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Legendary   Listen
noun
Legendary  n.  
1.
A book of legends; a tale or narrative. "Read the Countess of Pembroke's "Arcadia," a gallant legendary full of pleasurable accidents."
2.
One who relates legends.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Legendary" Quotes from Famous Books



... possession; and the meaning is pointed by an encounter with an old lady, who, in the popular belief, was one of Satan's miserable slaves and dupes, the witches, and is said—for Hawthorne never introduces the supernatural without toning it down by a supposed legendary transmission—to have invited him to meet her at the blasphemous Sabbath in the forest. The sin of endeavouring to escape from the punishment of his sins had brought him into sympathy with wicked mortals ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... and mirthsome. It is the original nucleus around which the other parts have gathered. Some years since, the writer was led to investigate the world-wide myth of the Man in the Moon, in its legendary and ludicrous aspects; and one study being a stepping-stone to another, the ball was enlarged ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... novelty and variety of milieu. There is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern world which he has not touched, always with the same vital and instinctive sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge. Passing by the legendary and remote ages and civilisations of East and West, he has painted the first dawn of the modern spirit in the Athens of Socrates and Euripides, revealed the whole temper and tendency of the twilight age between Paganism and Christianity, and recorded the last utterance of the ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... of course possible that some of the pictures now at Vizeu were the work of a man called Vasco, and one of those at Coimbra, in the sacristy of Santa Cruz, is signed Velascus—which is only the Spanish form of Vasco—so that the legendary personage may have been evolved from either or both of these, for it is scarcely possible that they ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson

... tombs, their effigies crowned, in golden armour, praying, with their swords by their sides. He would stop before the chapel of Santiago, admiring through the railings of its three pointed arches the legendary saint, dressed as a pilgrim, holding his sword on high, and tramping on Mahomedans with his war-horse. Great shells and red shields with a silver moon adorned the white walls, rising up to the vaulting, and this chapel his father, ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... regimental records. As, for example, the reason why the whole Army shouts "H.L.I." whenever the ball is kicked into touch; also why the Oxford L.I. always put out their tongues when they meet the Durhams. Some day some one will write the legendary history of the British Army, its myth, custom, and folklore, and will explain how the Welsh Fusiliers got their black "flash" (with a digression on the natural history of antimacassars), why the 7th Hussars are called the "White Shirts," why the old 95th will despitefully ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... a deal that is legendary about what I am going to tell you. But the ring given to my ancestor Rupert Littimer by Prince ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White

... the second. In the sequel he missed the premiership; but he very definitely accomplished his second desire. He died the unquestioned leader, the idol of his people; and it may well be that as the centuries pass he will become the legendary embodiment of the race—like King Arthur of the English awaiting in the Isle of Avalon the summons of posterity. As for Bourassa, he may live in Canadian history as Douglas lives in the history of the United States—by reason of his relations with ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe

... accommodate them to new and supplementary evidence which has been published in America since the outbreak of the war. But even without the excuse of recent discovery, no apology would be needed for any comparison or contrast of Hebrew tradition with the mythological and legendary beliefs of Babylon and Egypt. Hebrew achievements in the sphere of religion and ethics are only thrown into stronger relief when ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King

... particularly beautiful and leading one to speculate upon its permanence. A cutting in the chalk would probably recommend itself to the pious care of coming ages when the personage commemorated had either been entirely forgotten or had developed into a legendary heroine of fictitious character. That even cuttings are not always permanent is proved close by, for only occasionally can the cross cut to commemorate the great battle of Lewes be seen; the turf shows but a different shade of green at certain times ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes

... 50: Roman father—Lucius Junius Brutus, legendary founder of the Roman republic, was said to have passed sentence of death on his two sons for participating in ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... superstitions of bygone ages. Nothing is more inhuman than the commission of 'devout cruelty' under the mask of love of God and man. Is it not the misfortune, not only of Christianity, but of whole mankind, to have the Bible encumbered with legendary histories, stories of miracles, and a crude cosmology, which from time to time come in conflict ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... is the historical, traditional, or legendary allusion in this epithet, bestowed by Milton on ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various

... the principal display was not until the afternoon, they strolled to the Lake of Nemi, "situated in a deep basin, the crater of a volcano." Those Italian lakes which he had so far seen, while lovely and especially interesting from their historical or legendary associations and the picturesque buildings on their shores, seemed to the artist (ever faithful to his native land) less naturally attractive than the lakes with which he was familiar at home—Lake George, Otsego Lake, etc. ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse

... reversion of them carries a high privilege—a special thing not sold by Swears and Wells. The sword of Galahad—and of many another hero—arrived on the scene already hoary with history, and the boy rather prefers his trousers to be legendary, famous, haloed by his hero's renown—even though the nap may have altogether vanished in ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame

... the laws of Romulus did not teach you such fraternity. We have also seen you striking women in the street and disembowelling a child. What are we to think of that, fratelli d'Italia? Excuse us, but we are not accustomed to such incidents. Is it not natural that the legendary, gallant spirit of our sailors should infect the crowd? Our bluejackets have looked in vain for the three colours which are dear to them and which you have excluded utterly from all your rows of flags. Well, in ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein

... refused to forsake the fold. From the nourishing food they had discovered in the Word of God, they could not be induced to return to the husks offered to them in meaningless ceremonies, celebrated in an unknown tongue by men of impure lives. The Gospels in French remained more attractive than the legendary, even after the bishop had abandoned the championship of the incipient reformation. Briconnet's own expressed wish was granted: if he had "changed his speech and teaching," the common people, at least, had not changed ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... our story are located in the Philippines, the Casiguran mentioned probably being the town in Tayabas on the west toast of Luzon, the tale as a whole appears to have been imported. The Sinucuan referred to is probably the famous legendary King of Pampanga, of whom the Pampangans have a rich oral literature. He is said to have lived on Mount Arayat. He figures in ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... level of good, I can scarcely say excellent, work, at a time when no other lyrical poetry in any vernacular existed in Europe or the Islands. It was religious, mystic, and chiefly pathetic—prayers, hymns, dirges, regrets in exile, occasional stories of the saints whose legendary acts were mixed with pagan elements, and most of these were adorned with illustrations drawn from natural beauty or from the doings of birds and beasts—a great affection for whom is prominent in the Celtic nature. The Irish poets sent this lyric impulse ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston

