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More "Fanciful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it was not particularly fanciful or costly;—no detriment to its beauty. But as to the beauty of these costumes depending on the beauty of the women who wear them, and their unsuitableness to the needs of women who are without beauty,—It is undeniably ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Cadillac seems to have so termed Villebon's fort because the Micmacs of eastern New Brunswick and Nova Scotia often made it a rendezvous; perhaps also it was a fanciful distinction by way of comparison with the Maliseet ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... in New England; but its internal economy was somewhat nautical, containing numerous "lockers" and "store-rooms." Its front gate-posts were composed of the two jaw-bones of an enormous whale; the fence was of a most fanciful Chinese pattern; and directly in front of the house was erected that never-failing ornament of a sailor's dwelling, a tall flag-staff, with cap, cross-trees, and topmast, complete; the last, always being kept "housed," except upon the 4th of July, 22d of February, &c. At the foot of the ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... and threw it on the floor. I picked it up, and may communicate it to you, for it contains no secrets." All the generals stretched out their hands. Constant handed the paper to Marshal Marmont. The sheet contained nothing but large capital letters, joined with fanciful flourishes. [Footnote: Constant, "Memoires," vol. v., p. 269.] The generals gazed at each other with bewildered eyes. Those capital letters, this work of a child, was the day's labor which the energetic emperor had performed! The letters, ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... prefixed to their edition of the Sturlunga Saga, Oxford). The case for Norway and Greenland is argued by Dr. Finnur Jonsson (Den oldnorsk og oldislandske Literaturs-Historie, Copenhagen). The cases for both British and Norwegian origin are based chiefly on rather fanciful arguments from supposed local colour. The theory of the Corpus Poeticum editors that many of the poems were composed in the Scottish isles is discredited by the absence of Gaelic words or traces of Gaelic legend. Professor Bugge's North of England theory is slightly ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... and more heroic proportions, but also loses in distinctness of outline and feature. This is indeed the common lot of popular heroes; but the Lincoln legend will be more than ordinarily apt to become fanciful, as his individuality, assembling seemingly incongruous qualities and forces in a character at the same time grand and most lovable, was so unique, and his career so abounding in startling contrasts. As the state of society in which Abraham Lincoln grew up passes away, the world will read with ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... Sir Thomas himself, poor blinkered creature, was full of the most aristocratical and wealthy fancies, and only yearned to inspect the acres of his future honourable grand-children. He was, from these fanciful causes, unusually affable and indulgent to Maria; spoke so kindly always that she was all but dissolving thrice a-day; and, from his constant reveries about the countess, appeared perpetually to be brooding over dear ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... mare under an arch of scarlet leaves which curved over her head. Turning at their approach, she started at a brisk canter up the road, and as Virginia followed her, the sound of the horn floated, now loud, now faint, out of the pale mist that spun fanciful silken webs over ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... condition to your cousin and your grandfather. Your lucid period in the woods just before you reached the deserted house and went to sleep showed that your exercise was overcoming the effect of the drug. That moment, you'll remember, was coloured by the fanciful ideas such a ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... Gloucestershire? His additions to Sir Robert Atkyns make it the most sensible history of a county that we have had yet; for his descriptions of the scite, soil, products, and prospects of each parish are extremely good and picturesque; and he treats fanciful prejudices, and Saxon etymologies, when unfounded, and traditions, with ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... manuscript of 'Peter Wilkins,' by the author, 'Robert Pultock of Clement's Inn' to Dodsley, was discovered. From this document it appears that Mr. Pultock received twenty pounds, twelve copies of the work, and 'the cuts of the first impression,' that is, a set of proof impressions of the fanciful engravings that professed to illustrate the first edition, as the price of the entire copyright. This curious document was sold to John Wilks, Esq., M.P. on the 17th ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... A fanciful man once called himself the Emperor of the Sahara: the German Kaiser has stolen into a fair land and holds with weakening hands a land of craters and weed, and wire and wild cabbages and old ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... later portions, rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with rusticated work at the corners, and, on the blank spaces between the windows, quaint allegorical frescoes, faded, half washed-out. And then there were entirely modern-looking portions, of gleaming marble, with numberless fanciful carvings, spires, pinnacles, reliefs—wonderfully light, gay, habitable, and (Peter thought) beautiful, in the clear Italian atmosphere, against the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... when the winds came booming over the lake. As if too eager to permit anything within their fangs to escape, they brought with them a wild, dull light, which filled while it clouded the atmosphere, and which, it was scarcely fanciful to imagine, had been hurried down, in their vortex, from those chill glaciers, where they had so long been condensing their forces for the present descent. The waves were not increased, but depressed by the pressure of this atmospheric column, though it took up hogshead, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... narrating the foundation of each separate colony, render any substantial novelty of plan in a history of the United States impossible, except upon some scheme where fitness should be sacrificed to fanciful strangeness. Mr. Hildreth has judiciously refrained from attempting any thing of the kind: but perhaps he has pushed the mere chronological arrangement to an excess, and given undue prominence to the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... gave to those figures. Of these there are some drawings in our book, done in red chalk by his hand, with some very beautiful borders of little boys, and other borders drawn in that work by way of ornament, with various fanciful scenes of sacrifices in the ancient manner. And in truth, if Antonio had not brought his works to that perfection which is seen in them, his drawings (although they show excellence of manner, and the charm and practised ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... Nilakantha as 'I stand near these distressed brothers of mine' (for whose sake only I am for accepting sovereignty). This is certainly very fanciful. The plain meaning is, 'I am about to lay down ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... question of literary immortality, it is easy to recognise that the literary reputation of Robert Louis Stevenson is made of good stuff. His fame has spread, as lasting fame is wont to do, from the few to the many. Fifteen years ago his essays and fanciful books of travel were treasured by a small and discerning company of admirers; long before he chanced to fell the British public with Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde he had shown himself ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... Hymnorum (in the Franciscan Monastery, Dublin) contains a number of hymns associated with the names of Irish saints. The ornamentation consists of colored initials, designed with a striking use of fanciful animal figures interlaced and twined with delightful freedom around the main ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... called "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," was a woman of rare gifts. The chief poem known to be hers is called Our Saviour's Passion. It is full of the faults of the age. Sir Philip's sport with words is so graceful and ordered as to subserve the utterance of the thought: his sister's fanciful convolutions appear to be there for their own sake—certainly are there to the obscuration of the sense. The difficulty of the poem arises in part, I believe, from corruption, but chiefly from a certain fantastic way of dealing with thought as well as word of which I ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... death-watch, our snails, and many other insects, have all been the subjects of man's fears, but the dread excited in England by the appearance, noises, or increase of insects, are petty apprehensions compared with the horror that the presence of this Acherontia occasions to some of the more fanciful and superstitious natives of northern Europe, maintainers of the wildest conceptions. A letter is now before me from a correspondent in German Poland, where this insect is a common creature, and so abounded in 1824 that my informant collected fifty of them ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... your contemporaries had cultivated the subject of animal magnetism. It had occurred to me as just conceivable that you might be in a trance, and that the secret of your bodily integrity after so long a time was not the craft of an embalmer, but life. So extremely fanciful did this idea seem, even to me, that I did not risk the ridicule of my fellow physicians by mentioning it, but gave some other reason for postponing their experiments. No sooner, however, had they left me, than I set on foot a systematic attempt at resuscitation, of which ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... a trifle fanciful. But romance gathers round an old story like lichen on an old branch. And the story of Martin Pippin in the Apple-Orchard is so old now—some say a year old, some say even two. How can the ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... difficulty encountered by the politicians of that day seems to have been purely fanciful. Strictly speaking, the government did not have a policy. It went into operation with the impression that it would be persistently resisted, that its success was doubtful, and that any considerable popular disaffection ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... Socrates, that he must be a good orator because he had learnt of Aspasia, is not coarse, as Schleiermacher supposes, but is rather to be regarded as fanciful. Nor can we say that the offer of Socrates to dance naked out of love for Menexenus, is any more un-Platonic than the threat of physical force which Phaedrus uses towards Socrates. Nor is there any real vulgarity in the fear which Socrates expresses that he will get a beating from his mistress, ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... "and, behold it was a dream." But it was not one of those fanciful dreams, that come and go, and mean nothing. It was a dream from God, a great reality, as he was ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... her head toward the strange lady. "There is little to tell," said Bero, in a quiet tone. "Her brother is well known in Rome as an artist. He lives there with his sister and an old duenna. She wears this mysterious veil constantly, and some fanciful people see just as mysterious a cloud resting about her life. I only know she is strange and beautiful, and that her ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... Learned men have found it exceedingly difficult to give anything like an intelligible account of the Trinity of the Athenian philosopher, [457:1] and it seems to have had only a metaphysical existence. It certainly had nothing more than a fanciful and verbal resemblance to the Trinity of Christianity. Had the doctrine of the Church been derived from the writings of the Grecian sage, it would not have been inculcated with so much zeal and unanimity by the early fathers. Some of them were bitterly opposed to Platonism, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Convent, except upon circumstances as urgent as that which has conducted me to your door, I should be frequently summoned upon insignificant occasions: That time would be engrossed by the Curious, the Unoccupied, and the fanciful, which I now pass at the Bedside of the Sick, in comforting the expiring Penitent, and clearing the passage to Eternity ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the recent storms of tribulation which have beat upon those fairy islands of fashion may scatter this frail and fanciful population, and send them by shiploads on missions of civilization to our shores; in which case, the bustle and animation and the brilliant display on the old turnpike, spoken of familiarly as the "broad road," will ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was planted at Baltimore the first American congregation of that organization of disciples of Emanuel Swedenborg which had been begun in London nine years before and called by the appropriately fanciful name of "the Church of the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... if any, of heraldic blazonry. Though repudiated and unrecognised by the strict herald, they are now generally considered to be the particular property and distinguishing ensign of certain surnames and families, and as hereditary as the quaint and fanciful charges and quarterings ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... real Atman and the real external objects. This (error) may be compared with one diseased[FN363] in the eye, who imagines that he sees various things (floating in the air) on account of his illness; or with a dreamer[FN364] whose fanciful thoughts assume various forms of external objects, and present themselves before him. While in the dream he fancies that there exist external objects in reality, but on awakening he finds that they are nothing other than the transformation of ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... extravagantly, jealously. But she would have none of the plain or biblical names her husband suggested. She laughed at them with her bright humor and made merry amusement over them, calling the child by endearing and fanciful appellations. To-day she was one kind of a flower, to-morrow another, and Rosebud a great deal of ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... difficulty. Plato was no doubt satirising the misuse of the new philosophy which was becoming so popular with young men. When nothing means anything, laughter is the only human language left. The Cratylus is a similarly conceived diversion. Most of it is occupied with fanciful derivations and linguistic discussions of all kinds. It is difficult to say how far Plato is serious. Perhaps the feats of Euthydemus in stripping words of all meaning urged him to some constructive work—for Plato's system is essentially ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... circles round it—-without ever being observed to alight on the water. and continues its flight, apparently untired, in tempestuous as well as in moderate weather. It has even been said to sleep on the wing, and Moore alludes to this fanciful "cloud-rocked slumbering'' in his Fire Worshippers. It feeds on small fish and on the animal refuse that floats on the sea, eating to such excess at times that it is unable to fiy and rests helplessly on the water. The colour of the bird is white, the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... marred the sanded paths where pebbles and seashells lay in fanciful designs. Every window shutter was tightly closed as though air and sunshine were poison, and the massive front doors were never opened except on the occasion of a wedding, ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... A jutting cape, which, when the Northmen spied, A fanciful resemblance they descried To human features; so they gave a name To mark that cape, and ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... confess, in that first tumult of my thoughts, there appeared a disorderly kind of beauty in some of them; which gave me hope, something worthy of my Lord of ORRERY might be drawn from them: but I was then, in that eagerness of Imagination, which, by over pleasing Fanciful Men, flatters them into the danger of writing; so that, when I had moulded it to that shape it now bears, I looked with such disgust upon it, that the censures of our severest critics are charitable to what I thought, and ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... the moon and saw in it a face, a woman's face. She began to scorn the country in the fanciful intoxication of the drug. That face swung in the sky; then it sang, it sang with a well-known ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... twenty, had entered their dining-room together and seen me standing leaning against the mantel-shelf. They were both hard-headed Scotchmen engaged in business in Edinburgh, and certainly not the sort of people to conjure up fanciful imaginings, nor is it likely that the same fancy should have occurred to both of them; and therefore I can only suppose that they actually saw what they said they did. Now I myself was in London at the time of this appearance in Edinburgh, of which I had no consciousness whatever; ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... awe described in the market reports as 'firm' or 'weak,' 'receding' or 'steady') it forms the main or only export of many Oceanic islands, and is largely imported into this realm of England, where the thicker portion is called stearine, and used for making sundry candles with fanciful names, while the clear oil is employed for burning in ordinary lamps. In the process of purification, it yields glycerine; and it enters largely into the manufacture of most better-class soaps. The fibre that surrounds the nut makes up the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... vignettes everywhere grouped round the mighty central triumph of the adventures of Piper Steenie,—who but Scott has done such things? He never put so much again in a single book. There is something in it which it is hardly fanciful to take as a 'note of finishing,' as the last piece of the work, that, gigantic as it was, was not exactly collar work, not sheer hewing of wood and drawing of water for the taskmasters. And it was fitting that the book, so varied, so fresh, so gracious and kindly, so magnificent in part, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... what you'd call a fanciful sort of person," went on Sir John, with obvious veracity. "Regular habits—rise early and to bed early; never a day's trouble with my digestion; off to sleep as soon as my head touches the pillow. You can't call my dream a nightmare, and yet ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... he can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as the most probable particular explication. Call that fanciful,—it matters not; the connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... corrupting influence on the purity of the Mosaic doctrines, and on the laws. The original writings discovered by Hilkiah, were retrenched, added to, and the order of the events displaced. From the long residence amongst, and a great intercourse with strange people, all the frightful prejudices, all the fanciful dreams of our rabbins, were introduced into the sacred books. We learn from the second book of Chronicles, chap. xxxvi. verse 17, "that the king slew the young men with the sword in the house of the sanctuary, and had no compassion upon young man or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... is now-a-days a strong feeling among some persons about capital punishment; that there are those who will move heaven and earth to interfere with the course of justice, and beg off the worst of murderers, on any grounds, however unreasonable, fanciful, even unfair; simply because they have a dislike to human beings being hanged. I believe, from long consideration, that these persons' strange dislike proceeds from their not believing sufficiently that man ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... with beaux and admirers. I have, in vain, endeavored to escape from their fascinating diplomas, but they have followed me, and continued to prosecute me with their adorous intentions. None of them could ever touch my fanciful disposition, which has exalted an intrinsic and lofty beau—idle to itself. I always had to reply, when they got down upon their knees to me, and squeezed my hands, that I could not force my sensations; ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... are stories in verse about historic events, falsified and fanciful, and love tragedies full of wonderful events mixed with divine prodigies and diabolical magics—all lengthy, exaggerated, puerile, and absurd in the extreme. None of the characters is native. All are Turks, Arabs, knights, errants, ambassadors, ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... glassy water had merely started into being a slight, fanciful curiosity. The women of that coast did not commonly swim at dusk in their bays; such simplicity obtained now only in the reaches of the highest civilization. There were, he knew, no hunting camps here, and the local ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... leaves rose graduated alabaster columns, the inner stalks of the banana-plants, and on them were fastened flowers and ornaments, fanciful creations of the hands of Tahitian women, fashioned of brilliant leaves and of bamboo-fiber and the glossy white arrowroot-fiber. From the top of each column floated the silken film of the snowy reva-reva, the exquisite component of the interior of young cocoa-palm-leaves, a ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... suspended. This has been long observed by, and passes for a settled point amongst Seamen. The Reason of it however cannot be so easily assigned, at least a satisfactory Reason, for as to Suppositions, every fanciful Man can furnish them ...
— The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years' Experience • John Claridge
... fatness and warm ferments of the Var Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate. The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by their surroundings. July passed over their heads and the weather which came in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state of hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... has often been made to carry the origin of the electric telegraph back to a very remote epoch by a reliance on those more or less fanciful descriptions of modes of communication based upon the properties ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... the mess-room with a feeling that it was a dream,—so bright, so beautiful a day,—we so well, so late from land, and so near to death! "Bah!" I said to myself. "They are fanciful; the cliffs are still a couple of miles away, and something will come to avert the wreck." I went down to the stateroom; Laura and the boy were unable to raise their heads from extreme sea-sickness, but baby Lisa was swinging on the edge of her berth, delighted with the motion, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... and stupid, this corrupted and despised convict, has merited his fate. But what shall he then deserve who, intelligent, rich, educated, surrounded by the esteem of all, clothed with an official character, will steal—not to eat, but to satisfy some fanciful caprice, or to try the chance of stock-jobbing? Will steal, not a hundred francs, but a hundred thousand francs—a million? Will steal, not at night, at the peril of his life, but tranquilly, quite at his ease, in the sight of all? Will steal, not from an unknown who has ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... looking-glass as he wrote; and as for Charles Lamb, do not suppose that he did anything but hide in his clouds of ink. Sir Sidney Colvin thinks that Keats revealed himself in his letters, but I cannot agree with him. Keats is one of the best letter-writers we have; he can be merry, fanciful, witty, thoughtful, even profound. He has a sardonic turn of language hardly to be equalled outside Shakespeare. "Were it in my device, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation—on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers?" Where will you match that ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... "Don't be fanciful, Miss Saunders. You will have to look deeper than that for the spell which has been cast over my wife. Olympia afraid of creaks and groans? Olympia seeing sights? She's much too practical by nature, Miss Saunders, to say nothing of the ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... many-jointed, thick rootstock a single graceful curved stem arises each spring, withers after fruiting, and leaves a round scar, whose outlines suggested to the fanciful man who named the genus the seal of Israel's wise king. Thus one may know the age of a root by its seals, as one tells that of a tree by the ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... conventional—are his strength, though they also imply his weakness. Fielding, in fact, is the ideal John Bull; the 'good buffalo,' as Taine calls him, the big, full-blooded, vigorous mass of roast-beef who will stand no nonsense, and whose contempt for the fanciful and arbitrary tends towards the coarse and materialistic. That corresponds to the contrast between Richardson and Fielding; and may help to explain why the sentimentalism which Fielding despised yet ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... Involuntarily you compared yourself with the swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and metaphysical, for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he extended to your garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He would trim a hedge, throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile section of the garden with a vegetable that ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... does