"Personification" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... garlic cooked into a stew with a scrap of bullock that must have died of old age, when there was a tinkling of bronze pony bells and the stamp of hoofs without. The doors opened, and entered Chong Mong-ju, the personification of well-being, prosperity and power, shaking the snow from his priceless Mongolian furs. Place was made for him and his dozen retainers, and there was room for all without crowding, when his eyes chanced to light on the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... everybody that lives to remember her, whether bond or free, servant, acquaintance, relation, all say the same. Why, cousin, that mother has been all that has stood between me and utter unbelief for years. She was a direct embodiment and personification of the New Testament,—a living fact, to be accounted for, and to be accounted for in no other way than by its truth. O, mother! mother!" said St. Clare, clasping his hands, in a sort of transport; and then suddenly checking himself, he came back, and seating ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fearful tusks, and thick-set projecting whiskers, gave its visage a most truculent expression; and with its grotesquely fashioned ponderous carcass, provided with fin feet of strange formation, seemed to mark it as a personification of one of the fabulous conceptions ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... in the Provencal Courts of Love, was the allegorical personification of the husband; and Disdain suitably represents the lover's corresponding difficulty from the ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... handsome groom; and exclaimed in their hearts: How sad the father! How lofty, proud, exultant the mother! How like her to move heaven and earth to make this marriage! The attendants posed awkwardly, a personification of the uselessness of their situation, and they pitied the bride while they envied him for whose friendship they stood. The bridesmaids graced their position and gloried in it, and serenely smiled, and thought that to be launched in life in such dazzling manner ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... remember you very well; and from the trouble I used to take with you to make you distinguish between the work of the poet and that of the rhymester, I should have thought by this time you would have known a little more about the nature of poetry. Personification is a figure of speech in ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... interior,—and the piercing black eyes, the silver-white hair, and the strong, compressed lines of the mouth, as she worked, and struggled with the ghosts of her former life, made her look like no unapt personification of one of the Fates reviewing her flax before she commenced the spinning of some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... the twelve tasks, that the astronomical theory was applied to the mythus of the hero, and that he was regarded as a personification of the Sun, which passes through the twelve signs of the Zodiac. This, probably, took place during the Alexandrian period. Some resemblance between his attributes and those of the Deity, with whom the Egyptian priests were pleased to identify him, may have given occasion to this notion; ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... neighbor of how he had pleasantly reminded her of Timothy; just who Timothy was, and all about him. Mr. Watts was the personification of absorbed interest. Timothy sounded to him as if he might be a "human being," he declared, and quite ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... and esteemed his brown-eyed fair-haired fiancee, considered her the personification of feminine refinement and delicacy; and congratulated himself warmly on his great good fortune in winning her affection; but tender emotions found little scope for exercise in his intensely practical, busy life, which was ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... his Mark; J.Gueffier had the "Amateur Divin" as his sign, and an allegorical interpretation of the device, "Fert tacitus, vivit, vincit divinus amator," as a Mark; Guillaume Julian, or Julien, had "Amitie" as his sign, and a personification of this (Typus Amiciti) as his Mark, with the motto "Nil Deus hac nobis majus concessit in usus"; Abel L'Angelier (and his widow after his death) adopted the sacrifice of Abel as the subject of his Sign and Mark, with the motto "Sacrum pinque dabo nec macrum sacrificabo"; and the motto of both ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... whatever for HINDENBURG or anything which is his. He says that HINDENBURG and his crew have all along taken the line which any man could, but no gentleman would. In HINDENBURG he sees the personification of Prussian militarism, and for the Prussians and their militarism he has no use whatsoever. I forget what exactly is the Highland phrase for "no use whatsoever," but its meaning is even worse than its sound, and the sound of it alone is terrible to hear. Whatever befalls in the interval, it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... or used for a cradle, is apt to work evil for children. In some parts of England, it is believed that boys beaten with an elder stick will be retarded in their growth; in Sweden, women who are about to become mothers kiss the elder. In Germany, a somewhat similar personification of the juniper, "Frau Wachholder," exists. And here we come into touch with the dryads and forest-sprites of all ages, familiar to us in the myths of classic antiquity and the tales ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... which I have changed my mind is the nature of the great Aryan god whom the Romans called Jupiter and the Greeks Zeus. Whereas I formerly argued that he was primarily a personification of the sacred oak and only in the second place a personification of the thundering sky, I now invert the order of his divine functions and believe that he was a sky-god before he came to be associated with the oak. In fact, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... only title was plain "Mr." His ancestors were tradesmen, merchants, lawyers, politicians, and Presidents. He, too, was proud of his honored ancestry, and I have endeavored in this book to have him live up to an ideal personification of gentlemanly qualities for which the New England standard should be fully as high as that of Old England; in fact, I see no reason why the heroes of American novels, barring the single matter of hereditary titles, should not compare favorably as regards ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... sparkled like gems; while the dimples played and quivered on her cheeks, as you may sometimes watch the sunbeam on the pure surface of fair