Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Reminiscence   Listen
noun
Reminiscence  n.  
1.
The act or power of recalling past experience; the state of being reminiscent; remembrance; memory. "The other part of memory, called reminiscence, which is the retrieving of a thing at present forgot, or but confusedly remembered." "I forgive your want of reminiscence, since it is long since I saw you."
2.
That which is remembered, or recalled to mind; a statement or narration of remembered experience; a recollection; as, pleasing or painful reminiscences.
Synonyms: Remembrance; recollection. See Memory.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Reminiscence" Quotes from Famous Books



... into dear reminiscence and dearer daydreams, their common scene some two hundred miles north; but to realize his lapse was to recover from it promptly. Langholm glanced at himself in the little mirror. His was an honest face, ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung

... if they had been a race of warriors; they are said to have come in to Scandinavia and got the better of those who lived there before, because they worshipped a superior set of gods.[4] An historic reminiscence may lurk here. Before the Aesir there were giants, and the earth with all its parts is made of the body of one of these giants,[5] whom the new race superseded as governors of the world. But the giants are still there and their spirit is unchanged; there is a danger of their interfering ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... man, thus started on reminiscence, continued, somewhat garrulous, and Paul, sunk in the armchair by the fire, listened indulgently, waiting for Jane. She, meanwhile, was occupied upstairs and in the library answering telephone messages and sending word out to callers by the maid. For, on the heels of Paul, as ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... dancer grew drowsy after the fashion of a child, her eyes became misty, her red lips pouted, her voice drawled faint and complaining music in whispers, and Curran looked often and long at her while he talked. Arthur went away debating with himself. His mind had developed the habit of reminiscence. Colette reminded him of a face, which he had seen ... no, not a face but a voice ... or was it a manner?... or was it her look, which seemed intimate, as of earlier acquaintance?... what was it? It eluded him however. He felt ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... over-dazzling colour is this use of white and gray in large dominating masses. The noble figure of S. Giovanni gave him a prototype for many of his imposing figures of bearded old men. There is a strong reminiscence, too, of the saint's attitude in one of the most wonderful of extant Veroneses—that sumptuous altar-piece SS. Anthony, Cornelius, and Cyprian with a Page, in the Brera, for which he invented a harmony as delicious as it is daring, composed wholly of violet-purple, ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips

... talk without any palpable beginning, and drifted into reminiscence. "I remember being run away with by a mule train in Ronda ... the first I had ever handled. They got out of hand—it was a nasty gorge with a bend in it where you turn on to the bridge. I got round that with a well-directed stone which caught the off-side leader exactly at ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... was aware of a light step, a swishing, sibilant, delightful rustling—the caress of sound is the rustling of a well-groomed woman's skirts—and of an afterthought of violets, of a mere reminiscence of orris, all of which came toward him through the dimness of the hall. He ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell

... having ebbed considerably, she was less exposed to the beating of the waves. The sun was also about to make his appearance, and it was broad daylight when Jackson first came to his recollection. His brain whirled, his ideas were confused, and he had but a faint reminiscence of what had occurred. He felt that the water washed his feet, and with a sort of instinct he rose, and staggered up to windward. In so doing, without perceiving him, he stumbled over the body of Newton, who also was roused up by the shock. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... whose recollection so unbounded. He combined scholastic accuracy with unaffected ease; condensed and pointed, yet rich and perspicuous. Were it possible for his numerous friends, by any energy of reminiscence, to collect his discourse, John Henderson would be distinguished as a voluminous author, who yet preserved a Spartan frugality ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... of this pretension has not been justified. The demonstration has succeeded only with that large class of dreams in which there happens to be a trend of infantile reminiscence and of disguised sexual phantasy. It fails to reveal the inner nature of other kinds of dreams or the modus operandi of dreaming as a process of thinking. And while it is asserted by the publishers ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... measures, should one be chosen from the Carbonari of Ferrara. At that period of his life he entertained the opinion that suicide was justifiable to avoid an ignominious death at the hands of arbitrary power. Believing his fate sealed, he gave a few moments of tender reminiscence to his dead mother and his living father and sisters, to the dreams of his youth, and the patriotic aspirations to which he was about to fall a sacrifice. The jailer returned, bringing a book and a bottle of wine, for which he had asked; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... of reminiscence—probably designed to be repeated to Mr. Schofield—she disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, and returned with a pitcher of lemonade and a blue china dish sweetly freighted with flat ginger cookies of a composition that was her own secret. Then, having ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... being young, had something of youth's impatience, perhaps the only reminiscence of youth left in a calloused soul. So it was that he had shot a second too soon. Norton, as both hands rose in front of him, answered Kid Rickard with the smaller-caliber gun while the Colt in his right hand was concerned impartially with Galloway ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory

... the convolvulus, the passion-flower, and the begonia, all reminding me of home, here among these inhospitable rocks. There was a red begonia just the same color as one that is kept in a pot in the window of a certain villa in Streatham—but I am drifting into private reminiscence. ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... of France, Jean Brehal, in his reminiscence enumerates the reasons for believing that Jeanne came from God. One of the proofs which seems to have struck him most forcibly is that her coming is foretold in the prophecies of ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... Green—he and Take-Notice, with Irish mostly silent and with the girl extremely indignant at times and at others slightly incredulous, but always eager to hear more. More they said, not with malice, perhaps, for they liked Andy Green, but with the spirit of reminiscence strong upon them. Many things that he had said and done they recalled and laughed over—but the girl did not laugh. At sundown, when they rode away, she scribbled a hasty note, put it in an envelope and entrusted it to Irish for immediate delivery to the absent and erring one. ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower

... faces you have, going to a peak at the chin. When you're old, it runs to squares and doubles. Look to your cheeks, miss, if you wants to keep young!" She unfolded her arms, stretched them at full length, and comfortably folded them again. Her broad chest heaved in a cackle of amused reminiscence. ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... been to me a name to conjure with. At some far-away period in childhood it got imbedded in my fancy, and in process of time had acquired that subtilest, indefinable fascination which belongs only to imaginative reminiscence. In the future, I suppose, all this existence will have become such a childhood, its earth changed to sky, its dulness sharpened to a tender, delicious poignancy of allurement and suggestion. And were it not bliss enough for an immortality, this boundless deepening and refining of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... true love, what can we say of it? The dream of youth; the cherished reminiscence of age; celebrated in the songs of poets; that which impels the warrior to his most daring deeds; which the inspired prophet chooses to typify the holiest sentiments,—what new thing is it possible to say about ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... the little outpost in the Great Nor'-west, snow and ice had become so familiar—such matter-of-course conditions of existence—that green fields and flowers were a mere reminiscence of the remote past. The scent of a rose was a faded memory—indeed the scent of anything belonging to the vegetable kingdom had not once saluted our nostrils during those eight months. Pure white became one of the chief and most impressive facts of our existence ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne

... to ask and interrupted this reminiscence. Why did they all three always play together? And a look of something like fear came over Jim Bunion's face; and at first he would not speak. And then he said to me that it was like this; they had not paid for that crystal, but got ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany

... sharing the contents of his well-bucket. Such was the beginning of the Eleuthere Powder-works. M. Du Pont, who died some forty years ago, was much beloved for his benevolence and probity. In 1825, La Fayette, during his celebrated visit of reminiscence, was the guest of the brave old Frenchman for several days, during which he examined the battle-ground of Brandywine. He here received the ball with which he got his wound in that battle, from the hands of Bell ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... played. He was the son of very respectable labouring people of Willshampstead; had been misled into committing what was more a boyish freak than a crime, and was hanged. That was all the authorities could do for him, and they did it. This is the remotest and the saddest reminiscence of my life, and the only sad one I mean to relate, if I ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton

... similar or inferior to themselves: it is because the instinctive feeling of their country's claims still exists in their hearts; and because an involuntary pride in the name it bears, or a vague reminiscence of its bygone fame, suffices to give ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... hapless lodger in words that sound very like the apologia of Mr Harry Fielding himself: "I have always thought, indeed, Mr Luckless had a great deal of Honesty in his Principles; any Man may be unfortunate: but I knew when he had Money I should have it...." And the good woman's reminiscence that while her lodger had money her doors were thundered at every morning between four and five by coachmen and chairmen; and her wish that that pleasant humour'd gentleman were "but a little soberer," finishes, we ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... veil of the four elements, the wearisome and splendid glitter of a blue sea with the Seven Islets like minute specks swimming in my eye, the high red roof of the bungalow crowning the very smallest of them all. This visual reminiscence was profoundly disturbing. I knocked at the door with a ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad

... gestures rushed towards them as though they had found them after great danger, led them back into the circle, and danced with joy and animation. Here we see how mighty is tradition. This dance is a complete poem! Who knows of what long-forgotten incursion of the barbarians it is a reminiscence?'[69] ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... showing its hand in the lopping away of much redundant foliage, has brought it largely within the compass of scientific and technical expression; the native element reveals itself, now [Page 164] in plaintive reminiscence and now in a riotous bonhommie, a rollicking love of the sensuous, and in a style of delivery and vocal technique which demands a voluptuous throatiness, and which must be ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... the strangers and incomers have been incorporated into the English nation, within one or two generations have forgotten that they were ever ought else than members of it, have retained no other reminiscence of their foreign extraction than some slight difference of name, and that often disappearing or having disappeared. Exactly so has it been with the English language. No language has shown itself less exclusive; ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... dinner-party, when someone mentioned Harrow Speech-Day—"Ah! that used to be a pleasant day. The last time I was there I drove down with Lord Byron and Doctor Parr, who had been breakfasting with my step-father, Basil Montagu." This reminiscence seemed to carry one back some way, but I entirely agreed with Mrs. Procter. Speech-Day at Harrow has been for more than forty years one of my favourite holidays. In my time the present Speech-Room did not exist. The old Speech-Room, added to John Lyon's original building ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... before the memory of the man who had said, 'Lord, Thou shalt never wash my feet,' and then, with the swift recoil to the opposite pole which makes us love Him so much, hurried to say, 'Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head'—some reminiscence of that upper chamber, and of how the Master had girded Himself with the slave's apron, or towel, in order that He might serve the disciples; and then had told them that that was the pattern for all Christian men, and for all Christian ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... disastrous experiences; the turnkeys, and blighted inhabitants he had certainly taken from life. But he shifted the scene from the Marshalsea to the King's Bench Prison—the former place would have been too painful a reminiscence for his father. To his reporting expeditions we owe the Election scenes at Ipswich, and to another visit for the same object, his Bath experiences. Much of the vividness and reality of his touchings, particularly in the case of Rochester and its doings, is the magnifying, searching power ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald

... strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature. In the same way, as Malone pointed out, Othello's exclamation, 'Goats and monkeys!' (IV. i. 274) is an unconscious reminiscence of Iago's words ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... of little children, and the self-confessed bibliomaniac, gives us still another sort of laugh—the tender, indulgent sort. Nothing could be finer than the gentle reminiscence of "Long Ago," a picture of the lost kingdom of boyhood, which for all its lightness holds a pathos that clutches ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... not know; nor even if she had, could she have found the words with which to have explained it to him. It was, after all, the old German who won her confidence at last. There was, as we have said, something simple, genuine, homely about the old man; a reminiscence, perhaps, of his homely Fatherland still clinging about him, after more than forty years of voluntary exile, which Madelon could well appreciate, though she could not have defined it; for a child judges more by instinct than reflection, and it was through ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter

... the work in the press, and Chorley was anxious to know something about its character. The title, she said, was capital—'Only a Fiddler!'—and she enlarged on that word, 'Only,' and its significance, so put: and I quite agreed with her for several minutes, till first one reminiscence flitted to me, then another and at last I was obliged to stop my praises and say 'but, now I think of it, I seem to have written something with a similar title—nay, a play, I believe—yes, and in five acts—'Only an Actress'—and ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... to say this indifferently, as if caring little what the reply might be: but in her effort to seem indifferent her voice became haughty, a reminiscence of the days when she still was the daughter of the Duc de Marny, the richest and most ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... drifted to the Electoral Commission, which had counted Tilden out and Hayes in, and of which each of the four had some story to tell. Beginning in banter with interchanges of badinage it presently fell into reminiscence, deepening as the interest of the listeners rose to what under different conditions might have been described as unguarded gayety if not imprudent garrulity. The little audience ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... But Fougeres didn't see the ballet, didn't hear the music; he was imagining pictures, he was painting. He left Joseph in the middle of the evening, and ran home to make sketches by lamp-light. He invented thirty pictures, all reminiscence, and felt himself a man of genius. The next day he bought colors, and canvases of various dimensions; he piled up bread and cheese on his table, he filled a water-pot with water, he laid in a provision of wood ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac

... or thinker, if you want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is their highest point. Before it, you have but vague outlines or dim presentiments of them. After it you will have only weakened reminiscence or powerless regret; that moment is the moment ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... to portray the battle of Bull Run as it could appear to a civilian spectator: to give a suggestive picture and not a general description. The following war-scenes are imaginary, and colored by personal reminiscence. I was in the service nearly four years, two of which were spent with the cavalry. Nevertheless, justly distrustful of my knowledge of military affairs, I have submitted my proofs to my friend Colonel H. C. Hasbrouck, Commandant of Cadets at West Point, and therefore ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... During this reminiscence, the man on the ground had contrived to clear his mind of the mistiness induced by the Kid's upper cut. The first sign he showed of returning intelligence was a sudden dash for safety up the road. But he had not gone five yards ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse

... the place and do most of my writing there, catching snatches of conversation and reminiscence as they float ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill

... you attempt to relate another reminiscence while in my employ, I shall make a deduction from your wages. I warn you—I warn you in the presence of this witness. My overwrought nerves can endure no more. Between your inexpiable English and your inopportune reminiscences, I am a nervous wreck!" The little man's ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart

... recognition of the object as not wholly new, but only as an example of what he is mostly familiar with. Intellectual education has for its object the cultivation of reflection; reflection is the Platonic "Reminiscence," which retraces ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... clear, 'Mamma!'—and happy she the name who owns! Nor would I all suppress this starting tear, Which blinds me, while, that infant's voice I hear! Say it again, fair child; I like it well, Although I sit alone, within my room, Like hermit-hearted man within his cell. It wakens Reminiscence, like a bell; And summons up a vanished Form most dear, Which, long years since, I laid within the tomb! Strange, that a simple sound should reach so deep, And flood my heart with thoughts, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various

... This reminiscence of my cramming experiences, mixed up in hotch-potch fashion with the martial echoes that caught my ear from the banging drum and brazen bugle, at once recalled the gruesome fact that this was the eventful ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson

... voice and on his face nothing but kindness and a queer whimsical look of reminiscence. He broke off at the buzz of a disc that hung from his belt by a golden chain. He jerked it loose from its snap, and to his ear clasped a small receiver. Like a mask his gentleness dropped ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... himself wore his star and garter! Of course too the buffet and the table were loaded, with resplendent plate. That, scene of ostentation has been on the gray matter of my brain ever since young manhood, and I relieve myself now of the reminiscence for the first and last time. In another page I speak of Prince Astor's pure gold service when I dined with him at New. York; and I have grateful memory of the almost palatial splendour wherewith a rich ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... the local scenery, and, like the scenery, no one thought of remarking upon it, least of all those who best knew his lack of humor. He had come to them out of the Nowhere, some four years previously, and while he never spoke of himself, and discouraged reminiscence in others, it became known through those vague uncharted channels by which news travels on the frontier, that back in the Texas Panhandle there was a limping marshal who felt regrets at mention of his name, and that ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach

... was a cheery soul. Like others of his type in the Bernina region, he spoke a good deal of German, and his fund of pleasant anecdote and reminiscence kept Helen from brooding on her own troubles during the long ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy

... shocking description—he spared no deformity or defect of any one of us if it happened to engage his eye. Sometimes a whole hour's lecture would be consumed in a scandalous tale of Rome or Naples, sometimes indeed it would be a reminiscence of his own youthful days, which policy, if not propriety, should have counselled him to omit. Yet, as I say, he never lost the respect of the class, but was feared, served, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... she finds in her work of mothering the twenty-five boys and girls in her charge the secret of defying age. On this particular afternoon she wore black and white striped silk, the effect of which was a soft gray to match her hair, and her placid face was lighted with smiles of reminiscence. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... day of her marriage passed—in happy reminiscence and in vague foreboding; in affection yet in reproach as the secret wife; and still as the loving, distracted girl, frightened at her own bitterness, but knowing ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... the past. She talked familiarly of "Uncle This" or "Cousin That," who had been apparently the idols of her nursery before they had become the heroes of England; and Meadows had much ado to defend himself against her store of anecdote and reminiscence. "Unfair!" thought Doris, breathlessly watching the contest of wits. "Oh, if she weren't a woman, Arthur ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward

... divine concerns through symbols is Orphic, and, in short, accords with those who write fables respecting the gods. But he who does this through images is Pythagoric. For the mathematical disciplines were invented by the Pythagorean in order to a reminiscence of divine concerns, to which through these as images, they endeavour to ascend. For they refer both numbers and figures to the gods, according to the testimony of their historians. But the enthusiastic ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... listening, but particularly he enjoyed listening to his own thoughts as they trod slowly, but very certainly, to foregone conclusions. Into the silent arena of his mind no impertinent chatter could burst with a mouthful of puns or ridicule, or a reminiscence caught on the wing and hurled apropos to the very centre of discussion. His own means of conveying or gathering information was that whereby one person asked a question and another person answered it, and, if the ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... the unseen powers and the only human being who has the fire of hell in his veins to enable him to resist them; and to make this quite clear, as Bertram comes on, the great musician has given the orchestra a passage introducing a reminiscence of Raimbaut's ballad. What a stroke of art! What cohesion of all the parts! What ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac

... Mississippi Upon our Own Land Edgar Poe's Significance Beethoven's Septette A Hint of Wild Nature Loafing in the Woods A Contralto Voice Seeing Niagara to Advantage Jaunting to Canada Sunday with the Insane Reminiscence of Elias Hicks Grand Native Growth A Zollverein between the U. S. and Canada The St. Lawrence Line The Savage Saguenay Capes Eternity and Trinity Chicoutimi, and Ha-ha Bay The Inhabitants—Good Living Cedar-Plums Like—Names Death of Thomas Carlyle Carlyle from American Points ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... village of Istanos the honor of being the theatre of Alexander the Great's celebrated exploit of cutting the Gordian knot that disentangled the harness of the Phrygian king. Ayash is to be congratulated upon having its historical reminiscence to recommend it to the notice of the outer world, since it has little to attract attention nowadays; it is merely the shapeless jumble of inferior dwellings that characterize the average Turkish village. As I trundle through the crooked, ill-paved alley-way ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... was both. At the King's command the door of the audience-chamber was thrown open and a herald appeared in the purple colours of Mr. Buck's commonwealth emblazoned with the Great Eagle which the King had attributed to North Kensington, in vague reminiscence of Russia, for he always insisted on regarding North Kensington as some kind of semi-arctic neighbourhood. The herald announced that the Provost of that city ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... rose to depart. Time had transformed Jean from a pretty girl into a beautiful woman, but there was an expression of profound melancholy on her once bright face which never left it now, save when a passing jest called up for an instant a feeble reminiscence of the sweet ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne

... clock, with its maddening, mechanical death chant seemed to Shirley to cry, with each beat, like the reminiscence of some nightmare ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... fore paws hanging helplessly over their paunches, while, with a shrill discordant cry, they bid us good-morning and then hurried back to their houses again. Not having our rifles handy they escaped scot free, otherwise we might have borrowed a coat from one of them as a reminiscence of the country. After another kos or two we began to get clear of the glacier; but occasionally we came upon enormous masses of snow jammed up on either side of the torrent, the action of the water having worn away ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... the toys of science, playing with a solar microscope, and mixing strangest compounds in his crucibles, without taking the trouble to study any of its branches systematically. In his later years he abandoned these pursuits. But a charming reminiscence of them occurs in that most delightful of his familiar poems, the "Letter ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... cushions, waited for the water to boil, with her eyes fixed on the blue flame while she absently slipped her rings up and down her fingers, lost in a dream apparently. But it was no dream; it was rather a vague reminiscence, faint, confused and evanescent. All the recollections of the love that was past rose up in her mind, but dimly and uncertain, leaving an indistinct impression, she hardly knew whether of pleasure or of pain. It was like the indefinable perfume of a faded bouquet, in which each separate ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... accept the refinement of difference which Professor Benfey, followed by Mr. Keith- Falconer, discovers between the AEsopic and the Hindu apologue:— "In the former animals are allowed to act as animals: the latter makes them act as men in the form of animals." The essence of the beast-fable is a reminiscence of Homo primigenius with erected ears and hairy hide, and its expression is to make the brother brute behave, think and talk like him with the superadded experience of ages. To early man the "lower animals," which are born, live and die like himself, showing ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... that?" But she knows now, since she has studied with her pupil in college the problems of composition, under the wise advice of Mr. Charles T. Copeland, that the style of every writer and indeed, of every human being, illiterate or cultivated, is a composite reminiscence of all that he has read and heard. Of the sources of his vocabulary he is, for the most part, as unaware as he is of the moment when he ate the food which makes a bit of his thumbnail. With most of us the ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... a reminiscence of those human beings who sought safety in the water, retreating downward into the deep as the heat reduced its level, occasionally lifting up their heads to breathe the torrid ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... volumes the works of a man you cordially dislike and always mistrust has something of the same effect, whilst it is certainly hard measure on the poor fellow edited. His lot—if I may venture upon a homely comparison founded upon a lively reminiscence of childhood—resembles that of an unfortunate infant being dressed by an angry nurse, in whose malicious hands the simplest operations of the toilet, to say nothing of the severer processes of the tub, can easily be made the ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... all agreed. It was indeed a reminiscence, the details of which had been playing havoc with Rapidan's nerves for the past fifteen years. They felt that they could not ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly

... Hall, a fitting tribute to his influence upon the University on the part of his former students. Especially noteworthy is his representation here with his favorite mastiff, "Leo," his inseparable companion. No reminiscence of a student of that time is complete without mention of "Leo" and his later companion "Buff," an only slightly less huge animal acquired during the later years of Dr. Tappan's administration. So when, in the popular air of the ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw

... but it is of a real emotion in the spectator's soul, not of any quality detected by keen insight in the objects themselves. This emotion Milton's art stamps with an epithet, which shall convey the added charm of classical reminiscence. When, e.g., he speaks of "the wand'ring moon," the original significance of the epithet comes home to the scholarly reader with the enhanced effect of its association with the "errantem lunam" of Virgil. Nor because it is adopted from Virgil has the epithet here the second-hand effect of a ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... pensioner now enjoying the evening of life. Living near each other in the pleasant Kingstown-Dalkey district, we meet not infrequently, and when we do our talk, as is natural, often glides into railway reminiscence. We fight our battles over again. We had many allies, prominent amongst them being the City and Harbour Authorities of Limerick. They were represented by good men who were hand and glove with us. Sir (then Mr.) ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... elementary fact that every many-celled creature, reproduced in the ordinary way and not by budding or the like, starts as a fertilised egg-cell. The coherence of the daughter-cells into which the fertilised egg-cell divides is a reminiscence, as it were, of the primeval coherence of daughter-units that made ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... spirit of the poem. The Nibelungenlied is a poem of the late twelfth century. The Beowulf at latest belongs to the eighth. To choose for the translation of Beowulf, therefore, amedium surcharged with reminiscence of a time, place, and style quite different from those of the original is certainly an error. It may find an audience where another and more faithful rendering would fail; but it will never win the esteem of scholars. In his ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker

... the demolition of all feudal fortresses that were not necessary for the defence of the frontiers, and which were a permanent menace to the King's authority, and an object of terror to town and country, and to the nobles afforded reminiscence of past lawlessness. The demolition was entrusted to the communes themselves. And in order to bring the culprits to speedy judgment, he renewed the institution of the Grand Jours; that of Poitiers in 1634 condemned ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... beautiful Jurandowna, he conceived a violent passion for her, to which even Danusia's extreme youth was no check. But Danveld also knew to what family the girl belonged, and Jurand's name was united in his memory with a painful reminiscence. ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... home, and I was now poring upon the last familiar thing before I ventured into the high woods and began my experience. I therefore took a leisurely farewell, and pondered instead of walking farther. Everything about me conduced to reminiscence and to ease. A flock of sheep passed me with their shepherd, who gave me a good-night. I found myself entering that pleasant mood in which all books are conceived (but none written); I was 'smoking the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... Ericsson still living, where would you be?—answer me that. Quaint, odd, alien old city,—a faint phantasmagoria of past conflicts and forgotten plans, a dingy fragment of la belle France, a clinging reminiscence of England, a dim, stone dream of Edinburgh, a little flutter of modern fashion, planted upon a sturdy rampart of antiquity, a little cobweb of commerce and enterprise, netting over a great deal of church and priest and king with an immovable ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... and a sealskin cap, and tell how proud he was on one occasion, as he stood on the wharf, at being addressed as "captain," and asked what ship he had brought into port. Even the hard heart of youth must soften at such a reminiscence. ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... the better of herself for enjoying the favour of a person who had so large a field of comparison; and it was perhaps partly to gratify the sense of profiting by comparison that she often appealed to these stores of reminiscence. Madame Merle had been a dweller in many lands and had social ties in a dozen different countries. "I don't pretend to be educated," she would say, "but I think I know my Europe;" and she spoke one day of going to Sweden to stay with an old friend, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James

... said. This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly true reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of confessions a la Jean Jacques Rousseau would do. Observe! I didn't howl at her, or start up setting furniture, or throw myself on the floor and kick, or allow myself to hint in any other ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad

... man is so and so and so and so; but he has a friendly heart (although some wiseacres have painted him as black as bogey), and you may trust what he says." I should like to touch you sometimes with a reminiscence that shall waken your sympathy, and make you say, Io anche have so thought, felt, smiled, suffered. Now, how is this to be done except by egotism? Linea recta brevissima. That right line "I" is the very shortest, simplest, straightforwardest means of communication between us, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... smiling and dwelling with gratification on this reminiscence. The cart had now reached the Arc de Triomphe, and strong currents of air swept from the avenues across the expanse of open ground. Florent sat up, and inhaled with zest the first odours of grass wafted from the fortifications. He turned ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... half hidden in trees, and adorned with weather- stained frescoes of the saints, and near it a chapel much damaged by the violence of the River Po, which flowed hard by; not far off, the priest ploughs his few barren roods with borrowed cattle. This is no reminiscence of the Roman elegists, but true modern sentiment; and the parallel to it—a sincere, unartificial description of country life in general—will be found at the end of this part of ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... Burn there is a quaint little personal reminiscence. An aged person at Earlstoun many years ago related, that there used to be a portrait of the minstrel in Thirlestane Castle, near Lauder, "representing him as a douce old man, leading a cow by a straw-rope." ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... tendencies were implanted during the "silent rages" of his childhood, and that the effect of mountain scenery, which continued so strong upon him after he left Scotland, producing the sentiments with which he has imbued his heroes in the wild circumstances in which he places them, was mere reminiscence and association. For although the sullen tone of his mind was not fully brought out until he wrote Childe Harold, it is yet evident from his Hours of Idleness that he was tuned to that key before he went abroad. The dark colouring ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... reminiscence. "In a foreign city I wouldn't mind so much," he said; "one could go to one's Consul and get the requisite help from him. Here in one's own land one is far more derelict if one gets into a fix. Unless I can find some decent ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki

... mondo tornassino i medesimi uomini, como tornano i medesimi casi, non passarebbono mai cento anni che noi non ci trovassimo un altra volta insieme, a fare le medesime cose che hora. He seems however to have been drawn into the remark by a reminiscence of what Augustine says in his De Civitate ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... The comedy by Sir John Vanbrugh. Lamb liked this quotation. He uses it in his letter about William Wordsworth, junior, to Dorothy Wordsworth, November 25, 1819; and again in his "Reminiscence of Sir Jeffery Dunstan" (see ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... having done so, and get great pleasure from the recollection. Now, I have a friend of my own who will forgo present enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience for the sake of manufacturing 'a reminiscence' for himself; but there was something singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker found in making reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or unselfish luxury can be imagined. After he had unmoored his little embarkation, and seen me safely shoved off into ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the tenth book of the Pharsalia, where he describes him, at the same time, making love to Cleopatra, sustaining a siege against the power of Egypt, and conversing with the sages of the country, is, in reality, the noblest panegyric. * Note: Lord Byron wrote, no doubt, from a reminiscence of that passage—"It is possible to be a very great man, and to be still very inferior to Julius Caesar, the most complete character, so Lord Bacon thought, of all antiquity. Nature seems incapable of such extraordinary combinations as composed his versatile capacity, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... arrival and recognition of the son of Ulysses by Menelaus and Helen who are in a mood of reminiscence, speaking of and in the Present with many a glance back into the Past. The Oriental journey to Cyprus, Phoenicia, and specially Egypt, plays into their conversation, making the whole a Domestic Tale of real life with an ideal background ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... at the end," admitted Jimmy, "but take it all together it was a real pleasure. That cook sure does know how to make good pies," and an expression of blissful reminiscence spread over ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman

... seen proceeded— Hath wrought in this new-found country! I wonder if he would remember Anything about the Land of the Immortals. Something he would surely find In the deeps of his consciousness To wake up a dim reminiscence. Dreamy shadows might haunt him, Shadows of beautiful faces, and of terrible; Large, lustrous eyes, full of celestial meanings, Looking up at him, beseeching him, From unfathomable abysses, With glances which were a language. The finalest secrets ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... excellence of every Irish gentleman of the day—passed rapidly from hand to hand, the conversation did not languish, and many a deep and hearty laugh followed the stories which every now and then were told, as some reminiscence of early days was recalled, or some trait of ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... of the level it has reached, to bring our independence with it. As far as the hope which the majority of Danes cherish is concerned (including the noble professors of philosophy), of a time when Nemesis (reminiscence of theology!), shall descend on Prussia, this hope is only an outcome of foolishness. And even a Nemesis upon Prussia will never hurt Germany, and thus ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... doubt you are right, and that my vision of the exit is really a reminiscence of the entrance. In fact, now that you prompt my memory, I recall quite distinctly that Douglas, who came in as the follower, went out as the leader, and that the last word was spoken by Wilde after ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... of years dim the ruddy glow of that hearth-fire, nor the charm of the poem. The simplicity of metre, the purity of wording, the gentle sadness of some of its expressions, make us read between the lines the deep and affectionate reminiscence ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... not say anything about the quarrel; she feared to reopen it. She talked mainly of old times in a gentle monotone of reminiscence, while he listened, looking up ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible "points of view" his neat literary ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... all traces of the frolic had been tidied up, and made nice for the mother's return, they took seats in a circle and Jasper regaled them with story and reminiscence, till they felt as if fairy land were ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney

... in a dead century when, viewing it through her tears, Mrs Stanhope labelled it tenderly—"My dear little Catherine's hair, cut off the morning I lost her, November 20th, 1795." Of little Elizabeth a more curious and harrowing reminiscence ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)

... as the symbol of remembrance? It is the true spice-tree of our Northern clime, the myrrh and frankincense of the land of lingering snow. When its perfume rises, the shrines of the past are unveiled, and the magical rites of reminiscence begin. ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... public will be soon enabled to judge of the value and authenticity of the Commentaries of the Caesar of the East. Major Stewart's work commences with the Book of Dreams and Omens—a wild, but characteristic, chronicle of Visions and Sortes Koranicae. Strange that a life of Timour should awaken a reminiscence of the diary of Archbishop Laud! The early dawn and the gradual expression of his not less splendid but more real visions of ambition are touched with the simplicity of truth and nature. But we long to escape from the petty feuds of the pastoral chieftain, to the triumphs and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... and Company, publishers of Modern Eloquence, Chicago, for the following extracts and addresses: "Our Country," by William McKinley; "Our Reunited Country," by Clark Howell; "The Blue and the Gray," by Henry Cabot Lodge; "A Reminiscence of Gettysburg," by John B. Gordon; "The New South," by Henry W. Grady; and "The Hollander as an ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various

... affection, in the character of its lover, in the character of the girl who is remembered—a good example of Browning's power to image in a few verses two human souls so clearly that they live in our world for ever. Meeting at Night—Parting at Morning is another reminiscence, mixed up with the natural scenery of the meeting and parting, a vivid recollection of a fleeting night of passion, and then the abandonment of its isolation for a wider, fuller life with humanity. I quote it for the fine impassioned way in which human feeling and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... acquaintance of another itinerant, a preacher, Eliakim Abbott, drawn after the fashion of that crude grotesque which is found in Hawthorne's early work, and is not without a reminiscence of Scott in the literary handling; and the two become fellows of the road, the one with a sermon, the other with a story, and their fortune with their audiences is related. The only adventure of note, however, is the appearance of ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry

... chapter I wrote of my first Tweed salmon, and in this chapter there is no reason why I should not fall back upon the dear old formula for a reminiscence of the Tay. The emphasis should be on "springer," for I went northwards with a desire to catch one that had taken the form of a longing, a yearning for many successive seasons. Besides, it was February, when the springer ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... will?" "Thank you. You've been adventurous, it seems." "Yes, Fortune favors the adventurous: See the old proverb verified to-day!" "Praise a good day when ended. Here's my father: Father, Miss Percival!" The senior bowed, And said, "I used to know—" And then, as if Checked by a reminiscence that might be Unwelcome, he was silent, and they went All to the boat. "Please let me take an oar," Said Linda. "Can you row?" asked Charles. "A little! My father taught me." Then old Lothian Looked at her with ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent

... all things, the "mistress of the wild beasts"[3] that inhabit the woods. A god Attis, or Papas, was regarded as her husband, but the first place in this divine household belonged to the woman, a reminiscence of the period ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... 'I don't see how you can use a gallon of red ink at your post in one year,' and I writes back, 'What we don't use we abuse,' and next year he writes to me, 'It's the abuse we complain of,' and, with regretful reminiscence, "I got no more red ink." The substitution of red tape for the carmine fluid that inebriates ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... still in his chair and bit his pen. From his expression, Mrs. Johnson might have inferred that he had been in the Cathedral again, smelling at the choky incense, and had got "funny feelin's" within. They were like the nauseating reminiscence of an old sickness. He tried to ignore them. He said to himself, "I'm an ass. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay



Words linked to "Reminiscence" :   reproductive memory, mind, recall, reproduction, recollection, remembering, regurgitation, reconstructive memory, memory



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com