he now exist? Is this gentle and lovely being lost forever? Has this mind, so replete with ideas, imaginations fanciful and magnificent, which formed a world, whose existence depended on the life of its creator;—has this mind perished? Does it now only exist in my memory? No, it is not thus; your form so divinely wrought, and beaming with beauty, has decayed, but your spirit ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... battle. Chopin always shrank from the display of his powers as a mere executant. To exhibit his talents to the public was an offense to him, and he only cared for his remarkable technical skill as a means of placing his fanciful original poems in tone rightly before the public. It was with the greatest difficulty that his intimate friends, Liszt, Meyerbeer, Nourrit, Delacroix, Heine, Mme. George Sand, Countess D'Agoult, and others, could persuade him ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... extraordinary physical strength and extraordinary moral weakness, whose patriotic virtues and pathetic end have kept his memory alive through the ages? Have a hundred generations of men to whom the story of Herakles has appeared to be only a fanciful romance, the product of that imagination heightened by religion which led the Greeks to exalt their supreme heroes to the extent of deification, persisted in hearing and telling the story of Samson with a sympathetic interest which betrays at least a sub-conscious belief in ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... long a time I never got any closer than that. It was very hard, I thought, with the land so near to me now, and I unable to reach it, strive how I may! Perhaps, I fancied, those trees are a mere fanciful dream like the fairy-like mirage of the desert that tortures poor lost wanderers with pictures of cool lakes and rivers, while they are really in the middle of burning sandy plains. I began to doubt ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... our imagination as by our judgment. Hence some great characters have come down to us spotted with the taints of indelible wit; and a satirist of this class, sporting with distant resemblances and fanciful analogies, has made the fictitious accompany for ever the real character. Piqued with Akenside for some reflections against Scotland, Smollett has exhibited a man of great genius and virtue as a most ludicrous personage; and who can discriminate, in the ridiculous physician in "Peregrine ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... am fanciful. Do not heed what I have said. But such crimes are surely not common in Florence? I have always heard my father and godfather say so. Have they ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... forth a savory odor. And here and there, wistfully regarding this active scene, amid the green shrubbery, stands a sentinel before his sentry-box, built of spruce boughs, wrought into a mimic military temple, and fanciful enough, too, for a garden of roses. And look you now! If here be not Die Vernon, with "habit, hat, and feather," cantering gayly down the road between the tents, and behind her a stately groom in gold-lace band, top-boots, and buck-skins. ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... on a par with the ordinary medium. He was unquestionably a man of gigantic intellect, and he was unquestionably inspired, if by inspiration be understood the gift of combining subliminal with supraliminal powers to a degree granted to few of those whom the world counts truly great. If his fanciful and fantastic pictures of life in heaven and hell and in our neighboring planets welled up from the depths of his inmost mind, far more did the noble truths to which he gave expression. It is by these he should be judged; it ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... the dispute to that sad issue of a final separation. The establishment would have been well content to stop short of that consummation: and temperaments might have been found, compromises both safe and honourable, had the minority built less of their reversionary hopes upon the policy of a fanciful martyrdom. Martyrs they insisted upon becoming: and that they might be martyrs, it was necessary for them to secede. That Europe thinks at present with less reverence of Protestant institutions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... good repute, A. Fornander, chief of them, are severe with Captain Cook on account of his alleged greed, not paying enough for the red feathers woven into fanciful forms. Perhaps that is a common fault in the transactions of civilized men with barbarians. William Penn is the only man with a great reputation for dealing fairly with American Red Men, and he was not impoverished by it. Cook ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... must never tread! They are for men, and symbolical of manly virtues. There are dolls of all sizes, and a play travois leans against the white wall of the miniature lodge. Even the pet pup is called in to complete the fanciful home of the ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... began to ask one another in what guise the Maid should travel; for it was obvious that her cumbrous peasant garb was little suited for the work she had in hand, and we made many fanciful plans of robing her after the fashion of some old-time queen, such as Boadicea or Semiramis, and wondered whether we could afford to purchase some rich clothing and a noble charger, and so convey her to the King in something ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Baron Ricasoli, and had a long and most interesting conversation with him as to the conditions—of course political—on which he would consent to support Italian unity. These must have been done in pure levity; they were imaginative excursions, thrown off in the spirit of those fanciful variations great violinists will now and then indulge in, as though to say, "Is there a path too intricate for me to thread, is there a pinnacle too fine for me to ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... Pitt commenced it by describing the execution of the King of France as an event which outraged every sentiment of religion, justice, and humanity; and as the effect of principles which started by dissolving all the bonds of society, and which, relying on fanciful theories, rejected not only the experience of past ages, but likewise the sacred instructions of revelation. Pitt stated that the British government had from the commencement adopted a system of neutrality; that they had declined taking any part ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... very usual thing for fanciful theories to have their turn amidst the eccentricities of the human mind, and then to be heard of no more. But it is perhaps no ill occupation, now and then, for an impartial observer, to analyse these theories, and attempt to blow away ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... regarded as a fanciful figure: it is not a nebulous hope which is to be realised at some indefinitely remote period, thousands of years hence; nor is it a new species (in the Darwinian sense) of which we can know nothing, and which it would therefore be ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... her little black notebook to record these things, however. Instead, she picked up a number of the London Magazine and looked at the title of an article pencil-marked on the pale green cover. It was Janet Cardiff's article, and Lady Halifax had marked it. Elfrida had read it before. It was a fanciful recreation of the conditions of verse-making when Herrick wrote, very pleasurably ironical in its bearing upon more modern poetry-making. It had quite deserved the praise she gave it in the corner which the Age reserved for magazines. "I want you to understand," she said slowly, "that ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... artist with intellectual curiosity; and just as he lacked the depth of a philosopher so he wanted the vision of a poet. That he possessed genius will not be denied; but his art is fanciful rather than imaginative and of creative power he had next to none. His life was neither a mission nor a miracle. But he was blessed with that keen delight in his own sensations which makes a world full of beautiful and amusing things, charming people, wine, and warm sunshine seem, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... lines of her swan-like neck are fully displayed in all their splendor. Her form is lithe and supple, and its graceful contour is modestly marked by a snowy dress. As she lifts her head and gazes at the sky, a poet might easily fancy her to be some fanciful "being of the air," and convert her into the fairy ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... general interest; and they are composed in a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness checkered by gleams of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched with cross-lights of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described, whether men, or things, or usages; and in the rear of all this, the constant recurrence to ancient recollections ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the essential fact is that the science, the value, and the possibilities of flight have been proved in a thousand different ways. Vistas of travel and experience have been opened up which but a few months ago would have seemed fanciful. Everywhere men are dreaming dreams of the future which challenge one's deepest imagination. Already Caproni, the great Italian inventor, has signed a contract to carry mails from Genoa ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... was content to omit facts with which the Christians around him were well acquainted, than by the hypothesis that he was a spiritualistic writer of the 2nd century who wished to make his Gospel fit some fanciful theory of his own. In fact, the latter hypothesis has proved a signal failure. The critics who say that the writer omitted the story of our Lord's painful temptation as incompatible with the majesty of the Divine Word, may be asked {31} why the writer gives no fuller account of ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... is a deeper thought here. I wonder if it is fanciful to see in the text one of the very numerous allusions in this epistle to the events in our Lord's Passion. You remember that Jesus laid aside His garments, and took a towel, and girded Himself, and washed the disciples' feet, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... paid," returning the other way with a thousand dollars; coming again to the manager with: "Madame has one slipper on, but will not put on the other till she has her fee"—and so on. Doubtless apocryphal and yet only a bit fanciful and exaggerated. Yet it was known in the inner operatic circles in 1885 that Colonel Mapleson had succeeded in getting himself pretty deeply into her debt. How he did it the anecdotes of the reception and Mme. Patti's interview serve to indicate. In sooth, the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... put back the notes at once, without a second glance at them, and then sat looking thoughtfully at the lock of hair as it lay on her lap. "You are better than nothing," she said, speaking to it with a girl's fanciful tenderness. "I can sit and look at you sometimes, till I almost think I am looking at Frank. Oh, my darling! my darling!" Her voice faltered softly, and she put the lock of hair, with a languid gentleness, to her lips. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... of noble feeling, my poor Perdita (for this was the fanciful name my sister had received from her dying parent), was not altogether saintly in her disposition. Her manners were cold and repulsive. If she had been nurtured by those who had regarded her with affection, she might have been different; but unloved and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... this delicate nature we ought to avoid two opposite extremes. If we indulge a fanciful imagination, and build worlds of our own, we must not wonder at our going wide from the path of truth and nature. On the other hand, if we add observation to observation without attempting to draw not only certain conclusions but also ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... workers, and make their individual character the guide, and not the slave, of this machinery. Such a direction is already indicated by one of our few original and popular forms of art: the picture-book and the poster, which, by the new processes of our colour printing, have placed some of the most fanciful and delicate of our artists—men like Caldecott and Walter Crane, like Cheret and Boutet de Monvel, at the service of everyone equally. Moreover, it is probable that long before machinery is so perfected as to demand individual guidance, preference and therefore ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... passage of the parson was hailed by a grumbling undertone of blasphemy. It was considered fashionable to grunt when the hammer came in contact with the stone, and under cover of this mock exclamation of fatigue, it was convenient to launch an oath. A fanciful visitor, seeing the irregularly rising hammers along the line, might have likened the shed to the interior of some vast piano, whose notes an unseen hand was erratically fingering. Rufus Dawes was seated last on the line—his back to the cells, his face ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... romantic things to be found among help-wanted "ads" as there are in the most romantic romances. Now, lest it may be thought that some of the help-wanted "ads" which I have written right out of my head to illustrate the type of each are somewhat fanciful, I will copy out of yesterday's paper an advertisement which "Robinson Crusoe" hasn't anything on, to put it ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... very comfortably, I assure you, uncle Oliver," Clarissa replied. "No one was in the least rude or unpleasant. And I am so glad to come home—I can scarcely tell you how glad—though, as I came nearer and nearer, I began to have all kinds of fanciful anxieties. I hope that all is well—that ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... begging? And yet the description which I have read is a description of England, by Sir Thomas More—a description of the England of his day.