water. Her countenance, indeed, was wreathed with smiles. She seemed the happiest thing on earth; the very personification of a poetic spring; lively, and fresh, and innocent; sparkling, and sweet, and soft. When he beheld her, Ferdinand was reminded of some gay bird, or airy antelope; she looked ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... of foes with this new confidence becomes a question of importance to any one who wants to understand the real situation here. The answer is Hindenburg—not only the man himself, but all that he stands for, the personification of the German war spirit, the greatest moral asset of the empire today. He is idolized not only by the soldiers, but by the populace as well; not only by the Prussians, but by the Bavarians and even the Austrians. You cannot realize what a tremendous ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... that. All sane people think and talk according to certain abstract laws of grammar and logic; and they act in similar unconsciousness of the abstractions which impel them. Moreover, the Idea is usually clothed in a concrete Ideal, a personification, which brings it home to the simplest mind. This was long ago pointed out by the observant Machiavelli in his statement that every reform of a government or religion is in the popular mind personified as the effort of ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... vaguely but perpetually willing. It wears (let the violent personification be pardoned) a hanging lip, and a wrinkle in abeyance, and an eye in suspense. It is much at the service of the vagrant encounterer, and may be accosted by any chance daughters of the game. It stands in untoward places, or places that were once inappropriate, and is early at some indefinite appointment, ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... which lie at the foundation of all Mr. Darwin's reasoning; that he should confound an irrefragable deduction from the observed relations of organisms to the conditions which lie around them, with a metaphysical "forme substantielle," or a chimerical personification of the powers of Nature, would be incredible, were it not that other passages of his work leave no room ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... that it represented the Giants, Pope and Pagan, as described in the Pilgrim's Progress, while, close to Pope, was placed a delineation very like Don Quixote, purporting to be the superannuated Giant Chivalry, biting his nails at a dapper little personification of 'Civil and Religious Liberty.' A figure whose pointed head, lame foot, and stout walking-stick, shewed him to be intended for Sir Walter Scott, was throwing over him an embroidered surcoat, which a most striking and ludicrous likeness ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... suggested to him by the Quaker Ellwood; his losses by the Great Fire, 1666; first edition of "Paradise Lost" entirely sold by April, 1669; "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes" published, 1671; criticism on these poems; Samson partly a personification of Milton himself, partly of the English people; Milton's life in Bunhill Fields; his daughters live apart from him; Dryden adapts "Paradise Lost" as an opera; Milton's "History of Britain," 1670; second editions of his poems, 1673, and ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... by Bacon, in his account of Terror Panicus; and the etymological account which he gives of its meaning, is very superior to the ancient explanation preserved for us by Plutarch.[1] He connects the expression with Pan the personification of Nature;[2] and observes that fear is innate in every living thing, and, in fact, tends to its preservation, but that it is apt to come into play without due cause, and that man is especially exposed to it. The chief ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... to demonstrate by arguments drawn from etymology that Michabos, Messou, Missibizi or Manabozho, the Great Hare, is originally a personification of Dawn (Myths of the New World, p. 178). I have examined his arguments in the Nineteenth Century, January, 1886, which may be consulted, and in Melusine, January, 1887. The hare appears to be one out of the countless primeval beast-culture heroes. A curious piece of magic in a ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... the place of that religion of social benevolence, and of individual self-denial, in mockery of all religion, they institute impious, blasphemous, indecent theatric rites, in honour of their vitiated, perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their own corrupted and bloody republic;—when schools and seminaries are founded at the public expense to poison mankind, from generation to generation, with the horrible maxims of this impiety;—when wearied out with incessant ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... brigand hat, which gives his broad face, projecting cheek-bones, and blunt chin, a look of unmistakeable sullenness. Add to this a low, narrow forehead, generally covered with thick tufts of matted black hair, beneath which two savage eyes incessantly glare, and, reader, you have the repulsive personification of the man. Mr. M'Fadden has bought a preacher,—an article with the very best kind of a soul,—which he would send to his place in the country. Having just sent the article to the rail-road, he stands in a neighbouring ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... good-will to all men, like a personification of Christmas in May, I started out this morning to see my lawyers. I reached them at three o'clock, having idled at second-hand bookstalls and lunched on the road. I signed their unintelligible document, and wandered ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... studiously courteous questioner will show so much thought in the matter as to answer it himself, by declaring that had he looked at you he needn't have asked; meaning thereby to signify that you are an absolute personification of health: but such persons are only those who premeditate ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... Frazer has more especially developed this conception of the origin of sacred prostitution in his Adonis, Attis, Osiris. He thus summarizes his lengthy discussion: "We may conclude that a great Mother Goddess, the personification of all the reproductive energies of nature, was worshipped under different names, but with a substantial similarity of myth and ritual by many peoples of western Asia; that associated with her was a lover, or rather series of lovers, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... to all seeming she stood there the personification of the grief that is not to be comforted, oblivious to all surroundings. Incautiously he took another step. In an instant