... resemblance between the Scotch and Swiss than between any other two peoples of Europe, you may have some interest in determining whether the features of your own country-folk are not sometimes to be seen in those of mine, as exhibited in my legendary history. Certainly both countries had for many ages nearly the same sort of work to do; both had to maintain a long and ultimately successful war of independence against nations greatly more powerful than themselves; and as their hills produced little else ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... pirate blood in their veins will revel in this reproduction of the scenes of imagined adventure. Any reasonable pirate could be quite happy here. For here is the breadfruit tree, read of in many a tale of castaways; also the cocoanut palm, with the fruits hanging among the fronds, waiting for the legendary monkey to scamper up the trunk and hurl the great balls at the heads of the beholders. Here, too, are the mango, and many sorts of bananas, and the cabbage palm, another favorite resource of starving adventurers. With these there are other ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... many other ways. The whole ragged army of Bohemia, and whosoever loved good cheer without at all loving to work and pay for it, are addressed in contemporary verses as the "Subjects of Francois Villon." He was a good genius to all hungry and unscrupulous persons; and became the hero of a whole legendary cycle of tavern tricks and cheateries. At best, these were doubtful levities, rather too thievish for a schoolboy, rather too gamesome for a thief. But he would not linger long in this equivocal border-land. He must soon have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... however, in some degree, be ranked as historical; for although surrounded with rich fiction, as is always the case in Calderon, they nevertheless in general express the character of Biblical or legendary story with great fidelity. They are distinguished, however, from the other historical pieces by the frequent prominency of a significant allegory, and by the religious enthusiasm with which the poet, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... Impostoribus," which has been attributed almost to every great name in the middle ages which was conspicuous for opposition to the claims of the church, or for uneasiness under the pressure of its dogmatic teaching. The existence of the book is legendary: no one ever saw it: and the two distinct works which now bear the title can be shown to have been composed respectively in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: but the legend is a witness to the fact of the existence of the idea which the book ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... which appear urns, pillars, obelisks, and other forms of monumental marble, the tributes of private affection or more splendid memorials of historic dust. With such a place, though the tumult of the city rolls beneath its tower, one would be willing to connect some legendary interest. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... of men's brains"; so that "it is no wonder that they do not spare to wade in all the deepest mysteries that belong to the persons or the state of Kinges and Princes, that are gods upon earth." King James's attitude to Free Thought reminds one of the legendary contention between Canute and the sea. No one has ever repeated the latter experiment, but how many thousands still disquiet themselves, as James did, about or against the progress of ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer

... detailed description of his person collected from the information furnished by various people appears in the columns of a local newspaper. Putois lives in his strength and malevolence. He lives after the manner of legendary heroes, of the gods of Olympus. He is the creation of the popular mind. There comes a time when even the innocent originator of that mysterious and potent evil-doer is induced to believe for a moment that ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... And view in every field a fairy race. Spur thy good Pacolet to speed apace, And spread a train of nymphs on every shore; Or if thy muse would woo a ruder grace, The Indian's evil Manitou's explore, And rear the wondrous tale of legendary lore. ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake

... the old house were many little nooks, and each nook haunted by the spirit of some legendary story. As is the case in all houses where successive generations of the same family have lived and died, ghostly visitants came at certain times, so the negroes said, rang bells softly at dead of night, tipped ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea

... how high this strange legend can be traced. The other tradition that St. Paul was subject to epileptic fits, has a less legendary character. The phrase 'thorn in the flesh' is scarcely reconcilable with Luther's hypothesis, otherwise than as doubts of the objectivity of his vision, and of his after revelations may have been consequences of the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... sup on dry bread was apt to conquer, not provinces alone, but hearts. Besides, he had begun well and his people had done their best. The House of Julia, to which he belonged, descended, he declared, from Venus. The ancestry was less legendary than typical. Cinna drafted a law giving him the right to marry as often as he chose. His mistresses were queens. After the episodes in Gaul, when he entered Rome his legions warned the citizens to have an eye on ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus

... execration for all that followed. Others, however, have pointed out the discrepancy between the generally acknowledged purity of character of Florinda and the meaning of La Cava, and it is their opinion that Count Julian's daughter is merely legendary, and that La Cava refers in some allegorical way to the dissolute and voluptuous life which Rodrigo had been leading and which was in itself a good and sufficient reason for all the misfortunes which ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... one used to be able to walk from one end of North Africa to the other in the shade. Allowing for some exaggeration, this means that either the legendary African forest of the Romans continued to subsist, or that certain bare tracts covered themselves with timber in post-Roman periods of abandonment, before the Arabs and their goats had time—for it must have required time—to change the climate ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... his very rare gleams of humour), 'En cele contree aurent bien aler les jeume de seize anz en vingt quatre'? Had Fantina, Bellela, and Moreta half-brothers, flying their gerfalcons at the quails by the shores of the 'White Lake' where the Khan hunted, and telling tales of the half legendary father, who sailed away for ever when they were boys in the days of Kublai Khan? These things we cannot know, nor can we ever guess whether he regretted that only daughters sprang from his loins in the city ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... done so. Nor let it be urged, that the hostility of this tribe to foreigners, and the hereditary feuds they carry on against their fellow-islanders beyond the mountains, are facts which contradict me. Not so; these apparent discrepancies are easily reconciled. By many a legendary tale of violence and wrong, as well as by events which have passed before their eyes, these people have been taught to look upon white men with abhorrence. The cruel invasion of their country by Porter has alone furnished them with ample provocation; and I can sympathize in the spirit which ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... too. Tell me more about that, if you will." He sought to lead the talk away from himself, since he did not intend to be fully drawn. "You said something about the theory that the Earth is alive, a living being, and that the early legendary forms of life may have been emanations—projections of herself—detached portions of her consciousness—or something of the sort. Tell me about that theory. Can there be really men who are thus children of the earth, fruit of ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... youth I ever heard of would have consoled himself variously, and variedly. Almo's austere celibacy is a portent in our world and altogether marvellous. It lifts his affair with you out of the humdrum atmosphere of to-day and puts it on a level with the legendary stories of heroic times, with the life-long fidelities of the ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White