[200] And lest it should be considered highly coloured or fanciful, let it be recollected that there are accounts written by magistrates, in which it is stated that in every county there were 200 or 300 persons who lived by thieving—who went about, say the contemporary chroniclers, by sixty at a time—who ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... That nothing might mar the harmony of this fete, the prince and his wife had placed themselves on an equal footing with their guests; the princess had declined any conspicuous role, and was to appear in the simple but charming costume of a wood-nymph, while the prince had selected an ideal and fanciful hunter's costume. Even in the selection of huts the Princess Wilhelmina had refused to make any choice, and had drawn her number as the others did, even refusing a glimpse of it ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... a Hope That lighted my days with a fanciful glow, In her hand is the rope That strangled her life out. Hope ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... fanciful mood, Inspired by the time and the solitude, The Lady Lorraine, In whimsical vein, Said, "On Christmas eve, 'neath this mistletoe bough, I'll solemnly make an immutable vow." With a glance at the portraits that hung on the wall, She said, "I adjure ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... were soon thronging in. By half-past eight the performers were all in the back parlor, and there was a brilliant army of actors and actresses in varied and fanciful costume, many coming to the house dressed for their parts. There were gods and goddesses, shepherds and shepherdesses, angels, crusaders, who would take leave of languishing ladies, living statuary, and tableaux of all sorts. Dennis was much shocked at the manner in which ladies exposed ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... I determined to write some fairy tales because my mind was full of them. I set to work, and in course of time produced several which were printed. These were constructed according to my own ideas. I caused the fanciful creatures who inhabited the world of fairy-land to act, as far as possible for them to do so, as if they were inhabitants of the real world. I did not dispense with monsters and enchanters, or talking beasts and birds, but I obliged these creatures ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... tenth of the Muses, To Mirth rears a fanciful dome, We mark, while delight she infuses, The Graces find beauty at home. In her eye such vivacity glitters, To her voice such perfections belong, That care and the life it embitters, Find balm in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... a cave such as one might read of in a story of fanciful adventure. It is in a rock beside the Dordogne, where, the river rests in a deep pool. The entrance is under water, and it can only be reached with safety by a good diver when, the sun shining at a certain hour, and the light striking in a particular way, the passage into the cavern is ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... oaks; with it was mingled the scent of a bird; and a white feather, caught by a puff of wind, fluttered in the grass: young Reynard, boldest of an early family in the "earth," had stolen a fowl from a neighbouring farmyard near the river, and had carried it—not slung over his shoulders, as fanciful writers declare, but with its tail almost touching the soil—into the thicket beyond the wood. Rabbits had wandered in the undergrowth; and, near a large warren, the stale, peculiar odour of a stoat that had evidently prowled ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... feats in the combats of half a century ago, that we associate with the cavalry only ideas of splendor and glory, of wild freedom and dashing gallantry. But the cavalry service is far different from such vague and fanciful imaginations. Instead of ease, there is constant labor; instead of freedom, there is a difficult system of discipline and tactics; and instead of frequent opportunities for glorious charges, there is a constant routine of toilsome duty in scouting ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Grattan was a disappointed man—disappointed not so much because his proposals were not adopted, as because his own followers were slipping away from him. They had begun to realize that he was an orator but not a statesman; his ideas were wild, fanciful dreams. Whilst vehemently upholding the English connection he was playing into the hands of England's opponents by reminding them that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity; whilst hating the very idea of a Union, he was making the existing system impossible by preventing ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... uniformity does not proceed from an opinion, that particular combinations of letters have much influence on human happiness; or that truth may not be successfully taught by modes of spelling fanciful and erroneous: I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... of letters of larger sizes to mark these divisions. These, especially the paragraph initials, afforded an endless field for his ingenuity and the exercise of his artistic ability. A great initial letter might be made in any fanciful shape of which he could think. It might become a part of a beautifully executed miniature. It might be surrounded by a mass of gorgeous ornamentation extending to the bottom or the other margin ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... said Eliza. "I always was fanciful from a child dreaming of the pearly gates and them little angels with nothing on only their heads and wings so cheap to dress, I always think, compared ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... with the plan eagerly and one of them agreed to pay the expenses of a hall any time we wished to use one for campaign purposes. At first our efforts passed unnoticed by either political party. It was thought to be just another fanciful civic dream. We were glad of it. It gave us time to perfect our organization ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... the dexterous contrivances of Rascal, succeeded in doing wonders in the trifling space of time. It is really astonishing how richly and beautifully everything was arranged in so short a period. Such pomp and superfluity were exhibited there, and the richly-fanciful illuminations were so admirably managed, that I felt quite at ease; I had nothing to find fault with, and I could not but praise the diligence ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... history is full of the errors of states and princes.... The best public measures are seldom adopted from previous wisdom but forc'd by the occasion." But this sketch of what might have been sounds over-fanciful, and the English were probably right in thinking that a strong military union, with home taxation, involved more of danger than of safety for the future connection between the colonies ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... the night to that beautiful Ally Hook," grumbled Master Cheese. "It's a shame, sir, folks are saying, for him to give his time to her. I had to leave my warm bed and march out to that fanciful Mother Ellis, through it, who's always getting the spasms. And I had about forty poor here this morning, and couldn't get a bit of comfortable breakfast for 'em. Miss Deb, she never kept my bacon warm, or anything; and somebody had eaten the meat out of ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... houses! Why! They are stone-faced, white as a curd; there's something to take the eye! Houses in four straight lines, not a single front awry; You watch who crosses and gossips, who saunters, who hurries by; Green blinds, as a matter of course, to draw when the sun gets high; And the shops with fanciful ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... take the lead it will inevitably destroy the poetical—which lies at the exact medium between the ideal and the sensible. But man is so constituted that he is ever impatient to pass from what is fanciful to what is common; and reflection must, therefore, have its place even in tragedy. But to merit this place it must, by means of delivery, recover what it wants in actual life; for if the two elements of poetry, the ideal and the sensible, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... The abolitionists, on the contrary, think that slavery is from hell—that slaveholders are the worst of robbers—and that their slaves are the wretched victims of unsurpassed cruelties. Now, how do abolitionists propose to settle the points at issue?—by fanciful pictures of the abominations of slavery to countervail the like pictures of its blessedness?—by mere assertions against slavery, to balance mere assertions in its favor? No—but by the perfectly reasonable and fair means of examining slavery ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Jaggers would be found to be "at," I replied in the affirmative. We dived into the City, and came up in a crowded police-court, where a blood-relation (in the murderous sense) of the deceased, with the fanciful taste in brooches, was standing at the bar, uncomfortably chewing something; while my guardian had a woman under examination or cross-examination,—I don't know which,—and was striking her, and the bench, and everybody present, with awe. If anybody, of whatsoever ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... for any person who had long resided in New Andalusia, or in Lower Peru, to deny that there exists some connection between these phenomena: in another part, however he seems to think the connection fanciful. At Guayaquil it is said that a heavy shower in the dry season is invariably followed by an earthquake. In Northern Chile, from the extreme infrequency of rain, or even of weather foreboding rain, the probability of accidental coincidences becomes ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... disguised that what to the ordinary mortal are unexpected dangers, temptations and enemies also beset the way of the neophyte. And that for no fanciful cause, but the simple reason that he is, in fact, acquiring new senses, has yet no practice in their use, and has never before seen the things he sees. A man born blind suddenly endowed with vision would not at once master the meaning of perspective, but ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... years, for obeying God, only solaced with his Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs. Yet he made discoveries relative to the creation, which have been very recently again published by a learned philosopher, who surprised and puzzled the world with his vestiges of creation. Omitting the fanciful theories of the vestige philosopher, his two great facts, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... manner of the Queen Anne men, and Hazlitt is always best when he imitates nobody. "Hot and Cold" (which might have been more intelligibly called "North and South") is distinctly curious, bringing out again what may be called Hazlitt's fanciful observation; and it may generally be said that, however alarming and however suggestive of commonplace the titles "On Respectable People," "On People of Sense," "On Novelty and Familiarity," may be, Hazlitt may almost invariably be trusted ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... peasants, there were a goodly assortment; as also of Turks, Highlanders, and men in plain clothes. But being public, it was not, of course, select, and amongst many well-dressed people, there were hundreds who, assuming no particular character, had exerted their imagination to appear merely fanciful, and had succeeded. One, for example, would have a scarlet satin petticoat, and over it a pink satin robe, with scarlet ribbons to match. Another, a short blue satin dress, beneath which appeared a handsome purple satin petticoat; the whole trimmed with yellow bows. They looked ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... fulfilment. The predictions of suffering and death, however, are completely foreign to that apocalyptic