she had "landed" him over the head with a long narrow wooden box containing, one supposes, pencils and ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... Gulf, and was followed, at intervals, by several more similar beings, Berosus assures us, that he "taught the people all the things that make up civilization," so that "nothing new was invented after that any more." But if, as is suggested, "this monstrous Oannes" is really a personification of the strangers who came into the land, and, being possessed of a higher culture, began to teach the Turanian population, the first part of this statement is as manifestly an exaggeration as the second. A people who had invented writing, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... following line, translated from Juvenal by Dr. Johnson, is much superior to the original, owing to the easy personification of Worth and Poverty, and to the ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... call MERCY God's darling attribute. They clothe her in a white robe down to the feet; they fill her eyes with the milk of human kindness and her mouth with the tender words of forgiveness. But JUSTICE is a very different personification in their eye. He is not only masculine as to gender, but all his looks and ways have an air of condemnation in them. He is a dark-faced, frowning judge, forever watching with keenest eye not only the outward life of every man, but ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... all in supporting his father's cause, to pine in misery and want. He would give to a painted harlot a thousand pounds for a loathsome embrace, and to a player or buffoon a hundred for a trumpery pun, but would refuse a penny to the widow or orphan of an old Royalist soldier. He was the personification of selfishness; and as he loved and cared for no one, so did no one love or care for him. So little had he gained the respect or affection of those who surrounded him, that after his body had undergone an after-death examination, parts of it were thrown down the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the table promptly stood up, awaiting no second invitation to that look of Blenham's. Were one staging a morality play and in search of the personification of impertinence, he need look no farther than this cocksure youth. He was just at that age when one is determined that there shall be no mistake about his status in the matters of age and worldly experience; ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... TEMPERAMENT OF THE GUANACO. In appearance the guanaco is the personification of gentleness. Its placid countenance indicates no guile, nor means of offense. Its lustrous gazelle-like eyes, and its soft, woolly fleece suggest softness of disposition. But in reality no animal is more deceptive. In a wild state amongst its own kind, or in captivity,—no matter how considerately ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... there by Agni (this points to cremation which was frequent but not universal) or by Pushan. There the Pitris or fathers sit at the same tables with the gods, and are eternally happy. Brahmanaspati, lord of prayer, is a god of another type, a personification of the act of ritual, and his presence in the Vedas, beside the elemental deities, shows how ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... schools. The years of his best literary labour were much taken up in ways which were wasteful of his rare powers. He came by literary intuition to an idea of Scripture which others had built up from the point of view of a theory of knowledge and by investigation of the facts. He is the helpless personification of a view of the relation of science and religion which has absolutely passed away. Yet Arnold died only in 1888. How much a distinguished inheritance may mean is gathered from the fact that a grand-daughter of Thomas Arnold and niece of Matthew Arnold, Mrs. Humphry Ward, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... opposition, between romance and sobriety, that excites so strong a prejudice against the former: it is associated, in the minds of many, with folly alone. A romantic, silly girl, is the object of their contempt; and they so recoil from this personification of sentiment, that their chief object seems to be to divest themselves altogether of its delusion. Life is to them a mere calculation; expediency is their maxim; propriety their rule; profit, ease, or comfort their aim; and they have at least this advantage, ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... an evening party; it was quite impromptu, and no ulterior meaning was intended. "The Hunting of the Snark" was also regarded by some as an allegory, or, perhaps, a burlesque on a celebrated case, in which the Snark was used as a personification of popularity, but Lewis Carroll protested that the poem had ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... so-called Sprouse had made off with the priceless treasure and that only a miracle could bring about its recovery. O'Dowd's estimate of the man's cleverness was amply supported by what Barnes knew of him. He knew him to be the personification of craftiness, and of daring. It was not surprising that he had been tricked by this devil's own genius. He recalled his admiration, his wonder over the man's artfulness; he groaned as he thought of the pride he had felt in ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies." Grace Darling was, of necessity, after her act had made her famous, well known, and constantly watched. But there is only one report concerning her, and that is, that she was the personification of pure and simple goodness. It would not have been very wonderful if the tongues of malice and envy had found something hard to say of her, but we never hear of the shadow of a suspicion of any kind ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... of him, and, life becoming a burden, he went into the woods and slew himself. And the evil spirit of the night-air even Bumole, [Footnote: For an account of Bumole, or Pamola, see the chapter on Supernatural Beings. Bumole seems to have been the personification of the night-hawk.] or Pamola, from whom came the gift, swooped down from the clouds and bore him away to 'Lahmkekqu', the dwelling place of darkness, and he was no more heard ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... this unusual young man was not assumed. It was not a pose. He was not a dare-devil, nor was he a care-free, unstable youth who had matured abruptly in the exercise of power. On the contrary, he was,—and Captain Trigger knew it,—the personification of confidence, an optimist to whom victory and defeat are equally unavoidable and therefore to be reckoned as one in the vast scheme of human endeavour; a fighter who merely rests on his arms but never