... footsteps of Dante, is an experience that sends a poetic thrill through the blood. For it is on classic ground only that the Spirit of Antiquity walks. And it went on to ask the question, "If even England, with all her riches of historic and legendary associations, is not so rich in this kind of poetic material as some parts of the European Continent, what shall be said of the new English worlds—Canada, the United States, the Australias, the South African Settlements, etc.?" Histories they have, these new ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson

... found the path to excellence, suggested another essay of the ottava rima, a humorous poem "a la Beppo" on a larger and more important scale. If Byron possessed more than a superficial knowledge of the legendary "Don Juan," he was irresponsive and unimpressed. He speaks (letter to Murray, February 16, 1821) of "the Spanish tradition;" but there is nothing to show that he had read or heard of Tirso de Molina's (Gabriel Tellez) El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... departure, however, he entertained the King, the two Queens, and the principal nobility at one of those elaborate fetes which have now become merely legendary; and which combined a comedy, a concert, and a ballet, with other incidental amusements, sufficient, as it would appear in these days, to have afforded occupation for a week even to the most dissipated pleasure-seekers; ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... ever stand together without subtraction of a word. It belongs to the realm of the lapidary, and its facets can not be transferred. Yet when Mr. Zangwill refers to the Mephistophelian curl of Lord Beaconsfield's lip, the word is used advisedly. No character in history so stands for the legendary Mephisto as does this man. The Satan of the Book of Job, jaunty, daring, joking with his Maker, is the Mephisto of Goethe and all the other playwriters who, have used the character. Mephisto is so much above ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... the first and heroic period in Russia closes. Sagas and legendary poems have preserved for us its grim outlines and its heroes, of whom Vladimir, the "Beautiful Sun of Kief," is chief. Thus far there has been a unity in the thread of Russian history—but now came ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... great mass of the colored population to be educated? This was the question, and it was a most serious one. But the answer came not from the federal government, as some expected—that source from which so many had looked to get the mythical "mule" and the legendary "forty acres"—it came from the South, from the wasted resources of the former master. History furnishes no precedent as it affords no parallel to the action of the ex-slaveholders—a dominant race—in entering at once—before ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... acceptance of the idea by the East with its teeming life, counterbalances its comparative non-reception by the Western people of the day. From the early days of written or legendary history, Metempsychosis has been the accepted belief of many of the most intelligent of the race. It is found underlying the magnificent civilization of ancient Egypt, and from thence it traveled to the Western world being held as the highest truth by such teachers as Pythagoras, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... knew many of his own failings. He was by no means a vain man. Indeed he suffered considerable pain from the knowledge that he was not the tremendous person of the popular imagination. This knowledge robbed him of self-assurance. He tried to live up to the legendary Kitchener, and so long as he could find men as brave as himself, but of swifter and more adaptable intelligence, to do his bidding, he succeeded: many of the public, indeed, believed in the legendary Kitchener up to the day of his tragic death—death, that unmistakable reality, meeting him on a ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie

... way—for it is just as confounding right side or left—she and her friends take advantage of his absence to make the clever push for an establishment, and socially force him to legalize their union on his return. The deeds of the preceding reign had bequeathed a sort of legendary credence to the wildest tales gossip could ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Leatherstocking Tales or Hiawatha. At the time when the Revolutionary War broke out the population of the colonies was over three millions; Philadelphia had thirty thousand inhabitants, and the frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau fetches his Indian Student not from the outskirts of the settlement but from the remote backwoods ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... colour. High on the mighty fells the great glaciers—unchanging, almost, as the "everlasting hills"—gleamed in the sunlight against the azure sky, and sent floods of water down into the brimming rivers. The scalds ceased, to some extent, those wild legendary songs and tales with which they had beguiled the winter nights, and joined the Norsemen in their operations on the farms and on the fiords. Men began to grow weary of smoked rafters and frequent festivities, ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne

... household. He thought that he had forgotten; that he had conquered passion; but it reappeared with the violence of a tempest, reminding him of the terrible man he had been formerly—the bold adventurer, the descendant of brave, legendary chieftains. Each evening on his knees he flayed his skin with haircloth, he tried to banish the phantom of the regretted wife by calling from its coffin the skeleton which must now be there. But she constantly appeared before him, living, ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola

... Europe, though he was only identified as a "Jew" in the 17th century—students at Geneva College (now Hobart College) applied the name to a supposedly unsinkable floating log in Lake Seneca, identified as the legendary "Chief Agayentha"; Jefferson I have been unable to locate any "Jefferson" on ...
— The Lake Gun • James Fenimore Cooper

... superstition, more characterised, however, by tenderness than awe, that Harold learned that Edith had been undefinably impressed with a foreboding of danger to her betrothed, and all that morning she had watched his coming from the old legendary hill. Was it not in that watch that his good Fylgia had saved his life? Indeed, there seemed a strange truth in Hilda's assertions, that in the form of his betrothed, his tutelary spirit lived and guarded. For smooth every step, and bright ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... soapsuds." Honest, affable, adored, he presented the singular spectacle of a physician who scorned medicine, and yet who, it was said, had fewer deaths and more recoveries to his credit than any other practitioner of his generation. This belief arose probably in the legendary glamour which resulted from his boundless, though mysterious, charities; for despite the fact that he had until his death a large and devoted following, he lived all his life in a condition of genteel poverty. His single weakness was, I believe, an utter inability ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow

... or of the subjects, in accordance with which, in reversal of the adage that makes the child father to the man, the man is, in a new sense, father to the child, by stamping on his infancy and nonage traits borrowed from his mature years. Mingled with the species of legendary lore attaching to every generation, there is a foundation more or less of authentic annals. It is as affording an example of this human patchwork of fancy and fact, and as illustrating the impression deeply engraved on the popular mind, that the following incidents ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler

... to the story of Hereward the Wake, we must once more leave the realm of history for that of legend, for what further is told of him, though doubtless based on fact, is strictly legendary in structure. Landing on the coast of Lincolnshire, the fugitives abandoned their light ships for the widespreading forests of that region, and long lived the life of outlaws in the dense woodland adjoining Hereward's ancestral home of Bourne. Like an earlier Robin Hood, the valiant ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... "he makes rivers") was a legendary chief, about 1450, of the Onondaga Tribe of Indians. The formation of the League of Five Nations, known as the Iroquois, is attributed to him by Indian tradition. He was regarded as a sort of divinity—the incarnation of human progress and civilization. Longfellow's ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous

... from Old Testament history (with a recurring inclination for the theme of Paradise Lost), eight from the New Testament; thirty-three from the history of Britain (with a leaning towards the Arthurian legend); while five of them are legendary tales of Scotland or North Britain, the last being headed "Macbeth. Beginning at the arrival of Malcolm at Macduff. The matter of Duncan may be expressed by the arrival of his ghost." Now that Milton (an adorer of Shakespeare's ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... legendary stories crowded into his mind as that light came and went, and seemed to play here and there for what must have been half an hour, when it disappeared. But as it passed away he saw another away to his left, ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... easily placable if easily roused, started willingly enough on a congenial topic. And thus Adrian conceived his first impression of that romantic being whose deeds have remained legendary in the French west country, and who was destined to exercise so strong an influence ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... far in the opposite direction for him to reach the outer world beyond the wall and gain his freedom. Here again is one in whom we shall seek in vain for any indication of reflection. Like the rest, in spite of his legendary renown, he has no guide but the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... myself; where have I seen that face before, so classic and sinewy and versatile? I have seen it on Greek vases, and among the sailors of the Cyclades and on the Bosphorus. It is a non-Latin face, with sparkling eyes, brown hair, rounded forehead and crisply curling beard; a legendary face. How came Odysseus to ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... had come once as a small child, when the geography of the place was entirely different, and the fauna included certainly flamingoes and, possibly, camels. They strolled on, refashioning these legendary gardens. She was, as he felt, glad merely to stroll and loiter and let her fancy touch upon anything her eyes encountered—a bush, a park-keeper, a decorated goose—as if the relaxation soothed her. The warmth of the afternoon, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... we think, be extremely difficult to find any subject upon which persons, otherwise well informed, were so entirely ignorant, until the appearance of Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art, as the one upon which that lady treated in those ably written and beautifully illustrated volumes. It seemed as if the Act of Henry VIII., which declared that the name and remembrance of Thomas a Becket should be erased from all documents, had had ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 44, Saturday, August 31, 1850 • Various

... sketched us his little picture of the past, that Dierdre O'Farrell gazed at him, as if at some legendary knight in whose reality she did not believe. It was the first time I had seen any change in the sullen face, but it was a change to interest rather than sympathy. She had the air of saying in her mind: "You look more like a St. George, stepped down from a stained-glass ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... Hagiographa are all of late date. There is one on Psalms, Job, and Proverbs, the last tolerably accurate and free from legendary and paraphrastic additions; one on the five rolls—Ruth, Esther, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Canticles; which is not a translation, but rather a commentary in the Talmudic style; two ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... mythical people of central Italy, connected in legendary history with Aeneas, Latinus and Evander. They were supposed to have descended from their mountain home near Reate (an ancient Sabine town) upon Latium, whence they expelled the Siceli and subsequently ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... of the appearance of Jesus Christ is told with that strange mixture of the natural and impossible, that distinguishes legendary tale from fact. He is represented as suddenly coming in and going out when the doors are shut, and of vanishing out of sight, and appearing again, as one would conceive of an unsubstantial vision; then again he is hungry, sits down to meat, and eats his supper. But as those ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... so void, were screening a strange and undreamed-of part for him to play. The Spaniards, a vague, almost legendary people, as remote from Raymond's life as the Assamese or the cliff-dwellers of New Mexico, began to take on a concrete character, and were suddenly discovered to be the enemies of the human race. Raymond grew ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne

... business to win love incognito, according to the example of many ancient emperors, but in practice he had tripped over an ugly outgrowth from the legendary custom. The girl hated him, there was no doubt about it; and it was equally certain he loved her. Particularly caustic was the reflection that a twitch of his finger would get him Katharine as his wife, for before long the Queen-Regent was again attempting ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

... astonished,—as who would not have been?—that for an appreciable space of time I was practically in a state of stupefaction. I could do nothing but stare. I was acquainted with the legendary transmigrations of Isis, and with the story of the beetle which issues from the woman's womb through all eternity, and with the other pretty tales, but this, of which I was an actual spectator, was something new, even in legends, If the man, with whom I had just been ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... its wilder traditions, and local associations of a hundred kinds. The railroad from Frankfort to Heidelberg now runs along the Bergstrasse, and will ever present to the eyes of travelers the charming aspect of these old legendary hills; till the enchanting valley of the Neckar, with Heidelberg reposing amid its lovely scenery at its mouth, terminates the Bergstrasse, and the hills which stretch onward, on the way ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... "the Ash for nothing ill;" it was "the husbandman's tree," from which he got the wood for his agricultural implements; and there was connected with it a great amount of mystic folk-lore, which was carried to its extreme limit in the Yggdrasil, or legendary Ash of Scandinavia, which was almost looked upon as the parent of Creation: a full account of this may be found in Mallet's "Northern Antiquities" and other works on Scandinavia. It is an English native tree,[24:3] and it adds much to the beauty of any ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... 'legendary.' Legend says that this castle was built in a night by a magician to satisfy the whim of one of the early kings. Becquer tells the story of its ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... and putting himself in a posture of defence, received the ponderous mass on the sole of his foot: and I believe that the stone, with a deeply indented foot-mark on it, is, like the bricks in Jack Cade's chimney, "alive at this day to testify." Legendary lore and fabulous ballads aside, it would indeed be strange if something interesting to the antiquary does not turn up in such a mine as this. It is curious, however, that in all the operations ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various