conception, being akin rather, as Professor Charles has suggested, to the prophecies of the suffering servant in the Book of Isaiah (Book of Enoch, p. 314-317). Moreover, it may not be fanciful to find in his claims to heavenly authority a hint of the thought of the eighth Psalm, "Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet" (see Dalman WJ I. 218). Although the name ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... from the frenzied lips of the half-maddened bridegroom, as his glance flashed on Hazen. "Had you no mercy? Have you no mercy now, that you should torture her young, credulous soul with these fanciful obligations; obligations which no human being has any right to impose upon another, whatsoever the Cause, ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... reformers pronounced the worship of "idols" to be the root of all evil; and there have been many iconoclasts in different ages of the world. The maxim still holds good; for the worship of idols, that is, of fanciful conceits, if not the source of all evil, is still the cause of much; and it prevails as extensively now as it ever did. Men are ever engaged in worshipping the picturesque fancies of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Our carriage was overtaken by them more than once; they presented flowers and fruits to our ladies, and refused any return. Some of the younger women, though sun-burnt, were handsome; and many of them, from their fanciful dresses, resembled the cottagers as exhibited on the stage. The men, on the other hand, were a most ugly race of beings, diminutive in size, and with the features of an old baboon. Mr. Younge, indeed, in some degree accounted for this, by the information ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... other tack, and necessarily inclined from her enemy. Both vessels were stripped to their top-sails, spankers, and jibs, though the lofty sails of the Frenchman were fluttering in the breeze, like the graceful folds of some fanciful drapery. No human being was distinctly visible in either fabric, though dark clusters around each mast-head showed that the ready top-men were prepared to discharge their duties, even in the confusion and dangers of the impending contest. ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... table-cloth. Here are we forever supplied with pork and oysters and sweet potatoes and rice and hominy and corn-bread and milk; also mysterious griddle-cakes of corn and pumpkin; also preserves made of pumpkin-chips, and other fanciful productions of Ethiop art. Mr. E. promised the plantation-superintendents who should come down here "all the luxuries of home," and we certainly have much apparent, if little real variety. Once William produced with some palpitation something fricasseed, which ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... these baronial residences, some fanciful etymologists have derived the familiar saying of "Chateaux en Espagne." See Bourgoanne, Travels in Spain, tom. ii. ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... imperilling perhaps her religious faith; and she fancied that under Paula's influence Mary had transferred her affections from her to the younger woman with added warmth. Nor was this idea wholly fanciful; the child's strong sense of justice could not bear to see her friend misunderstood and slighted, often simply and entirely misjudged and hardly blamed, so Mary felt it her duty, as far as in her lay, to make up for her grandmother's delinquencies in regard to the guest who in the child's ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be able to make some use of in my records by and by. I said the other day that he had good solid prejudices, which is true, and I like him none the worse for it; but he has also opinions more or less original, valuable, probable, fanciful; fantastic, or whimsical, perhaps, now and then; which he promulgates at table somewhat in the tone of imperial edicts. Another thing I like about him is, that he takes a certain intelligent interest in pretty much everything that interests other people. ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... gentleman one day spoke to him at the club of Catiline's conspiracy, he withdrew his attention, and thought about Tom Thumb. In his Taxation no Tyranny, having occasion to notice a reference made by the American Congress to a passage in Montesquieu, he calls him in contempt the fanciful Montesquieu. Yet this is the man, of whom Burke, when his just horror of every thing fanciful in politics was at its height, has passed the noblest eulogium that one modern has ever made on another, and which the reader will pardon me if in my veneration for a great name I place ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... frequented the retreat, the ice shone with a myriad diamond tints; everything seemed to assume an extraordinary form and life. The fantastically carved walls of rock sparkled with capricious gleams. From the sides of black granite hung pendent icicles, sometimes slender and isolated, sometimes grouped in fanciful clusters. In the hollows, where damp and darkness for ever reign, climbed a bluish-grey moss, a melancholy and incomplete manifestation of life in the bosom of this death-like solitude. Within, the whole ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... sociableness, said she believed Guy did not like to talk to any-body but that little pet of his, and one or two of the old sailors. If left to her own resources, Fleda was never at a loss; she amused herself with her books, or watching the sailors, or watching the sea, or with some fanciful manufacture she had learned from one of the ladies on board, or with what the company about ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... attuned to a particular rate of oscillations, and when the difference between the rate of oscillation of the waves and the receiver exceeds one per cent., resonance ceases altogether, so that the message may be sent, but will not be received. It strikes us as hardly a fanciful supposition that many prayers fail to obtain an answer for a precisely analogous reason, i.e., for lack of attuning. The mere uttering of devotional phraseology, or even the sending forth of anguished appeals, does not ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... she was going to cook her husband a nice piece of toasted cheese. That fortunate man, as she was fond of telling him, with mingled contempt and envy, had the digestion of an ostrich, and yet he was rather fanciful, as gentlemen's servants who have lived in good places ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... my fanciful reminiscences as I lay, part of that day, in the Bay of New York, O! Also as we passed clear of the Narrows, and got out to sea; also in many an idle hour at sea in sunny weather! At length the observations and computations showed ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... saw a yellow whiteness, that, marked by the blue veins of the bared temples, was to her mind death-like. Mary had not been sheltered from taking part in scenes of suffering; she had seen sickness and death in cottages, as well as in her own home, and she had none of the fanciful alarms, either of novelty or imagination, to startle her in the strange watch that had so suddenly been thrust on her but what did fill her with a certain apprehension, was the new and lofty beauty of expression that sat ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is the Great Stone Face, already immortalized by the lamented Hawthorne. It is here presented to us under a new aspect, and while we think that even those grand old rocks fail to embody the glorious ideal of a Christus Judex, we must acknowledge the pleasure we have derived from the fanciful descriptions and pleasant associations offered us in this dainty ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fliers, but like the Grebes, because of their small wings they must get their first impetus from the water in order to rise; in case there is any wind blowing they also make use of this by starting their flight against it. They are very peculiar birds and the expression "crazy as a loon" is not a fanciful one, being formed from their early morning and evening antics when two or more of them will race over the top of the water, up and down the lake, all the while uttering their demoniacal laughter. They ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... observations are frequently exceedingly fanciful, and he is capable of attributing the most absurd reasons to the respect which is always shown by the most undeveloped races to dignity and character. You ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Keats is a wild and fanciful poem, containing some exquisite poetry, as this, to ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... He had with him a holy book, written, as he said, from the dictation of an angel, which he carried in tablets of bone in the nose-bag of a camel. Some chapters of this he read me; but, though the precepts were usually good, the language seemed wild and fanciful. There were times when I could scarce keep my countenance as I listened to him. He planned out his future movements, and indeed, as he spoke, it was hard to remember that he was only the wandering leader of an Arab caravan, and not one of the great ones ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... would draw away as though from something partly spectral. I had moments when I thought of him as of a man of pasteboard—as though, if one should strike smartly through the buckram of his countenance, there would be found a mere vacuity within. This horror (not merely fanciful, I think) vastly increased my detestation of his neighbourhood; I began to feel something shiver within me on his drawing near; I had at times a longing to cry out; there were days when I thought I could have struck him. This ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their own story. "Camp Eden," the fanciful name given to the quiet, shady spot where the low chain of hills met the river; the spot where the very waters seemed to lose themselves in their own cool depths, and depart sighing through the shallows beyond,—Camp Eden was deserted, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... lies past Santo Domingo, the church of the Holy Office, and down a long street where live the purveyors of all things for the muleteers. Here one may buy mats, ropes, pack-saddles—which the arrieros delight to have ornamented with fanciful designs and inscriptions, lazos, and many other things of the same kind. Passing out through the city-gate, we ride along a straight causeway, which extends to Guadalupe. A dull road enough in itself, but the interminable strings of mules and donkeys, bringing in pig-skins full of pulque, are ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... loved fable and allegory. Argument or truth, dressed out in such fanciful garb, gained double force and acceptance. We may not be able to follow a poet in his wanderings; his local allusions may obscure to us much of his meaning; the doctrine of his allegory may be to us largely a riddle; and the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... greet the cliffs of England. As the subject of an Academy picture, or an illustration for "The Hero's Homecoming, or How a Bigamist Made Good," the sketch would be excellent. But, except for the beaming faces, it is fanciful. A shadowy view of the English coast-line draws a crowd to the starboard side of the boat, whence one gazes long and joyfully at the dainty cliffs. Yet there is no outward sign of excitement; the deep satisfaction felt by all is ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... some of the blessings held out to the savage by civilization, and they are only some of them. The picture is neither fanciful nor overdrawn; there is no trait in it that I have not personally witnessed, or that might not have been enlarged upon; and there are often other circumstances of greater injury and aggression, which, if dwelt ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... belief and hallucinatory experiences are still very common in the Highlands, where I have myself collected many recent instances. Mr. Tylor observes that the examples 'prove a little too much; they vouch not only for human apparitions, but for such phantoms as demon dogs, and for still more fanciful symbolic omens.' This is perfectly true. I have found no cases of demon dogs; but wandering lights, probably of meteoric or miasmatic origin, are certainly regarded as tokens of death. This is obviously a superstitious hypothesis, the lights being real phenomena misconstrued. Again, funerals ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... if your wife and daughter had ceased to love you? Do you imagine for one moment that they forget you? It would do you good to talk to Aunt Madge; she has such wonderful ideas about all that. Some people—people like Mrs. Tolman, our vicar's wife—laugh at her and call her fanciful, but to me she is so real. Why should it not be true?" she went on, with gathering excitement, "nothing that is good can die! Love is eternal, and it is only pain and grief and sin that can come to an end. That is what Aunt