lays them down; a spirit that absorbs the bitters ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Latin. In p. 11. "Ratio naturalis" is personified, and governs the verb vidit, which is repeated several times. This is changed by the corrector into vidimus; but in the English passage, though varying much from the Latin, the personification is retained. In p. 58., "Dion Cassius" is corrected to "Xiphilinus;" but the mistake is preserved ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... she looked! He delighted to watch every movement of the deft fingers, to study every expression of the beautiful eyes and mobile mouth. He revelled in her beauty, because to him she was the personification of all that was lovely and noble and great. Her character he would have loved just as much had she been plain instead of beautiful, for his ideal was the inward, not the outward beauty, except as the two blended into one, as they did ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... Tempe. This legend expressed the attachment of the Laurel (Daphne) to the Sun, under whose heat the tree both fades and flourishes. It has been thought worth while to explain these allusions, because they illustrate the character of the Grecian Mythology, which arose in the Personification of natural phenomena, and was totally free from those debasing and ludicrous ideas with which, through Roman and later misunderstanding or perversion, it ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... was granted; and ever afterwards, when the crew was piped to stow away hammocks, Reuben James sauntered about the decks with his hands in his pockets, the very personification ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... esoteric doctrine of natural religion. But seeing in the same no practical or moral bearing, I confined it to the schools of philosophy. The admission of the Logos, as hypostasized (that is, neither a mere attribute, nor a personification) in no respect removed my doubts concerning the Incarnation and the Redemption by the cross; which I could neither reconcile in reason with the impassiveness of the Divine Being, nor in my moral feelings ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a desk, dictating a letter to a clerk who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe he proceeded to finish this task. He looked more than once at his visitor as he did so, in a preoccupied, impersonal way. To the other's notion, he seemed the personification of business—without an ounce of distracting superfluous flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame, without a trace of unnecessary politeness, or humour, or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine perfected and fined down to absolute essentials. He could understand a joke if it ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... man, this personification of evil? Ever there were his insidious wiles to compromise, cajole, trick and betray them. He could not tell. He only knew that he loathed him and that he would drive ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... it tragedy or comedy? Why, poets, actors, theatres, all fell to dust at our touch. Have we succeeded in reviving them? Would you compare our little miserable mysteries and moralities, all frigid personification, and dog Latin, with the glories of a Greek play (on the decoration of which a hundred thousand crowns had been spent) performed inside a marble miracle, the audience a seated city, and the poet ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... homely wares common to the country, with Aunt Betsy's onions served in a bowl, there was here the finest of damask, the choicest of china, the costliest of cut-glass, and the heaviest of silver, with the well-trained waiter gliding in and out, himself the very personification of strict table etiquette, such as the Barlows had never dreamed about. There was no fricasseed chicken here, or flaky crust, with pickled beans and apple sauce; no custard pie with strawberries and rich, sweet cream, poured from a blue earthen ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... university and especially undergraduate life. The comedy of Wily Beguiled has also a strong university touch, the scholar being made triumphant in it; and Lingua, sometimes attributed to Anthony Brewer, is a return, though a lively one, to the system of personification and allegory. The Dumb Knight, of or partly by Lewis Machin, belongs to the half-romantic, half-farcical class; but in The Merry Devil of Edmonton, the authorship of which is quite unknown, though Shakespere, Drayton, and other great names have been put ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... imagine, that he favourite doctrines were likely to gain any thing in point of effect or authority by being put into the mouth of a person accustomed to higgle about tape, or brass sleeve-buttons? Or is it not plain that, independent of the ridicule and disgust which such a personification must give to many of his readers, its adoption exposes his work throughout to the charge of revolting incongruity, and utter disregard of probability or nature? For, after he has thus wilfully debased his moral teacher by a low occupation, is ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... written about him—more will follow in the years to come. He is the personification of the old ante bellum Democratic party of the Northern States—a party that believed in the aggrandizement of the country, at home and abroad; which placed the rights of an American citizen before the gains of commerce; which fostered that commerce until it ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... the King of Hanover has also to yield, and the King of Bavaria abdicates. These, however, are comparatively small matters. But still the flame spreads. There is a successful insurrection at Vienna, the very stronghold of despotism in central Europe; and the Prime Minister, Metternich, the grim personification of the old policy, is compelled to resign. Then follows an equally successful insurrection at Berlin; Milan, Vicenza, and Padua are also in open insurrection. Venice is proclaimed a Republic. Holstein ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... disposition of will and heart, and almost identical with what the Old Testament elsewhere calls righteousness. But it is invested, as the writer proceeds, with more and more august and queenly attributes, and at last stands forth as being, if not a divine person, at least a personification of a divine attribute. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... weight of traditional odium, would visit these cities, would figure in the procession of riches, would have opened to her doors which she had always found closed, and she would pass through them leaning on the arm of a man who had ever seemed to her the personification of all ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... his long hair and blew it about his face till he became an equestrian personification of the frenzied muse. I had become acquainted with his trick of setting words to the music of quaint rhymes; but ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... either, that of Childe Harold, for this hero of his first poem is, in the first and second canto, the personification of youthful exquisites, with senses dulled and satiated by excesses to which Lord Byron had never yielded when he composed this type, since he was then only twenty-one years of age, and had hardly quitted the university, where ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... torn leg, arm, and breast literally to ribbons. So weak was he from continued exertion and loss of blood that but for the supporting wall I doubt that he even could have stood erect. But with the tenacity and indomitable courage of his kind he still faced his cruel and relentless foes—the personification of that ancient proverb of his tribe: "Leave to a Thark his head and one hand and he ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... domesticated wolves. But they had been domesticated for generations. Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild was the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing and ever warring. But to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild. He symbolised it, was its personification: so that when they showed their teeth to him they were defending themselves against the powers of destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the dark beyond ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... Their tails rose and stiffened, they raised their lips over their long white fangs, the napes of their necks bristled, and they showed each other the vicious whites of their eyes, while they drew in their breaths with prolonged and rasping snarls. Each dog seemed to be the personification of fury and unsatisfied hate. They began to circle about each other with infinite slowness, walking stiffed-legged and upon the very points of their feet. Then they wheeled about and began to circle in the opposite direction. Twice they repeated this motion, their ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the rending of their fantastic garments. It is the personification of legalized rowdyism; and if young men would but confine themselves to such rowdyism as may be looked at and laughed at by their mothers and sisters, they would find life just as amusing and a thousand times more pure ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... inscription on the pedestal, were sculptured various bas-reliefs; and the spectator, whose admiration for the Governor-general was not satiated with the colossal statue itself, was at liberty to find a fresh, personification of the hero, either in a torch-bearing angel or a gentle shepherd. The work, which had considerable esthetic merit, was executed by an artist named Jacob Jongeling. It remained to astonish and disgust ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... whose extensive property, thickly studded with freeholders, was a strong reason for her being paid every attention in Lord Callonby's power to bestow; Miss Betty O'Dowd—for so she was generally styled—was the very personification of an old maid; stiff as a ramrod, and so rigid in observance of the proprieties of female conduct, that in the estimation of the Clare gentry, Diana was a ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... thief grew wanton in his mischiefs, and his shrunk, hollow eyes smiled on his ruins." There is fancy in these of a lower order from "Bonduca": "Then did I see these valiant men of Britain, like boding owls creep into tods of ivy, and hoot their fears to one another nightly." Not that it is a personification, only it just caught my eye in a little extract-book I keep, which is full of quotations from B. and F. in particular, in which authors I can't help thinking there is a greater richness of poetical fancy than in any one, Shakspeare excepted. Are ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... was published in 1833, during an eventful period in its author's life. The character of Lelia was drawn from George Sand herself as a personification of human nature at war with itself. The original of Stenio was Alfred de Musset, whose intimate friendship with ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... king was enduring their tortures in one apartment, the queen was suffering indignities and outrages equally atrocious in another. Maria Antoinette was, in the eyes of the populace, the personification of every thing to be hated. They believed her to be infamous as a wife; proud, tyrannical, and treacherous; that, as an Austrian, she hated France; that she was doing all in her power to induce ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... the gift of formal speech-making, as Grant was, he could talk well, in clear sentences, whose mold was set by precise thought, which brought with it the eloquence that gains its point. It was more than personality, in this instance, that had appeal. He was the personification of a great ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... of the monarchy, and of Nineveh its capital, as well as of Babylon, is referred to the legendary heroes, Ninus and his queen Semiramis. The name of Ninus is not recorded on the monuments, and is, perhaps, a kind of mythical personification of Assyrian conquests and grandeur; and the name of Semiramis does not appear until the ninth century B.C. She may have been a princess or even queen. Assyrian independence began before 2300 B.C. Between 1500 and 1400 B.C., ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... always did. We have only to turn to the page, and find them where we left them!