejoice. One thing is the shining black roofs of the cabs, moving and pausing like processions of huge turtles up and down the street; obeying the gesture of the mid-stream policemen where they stand at the successive ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... object of human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the mind as did ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sanity at a time when everyone else seemed in danger of losing their heads, and to a large extent achieved it. I had known Mr. Krebs for more than twenty years, and while I did not care to criticise a fellow-member of the bar, I would go so far as to say that he was visionary, that the changes he proposed in government would, if adopted, have grave and far-reaching results: we could not, for instance, support in idleness those who refused to do their share of the work of the world. Mr. Krebs was well-meaning. I ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the finality of his judgment. Those who have worked with him have remarked upon his eagerness, once he has decided a course of action, to carry it into practical effect. The President of the Czecho-Slovak Republic, Thomas G. Masaryk, said that of all the men he had met, "your visionary, idealistic President is by far and away the most intensely practical." One of the Big Four at Paris remarked: "Wilson works. The rest of us play, comparatively speaking. We Europeans can't keep up with a man who travels a straight path with such a swift stride, never looking ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... Now Pen would as soon have cut off his nose and ears as deliberately and of malice aforethought have made his mother unhappy; and as he was of such a generous disposition that he would give away anything to any one, he instantly made a present of his visionary red coat ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... opposite tendencies of the two friends,—to long-established opinions and matter of fact on one side, and to all that was most innovating and visionary on the other,—more observable than in their notions on philosophical subjects; Lord Byron being, with the great bulk of mankind, a believer in the existence of Matter and Evil, while Shelley so far refined ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... was designed to a great extent by the first earl, with the assistance of Pope, has been entirely thrown open to the people of Cirencester; and "the future and as yet visionary beauties of the noble scenes, openings, and avenues" which that great poet used to delight in dwelling upon have become accomplished facts. The "ten rides"—lengthy avenues of fine trees radiating in ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... a little. He stared doubtfully at the inventor before the clearing thought came. Before him stood a madman, a wild visionary. ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... faith and practice of Christian life. And here it is necessary to guard against what is childish, visionary, and exuberant, against things that only feed the fancy or excite the imagination, against practices which are adapted to other races than ours, but with us are liable to become unreal and irreverent, against too vivid sense impressions and especially against attaching too much importance ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... denominated "regular" also fail, seems never to be thought of. The mental healer, regardless of his success, is looked upon as an enthusiast, or worse, and even the citizen who modestly accepts the theory of possible mind-healing, is regarded as credulous and visionary by those who pride themselves upon their practicality. Why does this prejudice exist, when advancement in physical science uniformly meets with a ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... one half-minute the whole vast universe appeared to swim in the same watery uncertainty in which I floated. I began to doubt everything, to distrust the stars, the line of low bushes for which I was wearily striving, the very land on which they grew, if such visionary tiring could be rooted anywhere. Doubts trembled in my mind like the weltering water, and that awful sensation of having one's feet unsupported, which benumbs the spent swimmer's heart, seemed to clutch at mine, though not yet to enter it. I was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... you that I loved him. I knew, and, father, you knew, and he knew, that I never did. I was not wholly indifferent, for I had a hope of being pleasant and useful to Tom. I made that wild escape into something visionary, and have slowly found out how wild it was. But Tom had been the subject of all the little tenderness of my life; perhaps he became so because I knew so well how to pity him. It matters little now, except as it may dispose you to think more leniently ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... the matter in hand, however. Believe me, without farther instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation's vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the soldiership of early Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of Tuscany; the splendid human energy and beauty of Venice. I have no time to do this to-night (I have done it elsewhere before now); but I proceed to apply the principle to ourselves in ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... me thy face— My faith and love Shall henceforth fixed be, And nothing here have power to move My soul's serenity. My life shall seem a trance, a dream, And all I feel and see Illusive, visionary—thou The one reality. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... all human interests, it is not likely to grow weaker; a young man will break a blood-vessel for the honor of a boat-club; a savage will allow himself to be tortured to death for the credit of his tribe; why should it be called visionary to believe that a civilized human being will make personal sacrifices for the benefit of men whom he has perhaps not seen, but whose intimate dependence upon himself he realizes at every moment of his life? May not such a motive generate a predominant passion with men framed to act upon ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... people are bounded by the horizon of the town where they live, some by the particular church to which they belong, some the denomination, some the state, or even the nation. Jesus fixes the horizon of His follower as that of the world. Jesus was visionary. He talked about all nations, a race, ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... for me to do that, as you will readily believe when you come to know my story; for, on this eventful evening there happened something which, somehow or other, thenceforth, whether owing to what visionary folk term "Destiny," or from its arising through some curious conjuncture of things beyond the limits of mere chance, appeared to exercise a mysterious influence on my life, affecting the whole tenor and course of my ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... and vistas that seemed to promise a bright solution of his mystery, keeping his imagination always awake and strong. That castle in the air,—so much more vivid than other castles, because it had perhaps a real substance of ancient, ivy-grown, hewn stone somewhere,—that visionary hall in England, with its surrounding woods and fine lawns, and the beckoning shadows at the ancient windows, and that fearful threshold, with the blood still glistening on it,—he dwelt and wandered so much there, that he had no real life in the sombre ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... take me for a visionary. Curious, indeed, if that man who, a poor son of the people, took the lead in abolishing feudal injustices a thousand years old, created a currency of millions in a moneyless nation, and suddenly organized armies out of untrained masses of civilians; directed ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... or its communications to join with Grant in the capture of Lee's army, and the other was to destroy the military resources of the Southern Atlantic States. The first was too grand, and perhaps might seem too visionary, to be talked about at first, nor was any mention of it at that time necessary. Besides, events might possibly render the march to Richmond unnecessary or impracticable; or, possibly, Sherman might be compelled ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... to have a far and peculiar fascination for him, and I suspect he was a visionary in the midst of his poverty. Yet I suppose he had—hardly the personal property which the law exempts from execution. He had lived in a great many towns, moving from one to another with his growing family, by easy stages, and was always the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... now, who lay there, fighting down the welling desolation; no visionary adolescent grieving over the colourless ashes of her first romance; not even the woman, socially achieved, intelligently and intellectually in love. It was a girl, old enough to realise that the adoration she had given was not wholly spiritual, that ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... all this accumulation of work, all this expenditure of genius, to think that he did not yet have an assured living! He had frightful attacks of depression, but they had no sooner passed than his will power was as strong as ever, his fever for work redoubled, and his visionary gaze discerned the fair horizons of hope as vividly as though they were already within reach of his hand. Then he would shut himself into his room, breaking off all ties with the social world, or else would flee into the provinces, far from ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... of divine truth on the shores of Hudson's Bay, with the aid and co-operation of the Hudson's Bay Company. These pious, simple, devoted Missionaries, have proved that missions to the heathen on the most inhospitable and barren shores are not visionary schemes, but succeed effectually under the blessing of heaven to the conversion of the natives; and they have established the principle, that wherever the waters roll, and however barren the rock on which man is to be found, there man may be benefitted with the saving knowledge and blessings ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... matchless creature, with a full acknowledgment of its beauty. A single word would have impaired it; but she did not utter a syllable. On retiring, she slowly raised her expressive countenance, fixing her eyes above, as if she thanked some visionary protector of France for this crowning triumph; and then, with hands clasped, and step by step, sank ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
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