Madge says, and she does more than ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... part of M. Lefebure's book is devoted to the history of lace, and though some may not find it quite as interesting as the earlier portion it will more than repay perusal; and those who still work in this delicate and fanciful art will find many valuable suggestions in it, as well as a large number of exceedingly beautiful designs. Compared to embroidery, lace seems comparatively modern. M. Lefebure and Mr. Alan Cole tell us that there is no reliable or documentary evidence to prove the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... confess, in that first tumult of my thoughts, there appeared a disorderly kind of beauty in some of them, which gave me hope, something, worthy my lord of Orrery, might be drawn from them: But I was then in that eagerness of imagination, which, by overpleasing fanciful men, flatters them into the danger of writing; so that, when I had moulded it into that shape it now bears, I looked with such disgust upon it, that the censures of our severest critics are charitable ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... Malling would not trust their supervision even to Prudence, much less to the hired girl, Mary. Sarah Gurridge remained in her seat by the stove watching the glowing coals dreamily, her mind galloping ahead through fanciful scenes of her own imagination. Had she been asked she would probably have stated that she was looking forward into the future of the pair who were so ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... disappeared; his imagination had spread its wings only to feel them flop all grotesquely at its sides as he recognised in his hostess's quiet companion, the oppressive alien who hadn't indeed interfered with his fanciful flight, though she had prevented his immediate declaration and brought about the thud, not to say the felt violent shock, of his fall to earth, the perfectly plain identity of Cornelia Rasch. It was she ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... month or more the lonesome husband "stevedored," wrestling freight on the lighters, then he disappeared. He left secretly, in the night, for by now he had grown fanciful and he dared to hope that he could dodge his Nemesis. He turned up in Fairbanks, a thousand miles away, and straightway lost himself ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... cast off as they glide silently into the dark again, to take on some semblance too awful for mortal eyes. Farther and farther we went along these arched, crypt-like ways; passing frequently through lofty chambers where the roof could not be discovered, each with some fanciful and often inappropriate name assigned to it, until we came at length to what looked like a window in the side wall of the cave. Peering through this, and holding my lamp high over my head, I could see neither roof nor sides nor bottom,—only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... frock-coat, the bald head, the fat, reddish face, and the rather rusty "chimney-pot" here recurred to him, and he nearly giggled out loud in thinking how irresistibly funny Mr Buskin would look if he were now going through all these fanciful gesticulations in his walking dress. The fact was that the man himself was perfectly unrecognisable, and Austin was mightily impressed by what was really a signal triumph in the art ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... told him all I knew of Bokhara, and Samarkand, and Tashkend, and Yarkand. I showed him the passes in the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush. I traced out the rivers, and I calculated distances; we talked over imaginary campaigns, and set up fanciful constitutions. It a was childish game, but I found it interesting enough. He spoke of it all with a curious personal tone which puzzled me, till one day when we were amusing ourselves with a fight on the Zarafshan, and I put in a modest claim to be allowed ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... "My own darling, how fanciful you are! your hands have grown cold as ice. Probably when you are seventy you will consider yourself a still fascinating person of middle age, and look upon these thoughts of to-day as the sickly fancies of an infant. Do not let us talk ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... time afterwards, and with fainter ink. There is reason to suppose that nothing was accomplished at that time in the way of getting rid of the "pewter tankards." The farmers were too hard pressed by taxes imposed by the province, and by the weight of local assessments, to listen to fanciful appeals. They probably continued for some time, and perhaps until after receiving Deacon Ingersoll's legacy, in 1720, to get along as they were. They did not believe, that, in order to approach the presence, and partake of the memorials, of the Saviour, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... we could distinguish the moaning cries of monkeys—one seeming to be calling to the other for help in piteous tones. The effect was curious, and had a peculiarly melancholy sound; indeed we might easily have supposed them to be the cries of captive slaves, or perhaps a more fanciful person might describe them as disembodied spirits in some haunted island. Meanwhile the night wind, sighing through the lofty trees, came moaning down towards us. At length darkness compelled us to give up our sport, and, with an abundant ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... and over this last was a collection of books ranged upon shelves of red cedar-wood. A handsome clock adorned the mantelpiece; and in the open fireplace was a pair of small "andirons," with silver knobs, cast after a fanciful device, and richly chased. Of course, there was no fire at that season of the year. Even the heat caused by the mosquito bar would have been annoying, but that the large glass-door on one side, and the window on the other, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... Union Jack, because her cause was her country's cause, and England claimed a title in her sacrifice. It is a far cry from Edith Cavell to the old soldier who gave Germany the giant airship, but the Zeppelin will also be remembered, because the popular imagination, which is often both just and fanciful, found a symbol of Germany's cause in this engine of terror, so carefully and admirably planned down to the minutest detail, so impressive by its bulk, so indiscriminate in its destructive action, and so frail. Its inventor was Count Ferdinand ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... ugly little streaked mountain village that followed the windings of the country road for half a mile and then gave out. The last house was not a house at all, but an old box car. And this was the home of Sal Prout. But she denied that it was a box car, with a hundred fanciful deceptions. First, it was whitewashed within and without; second, it was covered with house vines; third, the dooryard smiled at you from the face of a thousand flowers, like a Heavenly catechism of color. But go as often as we would we never found Sal at home. She was busy with the ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... something about him—don't think me fanciful, but it gives me a nasty little sensation, a tightening of my muscles, when he comes near me. It's a ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... here and there, too, one sees the evidence of real understanding and taste. If every tenant of a sky-scraper demands—as I am informed he does—the same windows, and radiators under every window, then the architect had better begin by accepting that demand openly, with no fanciful or pseudo-imaginative pretense that things are not what they are. The Ashland Building, on Fourth Avenue, where the architectural imagination has exercised itself soberly, honestly, and obediently, appeared to me to be a satisfactory and agreeable sky-scraper; ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... bucentaurus on the analogy of a supposed Gr. [Greek: boukentauros], ox-centaur (from [Greek: bous] and [Greek: Kentauros]). This led to the explanation of the name as derived from the head of an ox having served as the galley's figurehead. This derivation is, however, fanciful; the name bucentaurus is unknown in ancient mythology, and the figurehead of the bucentaurs, of which representations have come down to us, is the lion of St Mark. [v.04 p.0658] The name bucentaur seems, indeed, to have been given to any great and sumptuous Venetian galley. Du ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... occult.[49] All of which would be very wonderful, if true. It is, however, only one more of those fascinating fictions with which mystery-mongers entertain themselves, and deceive others. Small wonder that thinking men turn from such fanciful folly with mingled feelings of pity and disgust. Sages there have been in every land and time, and their lofty wisdom has the unity which inheres in all high human thought, but that there is now, or has ever been, a conscious, much less a continuous, fellowship of superior ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... soon he tunes each quivering chord, And, with preamble wildly sweet He doth the wondering listeners greet;— Then strikes into a changeful chaunt That fits his fanciful romaunt. ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... so it is with the varying opinions of the Western thought regarding it—the various cults advocating some form of its doctrine—the original doctrine may be learned and understood in spite of the fanciful dressings bestowed upon it. "The Truth is One—Men call it ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... remove all traces of that elegant and fanciful disposition of my effects, from which I had hoped for so much credit; for I was now ashamed and angry at having thought an instant upon the mode of receiving a visit which had commenced so agreeably, but terminated in ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... being while others are up and doing. The Austrians are of mixed blood, and partake of South European characteristics less prominent among the purer blooded Teutons of the north. They have life on easier terms, are less intellectual, are more sensuous, emotional, more fanciful, fonder of artistic enjoyment, more sensitive to color and to those effects called "color," by contrast to form, in other arts than that of painting. The art of music is most germane to the Austrian spirit; and we have a ready key to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... leads to results that square with the other facts of nature. Thus these appliances of art supply a protection, perhaps our chief protection, against a recrudescence of these superstitious beliefs, those fanciful myths and infertile imaginings about nature in which so much of the best intellectual power of the past has been spent. If we add one other factor, namely, that such appliances be not only used, but used in the interests of a truly ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... marked deviation from Chinese or Korean models, except that, the tazzas and occasionally other utensils are sometimes pierced in triangular, quadrilateral, and circular patterns, to which various meanings more or less fanciful have been assigned. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... and contentions in the early Church, the disputes between the Jew and the Gentile convert, the excesses of spiritual excitement, the extravagances of fanciful belief, of which the Epistles themselves furnish abundant evidence, ceased to all appearance at the door of the catacombs. Within them there is nothing to recall the divisions of the faithful; but, on the contrary, the paintings on the walls almost universally relate to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... any print dresses. I haven't even got a white one. I've two aprons like this," holding out a fanciful thing trimmed with lace. "That's all, and I never saw any sleeves; I don't know what ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... struggling gentleman, perhaps a married curate, whose dwelling is bare, whose dress is poor, whose fare is scanty, whose wife is careworn, whose children are ill-fed, shabbily dressed, and scantily educated. It is conceivable that fanciful wants, slights, and failures, may cause the rich man as much and as real suffering as substantial wants and failures cause the poor; but the world at large will recognise the rich man's lot as one of success, and the poor man's as ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... 