—Many of the most exquisite pieces in the Tatler, it is to be observed, are Addison's, as the Court of Honour, and the Personification of Musical Instruments, with almost all those papers that form regular sets or series. I do not know whether the picture of the family of an old college acquaintance, in the Tatler, where the children run to let Mr. Bickerstaff in at the door, and where the one that loses the race ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... was evidently an audience-chamber or court-room, and that it was now entirely empty. As the guard approached the door, Seaton waved them back. All retreated across the hall except the officer in charge, who refused to move. Seaton, the personification of offended dignity, first stared at the offender, who returned the stare, and stepped up to him insolently, then pushed him back roughly, forgetting that his strength, great upon Earth, would be gigantic upon this smaller world. The officer spun across the corridor, knocking down three ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... stood rigid with his hands on his thighs, leaning over the box, his hair bristling, his white face running with sweat, his jaw dropped; the very personification of horror. And of a sudden he began ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... approach of the mighty chief. Captain Perry went forward to greet the sheik as he came over the side of the ship, but he was brushed aside by the advance guards. Half a hundred swarthy fellows crowded aboard and then came the sheik, the personification of pomp ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... stopped right in the middle of a column, which, as we heard, was a conglomeration of the tag ends of different regiments and I was almost afraid—the men peered in at us so maliciously. I have never seen such a frightening spectacle of humanity, for it was the personification of a rogues' gallery with every kind of cut-throat, brigand and robber mixed up into a grand ensemble, toiling and perspiring, limping and crawling along in the dust ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... stronger his passion grew for hiaqua, and, when a spirit told him in a dream of vast hoards at the summit of Rainier, he determined to climb the mountain. The spirit was Tamanoues, which, Winthrop explains, is the vague Indian personification of the supernatural. ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... forward, ponderously willing to please, and placed his hand on the board. And for ten solid, stolid minutes he stood there, motionless, like a statue, the frozen personification of the commercial age. Uncle Robert's face began to work. He blinked, stiffened his mouth, uttered suppressed, throaty sounds, deep down; finally he snorted, lost his self-control, and broke out in a roar of laughter. All ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... opposition inferred from the laughing and cheering of the Bishop's enemies, and from the silence of his friends, that there would be no difficulty in driving from Court, with contumely, the prelate whom of all prelates they most detested, as the personification of the latitudinarian spirit, a Jack Presbyter in lawn sleeves. They, therefore, after the lapse of a few hours, moved quite unexpectedly an address requesting the King to remove the Bishop of Salisbury from the place of preceptor to the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... break the law when I see a West End or any other dandy on a theatrical stage libelling the sailor by his silly personification: hitching his breeches, slapping his thigh, lurching his body, and stalking about in a generally ludicrous fashion, at the same time using phrases which the real sailor would disdain to use: such as "my hearty," "shiver-my-timbers," and other stupid ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... the child of her youth as Donald was the child of her maturity. Deep down in her wonderfully varied nature there were certain bottomless springs of courage, daring and enterprise which she herself had little chance of expressing and of which Hugh alone was the personification. ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... translation of Beltramo Bergamasco, i.e. a native of the town and province of Bergamo, in the north of Italy. Compare "Comasco." Harlequin ... was a Bergamasc, and the personification of the manners, accent, and jargon of the inhabitants of the Val ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... du XIIIe Siecle en France," and use it for a guide-book. Here you need only note how symbolic and how simple the sculpture is, on the portals and porches. Even what seems a grotesque or an abstract idea is no more than the simplest child's personification. On the walls you may have noticed the Ane qui vielle,—the ass playing the lyre; and on all the old churches you can see "bestiaries," as they were called, of fabulous animals, symbolic or not; but the symbolism is as simple as the realism of the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... but alight in flocks, and a whole flock of misfortunes it was to the Liberator when Joshua Coffin, "that huge personification of good humor," was appointed canvassing agent for the paper. He was as wanting in business methods as his employers were. Confusion now gathered upon confusion around the devoted heads of the partners, was accelerated and became daily more and more ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... contribution of John Brown to American history does not consist in the things which he did but rather in that which he has been made to represent. He has been accepted as the personification of the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... his work we might say that his characters are to those of Galdos, for instance, as counterpoint music to the complex modern symphony. Joaquin Monegro, the true hero of his Abel Sanchez (1917), is the personification of hatred. Raquel in Dos Madres[1] and Catalina in El Marques de Lumbria[1] are two widely different but vigorous, almost barbarous, "maternities." Alejandro, the hero of his powerful Nada Menos que Todo un Hombre,[3] is masculine will, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... said both little boys in a breath, then doubled up in noisy mirth. Laura was constantly doing something to set their young blood in amazement: they looked upon her as the personification of all that was startling and unexpected. But Pin, returning with the reel of thread, opened her eyes in ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... of a sudden chill. The bare room, with its stone-flagged floor, its plain deal furniture, depressed me no less than the cold, forbidding appearance of the woman who stood now motionless before me. She was paler than any woman whom I had ever seen in my life. A living person, she seemed the personification of lifelessness. Her black hair was streaked with grey; her dress, which suggested a uniform in its severity, knew no adornment save the plain ivory cross which hung from an almost invisible chain about her neck. Her ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Mahabharata, Arjuna is taught the occult philosophy by Krishna (personification of the universal Divine Principle); and the less mythological view of Orpheus presents him to us as "a divine bard or priest in the service of Zagreus .... founder of the Mysteries .... the inventor of everything, in fact, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... detested, had massacred the poor Madrilenes who remained faithful to their old rulers, then public opinion turned against the former hero of Marengo and Austerlitz and