... however, owing to the enormous amount of work which has been done of late on the subject of Christian origins, the question takes on quite a different complexion. And from Strauss onwards a growingly influential and learned body of critics is inclined to regard the whole story of the Gospels as LEGENDARY. Arthur Drews, for instance, a professor at Karlsruhe, in his celebrated book The Christ-Myth, (1) places David F. Strauss as first in the myth field—though he allows that Dupuis in L'origine de tous les cultes (1795) had given the clue to the whole ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... were wranglers, and they took a peculiar pride in the traditions of their own calling. There wasn't a one of them who wouldn't spend hours mulling over the lore of the range and the prairie. They knew the Great Names from the Great Days—Eugene Autry, Wyatt Earp, the legendary Thomas Mix, Dale Robertson, Paladin, and all the others; men who rode actual horses in the era when the West was really ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch

... nominalism always gained ground, having among other celebrated champions, Peter d'Ailly and Buridan; the one succeeded in becoming Chancellor of the University of Paris, the other in becoming its Rector. Buridan has remained famous through his death and his donkey, both alike legendary. According to a ballad by Villon, Buridan having been too tenderly loved by Joan of Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, was by his order "thrown in a sack into the Seine." By comparison of dates, the fact seems impossible. According ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... walls under whose shelter the noble dames of yore used to grow it for their unguents. To this day, feudal ruins are its favourite resorts. Crusaders and manors disappeared; the plant remained. In this case, the origin of the clary, whether historical or legendary, is of secondary importance. Even if it were of spontaneous growth in certain parts of France, the toute-bonne is undoubtedly a stranger in the Vaucluse district. Only once in the course of my long botanizing-expeditions across the department have I come ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... went by train to Nottingham, where they spent a short time in exploring. The present town is much like others, except in its legendary connection with Robin Hood. All visitors might not find it as fascinating as did Mrs. Pitt and the young people, who knew it as the abode of the disagreeable Sheriff whom Robin Hood heartily hated, and upon whom he continually played so many tricks, always evading punishment ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson

... are marked by narrow terraces or parallel roads, which sweep round the shoulders of the hills with "undeviating horizontality." These roads are described by Sir Archibald Geikie as having long been "a subject of wonderment and legendary story among the Highlanders, and for so many years a source of sore perplexity among men of science." (517/2. "The Scenery of Scotland," 1887, page 266.) In Glen Roy itself there are three distinct shelves or terraces, and the mountain sides of the valley of the Spean and other glens bear ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... used universally in making announcements to large crowds, particularly at sporting events, is also due to this period as a perfection by Edison of many antecedent devices going back, perhaps, much further than the legendary funnels through which Alexander the Great is said to have sent commands to his outlying forces. The improved Edison megaphone for long-distance work comprised two horns of wood or metal about six feet long, tapering from a diameter of two feet six inches at the mouth to a small aperture ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... Wren's Nest" is peopled by these legendary forms with their never-dying souls. They lurk in every corner and peer out from every crevice. They hide behind the trees, and sometimes in the moonlight we see them looking out at us as we walk along the path. They crouch among interlacing vines ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... Nation" vol. i. (an article written on the occasion of Browning's death) says that he was told by Carlyle of his first meeting with Browning—as Carlyle rode upon Wimbledon Common a "beautiful youth," walking there alone, stopped him and asked for his acquaintance. The incident has a somewhat legendary air.] ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... Epigrams occasionally are put under wrong headings. For example, a dedication by Leonidas of Alexandria is followed in the /Dedicatoria/ by another epigram of his on Oedipus;[6] an imaginary epitaph on Hesiod in the /Sepulcralia/ by one on the legendary contest between Hesiod and Homer;[7] and the lovely fragment of pastoral on Love keeping Thyrsis' sheep[8] comes oddly in among epitaphs. The epideictic section contains a number of epigrams which would be more properly placed in one or another of all the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... and collectors, they have not as yet been presented in a popular manner to English-speaking readers. The probable reasons for what would appear to be an otherwise incomprehensible omission on the part of those British writers who make a popular use of legendary material are that many Breton folk-tales strikingly resemble those of other countries, that from a variety of considerations some of them are unsuitable for presentation in an English dress, and that most of the folk-tales proper ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... healthy senses and a human heart." Although this may be particularly true of opera, which is a composite form of art, making so varied an appeal to the participant that everyone can get something from its picture of life—historical, legendary, even fictitious—as well as from the actors, the costumes and the story, the statement is certainly not applicable to what is called absolute music, where music is disassociated from the guiding help of words, and expressed by the media of orchestra, string quartet, pianoforte, and various ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... science. From the first his aim was to express himself; and it was a long time before he realised that verse was not his native language. His first three plays were in verse, the fourth in verse alternating with prose; then came two plays, historic and legendary, written in more or less archaic prose; then a satire in verse, Love's Comedy, in which there is the first hint of the social dramas; then another prose play, the nearest approach that he ever made to poetry, but written in prose, The Pretenders; and then the two latest and most ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... cottage welcomed the festive season with green decorations of bay and holly—the cheerful fire glanced its rays through the lattice, inviting the passenger to raise the latch, and join the gossip knot huddled round the hearth, beguiling the long evening with legendary jokes ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving

... other name can ever call up. What will be called hereafter the madness of the Italian people took possession of them on the day when Rome was theirs to do with as they pleased. Their financial ruin had its origin at that moment, when they became masters of the legendary Mistress of the world. What the end will be, no one can foretell, but the Rome of old was not made great by dreams. Her walls were founded in blood, and her temples were built with the wealth of conquered nations, by captives and slaves ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... Protestant Reformation, and even Melanchthon and Luther seem to have entirely believed that Faustus could make the forms of the dead appear, could carry people invisibly through the air, and play all the legendary tricks of the enchanters. So strong a hold does humbug often obtain even upon the noblest and ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum

... was occupied by the throne, he, himself, seized the royal chair, and relegating it to a less conspicuous station, he cried: "Room for the great Raphael." If this is historic, it does honour to the prince; if legendary, it is to the glory of the people whose ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... as a companion volume to "Child-Life in Art," and is a study of Madonna art as a revelation of motherhood. With the historical and legendary incidents in the life of the Virgin it has nothing to do. These subjects have been discussed comprehensively and finally in Mrs. Jameson's splendid work on the "Legends of the Madonna." Out of the great mass of ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll

... where we are, the rifles and the big guns have gone on from morning to night and from night to morning. We are buried deep in an everlasting battlefield; but like the ticking of the clocks at home in the days gone by—in the now almost legendary Past—you only hear the ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... magic numbs thought. In the great centres of civilization we admire and study only the results of mind,—the products of human endeavor: here one views only the work of Nature,—but Nature in all her primeval power, as in the legendary frostless morning of creation. Man here seems to bear scarcely more relation to the green life about him than the insect; and the results of human effort seem impotent by comparison son with the operation of those vast blind forces which clothe the peaks and crown the dead craters ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... holes. We wonder whether Rosa Bud and Helena Landless ever played on them! Looking round, we half expect to witness the famous courting scene in Edwin Drood, and afterwards "the matronly Tisher to heave in sight, rustling through the room like the legendary ghost of a dowager in silken skirts, [with her] 'I trust I disturb no one; but there was a paper-knife—Oh, thank you, I am sure!'" An excellent local institution, called "The Rochester Men's Institute," has its home here. The house has been immortalized by Mr. Luke Fildes ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes

... vineyards and fields filled with cattle. Man will gain in gentleness and morality because he will cease to live by the carnage and destruction of living creatures.... The earth will be covered with grass, flowers and woods and in it the human race will dwell in the abundance and joy of the legendary age of gold—provided that a spiritual chemistry has been discovered that changes the nature of man as profoundly as ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... on the air, the hardier guests at "Idle Times" still clung to those outdoor sports which properly belonged to the summer. That afternoon a canoeing expedition was made up river to explore a cave which tradition had endowed with some legendary tale of pioneer ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... it was even more vain to imagine that through his own unaided power he could strike down a figure of such almost legendary terror as McGurk. The bondage of the gang might be a terrible thing through the future, but the present need blinded him ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand

... India;" and he took particular care to state that his essay, though published only in 1788, had been written in 1784. In that essay he endeavored to show that there existed an intimate connection, not only between the mythology of India and that of Greece and Italy, but likewise between the legendary stories of the Brahmans and the accounts of certain historical events as recorded in the Old Testament. No doubt, the temptation was great. No one could look down for a moment into the rich mine of religious and mythological lore that was suddenly opened before the eyes of scholars ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller

... appeared a very startling truth. It was so difficult to realise that the solid earth on which we stand reposed on nothing! What was to keep it from falling? How could it be sustained without tangible support, like the legendary coffin of Mahomet? But difficult as it may have been to receive this doctrine, yet its necessary truth in due time commanded assent, and the science of Astronomy began to exist. The changes of the seasons ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... happy creatures who are amusing themselves. But their first feeling of surprise was soon followed by terror, a growing terror, as if they beheld the opening of some pesthouse of ancient times, some hospital of the legendary ages, evacuated after a great epidemic. The two girls became quite pale, while the father and the mother felt icy cold in presence of that endless defile of so many horrors, the pestilential emanations of which were blown full in their faces. O God! to think ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... the right bank, is seen another picturesque ruin. No river in Europe boasts of more ruins than the Rhone. Then we reach the legendary rock called the Table du Roi. Just as AEneas and his companions made of their flat loaves, plates, and so fulfilled the Sibyl's prediction, St. Louis saw in this tabular block a dinner-table, providentially designed for the ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... the various exclusive religious organizations. We may demand the credentials of every creed and catechise all the catechisms. So we may discuss the gravest questions unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our evening tea-cups. There is no rest for the Protestant until he gives up his legendary anthropology and all ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... cave, also, Zeus grown to maturity, was united to Europa, the daughter of man, in the sacred marriage from which sprang Minos, the great legendary figure of Crete. And to Crete the island god returned to close his divine life. Primitive legend asserted that his tomb was on Mount Juktas, the conical hill which overlooks the ruins of the city of Minos, his son, his friend, and his priest. It was this surprising ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... should be popular in the best sense of the word—William Tell. It is his one play with a happy ending and has always been a prime favorite on the stage. The hero is the Swiss people, and the action idealizes the legendary uprising of the Forest Cantons against their Austrian governors. There are really three separate actions: the conspiracy, the love-affair of Bertha and Rudenz, the exploits of William Tell. All, however, contribute to the common ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... our knowledge of the Arthurian material are, however, comparatively small, since he augmented his original in the main by passages inspired by his own imagination.[19] His additions may be called poetic rather than legendary. Partly because of its Saxon character his Brut never attained wide popularity, and it had little effect upon the cycle; but it remains one of the most truly great literary achievements in the field of both ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace

... except from Sir Knight. He says that only lately people have found several oases south of Tripoli, which were talked about before in the same legendary way as this one he's going to search for. Only a few people know about them now: but they are known. And they're inhabited by Jews who fled by tribes from the Romans when Solomon's Temple was destroyed, in the reign of the Emperor ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... spars the wailing strains of the violin came to him across the waters. If they were conscious there of the presence of the schooner they cared little about it. For the moment it occurred to Robert that it must be the Flying Dutchman, or some other old phantom ship out of the dim and legendary past. ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler

... word Daimon and Daimones in Plato; Socrates urges that by daemons the Gods, or the children of the Gods, were meant. I felt as though I, too, were one of the children of the Gods. In all the great legendary figures of the middle ages I detected the feature of divine possession, especially in the two who had completely fascinated the poets of the nineteenth century, Don Juan and Faust. The first was the symbol of magic power over women, the second of the thirst for knowledge giving ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... shall be the first of a series of little volumes in which shall be presented in a handy form selections from the Folk-lore and legends of various countries. It has been well said that "the legendary history of a nation is the recital of the elements that formed the character of that nation; it contains the first rude attempts to explain natural phenomena, the traditions of its early history, and the moral principles popularly adopted as the rules for reward ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous

... novel of Mr. Reade, "White Lies," although somewhat crude, otherwise ranks with his best. The action is uninterrupted and swift, the characters sharply defined, if legendary, the dialogue always sparkling, the plot cleanly executed, the whole full of humor and seasoned with wit. So well has it caught the spirit of the scene that it reads like a translation, and, lest we should mistake ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... guile of Hera, the fiery death of Semele, the double birth of Dionysus; of Athene and Hephaestus and Erichthonius, of the strife for the possession of Athens, of Halirrhothius and that first trial on the Areopagus, and all the legendary lore of Attica. Above all, the wanderings of Demeter, the finding of Persephone, the hospitality of Celeus; Triptolemus's plough, Icarius's vineyard, and the sad end of Erigone; the tale of Boreas and Orithyia, of Theseus, and of Aegeus; of Medea in Greece, and of her flight thereafter into ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata

... preserved, if not in use, at least in memory. I should also be especially glad of references of any other allusion to the "white Paternoster" or "seynte Petres soster," or for any information as to sources for ascertaining the history, whether authentic or legendary, of the personage supposed to be alluded to in the closing words of this ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various

... who from his bower in the woods showered good children with gifts.[148-A] But to celebrate the day quietly was altogether a different thing from introducing to the American public the character of Santa Claus, who has become in his mythical entity as well known to every American as that other Dutch legendary personage, Rip Van Winkle. ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey

... a good deal about the personages you mention from Bulfinch's "Age of Fable," from Alexander S. Murray's "Manual of Mythology," and from Mrs. Clement's "Handbook of Legendary and Mythological Art"; but the poems of Homer,—the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey,"—of both of which there are good English translations,—are the chief ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various

... of the work before us is equivocal: a reader might as reasonably expect the Sports of the Western World, as adventures in Ireland, such as make up the present volumes. What we principally complain of is the paucity of Sports among their contents. It is true that the title also promises Legendary Tales and Local Sketches, but here they are the substance, and the Wild Sports mere shadow. We have too little of "the goodly rivers," "all sorts of fish," "the sweet islands and goodly lakes, like little inland seas," "of the most beautiful and sweet countrey," as Spenser phrases it in the author's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various

... Berlin, and then went to Paris; he was meditating a tour in Russia. Pressing invitations reached him from St. Petersburg and Moscow. The most fabulous accounts of his virtuosity had raised expectation to its highest pitch. He was as legendary even among the common people as Paganini. His first concert at St. Petersburg realized the then unheard-of sum of L2,000. The roads were crowded to see him pass, and the corridors and approaches to the Grand ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... effect produced upon me by this volume, but it must have been considerable. At all events I had got a key to a difficulty; in these sermons (or rather heads of sermons, as they seem to be, taken down by a hearer) there is much of what would be called legendary illustration; but the substance of them is plain, practical, awful preaching upon the great truths of salvation. What I can speak of with greater confidence is the effect upon me a little later of the Exercises of St. Ignatius. Here again, in a pure matter ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman

... were four dungeons. Rosslyn was associated with scenes rendered famous by Bruce and Wallace, Queen Mary and Rizzio, Robert III and Queen Annabella Drummond, by Comyn and Fraser, and by the St. Clairs, as well as by legendary stories of the Laird of Gilmorton Grange, who set fire to the house in which were his beautiful daughter and her lover, the guilty abbot, so that both of them were burnt to death, and of the Lady of ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... pageantry of Romish worship may be kept up in that church, till mystical Babylon shall be destroyed, in the awful manner foretold in the Revelation; but infidelity hath long since, tipped the foundation of catholic religion, being grafted on the ruins of superstition. The absurd doctrines, and legendary tales of popery, may have been credited in the dark ages, when many of the clergy were unable to write their names, or so much as read their alphabet; but the belief of them is utterly inconsistent with the light everywhere diffused ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee

... eclipsed in its sublimity by the feat which has just been performed by Sister Cipriani, who has just traversed the same weary, arid waste on foot, accompanied by a single Arab attendant. Gordon's name will live forever in story, side by side with the great knights, historical and legendary, of the olden time. The labors of the noble and heroic Sister Cipriani, though attended with as much personal danger, and performed in a higher sphere, will, perhaps, meet with little earthly recognition. Be it so. She wants no ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various

... also wrote a dramatic poem in five acts, entitled 'Vivia Perpetua', referred to by Mrs. Jameson in her 'Sacred and Legendary Art', and by Leigh Hunt, when he spoke of her in 'Blue-Stocking Revels', as 'Mrs. Adams, rare mistress ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... every man the woman whom he loves is as Mother Earth was to her legendary son: he has but to kneel and kiss her breast to know that he ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... came to an end; save that, on one side of the little entry where it terminated, a flight of a dozen steps gave access to the roof of the tower and the legendary shrine. On the other side was a door, at which Miriam knocked, but rather as a friendly announcement of her presence than with any doubt of hospitable welcome; for, awaiting no response, she ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... no weird and legendary lore Invests our young, our golden Austral shore With that romance the poet loves too well, When Inspiration breathes ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... characteristic; and much in the creation of the Ireland in the mind is already done, and only needs retelling by the new writers. More important, however, for the literature we are imagining as an offset to the cosmopolitan ideal would be the creation of heroic figures, types, whether legendary or taken from history, and enlarged to epic proportions by our writers, who would use them in common, as Cuculain, Fionn, Ossian, and Oscar were used by the generations of poets who have left us the bardic history of Ireland, ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell

... immortality as anyone should set his heart on; for who would wish to be chattered about by the people that will live in these islands three hundred years hence? We should not understand them nor they us. Avaunt, therefore, all legendary immortalities, and let us be content, Ross, to be remembered by our friends, and, perhaps, to have our names passed on by disciples to another generation! A fair and natural immortality this is; let us share it together. Our bark lies in the harbour: you tell me the ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... believe. Deism allows that man has in his nature this empty bucket, which is not to be filled during his stay in this world, if it shall ever be! Nor are these all the hard things which Deists ask me to believe. He wishes me to believe that the history of the Nazarene is legendary, that he was a fanatical enthusiast. Some Deists have refused to believe so hard a thing ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various

... of the Christian Church during the ages immediately succeeding the Apostles. In the eyes of his own and the next generations, Clement of Rome appears to have held a more prominent position, if we may judge from the legendary stories which have gathered about his name; but for ourselves the interest which attaches to Polycarp is far greater. This importance he owes to his peculiar position, rather than to any marked greatness ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... to feel, in submitting these Poems to the judgment of the Public, may perhaps plead my excuse, for detaining the reader to relate, that they were written under the disadvantages of a confined education, and at an age too young for the attainment of an accurate taste. My first production, the Legendary Tale of Edwin and Eltruda, was composed to amuse some solitary hours, and without any view to publication. Being shewn to Dr. Kippis, he declared that it deserved to be committed to the press, and offered to take upon himself the task of introducing it to ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams

... coincided with the latter part of the twelfth century: and the curious outburst of Pantheism which connects itself on the one hand with the little-known teaching of Amaury de Bene and David of Dinant, on the other with the almost legendary "Eternal Gospel" of Joachim of Flora, occurred almost exactly at the junction of the twelfth and thirteenth. As for the writers of the thirteenth century itself, that great period holds in this as in other departments the position of palmiest time of the Middle Ages. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... in 3 CHUAN. Attributed to Huang-shih Kung, a legendary personage who is said to have bestowed it on Chang Liang (d. 187 B.C.) in an interview on a bridge. But here again, the style is not that of works dating from the Ch'in or Han period. The Han Emperor Kuang Wu [25-57 A.D.] apparently quotes from ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu

... hunting adventures, and exploits and perils in the wilderness; many of which were so strange and improbable, that I will not venture to repeat them, lest the veracity of Antony Vander Heyden and his comrades should be brought into question. There were many legendary tales told, also, about the river, and the settlements on its borders; in which valuable kind of lore, the Heer Antony seemed deeply versed. As the sturdy bush-beater sat in the twisted root of a tree, that served him for a kind of arm-chair, dealing forth these wild ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... these men who constituted the cream of Earth's scientific ability. Professor Estapp, the good-looking young American; Dr. Swanson, the Swede; Master Scientist Cram—the great English genius Cram, already legendary, the only other of that rank beside yourself; Professor Geinst, the hunchbacked, mysterious German; and Dr. Norman—Dr. Sir Charles Esme Norman, to give him his English title. I wanted these men, and I got them! All except ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore

... says:—"Seeing that the Spanish garrison in Baler, consisting of a handful of men, isolated, without hope of succour, is, by its valour and constant heroism worthy of universal admiration, and in view of its defence, comparable only with the legendary valour of the sons of the Cid and of Pelayo, I render homage to military virtues, and, interpreting the sentiments of the Philippine Republic, on the proposal of my Secretary of War, and in agreement with my Council of State, I hereby decree ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... at York in 306, and there is a tradition that hundreds of years afterwards his body was found under the Church of St. Helen-on-the-Walls, with a lamp still burning over it. Many churches in the neighbourhood of Eburacum were dedicated to his wife Helena, the legendary finder of the True Cross. It has been supposed that Constantine the Great was born at York, but this is probably untrue, though he was proclaimed emperor there. In the middle of the fourth century the Picts and Scots began to make inroads, and it is probable that they captured York about ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock

... deep impression on the imagination of a boy whose delicate health prevented his rushing into the amusements and society of children of his own age. There are plenty of crones in every village, and one at least in every gentleman's house to watch "the master's children" and pour legendary lore into their willing ears, accompanied by snatches of song and fairy tale. All these were certain to seize upon such an imagination as that of Burke, and lay the foundation of much of that high-souled mental poetry—one of his great characteristics; ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... constructed on that method to which I have applied the adjective ikonomatic, and by which it was quite possible to preserve the sound as well as the sense of sentences and verses.[43] Such attention could have been bestowed only on the sacred, royal, or legendary chants, while the compositions of ordinary poets would only be disseminated by ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton

... potentially dead, but was allowed to live by the mysterious favor and interference of the Giver of Life. The buffalo hung opposite the image of his own body in death, because it was the support of his physical self, and a leading figure in legendary lore. Following the same line of thought, when he emerged from the solitary lodge of preparation, and approached the pole to dance, nude save for his breechclout and moccasins, his hair loosened and daubed with clay, ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... The curtain rose, and the first act, little more than a prelude, was soon over. It was an introduction to the spectators, of that weird, fantastic, legendary world into which they were to enter, with Arivana, the sacred place of offering, the holy of holies, in ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner

... and early progress of Christianity in Russia is involved in obscurity and overlaid with legendary stories. There is little doubt that it came from Constantinople, and was not only rapidly spread, but firmly established in the country within a short space of time. The date most generally accepted is that of the reign of Vladimir, the great prince of Kief, grandson of ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... to borrow all the beautiful Old World associations, poetical and legendary, that cluster about the holly at Christmas time, although our native tree furnishes most of our holiday decorations. So far back as Pliny's day, the European holly had all manner of supernatural qualities attributed to it: its insignificant little flowers caused water to freeze, he tells ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... have not been able to ascertain, owned the premises in Icknield Street West, now known as Monument House, and in his garden, near the house, he built the tall octagonal tower, now known as the Monument, respecting the origin of which so many various legendary stories are current. It was, no doubt, erected to enable its owner, who was an astronomer, to obtain from its upper chamber a more extensive field of view for his instruments, and thus to enable him to make observations ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards

... the story, at this page of the legendary tale, how the children would clap their hands, with all that love of justice innate in children, and how the faces of worthy parents would beam with the approval of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various



Words linked to "Legendary" :   legendary creature, legend, unreal



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