'There's no mistaking YOU. It's Mary's chin, and Mary's brow—with just a little something, perhaps, of her dreamy eye. But you haven't all her looks, Mr Lawford, by any manner of means. She was a very beautiful girl, and so vivacious, so fanciful—it was, I suppose the foreign strain showing itself. Even marriage did not quite succeed in ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... [Footnote 121: Such fanciful descriptions of men and lands are common in the French epic poems, where they are usually applied to the Saracens (F.). Cf. W.w. Comfort, "The Saracens in Christian Poetry" in "The Dublin Review", July 1911; J. Malsch, "Die Charakteristik der Volker ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... have preconceived the case, this narrative might, in the absence of explanation, seem purely fanciful, let me briefly refer to the historical facts on which it is based. The Mormons revere but one prophet. As to his identity there can be no mistake, since many of the "revelations" were addressed to him by name—"To Joseph ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... interesting, there arises an illative impression that all things of old really were so: and all things in idea associated with that time, whether real or fictitious, are afforded a favorable entertainment. Now these associations are neither trivial nor fanciful:{11} for I remember to have discovered, after visiting the British Museum for the first time, that the odour of camphor, for which I had hitherto no predilection, afforded me a peculiar satisfaction, seemingly suggestive of things scientific or artistic; it was in fact ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... sympathizing tear soothed their dying moments; no clergyman eulogized their heroism, self-sacrifice and virtues; no orator has pronounced a panegyric; no poet has embalmed their memory in song, and no novelist has taken their record for a fanciful story. Since their mission was a failure their memory is doomed to rest without marble monument or graven image. To the merciful and the just they will be honored ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... costumes, and transformed the placid Mellicent into a dozen different characters: Ophelia, crowned with flowers; Marguerite, pulling the petals of a daisy; Hebe, bearing a basket of fruit on her head, and many other fanciful impersonations, were improvised and taken before the week was over. She went about the work in her usual eager, engrossed, happy-go-lucky fashion, sticking pins by the dozen into Mellicent's flesh in the ardour of arrangement, ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... The infrequency of extended fanciful promotion in behalf of the old English nostrums in American newspaper advertising may have been compensated for to some degree in broadside and pamphlet. A critic of the medical scene in New York in the early 1750's asserted that physicians used patent medicines which they learned ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... see nothing in the interior of Africa, but what some compilers of maps or geographers are fanciful enough to imagine. What a happy event, therefore, should we not expect from a voyage of discovery and colonisation undertaken in so magnificent a style as the present! what a pride—what ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... will confute the most stubborn logician. "With all his hardness of mind, and of heart, he is dying of a fright. I heard it in the kitchen, I have heard it from himself,—he could not be deceived. If I had ever heard he was nervous, or fanciful, or superstitious, but a character so contrary to all these impressions;—a man that, as poor Butler says, in his 'Remains of the Antiquarian,' would have 'sold Christ over again for the numerical piece of silver which Judas got for him,'—such a man to die of fear! Yet he IS dying," ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... conversation, and a tumult of obstructive defendants, who impeded, by their want of skill, the very convenience which they were purposed to facilitate. How different the surrounding scene! A table covered with flowers, bright with fanciful crystal, and porcelain that had belonged to sovereigns, who had given a name to its color or its form. As for those present, all seemed grace and gentleness, from the radiant daughters of the house to the noiseless attendants that anticipated ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... clearly know what Mr. Jaggers would be found to be "at," I replied in the affirmative. We dived into the City, and came up in a crowded police-court, where a blood-relation (in the murderous sense) of the deceased, with the fanciful taste in brooches, was standing at the bar, uncomfortably chewing something; while my guardian had a woman under examination or cross-examination,—I don't know which,—and was striking her, and the bench, and everybody present, with awe. If anybody, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... my reading off, as well as I could into Spanish, the description I had just written down. It occasioned a world of merriment, and was taken in excellent part. The lady's cheek, for once, mantled with the rose. She laughed, shook her head, and said I was a very fanciful portrait painter; and the husband declared that, if I would stop at St. Filian, all the ladies in the place would crowd to have their portraits taken, —my pictures were so flattering. I have just parted ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noxiously of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... horizontal lines are required to diminish the apparent height of the building or affect its proportions, make them of brick of different color from those of the main wall or laid in different position. Remember this; fanciful brick decorations are quite sure to look better on paper than when executed. As a rule, the more complex the design the greater the discount. Such work is apt to have an unsafe appearance, as though the whole was at the ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... attendance on her—it was her duty to tell her stories in the night. 'But only the old ones,' Malania Pavlovna would beg—'those I know already; the new ones are all so far-fetched.' Malania Pavlovna was flighty in the extreme, and at times she was fanciful too; some ridiculous notion would suddenly come into her head. She did not like the dwarf, Janus, for instance; she was always fancying he would suddenly get up and shout, 'Don't you know who I am? The prince of the Buriats. Mind, you are to obey me!' ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... spirit of sea-going currents!—thou, being The child of immortals, all-knowing, all-seeing— Thou hast at thy heart the dark truth that I borrow For the song that I sing thee, no fanciful sorrow; In the sight of thine eyes is the history written Of Love smitten down as the strong leaf is smitten; And before thee there goeth a phantom beseeching For faculties ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... word in this communication, I afterward obtained a guinea. The money not being due till after the appearance of the article, I anticipated it with various sketches, stories, etc., all of which were largely fanciful or descriptive, and contained no paragraph which I wish to recall. In other directions, I was less successful. Of two daily journals to which I offered my services, one declined to answer my letter, and the other demanded a quarto ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... that he did it in the park; but when I remember how ghastly he looked I feel sure that the sounds must have had some infernal quality added to them which frightened the man himself. Yet, later, he would persuade himself that he had been getting fanciful. Of course, I must not forget that the effect upon Miss Hisgins must have made him ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... bureau, and, taking three of the ounces, she left the room. In the gloaming, she was again on her way to Paul's workshop, where she found the artist, as usual, with his head bent over the bright desk on the bench, engaged in some of his fanciful creations. Having seated herself in the chair where she had so often sat, she commenced her story of the circumstances of the day,—how Walter Grierson had acted and spoken to her; how he had accounted for the locket and inscription; how ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... is given to reverie quite as much as youth. I can remember a time—long, long ago—when in the twilight of a summer evening it was a luxury to sit apart with closed eyes; and, heedless of the talk that went on in the social circle from which I was withdrawn, indulge in all sorts of fanciful visions. Then my dream-people were all full-grown men and women. I do not recollect that I ever thought about children until I possessed some of my own. Those waking visions were very sweet—sweeter than the realities of life that followed; but they were ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... chosen the steepest places to come down, for the sake of the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystal this way and that, as the wind takes them, with all the grace, but with none of the formalism, of fountains; dividing into fanciful change of dash and spring, yet with the seal of their granite channels upon them, as the lightest play of human speech may bear the seal of past toil, and closing back out of their spray to lave the rigid angles, and brighten with silver fringes and glassy films each lower ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... be lamented that antiquarian zeal is so often diverted from subjects of real to those of merely fanciful interest. The mercurial young gentlemen who addict themselves to that exciting department of letters are open to censure as being too fitful, too prone to flit, bee-like, from flower to flower, now lighting momentarily upon an indecipherable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... causes they presented and the interest they took for granted. The last was their strong point. They simply implicated us in whatever was good and true. Their enthusiasm was infectious and we 'caught' it—to our own lasting spiritual benefit.... I do not believe that I was over-fanciful when I used to feel that Lucy Stone and you, Miss Anthony, looked at us as if you would say, 'Make the best of your freedom for we have bought it ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... Bankes at Kingston Lacy. The scene is a remarkable one, conceived in an absolutely unique way; Solomon is here posed as a Roman Praetor giving judgment in the Atrium, supported on each side by onlookers attired in fanciful costume of the Venetian period, or suggestive of classical models. It is the strangest possible medley of the Bellinesque and the antique, knit together by harmonious colouring and a clever grouping of figures in a triangular design. As an interpretation of a dramatic scene it is singularly ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... done, and the afternoon was all her own, she was able to give herself up to this unexpected delight, and spent many hours composing new groups of flowers, and arranging them in fanciful designs. When a maid brought up her solitary tea she lifted her flushed face and murmured, "Oh, can it be tea-time?" and then spread out all her drawings against the wall, and stared at them while she ate her ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... love God whom he hath not seen? You, Mr. A, L, M, O, you who care not for Milton, and value not the dark sublimities which rest ultimately (as we all feel) upon dread realities, how can you seriously thrill in sympathy with the spurious and fanciful sublimities of the classical poetry—with the nod of the Olympian Jove, or the seven-league strides of Neptune? Flying Childers had the most prodigious stride of any horse on record; and at Newmarket that is ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... allow me this pleasure, I am sure, if only because of the love I bear Tara's son." (One of the whelps this lady had bought from him was a son of Tara.) "I know Mrs. Forsyth quite well—a whimsical, fanciful little person, who takes up a new fad every month, and is apt to change her pets as often as her gloves. I could not possibly let a stranger buy the beautiful mother of my Dhulert, and it gives me so much real pleasure to be the means of bringing ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... necessarily restricted to the selected classes, and the masses either remained untouched by the faiths and fads of the learned, or accepted the same in grotesquely distorted forms. A phrase of a classical writer, or a fanciful conception of some hero of Plutarch, sufficed to enthuse a criminal, or to upset the mental equilibrium of a political speculator. The jumble of heterogeneous mores, and of ideas conformable to different mores, caused numbers to lose their mental equilibrium and to become victims either ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... that still hung heavy on my mind were only the morbid, fanciful thoughts of the hour, here was a man whose society would dissipate them. I resolved to try the experiment, and ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... Crown. His task will be very difficult. "Bread, cheap bread," "the poor oppressed by the aristocratie," etc.—a whole vocabulary of exciting words of that kind will be put forward to inflame the popular mind; and of all the Sovereigns, the Sovereign "People" is certainly one of the most fanciful and fickle. Our neighbour in France shows this more than any other on the whole globe; the Nation there is still the Sovereign, and this renders the President absolute, because he is the representative of the supreme will of the supreme Nation, sending us constantly ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... in the eye, such statuesque lines, such rose-leaf color, such hair—'hair like the thistle-down tinted with gold,' as John Mills, the Scotch poet-player, sang. The old man Raynier worshipped her, perhaps as a wild beast loves its whelp. But he had all sorts of fanciful names for her, Heart's-ease and Heart's Delight, and Violet and Rose and Lily. He grew almost gentle when he spoke to her; and he never knew that she was feeble-minded. She just missed being an imbecile. Perhaps you would not have known that all at once; you might not have ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... the bumps"; she slid gracefully around them, describing fanciful curves and loops in her airy flight. When she arrived in a confused bunch on the cushioned platform below, she was greeted ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... practicable to double the cape in question, and to reach the Lena in the same track as Shalauroff, there would have still remained the space betwixt that river and Archangel, which, though undoubtedly to a great degree explored, does not appear to have been ever altogether navigated. To the merely fanciful caviller at the result of this attempt, it would be a prostitution of time and patience, even if one had both in the requisite quantity, to offer a reply. But the observations which Captain King immediately ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... at the corners, and, on the blank spaces between the windows, quaint allegorical frescoes, faded, half washed-out. And then there were entirely modern-looking portions, of gleaming marble, with numberless fanciful carvings, spires, pinnacles, reliefs—wonderfully light, gay, habitable, and (Peter thought) beautiful, in the clear Italian atmosphere, against the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... I said, that the passage which follows will be new and instructive to most of the company. De Morgan's interpretation of the cabalistic sentence, made up as you will find it, is about as ingenious a piece of fanciful exposition as you will be likely to meet with anywhere in any book, new or old. I am the more willing to mention it as it suggests a puzzle which some of the company may like to work upon. Observe the character and position of the two distinguished philosophers ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... guide than that of the great poet. This accounts for the fact that masterpieces of simple poetry are commonly followed by a host of stale and unprofitable works in print, and masterpieces of the sentimental class by wild and fanciful effusions,—a fact that may be easily verified on questioning the history ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the Himalayas dwells the "snow bear." This species has received from naturalists the very fanciful appellation of the "Isabella bear" (ursus isabellinus)—a title suggested by its colour being that known as "Isabella colour,"—the type of which was the very dirty gown worn by Queen Isabella at the siege of ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... 97: Lysander had probably the following passage more particularly in recollection; which, it must be confessed, bears sufficiently hard upon fanciful and ostentatious collectors of books. "[Il y a] deux sortes de connoissance des livres: l'une qui se renferme presque uniquement dans les dehors et la forme du livre, pour apprecier, d'apres sa date, d'apres la caractere de l'impression, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... strong feeling of balance in the decorations, and the chief motifs were the acanthus beautifully carved, conventionalized flowers and fruit, horns of plenty, swags and wreaths of fruit and flowers, the scroll, dolphin, human figure, and half figure ending in fanciful designs of foliage. Beautiful and fascinating arabesques were carved and painted on the walls and pilasters. The chief pieces of furniture were magnificently carved chests and coffers which were also sometimes gilded and painted, oblong tables with elaborately carved supports ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... frightened of old Nance,' said Justin, with some contempt, 'she'd think her a witch; girls are always so fanciful.' ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth
... its sculptured walls the story of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, in company with the strangely-contrasting "Allegories", from Petrarch's "Triumphs", is enough in itself to keep the mind engrossed with fanciful musings for an hour. How did Petrarch and the Field of the Cloth of Gold come together in the brain of the sculptor who long ago worked at these ancient bas- reliefs? One wonders, but the wonder is in vain,—there ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... if you talk like this. I will not stay here and listen to it; you know I was not here," said Madelon, and she paled a little, for she almost thought, used to his fanciful talk though she were, that ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... eyes, staring unblinkingly, seemed as if set on a vision of his friend prone on the muddy floor of the drive, with the treacherous waters stealing amongst his hair. The present mission had nothing in common with those fanciful adventures that had served to make the boy the wonder and despair of his native township. Richard Haddon was entirely forgotten for the time being, and this concentration of mind and energy served to carry the ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... to the vaults. He had passed the spot not a minute before, and she was certainly not there then. She looked as if she had just glided up that slope from a region so dark that a spectre might haunt it all day long. But Beauchamp was not of a fanciful disposition, and instead of taking her for a spectre, he accosted her with ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... look, hearing the noisy clamor of the sailor crowd, sent the Queen with her damsels in a very light barge to stay on a little island distant from us a quarter of a league; himself remaining a very long time, discoursing by signs and gestures of various fanciful ideas, examining all the equipments of the ship, asking especially their purpose, imitating our manners, tasting our foods, then parted from us benignantly. And one time, our people remaining two ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... unhappy man this meant that she was dead. He demanded that his one faithful valet, known by the fanciful name of Eros, should keep his promise and kill him. Eros drew his sword, and Antony bared his breast, but instead of striking the sword into the vitals of his master, Eros plunged the blade into his own body, and fell ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the waste of mind which takes place in the colonies of a very highly civilised country adverted to in a rather fanciful and rationalistic connection with the desponding reply of the captive Jews to their spoilers: 'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?' Ages, sometimes whole centuries, elapse, remarks the commentator, ere the colonies of even eminently literary ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... that they afterwards wrought the greater part of that choir both with carvings and with tarsia-work; which choir has been finished in our own day, with a manner no little better, by Batista del Cervelliera of Pisa, a man truly ingenious and fanciful. ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... as Angela had expected, knowing by hospital reputation what the doctor was supposed to be to old ladies and fanciful mothers, while perhaps he had also heard of her fracas long ago at the hospital. For he was not more courteous to her than could be helped, treating her much as if she were only the nursery maid, and hardly looking at the opinion which she had made Professor ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... religion and expressed itself in the poetry of the Greeks, and possibly contributed to foster Shelley's sympathies with heathen religion. His mind was peculiarly Greek, simple not complex, imaginative rather than fanciful, abstract not concrete, intellectual not emotional; wanting the many-sidedness of modern taste, partaking of the unity of science rather than the multiformity of nature, like sculpture rather than painting. This mental peculiarity contributed to scepticism by inclining his ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... belief is strong; doubtless, with this weakly and fanciful race, it is in many cases strong enough to kill; it should be strong indeed in those who tapu their trees secretly, so that they may detect a depredator by his sickness. Or, perhaps, we should understand the idea of the hidden ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... about here in a gondola, I surprise myself looking into other gondolas as if I hoped to see them. It would overcome me with joy to see them, but I don't think it would surprise me much, at first. In my fanciful times, I fancy that they might be anywhere; and I almost expect to see their dear faces on the bridges or ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... kind young persons who sent the fanciful gift could have seen how it was received, their doubts would soon have been set at rest; for Jessie laughed and cried as she told the story, counted the precious coins, and filled the pretty shoe with water that the buds might keep fresh for Laura. Then, while the needles ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... saying, if you scratch a Russian you will find a Tartar beneath, so, according to M. Ouatrefages, we may suppose that scraping a Prussian would disclose a Finn. The political inferences which he draws are very fanciful. He traces shadowy analogies between the tactics of Von Moltke's veterans and the warlike customs of the ancient Slavs, and suggests that the basic origin of the Prussian population may lead it to cultivate a Russian alliance rather than an Austrian, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... heroes. No Vandyck may delight to warm his canvas with their forms. How many or how few astronomers like Banneker, chieftains like Toussaint, orators like Douglass they may have, it is not worth while to conjecture. It is better to dismiss these fanciful discussions. To vindicate their title to a fair chance in the world as a free people, it is sufficient, and alone sufficient, that it appear to reasonable minds that they are in good and evil very much like the rest of mankind, and that they are endowed in about the same degree with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... judging of the defects or wants of the other. It was not in a speculation which amused itself, as with a curious fact, in seeing that the same material can be made into scholars, legislators, sages, and models of elegance—and also into helots; and then went into a fanciful question of how near they might possibly be brought together: it was in a speculation which, instead of dwelling on the view of what was impossible to the common people in a comparative reference to the highest classes of their fellow-men, considered what was left practicable to them within ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... reckon the advantages, whether of Federation or of Union, in pounds, shillings, and pence, may regard the psychological requirement as fanciful. It is not fanciful; on the contrary, it is related in the clearest way to the concrete facts of the situation. Before there is any question of Federation Ireland needs to find herself, to test her own potentialities, to prove independence ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... said—'for you must allow me to call you that, who have no others within so many hundred leagues—perhaps you will think me fanciful and sentimental; and perhaps indeed I am; but there is one service that I would beg of you before all others. You see me set here on the top of this rock in the midst of your city. Even with what liberty I have, I have the opportunity to see a myriad roofs, and I dare to say, thirty leagues ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Geddes gives a sketch of what he conceives the vast and ever-growing literature of cities will one day be. Even if the comprehensive monographs which he foreshadows are never [Page: 140] written, it is not surely fanciful to expect that, with education universal, almost every dweller in our old towns will acquire some sort of that feeling with which a member of an ancient family looks upon its ancestral house or lands—will, even without much reading, have some sort of notion of his predecessors ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... Westminster. It formed part of the great demesne belonging to the Abbey of Westminster, and was inhabited chiefly by Thames fishermen, who had a settlement on the bank, and by the farmers of the Westminster estates. The derivation of the name from La Chere Reine is purely fanciful. ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
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