a hundred other revolutionary battles. Then and only then, when Napoleon was no longer the hero of the revolution but the personification of all the bad traits of the Old Regime, was it possible for England to give direction to the fast-spreading sentiment of hatred which was turning all honest men into enemies of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... landscape painting, as contained in one—viz., breadth. The tones of colour with which Rembrandt clothed his subjects are always in the highest degree appropriate and conducive to the sentiment, whether within the "solemn temples," or the personification of some great supernatural event. As most of his historical subjects are from Sacred Writ, he never loses sight of those qualities which take them out of the page of every-day occurrences. I shall mention two, though one is sufficient for a ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... preaching on the subject of faith, once took a railroad journey for an illustration. As he pointed out, with much eloquence and force, there could be no more realistic personification of faith than the man who peacefully lay down to sleep at night in his berth of a Pullman car, relying implicitly upon the railroad men to avert the thousands of dangers which had to be encountered during the still ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... saw her again; surgical bandages were gone, medical attention and a week's food and rest had done something for her, but still she was the personification of misery. ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... the personification, slightly modified, of a single type, a single idea—the individual; free, but nothing more than free; such as the epoch now closing has made him; Faust, but without the compact which submits him to the enemy; ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... predominate, the whole is so much of one colour, that the result resembles one of those allegorical personifications in which, as much as possible, everything human is eliminated except what belongs to the peculiarity, the personification. How different is it with Shakspere's representations! He knows that no human being ever was like that. He makes his most peculiar characters speak very much like other people; and it is only over the whole that their peculiarities ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... at full length, the personification of grandeur and power. A tremendous force trembled in his very finger tips. He was like a gigantic dynamo, charged with the might of ten thousand magnetic storms that shake the earth in its orbit and lash myriads of ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... Insulae). The Greek and Roman forms are doubtless attempts to reproduce a Celtic original, the exact form of which is still matter of dispute. Brittany (Fr. Bretagne) in western France derived its name from Britain owing to migrations in the 5th and 6th century A.D. The personification of Britannia as a female figure may be traced back as far as the coins of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (early 2nd century A.D.); its first appearance on modern coins is on the copper ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... and stood the personification of haughty displeasure as the poor man, who dared his anger, walked composedly up the path. He now stood by the ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... God; and also because his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence have a corresponding limitation.[498] (2) The assumption of divine emanations and of a differentiated divine pleroma represents the Deity as a composite, i.e.,[499] finite being; and, moreover, the personification of the divine qualities is a mythological freak, the folly of which is evident as soon as one also makes the attempt to personify the affections and qualities of man in a similar way.[500] (3) The attempt to make out conditions existing within ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... (Milton's "Ophiuchus huge") translated to the skies with Bacchus and Ariadne. Notice too another piece of poetry: the marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne took place in the spring, Ariadne herself being the personification of its return, and Bacchus of its gladness; hence the flowers in the ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... the personification of prosperity and good fortune. Modelled after the Greek Demeter, she is practically identical with Copia, Annona and similar goddesses. On the coins of the later Roman emperors she is frequently represented holding a cornucopia, from ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... inside the sarcophagus shows that they are conceived mystically; Mary as the Church, and St. John as the personification of Christian Philosophy—a significance frequently attached to these figures. Such a picture was designed to hang over the altar, at which the mystical sacrifice of the Mass ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... it from me to blame you, my dear sir. Or there's the alternative of taking him to stand for your sole great festival holiday, and worshipping him as the personification of your ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... guide in looking around on nature, we discover only a universe of brute matter, phenomena linked together in uniform succession of antecedents and consequents. Mind becomes only a higher form of matter. Sin loses its poignancy. Immortality disappears. God exists not, except as a personification of the Cosmos. Materialism, atheism, fatalism, are the ultimate results which are proved by logic and history(99) to follow from this extreme view. The idea of spirit cannot be reached by it. For if some other form of experience than the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... in His opinion, who had afflicted this woman; it was Satan, the personification of all evil. But in order that such references should not be misunderstood He had said of Satan, only a short time before, "I beheld Satan as lightning ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... transmitted from father to son, while the mothers and daughters, all unconscious of the great wrong they suffer by it, have never denied it. It is not only false, but it is absurd. How could it be true? A man is not lovable as a woman is. How can she love him as he loves her, who is the personification and incarnation of beauty and gentleness and sweetness? That is, some are, for it must be conceded that woman is like Jeremiah's figs, the good are very, very good, while the bad are very naughty—too ...
— The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism: An Address Delivered Before the Indiana Methodist Historical Society • Thomas Aiken Goodwin
... for four days, that nearly drove him mad. It was always put by that horrid young lynx-eyed new commissioner, who sat there with his hair brushed high from off his forehead, peering out of his capacious, excellently-washed shirt-collars, a personification ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... the mainland. It was almost certainly sacred to Forsete, the son of Balder the Sun-god—if he be identified, as Grimm and all Frisian writers identify him, with Fosite the Frisian god. Forsete, a personification to men of the great white god, who dwelt in a shining hall of gold and silver, was among all gods and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... tableau represents the Spirit or personification of Chivalry, surrounded by men of various pursuits, religious, military, and civil, who represent, as by an upper court or house, the final acquisition of her honors and rewards. Beneath, as not having obtained, though within reach of, ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... usual state of comparative nudity. Beholding this personification of poverty in the middle of this luxurious dining-room, the cost of one panel of which would have been a fortune to the bare-legged, bare-breasted, and bare-headed child, it was impossible not to be ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... falsehood lurked within the liquid depths of those clear, calm, steadfast eyes, or was hidden behind that smooth and placid brow, then I thought must the very angels be false! If falsehood could shroud itself behind a mask of such surpassing loveliness, such an aspect and personification of all that is pure, and innocent, and faithful, and true, "where," I asked myself, "oh! where is truth to be found?" That my mother had, all unwittingly, and in some inexplicable manner aroused my father's suspicions, I could not doubt; but, after all, the matter ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... more plainly, as insisted upon on an earlier page, that there is not one natural selection and one survival of the fittest, but two, inasmuch as there are two classes of variations from which nature (supposing no exception taken to her personification) can select. The bottles have the same labels, and they are of the same colour, but the one holds brandy, and the other toast and water. Nature can, by a figure of speech, be said to select from variations that are mainly functional or from variations that are mainly ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... he pounces from the highest sky on fish swimming on the surface of the water and carries them up, the eagle, classed in Leviticus and Deuteronomy with the unclean beasts, is transformed, as being a bird of prey, into a personification of the Devil snatching away souls to gnaw ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... "plague on you," "mischief take you" and the like. The use of the word as an euphemism for "the devil" is later. According to the New English Dictionary the most probable derivation is from a Low German das daus, i.e. the "deuce" in dice, the lowest and therefore the most unlucky throw. The personification, with a consequent change of gender, to der daus, came later. The word has also been identified with the name of a giant or goblin ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... own pure divinity, the central flame which, however obscured, has animated him through all these struggles. And having found this sublime home he is sure as the heavens themselves. He remains still, filled with all knowledge and power. The outer man, the adoring, the acting, the living personification, goes its own way hand in hand with Nature, and shows all the superb strength of the savage growth of the earth, lit by that instinct which contains knowledge. For in the inmost sanctuary, in the actual temple, the man has found the subtile essence of ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... This is composed of many stories, the precursors of the novel and "short story" of the present age. We are indebted to this cycle for several well-known works of fiction, such as the tale of patient Griseldis, the gentle and meek-spirited heroine who has become the personification of long-suffering and charity. After the mediaeval writers had made much use of this tale, it was taken up in turn by Boccaccio and Chaucer, who have made ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... and the finer moments of that great story, he gave with the simplicity that was their best setting. It seems to me such an apology (in the old sense) as New England might have written for herself, and in fact Doctor Palfrey was a personification of New England in one of the best and truest kinds. He was refined in the essential gentleness of his heart without being refined away; he kept the faith of her Puritan tradition though he no longer kept the Puritan faith, and his defence ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... [Fr.], way of speaking, colloquialism. phrase &c 566; figure, trope, metaphor, enallage^, catachresis^; metonymy [Gramm.], synecdoche [Sem.]; autonomasia^, irony, figurativeness &c adj.; image, imagery; metalepsis^, type, anagoge^, simile, personification, prosopopoeia^, allegory, apologue^, parable, fable; allusion, adumbration; application. exaggeration, hyperbole &c 549. association, association of ideas (analogy) 514.1 V. employ a metaphor &c n.; personify, allegorize, adumbrate, shadow forth, apply, allude to. Adj. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... melting at times into symbol and figure—but far too living and real, addressed with too intense and natural feeling, to be the mere personification of anything. The lady of the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The student's dream has been broken, as the boy's had been; and the earnestness of the man, enlightened by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Reverend Septimus Porkington, as it turned out, a friend of his family; and he showed that it was the Reverend Septimus himself who had sat to a photographer in Baker Street for the portrait which Charles too hastily identified as that of Colonel Clay in his personification of Mr. Richard Brabazon. He further elicited the fact that the portrait of the Count von Lebenstein was really taken from Dr. Julius Keppel, a Tyrolese music-master, residing at Balham, whom he put into the ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... Victor, the man who is taking an oath to Iuppiter as the deus Fidius. As a still later development the cult-title will, as it were, break off and set up for itself, usually in the form of an abstract personification: Iuppiter, in the two special capacities just noted, gives ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey |
